My Essential Music: Sweet Jane - The Velvet Underground

I first started listening to The Velvet Underground when I was about fifteen having found out that they had been a huge influence on REM. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for when I picked up the innocuous looking CD with it's jolly banana cover. The Velvet Underground and Nico took me from the safety of my bedroom and plunged me into the murky underbelly of New York in 1967. The light years that separate The Velvet Underground and Nico from the other seminal album of that year, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, are many and how lyrics and music of such ferocity emerged at the height of the Swinging Sixties remains, to me, an anachronistic mystery. This album is no time capsule from the summer of love, it's a primal scream from a never ending winter.

By the time a friend of mine lent me his copy of Loaded, the Velvets's fourth album, I was a confirmed fan. However, without John Cale's drones I knew this album wouldn't be the same bitter pill as the first two. Even the cover, with it's marshmallow pink smoke seemed like a visual move in the MOR direction.

The first song, Who Loves the Sun, was a pleasant Nico-less I'll Be Your Mirror but it was what came next that won Lou Reed's place in my eternal esteem. From the first notes of Sweet Jane my pulse began to race and a feeling of bliss spread through my veins, a warm wash of guitar and reverb that sounds like liquid sunshine. For me the perfection of the song lies in those first 16 seconds. The amazingly effective simplicity of the rest of the song, to my mind, is elevated from the ordinary by the intro's aural nirvana. I couldn't help but repeat the song over and over again, sometimes just listening to the intro. It became an obsession. And then, I had to return the CD after a falling out with my musical donor. I had copied the album, but to a cassette that got lost in one of my many moves. So, I forgot about Sweet Jane and the fix of absolute euphoria that the intro gave me.

That was until just before Christmas, while in a bar I let out a squeal of delight mid conversation when the DJ put it on and I was listening to it with new ears. It sounded just as good as the first time round and once I arrived home I sought it out and the obsession returned with renewed vigour.

Not a day goes past now when I don't listen to Sweet Jane. I can rely on the intro to bring me out of even the worst of bad moods and it's ironic that the thing I like most about the Velvets (their dark, sinister and uncompromising music) is absent from my favourite song of theirs.

Listen to the most perfect 16 seconds of music here :)

http://www.reasontorock.com/audio/sweet_jane/intro.mp3