Loaded

Loaded is the fourth album by The Velvet Underground, released in November 1970, by Atlantic Records’ subsidiary label, Cotillion. The album was the final album recorded featuring Lou Reed, though he had departed from the band shortly before the album’s release. In 2003, Loaded was #109 on Rolling Stone’s reissue of their 500 greatest albums of all time.

Loaded was a commercial effort aimed at radio play, another step away from the Warhol-influenced days. The album’s title refers to Atlantic’s request that the band produce an album “loaded with hits”. Doug Yule said, “On Loaded there was a big push to produce a hit single, there was that mentality, which one of these is a single, how does it sound when we cut it down to 3.5 minutes, so that was a major topic for the group at that point. And I think that the third album to a great extent shows a lot of that in that a lot of those songs were designed as singles and if you listen to them you can hear the derivation, like this is sort of a Phil Spector-ish kind of song, or this is that type of person song.”