Lot #249: 1970 The Velvet Underground - Loaded. Vinyl LP

Loaded was a commercial effort aimed at radio play, and the album's title refers to Atlantic's request that the band produce an album "loaded with hits", with a double meaning about the word "loaded", that can also mean "full of drugs" or "really high on drugs". Singer and multi-instrumentalist 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."  Reed was critical of the album's final mix. He left the Velvet Underground on August 23, 1970, but Loaded was not released until November. After its release, Reed maintained in interviews that it had been re-edited and resequenced without his consent.

The artwork was designed by Stanislaw Zagorski, features a drawing of the Times Square42nd Street subway station entrance, with "downtown" misspelled as "dowtown". :)