I'm sure most of us who keep up with music trends have read that cassettes are "cool again", what with Cassette Store Day, tape-only labels, and box sets coming out in the format. I've always had a soft spot for tapes, as they were the dominant format when I first started obsessively collecting music. And when I got my first CD player in the late 1980s, I was underwhelmed with the sound quality (especially after all the "perfect sound forever" hype). Things have improved with time, as producers and labels seem to now know how to properly master older analog recordings so that they don't sound flat and thin on CD, but just as often, they digitally compress things for the "loudness" effect that blows out any subtlety.
Anyway, my 10-year-old Volvo S40 has both a cassette deck and CD player, and I thought it would be fun to collect Velvets albums on cassette. Hey, there's only so many times I can buy these things on vinyl and CD before I need something different.
And cassettes don't skip when I hit a pothole! So I was pretty quickly able to pick up 10 VU tapes on eBay and Discogs, followed by a hard plastic case that holds exactly 10 tapes. I printed out a Warhol banana, put some adhesive backing on it, and voila...my own VU cassette box set!
I was able to pick up nearly all of these tapes still sealed from one eBay seller. The exceptions were: 1.) Loaded, which was very, very hard to find on cassette. The only thing I could come up with was a used European press on Atlantic that is titled "Art Gallery - Loaded", via Discogs Marketplace. I'm not sure what "Art Gallery" means, although I am guessing it was a reissue series of some sort (the copyright date is 1975); and, 2.) The last tape is a 2003 European comp apparently meant to capitalize on the popularity of "I'm Sticking With You" having been used in a Hyundai commercial. I did get this one sealed and on eBay, but from a different seller. The tape was manufactured in Thailand, likely one of the last few places in the world still making tapes in 2003.
Needless to say, I've been enjoying listening to the tapes in the car. They all sound pretty great. White Light/White Heat, in particular, has not had a CD release that I really like yet (I've got really high hopes for the upcoming 45th anniversary set), and "Sister Ray" sounds great in this analog format. I've enjoyed the 2003 comp quite a bit more than I expected to. It leans more towards the Velvets' more mellow side (something they admit to in the liner notes). Many songs are in different versions than are on the other tapes -- all but one of the included Banana Album tracks are in mono, and "Sunday Morning" is even the mono single mix; all the tracks from the 3rd album are Closet Mixes, except for "Pale Blue Eyes"; and "Sweet Jane" and "Rock and Roll" are the "Full Length Versions" from Peel Slowly and See/Fully Loaded. It seems weird to have these versions on a commercial cassette, when they only became widely available in an era when CDs had pretty much killed cassettes in most of the world.
