Loaded 'hack surgery'

[Mark]

While we're talking about controversial remixing work, I was wondering whether anyone could shed any light on the mystery of just what happened with the infamous edits of certain tracks on Loaded that Lou hates so much. Consider this quote from Lou:

"The songs are out of order... they don't form a cohesive unit, they just leap about. They don't make sense thematically. The end of 'Sweet Jane' was cut off, the end of 'New Age' was cut off, the guitar solo on 'Train Coming Round The Bend' was fucked around with and inserted."

('Fully Loaded' review, Record Collector, April '97 - don't know the original interview source, can anyone help?)

This suggests that someone other than Lou - Doug Yule? Sesnick? Geoffrey Haslam? - was responsible for slicing and dicing his masterpiece after his departure from the band. However, consider this quote from Yule in the revealing Perfect Sound Forever interview:

One of the things that Lou has always said, is that after he left, the rest of you went back and re-edited "Sweet Jane" and "New Age" and ruined them. The box set includes the original, longer versions. What's the story?

He did that. He edited it. You have to understand at the time, the motivation was... Lou was, and all of us were, intent on one thing and that was to be successful and what you had to do to be successful in music, was you had to have a hit, and a hit had to be uptempo, short, and with no digressions, straight ahead basically, you wanted a hook and something to feed the hook and that was it. "Sweet Jane" was arranged just exactly the way it it is on the original Loaded release exactly for that reason - to be a hit!

This does have a ring of truth to it. But if, as Yule says, Lou was responsible for all those edits, then what has he been getting so upset about for all these years?

I think one possibility is that Lou was indeed responsible for the edits, but they weren't intended to go on the album. The extra versions of 'Rock & Roll' and 'Head Held High' on the Fully Loaded set suggest that during the sessions, there was some experimentation going on to try and edit the tracks down to 'hit' versions. However, if you've got a 'hit' version of a track, you put it out as a single, and save the full-length, artistically pure version for the album.

So maybe what Lou was so mad about was not that the tracks were edited, but that these bastardised "single edit" versions were put on the album and held up as the definitive versions of the songs.

What does anyone think?

[arjan]

Sounds quite plausible, actually. Never thought of it that way (single/album cuts and comparison to the HHH versions).

What never fails to get my goat is that Lou always plays the innocent "they never asked me" victim when it was/is always him who plays the cut version (only time I ever heard him play the wine/roses bridge was with the VU in Rotterdam) whereas as late as 1973, Doug Yule and band played the entire song (see Final V.U., disc 4). So who cut what?

[jimjim]

ISo maybe what Lou was so mad about was not that the tracks were edited, but that these bastardised "single edit" versions were put on the album and held up as the definitive versions of the songs.

What does anyone think?

Sounds about right. The mono single mix of HHH sounds fantastic and more like an MC5 outtake than the polished version on LP. Its totall different to the LP version and has an intro not on the LP. Also, some of these mono edits were released as singles in a few parts of the world. But, I just can't imagine New Age as a single though.

Talking of which has anyone ever heard the mono version of this LP? According to Olivier's site, it exists but so far no copies have circulated. Might be worth checking out for differences...

[Pig Related]

He played the bridge when he was touring with The Tots (at least on American Poet and the Phantom of Rock bootleg) and also did the bridge in 1990, when he played with Moe Tucker (on the Osaka, Japan, July 30 bootleg). In any case, he almost never plays it. Which is a shame.

And I always wondered what the order of the tracks should've been on Loaded.

[Mark]

And I always wondered what the order of the tracks should've been on Loaded.

I wonder if the picture of the tape box on disc 5 of Peel Slowly & See gives any clues? If you've noticed, each song is assigned a number, but they're all out of sequence. Perhaps these numbers indicate Lou's original planned sequence? If so, Loaded would have run like this:

SIDE 1
Who Loves The Sun
Sweet Jane
Train Round The Bend
New Age
Rock & Roll

SIDE 2
Cool It Down
Lonesome Cowboy Bill
Oh! Sweet Nuthin'
Head Held High
I Found A Reason

Hmm... maybe this is a red herring...

[jimjim]

Hey..I've just had a thought. On the Max's rehearsal tape, when the guys run through HHH they begin with the same intro I mentioned above. Perhaps this was how it was meant to be or this was meant to be the first single and therefore they played it that way live to boost its sales? Mmm....interesting.

[Mark]

Well... I don't think the Fully Loaded version of Head Held High, with that intro, was intended for the album because (I think) it's in mono. Remember that when the Max's rehearsal tape was being made, the band were still working on the album and tinkering around with things - maybe they didn't come up with the "aaaaaahh..." intro till later?

[Cameo Role]

Lou doesn't play the bridge because he says it's pointless to seeing as how most fans don't know of it.

[arjan]

Lou doesn't play the bridge because he says it's pointless to seeing as how most fans don't know of it.

Yes, but what better way to educate the fans/re-introduce them to the lovely bridge bit than by playing it?

[Mark]

Just some more thoughts on exactly what cuts were made, based on comparisons between the original LP and the PS&S/Fully Loaded versions, and theories on why...

Sweet Jane
Obviously, the "Wine & Roses" bridge was chopped. Presumably this was intended for a single release.

Rock And Roll
Couple of bars cut from the guitar break at around 3m 22s. Again, perhaps intended as a single edit?

New Age
On the final "It's the beginning of a new age" chorus, six repetitions of that line (as per the Fully Loaded full-length version) are chopped down to two and an early fade is added, butchering the song's length from around 5:20 to 4:40. (There was also a 'partially butchered', version, with "It's the beginning of a new age" x 5 and running to 5:10, which ended up on the box set.)
This is the most perplexing of all the editing work done on Loaded. New Age is a highly unlikely candidate as a hit single, certainly compared to the rest of the album, so it seems strange they would bother to make a 'single edit'.
There's also evidence that the edit was done very late in the day - if you look at the tape box for the album master reproduced on PS&S 5, it still lists the track's timing as 5:20.
Lou hates this edit in particular ("That was supposed to go on for a full minute, that was the powerful part of the song, they have it go on for one chorus - how could anyone be that stupid?") and Doug denies all knowledge ("There's a nasty splice on the end of New Age that reverses the chord changes. It sounds like a post production change, I don't remember it at all.").
So who could have been responsible? Perhaps either Geoffrey Haslam or Shel Kagan, under the direction of Sesnick?

Train Round The Bend
Lou claims that "the guitar solo on 'Train Coming Round The Bend' was fucked around with and inserted". Maybe he was thinking of 'Rock And Roll'? The only editing apparent when comparing the "alternate mix" on Fully Loaded with the LP version is an early fade, reducing the time from 4:40 to 3:22 and losing the final verse. Still enough to get mad about though. Again, maybe this was done with a single release in mind.
The Fully Loaded 'alt mix' also sounds, to my ears at least, much better than the LP version. It would be interesting to know whether this mix was done at the time or was prepared from the original multitracks specifically for Fully Loaded... anyone?