The Day Lou Reed Played His Last Show With the Velvet Underground

By the time 1970 rolled around, Lou Reed had one foot out of the Velvet Underground door.

In his defense, the band had been splitting apart piece by piece for several years at that point. Producer/manager Andy Warhol was fired by Reed after just one album together, their 1967 debut The Velvet Underground & Nico. In turn, Nico quit the band, followed by cofounder John Cale in 1968, after he participated in the making of the band’s second album, White Light/White Heat. By 1970, the core members of the band were Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Moe Tucker and bassist/multi-instrumentalist Doug Yule.

That worked well enough for the band’s third album, Loaded, but Tucker didn’t contribute much — she was on maternity leave with her first child, leaving the parts to be recorded by session musicians that included Yule’s own younger brother, Billy. Morrison was also busy, splitting his time between the studio and finishing his undergraduate studies in New York City.

‘The Final Straw Was Long Before That’

But Reed was fed up prior to the album’s release in November of 1970. Final mixing was finished without him.

“The final straw was long before that,” Reed emphasized in a 2004 interview with Classic Rock. Would he care to elaborate on that? “No, it was just a terrible thing with the manager. Where the manager feels that he is more important than the artist, or is in competition with the artist. It’s always a bad situation. You know, the manager has an apartment and the artist is sleeping on the floor by the fireplace like a sheepdog.”

Listen to the Velvet Underground Perform ‘Sweet Jane’ Live at Max’s Kansas City in August 1970

That was in refererance to Steve Sesnick, whom Reed felt had driven “a wedge between” himself and Yule during the making of Loaded. Still, the band’s label was excited about the new album — they thought “Sweet Jane” had a good deal of radio hit potential, none of which Reed was interested in himself.

“I didn’t belong there,” Reed later said (via Mojo). “I didn’t want to be in a mass pop national hit group with followers.”

Reed Removes Himself From the Velvet Underground

All of that came to a head in August of 1970. After approximately two months of a residency at Max’s Kansas City in New York City, Reed played his very last show with the Velvet Underground on Aug. 23. (Ironically, this show was tape recorded by a friend of Warhol’s named Brigid Polk and ultimately turned into a 1972 album called Live at Max’s Kansas City.) He went back to his parents’ home on Long Island, took a job as a typist at his father’s company and started writing poetry instead of songs.

“When I left the Velvet Underground, I just packed up. I’d had it,” Reed explained to Rolling Stone in 1989. “So I was a typist for two years. My mother always told me in high school, ‘You should take typing. It gives you something to fall back on.’ She was right.”

Listen to the Velvet Underground Perform ‘Candy Says’ Live at Max’s Kansas City in August 1970

Not that that was the end of the road for Reed’s musical career.

“They said I would never write anything as good as ‘Heroin,'” he said to journalist Paul Zollo in 2013. “And then they said that if I left the Velvet Underground, I would never be as good as I was in the Velvet Underground.”

Of course, Reed proved them wrong, in particular with 1972’s Transformer, a highly influential album in the world of glam rock. Reed would not return to the Velvet Underground until he reunited with Tucker, Cale and Morrison in the early ’90s for a tour that eventually ended in another breakup.

But in that period just after his final performance with the Velvet Underground in 1970, Reed wrestled with all sorts of questions in relation to his future in music.

“Did I want to do it myself? Did I want to have a band? Did I just want to do songwriting, not even get onstage?” he explained to Rolling Stone. “I’m the last person in the world I’d have thought should be on a stage. Some people really like having a spotlight on them. I don’t. What I like is the song and performing it. Doing it for people – who like it.”