Why is it that Tupac comes out with an album every year, but the great defuncts of rock ‘n’ roll die with the last chord struck on the last stage they played. Cheap commercial greatest hits albums and B-side collections aside, true fans are relegated to trying to track down rare UK issues if they want more of a band who called it quits before they were even born.

True gimps and junkies, LISTEN UP!

Imagine if the truest American artisitic visionary of the past century were to diversify, trade one of his paintings for studio time to take a small piece of his famed party lifestyle, a band of his protege musicians, and record them in his own image. It’s not difficult, because anyone worth his salt in music would recognize that painting anywhere, the yellow banana on the white background.

It’s one of the most important albums ever made. A collection of songs so intense and frighteningly inspired that it blew the lid off psychedelia. The Velvet Underground and Nico singlehandedly showed all the long-haired freaky people how truly unfreaky they were. Really, Grace Slick may be the only woman who could ever compete with Nico’s gothic expect-orations.

But we know that one session does not an album make. And didn’t The Velvet Underground’s first LP come out on a major label? For the label to have heard the band’s sound, there had to be a demo.

That demo, the mythalogical Scepter sessions named for Scepter studios, where the acetate was made, was lost for 37 years until some French Canadian putz accidentally bought it in a box of albums for 75 cents when he thought he was just getting some really good Muddy Waters.

The record is acetate, pressed on metal and never intended for release. It’s fragile, it’s very old, and it’s currently for sale on ebay, touting more bluesy and radically different versions of tracks that would eventually come the first two Velvet Underground LPs.

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