Squeeze
The Disowned Velvet Underground Album
by Bob Pomeroy
In 1971, the Velvet Underground were still an active band. They were a very different band. Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison had left for other pursuits, and Doug Yule, who had replaced John Cale in 1968, was the de facto leader of the band, singing, playing guitar, and writing songs. Maureen Tucker was still on drums, Willie Alexander was on keyboards and vocals, with Walter Powers on bass. They weren’t just coasting on their reputation. Bootlegs from that era show they were playing Lou Reed songs as well as new compositions by Yule and Alexander. This band toured Europe in support of Loaded with the intent to record a followup afterward.
Things started to go sideways when Atlantic Records decided to release the authorized bootleg, Live at Max’s Kansas City (1972), instead of bankrolling an album by the Yule-led Velvets. Things went from bad to worse when their manager, Steve Sesnick, decided to press on with a new Velvets album to be recorded in the UK. Sesnick then made the bizarre decision to send Tucker, Powers, and Alexander back to the States and send Doug Yule into the studio all by himself.
Squeeze features Doug Yule playing all instruments except drums. Ian Paice of Deep Purple was hired to play drums on the sessions. Paice is a good drummer, but he doesn’t have the unique style of Maureen Tucker. The basic tracks were laid down with drums and guitar, then Yule stacked on the overdubs. Yule told Thomas Pat in a 1996 interview for Perfect Sound Forever, “How much interplay can you have when all it is- is one guitar or a piano? You can hear that, it’s kind of dead. I think you get more when you have 3 or 4 people playing together, they feed off each other, they work together and something comes out of it, it’s bigger.”
Squeeze was released on Polydor in early 1973. The album didn’t do well. The Velvet Underground came to its conclusion after a brief tour, and the album was quickly forgotten. We can see that the album was hobbled from the start. The question remains: was _Squeeze an abomination, or did it deserve better?
Well, if you take it as its own thing, it’s not a bad record. It’s not a lost treasure, but it doesn’t suck, either. Doug Yule on his own sounds like he’s more influenced by the Grateful Dead than Lou Reed. “Little Jack” and “Mean Old Man” have the timbre of a Jerry Garcia song. “Caroline” and “Dopey Joe” have some of Lou’s style. “Friends” sounds the most like something that might have been on Loaded. Unsurprisingly, Squeeze sounds a lot more like Yule’s next band, American Flyer, than the Velvets.
Still, I wonder what Squeeze might have been if Sesnick had let the post-Reed version of the band actually record the album. It would definitely have sounded fuller with a real band playing road-tested songs. Willie Alexander would most likely have contributed both songs and vocals. The Japanese collection of bootlegs, The Last V.U, shows that leading up to the recording, they were playing songs by both writers. It would still probably have bombed, but it could have been an accurate representation of what the final days of the Velvet Underground really sounded like. ◼
Featured photo of Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule by Jeff Albertson, 1969.
