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This probably isn't the Velvet Underground's best-known song, but it is certainly my favorite:
I also love this cover by Elizabeth Mitchell, from 2006:
Feel free to add links to your favorite online Velvet Underground songs/performances (or to your favorite covers of their songs).
Anyone who had a heart would enjoy Jeff Buckley's version of 'All Tomorrow's Parties'; he gives a (for him) restrained rendition, not going all Hallelujah/Dink's Song on us:
Of the countless versions of 'Sweet Jane' by the Underground and others, its consummation as a rock song must be Reed's own 1973 version on Rock N Roll Animal album:
Insane and hilarious as it may seem, The Velvet Underground apparently were booked to play at the annual dinner of The American Society of Clinical Psychiatrists in 1966; this would seem to be photographic evidence: https://www.adam-ritchie-photography.co.uk/?page_id=1341
If there were a time machine invented that I could use to visit one, but only one, historical episode of less than two hours' duration, I might very well choose this one.
One of your very best music links…almost as good as Steve Miller Band six years ago.
I once saw Robyn Hitchcock do a 'covers' set. After long consideration I'd just decided on the song I'd really like to hear him do ("New Age") when he came on & the shouting started. I realised that, although I was near the front, I was never going to be able to make my request heard. He waited for the noise to die down, then said "This is a request from me," and went into… "New Age". Thanks, Robyn!
For some reason I've never been a big VU or Reed fan, but I concur 100% that Reed's live Rock N Roll Animal "Sweet Jane" can't be bettered. This is due in large part to the guitarists, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. See this lengthy interview with the two of them for background:
https://www.vintageguitar.com/2795/dick-wagner-and-steve-hunter/
One of Hunter's detours was with Peter Gabriel's first solo album band, playing with Robert Fripp, among others. Producer was Bob Ezrin, who worked on a number of Alice Cooper albums on which Hunter and Wagner also played.
Well, you're correct they ain't so obscure. I throw my hat into the ring for "Pale Blue Eyes," which I listened to nonstop as I was renovating the kitchen of my 1896 house in Sacramento. Must have driven the neighbors batty, especially because this project went on for many weeks.
Call me perverse, but this 1978 version at the Bottom Line is still my favorite 'Sweet Jane'. Not musically superior to 'Rock and Roll Animal', but lots more Lou Reed being Lou Reed. The drummer especially is great here.
I had entirely forgotten Take No Prisoners. I was working in a record store when it appeared; we played it occasionally.
For peak perversity I'll share that my favorite Reed album is Metal Machine Music.
I would say that along that dimension, among Reed albums, there remains some distance out beyond MMM.
On the broader question, one of my favorite VU moments is the side-filpping transition on White Light/White Heat, between 'Here she comes now' and 'I hear her call my name'.
Peak Perversity, indeed. Reed said he could not listen to it all in a sitting and had found no one who could. Can you?
I haven't listened in one sitting, no, but Reed might have been playing a game. The original release on vinyl culminated with an infinite loop. Strictly speaking, MMM never ends!
I'll add that I do listen in full to many at least equally dissonant recordings of a similar duration: some of the electronic works of Xenakis can get pretty dense; an LA artist who goes by the name Unsustainable Social Condition; Flying Luttenbachers and other projects by Weasel Walter… Noise is a genre of sorts.
Surely, we should mention this live version of What Goes On
recorded by WVO Quine’s nephew and Blue Mask era Lou Reed collaborator, Robert Quine.
No idea if they ever discussed Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
However, early VU associate Tony Conrad is said to have taken a logic class w/ Quine at Harvard.
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