The Velvet Underground

A song honed since the Ludlow Street days, it is where Reed's rock and roll and Cale's drone music first locked together.

• The note that rings like grinding metal from beginning to end is Cale's electric viola. Cale restrung and amplified the viola and scraped it with a bow to lay down one long sustained note (drone) — follow whether that sound stays underneath for the whole song.
• Reed's guitar is said to have been played in the so-called Ostrich tuning, with the strings set to the same note. So even as the fingers move, the same notes pile up in a droning hum.
• Tucker's drums mark only slow, solid beats, like a funeral procession. Stripped of ornament, this beat draws the song along like a trance.
• Reed sings with almost no change in pitch, as if reading a novel aloud. The title and subject come from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel of the same name.
• Compare it with the 1965 Ludlow Street demo on the 1995 box set “Peel Slowly and See,” and you can hear that the song set out as something close to a folk ballad.

A debut album that gathers Warhol's patronage, Nico's voice and the stories of New York's streets in one place. It barely sold on release, but has become one of the most often cited debuts in rock.

• The card's video is “I'm Waiting for the Man.” Cale pounds the piano keys on the same beat without pause while the guitar and drums drive that beat forward, turning into rhythm the impatience of a person waiting for someone on the street.
• The opening track, “Sunday Morning,” was the last on the album to be recorded, in November 1966, with Tom Wilson producing. The keyboard that rings out clear as a bell in the introduction is a celesta played by Cale.
• In “Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow's Parties” and “I'll Be Your Mirror,” sung by Nico, listen to that low, singularly inflected voice side by side with Reed's singing.
• The closing track, “European Son,” is dedicated to Reed's mentor Delmore Schwartz. Once the early vocals end, the sound of something shattering serves as a signal, and the song collapses into noise-laced improvisation.

A song Reed had been writing since college, it renders drugs from inside one person's consciousness, neither praising nor condemning them. It was also a major reason radio shunned the debut album.

• The song shuttles between just two chords for more than 7 minutes. It begins slowly, speeds up, then slows down again, and this rise and fall in tempo stands in for a plot.
• The drone of Cale's viola, scraping sharply at a single note, grows fiercer as the song goes on, until in the accelerating passages it sounds like a scream.
• Tucker recalled stopping for a while during the recording because the other instruments were hard to hear. Listen for the passage late in the song where the drums drop out and then return.
• Reed's voice appeals to no one, flowing on like a person talking alone. Beginning quietly, as if speaking, it comes close to a shout in the accelerating passages, so that the listener seems to be inside the singer's head.

The peak of the second album, which used the studio like a concert hall, and the final chapter of the noise experiments Reed and Cale made together.

• For more than 17 minutes a short repeated phrase of only a few chords (riff) cycles almost without pause. The members recalled agreeing not to stop no matter who made a mistake, and recording it in one take.
• The keyboard snarling in the background is Cale's Vox organ, its sound deliberately warped (distortion). From the middle onward, listen for the passages where the organ and Reed's guitar fight to drown each other out.
• With every instrument blaring in one room, each microphone picked up the others, so the sound comes across as a single mass with its edges smeared. That smearing is itself the song's texture.
• Reed lays out a scene of a debauched party in the voice of an indifferent storyteller. That emotionless delivery stands in strange contrast to the noise.
• Joy Division's recording of this song, played live, appears on their album “Still,” so you can compare it with the original.

The ballad that best represents the band in its quieter days after Cale's departure, a lonely confession to a love that can never be.

• Reed's voice is close, almost a whisper, and unfolds in the second person, as if confiding directly in someone. It is nothing like the detached storyteller of the previous album.
• With no loud drums, light percussion like a tambourine and soft keyboards carry the beat. The pared-down arrangement pushes the song's confession to the front.
• The guitar solo in the middle flows briefly in a clean, undistorted tone, almost as if singing. Heard right after the roar of "Sister Ray," it is hard to believe this is the same band.
• The label engineer's mix and Reed's own "closet mix" place the vocals and instruments at different distances. The two mixes can be compared on releases such as the 2014 expanded reissue.
• R.E.M. put this song on the B-side of their 1984 single "South Central Rain."

Their most accessible album, made under the label's demands for a hit; Reed left the band before it came out.

• The video on the card is "Sweet Jane." The opening guitar riff is a simple one that moves between a few chords, yet it became a textbook of rock guitar that countless bands would later play.
• On the album version, the slow passage (the bridge) that shifts the mood midway through was edited out, and Reed voiced his displeasure. The original form can be heard on the 1997 expanded edition "Fully Loaded."
• "Rock & Roll" tells of a suburban kid whose life is changed by rock and roll coming over the radio; Reed later said it was his own story.
• Yule and session players took the drums in place of Tucker, so the beat is neat and polished. Compare it with Tucker's standing-up drumming on the earlier albums.