According to ArtNews, the Andy Warhol Museum has discovered and digitized rare master tapes from the band’s epoch-defining 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, from Verve Records.
The monophonic reel-to-reel ¼” tapes contain alternative versions and mixes of the nine initial songs that formed the foundation of the 1967 release.
“You’re hearing the album as the band originally intended,” Matt Gray, manager of archives at the Warhol said in a statement. “The track listing alone is a retelling of the album. The quality of sound is remarkable; it gives you a new perspective.”
“The pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all,” Warhol wrote in his 1980 memoir POPism: The Warhol Sixties. “Nobody wanted to stay in one category; we all wanted to branch out into every creative thing we could — that’s why when we met The Velvet Underground at the end of ’65, we were all for getting into the music scene, too.”
The recording will make its public debut in a new exhibition at The Warhol in 2023.
