Concert Review: Velvet Underground at The Second Fret, January 1970

BY JOEY SWEENEY | This wasn’t the Velvet Underground’s first gig in Philly; I bet it wasn’t even their twentieth. But just on the other side of Rittenhouse Square, at the 2nd Fret on the 1900 block of Sansom, the Velvets did a whole string of dates in January 1970. 

The 2nd Fret was tiny — it’s wild to even consider Joni playing here — but it was a scene unto itself. From an account of an earlier gig there that the band did:

"In September they returned to the smaller Second Fret, which is usually a folk club. It was an old rowhouse store building on smallish Sansom Street in Center City, about 18 feet wide and 80 feet deep, with wooden folding chairs eight wide that went right up to the tiny front stage that was a foot above the floor. If you were in front row with your feet on stage, the band was right on top of you."

Full disclosure: I wasn’t there, but I have the materials at hand, some of them anyway, to try and piece together and tell you what the show was like, thanks to the Internet and somehow very healthy VU bootlegging scene that exists to this day. (It turns out there’s also a recording of the Velvets at the 2nd Fret in May of 1970, on Disc 5 of Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition, but it’s almost unlistenable.) 

This recording says a lot about the band in this era, and something I’ve always wondered about them — at this point, both the Grateful Dead and the Velvets were both hard-working, touring bands who also had a following in every city that they would have had very close contact with. Were the Velvets Dead-adjacent in both bluesy roots and their own share-and-share-alike values as music makers? Says a fan taper called Bob Kachnycz, who’s credited with this boot: "The band thought it was fine to be taping them. [...] I sent my tapes to a Velvet fan in Boston, and they got some radio play and came out on some boots."

The Velvets played at the 2nd Fret, and in Philly in general, a lot.

The band opens with “White Light/White Heat,” which, live in a little room, needs to do different, only marginally quieter things than the screaming-ness that the song achieves on record. Here, it’s an amped-up, groovy blues, which is always what it was underneath. You can say some version this same thing for a lot of the band’s sets around this time — in their later career, the Velvets became some strange hybrid of a bar band and an art rock band all at the same time. These songs choogle like Creedence choogles, they do inherited frugs that were kind of like a garbage plate of all the dances that came before and were yet to come. Really just ancient fucking movement here, baby. 

It’s a short set — and what’s on record here was the second of multiple sets that night, because that would have been the kinda gig this was, playing for equal parts switched-on kids and corny tourists — but it’s bedrock solid: “White Light/White Heat,” “Sweet Jane” (slow version), deep cut “Over You,” and then a one-two punch of “Foggy Notion” and “Sister Ray.” 

Those last two feel like transmissions from outer space even still. “Foggy Notion” is glacial slow while at the same time being the size of a thought in the way that psychedelics themselves are; when “Sister Ray” begins, the tape seems to jump in a way that feels like a radio station flipping and something very, very, very far away fighting to come in. When I think of what it might have been like being at this show, I can imagine it almost, but not really. Was it just music in a bar? Or did it feel like the Earth was splitting open and inviting you to come down into it?

I can’t say. But I’m putting together this, and maybe only this: Helluva show, friends.