[Coney Island Baby] made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days…. Now, when I was younger, the Velvet Underground meant to me what the Stones, Dylan, etc. meant to thousands of other midwestern teen mutants. I was declared exempt from the literary curriculum of my upper class suburban high school simply because I showed the English department a list of books I'd glanced through while obsessively blasting White Light/White Heat on the headphone...

To capture the correct mood—exactly what has been missing from most of his RCA records—for Coney Island Baby, the artist has forsaken his recent daze for the days of 1969 and Loaded to reclaim the warmth of some of the songs ("Pale Blue Eyes," particularly) he loved to sing. Such a move does not imply that Reed was then or is now a moony sentimental fool—1969, Loaded and Coney Island Baby are all extremely tough LPs. But it does infer that since he left the Underground (in...