It’s only a matter of days before the new six disc Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition box set of the 1970 Velvet Underground classic comes out. I’ve been bugging the label about getting a copy of this hefty sucker—which includes demos, the Live at Max’s Kansas City show remastered and another set from the Second Fret in Philadelphia, plus, for the first time ever, a 5.1 surround remix of Loaded, which frankly I am salivating to hear.

Here’s a previously unreleased version of “Sweet Jane”—it’s an early take of the song from disc three of the box set. It starts out slow and tenuous, as if Reed is teaching the song to the rest of the group for the first time, but soon he starts feeling the… power, I guess, of his song and it starts to take flight. In a 2005 interview, band member Doug Yule revealed that the song’s signature riff wasn’t arrived at until right before they recorded it. Certainly they were nowhere near that place at this stage of the song’s development.
 

 
We’ll have a full review of Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition in a few days, in the meantime, this should tide you over.