The Velvet Underground's final album with Lou Reed abandoned the avant-garde abrasion for something approaching actual pop music, a commercial gambit that arrived too late to save them but just in time to influence everyone else. Recorded amid lineup flux and Reed's mounting frustration, Loaded yielded Sweet Jane and Rock & Roll, songs that distilled the band's street-level romanticism into three-minute radio propositions.

Reed quit before release, leaving behind an accidental blueprint for power pop and heartland rock that others would mine for decades.