The band's appearance represents one of the rare occasions on which the Velvet Underground was professionally recorded in a live setting, and while several of the performances in this set have been released in various fashions and configurations before (in particular, on the album 1969: The Velvet Underground Live and the 45th anniversary reissue of The Velvet Underground, as well as via much lower-quality audience recordings in Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes), it is the first time all of them have been collected together. Additionally, this represents the first time much of this material has been presented in a CD version sourced directly from the original tapes, which had been considered lost for decades, and nine tracks from this collection had previously been completely unreleased in any configuration. The original reels were held by Matrix soundman/manager Peter Abram. Though long rumored, the recordings had not been heard other than the tracks issued on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live. It was not until the late 90's that Abram was persuaded to bring the beautifully preserved reels to a recording studio to do a proper transfer/mix-down. He would only allow short snippets of the 22 tracks to be burned onto a sampler disc in order to verify the high audio quality to interested labels. The original transfer was financed and executed by Sal Mercuri and Pat Thomas. Universal Music and The Velvet Underground Partnership eventually struck a deal with Abram to allow for a proper and complete release of the performances. During the mixing process, a gap was discovered in one of the very lengthy performances of Sister Ray. This gap was caused by the time it took to change the reel during the performance. It was decided restore the missing music using part of the same performance from the intact, albeit sonically far inferior version available on Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes.
Two of the songs from these performances, "Over You" and "Sweet Bonnie Brown/It's Too Much", have never been released as studio recordings by the band, and it is not known whether the band ever recorded them in the studio. Songs such as "Sweet Jane" and "New Age" feature significantly different or expanded lyrics from their eventual studio counterparts (which would both be released in 1970 on Loaded), while others such as "Sister Ray" and "White Light/White Heat" are substantially longer than their studio versions.
The album – which received a Metacritic score of 86 based on 13 reviews (indicating "universal acclaim") – was widely praised both for its sound quality and for the power of its performances.[6][10][2]