Velvet Underground

Many of my favorite groups have been commercially successful at the time they were active, as well as over the years. Today's favorite group wasn't commercially successful at the time it was active. However, it is one of the most influential acts of all time. As Brian Eno said in 1982: “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band”.

The foundations for what would become the Velvet Underground were laid in late 1964. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Lou Reed had performed with a few short-lived garage bands and had worked as a songwriter for Pickwick Records (Reed described his tenure there as being "a poor man's Carole King"). Reed met John Cale, a Welshman who had moved to the United States to study Classical music upon securing a scholarship. Cale had worked with experimental composers Cornelius Cardew and La Monte Young, and had performed with Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, but was also interested in Rock music. Young's use of extended drones would be a profound influence on the band's early sound. Cale was pleasantly surprised to discover that Reed's experimentalist tendencies were similar to his own: Reed sometimes used alternative guitar tunings to create a droning sound. The pair rehearsed and performed together; their partnership and shared interests built the path towards what would later become the Velvet Underground.

Reed's first group with Cale was the Primitives, a short-lived group assembled to issue budget-priced recordings and support an anti-dance single penned by Reed, The Ostrich, to which Cale added a viola passage. Reed and Cale recruited Sterling Morrison - a college classmate of Reed's at Syracuse University - as a replacement for Walter De Maria, who had been a third member of the Primitives. Reed and Morrison both played guitars, Cale played viola, keyboards and bass and Angus MacLise joined on percussion to complete the initial four-member unit. This quartet was first called the Warlocks, then the Falling Spikes.

The Velvet Underground by Michael Leigh was a contemporary mass market paperback about the secret sexual subculture of the early 1960s that Cale's friend and Dream Syndicate associate Tony Conrad showed the group. MacLise made a suggestion to adopt the title as the band's name. According to Reed and Morrison, the group liked the name, considering it evocative of "underground cinema", and fitting, as Reed had already written Venus in Furs, a song inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's book of the same name, which dealt with masochism. The band immediately and unanimously adopted the Velvet Underground as its new name in November 1965.

The newly named Velvet Underground rehearsed and performed in New York City. Their music was generally much more relaxed than it would later become: Cale described this era as reminiscent of beat poetry, with MacLise playing gentle "pitter and patter rhythms behind the drone".

Manager and music journalist Al Aronowitz arranged for the group's first paying gig - $75 (US$570 in 2017 dollars) to play at Summit High School, in Summit, New Jersey, opening for the Myddle Class. When they decided to take the gig, MacLise abruptly left the group, protesting what he considered a sellout; he was also unwilling to be told when to start and stop playing. "Angus was in it for art", Morrison reported.

MacLise was replaced by Maureen "Moe" Tucker, the younger sister of Morrison's friend Jim Tucker. Tucker's playing style was rather unusual: she generally played standing up rather than seated and had an abbreviated drum setup of tom-toms, snare and an upturned bass drum, using mallets as often as drumsticks, and rarely using cymbals (she admits that she always hated cymbals). (The band having asked her to do something unusual, she turned her bass drum on its side and played standing up. When her drums were stolen from one club, she replaced them with garbage cans, brought in from outside.) Her rhythms, at once simple and exotic (influenced by the likes of Babatunde Olatunji and Bo Diddley records), became a vital part of the group's music, despite Cale's initial objections to the presence of a female drummer. The group earned a regular paying gig at the Café Bizarre and gained an early reputation as a promising ensemble.

In 1965, after being introduced to the Velvet Underground by filmmaker Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol became the band's manager and suggested they feature the German-born singer Nico (born Christa Päffgen) on several songs. Warhol's reputation helped the band gain a higher profile. He helped the band secure a coveted recording contract with MGM's Verve Records, with himself as nominal "producer", and gave the Velvets free rein over the sound they created.

Thus their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, came to be. The album cover is famous for its Warhol design: a yellow banana sticker with "Peel slowly and see" printed near the tip. Those who did remove the banana skin found a pink, peeled banana beneath.

The album was released on March 12, 1967 (after a lengthy delay by Verve) and eventually reached #171 on Billboard magazine's Top 200 charts. The promising commercial growth of the album was soon dampened by legal complications: the album's back cover featured a photo of the group playing live with another image projected behind them; the projected image was a still of actor Eric Emerson from a Warhol motion picture, Chelsea Girls. Emerson had been arrested for drug possession and, desperate for money, claimed the still had been included on the album without his permission.

Instead of compensating Emerson for damages, MGM Records canceled all distribution of the album for nearly two months until the legal problems were settled (by which time the record had lost its modest commercial momentum), and the still was airbrushed out of the remaining copies of the album. By the time the record was re-distributed into stores, it faced stiff competition in the marketplace which further hindered the release. Regarding MGM/Verve's delay in releasing the album, Warhol's business manager Paul Morrissey once offered the following: "Verve/MGM didn't know what to do with The Velvet Underground and Nico because it was so peculiar. They didn't release it for almost a year. Tom Wilson at Verve/MGM only bought the album from me because of Nico. He saw no talent in Lou [Reed]."

The critical world also took little notice of the album. One of the few print reviews of the album in 1967 was a mostly positive review in the second issue of Vibrations, a small Rock music magazine. The review described the music as "a full-fledged attack on the ears and on the brain" and took note of the dark subject matter to be found in the majority of the song's lyrics.

It was not until a decade later that the album started to receive almost unanimous praise by numerous Rock critics, many of whom made particular note of its influence in modern Rock music. Robert Christgau in his 1977 retrospective review of 1967 said "it never stops getting better". In The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1998), Colin Larkin called it a "powerful collection" that "introduced Reed's decidedly urban infatuations, a fascination for street culture and amorality bordering on voyeurism." In April 2003, Spin led their "Top Fifteen Most Influential Albums of All Time" list with the album. On November 12, 2000, NPR included it in their "NPR 100" series of "the most important American musical works of the 20th century". Rolling Stone placed it at #13 on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, calling it the most prophetic Rock album ever made.

The album commences with the celestial Sunday Morning:

I'm Waiting for the Man is an urgent rocker about going uptown to score drugs. With John Cale pounding away on the piano, Reed laid out the blueprint for his career: tough, urban, noisy, taboo, poetic.

This hard-edged tune is followed by a softer one; Femme Fatale was written about Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick (who was also Dylan's companion for a while).

This is a great cover by Big Star:

In an album of great songs, this is one of the greatest. Venus in Furs was inspired by the book of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, after whom masochism was named. The song includes sexual themes of sadomasochism, bondage and submission, which are still daring by today's standards, so much more by 1967's. Yet it's not sensationalism that drives the lyrics, but a kind of urban wisdom:

Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather

Shiny leather in the dark

Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you

Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

Severin, Severin, speak so slightly

Severin, down on your bended knee

Taste the whip, in love not given lightly

Taste the whip, now plead for me

I am tired, I am weary

I could sleep for a thousand years

A thousand dreams that would awake me

Different colors made of tears

The arrangement features John Cale's cacophonous electric viola as well as Lou Reed's ostrich guitar, which is a guitar with all of its strings tuned to the same note. The more prominent guitar work is Reed's guitar at standard tuning, albeit a semitone down. Guitarist Sterling Morrison played bass on the song. The backbeat consists of two bass drum beats and one tambourine shake, played at a slow pace by Maureen Tucker.

In his essay "Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground", Erich Kuersten writes:

"There is no intro or buildup to the song; the track starts as if you opened a door to a decadent Marrakesh S&M/opium den, a blast of air-conditioned Middle Eastern menace with a plodding beat that’s the missing link between Bolero and Led Zeppelin’s version of When the Levee Breaks.

Run Run Run details a number of characters living in New York City, including Teenage Mary, Margarita Passion, Seasick Sarah, and Beardless Harry, all of whom are detailed using or seeking drugs. In addition to mentioning New York scenery such as Union Square and 47th Street, the song makes use of drug terms paired with religious imagery. The song is also well known because of Lou Reed's guitar solo, and its lack of a conventional approach.

Warhol's favorite song was All Tomorrow's Parties. Inspiration for the song came from Reed's observation of the Warhol clique; according to Reed, the song is "a very apt description of certain people at the Factory at the time. ... I watched Andy. I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things." In a 2006 interview Reed's bandmate John Cale stated: "The song was about a girl called Darryl, a beautiful petite blonde with three kids, two of whom were taken away from her."

The song had a Cinderella-style narrative turned on its head:

And what costume shall the poor girl wear

To all tomorrow's parties

A hand-me-down dress from who knows where

To all tomorrow's parties

And where will she go, and what shall she do

When midnight comes around

She'll turn once more to Sunday's clown and cry behind the door

My favorite song of the album is Heroin. I've never done hard drugs in my life, but this song gets me into the headspace of a heroin addict, just like Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat gets me into the headspace of a psychotic killer (I'm not that either).

In an interview with WLIR in 1972, Reed said he wrote the lyrics while working for a record company:

I was working for a record company as a songwriter, where they'd lock me in a room and they'd say write ten surfing songs, ya know, and I wrote Heroin and I said "Hey I got something for ya." They said, "Never gonna happen, never gonna happen."

Heroin begins slowly with Reed's quiet, melodic guitar and hypnotic drum patterns by Maureen Tucker, soon joined by John Cale's droning electric viola and Sterling Morrison's steady rhythm guitar. The tempo increases gradually, mimicking the high the narrator receives from the drug, until a frantic crescendo is reached, punctuated by Cale's shrieking viola and the more punctuated guitar strumming of Reed and Morrison. Tucker's drumming becomes hurried and louder. The song then slows to the original tempo, and repeats the same pattern before ending.

Tucker stopped drumming for several seconds at the 5:17 mark, before picking up the beat again. She explains: "As soon as it got loud and fast, I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't hear anybody, so I stopped, assuming, well, they'll stop too and say "what's the matter, Moe?" [laughs] But nobody stopped. And then, you know, so I came back in."

The song was famous for its neutral stance on heroin usage, though many of the critics and much of the public didn't quite get it. The song managed to be cleverly political as well:

Because when the smack begins to flow

I really don't care anymore

About all the Jim-Jims in this town

And all the politicians making crazy sounds

And everybody putting everybody else down

And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

'Cause when the smack begins to flow

And I really don't care anymore

Ah, when that heroin is in my blood

And that blood is in my head

Then thank God that I'm as good as dead

And thank your God that I'm not aware

And thank God that I just don't care

And I guess I just don't know

Oh, and I guess I just don't know

Here's a great live version from Lou Reed's Rock 'n' Roll Animal:

There She Goes Again, a song about an abusive relationship, is most likely musically influenced by The Rolling Stones' cover version of Marvin Gaye's Hitch Hike. Sterling Morrison had said of the song:

"Metronomically, we were a pretty accurate band. If we were speeding up or slowing down, it was by design. If you listen to the solo break on "There She Goes Again," it slows down—slower and slower and slower. And then when it comes back into the "bye-bye-byes" it's double the original tempo, a tremendous leap to twice the speed."

I'll Be Your Mirror was a delicate song that Reed wrote for Nico, who provides lead vocals. Inspiration for the song apparently came about after Nico approached Reed after a show in 1965 saying, "Oh Lou, I'll be your mirror."

I'll Be Your Mirror was the most difficult for Nico to record, as the band wanted her to provide slender, delicate vocals for the song, yet she would sing louder, more aggressive vocals take after take. Sterling Morrison described the ordeal in an interview:

"She kept singing I'll Be Your Mirror in her strident voice. Dissatisfied, we kept making her do it over and over again until she broke down and burst into tears. At that point we said, "Oh, try it just one more time and then fuck it — if it doesn't work this time, we're not going to do the song." Nico sat down and did it exactly right."

Nico moved on after the Velvets severed their relationship with Andy Warhol. Reed once commented on their leaving Warhol: "[Warhol asked] do you want to just keep playing museums from now on and the art festivals? Or do you want to start moving into other areas?" I thought about it, and I fired him. […] I never saw Andy mad, but I did that day. He was really mad, called me a rat. It was the worst thing he could think of."

Steve Sesnick was soon brought in as a replacement manager, much to the chagrin of Cale, who believes that Sesnick tried to push Reed as band leader at the expense of band harmony. Both Cale and Reed called Sesnick a "snake" in different interviews after leaving the band. In September 1967, the Velvet Underground began recording their second album, White Light/White Heat, with Tom Wilson as producer.

The album was recorded in just two days, and with a noticeably different style than The Velvet Underground & Nico. John Cale described White Light/White Heat as "a very rabid record... The first one had some gentility, some beauty. The second one was consciously anti-beauty." Sterling Morrison said: "We were all pulling in the same direction. We may have been dragging each other off a cliff, but we were all definitely going in the same direction. In the White Light/White Heat era, our lives were chaos. That's what's reflected in the record."

Nearly every song on the album contains some sort of experimental or avant-garde quality. The Gift, for example, contains a recital of a short story and a loud instrumental rock song playing simultaneously, with the former on the left speaker channel and the latter on the right on the stereo version. I Heard Her Call My Name is distinguishable for its distorted guitar solos and prominent use of feedback.

The record's lyrics vary from themes of drug use and sexual references (such as fellatio and orgies), including the song Lady Godiva's Operation, about a transsexual woman's botched surgical procedure, and the title track White Light/White Heat, which describes the use of amphetamine. Here She Comes Now is built around a double-entendre. On the album's last track, Sister Ray, Lou Reed tells a tale of debauchery involving drag queens having a failed orgy, while the band plays an improvised seventeen-minute jam around three chords.

The opening track, White Light/White Heat, was a Bowie favorite:

In 1997, for David Bowie's fiftieth birthday, Reed got onstage with his old friend and collaborator to perform Dirty Blvd. and White Light/White Heat. They traded lines and secret smiles – on their faces, you could see how Reed's music, often alienating, was also the source of profound joy.

Here's Lady Godiva's Operation:

Lady Godiva here dressed so demurely

Pats the head of another curly haired boy, just another toy

Sick with silence she weeps sincerely

Saying words that have oh so clearly been said so long ago

Here She Comes Now was much loved by critics: Eddie Gibson of Music Review Database praised the song as "one of the more beautiful tracks from White Light/White Heat". He described the instrumentation as "delicate and in an acoustic manor" [sic] and said "it's something spectacular because the guitar is very delirious and the sparse drumming only adds to the beautiful atmosphere". He also commented that the delayed reverb gave the song a "sweet, melancholy edge over the rest of the album". Uncut described it as "a soothing mantra that served as a brief moment of balm amongst the blistering noise, a guttering light in the churning darkness". Similarly, Mark Deming of AllMusic considered it "the album's sole 'pretty' song" and "mildly disquieting". Authors Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz deemed the song "the album's lone melodic ballad" that "carried an uneasy undercurrent". Author Doyle Greene considered the track "a brief and relatively sedate song closest to the Psychedelic Folk leanings of the first album".

Reed said of the lyrics of the album's closing track: "Sister Ray was done as a joke - no, not as a joke - but it has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything. It was built around this story that I wrote about this scene of total debauchery and decay. I like to think of Sister Ray as a transvestite smack dealer. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear." At 17 minutes 29 seconds, it is the longest song on White Light/White Heat, taking up most of the second side of the record, as well as the longest song in the Velvet Underground's studio discography.

The album entered the Billboard Top 200 chart for two weeks, at a dismal number 199.

Tensions were growing: the group was tired of receiving little recognition for its work, and Reed and Cale were pulling the Velvet Underground in different directions. The differences showed in the last recording sessions the band had with John Cale in 1968: three Pop-like songs in Reed's direction and a viola-driven drone in Cale's direction. Further, some songs the band had performed with Cale in concert, or that he had co-written, were not recorded until after he had left the group.

Reed called Morrison and Tucker to a band meeting at the Riviera Cafe on Sheridan Square in the West Village without Cale's knowledge, and delivered an ultimatum by declaring that either Cale was sacked or the Velvets were dissolved. Neither Morrison nor Tucker were happy with the idea, but faced with a choice of either no Cale or no band at all, the pair reluctantly sided with Reed.

It has often been reported that before Cale's departure (following White Light/White Heat) there was a struggle between his creative impulses and Reed's: Cale's experimentalist tendencies had contrasted with Reed's more conventional approach. According to Tim Mitchell, however, Morrison reported that while there was creative tension between Reed and Cale, its impact has been exaggerated over the years. Cale played his last show with the band at the Boston Tea Party in September 1968 and was fired shortly afterwards.

Before work on their third album started, Cale was replaced by Doug Yule of the Boston group the Grass Menagerie, who had been a close associate of the band. The album was recorded in late 1968 and was simply called The Velvet Underground. Its sound - consisting largely of ballads and straightforward Rock songs - marked a notable shift in style from the group's previous recordings. In 2003, the album was ranked #314 on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list.

Candy Says was the opening track. A soft-sounding song dealing with a young girl's mental anguish:

Candy says I've come to hate my body

And all that it requires in this world

..............................................

Maybe when I'm older

What do you think I'd see

If I could walk away from me

What Goes On was the only single released from this album. It's a song in the vein of White Light/White Heat:

Pale Blue Eyes is one of the most conventionally beautiful songs the VU ever recorded:

Jesus was an unexpected prayer-like song:

I'm Beginning to See the Light was another highlight:

Closing track After Hours is one of few songs with lead vocals by drummer Maureen Tucker, as Lou Reed stated the song was "so innocent and pure" that he could not possibly sing it himself. Tucker's vocals are accompanied by acoustic and bass guitar.

By 1969 the MGM and Verve record labels had been losing money for several years. A new president, Mike Curb, was hired and he decided to cancel the recording contracts of 18 of their acts who supposedly glorified drugs in their lyrics, including their many controversial and unprofitable acts. The VU were on top of this list. Consequently Atlantic Records signed the Velvet Underground for what would be its final studio album with Lou Reed: Loaded, released on 15 November 1970, was a commercial effort aimed at radio play, another step away from the experimental days of their earlier albums. The album's title refers to Atlantic's request that the band produce an album "loaded with hits". The album, like the previous ones, was not successful at the time, but was greatly appreciated later on: In 2003, Loaded was #110 on Rolling Stone's reissue of their 500 greatest albums of all time.

Opening track Who Loves the Sun is sung by Doug Yule:

Then comes my joint favorite (along with Heroin) VU song ever: Sweet Jane. There are two distinct versions of Sweet Jane with minor variations, spread over its first four releases. The first release of the song, in November 1970, was a version recorded earlier that year and included on Loaded. In May 1972, a live version (recorded August 1970) appeared on the Velvet Underground's Live at Max's Kansas City; this had an additional bridge that was missing from the Loaded release.

This is the Loaded version:

This version is live at Max's Kansas City:

In February 1974 a live version recorded in December 1973 (similar to the Loaded version but with extended "intro" and Hard Rock sound), appeared on Reed's Rock 'n' Roll Animal. The elaborate twin guitar "intro" on the Rock 'n' Roll Animal version was written by Steve Hunter and played by Hunter and Dick Wagner, two Detroit guitarists who would go on to play with Alice Cooper. Here it is:

In 1972, there was a great cover version by Mott The Hoople:

In the liner notes to the Velvet Underground's box set Peel Slowly and See, Lou Reed wrote, "Rock And Roll is about me. If I hadn't heard Rock and Roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet. Which would have been devastating - to think that everything, everywhere was like it was where I come from. That would have been profoundly discouraging. Movies didn't do it for me. TV didn't do it for me. It was the radio that did it."

New Age is one of the songs that feature Doug Yule on vocals, encouraged by Lou Reed. In its original form, it was about Reed's girlfriend at the time, Shelley Albin, and included a possible reference to Reed's bisexuality: "It seems to be my fancy to make it with Frank and Nancy." The later, studio version, is written from the point of view of a fan addressing a "fat blonde actress."

The closing track of the album, Oh! Sweet Nuthin', is a seven and a half minutes' long song about poverty and a plead for empathy. It includes great Doug Yule vocals and some of the most unreal "feel" guitar soloing ever by the oft-ignored Sterling Morrison.

In our next chapter, we'll deal with Lou Reed's extremely interesting and long solo career. Till then!