MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS
The Velvets and Their Underground Reputation
The Velvets were the first important rock & roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience. [If ] this was paradoxical, . . . the very idea of rock & roll art rests on a contradiction. Its greatest exponents—the Beatles, the Stones, and (especially) the Who—undercut the contradiction by making the surface of the music deceptively casual, then demolished it by reaching millions of kids. But the Velvets’ music was too overtly intellectual, stylized, and distanced to be commercial. Like pop art, which was very much a part of the Velvets’ world, it was anti-art art made by anti-elite elitists.
ELLEN WILLIS, 1978
WHEN LOU REED, JOHN CALE, AND STERLING MORRISON MADE THEIR FIRST recordings as the Velvet Underground—during July 1965, in the lofty crash-pad of Cale and Reed on Ludlow Street, at the eastern extremity of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—they hardly envisioned inhabiting the same realm as their heroes, those exponents of “rock & roll art” Willis cites above. From the start, the band existed on that radical borderline still separating “pop” from serious music (Dylan being days away from dissolving the old order of pop and folk at some tin-poke folk-fest on Rhode Island).
The songs they recorded over the noise of the New York streets that summer afternoon—which now fill the first disc of the Velvets’ very own five-CD anthology, Peel Slowly and See (1995)—were not merely “too overtly intellectual, stylized, and distanced to be commercial,” but their subject matter stood a million miles away from the world of radio play. Sex, drugs, politics, and death collide on “Heroin,” “Prominent Men,” and “Venus in Furs” (as well as on another, seemingly lost reel where “Black Angel’s Death Song” apparently resides, alongside something called “Never Get Emotionally Involved with Man, Woman, Beast, or Child”).
There was nothing “pop” about these prototypical recordings, made barely a month after the ramparts were first raised by Dylan’s electric marauders on the world’s first six-minute pop 45, “Like a Rolling Stone.” That Reed was still hiding under Dylan’s umbrella is evidenced by “Prominent Men,” as well as by the lopsided folkiness of the trio’s time signatures. But Reed was already dealing with subject matter at which even an amphetaminized Dylan balked.
Reed had previously been punching the clock (and the wall!) in the Long Island equivalent of the Brill Building, pounding out hit replicants for the Pickwick label under a variety of necessary disguises. But his final Pickwick recording, “The Ostrich”—leading as it did to that serendipitous rendezvous with Cale—was a Spitting Image send-up of this whole sorry factory of pop songsmiths. It was time to get serious.
At the same time, John Cale was looking to embrace a little frivolity. His adoption into one of the more idiot-savant credos among New York’s avant-garde—as ongoing member of the Theater of Eternal Music aka Dream Syndicate, an experimental outfit that centered on La Monte Young—certainly made for some challenging evenings bewildering Noo Yawk’s arty-sans, even if the warm drones emitting from Young & Co. lent more toward the eternal than the musical.
Upon meeting Lou Reed and hearing him play the likes of “Heroin” and “Waiting for the Man”—“on an acoustic guitar as if they were folk songs”—Cale admits that he “was terrifically excited by the possibility of combining what I had been doing with La Monte with what I was doing with Lou, and finding a commercial outlet ” (my italics). Here comes that dichotomy rearing up again. (And lest we forget, Cale continued his sonic experiments for his own amusement, recording a series of short instrumental pieces like “Loop” and “Noise”—issued in the Velvets’ name as part of multimedia packages—as well as more ambitious pieces like the forty-two-minute “Sun Blindness Music,” issued in 2000 as the title piece on the first of three archival CDs of Cale’s Velvet-era home recordings.)
The kind of contradictions highlighted by Willis were present from day one, inherent in their whole aesthetic. It would center on an in-your-face sonic confrontation, celebrated in the (essentially negative) press quotes proudly emblazoned across the inner sleeve on their debut album. If, at the time, they hoped it might yet prove a selling point, evidence was mounting against them. As soon as they stopped playing to the smart-art crowd and began infiltrating a more pop caucus, they were trying to cry halt on the whole midsixties pop gestalt—with predictable results. Witness Rob Norris’s 1979 recollection, in Kicks, of the November night the Velvet Underground invaded Summit High School in New Jersey, their first billed performance:
Nothing could have prepared the kids and parents assembled in the auditorium for what they were about to experience that night. Our only clue was the small crowd of strange-looking people hanging around in front of the stage. When the curtain went up, nobody could believe their eyes! There stood the Velvet Underground—all tall and dressed mostly in black; two of them were wearing sunglasses. One of the guys with the shades had VERY long hair and was wearing silver jewelry. He was holding a large violin. The drummer had a Beatle haircut and was standing at a small oddly arranged drumkit. Was it a boy or a girl? Before we could take it all in, everyone was hit by a screeching surge of sound, with a pounding beat louder than anything we had ever heard. About a minute into the second song, which the singer introduced as “Heroin,” the music began to get even more intense. It swelled and accelerated like a giant tidal wave which was threatening to engulf us all. At this point, most of the audience retreated in horror. . . . My friends and I moved a little closer to the stage, knowing that something special was happening.
Dylan may have met his nemeses head-on at Newport, and gone on from strength to strength, but confronting one’s audience remained a tricky business, made trickier for the Velvets by their lack of any audience and their expulsion from the Cafés Wha and Bizarre in the West Village for upsetting the customers. If Captain Beefheart had the Avalon in San Francisco at which to diddle his “Diddy Wah Diddy,” and the MC5 had the Grande in Detroit from which to go “Black to Comm,” it took the interest of would-be pop impresario Andy Warhol before the Velvets found the requisite umbrella under which they could profit and prosper.
Warhol instinctively realized that if ever there was a rock band designed to be darlings of the underground, it was the Velvets. Save that, in 1965, there was no pop underground. Nor was there an underground press as such. Whereas, by the end of 1968, when the MC5, Captain Beefheart, and the Stooges were all signed up, there was at least the prospect of press for such pop-pariahs.
When the Velvets signed to Verve, in 1966, all bands made their reputations with singles (something even Dylan recognized after the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” introduced him to a whole new demographic). Most albums comprised two hit singles and a dozen b-sides, whilst the press still translated the new sounds for an essentially middle-brow mainstream media. There were no forums for hip young rock critics, because there were no rock magazines. What passed for the pop press in America—Sixteen, Datebook, Teen Scene, and Hullabaloo— was not merely uncritical, it was wholly nonconfrontational juvenalia designed to keep teens keen.
It could be argued that the underground rock press came along precisely because the mainstream press maintained a lofty disdain for the more challenging forms of pop music, while the teen mags reduced everything down to favorite sandwich filling. In fact, the Velvet Underground very soon piqued the interest of the dailies, albeit as willing performers in impresario Andy Warhol’s latest circus of freaks, first, and musical curios, second.
A typically sardonic New York Times review of their first appearance under the Warhol imprimatur—at a psychiatric convention at the Delmonico Hotel on January 10, 1966—provides an exact snapshot of the kind of shock value the band carried as their banner for the longest time: “When ‘The Velvet Underground’ swung into action the high-decibel sound, aptly described by Dr. Campbell as ‘a short-lived torture of cacophony,’ was a combination of rock ’n’ roll and Egyptian belly-dance music.”
A month later they were again to be found in their hometown broadsheet. This time it was their stint at the Cinemateque—playing against a backdrop of mismatched films—that drew the fire of the Times’ crusty-enough- to-be-a-crustacean critic of film and theater, Bosley Crowther. By the end of the evening, Crowther was clearly beginning to feel that he was getting too old for this. But then, the intent all along was to disturb. As Cale observed in his autobiography, Warhol felt “he had to whip his act into shape and bring the focus and volume to a shattering level. To this end he arranged a week-long engagement in mid-February at the Cinemateque, where underground movies were screened. We were in this tiny little theater playing as loud as possible, just victimizing the audience more than anything.”
The whipping—metaphorical and literal—achieved its purpose, and by the spring the Velvets were ready for their first assault on a West Coast state of mind. When they headed west in early May, expecting a long, strange trip, they arrived first at the Whisky A Go Go’s short-lived alter ego, the Trip. The band’s stint at the Trip, scheduled to last a fortnight, was curtailed by the police, who shut them down after the third night, having viewed the likes of “Venus in Furs” as the pop-song equivalent of one of Lenny Bruce’s satirical screeds, and an affront to core values.
As such, the Los Angeles Times review, which ran the same day the quartet’s First Amendment rights were put on hold, was a prescient piece of writing in its depiction of “a rock group that goes beyond rock.” However, it was the “abandoned, frenetic, frenzied dances . . . with leather, ropes and foil, sort of fetishist,” that spun the LAPD’s wheels. So the Warhol troupe and its court minstrels, the Velvets, fled to the Castle, a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, to await their next engagement and to read an altogether hipper critique in the Los Angeles Free Press, courtesy of the awfully well read (it’s well known) Paul Jay Robbins. The Free Press may not have been a rock fanzine per se, but it counted in the counterculture stakes, continuing to cast the occasional glance at the Velvets throughout their—and its—existence.
Further up the coast, the San Francisco Chronicle itself found the Velvets “shatteringly contemporary,” though their one and only pop critic, Ralph J. Gleason, gave them the critical cold shoulder after they alienated the overseer of the Fillmore franchise, gruff East European émigré Bill Graham. Gleason never saw the light, even though San Francisco became, in the years to come, the band’s second-favorite residence.
The Velvets, seemingly unfazed, returned east via Chicago, where they stopped off at Poor Richard’s to perform a couple of shows in their most avant-garde incarnation. Reed had been laid low by some disease of the soul. The show, though, in its Exploding Plastic Inevitability, went on—with Cale as frontman, Mo on bass, and Angus MacLise, the combo’s original drummer, beating out time, whilst Ronald Nasser filmed the performance, before dissecting it into some kind of celluloid cut-up for his less-than-representative Exploding Plastic Inevitable (a review of which, from the Free Press, appears herein).
Again, opinion was not so much divided as dichotomized within the breezy boroughs of the Second City. Dispatched from the Tribune was an uncomprehending Ms. Nelson, determined to prove the whole thing to be one of Warhol’s “put-ons,” while the Daily News’ Michaelo Williams found that Warhol’s revue “actually vibrates with menace, cynicism and perversion. To experience it is to be brutalized.” If the Chicago daily press had entrusted their reactions to the womenfolk, the folkies had also dispatched one of their own to check out what might be happening. It was Larry McCombes, not Mr. Jones, who sent a long, bewildering review to the Boston Broadside, a long-standing alternative to New York’s Broadside, which they duly ran, presumably as a warning to one and all.
If the Boston Broadside’s continued interest in more traditional fare—unfazed by Dylan’s act of electric apostasy—was about to consign it to the same historical waste-disposal as the Little Sandy Review, Minnesota’s folkzine (cofounded by Paul Nelson, who was converted by Dylan’s new sound and would go on to compile VU’s double live set, 1969), it at least concentrated on the musical aspect. In fact, one of its readers had already decided that what was needed was a forum for the more musically furious. In February 1966, a regular subscriber to Boston Broadside and a Swarthmore student, Paul Williams, mimeographed the first issue of an ostensibly biweekly review magazine of the latest sounds, fittingly named Crawdaddy.
And yet, when the Velvets performed down the road from Swarthmore as part of the Philadelphia Art Festival in December 1966—by which time Crawdaddy was printed, not mimeographed, and monthly— it was left to the everyday Enquirer to shape public perceptions about this self-proclaimed “mixed-media discotheque.” Perhaps the ads for this extravaganza passed Williams by, which temptingly offered a bill that consisted of “first . . . underground films . . . then Andy Warhol, himself, and [then] his rock group, The Velvet Underground And Nico. Then they flash lights on you and everything and turn you into wallpaper. Then you’re supposed to go out of your mind. The critics aren’t wild about this but only the Arts Council has the nerve to do it.”
Williams later admitted, in his mid-1980s rock odyssey The Map, that even in 1968 he felt foolish because friends had been telling him how great the Velvets were for the past two years, “and I wouldn’t listen.” And yet, to his eternal credit, when he did realize the error of his ways, he ran two seminal critiques of the band in the summer of 1968, one a review of White Light/White Heat by Sandy Pearlman and the other an iconoclastic demolition of the common perspective in rock criticism to date (Williams’s included) by Wayne McGuire. These appeared in consecutive issues of Crawdaddy, which remained under Williams’s tutelage, though it had traveled a long way from its original mimeographic self.
This pair of think-pieces served as important reminders of the band’s ongoing significance at a time when they had all but fallen off the commercial cliff. Their initial sprint of newsprint had been exhausted with and by the end of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and its “newsworthy” Warhol association. The message was clear: as long as the Velvets remained Warhol’s latest playthings, they could garner column inches in the drip-dry dailies. It is no coincidence that the last mainstream review of the Velvets in the sixties came from Ann Arbor shows in April 1967, part of the EPI’s final furlough.
At some point during a three-week residency at the New York Gymnasium, which began just three days after their Michigan meeting, the Velvets—who were billed beneath both Warhol and Nico in Gymnasium press ads—jettisoned their imposed prima donna and her artistic ally. Barely a month after the belated release of their debut album, bedecked by a pink banana, the Velvets decided to set their own dates with destiny.
The result, on an artistic level, was a triumph: eighteen months of white-heat creativity as a live act, during which they reinvented rock as a performance art (for good). Until September 1968, when their most versatile contributor, John Cale, was putsched out of the band, they also inadvertently became modern music’s greatest secret. Even now, when their Import is a given, the only officially available audio documentation of this eighteen-month period is a recording of two songs from their final night at the Gymnasium in April 1967 (though two more songs from an early show at La Cave, in Cleveland, exactly a year later, circulate widely on bootleg).
The studio recordings from this period still highlight the paradoxical nature of the band, combining their most devoutly dissonant statement, White Light/White Heat, with the fairground attraction of at least one unissued 45, “Stephanie Says b/w Temptation Inside Your Heart” (both issued on 1985’s VU). But these recordings from the unnatural confines of four studio walls rarely suggest the dark recesses the band was inclined to explore live—save for “Sister Ray,” where the band gambled that the tape would capture the same red-line spirit the song nightly displayed in concert, and it paid off. Serving much the same purpose as the Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” which took up far more tape before it was caged on record, “Sister Ray” defined what Cale had hoped the Velvets might become from the very start—before the Warlocks fell on their spikes—“a tapestry behind which [Lou] could set up his words, and we could do anything we wanted. And we would improvise every night, and only record albums live.”
The Velvets sat at the forefront of American attempts to turn the four-minute album track into a twelve-minute excursion into extemporization— cock an ear to bootleg recordings of “Run Run Run” from Columbus in November 1966 and the Hillside Festival in August 1969 if you don’t believe me—while their true peers lay across the ocean, the Pink Floyd and Fairport Convention being almost as adept at these exercises, albeit minus most of the self-conscious cacophony. As their early producer Joe Boyd once told me, “The Pink Floyd used to do a version of ‘Arnold Layne’ that went on for ten minutes, but when we recorded it, we did a three-minute version. Most songs were like that. . . . There was definitely a feeling at the time that recordings were supposed to be compact. [So] if you’d heard a track with Richard [Thompson] playing five choruses as a solo, you would then go into the studio and record him compressing . . . those five choruses into one.”
Perhaps hoping to capture just such a free-form aesthetic, Cale arranged to record the Velvets’ first live foray free of Warholian accoutrements—Nico et al.—at The Gymnasium in New York. It was here that they debuted “Searchin’ for My Mainline,” aka “Sister Ray,” already a seventeen-minute slamfest of vying discordancies, as well as equally punch-drunk paeans like “Guess I’m Falling in Love” and “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore.” Sadly, only Lou’s anthem to amorous guesswork and the tarmac-stripping takeoff that is “Booker T” have so far been offered (even un)officially to the faithful.
Though the band continued to pound the boards month after month, exponents of audio-vérité go all mute on the eastern front (as do the press) until the Velvets entered Cleveland’s La Cave, a year on almost to the day. Here they proceeded to reveal a sound that had fully assimilated the modus operandi of Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, but to a higher purpose (i.e., musical progression over sonic stasis). Their oft-bootlegged thirty-five-minute “prelude” to “Sister Ray,” “Sweet Sister Ray,” with which they opened one particular show that April—thankfully captured for posterity by Clevelander Jamie Klimek—shows a band who have welded together elements of “The Nothing Song,” “Melody Laughter” (the two long EPI improvisations), and “Day of Niagara” (one of Theatre of Eternal Music’s last experiments) with broader strokes and a greater dynamic range, riding the subconscious vibes of a sympathetic audience. (Sadly, the “Sister Ray” into which it segues has never circulated and may not even have been recorded).
So what happened to “Sweet Sister Ray”? Compressing its “five choruses into one,” the Velvets probably made it an element in a greater whole, as part of a longer, more symphonic “Sister.” “Sweet Rock & Roll,” aka “Sister Ray, Part 3,” is another element/song that seems to have fleetingly transfixed lucky witnesses at a handful of West Coast shows in the summer of 1968. According to the late Sterling Morrison, “Sweet Rock & Roll” was also used as a “preamble” to “Sister Ray”: “It kind of just goes along and then hits the chords, which were very heavy.” Lester Bangs, more prone to praise, described the song in glowing terms in his Velvets valedictory for Creem in 1971:
The song I remember most particularly was one they did at a strange San Diego concert in 1968. They were on with Quicksilver Messenger Service, and much of the audience was apathetic or put off; they wanted those California acid-vibes instead of what they took for cold New York negativism. . . . In a way it was the ultimate Velvet Underground concert. The audience was terrible; those that weren’t downright hostile kept interrupting the announcements between songs to yell out what they wanted to hear, like “How about ‘Heroin’!” and even “Play ‘Searchin’ for My Mainline’!” But right in the middle of all these bad vibes, the Velvets launched into a new song that was one of the most incredible musical experiences of my concert career. Lou announced it as “Sister Ray, Part Two,” but it sounded nothing like the previous song. It was built on the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling mournfully, somewhat like “Venus in Furs” but less creaky, more deliberate and eloquent. The lyrics, many of which Lou made up as he went along, seemed like some fantasy from an urban inferno: “Sweet Sister Ray went to a movie / The floor was painted red and the walls were green / ‘Ooohh,’ she cried / ‘This is the strangest movie I’ve ever seen. . . .’” But it was the chorus that was the most moving: “Ohhhh, sweet rock and roll— it’ll cleanse your soul. . . .”
The improvised lyric Bangs cites does not appear on any known recording, even those super-slow arrangements from 1969 that have embraced “the most dolorous riff imaginable,” but once Sister Ray and her crew took on a life of their own, the song invariably acquired a free-form story line embracing the surreal. The “others” in the band share Cale’s belief that Reed frequently adopted an ever-expanding retinue of characters to accompany the sister on her search: “We’d start way off left of field with something totally chaotic and gradually work our way back to the version on the record. Very long, very intense, with Lou becoming a Southern preacher man, telling stories and just inventing these fantastic characters as we played.”
Both “Sweet Sister Ray” and “Sweet Rock & Roll” evidently left an indelible mark on some attendees. The latter even warranted a mention in the anonymous single-paragraph review of the July 1968 Shrine show in the Los Angeles Free Press. For Lance Loud, though, when describing his own epiphany from a distance of three decades, it was “Sister Ray” who embossed herself on his psyche. He recalled the self-same Shrine performance in considerably greater detail, in a mid- 1990s piece in the short-lived Gadfly:
After a moment of complete silence, one of four shadowy figures stepped to the microphone in front. “Good evening Los Angeles. We’re the Velvet Underground.” Then, turning his back to the audience, Lou Reed counted, “One, two, three. . . .” With a crash, the band slammed into its first song, “White Light/White Heat.” Talk about a Wall of Sound. The music’s sheer volume, enhanced by massive distortion, multiplied by feedback and then raised to the nth degree by a brutal attack on the instruments, roared like a rhythmic avalanche and crushed the crowd.
At the height of the peace-and-love era, there was very little about this band that suggested flower power. . . . [Reed] introduced “Heroin” sarcastically as “our big hit.” Propelled by Cale’s viola, the number moved grippingly between dream state and Armageddon.
Apart from Tucker’s arresting stage presence, though, the band remained deliberately aloof. Reed rarely looked at the audience, even when he spoke a few mumbled words. But that is not to say that the audience wasn’t paying attention. Like bystanders at the scene of a grisly accident, the crowd kept its eyes glued to the stage. . . .
But deep in my memory, the image of that night at the Shrine keeps pounding away. As the band played its final number, “Sister Ray,” Cale bent over his electric organ, filling the hall with jagged glissandos, chaotic onslaughts of notes thrown like shards of broken glass into the crowd. And, finally, the audience danced. All the while, a growing, doomy drone began to envelop and erase the distinct characteristics of the individual instruments, until they all seemed to blend into an ominous rumble that did not stop coming out of the speakers, even after the band left the stage.
Of course, Loud writes here from the other side of the divide. By the time he penned these thoughts, catching the Velvets in their prime had become a badge of honor, and to have been one of the few self-appointees who “got it” only brought further kudos. Ever noticed how everyone who booed Bobby D. at Newport has died off or been rendered mute by the gods? Even Bangs’s religious experience in San Diego was imbued with the posthumous glow of notoriety, being recalled when he was trying to bottle the band in his memory bank, knowing that he would not see their kind no more. As the headline to his eight-thousand-word post-Max’s essay put it, “Here Lie the Velvets, Underground.”
Hence the disproportionate significance of those glaringly few bite-sized reviews the Velvets generated in 1967 and 1968, when the pop world was yet to stir from its self-induced torpor in Pepperland. Just about any contemporary documentation acquires a certain value from its scarcity, and a concomitant paucity of detail as to what really “went down, man.” When a letter from October 1968, penned by a gushy Susan Pile to her pen pal Edward Walsh, describes the Velvets at the point of transition from Calean chaos to the Yule school, it becomes an important historical document—if a somewhat scant substitute for audio evidence of the described gig at Whisky A Go Go, where the Velvets were playing for the first time without Cale. In Pile’s fevered opinion:
They’re sounding better than I can remember them for a long time. The new kid is named Doug(ie)(las)—he’s from Boston, plays bass and organ and is really neat-looking (more so—perhaps—from a strictly objective viewpoint—than M. Reed). They have a lot of new material, like one song that ends (in joyous two-part harmony of sufficient unintelligibility) “How does it feel . . . to be dumb?” Plus, things like “Waiting for the Man” slowed to an easy Booker T. Louis doesn’t really dominate the group any more—in fact, I would consider Sterling lead guitar. You won’t believe how strong they are musically now.
Would that one could bend an ear to the Whisky-infused variant of those precious auditory documents that sporadically revealed how these post-EPI explorations were progressing. One listen to the rendition of “What Goes On” on the official boxed set—uncorked from Jamie Klimek’s vintage hoard of La Cave tapes, and presumably a representative sample from what Yule believes to have been his actual live debut in early October 1968—suggests the scale of the loss. Thankfully, it heralded some kind of new age when tape recorders (most, admittedly, attached to cocoa tins by string) began to appear at Velvet Underground gigs, even if they were rarely accompanied by reporters’ notebooks.
Those who learned to prefer the not-so-perfect to the note-perfect as long as it remained fresh and vital incorporated a small cabal of Clevelanders, who held on to their faith through the half-yearly intervals in 1968–69 that separated one residency at La Cave from the next. Among those who found reverence, not revulsion, in this dank cavern were Jamie Klimek, later founder of the Cleveland pre-punk combo the Mirrors, who was busy accumulating an archive for personal reference; and an equally callow Peter Laughner, a guitar player already looking for a ride, who concentrated on taking mental notes of the duosonics coming out of Morrison and Reed. Laughner would form a number of Velvet-inspired combos in his hometown, beginning with Cinderella Backstreet, before he took his final ride into the sunset in June 1977, aged just twenty-four. Both lads avidly scanned the few rock-oriented rags for any notes from the Underground.
Also temporarily trapped in the Midwest was another fledgling guitarist for whom the eclectic and the experimental went strap in hand. Robert Quine was holed up in the Missouri mudflats, awaiting opportunity and working on a law degree, when the Velvets passed through St. Louis in the spring of 1969. Inspired by a self-made recording of that show that he played to the brink of death that summer, Quine relocated to the Bay Area that fall, in time for the return of the Velvets to The Matrix, where another secret society founded on feedback awaited their ubiquitous shows that fall.
If there were small clubs, non-greedy owners, and loyal punters enough to fill the band’s calendar a month at a time in San Francisco and its spread-eagled environs, the Velvets still found themselves excluded from the white boys’ club that existed at 746 Brannan Street, despite its inmates appointing themselves arbiters of all things counterculture in rock. The San Francisco–based Rolling Stone had taken the Crawdaddy template but employed a real designer, and despite a two-year head start, was soon nudging past its more senior rival on the inside track. Though Stone was up and running by the time the Velvets took to the road to promote their second fab waxing, White Light/White Heat, released at the cusp of 1967 and 1968, it failed to muster even a curt dismissal in the review pages of this not-yet-august journal—despite Verve stumping up for a full-page ad in issue nine. In fact, the review editor, John Burks, passed over an unsolicited review of that album sent in by some shoe salesman from San Diego by the name of Lester Bangs.
The band’s second Verve offering had at least come to the attention of the not merely august but positively venerable Melody Maker, the oldest pop weekly in the world. Their album reviewer latched on to the aesthetic right away—as the work of pop Dadaists: “Utterly pretentious, unbelievably monotonous. It even has one track taken up by a long bit of story-telling.” Such was the tone, nay, the extent, of the band’s contemporaneous coverage in the U.K. (A single-paragraph review of the third album was less damning. However, as faint praise goes, “not sensational, but interesting” hardly encapsulates either The Velvet Underground or White Light/White Heat.)
Sandy Pearlman, writing in Crawdaddy, also found the Velvets’ second album pretentious and monotonous, save that on his clipper ship these were terms of praise. Pearlman was hip enough to dig the schtick that “each of the six songs on the album is generated out of its own virtually immutable bass/drum pattern. Repeated over and over. Not even cycled. All sounding mechanistic enough to be mistaken for electronics. ‘White Light/White Heat’ especially. It fails to be boring ’cause it’s got that fascination potential inherent in all mechanically perfect execution (hypnosis).”
The almost total dearth of coverage in the highly competitive British music press hardly suggested the beginning of the kind of groundswell that, twenty-five years later, resulted in the Velvets— with Cale—returning to tour Britain and not the States. Back in October 1969, Melody Maker’s Richard Williams—who, in his A&R days at Island would try to sign the Hell-era Television to the label— summed up the tide of apathy in his headline to the one positive review of the Velvets to infiltrate the English music weeklies when the band was still a going concern: “It’s a Shame That Nobody Listens.”
Lillian Roxon, sweltering in New York and increasingly short of breath, writing in her Rock Encyclopedia the same summer (though not being published till the following year), suggested that the media silence stemmed in part from an understandable trepidation about the Velvets and their ostensible message:
The important thing about the Velvet Underground was that in 1966 and 1967 they were as far away as a group could possibly be from the world of incense and peppermints and lollipops and even earnest teenage protest. Theirs was the dim underworld of drugs and sexual perversion, of heroin addiction and the desperate loss of hope that goes with it. Their concern was with death and violence. They were singing about a world that exists and that they knew. . . . “Heroin” didn’t have to [use] code words to get its meaning across. Musically they were very advanced, using sounds and voices in a way most groups didn’t start using until 1968[!]. They were using whips on stage before the Nice and Dave Dee, and with far more sinister intent. Oozing evil and lubricity, they made every other group look like kid stuff, and they made a lot of people nervous. Their records were never played on commercial stations. There is no word for their sound but sometimes it seems as if a presence has taken over, perhaps even His Satanic Majesty himself. You can easily imagine someone performing black masses with the Velvet Underground’s albums. Not for the kiddies.
Such was the critical perception of these guys ’n’ gal in the summer of 1969. In the wilderness years that separate their residency at The Gymnasium from their triumphant return to Max’s Kansas City in 1970, it must have seemed at times like there was but one place where the Velvets had any kind of profile. Persona non grata in the city that spawned, then spurned them, the Velvets had in the interim become honorary Bostonians, courtesy of their new manager Steve “Crawling King Snake” Selznick. One of Selznick’s side interests was part-ownership of Boston’s premier rock venue, The Tea Party, at which the Velvets made their debut at the end of May 1967, barely three weeks after they had cut the purse strings of their pop-art mentor. For two years-plus, there was rarely a season in which the Velvets did not grace the BTP with a residency.
Almost from that first instance, they drew a few moths to their flame, one of whom was the sixteen-year-old Jonathan Richman. He was immediately inspired to articulate his profound experience in print, albeit in the so-far-underground-it-was-invisible pages of Boston’s first rockzine, Vibrations, where his three-page feature, “New York Art and the Velvet Underground,” came complete with a diagram in which Richman predicted the Velvets overtaking everyone save the Beatles, crossing the “made-it line” at some point in 1968, and closing in on God by the end of 1970 (see page xxxv). As Cale later recalled, “Jonathan would show up persistently with . . . scribbled poems that he had written about this, that and the other, mainly about the band.” Evidently, Vibrations ran one such scribbling.*
If Vibrations existed below just about every radar invented, the next advocate to demand that someone pay attention to these denizens of discordancy was writing in the altogether more snappy-looking Crawdaddy. In the summer of 1968, Crawdaddy still represented a viable counterpoint to the countinghouse culture already working its poison at Rolling Stone. If many of Paul Williams’s trusty cabal of rock reactionaries, like Richard Meltzer, Jon Landau, and Sandy Pearlman, were on the verge of jumping ship (as was Williams), he was always looking for fresh perspectives. Along came one in the form of a long, rambling piece by the mysterious Wayne McGuire, ostensibly about something called The Boston Sound. Save that Mr. McGuire did not mean the Hallucinations or the remnants of the Remains, or even that babbling Irish bum who wandered from Cambridge club to Cambridge club claiming to be the author of “Gloria” and “Brown-Eyed Girl.” As if.
McGuire was a man on a mission, not merely writing a review of the Velvet Underground, but making it “a review of the end of the world . . . a review of the Antichrist and Christ . . . a review of Life and Death . . . a review of tomorrow and of ever and ever.” As for his peers in the music press, he accused them of being “engaged in creating and perpetuating New American Muzak,” of being “probably too occupied delving into the subtleties of Sgt. Pepper, due to an astigmatism of the mind,” to notice the one band that was “musically and mentally two years ahead of its time.” Only for the Velvets (and Coltrane) did he reserve words of praise. But what praise: “Put quite simply, the Velvet Underground is the most vital and significant group in the world today.” Where did such insights dawn? “At the Boston Tea Party . . . [where] the V.U. brings about an organic fusion of image, light and sound.”
So the likes of Richman and McGuire, true evangelists of Velveteen performance-art, did exist in towns like Boston. Even here, though, with Vibrations as reliable as Errol Flynn on a bender and the fledgling Fusion still finding its feet, opportunities to write about the band were as rare as a bad Beatles 45. The cruel historical truth is that much of the self-styled underground press was still searching for an identity when the Velvets were already pinging past their pomp. (By October 1968, Paul Williams, the one editor open enough to publish articles offering a new perspective, even if they came from someone directly attacking his own—as McGuire assuredly did—had quit Crawdaddy, retiring to a commune in Mendocino [yes, those were the days!], so even Crawdaddy had ceased to document the Velvets, save for one impenetrable interview with frontman Reed in 1970 from some clown who thought it terribly clever to refuse to clarify who was saying what.)
For the moment, Crawdaddy’s slow crawl to extinction left precious few forums save the pages of the already conformist Rolling Stone, where even record reviews were expected to adhere to some vague party line. Reflective of this sorry state of affairs was the fact that even the twenty-one-year-old Lester Bangs, another convert bustin’ to write about the band, was obliged to write his first Velvet screed at the behest of Stone. That 554-word review of The Velvet Underground—that “difficult third album” for the band, but undoubtedly their most accessible offering to date (“Murder Mystery” excepted)—reflected a number of Stone-like constraints imposed editorially from above.
At Rolling Stone, the prose style of the most original rock critic of his generation was not so much reined in as boxed in and columned up. (Not surprisingly, the album reviewer in question never expected a gold watch for long service, though he penned the odd piece for Wenner’s biweekly for the next three years.) As far as Stone was concerned, Bangs remained an occasional album reviewer who transmitted his thoughts from the bordertown he inhabited till he was called east by Creem and set free. In San Francisco the Stone staffers preferred to remain in their ivory townhouse whilst the Velvets launched a sustained assault on all things west in the fall of 1969.
Now, in the twenty-first century, there are five jam-packed CDs of official wares documenting the Velvets’ blitzkrieg on the Bay Area in those last months of that monumental decade, including a thirty-eight- minute version of “Sister Ray” from the Matrix one fateful December day that may even have been the specific satanic rite that unleashed the demons who then sped through the Altamont racetrack the self-same evening. Rolling Stone devoted half an issue to the events at Altamont, but not even a column inch to the equally apocalyptic events down the street.
1969—a concise enough title for the Mercury double album Paul Nelson compiled in 1974—seemed to provide prima facie evidence of a band cutting across every edge going, compiled as it was from November shows at SanFran’s very own Matrix and a two-nighter in October 1969 at the End of Cole Avenue in Dallas (though doubts remain as to the provenance of the version of “What Goes On,” which came on a reel of its own, and sounds rather Calean to these ears). It certainly prompted a rhapsodic response on its release from punk-poetess Patti Lee Smith, whose Creeming-jeans prose still had a place in Detroit’s favorite rockzine:
[The reason] I love this record so much [is that] it goes beyond risk and hovers over like an electric moth. Theres no question no apologizing there is just a trust a bond with time and god their relentlessly relaxed method of getting it on and over the land of strain. Like Rimbaud we rebel baptism but you know man needs water he needs to get clean keep washing over like a Moslem. Well this drowning is eternal and you don’t have to track it lambkin you just lay back and let it pour over you. Dig it submit put your hands down your pants and play side C.
However, the contrast between the respective performances at these two venues did not become apparent until the 1991 release of the entire second night at the End of Cole Avenue, Dallas, October 19, 1969, on a quasi-official Italian CD set, when the economics of unauthorized (but kosher in certain places) protection-gap releases made some important archival explorations commercially viable (see my own history of the subject, Bootleg! The Rise and Fall of the Secret Recording Industry [Omnibus, 2004]). The Dallas gig, taken from the original master (unlike the four cuts on 1969—“Waiting for the Man,” “Femme Fatale,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror”—which were from a crude dub given to the Velvets’ then-manager), suggested that excursions into extemporization were sometimes the exception rather than the rule.
In fact, Sterling Morrison suggested that the problem was a more general one: the 1969 recordings were “taped in small locations. . . . Generally our sound was bigger. . . . At the Boston Tea Party, a bigger location, the ideal size for us, about 1,200 people, we could really play.” The first installment from Dallas suggested Morrison was right. The quartet was certainly playing low and languorous, suffering second-night blues at the End of Cole Avenue and their tether. Even the other then-official document of the Velvets live—Atlantic’s twist my arm, budget-bootleg, ten-song edit of both sets from their final night at Max’s Kansas City in August 1970—seemed to bear out Morrison’s prejudice against small shows.
Only when the first night at the End of Cole Avenue, recorded from the back of the hall in authentic cassette-mirk and mire, was given its own protection-gap dispensation in 1993 did the band show it could flex its musical muscles anywhere, anyhow, anyway. The renditions of “I Can’t Stand It,” “Heroin,” and “Sister Ray” (actually already issued on the second-night set as a substitute for the incomplete recording from that night) suggested that place and time had less to do with their flights of fancifulness than whether the attendant few felt the fever. When the main muso at Universal, Bill Levenson, obligingly pulled a ten-minute “Some Kinda Love” from the full Max’s tape—Reed’s penultimate performance on that farewell farewell—for the Peel Slowly and See box, it reinforced the suspicion that they could give pretty much any song “the treatment.”
However, it was 2001 before the audio equivalent of a smoking gun was produced—the three-CD Quine Tapes (first alluded to in From the Velvets to the Voidoids back in 1993). Bob Quine’s foresight, and an understanding of the basics of recording from the audience, provided three hours plus of performances from the Matrix and the Family Dog, venues where Morrison’s dictums dissolved as familiarity bred extent. Comfortable with their equipment and their audience, the band seemed prepared to bulldoze any preconceptions about song length and direction. Any and all songs could be taken on a journey. Or not. Songs that a month earlier in Dallas barely broke the five-minute barrier here scale double digits in the grandest style imaginable. The ten-minute- plus, extemporized “White Light/White Heat,” “Waiting for the Man,” and “Ride into the Sun” rank alongside the August 1969 Hillside Festival performances of “Run Run Run” and “What Goes On” as the definitive musical moments of the Yule era.
And then it was a new decade. The band even reached the conclusion that it was high time they made their peace with their hometown, announcing a week-long residency at the fashionably decadent Max’s Kansas City in New York City at the end of May 1970 to celebrate a new label (Atlantic) and a new album. (A fourth album’s worth of material was recorded for Verve/MGM, but relations were such that the label deemed the results a nonstarter commercially, and the Velvets took their songbag elsewhere, leaving Polygram to rediscover these lost treasures in time for two mid-1980s albums from the archives, VU and Another View.)
As the one-week residency at Max’s became a summerlong homecoming, an unprecedented wave of positive press should have encouraged some Quine-like sage to capture those early performances at Max’s that confirmed the promise of the warm-up shows in Philadelphia and Boston, at which the band debuted the likes of “Head Held High,” “Oh Gin,” and an eighteen-minute from-hoedown-to-showdown medley of “Train Round the Bend” and “Oh Sweet Nuthin’.” Listening to those shows merely affirms how much was sacrificed in the studio to make an album Loaded with hits. Nor were the new songs the only ones trimmed to a new cloth. Trusty stalwarts like “Waiting for the Man,” given a nine-minute workout in Philly, had been trimmed down to a four-minute afterhours afterthought by the time of Live at Max’s at the end of August, when Brigid Polk had the wit to lug a tape recorder onto the counter and into the archives. By then, according to Reed, “I couldn’t do the songs I wanted to do and I was under a lot of pressure to do things I didn’t want to do.” Perhaps that final “Some Kinda Love” was intended to be to the Max’s residency what the lost rendition of “Black Angel’s Death Song” was to the last Café Bizarre gig five years earlier.
But early on at Max’s, it would seem, the band still had fire in their fingertips, before a debilitating schedule of simultaneous shows and sessions and the loss of a heavily pregnant Tucker, the timekeeper and peacemaker, finally took its toll on Reed’s vocal chords and temper. For the first and last time, it would be the press hounds who were hot on the trail, and the tapers who stayed home, as we once again find ourselves—me and you—obliged to salivate at descriptions by the regular press of how the band’s return to their wellspring was an affirmation devoutly to be wished:
The Velvet Underground plays a hard rock that is powerful and tight as a raised fist; so unified and together that it just rolls itself into a knot and throbs.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
Opening night, of course, was something of an event, a kind of Old Home Week that brought together various elements of the rock/pop hierarchy; plus nostalgia seekers and true believers, most of whom had not seen the Velvets since they exercised at the Gymnasium three years ago. I don’t know what they expected to hear, but they certainly weren’t disappointed.
—THE VILLAGE VOICE
However, by the summer of 1970 the local scribes from the New York Times and the Village Voice were having to slum it with the rock hacks from the new journals, for the rock underground was in bloom and oblivious to the flowers of evil they were about to propagate. Creem from Detroit, Fusion from Boston, New Times from New York, Circus too, Friendz and Zigzag from England, all wanted to praise the band just for surviving. Max’s afforded them the opportunity:
They sound something like the old Velvets, the old Who and Creedence Clearwater stuck together. Hard rock with the trademark of Lou Reed’s Bo Diddley strumming. Maureen Tucker’s stethoscopic drumming isn’t there, but Doug’s bruvver swings a lot more. . . . “White Light White Heat” [is] at pain threshold volume and rocking like fuck. Lou Reed, hand on hip, hand waving, head nodding with a little sneer, makes Jagger look like Val Doonican.
—FRIENDS
The reviewers who rhapsodized about the Max’s residency continued to hold their heads high when the Velvets’ Atlantic debut platter, Loaded, appeared at the winter solstice. By then, it was known that Loaded was also to be the final proclamation of the band. Loaded and Max’s had taken too much out of them, being a step too far along the road to commercial acceptance (“Who Loves the Sun,” in particular, I find to be a sickly, pale eye-shadow copy of “Ride into the Sun”— whither “Ocean”?). Perhaps it was inevitable that Reed’s ambivalent attitude to success would make him prefer “sweet nuthin’” as soon as commercial acceptance mutated into a probability. Equally predictably, now that the Velvets were dead, their legions arose to salute them.
After the fact, the likes of Jonathan Richman, Sandy Pearlman, Peter Laughner, Jamie Klimek, Bob Quine, Lenny Kaye, and Jim Carroll carried the aesthetic with them into their music-making. Meanwhile, Lester Bangs, hamstrung by a patent lack of musicality himself, founded an entire school of rock journalism on the Velvets and all that they had stood for, often taking his prose where Sister Ray led. Soon enough it would be left to others, less fortunate, to write secondhand accounts of the band and its Import, until—like all things once vital and alive—its more mythopoeic elements, in large capital letters, blocked out the truth: that there was a time when the only people taking any of this in were the boys (and girls) in the backroom at the Tea Party, the End of Cole Avenue, the Dom, the Family Dog, or the Whisky.
The glare of hindsight may require some shades. Proceed with caution. As for the Velvets themselves, they continue to linger on, as an influence overarching every worthy successor to their cultish crown.
Clinton Heylin, June 2004
*Sadly, Richman refused permission to reproduce the article here, though it can be found on Scorpio bootleg set, Caught Between the Twisted Stars.