PROBLEMS IN URBAN LIVING

Robert Somma

Fusion, April 14, 1969

THE BAND IS STRICTLY NEW YORK.YOU CAN TELL: THEY WORK QUICKLY,ALMOST abruptly, and if you’re from out of town, they seem almost spitefully good. Their efficiency and care was once known as professionalism. They used to look hostile, and never said very much. They still do their numbers straight: “This is a song called ‘Heroin.’” When it’s over, they do another: “. . . thank you. This is a song called ‘Sister Ray.’” They don’t fuss with their equipment—they spend time tuning. They hardly ever jive with the audience and never with themselves. They sing about the simple items on any New York social calendar: mainlining, balling, hookers, junkies, queens, the usual collection of creeps, freaks and divinely accented characters closer in temperament to the world of Genet than that of the good guys. Everyone seems to know what’s going on at the concert: weirdly similar teenagers, dressed in army drag—youthful conscripts of a civilian war; semi-hip, partially-groovy chicks who babble about amphetamizing in the bathroom, wishing they were in a bigger city—paying little attention to the music, a few over-thirties, who watch carefully, and who are, in speech, overly loud as well. The band does its set, says a brief thank you and packs it in. It used to be freak-time in Boston when the Velvets came to town. For a year and more they were the only surviving and functioning rock band to come out of New York intact, and the place to which they brought their music was two hundred miles from the place they put it together.

The Velvet Underground possesses no characteristic, whether musical or personal, not unique or worthy of investigation. Their drummer is not a chick, she’s a girl. Their lead singer, who wrote “Heroin” when the Beatles were holding each other’s hand, isn’t by profession a doper but a musician. They are not a creation of Andy Warhol, nor still another product of the Factory. From their formation late in 1965 until their one personnel change three years later, they have produced a sound consistent, integral and almost without parallel in rock.

For those three years it was Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and John Cale. Toward the end of 1968, Doug Yule replaced Cale and the emphasis and personality of the band changed, first imperceptibly, then strikingly. From the beginning they were a gathering-point for hip people. They did the Cafe Bizarre and starved a little. At the film-maker’s Cinematheque they played behind the screen while Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth unwound. They were the only rock band to be graced by Warhol’s light-show, and made the mixed-media move a scene before the New York Times had ever heard of Bill Graham. They toured as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable: lights and movies by Warhol, dancing by Gerard Malanga, Nico an occasional “chanteuse.” They played the Dom before the Electric Circus moved in, and hosted a party at the Gymnasium. When the Inevitable ended, and the disco scene played out (you could tell: Arthur opened), the Underground retained some well-rehearsed material, a few convictions about the nature of rock and a few suspicions about the hard-nosed realities of promotion, marketing and touring. At that moment they could have withered away. The Velvets are unthinkable without New York City. Cale is a Welshman and the others are Long Islanders, but if Manhattan didn’t exist, neither would they. And if the air in New York were unbreathable, the water potable, the freaks and the perverts avoidable or just not there—then the Velvets would be laborating cheerfully for IBM, Sperry-Rand, Discount Records, or who knows, Harper and Row. New York does for them what Paris did for Baudelaire—provides not an excuse or even a goad, but an existential experience and a justification for the things they create.

The differences which distinguish the Velvets from all other bands are primarily ones which resurrect the battle lines between the two coasts. The eternality of the west coast, its hermetic nourishment and thalidomide culture, couldn’t qualify as even bizarrely noteworthy back east.

Brought up in Levittown, Brooklyn, Pelham, Peter Cooper Village, Jamaica or the West Side, one would find it difficult to comprehend a state of nature such as California proposed. New York is a series of unrequited loves, interrupted trips, false openings and premature closings. Flower children came to New York to die—their strengths weren’t equal to the exposure. People who hate New York live there for the best reasons: to prevail, triumph, survive. People who love it, leave it for the worst: anxiety, illusion, doubt. It is the opinion of the Underground that New York is, at the same time, unfit for human beings and a gift from heaven. And if a band can express a mentality or a state of mind prevailing among its contemporaries, then the Velvet Underground must be seen in that light. Everything they have to say, they say about New York.

There is a reverential air surrounding Andy Warhol which the few press cliches and publicized truisms of the past five years don’t penetrate. He is looked upon with a feeling of guarded awe and confidence one doesn’t usually associate with the aggressively self-oriented world of New York city art. Those who have had close contact with him, as “stars,” camp-followers, spear-carriers, professional associates, etc., find him a form of permanency, stability, self-awareness and concern partially or wholly lacking in their own lives. It is almost impossible to convey the sentiment and unconsciously protective attitude many of those around Warhol feel for him, and for the relationship they have with him. It is as though too extensive or probing an investigation would burden those involved beyond endurance.

Warhol was shot the first week of June of 1968 by Valerie Solanis, a tangent on the Warhol circle. She is described, as many of the women around and within that circle, as intelligent, amusing and obviously disturbed. Tension is one of the dynamic motive forces in the group, and Valerie provided her share with her misanthropy, her eccentricity, her terrifying threats. When she walked into the Factory and shot Warhol, she surprised no one, but shocked them all.

But the curious relevant aspect of the Solanis incident is this: as Warhol lay dying, for all practical purposes, the unacknowledged and fascinating attraction of death became frighteningly real to him and to those who knew him. The Velvet Underground, who had explored with Warhol, at one time or another, every deranged evasion of contemporary society—the under-surface of the city, the subterranean conduct of its men and women, their sexual inclinations and dishonesties, their psychological dependencies and experiments—now had come before a reality perhaps more ugly. This time it was no freaked-out head or raging dike who took the trip: it was Andy, who works hard, says little and feeds, as best he can, his sheep. Warhol’s intimacy with pain and death, beyond image and speculation, could not fail to be a signal event for the people whose lives touch his at so many common points.

This confrontation with death has existed in the personal life of each of Warhol’s associates. His art is not unaware of the method by which the important is made irrelevant in modern life. Saint Genet would not have needed to be written if Sartre knew how to draw. He could have merely repeated, endlessly in various colors, the acts of fellatio, the anal penetrations, the petty thefts—all the emblematic moments of Genet’s life.

The Velvets, a rock band, are intrinsically related to Warhol. The four people in the group, as a single musical force, and as a collection of individual musicians, couldn’t have functioned as Warhol’s band had not two conditions been present. They must have been inclined, by personality, experience and outlook to the artistic rationale of Warhol, and yet they must have resisted to some extent the influence of the Warhol environment. Something meshed: events; personalities; ideas conscious and less so about the nature of music, film, light, and about the direction and mood of America and its cultural life—its disguised paranoia, its hysterical fear of being involved, its icy demand to be entertained and not provoked. The Velvets are, in some ways, a logical extension of whatever aesthetic can be derived from the artistic productions associated with Warhol’s name. This is said in knowledge of the fact that Warhol resists the type of propaganda which relates in public a definition of beauty, etc. Yet, it is possible to see similarities in form and in content between Warhol’s work and the creations of the Underground.

The Underground is a band of surface simplicities. They play rock and their figures are not obviously complex. (Reed’s vocal predecessors are identifiable; some are still performing: Jagger, Jerry Lee Lewis, parts of Presley, Morrison and the vinyl Buddy Holly.) Their music begins in simplicity; they recall, at times, the chord patterns of early rock groups—up-front percussion, repeated guitar chords of recognizable fingering, a definite melodic line with keyed shifts—all well-rehearsed, all beautifully performed. The Channel’s “The Closer You Are”; “Tonight I Fell in Love” by the Tokens; the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” and “Little Girl of Mine” by the Cleftones; “Rave On” by Buddy Holly— these are all rock and roll numbers which the Velvets would find familiar and noteworthy in attitude and execution. The best rock groups, most of whom preceded by several years the later Beatles-Stones-Kinks models, share an insight with these models and with the Velvets about the essential nature of rock; they recognize its basic rudimental simplicity of appeal and production, its reliance upon apparently rough-cut rhythmic diamonds for the purposes of decorating a sentiment, a belief, a discovery. They understood long ago how briefly rock would stand if it were based upon patterns too far-ranging and convoluted for a bass guitar and a drum to support. Early rock may not have approached the situational profundity of the present—but no one has gone very far beyond it in arrangement and instrumentative conception.

The Velvets are made whole by such a conception—one which doesn’t ignore complexity, but chooses to avoid it. The most recent manifestations in rock of the principle of simplicity are found in the music of the most successful rock bands: Something Else by the Kinks, Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground No. 3 by the Velvets. Yet they are distinguished, all of them, by the material to which the musical conception has been ordered. The subject matter of “David Watts,” “Salt of the Earth,” “Pale Blue Eyes” is instantly recognizable as the area of concern of the Kinks, the Stones, the Underground. Here, too, is a key on the simplicity rationale: one never mistakes the work of such an artist—his product is his signature. And if the Velvets determine, for the most part, the musical processes in their work, the material and the processes must be seen in the context of the Warhol environment.

When the Velvets formed and played their first gig in a New Jersey gym, they were four musicians with differing abilities, styles and tastes. Cale could, and often did, out play most rock musicians on a variety of instruments; with the Velvets, he concentrated on bizarre and virtuoso electric viola and organ playing. Maureen Tucker, self-schooled in a percussion system of rudiments and endurance, brought the Bo Diddley and African styles to a unique and reliable compound. With her bass drum turned on its side, she did a number on rock drummers not by expanding the conventional rock fills, but by modifying them. Sterling Morrison added a line to the group traceable to the components of his own personality: direct, candid, impatient of cant, frequently reticent by choice, always ready to provide a comment necessary to the musical continuity. Lou Reed, in whose image the Velvets have discovered many of the enduring features of their work, played lead, wrote songs and sang them with a restrained flair and a conviction about their essential merit characteristic of the best rock vocalists. These four musicians played a music of repetition, commingled with harsh accents, control and New York City overdrive. Their moves led to descriptions legitimate and understandable but frequently off-center: menace, contempt, obsessive hostility, surliness. Their service as house-band for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable helped in the embellishment of their reputation. Nico sang trance like, fixated, aloof, her beauty as removed from conventional concepts of warmth as a polar cap; Warhol’s shows filled the space around the music with images as disturbing and abrasive to the mind as the situations in several of Reed’s songs. The situation of the Underground, as a component in Warhol’s system, helped them to develop as a group fertilized by an original and uncompromising mind.

The peculiar nature of rock music makes strong demands upon the performer. It provides him with a release and a freedom not previously known to popular artists who wished to deal successfully with the dilemma of American life—its commerce and its culture. Rock performers stand as naked on a stage as any politician in the first chilly hours of defeat. A rock band which doesn’t find a personal unity and cohesion on other than musical levels will find itself ultimately falling apart. Rock is best because it depends on a shared emotion, a collective response. It functions almost like a church providing shelter for those of uncommon background who share a common belief. Non-sectarian, it can still be dogmatic and slightly larcenous. But it’s there that you find the intensity, the tainted madness of the convinced, the celebrated and the hopeful.

It is experience which brings to any rock group the proof of its value or the refutation of its plea to be heard. Rock, like life, has its cheap thrills, its staggering surprises, its small compensations and its large-scale squandering of resources. The Velvets hung together through moments of bleak economic outlook, personal confusion and professional neglect. With the demise of the Inevitable, the Velvets were thrown back upon themselves, forced to discover the kind of band they had been in the process of becoming. In a sense, they were as much victimized by their relationship with Warhol as they were helped by such a close contact with the bizarre consistency of his mind. They never insisted, except through their music and then only subtly, on their independence as a group. Their songs only helped to support the generally accepted notion that they explored those areas of society inhabited by pop figurines—as though the world had been made bad to be the decor for a sermon. The Velvets sang “Heroin”—don’t all those underground creeps take it? They sang about lesbians, the frenetic trip for a connection, the cruel sham of New York City (“I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Waitin’ for My Man,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties”). The cultural attitudes and realities in their songs seemed to have originated in the social ambience whirling around Warhol like an industrial spoor. Yet they were more correctly associated with the visions inside and not hovering above that head. “Venus in Furs,” “White Light/White Heat,” “There She Goes Again” are certainly the products of a city governed by Lindsay and mired in decades of its own muck. But neither Warhol nor Lou Reed created New York—they only live there.

All those songs, however, are less remarkable for their subject matter than for the musical ordering to which they submit. Warhol explored the meaning of repetition—the Velvets do it, not with commonplace images, but with notes. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is a tableau, and the picture doesn’t change, the scene is the same, the stanzas don’t vary. “Heroin” functions as a dynamic persona, a mask which moves from anticipation to ecstasy, from the strung-out decision to shoot-up to the slightly furious paradise of a run. Warhol was satisfied to repeat, with variations in color, location, and personnel, images of the ordinary. The Velvets took his lead. The disjunction and displacement of life in New York performs precisely the same kind of operation, from the ordinary to the bizarre, on its citizens—frequent, habitual confrontations with the sewer lead to a comfortable feeling, a sense of appropriateness which the less adventuresome or simply wealthier burghers find in a daily diet of TV and the New York Times. Anything, no matter how lurid, off-beat, far-out, or freaky, can be made to look ordinary if you see it enough. It can lead you to ask, with Dylan, what else have they got left.

Several clearly catalogued figures in art, music and urban development contribute to the material and performance technique of the Velvets. Major commercial enterprises and movements in the rock industry did not. The Sgt. Pepper era, San Francisco rock, the blues revival, the tainted and synthetic soul products of Motown—all were temporary and without influence in the minds and work of many rock purists, the Velvets among them. The latter, however, are drawn to the current rock creations, which recall in some way the sound and the attitude of the first rock era. Peripheral phenomena are just that: secondary and maybe inevitable, but not necessary to the music—self-inflating discjockeys, hyperexcited promotions, falsely enthusiastic and appreciative record company execs, flock-like audiences. The bustle and frantic moves of a coming group are part of the commercial reality to the business—they must be dealt with and accepted as “real,” not right.

For the Velvets to be associated on a personal and professional basis with Warhol was an experience of incalculable importance. Through him was transmitted, even if only by implication, unconscious support or opposition to a world of artistic endeavor and conception not usually given to the rock performer. Lennon, for example, is getting it secondhand through Yoko Ono; the Stones aren’t getting it at all. The Velvets pass slightly beyond the rock groups for whom cross-fertilization means a careful attentiveness to what other successful bands are doing, in music and elsewhere. The Velvets were able to examine at second- and sometimes first-hand new processes and their effects upon clever and intelligent people involved in activities often quite removed from rock. For them cross-fertilization meant a drug-scene, certainly, but one quite different from the antiseptic and almost obscenely safe world of the Beatles or a Buffalo Springfield bust. It also meant contact on a performing level with novelty and originality, with the incipient moments of a new idea and its initial public expression. Light-shows, for example, in the Velvets’ world were no discordant or irrelevant pastiche, no tiresome stylization, no synthetic prettiness or calculated and scoured freak-out.

The Velvet Underground, then, derives, in part, from a cultural scene peculiar to New York. The many faces in the scene are traceable, some with more difficulty than others. “Pop” is certainly a major and, for a while in their careers, a persistent influence. Yet, “pure” rock is as important to their musical production as Pop was to their artistic conceptions. For those who grew up in New York, who came to what insurance salesmen call maturity during the early and middle sixties, rock means certain specific songs and groups, and will continue to mean only those plus whatever new releases or bands resemble them, in performance and attitude, most closely. The Supremes aren’t the greatest black girl-group in rock; they’re only the richest. Purists remember the Chantels, who were there first with “Maybe” and their immediate successors, the Shirelles, who sang “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Purists were in grammar school (or should have been) when the Penguins made “Earth Angel,” but they loved it with the fervor and insight of a post-pubescent. Rock purists didn’t need the Bee Gees or Joshua Rifkin to find out about fag-rock: Danny and the Juniors did it better. Social comment? The great Crystals songs: “He’s a Rebel,” “Uptown,” etc.; the Drifters, early and late; the Corsairs’ “Smoky Places.” The Velvets are hip to this tradition, which is a factor in the development of their repertoire. Unlike many rock artists insecure in their self-conception and undermined by a lack of confidence in their pose, the Velvets say little about what it is they know or do. Yet, their performances reflect knowledge as well as a feeling about rock, and reveal them, from one point of view, as the most conceptually intellectualizing. The Velvets, by contrast, sing with no parenthetical explications, a song called “Rock and Roll,” and it sounds less like “A Day in the Life” (which barely qualifies as rock) than “Tonight Tonight” by the Mellokings. Both songs are happy to be contained within limits.

Through two albums the Velvets persevered in their creations. The first album reflected many of the influences, the involvements and the concerns of the band and particularly of Reed. “Waiting for My Man,” “European Son,” “There She Goes Again”—the entire album is, as Reed once described the band’s performance at the Cinematheque, “a dog-whistle for all the freaks in the city.” Yet, in addition to that, it contained elements of musical achievement (rock and roll conception and memories) to which the group would cling during the months after their split from Warhol.

The second album must be rated on its technical deficiencies, not its aspirations. “Lady Godiva” and “I Heard Her Call My Name” are badly mixed; “Sister Ray” hasn’t the magnificently precise and lucid breaks and changes of the in-person performances; “White Light/White Heat” is more frantic, less accurate than the live version. There are numerous reasons for the failure of the LP. The conflicts which divided the group were becoming more apparent and more certainly insoluble. The split between Cale and the others permitted Reed to present the group with a number of simple and beautiful songs, far removed, not from his prior excellence, but from the neurotic obsessions of the years with Cale.

Their latest album is technically perfect and substantially different from the music of the first two. Reed’s songs are self-aware, not self-conscious; his singing is predictably superior to most rock vocalizing; the band plays with a care, a punctuality and a self-assurance too often undetermined by Cale’s flamboyant figures. Their third LP, with “Candy Says” (the Velvets singing “doo-doo-wah! wah!”), “Pale Blue Eyes” (a successor to “If I Fell” and “Love Minus Zero: No Limit”), “I’m Beginning to See the Light” (rock and roll music in its pure state) is matter-of-factly stunning in the depth and normalcy of its emotion, in the care of its execution and in the perfectly realized self-conception it reveals. The Velvets are passing beyond the cities they live and play in and rising to the occasion of consistent and almost easy brilliance.