I’M BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT
(In Which New Records by Bob Dylan and
the Velvet Underground Are Given Some
Attention, and Other Things Happen)

Paul Williams

Planet, May 15, 1969

b.

Everybody loves the Velvets’ new LP! I am surprised, I am delighted! I mean—my friends who hear the album ask to hear it again, they walk around singing it, they talk about it during dinner. They buy copies themselves if they have phonographs. They drop by to hear it otherwise. The Velvet Underground, their third album, on MGM, is currently competing for attention with Dylan’s spanking new love-gift—and holding its own! It’s my own favorite album since Forever Changes. And I haven’t had so much luck in turning people onto a record since The Doors. That came out in winter 1967, concurrent with an album called The Velvet Underground & Nico. I was an eager propagandist for that first Doors LP in those days, and somehow never paid much attention to the one or two Velvet evangelists afoot. Almost two years later, last fall, I began to open my ears. “Let me tell you people what I’ve found.”

“I met myself in a dream, and I just want to tell ya everything was all right.” I think the Velvets are speaking to the insides of our minds today, as the Band did last summer, the Beatles the summer before that, the Stones even earlier on in our lives. “No kinds of love are better than others.” The Velvet Underground is one of those few albums that allow us to suspect great music is being created in our time. On the inner sleeve of my copy of Nashville Skyline, I read some fascinating propaganda for the medium Dylan’s message is impressed upon (the word “tape” was never once mentioned in the spiel, but I surmise some threat is felt) and came upon this shocking reminder: long-playing records are this year twenty-one years old, mere children by this world’s standards. 1948, same year as Stevie Winwood, Israel, and me! Why is all this barely mature stuff taken so seriously? . . .

g.

We just listen to the Velvet album over and over. Sometimes “Some Kinda Love” is the track that most amazes me, the way it rolls and barks, so sweet, so sensitive. Reminding me always of a formal French lovesong & the blues of John Lee Hooker. Earlier I was amazed that one song could resemble such apparently diverse stuff; now I am so busy being amazed by Lou Reed’s voice, the depth of humanity it encloses and breathes, and by his words, and by the guitar, bass, drums singing along, I am so thoroughly and immediately astonished by everything I hear in this song, now, every time I listen, that I no longer can focus on resemblances. I can only absorb, opening every receptor in my nervous system in my effort to feel this incredible moment more fully. One word for this music is “sensual.”

Another word is “human.” Not just the words, which really do speak directly to our human situation, but the music, especially the performances: there is something so real, so immediate and personal, in the movement of these songs, the touch of fingers to guitar strings, the extension of energy through a drumstick so that it is strike and touch both, an intimate, human action, you can feel this in the music as it touches you, strikes you, awakening in you a knowledge of the texture and movement of being alive. Bass notes like pulse beats, spoken words like the sensory explosion of opening my eyes.

“Got my eyes wide open”—the Velvets have always been in touch with the world. Now they are making that world, the real one, palatable, not by sugar-coating but by being gentle. The penetrating. Magic on the level of the Beatles, stark and subtle awareness on some higher level still, the Velvets have finally made an album we can all listen to; they have found a way to be even more honest. They have brought the whole world—not just the harmless parts—closer, and without scaring anyone. Now, that’s revolution! We’re set free.

h.

If you like Bob Dylan’s new album, move to the country. If you’re already in the country, I suppose the proper response to the record is to make love more, and better. Shine on brightly. Relax.

i.

It’s frustrating. This essay feels like it’s done, and yet there’s so much more I want to say. About the Velvet album: how it moves, stopping and starting, the break in “Candy Says” (“if I could walk away from me”) which is simply the best example I can think of of how beautiful motion can be, the breakthrough in “The Murder Mystery” (the listener is set up, the repetition of the word “structures” becomes increasingly ominous, both streams call for attention more and more in their quiet ways, until you’re completely split and suddenly realize that the piano is a part of both streams and something else, at which point, with the aid of the word “perverse” and a sense of timing that is evidence of genius, you break through, three streams become a thousand, the song wanders to an ending and you are left on a higher plane—and ready to hear “Afterhours”), the way everyone identifies with “Jesus,” the way everyone walks around singing “Afterhours” and plays it again when the album’s over. I want to get into a rap on subject matter, how “Some Kinda Love” is about the worthiness of casual affairs (“Situations arise / Because of the weather / And no kinds of love / Are better than others”) and “Pale Blue Eyes” is about more than adultery, maybe the significance of adultery’s texture. I want to declare that “I’m beginning to see the light” is the best line I’ve heard in months, and the song is better, and the “How does it feel to be loved” ending is almost more than I can hold in . . . which is fine, because the next song is “I’m Set Free” (“I’ve been set free, and / I’ve been bound”), in which the growth cycle of release leading to greater need leading to grander release, etc., is not merely described but created, expressed, performed. And followed by “That’s the Story of My Life,” another perfect transition: “. . . that’s the difference between wrong and right. But Billy said, both those words are dead. . . . ” (It is incredible how this album talks about almost everything that is worth talking about these days, and has a revelation to offer in almost every area! And the music, the music. . . . But I guess that’s what it means to be completely in harmony with the moment.) I want to discuss so many things, all those wonderful lines in “The Murder Mystery” and what they do to your head as they seep, one by one, into consciousness— I would like to analyze every line of “Afterhours” and of course Maureen’s magnificent vocal as a study of the nature of perfection in this century—I would like to play this album with you about a hundred times and share more every time. Not to mention that I could write volumes about Nashville Skyline or just “Lay Lady Lay” and my own lovelife during the past week . . . and I’ve certainly much more to say about birth, how people being born and words being born have so much in common & how the “population explosion” as ungraspable metaphor and fact rules not only our subconscious at this time but our literature. . . .

But shit, this essay is over, it was over before I set down the letter i. This is all afterthought, a sneaky effort at releasing pent-up tension of expression, giving birth. . . .
I’m beginning to see the light.