Melody Maker, October 25, 1969
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND HAVE MADE JUST THREE ALBUMS, NONE OF which have sold particularly well in Britain. But that trio of albums constitutes a body of work which is easily as impressive as any in rock.
If you doubt that statement, then it’s unlikely that you’ve listened hard to the albums, because they yield up their treasure only to a listener who is prepared to treat them with respect and intelligence.
The group was spawned a couple of years ago, part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multi-media troupe. It was immediately obvious that they were very different from the hundreds of other groups springing up during the American Rock Renaissance.
Their music was hard, ugly and based in a kind of sado-masochistic world which few dared enter. The first album, called The Velvet Underground and Nico, was produced by Warhol and released here on Verve, and a scary document it is.
Three tracks feature Nico, the beautiful blonde singer whose voice has a unique deathly pallor. “Femme Fatale” takes a standard pop-song form and turns it into something tantalizing and frightening, while “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is a grim view of the life of a Lower East Side good-time girl.
“Parties” and another track, “Venus in Furs,” share the group’s best trademark: a kind of heavy, almost martial beat, very hypnotic and quite unrelated to any other music you can think of. They arrived at this, I think, because of the presence of a girl drummer, who is most definitely not a joke. She adds to the already somewhat surrealistic charisma of the group, and the fact that she isn’t a “real” drummer means that the music isn’t cluttered up with pat, meaningless cliches.
“Heroin” is another superlative cut, featuring leader Lou [Reed’s] voice on top and sometimes inside of screeching feedback and electric viola, played by John Cale. It builds to a mind-shattering climax which is best not heard at all by those of a nervous disposition.
By the time their second album, White Light/White Heat (Verve) came round, Nico had left the band, and they had got further into some of the McLuhanistic tricks hinted at in the first album. “The Gift,” for example, is a horror-story narrated by Cale over a hard-rock backing, and it’s teasingly difficult to catch the lyric content.
On “Sister Ray,” the album’s long track, they explore sound, with howling feedback and screeching organ making some of the most modern music ever heard. Like many of their compositions, this track never resolves: one gets the feeling that it could go on and on.
The third album, on MGM, was almost totally ignored in this country, and [Melody Maker]’s reviewer dismissed it with a contemptuous: “Not sensational, but interesting with the group now into the gentleness and beauty bit.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. The songs were, in the main, quieter and more restrained, but the old cruelty was still there, manifesting itself in the overall mood and many of the words—if anybody bothered to listen to them.
For a start, nobody realized that the whole album was a continuous suite, although not billed as such. It traced the progress of a girl, Candy, from permissiveness through a realization of evil, and back to decadence.
The tracks are linked so inextricably that it’s difficult to talk about them separately, but “I’m Set Free” is probably the best tune they’ve written (with the terrifying beat again), and “What Goes On” contains brilliant organ and guitar.
Typically, the key track—“Murder Mystery”—has been distorted so that the words can’t be heard, but it serves, as the group intended, to make the listener think hard. This suite is so subtle and sophisticated that it’s on a par with Tommy, and so far ahead of Sgt. Pepper that it makes that album sound like a series of nursery rhymes.
It’s beginning to look as if the Velvet Underground will never make it, commercially. Nevertheless, groups like them do the spadework which enables less-talented musicians to progress. It’s just a shame that nobody listens.