Crawdaddy, January 1970
“I’M A CHANNEL. I BRING THINGS TO OTHER PEOPLE, THINGS PEOPLE HAVE given me. I brought the Alice A. Bailey books to him not as a gift, but so he could learn what the information was, understand it and tell me and then I could talk about it to others.”
. . . Alice A. Bailey, her books of knowledge, all 24 volumes, for the recruits of the new civilization, “The teaching planned by the Hierarchy to precede and condition the New Age, the Aquarian Age . . .” and Lou Reed is a channel. And so am I. And everyone, and the more you open the output, the greater the input. . . .
The Velvet Underground is one of the few groups to afford imaginations the play of universes, of astrological heavens, of grounds and spaces as wide as time itself. Each album, and there are three, is a progression, the stuff and elements of how-to Yellow Brick Road, but the detours are your own business. The most popular method of nearly describing something which is nearly what the Underground might be about in a hip, capsulated form is “Heroin” to “Jesus”—both song titles and both brand names.
What I remember of a conversation with Lou Reed before listening to it played back on the tape:
Slang, what happens when life is taken over by slang so that the non-specific meaningless definitions become our lives;
and Communication, reaching out to people, to everyone as a minimum, and if you don’t succeed in reaching us all, it is your fault;
and A Life of Positive Actions, trying not to commit negative actions is a lifetime occupation;
and Wanting to Reach everybody.
All the ways are the same.
There is a way to all-knowledge.
You just have to find one that is right for you.
To know when to touch something, to be in a condition which allows you to utilize the information at hand; to be pure and strong enough to use the power which is there. To know the right time and place to match energy with matter. In my time, yes.
“And what I’m tryin’ to find out—a rock band can be a form of yoga and you can put a high percentage of the energy through there . . . the records are all letters to people I want to get in touch with . . . vibrators, vibrations . . .
“You just might get everyone going at the same time and BAM! I know just enough to get by doing rock and roll, which is a small part of the world—not as important as most people think it is—but it may be the most important social force going, is what I think rock and roll is. I think it’s leading to something else which is the real potent quality. . . . When people are dancing mindlessly, and your mind’s just not there, dancing to that rhythm—well, that’s not the only rhythm going.”
A conversation, a propos:
ME: You have to realize that theoretically you want to reach everyone but that really you can’t.
REED: I can try.
M: Well, some people won’t have the courage to meet you halfway.
R: I’ll go more than halfway; I’ll go all the way.
M: That won’t help them; if someone doesn’t go halfway, then he isn’t part of the Creation of the Involvement, and the meeting will pass through him, by him.
R: Well, if I go all the way, then maybe they’ll go all the way and we’ll go through each other like this, Choom! and come out the other side. . . .
It’s like a tree; you can’t see it all at once, you have to stand up close sometimes, go back far other times, and it keeps changing meantimes.
I want to be a tree.
People never want to get past right and wrong, it is such a convenient stopping place, a well-accepted one, almost well-respected. It takes purity to see clearly that the Universe Energy never stops so that “stopping” is a onesided myth and it takes courage to keep on going because poppy fields seem the perfect place for a nap. That’s a line from “Story of My Life.” “It’s the difference between wrong and right, but Billy said, both those words are dead, that’s the story of my life.”
. . . Keys to people; you would have sat here politely, blankly answering/asking questions until I came up with a key which turned into you, the person, not the personality. No, I was going to drop a few things here and there, and either you were here or you weren’t.
Well then, are you a pogostick or running water; which way do you find to action: over or around, through at all costs including jumping over and on top of people or the way of gentle perseverance, chancing that you miss the right time and place?
“Tauruses are the only people who make me laugh—in all the nice ways, even over the phone.”
A guide: all quoted phrases are direct quotes of someone during the interview; passages which are not quoted are responses to thoughts which passed either during the interview directly or in an inter/view afterwards while playing back the tapes. Some direct quotes are not in quotes. All thoughts in the piece have to do with the Velvet Underground and the energy they created, either directly or indirectly. Every word is based on reality. Reality, after all, is all there is that we know because if someone thought it up, then it exists.
Only reality counts.
All real living is meeting, and you know, if we all split, who would be around here to make it go.
A dark door and who is behind it: each person, it is true, has a dark door to himself and you can knock and ask to be let in, but once you are there, let me tell you, there will be a moment of panic and the only thought—Don’t show fear in front of wild animals; then, you’ll remember he is a friend.
But the existence of that moment is all so real. R. D. Laing is a nice man on the path to somewhere, on one side of a two-way street, recognizing the need to go through the madness and come out on the other side—
“What’s really funny is that after you do it, it’s over and then you just go through the motions of . . . publishing, copyrighting or whatever.” What is true humility and does it count when you admit to yourself that even though you are trying, you can’t feel completely humble: that part of you is proud to be aware that you are trying to feel humble? Does trying . . . to say you are trying as hard as you can, and still realize that you are not using all of your self? Does trying count, does it really pay off to try your best? What happens when someone achieves personal grace with less personal effort, and achieves it completely? Did they try their best a long time ago . . . ?
The Velvet Underground is a rock and roll group who, like the Rolling Stones, saw the need early to push people out of their normally bound perceptions, and also came to the conclusion that paranoia, fear and shocking truth were convenient, dependable tools. Who knows how big the iceberg is, or the true color of a white bear . . . underlying the obvious stream of conscious thought supplying the Velvet’s songs with their sophistication, complex people and gutter (or gut) stories has always been the undercurrent tug of the Universe Energy tides from moons and suns.
I threw the I Ching and got a strange set of hexagrams; first, Standstill, which explains that at the moment of standstill is born the end of standing still and the beginning of change . . . and it is true that the Velvets are at the center where perspectives of time and space would make it seem that they are unmoving, having no need to move. Nine in the 4th line says, “He who acts at the command of the highest remains without blame. Those of like mind partake of the blessings.”
And the hexagram becomes Contemplation which says, “Contemplation of the divine meaning underlying the workings of the universe gives to the man who is called upon to influence others the means of producing like effects. . . . Thus a hidden spiritual power emanates from them, influencing and dominating others without their being aware of how it happens.”
Sure.
The three albums form a textured progression into a land of pure question-asking, of “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “I’ve Been Set Free and I’ve Been Bound (to find a new illusion),” of “Jesus,” and through to “Afterhours”: “If you close the door, the night could last forever and I’d never have to see the day again.”
Songs about eating, sleeping, love and the cliche which is life itself, each past action understood and therefore done with, done for. But living, becoming, are not cliches and it is on the tightrope separating and uniting the two that the Velvet Underground has so successfully been existing.
“She wanted to talk about divine grace and all that, which was fine, but I had to know—”
“Yeah, she should have thrown me out and of course I see now that she was testing me: I didn’t see before because I was too insecure and unsure to recognize the spirit behind rampant smiling indifference. How many years of people has she seen wanting a crutch instead of life itself?”
He could be ruling the world—very subtly. But he could be controlling it.
At this point during the interview, we talked about slang and communication, one of us making the point that communication is always for the other—or another—person, and is done to get that person to understand you. The danger of slang, of pre-agreeing to nothing, is a meaningless generality, so that you become Everyman’s mirror image and are therefore unable to blow your nose without stopping to think and compensate for right-becoming-left. So “the point is, why dontcha be specific?”
A specific question: If you want to use songs as letters to people and want to reach everyone, and assume you do meet these people some times, then also given that I have said that it is the yoga exercise aspects of your songs which made me want to do this interview, which is an inter-view implying at least two sides . . . then why do you say we should do whatever I want to do because you don’t want to do this? How can you be doing something you don’t want to do? How can you be wanting to “do what I want to do”? Can you do something which someone else wants to do and not want to do it, too?
Then I would say let the public be the judge.
—No, you’d say, fuck you . . .
’cause you’d do it.
I would say in my own defense that you should like me because I’m not such a bad person.
A question: Do you remember going to Syracuse University, living with a girl, and a girl across the hall who played guitar . . . ?
“If I heard the records, I’d say, ‘There’s someone talking to me for real over there.’”
Doug Yule is really a 4th member, he’s not sitting in for John Cale . . . everything is where it’s supposed to be. We’re really a young group, we really haven’t started to do yet whatever it is we do. Which is to play rock and roll music. We were first with everything, we preceded it all: light shows, feedback, mixed media . . . back in the old Cinema-theque on Lafayette Street. There was no St. Mark’s Place at that time.
Angus MacLise
Piero Heliczer
Barbara Rubin
Flesh and blood, not print in books or on tongues but people.
Flesh and blood, not print in books or on tongues but people.
This is a view from one side, as it should be. It is possible to listen to the Velvets and remain unmoved; I know some people who have done so. Still, the world is changing. . . .
Still, for those who like interviews, here is some:
“And Ray Milland has all this money in his suitcase and Anthony Quinn knows, but pretends he doesn’t, and asks him, ‘What you got in the suitcase?’ and Ray Milland says, ‘Uh, underwear.’ And Quinn says, ‘Oh yeah?’ and Milland says, ‘You take care of your end and I’ll take care of mine,’ and Mo says to me, ‘Do you think that was a purposeful pun?’”
Ensuing discussion of puns in personal life, and early Hollywood movies.
“Stars are fabulous.”
“Outcast by Ernie and Eddie! It’s what the Stones are just getting into today . . . you can hear the double basses . . . mmm.”
In the same vein:
“You know ‘Gloria’?”
—By Van Morrison?
“Hoooooh, no. By the Cadillacs. And the Four Jesters and I think the Diablos did a version, too.”
Pet theories:
—What do you think you’re doing, then?
Making little plays.
“No, no, my horror movie is better than yours . . . ‘The Undertaker and His Friends’—they murder somebody, carve him up and bring him back to the butcher shop in the back, put him in this vat of acid. His girlfriend comes by, says she has a stomach-ache and they say, ‘Well, we’ll operate; they chloroform her, cut out her stomach—on screen!— you see every wriggling, thumping . . . then they chop off her arm, put it through a meat grinder. And at this moment, the hero comes in and asks what’s for lunch and they wink and say, ‘Chopmeat. . . .” People were walking out in droves . . . and then at the end all the characters come out and wink at the audience and do a little dance!!!”