New Times, April 20, 1970
DARK BLUE. SPATTERED FRAGMENTS. SPLINTERS. PINPOINTS. IF YOU MIX STEEL and concrete and people, what do you get? Whip it on me, Jack, whip it on me. And over it all, strangely enough, a little clear white light that tumbles and gleams its way to the east, rolling and flowing along.
They don’t work New York anymore. If you ask, they’ll tell you it’s because there aren’t any clubs left to play here, or that they can’t stand Bill Graham, or any number of other Official Reasons. But it’s more than that, you know, much more. There was a scene here once, a collection of people, places and things; a meeting in time and space that happened at a single point and will probably never occur in just that way again.
The Velvet Underground were a part of that scene, articulated it, musically defined and eventually pointed to where it would all lead. And as the process moved on, as it eventually had to, they went along with it, still a step or two ahead of the rest, watching, alert for the signs of Change.
When you sit back and look around now, you should always remember one thing. They were there first.
In the comics, superheroes always have to be given origin stories. Superman was deposited on Earth after home-planet Krypton blew itself to smithereens with him as the only survivor. Spiderman was just plain Peter Parker until he was bit by a you-know-what. The fantastic Four got caught in a cosmic ray storm. The (old) Human Torch was created by a benevolent scientist.
For the Velvets, you could write the story in many different places. You might begin when Brooklyn-born Lou Reed, working as a kind of song-writing machine for Pickwick Records, first met John Cale, a Welsh musical drop-out from a massive Leonard Bernstein Composition and Theory Scholarship to Tanglewood. Reed had written a thing called “The Ostrich” and needed a group to take it around the local high schools and record hops. With Cale, he formed the Primitives, which lasted together for something like a week before falling apart.
Or you might begin in the depths of the lower lower East Side, a cold water wood-burning flat on Ludlow Street where Reed, Cale, Sterling Morrison, a drummer named Angus MacLise and various others spent a long winter in late 1965. As usual, they had been puttering around with forming a band, calling themselves such things as the Falling Spikes and the Warlocks, ultimately lighting on the paperback title of Velvet Underground. Nothing was very organized at the time; there were few amplifiers, only a couple of songs Lou had written a while back (“Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for My Man”). And of course, there were no jobs.
Origins, lots of places, here’s Summit, New Jersey, for instance, where Al Aronowitz got the group its first honest-to-god gig in the high school gym. “The Black Angel’s Death Song” for the princely sum of seventy five dollars. Fantastic. Or maybe when they opened at the Cafe Bizarre, no drummer (Angus had split for India), and they got friend Maureen to bring down her set and Reed was still trying to find a drummer ’til showtime but no luck so finally he turned to Mo and asked if she could play those things and she said yes and another piece dropped neatly into place.
But if you want to write the story of the Velvet Underground, you have to begin far beyond any of the physical things that actually happened. You first have to look at New York City, the mother which spawned them, which gave them its inner fire, creating an umbilical attachment of emotion to a monstrous hulk of urban sprawl. You have to walk its streets, ride its subways, see it bustling and alive in the day, cold and haunted at night. And you have to love it, embrace and recognize its strange power, for there, if anywhere, can you find the roots.
Even as late as 1966, the Velvet Underground at the Cafe Bizarre must have been quite a sight to behold. While other groups around the MacDougal St. area were dabbling in variations of Byrds folk-rock and thinking how nice it was that the Lovin’ Spoonful had really made it, the Velvets set out to cover a whole new territory. The thing was to be real, not merely superficial, and so years before Altamont, before the love-peace-death trip, before dope had become acceptable on a mass scale, the Velvets had moved into violence, drugs, an entire area of human consciousness that few, if any, had ever put to the rock ’n’ roll form before.
And believe it or not, that was what it was. Rock ’n’ roll. Plain and simple. Oh, they worked on it, adding things on top and bottom, releasing it from certain standards that had previously been held inviolable. Cale, for instance, had just come from working with LaMonte Young and his “Dream Symphonies,” where they would experiment with holding sets of chords and notes for long periods of time. Sterling had studied classical trumpet; Lou had been working at the piano since the age of five.
But in the end, it was all rock ’n’ roll. Maureen sat heavily in the back, smashing out a set of Bo Diddley–derived rhythms that seldom if ever varied. Cale and Morrison fell easily into the form, viola and guitar nailed on top. And Reed: he never expected anything more than an old time rock ’n’ roller, except that his lyrics slowly changed from little fantasies about the girl next door. If you lived in the right place, that is.
It was at the Bizarre that the Velvets as a group first came into contact with Andy Warhol, and by extension, the entire New York avant-garde scene. Film-maker Barbara Rubin had brought Warhol down there one night and he immediately latched on to the atmosphere of perverse urban sexuality that was the Velvets’ stock in trade. The timing was incredible. Warhol had just been offered a large sum of money to put on a show at Murray the K’s burgeoning World out on the Island, and had been looking for a rock band to help him do it. With the Velvets, it was a perfect match.
In retrospect, the group’s relationship with Warhol has never been made clear, probably because the sheer strength of the Warhol name has always made the pairing seem greater than it actually was. Though listed as producer on their first album, he never actually took a hand in the making of their music. Most of the early material had been written long before his arrival, and the basic sound was formulated and set down by the time of the job at the Bizarre. Essentially, his role seemed to be as a semi-manager, who guided the group only in terms of giving them an environment in which to expand. “Andy had sort of a good way of picking out situations for us to appear in,” remembers John Cale. “He would almost invent places for us to play.” After the group was fired from the Bizarre, Warhol brought them to the early Film-makers Cinematheque, gave then rehearsal space in the magic world of the Factory, and helped them find jobs and equipment.
It was at the Cinematheque that much of what was later put into the Exploding Plastic Inevitable first began to form. Andy would take a series of movies, then project them for the Velvets to accompany in a kind of live soundtrack. In addition, Warhol would experiment with light projections, the group playing free-form in back of the movie screen, trying to combine visual and auditory images into a searing whole. It was Mixed-Media even before such a word existed, an attempt at something New which only a breed of highly-tuned figures like Marshall McLuhan had been able to pick up and recognize.
The Cinematheque also brought Nico to the Velvets. She had been in Europe, dabbling on the fringes of the jet set, making a spot appearance in La Dolce Vita, and was now in a New York hotel telling people that she was a singer. Somewhere along the line, she had made a little 45 record and was continually dragging people up to her room to listen to it. The story (and its truth, of course, is irrelevant) is that she came to the Cinematheque one night with Brian Jones, saying she wanted to sing. Her first performance was Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine” (which she did while the Velvets backed her up) and after that, more or less officially joined the group.
With the obvious success of the Cinematheque behind them, Warhol moved his show to still-dormant St. Mark’s Place, where they set up shop in an old Polish community hall called the Dom. There, they constructed a massive multi-media show known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, featuring lights, music, even a kind of dance and theater. Warhol would run the projections—fine, geometrically perfect patterns encircling the walls—the Velvets would play, old records blared out during the breaks. Gerard Malanga, dressed in leather and brandishing a whip, would dance with Mary Mite in front of the group, each pretending to beat the other. Even the audience couldn’t escape; they too were part of the inevitable.
Reviewers who came drew parallels to Berlin in the depths of the thirties, but they missed the mark. It was New York in the sixties, the essence distilled and brought out, a city splitting apart and loving every minute of it.
In its own way, the group’s debut album captured the Exploding Plastic Inevitable scene perfectly. The Velvet Underground and Nico was the first of the concept albums, first with cuts to break the three-minute barrier, drawing a picture that was at once sinister and beautiful, ranging from delicately-crafted melodic pieces to piercing shrieks of electronic energy. In some sense, it was a schizophrenic album, moving from one side of the coin to the other, always juxtaposing, asking a question in one song and then answering it in a totally different way with the next. Nico was the one who sang its dominant theme:
I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are
In case you don’t know . . .
Lou Reed refers to each of the group’s albums as “chapters,” and looking at how they fall into a line, one neatly after another, you can easily see that he’s right. As a group, the Velvets’ progression has never been the common move of good to bad, or even simple to complex, but rather from one total level to the next, each one explored, set down, and left to be built upon by the next. The albums stack on top of each other, and to pull one out and take it from its neighbors is to risk toppling the entire construct.
Almost prophetically, the first album set out a lot of the ways the Velvets would deal with their music in the future. Lyrically, the group would create little characters, tell stories about them, interlock each so that what was being spoken of would not be so much a set individual as an entire group. And regardless of how they came off to those who listened, these were not idealized portraits. The Velvet Underground and Nico contains a lot of ugliness, a lot of the down side of life that is so much an inescapable part of city living. “The Real Thing,” says Reed, “is not something you’d want to idolize”: once again, this passion to create something real. Yet the group’s very fascination with the dark sides of the human nature automatically removed anyone (or anything) they were talking about from moral grounds. It existed, was something they particularly knew about, and in the end, that was all that was necessary. There was no good or bad, only shades of each.
The key to that first album is not “Heroin,” though it clearly was the most popular song, receiving a rather large amount of airplay for something so taboo-ridden and straight-forward. Rather, the key lies throughout the entire record, culminating in the broken glass and shattered images of “European Son.” Where many of the earlier cuts relied on their lyrics to create a mood, the entire second half of “European Son” stood on its music, a coda to the framework the rest of the album had attempted to set up. Everything that was a part of the Velvets’ world—pain, angular passions, an underlying flow of violence, existence on the very edge of reality—took shape in the short minutes of that cut.
At first glance, White Light/White Heat seems a logical successor to the first album, taking everything worked out there and moving it another step further, a bit more hellish, a lot less romantic. Even musically, it builds on the same components: using the rhythmically hypnotic as a creative force, taking repetition as a guiding energy, purposefully throwing away accepted musical guide-lines in order to achieve a grander vision than mere instrumental proficiency.
But over that there was more happening within the album than just a standard growth. In essence, a drastic restatement had taken place; events had thrown the Velvets into a whole new stage of development. In the intervening time, the group had gone to California (doing the Trip, the early Fillmore) and had come back to find they had lost the Dom, their lease torn up, a future Electric Circus on the way. For a while, they tried to recreate the Inevitable in a little place called the Gymnasium, but it never quite turned out the way everyone had wanted. The spontaneity that had spurred the Inevitable in its finest moment was gone now, and to force things seemed somehow not right.
And increasingly, there were tensions within the group itself. The nervous energy that had once brought three independent sources of power together had begun to dissipate, and the resultant tensions were beginning to rumble and twitch beneath the surface. The first to slip away was Nico, already downstairs at the Dom appearing as a solo act with Jackson Browne, while a rift had begun to open between Reed and Cale.
“We were very distraught at the time,” says Cale. “There was pressure building up—God knows from where—and we were all getting very frustrated.” It was also about this time that they made moves to establish their independence from Warhol, who was getting more and more involved with his film-making and less concerned with the group.
It was in this atmosphere of strain, with formerly known and relied-upon landmarks crumbling around them, that the Velvets put together White Light/White Heat. You can hear it all reflected in the music. There is a feeling of hurriedness, an urgency which moves each cut up to a slightly greater level of intensity. The production is muddy (the group insisted on playing at full volume in the studio), which only served to heighten the quickened pulse of the album.
When you put the first and second albums side by side, there is a literal difference that you can almost reach out and touch. The Velvet Underground and Nico seems brighter with more colors, pictures, an almost fun painting of a banana on the front cover. White Light/White Heat stands in stark black and white, graced with an invisible death’s head on its cover.
More, there is a very real element of paranoia to the album. “I Heard Her Call My Name” begins abruptly, almost as if it was afraid that the side would start without it. “The Gift” is an almost classic study in paranoia, possibly taking place all in the mind of Waldo, recited in a cool, emotionless tone by Cale that serves to bring it home even further. And on “Lady Godiva’s Operation,” a subliminal voice hisses out, “You’re a boy—you’re a girl,” tense, accusing.
The climax of the album, “Sister Ray,” gathers together the five previous cuts much the same as “European Son” did on The Velvet Underground and Nico. It is a story, first of all, with narration switched from person to person: the sailor, someone named Rosie, Sister Ray herself, several others. And there are events that take place: a killing, people wanting jobs to “try and earn a dollar,” a variety of comings and goings. A little world, in other words, covered over by that strange desire for salvation which continually creeps up in Velvet lyrics. “I’m searchin’ for my mainline,” sings Reed, over and over and over until the words separate into syllables and finally to individual letters. Almost, if you’ll pardon the comparison, like John and Yoko repeating their names through a whole side of a record, watching them break slowly down from things with a symbolic meaning to mere sounds from a human throat.
Musically, the group behind Reed solidly backs up the effect of the lyrics. Everything is based around one chord, cemented by a stolid, endlessly patient beat by Maureen. Guitars mingle and clash over the bottom, pieces of viola, organ and vague electronics fly around, but nothing can really rise too far over the drone on the floor. It encompasses everything. After ten minutes or so, as if to drive the point home, the Velvets abruptly cut the flow for just the briefest of moments, like a sudden light after a dark tunnel. Just to let you know.
At least here, if in no other place, we can use a Velvets composition as a basis to compare their approach with that of another group. About a year before “Sister Ray,” the Seeds put together a song on their second album (Web of Sound) called “Up in Her Room,” where they repeated that phrase over the course of fifteen-plus minutes, building the music with it in a kind of logical intensity. At least on a physical level both songs work much the same way. After x amount of time, they tend to create an environment of their own: listening to them is like humming in a room where another dozen people are humming also, in a constant pitch, never varying, unchanging.
But the Seeds are a California group, and just in terms of the different life-style, they operate in an entirely opposing fashion to the Velvets. Where Lou Reed spits out his words, knows their power, chooses them and realizes what he is aiming for in the way of effect, the Seeds have come about their sound in a much more elementary way. Most likely, they thought of it once in a practice, liked it, and decided to build a song around it. And from the appearance, they never thought of basing their music around a dominant aesthetic, never dawdling with such matters as theme, never cared much about things like context and meaning.
The difference is important. In terms of Art (capital A), the Seeds’ approach is hit or miss, a product of spontaneous thinking that can only go as far as the initial creative impulse will take it. But the Velvets, a product in many ways of the New York avant-garde—who read, go to movies, obviously do a lot of heavy thinking—are used to intellectualizing about what they do. They function in the realm of Art, first and foremost, not only intrigued with matters of Style (as are the Seeds—and please don’t misunderstand, there is much to be said for that), but also with matters of Content. The Velvets have always moved in terms of carefully thought out theories, knowing what they want to accomplish and how best to go about it.
Art-rock has become a much scorned term of late. In large part, I’d tend to go along with that: most of the stuff that has passed under the title has been little more than a combination of pretentious garbage and two-bit eclecticism, part of a seeming campaign to make rock “acceptable” for people who never much cared for it in the first place. But then there comes a group like the Velvet Underground, who takes the hidden powers in art-rock and slowly brings them to the light, giving the phrase some much-needed relevance once again.
And so today.
They’ve been on the road since the beginning of October, are tired, a little sick, weary and hurting to get back to New York. John Cale is no longer there, off producing and building his solo album. Doug Yule has come in to replace him, playing bass and organ. Maureen still stands when she plays the drums batting away, never missing a beat, Reed and Morrison are working immeasurably closer on the guitars, seemingly more in control of their instruments than previously. They still do some of the old songs on stage, but the present material is about half new and unrecorded.
In many ways, the Velvet Underground are a changed band. The frantic pushing that was so much a part of White Light/White Heat is gone now, replaced by an ethereal calm that seems to signify that the mainline has indeed been found, the next level ascended to and attained. Their third album is simply called The Velvet Underground, attesting to the fact that the separate pieces are gone now, that the group is for once a tight, cohesive single unit.
The music has changed also: the melodic lyricism that only crept up in part on the first two albums has by the third become dominant. Reed still asks his questions, creates his characters, sets up each song by the one before (“Jesus” leading into “I’m Beginning to See the Light” which in turn becomes “I’m Set Free”), but the way he goes about it is more methodical and paced. The urgency has disappeared; “The Murder Mystery,” the third album equivalent of “Sister Ray” and “European Son,” is almost pleasant to hear, combining a happy recitation from one speaker with a sad [one] from the other, creating something which is not so much opposing forces as interlocking halves.
The Velvet Underground is probably the group’s most commercial album, yet like the others, it’ll probably leave them in as large an obscurity as they now find themselves. When people do know about them, they remember “Heroin,” or they think it’s all a put-on, or they somehow lump them in with other New York underground groups like the Fugs. It’s sad, of course. The Velvets are probably the most creative band in America today, dealing in an area which most other groups studiously avoid whenever possible: Life.
To be real, you see. Because if you can’t do that, say the Velvets, you may as well not be doing anything at all.