Usually I write about music of Africa and the African Diaspora but my listening habits have always been wider than that. As a musician my first band experiences were with rock bands in the Sixties, what were later called "garage" bands. Rock music in the Sixties was exciting because it seemed from 1964 through 1969 that every few weeks something really different would surface. One of the most unique musical entities to emerge was The Velvet Underground, who were formed in 1965 and relased their first recording in 1967. A number of truisms about The Velvet Underground are oft repeated. One such truism is that not many people actually saw The Velvet Underground perform but most of those who saw them went on to form bands, which is a clever way of saying they were highly influential, out of proportion to their relatively limited record sales. Although it is true they didn't sell a lot of records relative to more popular rock bands, and they didn't play vast numbers of dates, they were nonetheless a working band from 1966 through 1970 or so, playing regularly in places where they were accepted--Boston and Cleveland, for instance. They would have played even more places had they been more widely accepted. So it wasn't like they were impossible to see.But their music was challenging to say the least and went against the grain of most of what was going on in the rock scene of their time. My thoughts about the Velvet Underground were triggered by seeing a blog post about a bootleg LP of one of their live performances at a venue called The Gymnasium in New York City in 1966, a recording I had heard about but didn't know was available. I had been searching for decades for more of the music that The Velvet Underground made in their original recording incarnation: Lou Reed on guitar and lead vocals, John Cale, bass, keyboards and electric viola, Sterling Morrison, guitar and bass, and Maureen Tucker, drums. A fifth member, sometime vocalist/fashion model/actress Nico, appeared on their first album and was part of a number of early shows, but was had been foisted on the band by Andy Warhol and was only half accepted by the band during her brief tenure. By 1968, Cale had left and the band's sound was never the same, though they made much great music after his departure. I was one of the fortunate few who witnessed the original line-up of The Velvet Underground live and have been longing ever sense to hear of the astounding, profoundly powerful music they made in that incarnation.
My encounter with The Velvet Underground came about by sheer chance. A schoolmate of mine, Tommy Sellers, had a band called The Muffins, who had scored a recording deal with RCA Records. To mark the occasion of the release of their first single, they had a show in the summer of 1967 at The Trauma, Philadelphia's first "psychedelic" nightclub. I went to celebrate and support a band of guys from the Philly suburb where I lived, who seemed to be "making it." When I arrived at the Trauma with my friends, I saw that there was an opening act: The Velvet Underground. I had never heard of them but the word was they were "from Boston" (which wasn't true but the rumor probably started because they played so much at The Boston Tea Party in Boston--more there than in the city where they had been formed--New York City).
At the appointed time, the four members (Nico wasn't present) of The Velvet Underground walked out--looking nothing like the paisley/day-glo/tie-dyed denizens of The Summer Of Love. For one thing, they were all dressed in black and three out of four of them were wearing shades. The one person who was not wearing shades had close-cropped reddish hair and as he/she took up a position standing behind the drums, it wasn't immediately clear if he/she was a man or woman. The drum set was odd--the bass drum was turned horizontal and he/she held mallets in his/her hands, not drumsticks. One of the guys, with long straggly hair and a wispy moustache and beard that somehow suggested a raggedy French bohemian, brandished an electric viola. The other two held electric guitars. None of them smiled. The leader--who I later learned was Lou Reed--stepped up to the main microphone and pronounced one word in a flat monotone: "heroin." The band then kicked into a repetitive two-chord pattern puncuated by accents from the drummer's mallets. Holding it all together was a whining, droning sound as the singer intoned "I....don't know...just where I'm going...but I'm...gonna try....to nullify my life"....the music surged forward, propelled by galloping, uneven drumming as the singer spoke/sang the experience of a heroin addict shooting up. Several minutes in, the viola player began hitting atonal runs and the leader unleashed screeching feedback from his guitar amp--a cacaphony erupting from the steady drone, an expression of transcendence of some sort. It was the loudest music I had ever heard; even though they just had medium sized Vox and Silvertone amps, they played at the pain threshold. Other people were using feedback during that period--Jimi Hendrix, Peter Townshend of The Who, Jeff Beck of The Yardbirds-- but none of them used it like The Velvet Underground, playing off the drones, unleashing wild, oscillating shrieks for minutes at a time. The front man was running his fingers up and down his guitar neck--either it was just random picking or else he was doing some brilliant stuff. Some ten minutes in, the sonic storm resolved on a pure D chord, all the droning notes coordinated, a triumph of sorts--survival of psychic storm. The song depicted a horrific reality and yet it was beautiful at times. Those who later said the song glorified drug use couldn't have been listening to carefully; the horror outweighed the bliss but it was simple honesty to portray the bliss that led people to indulge despite the horror. And that was just the first tune! I can't say I understood all that was going on that night; nor would I say necessarily that I "liked" it. But it made an indelible impression on me; I had never heard any music like it before.
Two months later I was away at college and during freshman week, before the upperclassman arrived, the college radio station--which was piped into the dorms--played pre-recorded programs of music. In that week, the same program would play at the same time each day. As it happened, I had a late morning break each day and as I came back to my room I would hear the same songs. One of them was "Heroin" by The Velvet Underground. Hearing it daily, I began to understand it and marvel at its megnificence. The campus cafe and bookstore had a small selection of records and one day by chance I saw in the racks an LP by The Velvet Underground. The cover was simply a yellow banana on a white background--a creation of Andy Warhol, whose name was emblazoned on the cover. "Peel Slowly and See" read the small type on the cover....the banana skin was a decal that could be peeled back to reveal a pink banana inside. I bought the LP and took it back to my dorm room. The music on that album was sometimes tuneful, often confounding or alienating. There were songs about drugs but not the "let's all get high" celebration of pyschedelics purveyed by so many Sixties bands; no, these songs were about the grimy realities of scoring and doing heroin. Other songs dealt with sado-masochism, death, alienation, and love. Aside from a rock re-write of Marvin Gaye's "Hitchhike" and a pleasant little pop ditty called "Sunday Morning" and a pretty love ballad called "I'll Be Your Mirror", the music on the album was ragged, raw, aggressive, dissonant and often tied together with drones. On "Run, Run, Run", the initial notes of the guitar solo bleed into a screech of feedback as Lou Reed hits the solo, much of which is double-picked. "The Black Angel's Death Song" is a repetitive dissonant viola pattern that sounds almost North African at times behind declaimed poetry. It all added up to some of the most powerful music I'd ever heard.
I became a fan of The Velvet Underground. Within a year there was a second album, "White Light, White Heat"; the LP jacket was pure black, though if you tilted it at a certain angle you could see some sort of shape within the blackness. The sound of the album was different than the first one, grungier and even rawer if that's possible. One side had ditties about methamphetamines and a short story called "The Gift" about a man who had himself mailed in a box to his girlfriend as a surprise present, only to perish as the eager young woman plunged a pair of scissors into the package to open it up--this tale delivered in a plummy British accent. The other side had only two cuts, a rampaging "I Heard Her Call My Name" ("and then my mind split open..." Reed sang just before the solo, his words punctuated by a squeal of feedback) and the epic "Sister Ray", a repetitive narrative about some sailors, a junkie and a prostitute over hugely distorted guitars and electric organ propelled by an unvarying pile-driving machine-like drum pattern. There was no bass. Maureen Tucker on drums was no virtuoso but she could deliver a beat with metronome-like precision, which was important because an essential element of the Velvet's music was hypnotic effect from repetition and the drones.
After "White Light, White Heat", John Cale left the band and The Velvet Underground's sound altered radically. Cale and Lou Reed had a tremendous creative tension--not unlike that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney--that resulted in something more than the sum of its parts. One reviewer described them as having "two of the heaviest nervous systems on the planet" and that sounded about right. Though both did create challenging, occasionally very good or even great music apart, their true peak came when they worked together. The third Velvet Underground album was sonically restrained compared to their previous work, often tender, intimate, subtle; the songs focus more on love in all its manifestations, as well as spiritual transcedence and redemption. There was even a song called "Jesus." Much of it is quite beautiful and there is wisdom in many of the songs. But it sounds conventional when put alongside the first two. The band's fourth and last album, recorded as the group was disintegrating, is sonically even more conventional, the production feeling a bit freeze-dried and bloodless. Nontheless there are a number of very good songs, with Reed's ever-provocative lyrics; "Sweet Jane", in particular is a joyous hymn to the liberating potential of rock 'n' roll. Reed wrote with a literary sensibility, limning characters as a novelist would, or stringing together clusters of words as a poet would.
I saw The Velvet Underground--without John Cale--a couple more times before they split. Both times they were pithy, punchy, and special. But I still longed for the wild improvisation and raw sonics of their original incarnation. There were flashes of that; John Cale and Lou Reed re-united for a celebration of their mentor, Andy Warhol--the most impressive "Songs For Drella." And the original band reunited for some European dates once....I would have flown to Europe to see them if I had known they would split up again before they could tour the U.S. A video documents that reunion and they sound great; it is the same vibe that I witnessed back in 1967, marred only by Lou Reed's somewhat shaky vocals. But it was clear that they still had the special chemistry that defined them as a band. Anyway, this is why the news of the Velvet Underground bootleg "Live At The Gymnasium" is so exciting to me. Besides great versions of songs such as "Run Run Run", "Waiting For My Man" and others from their debut album their are a couple songs that hadn't been on their recordings. And the sound...it is the sound I heard at The Trauma-- a sound that will never come again.
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