Lou Reed, the lyricist, I like to compare to water flowing downhill: he takes the quickest, shortest path.
It’s not always precise, it’s not always artful, but, like a garbage man making the morning rounds, he gets the job done. He cuts to the chase. He shoots first and asks questions later.
I don’t even need to search particularly far and wide for an example of this tendency. “But she never lost her head/Even when she was givin’ …” Yes? I can just see Lou now, leaning back in his smooth leather armchair, the Greek and Roman classics lining the walls of his study, quill and parchment in hand. “Hmmm. What rhymes with ‘head’? Oh, I got it, how about ‘head’?” Zen koan of the day: If you rhyme a word with itself, is it truly a rhyme? (In Lou’s defense, the first “head” does carry a very different connotation than the second one, but still.)
Or how about “Went to the/Uh-pah-loh/You should’ve seen ‘em/Go, go, go”? Never mind that the stress in the word “Apollo” is supposed to be on the second syllable, not the third. The funniest part is that he obviously ran out of syllables in the second half of the lyric, and decided, “No, it’s cool, I’ll just repeat ‘go’ three times to fill the gap. Good enough for government work.” Witness the inverse of the syllable conundrum in “Lisa Says”: “Lisa says that she has her fun/And she’ll do it with jusssbout anyone.” Like, maybe if he sang it fast enough, nobody would notice?
Calling out awkward Lou Reed rhymes feels like shooting fish in a barrel. Here’s a fine pair from Loaded’s “Head Held High”: 1) “Just like I figured/They always disfigured/With their head up high.” I … guess that counts as a rhyme? I guess, I just don’t know, oh, and I guess, I just don’t know; 2) “They said the answer/Was to become a dancer/With their head up high”? Does anyone genuinely believe that a person aspiring to the choreographic arts plays any meaningful role in the lyrics of this composition? “Got a foggy notion/Do it again/I got my calamine lotion/Do it again”? One could speculate that Lou was intending to hint at the absurdity of a person needing a product that reduces itching from insect bites while standing in misty, overcast weather, but I suspect that’s being generous.
Or how about this gem from “I Can’t Stand It”: “I live with thirteen dead cats/A purple dog that wears spats/They’re living out in the hall …” And? Ooh, how’s he going to make it out of this one? The suspense is killing me. “And I can’t stand it any … more.” Really? To be fair, his New Yawk accent does manage to turn “more” into “moh-ah,” making the attempted rhyme with “hall” a touch more palatable.
Or, to bring the discussion around to the album in question, take these lines near the end of “I’m Waiting for the Man”: “I’m feeling good, I’m feeling oh so fine/Until tomorrow but that’s just some other time.” “Just some other time”? Almost sounds right, but … hold on, buddy. Does anyone phrase that particular sentiment in that particular way? More critically, did anyone in the ‘60s ever phrase that particular sentiment in that particular way? My guess is that the phrase people actually would have used was, “Until tomorrow, but … I’ll worry about that tomorrow.” Alas, “tomorrow” doesn’t rhyme with “fine” and, he probably figured, “Look, nobody’s going to buy the fucking album anyway.”
Or how about this one from “Run Run Run”: “Rode the trolley/Down to Forty-Seven/Figured if he was good …” Hmmm, let me guess. Ooh, ooh, I know! He’s gonna rhyme “seven” with “heaven.” Lou Reed, boldly going where no lyricist has gone before. “Figured if he was good/He’d get himself to heaven.” Does this imply that the character being described is a devoutly Christian fellow? Or, as a friend once suggested to me, is Reed implying that the “heaven” in question is a “heaven” of the chemical variety? Frankly, I’ve never taken the lyric as representing anything more than “Shit, man, I need a rhyme.”
Or how about this much-referenced and much-admired couplet from “Heroin”: “When I’m rushing on my run/And I feel just like Jesus’s son.” Hold on, hold on, Jesus had a son? Did I miss an extra chapter in the Gospels somewhere? Shouldn’t somebody tell the Pope? How exactly would His Holiness feel about this sudden discovery of Jesus’s apparently drug-addicted offspring? What I assume Reed meant was something along the lines of “And I feel like God.” But, again, he needed a rhyme for “run” and, well, what are you gonna do?
However, I’ll give the man this: unlike certain other members of the group, at least he didn’t sing with a funny accent.
Back in college, during a communal Velvet Underground & Nico listening session, one of my fellow students floated the tantalizing theory that the other members of the band deliberately gave Nico words to sing that they knew she would mispronounce, solely to induce giggles among the native English speakers in her midst. “She’s going to smile to make you fronnn, what a clonnn.” “And what costume shall the poor girl wear/To all tomorrow’s pahh-tiesssssss?”
Here is what I consider the sad and painful truth: there is absolutely nothing that a non-native speaker can do about it, but if you sing in English with a thick accent, no matter how talented you might otherwise be, or how serious your intentions are, you are going to sound funny.
I suppose this is one of the (many) reasons why I could never truly get behind the recorded output of Yoko Ono. I’ve always gotten the sense that, inside her head, while sitting there in the recording studio, she truly believed, in her own mind, “Yeah! I sound just as tough, raw, primal, and passionate as John does!” But to a native English speaker, she just sounds like someone with an extremely thick Japanese accent trying to sound like a rock star. Singing isn’t like writing. There’s an element of performance involved.
The critical difference in Nico’s case, I would say, and the reason why I can appreciate the three songs she sings on this album in ways that I can’t quite appreciate the work of a certain Liverpudlian’s spouse, is that I find the oddness of her accent, like the oddness of Lou Reed’s lyrics, to be a more appropriate complement to the oddness wafting from the sonic tableau behind her. In other words, her accent may be funny, but so, in its own macabre way, is the music.
*****
The Velvet Underground & Nico is the kind of album I have been highly tempted not to like as much as I do.
First of all, raise your hand if you think that doing drugs, or writing songs about doing drugs, makes you “cool.” You can’t see that my hand is down, but it’s down. Second, raise your hand if you think that liking a piece of art that wasn’t commercially successful in its day, and arguably isn’t nearly as well-known today as other pieces of art from the same era are, makes you cool as well. Yeah, my hand is still down. Sick of hearing your parents proclaim, for the thousandth time, that the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, Motown, and Stax came out with “the best songs ever,” while the only song they might possibly associate with the phrase “velvet underground” is Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy”? I doubt you can witness, from the safety of your own computer, my eyes rolling into the back of my head.
See, I’ve rarely been into the notion of liking something because it’s “not” this other thing. Countless are the reviews I’ve read of The Velvet Underground & Nico where the reviewers go out of their way to take an unnecessary swipe at a more familiar and supposedly more “cherished” Baby Boomer perennial. One example that has stuck in my head for years: “The true birth of art rock, Sgt. Pepper’s be damned.”
Yeah, see, that sort of whiny revisionism doesn’t really fly with me.
While I’ve yet to take it upon myself to read Pitchfork Media’s own list of the best albums of the ‘60s (am I secretly terrified that it would influence my own?), I did have an amusing chat with a co-worker shortly after their publication of it, since he wanted to see me react as he informed me that they’d placed The Velvet Underground & Nico at #1. Listen, they can rank their list however they want to rank it. But to me, putting this album at #1 feels like a reaction to every other “Best Albums of the ‘60s” list the Pitchfork writers had been traumatically forced to swallow throughout their lifetimes. Let me put it this way: if someone who knew absolutely nothing about the popular music of the 1960s came up to you and asked you which album from that decade they should listen to before any other album, would you answer The Velvet Underground & Nico? If so, well, to quote one of this group’s highly experimental mid-‘60s rock peers, mister, you’re a better man than I.
And another thing! Over the years I’ve read several interviews with, and comments from, the members of the Velvet Underground themselves (and from Lou Reed in particular), in which they say mean things about their fellow late ‘60s musical contemporaries, almost all of whom are musicians whose music I personally enjoy. Fine, I get it, you were ahead of your time, you were pissed off, you were from New York, you thought West Coast hippies were naïve trust-fund poseurs, the music press ignored you, no one bought your records, you didn’t make a single lousy penny, and when the band broke up, you had to move back in with your parents in Long Island and work at your father’s tax accounting firm as a typist (fun fact: this is apparently what Lou Reed ended up doing after he quit the band shortly before the release of Loaded). You hated everything and everyone. I don’t want to hear about it.
And yet, this album still comes in at #7 on my list. To borrow a line that All Music Guide writer Steve Huey used in his review of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out: “… as someone once said of Shakespeare, it’s really very good in spite of the people who like it.”
All the issues that I listed above are merely the peripheral modern day bullshit surrounding the album. What’s actually on the album is what one should judge the album by, and what’s actually on the album is stuff I admittedly like. Now, if Lou Reed had devoted a significant portion of the album’s lyrics to petty sniping directed toward his ‘60s rock contemporaries, that would be a different story. But none of that hostility is technically present in the finished product itself. I can’t hold the surrounding noise against it. Also, given that Lou Reed’s apparent number one life goal was to elevate being a raging celebrity asshole to a new artform, part of me has concluded that one should probably take every single Lou Reed interview from 1967 to, say, 1991, crumple it into a little ball, and toss it into the nearest compost bin.
Because, despite what they tell you, I don’t think this album is merely “I’m a junkie and I hate hippies,” eleven times over. I find it to be not only more multifaceted than that, but altogether more amusing than that.
Rock historians tend to treat this album with such gravity, such solemnity. It’s “the birthplace of punk, blah blah blah.” Maybe I’m one deranged goofball, but I see this album as, above anything else, a lot of fun. Certainly the backstory behind it is. You want to read about the “bravery” and “iconoclasm” of the band’s “searingly honest portrayal of mid-20th century urban living”? Many other writers before me – the kind who probably drank scotch, used a typewriter, and could quote Ginsberg and Burroughs at the drop of the hat – have surely beaten me to it. No, I’m going a slightly less traveled route. I’m going to have myself some fun with this one.
*****
One sunny, non-descript college afternoon, my fellow student and music-listening partner-in-crime, whose taste ran a little more alternative than mine, posed an interesting question to me and, by extension, to the universe:
“Just how well-known were the Velvet Underground in their day? Were they like ‘Pavement’-level well-known, ‘Tom Waits’-level well-known, ‘Ween’-level well-known, or were they just completely unknown?”
Well, propose a question to the universe, and one day, the universe just might reply.
Because in 2008, rock historian and frequent All Music Guide contributor Richie Unterberger set out to elucidate that very subject in his rigorously researched and laughably detailed book White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day.
Here is a piece of rock journalism that often plays more like a riveting detective story than a music biography. We’re talking about an author willing to scour every newspaper, magazine, fanzine, concert poster, and college flier that ever saw the light of day between 1966 and 1970 for merely the tiniest mention the Velvet Underground, in a herculean effort to firmly establish the band’s precise whereabouts. We’re talking about an author who, under a section dated “April 2, 1967,” writes the following:
“According to an ad in the March 30 edition of the Village Voice, The Velvet Underground are scheduled to appear at the Gymnasium on Friday March 31 and Sunday April 2. It seems doubtful that the March 31 show could have taken place, however, as the Velvets were in Rhode Island, and there’s no other evidence to suggest that tonight’s show goes ahead, either.”
But … but … how can I sleep at night without knowing, with absolute certainty, whether the Velvets played that concert or not??
We’re talking the kind of author who scours the BMI database and spots a song called “Sweet-and-Twenty” that happened to be registered in 1969 by a man residing in Brooklyn, New York named “Lewis Reed,” before concluding that, since the Velvet Underground were not known to have ever performed such a song live, and that since Lou Reed never lived in Brooklyn during the late ‘60s, this would most likely be the work of an entirely separate, unrelated Lewis Reed.
In other words, if you’re a competing author planning to disagree with aspects of Unterberger’s research, you better bring your A game.
The man leaves no stone unturned. Want to know about a recording John Cale made with LaMonte Young in his pre-VU days titled “Day of the Antler 15 VIII 65 the Obsidian Ocelot, the Sawmill and the Blue Sawtooth High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting the Legend of the Dream of the Tortoise Traversing the 189/98 Lost Ancestral Lake Region Illuminating Scenes from the Black Tiger Tapestries of the Drone of the Holy Numbers from ‘The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys’”? Then this is the book for you.
But to circle back to my friend’s critical question, “Exactly how well-known were the Velvet Underground in their day?,” the short answer, at least according to White Light/White Heat, is:
For those plugged in to the music scene, fairly well-known.
Unlike, say, Big Star (another now-legendary cult act) in their day, I don’t get the sense that the Velvet Underground existed in virtual obscurity. The only two groups of people in 1974 who might have heard any music released by Big Star were disc jockeys and rock critics – because those were the only two groups of people who would’ve received a copy of a Big Star album from the record label! It’s hard to even consider #1 Record and Radio City as having been legitimately released; I believe they sold somewhere between 3,000-5,000 copies each. By comparison, Unterberger claims to have located a royalty statement from MGM dated February 14, 1969 stating that The Velvet Underground & Nico had sold 58,000 copies – which ain’t bad at all, considering. John Kennedy Toole, the Velvets were not.
A few choice examples of their brushes with the mainstream:
- In November 1966, the Velvets briefly joined “Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars” for a series of shows in Detroit alongside the Yardbirds, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, Brian Hyland, and Gary Lewis & the Playboys (?!)
- In May 1966, the group performed several tension-filled shows in Los Angeles, which were attended by the likes of Sonny & Cher, John Phillips and Cass Elliot, David Crosby, and a then-unknown Jim Morrison (Crosby’s verdict: “It’s like eating a banana nut Brillo pad”; Cher’s take: “It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.”)
- In April 1966, the Velvets played a benefit for journalist George Plimpton’s Paris Review which was apparently attended by Robert Kennedy, Mike Nichols, and other esteemed denizens of the hoi polloi. A quote from one attendee: “There were a lot of celebrities at that event, and when Frank Sinatra came downstairs where the Velvets were playing, he took one look at them, and turned right around and went back upstairs.” Ol’ Blue Eyes not fond of screeching viola, I presume.
- In April 1967, Lou Reed supposedly found himself sitting face-to-face in a limousine with Brian Epstein, who promptly offered Reed a joint and claimed that he’d purchased the banana album prior to taking a week-long trip to Acapulco and that it was the only album he’d listened to the whole week, before suggesting that, hey, maybe he could become the Velvet Underground’s manager.
Unterberger’s testimony aside, I should also mention this conversation I once had with an older actor friend of mine (who’d been fairly attuned to the musical goings-on of the era, having attended Woodstock, among other happenings) on the set of a short film we were making together:
“So, was anyone actually aware of the Velvet Underground at the time?”
“Oh yeah. Everybody liked them.”
“But … they hardly sold any records, or got any radio play.”
“So? Yeah, everybody knew them, everybody liked them.”
Well there you have it.
But. If they were known, the sense I get is that they were known not as some groundbreaking rock ensemble but more as Andy Warhol’s freak show. The release of an album by the Velvet Underground AKA “those anonymous weirdos dressed head-to-toe in black and making strange droning noises as accompaniment to whatever the fuck was being projected during Warhol happenings” would have been treated almost as an afterthought, like someone releasing a soundtrack album to an amusement park ride, or perhaps one of the many releases by the Insane Clown Posse, with the record functioning more as an addendum to the in-person cultural attraction than as the main event itself. Which means that few at the time appeared to take this album seriously – not even rock critics, although in 1967 “rock criticism” itself would have been considered a rather infant, inchoate concept (in other words, few at the time appeared to take rock criticism seriously – not even rock critics).
Therefore, in terms of describing just how “famous” the Velvet Underground might have been in their day, perhaps a better comparison might not be with critically acclaimed acts like Pavement or Tom Waits but with deranged heathens like the Butthole Surfers or the Flaming Lips – bands who were more “notorious” than “admired,” bands mainly known for their terrifying, drug-fueled live spectacles than for any particular studio artistry or compositional finesse. If the phrase “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” doesn’t ring a bell, just picture a rave, except without anyone dancing, and without anyone enjoying themselves. Here’s a quote Unterberger digs up from a review of a December 1966 show the Velvets played in Philadelphia:
“Maybe they’re tuning up,” said one boy hopefully to a neighbor. “No, that’s how it sounds,” said his friend. The Thing – whatever it was – went on and on. People drifted in and out, pressing their hands to their heads. “I’m getting one of my migraines,” said a girl. Periodically one man jumped up from his seat and called, “Author, author,” and the people around him laughed. “This is the best argument against taking LSD I’ve ever seen, if that’s what it’s supposed to be like,” said a man under his breath. “I think it was sponsored by the narcotics squad,” someone answered. “I mean, when you get out of here, you don’t want LSD – you want an Excedrin.”
Not the description of a smashing success, perhaps, but hardly a concert to forget. As Maureen Tucker put it years later, “I’d be beating the shit out of those drums, and I’d look up and see – ugh! – it was, like, 50-year-olds, people who came to see a soup can, and this is what they got.”
Basically, the fame hierarchy went like this: 1) Warhol; 2) Nico; 3) the Velvet Underground.
Nico, man, she really got around. Here is a brief list of ‘60s and ‘70s rock legends she managed to hang out with and/or screw: Bob Dylan, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop, Jackson Browne … that’s like half of Robert Christgau’s record collection right there. I suspect every recording executive, upon hiring their promising new male singer-songwriter, ushered him into a dimly-lit office on the 25th floor, sat their new acquisition down, and asked, “So … shacked up with Nico yet?” (Apparently, after a brief fling with her bandmate Lou, she walked into a rehearsal regretfully stating, “I cannot make love to Jews anymore.”) Other choice Nico highlights from White Light/White Heat:
- While spending time with our budding golden-haired chanteuse in London in May 1965, Bob Dylan offered her an as-yet unreleased composition, “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” as a potential track for her to record. But before making a demo of that song, he played her a song that he was thinking of releasing as his next single, a little number called “Like a Rolling Stone.” From Unterberger: “Already irritated by having to wait around with other Dylan girlfriends for hours, Nico tells him that the new song is not as good as “I’ll Keep It With Mine.’” You do you, Nico.
- She claimed to have attended the release party for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in May 1967: “There is a song I liked on Sgt. Pepper, called ‘A Day in the Life’ … it has this beautiful song and then this strange sound like John Cale would make (he told me it was an orchestra, actually) and then this stupid little pop song that spoils everything so far. I told this to Paul, and I made a mistake, because the beautiful song was written by John Lennon and the stupid song was written by Paul. It can be embarrassing when you tell the truth.” Yup. Pretty embarrassing, all right. Maybe Nico was in the wrong line of work – she would’ve made a killer A&R executive.
- In addition to helping her record her debut single in 1965, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones engaged in a “brief and apparently tempestuous” affair with our Teutonic beauty, somehow managing to avoid fathering one of his 2,000 illegitimate children with her. In June 1967, they even attended the Monterey Pop Festival together (with Nico, like a fish swimming upstream, dressed entirely in black). When Jones bit the dust in 1969, Nico composed the song “Janitor of Lunacy” for him as a tribute (which was apparently not, as I had supposed, an ode to the local janitor at Lunacy High School in Pensacola, Florida).
- As if Brian Jones weren’t volatile and uncommunicative enough of a rock star for her tastes, she followed him up with Jim Morrison. According to future Stooges and Ramones manager Danny Fields, “Morrison and Nico had this wondrously strange affair, which consisted of the two of them standing in adjacent stone doorways of this false castle, and staring at the same spot on the floor, I guess communicating via reflections of the stone.” I can picture it now. But before moving on to bigger, better, and less German things, Morrison not only encouraged Nico to start writing her own material (meaning that we apparently owe her numerous harmonium-laced top forty hits to Jim), but also to dye her hair red. Sure, why not.
White Light/White Heat is worth the price of admission alone for its cornucopia of then-contemporary descriptions of Nico’s voice:
- “…her voice sounded like a horse on steroids.”
- “She sings so flat she’s almost in the next key.”
- “… the sound of an amplified moose.”
- “… the words of this ballad along with the intonation strongly suggest the necrophilic queen in Snow White.”
- “… it almost sounded like a cello that somebody had modified.”
- “…sung like an IBM computer with a Garbo accent, sung, say, the way Rosa Kleb in From Russia, With Love might sing …”
- “…she sounded like a Bedouin woman singing a funeral dirge in Arabic while accompanied by an off-key air raid siren.”
Truthfully, if I’d read these quotes first, and then listened to her singing, I probably would have been disappointed.
*****
Never, I suspect, has the universe been more indifferent to both the creation and release of an album than it was to the creation and release of The Velvet Underground & Nico. An artistically fearless collective burst forth into the world with a glorious vision, and humanity yawned.
First of all, for reasons that remain slightly unclear to this very day, although the bulk of the album was in the can by May 1966, Verve didn’t get around to releasing it until March 1967. Many band members claim, with a suspicious lack of proof, that the label decided to prioritize the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! instead, supposedly due to concern over the possibility of two “freak” albums cancelling out each other’s sales. (Oh, the agonies of the fringe record label.)
Nor did the band enter the studio with, shall we say, an experienced production team. Although nominally “produced” by Warhol, the real legend behind the boards for the majority of the album’s tracks was one Norman Dolph, described by Unterberger as “a Columbia Records sales executive who met Warhol in the course of his side job supplying music for art gallery shows and openings with his mobile disco” who asked to be “paid in art rather than cash.” I should try that sometime.
Therefore, the impression I get is of one of the most “influential and groundbreaking albums in rock history” being produced by the neighborhood bartender. According to Cale, the recording sessions were “a complete shambles. Norman Dolph is in the booth making comments like ‘Great! Dynamite! We got it!’ And we’re all looking at each other, going ‘Where is it written that he gets to say “This is a take”?’” Upon being told, years later, that Cale referred to him as a “shoe salesman,” Dolph responded, “If you run into Cale, tell him to give you his foot size, and I’ll send him a fucking pair of shoes.”
You know what? I like this guy.
Competency levels aside, Dolph and the band managed to lay down complete takes of ten full tracks. Boom, done, finished.
Except … not quite, as a month later during their trip to LA, for further reasons that remain slightly unclear to this very day, the group re-recorded “I’m Waiting for the Man, “Venus in Furs,” and “Heroin,” most likely with producer Tom Wilson, who, although having “Like a Rolling Stone,” “The Sounds of Silence,” and the aforementioned Freak Out! under his belt, was clearly no Norman Dolph. But despite this steep drop-off in production know-how, the band came away with new versions that all ended up replacing the earlier Dolph versions on the final album. Boom, done, finished.
Except … Wilson suddenly got it into his commercially aspirational head that the way to “sell” the debut album would be to focus just a wee bit more on Nico. Per the band’s then-manager Paul Morrissey:
“He said, ‘We have to put something out as a single, but there’s nothing on there that could be a single, and I want Nico to sing it. But I need a commercial type of song for Nico to sing.’ But when we got to the recording studio, Lou said, ‘Yeah, but I’m gonna sing this.’ Wilson was surprised; Lou was really arrogant in a nasty sort of way and Tom Wilson didn’t know what to say.”
Doesn’t sound like the Lou Reed I know. I would’ve expected him to take a moment to consider how the others might have felt about the situation, before allowing the rest of the band to confer in the hallway, after which they surely would have concluded, “No, you know what, Lou? You wrote this song. You sing it. You’re our front man, sink or swim, and don’t let any hotshot producer tell you different.”
This is how and why “Sunday Morning,” by some distance the last song to be recorded (in November 1966), became the opening track. At least Lou allowed Nico to chip in with a few crucial, unnervingly delicate “da-da-da” bits toward the end, which I think adds a nice, extra element of unity to an album that otherwise runs the risk of becoming too fractured for its own good. Thus, to every reviewer who writes that Nico only sang on three of this album’s tracks: False! It’s more like three leads and a cameo.
But Tom Wilson’s hopes and dreams of pop stardom aside, Verve appears to have had zero idea of how to promote the album (as if any record label would have?). Behold this advertisement:
“So far underground, you get the bends”? Hey, I’ve read Journey to the Center of the Earth, I don’t recall Jules Verne mentioning anything remotely of the sort. Plus, there was a peelable banana sticker on the front cover, which cost Verve extra money to assemble. Then a dancer whose image appeared on the back cover claimed that he never gave permission for his likeness and sued the record label, which forced them to pull the album from distribution just as it was making its feeble attempt to climb the charts, and … I mean, it just wasn’t meant to be.
And so, The Velvet Underground & Nico swiftly shriveled into obscurity, never to be heard from again.
Another note: I love the outright stubbornness of the album title. Here was the Velvet Underground’s debut album. At this point in time, both the Velvet Underground, the group, and Nico, the singer, were almost entirely unknown to the general listening public. Yes, Andy Warhol suggested adding Nico to the pre-existing band, but how many people purchasing the record would have seriously cared about the thoroughly annotated backstory? They should have just called the album The Velvet Underground, but nope. Lou Reed insisted people needed to understand that “Nico” was a separate artistic entity from “The Velvet Underground” and was not, in fact, an official member of the core band.
Got it.
A few last words on Unterberger’s book before I move on and actually write about the thing I’m supposed to be writing about. I think my favorite moments aren’t necessarily the sections that paint the band as “serious, iconoclastic artists” who were “far ahead of their time” but more as the sneaky kids in art class who were way too intelligent for school and thus survived by resorting to good old all-American, anti-authoritarian mischief.
Take this anecdote about Reed and Cale scrounging up some much-needed dollars, Joe and Ratso-style, by agreeing to let their images be used for seedy tabloids. Cale: “We saw an ad in the Village Voice saying ‘$5 for a pint’ and another which would be for National Enquirer, where we were paid $15 apiece with the signing of a release that stated we would not sue if our pictures were used to depict murderers, thieves, rapists, etc.” Reed: “[We] posed for these nickel or fifteen cent tabloids they have every week … my picture came out and it said I was a sex maniac killer that had killed 14 children and tape recorded it and played it in a barn in Kansas at midnight. And when John’s picture came out in the paper, it said he had killed his lover because his lover was going to marry his sister, and he didn’t want his sister to marry a fag.”
That’s my boys.
Or this snippet of Cale recording his free-form viola “compositions” in an apartment that happened to be located above the local fire department: “After about five minutes of tumultuous sound, one of the firemen from downstairs can be heard ordering Cale to cut it out. ‘I don’t want to hear this bullshit!’ he yells. ‘Knock it off! This is going on and on and on … If you’re gonna do something, do it far, far away, out in the country. I don’t wanna hear another peep!’ (The liner notes waggishly credit the New York Fire Department with a ‘vocal.’)”
Or this quote from a young Rhode Island School of Design student who happened to stand next to Reed in the restroom after a show: “I also recollect getting a music theory lesson from Professor Lewis Reed while we peed in the adjoining urinals … Something about manipulating the harmonics or overtones that result from high decibel music – it’s difficult to remember. That lecture continued outside the men’s room for some time. I just nodded in agreement, pretending that I understood the profundity and incisiveness of his commentary when, in reality, I didn’t understand one damned word.’”
At least, unlike a few other books on the market, the portrait I get of Lou Reed from White Light/White Heat is of a man who is not so much an “asshole” as a “smartass.” Mainly, like any great work of rock scholarship should do, Unterberger’s just makes me want to be in a band.
Though probably not this band.
*****
I think I got the order wrong. According to Brian Eno, I was supposed to be inspired to start a band after buying the album, not while reading some book about it in the safety of my own home decades later.
I got a lot of things wrong. Here’s how David Bowie responded after hearing an early bootleg copy: “… I was so excited I couldn’t move … I sat transfixed, unable to comprehend what I’d just heard … everything I both felt and didn’t know about rock music was opened to me on one unreleased disc.” Uh, after my first listen, I’m pretty sure that I was still able to sit, stand, turn my head, flex my arms, and otherwise move about.
Nor, for that matter, did I respond the way Iggy Pop did (as stated in Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk):
The first time I heard the Velvet Underground & Nico was at a party on the University of Michigan campus. I just hated the sound, you know, “HOW COULD ANYBODY MAKE A RECORD THAT SOUNDS LIKE SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT? THIS IS DISGUSTING! ALL THESE PEOPLE MAKE ME FUCKING SICK! FUCKING DISGUSTING HIPPIE VERMIN! FUCKING BEATNIKS, I WANNA KILL THEM ALL! THIS JUST SOUNDS LIKE TRASH!”
Then about six months later it hit me, “Oh my god! WOW! This is just a fucking great record!” That record became very key for me, not just for what it said, and for how great it was, but also because I heard other people who could make good music without being any good at music. It gave me hope.”
There you have it. People making good music without being any good at music. Let this album give hope to us all then.
No, the first time I heard The Velvet Underground & Nico was something of an anticlimax – and it’s all thanks to Alternative Boy.
You likely had one at your high school. His family life seemed fairly stable and supportive as far as I could gather, so I never quite pinpointed the source of Alternative Boy’s deep cultural disaffection, but he was one of those ‘90s kids who, following the “alternative rock” explosion, worked his way back to all those bands who had passed me by entirely: Husker Du, the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, the Pixies … you know the type.
One night in our junior year, during a lengthy phone conversation, he pledged to make me a mixtape of songs he felt that I, an intelligent young classic rock aficionado, might have never come across on the dial sandwiched between the Doobie Brothers and Supertramp, but that I might nevertheless appreciate. Thus, nestled among the Pixies’ “Cactus,” Husker Du’s “Turn on the News,” U2’s “Like a Song,” and Depeche Mode’s “Policy of Truth” were the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” and “Run Run Run.”
He tried to sell me on the concept before even giving me the tape. “So the Velvet Underground have this song where they, like, imitate the experience of a junkie doing heroin … with their instruments!” Cool … I guess?
I’d heard the band name before, but where? Ah, right, Lou Reed, “Walk on the Wild Side” – the only song by Lou Reed that I knew, but it certainly was a memorable one. “Walk on the Wild Side” was the kind of song by a 70s “one hit wonder” that somehow hinted at a larger catalog behind it. When hearing the Stampeders’ “Sweet City Woman” or Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line,” I figured I wasn’t missing out on much else, but when hearing “Walk on the Wild Side,” I figured, “Now this guy probably has a backstory.”
So, my first impression of “Heroin” and “Run Run Run”? Kind of enjoyable. Liked ‘em, didn’t love ‘em. One might describe my initial verdict as, “Hmm, interesting.” With all due respect to Brian Eno, hearing them didn’t make me immediately want to go out and form my own band. So “Heroin” was their attempt to sonically recreate a junkie’s high … aaand? Seemed kind of gimmicky to me. “Run Run Run” struck me as a quirky, rhythmically compelling slice of what was surely a massive pile of late ‘60s rock that had never made it onto the Billboard charts and was likely still worth exploring years later, but which certainly posed no threat of supplanting the artists from the era to whom I’d already pledged my allegiance (right around then, I was deep into my suburban ‘70s burnout/Pink Floyd/Elton John/Fleetwood Mac phase). I did not feel an immediate need to hear more of whatever the hell this was.
Fast-forward to the start of my senior year, when I’d finally burned out on all my suburban ‘70s burnout rock and was desperately in the mood for unfamiliar material of just about any kind, so Alternative Boy loaned me, among other CDs he had lying around, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded.
Being exposed to only “Heroin,” “Run Run Run,” and “Walk on the Wild Side” hadn’t quite given me the full picture of Lou Reed’s, ahem, vocal prowess, so my first reaction to Loaded was, “This guy can’t sing!” My second reaction was, “This just sounds like a slightly more poorly-performed and vaguely sleazier version of early ‘70s mainstream rock, so … why was this so influential again?” “Despite all the amputations/You know you could just dance to the rock and roll station?” This was the inspirational wordsmith of a generation?
See, in those days, when borrowing a CD from a friend or from the library, I often had a critical decision to make: to cassette copy, or not to cassette copy? That was the question. And with Loaded, I was right on the fence. Hmmmm. I gave it one last spin before pronouncing my verdict. “Oh! Sweet Nothin’” was kinda growing on me. “New Age” sported a nice outro. Some external force spoke and whispered, “Go ahead and tape it – fortune favors the bold.”
And that external force apparently knew what it was doing, because, in the months that followed, I kept coming back to Loaded, overlooking the off-key vocals and instead discovering tiny moments of subtle instrumental craft that continued to reveal themselves on repeat listens. For instance:
- The way the frenetic guitar solo in “Rock and Roll” transitions into the army of buzzing guitars that almost sound like saxophones, and yet the drumming remains in double-time for just that couple of extra beats, before switching back to the main groove, like a skateboarder who’s flown off a ramp and twisted in the air a second longer than his buddies expected him to, before somehow nailing the landing
- The way Doug Yule’s vocals at the tail end of the bridge to “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” coyly ping-pong against the backing vocals, before a communal “oooh” and honky-tonk piano bring the track right back around to its rollicking origin point
- The way how the climactic, cathartic, and yet oddly soothing instrumental jam over the tasty “Hey Jude”/”Sympathy for the Devil” chord progression that makes up the coda of “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” builds and builds and builds until it feels like Lou’s fingers are about to fall off, before unexpectedly sliding back into a nonchalant groove, Yule crooning “Ain’t got nothin’ at all” in a low octave, crooning it a second time a little higher, crooning it a third time a little higher, and then, the fourth time around, letting the backing vocals leapfrog him and croon it even higher than he does
Oh yeah. Bit by bit, piece by piece, each cut on Loaded was growing on me in its own seedy, degenerate way. Not only that, but some sources were telling me that this might have been, in fact, the Velvets’ least significant and least influential album? Well bring it on then. I turned to Alternative Boy and growled, in my surliest Brando voice, “So what else you got?”
“Uh, just this cassette compilation, Best of the Velvet Underground.”
“That’s it? A best of? What about The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light/White Heat … what kind of Velvet Underground fan are you?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna try to buy them all soon, but yeah.”
So, I took what I could get. For the record, the reason The Best of the Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed was given that rather cumbersome title was so that it could, according to Wikipedia, “capitalise on the new public awareness of Lou Reed, who had issued his critically acclaimed album New York earlier that year [1989].” Oy. Can you imagine the thought process here? “The ‘Velvet Underground’? Why would I want to buy this compilation from some crummy old band called the ‘Velvet Underground’? Wait, you mean all these songs were written by the same guy who did ‘Dirty Blvd.’ and ‘Busload of Faith’? Well why didn’t you say something?”
Anyway, for those keeping score, since The Best of featured six out of the debut’s eleven tracks, here is where I made my first acquaintance with “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” I could never quite anticipate how these loans from Alternative Boy were going to strike me; for instance, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation bounced off me like a ping pong ball against Dom DeLuise’s tummy. Well, although “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and its tambourine of death didn’t quite do it for me, I warmed to the other three cuts right off the bat. Catchy, hypnotic, intriguingly textured – there was a place for songs like these in my music collection, no? Not to mention some of the other material, like “I Can’t Stand It,” “Lisa Says,” and perhaps the hidden gem of them all, “What Goes On,” featuring arguably the finest two minute organ-and-rhythm guitar outro in the history of two minute organ-and-rhythm guitar outros. But just as I was planning on making my own cassette copy of the compilation, Alternative Boy hit me with a late-breaking bulletin: he was purchasing The Velvet Underground & Nico on CD outright. And naturally, I’d be first in line at the borrowing table.
OK, folks, here it was. And yet, as I wrenched the disc from its banana-emblazoned case, having already heard 54% of the album, I knew this wasn’t going to be terribly revelatory. Fate had denied me my David Bowie/Brian Eno moment. Nevertheless, I encountered two immediate revelations in “Sunday Morning” and “Venus in Furs.” What moron at the record label had left those two off The Best of? Who was in charge of this shit?
Well, now I had the whole picture, and my initial take was that it was a tale of two albums, because I loved the first seven songs, and wasn’t really into the last four songs. After “Heroin,” I didn’t need the rest. But loving the first seven songs was more than I would have expected to happen (and at least the band had been considerate enough to place those seven songs all in a row for me). Maybe not as consistent as Loaded, but … seeing it on all those “greatest albums” lists, I kind of understood. Hearing the full album in its proper sequencing was key (I don’t think “Femme Fatale” would feel quite as soothing and fragile without that ambiguous, mood-shifting silence and the opening squall of “Venus in Furs” behind it). Listening to the album felt like stepping into eleven different basements belonging to eleven different drug dealers, each basement sporting its own distinct décor, odor, and clientele.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d screwed up the narrative somehow. This shouldn’t have been the kind of album that 18-year-old, mainstream classic rock-loving me was supposed to enjoy without a little skepticism. What was supposed to happen was this: I was supposed to think, “Man, this is too extreme, they’re singing about drugs and weird sex and there’s all this screeching viola-playing and who in God’s name would actually like this crap?,” put the album on the shelf for a couple of years, maybe give it another chance on some dreary, rainy afternoon where I couldn’t find anything good on TV, then slowly revise my initial dismissal until I considered it the be-all and end-all of the rock and roll medium.
Whoops.
*****
I fear that rock historians have built up such a narrative regarding the myriad ways in which the Velvet Underground differed from the majority of their late ‘60s peers that they may have overlooked the ways in which, you know, the Velvet Underground were actually similar to their late ‘60s peers.
Iggy Pop’s eventual fondness for it aside (apparently it wasn’t love at first sight), does The Velvet Underground & Nico strike anyone as bearing much of a sonic resemblance to what ultimately came to be known as “punk”? I doubt the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, or the Clash, to name arguably the three most influential first-wave punk bands, spent very many afternoons sitting next to a record player and listening to the Velvet Underground, let alone consciously deciding to themselves, “Hey, let’s try to sound like the Velvet Underground.” (I think the Beach Boys, the Faces, and Mott the Hoople, respectively, were more their style.)
Sometimes it takes a greener pair of ears to pick up on a certain quality in a work. When I loaned this album to a dormmate in college, expecting him to march into my room after his first listen and gush about how “proto-punk” it was (since rock scholarship had groomed me to view it through such a lens), I was taken back when his response was, “Yeah, I really dig their whole mellow, folk-rock vibe.” Mellow folk rock? No, no, no. I considered snottily explaining to him that rock critics, raised from the womb on the canonical importance of the album as the sacred Rosetta Stone of punk and alternative rock, would have bristled at hearing The Velvet Underground & Nico being described as “folk-rock.” But I said nothing.
And yet …
Loud drums with crashing cymbals are a fairly important element of the punk musical style, most would probably say, but Mo Tucker’s drums, bless her heart, don’t strike me as a particularly prominent element in the mix of The Velvet Underground & Nico. I don’t even think she owned cymbals. Indeed, when that freshman year dormmate, with those unspoiled, untampered ears of his, heard this album and lumped it in with the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Mamas & the Papas, I think, in his own blissfully ignorant way, he might have been on to something.
Take “Venus In Furs,” a song that, on first listen, was supposed to send me out of the room clutching my ears in a histrionic fit, but instead became an immediate favorite, and remains one to this day. You know why? Because beneath the viola part that sounds like an elephant seal being intermittently poked in the butt by a thumbtack, “Venus In Furs” has always struck me as – gasp – a highly catchy, highly melodic ‘60s pop song. The track even boasts, dare I say it, a classic ‘60s pop bridge, which features … hold on just a minute, is that a key change? See, the Velvet Underground even knew about key changes. (Don’t be fooled by Lou’s legendarily provocative comment: “One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”)
What I’m saying is that all the other experiment shit wouldn’t have gained any traction if the songs beneath the waves of experiment shit weren’t strong, memorable pop compositions in the same way that every other late ‘60s band’s songs were strong, memorable pop compositions. To quote another ‘60s rock classic, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Or as guitarist Sterling Morrison said in retrospect regarding “Venus In Furs”: “The song is very seductive. That’s what I thought was our best and most destructive song, as far as the image was concerned. We would have been forgiven anything about the drugs, but the song that really scared people was ‘Venus in Furs’ – because they liked it!”
Am I going to get expelled if I state that the Velvet Underground, in general, made good old-fashioned pop music? Let’s use the “solo piano” test: Would these songs still sound good if someone played them unaccompanied on a piano or a guitar? “Femme Fatale”? “All Tomorrow’s Parties”? I’d listen to that. I can hum these tunes. Try humming Trout Mask Replica.
And the crazy thing is, they put the poppiest song first!
“Sunday Morning” is the ultimate fake-out move, the ultimate gesture of misdirection, like The Wizard of Oz opening in black and white on a dusty farm, or Willy Wonka limping out of the factory with a cane, giving the audience absolutely zero hint of the flying monkeys or oompa-loompas to come.
But perhaps the most hilarious twist is that … it turns out the Velvet Underground could do this kind of song really, really well. A celeste? What is this, “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy”? Let me guess, did Lou put on a tutu during the recording session and drape mistletoe around his neck? (Wouldn’t have put it past him). Cale also added an indistinctly-recorded viola in the background, which is so muffled and echoey that my ears tend to assume it’s a mellotron. As for Lou, he doesn’t quite hit the notes, but he doesn’t quite not hit them either. It’s like the old saying goes: “Close” only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and Lou Reed vocal performances.
Perhaps by design, “I’m Waiting for the Man” is conveniently devoid of any extraneous notes for Lou to barely manage to hit. And here’s a nice example of how Lou’s “water flowing downhill” approach to lyric writing, despite arguably not being a deliberate stylistic choice, might often work in his favor. He begins the last verse by slyly regurgitating early ‘60s dance record cliches, as if he were a laconic Jackie Wilson (“Baby don’t you holler, baby don’t you bawl and shout/I’m feeling good, you know I’m gonna work it on out”), only to subvert that genre’s superficial cheeriness with the next couplet: “I’m feeling good, I’m feeling oh so fine/Until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time.” Translation: the narrator is probably not feeling very good.
Nor is the poor protagonist at the center of the aforementioned “Venus In Furs,” although the casual listener might not pick up on the sense of suffocating dread buried quietly within the track based on the content of the verses alone, which seem to expertly depict the plotline of your run-of-the-mill Nicki Minaj or Cardi B music video:
Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather
Shiny leather in the dark
Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart
Poke me when it gets raunchy. But! With that deftly-employed key change in the bridge comes a deftly-employed narrative change, as the point of view unexpectedly shifts to the first person, and Lou drops what I might consider the most evocative, enigmatic lyrical snippet he ever penned:
I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears
Tears made of different colors I understand, but different colors made of tears? Dreams that would wake a person? Here is the kind of bleak, twisted, and yet oddly beautiful language that makes sense on an emotional level, not a literal one. And it’s the switch between the clinical, descriptive viewpoint of the verses and the haunted, abstract viewpoint of the bridge that I find eerily touching (in an unexpectedly non-kinky sort of way).
This essay would be remiss if I didn’t mention the most disturbing of Lou Reed’s vocal tics: the little reflexive “laugh” he emits in between breaths. I’m thinking of three in particular: 1) at the 3:18 mark in “Venus In Furs” (“Now bleeeeeed for meh-heh-heh”); 2) at the 4:45 mark in “Heroin” (“it’s my wife, and it’s my life, heh-heh”); 3) later in “Heroin” at the 6:21 mark (“When that heroin is in my blood, heh, and that blood is in my head”). You know the involuntary laugh of a psychopath? I mean, you may not know it personally, but … it probably sounds like that. It’s the laughter of a man who shouldn’t be laughing at the thing he is laughing at. David Byrne, take this torch and run with it.
(Speaking of David Byrne, another priceless anecdote: After catching one of Talking Heads’ shows when they were starting out at CBGB’s, Lou Reed gave David Byrne two quick [and presumably unsolicited] pieces of feedback that went something along these lines: 1) “It’s cool you have a chick in the band. Wonder where you got that idea?” 2) “You should only wear long sleeve shirts, not short sleeve shirts – because let’s face it, you’ve got really hairy arms.” Always handy with the advice, that Lou.)
All right, so not every song on the album could be categorized as being only a couple of steps removed from the Turtles or Tommy James. You know what a fun practical joke would be? To play “Heroin” for some gullible Gen-Z kid, witnessing, with patrician solemnity, as they absorb every chaotic twist and turn, and then tell them that the reason the song sounds like it does is because the band were forced to record it in the middle of a construction site. I’ll bet at least somebody would buy it.
Oh sure, it’s an agonizingly immersive auditory journey into the see-saw experience of the despondent addict, yadda yadda yadda, but it does kind of sound like Lou is attempting to cut his boldly confessional folk blues ballad to tape while the neighbors across the hallway are refurbishing their apartment, does it not? “Cause when the smack begins to flow …” and here comes John Cale with the power saw and, God damn, soldering this bolt into place really is a bitch. “I … wish that … I’d sail the darkened seas … on a great big clipper ship … hey Mo, do you have to hammer right at this very moment? Could you wait just a couple more minutes? I’m in the middle of a take here. No, a little hammering is fine, but you’re really going overboard with that thing.”
By the time the listener gets to “There She Goes Again,” it’s like, “Finally, a nice, normal little mid-tempo R&B song that doesn’t sound like it’s attempting to be an audio approximation of the electro-shock therapy to which Lou Reed was subjected in his teen years, what a relief!” And then, hold on a minute, did he just sing, “You better hit her”? So much for that break from despair and despondency. Although I’ve warmed to this one over the years, chord progression-wise it’s always struck me as kind of a poor man’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.”
Nor have I been terribly into (I presume) Sterling Morrison and John Cale’s attempts at high-pitched backing vocals on either “There She Goes Again” or “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (“Reflect what you ahhh-ahrr.”) “But,” you point out, “aren’t their backing vocals on ‘Femme Fatale’ completely flat as well?” Well yeah, but at least they’re not flat in that “falsetto” way. Doesn’t quite do it for me, but I’ll manage. Also, every time Nico sings “Please put down your hannnntz/Cause I see yoooooo,” I picture a babysitter playing peekaboo with a four-year-old.
What else? Ah, “Black Angel’s Death Song.” [switching into cutesy babysitter voice] How could I forget about you? It may be grating, abrasive, and atonal, but at least it’s short. Look, fine, I get it, they were “experimenting.” At least they threw it on towards the end of the album where it couldn’t harm anybody.
Besides, its usage as the band’s certified “room clearer” definitely serves as another source of mirth. In December 1965, according to Unterberger, the Velvets were growing sick of “playing six nights a week for five dollars each per night” to uncomprehending folkies at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village: “The final straw comes when, having already worked on Christmas Eve, the group are told to play on New Year’s Eve as well. They want out, whatever it takes. But this being The Velvet Underground, they’re going to get out of their New Year’s commitment in style.” Ooh, sign me up! Per Sterling Morrison: “Around December 30, after a set, the lady who owned the café came up and said that if we played ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’ one more time we were fired. So we led off the next set with it. A really good version, too.” (Unterberger goes the extra mile to point out that, in a separate interview, Morrison referred to it as “the all-time version.”) Guess I missed out on that one.
Lou Reed gave a slightly altered, if equally delightful, version of events: “We got fired that night anyway, because some sailors came in and we played … ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’ or something … These guys yelled at us, ‘You fucking play that again, we’ll beat the shit out of you!’ So of course we started right up and played it immediately and the chairs started flying and all this … I mean, an audience of four people, all of them trying to attack us. That’s where a guitar comes in handy. An electric one, solid-body.” I appreciate the clarification.
Last and possibly least, there’s “European Son,” perhaps a number one hit in the alternate universe in which David Cronenberg movies take place. On initial listen, I have to say, I was bopping my head to that first minute (and don’t tell me Yo La Tengo didn’t nick the bass line of that opening section for “Moby Octopad.”) The makings of another fine little dance number, but, alas, the band had different ideas. Like many before me, I found the six minute “outro” about as enjoyable to listen to as the sound of six blenders set to “puree” placed together in a room with five AM radios that all happened to be stuck between stations simultaneously blaring away. (Fun fact: according to White Light/White Heat, the noise at the 0:58 mark that sounds like the MGM lion stepping on a rusty nail was most likely created by John Cale pushing a chair into a stack of metal plates. When he referred to himself as a multi-instrumentalist, he wasn’t kidding around.)
Another fun fact: when I initially made a cassette copy of the album, given that the total running time (49 minutes) wouldn’t quite fit onto one side of a 90-minute cassette, I came up with one of my most ingenious home taping solutions yet: I simply edited a few minutes out of the middle of “European Son,” and PRESTO – problem solved, no one got hurt. (Apparently I managed to, and desired to, retain the track’s ending seconds).
Nowadays? I can’t say I would include “European Son” on a custom-made “Best of the Velvet Underground” mix, but … I don’t mind it so much. I remember, in high school, asking Alternative Boy if he genuinely liked listening to “European Son,” or if he just wanted to say he liked listening to it in order to come off as edgy and contrarian. His response: “You know, after the first couple of minutes, I just kind of zone out, and it sort of fades into the background. It’s not that I ‘like’ it or ‘dislike’ it, but it’s just kind of ‘on’ and it doesn’t really bother me.” I couldn’t make heads or tails of that answer at the time, but you want to know something funny? After having sat through endlessly noisy, droning, atonal tracks of this nature from the likes of Can, Suicide, Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3, Nirvana (“Endless Nameless”?), and the Flaming Lips, to cite but a few, I now listen to “European Son” the same way Alternative Boy did. It just kind of fades into the background until it’s over. If you think “European Son” is rough, Metal Machine Music would like a word.
Anyway. For 23 years now, I’ve been waiting for that moment when I listen to this album and say to myself what Iggy Pop apparently said to himself when he first put the needle to wax: “FUCKING DISGUSTING HIPPIE VERMIN! FUCKING BEATNIKS, I WANNA KILL THEM ALL! THIS JUST SOUNDS LIKE TRASH!” Somehow, I’m still waiting. Will that freshness, that vitality, ever fade? Will that banana ever peel?
My alternative-loving friend from college (“Son of Alternative Boy,” if you will), the one trying to ponder how famous the Velvets were in their day, and someone who cherishes this album with every fiber of his being, once tried to articulate to me why he cherished it so: “It’s like they found beauty where most other people would have only seen ugliness and degradation and squalor.”
Yes, art should be “beautiful.” But how often do I want to experience art that’s about “perfect” people who live in the “nice” part of town and wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near Lexington 125? Who says that’s beauty? I want my artists to show me the beauty that others might have missed.
And regarding Lou Reed’s whole “first draft is the best draft” lyric-writing style, you know what? Sometimes, even the most dexterous wordsmith can’t conjure up a line that expresses the uncertainty, humility, and vulnerability of the human experience as well as a simple line like this one does:
“And I guess I just don’t know/Oh, and I guess I just don’t know.”