The Velvet Underground
The NATN Pantheon
»
 |
The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
White Light/White Heat (1968)
The Velvet Underground (1969)
Loaded (1970)
Recommended
1969: Velvet Underground Live, Vol. 1 (1974)
1969: Velvet Underground Live, Vol. 2 (1974)
VU (1985)
Worth Hearing
Bootleg Series, Vol. 1: The Quine Tapes (2001)
Live At Max's Kansas City Deluxe Edition (2004)
Obsessives Only
Another View (1986)
Live MCMXCIII (1993)
Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition (1997)
Before mainstream rock had hardly even the chance to define itself, the Velvet Underground arrived to provide its dark mirror. Underground before such a thing even really existed, the Velvets were darker, noisier, and scarier than anything that had been heard before and indeed most of what's been heard since. Ignored in their home city and on the charts, the VU progressed with complete disregard for imagined constraints on subject matter, song length, and musical accessibility. In barely six years of alarmingly fevered activity, they blazed a road map for challenging, confrontational pop music that every band even the least bit cool since must either admit as an influence or be exposed forever as poseurs.
The marvelous thing about the band's recorded output is that the group the Velvets challenged most was themselves. No album could be seen as following on the coattails of the last one. No song could be heard as a rewrite of an earlier track. They were constantly moving forward, and due to this spirit of innovation even their failed experiments and rare misfires sound today like the building blocks of a legend. Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay the Velvets is all the pairs of later bands you can name that while both hugely influenced by the VU sound absolutely nothing like each other. R.E.M. and The Clean, say. Or Stereolab and the Feelies. Phish and Yo La Tengo. I could go on all day. The reason every rock band worth its salt has a Velvets cover or two in the repertoire is that for all the screeching strings and primitive guitar effects, Lou Reed just wrote great songs, a minor detail that too many of the VU disciples from their time to now somehow overlook.
The band came together in 1965 around two outsiders fully embracing all New York City had to offer: Long Islander Reed and Welsh émigré John Cale, an experimental musician who had served time in the group drone ensembles of composer LaMonte Young. While Reed was trying his hand as a commercial composer at the time, under Cale's influence he quickly developed a songwriting style that was the lyrical equivalent of Cale's signature viola howl, directly addressing the sex and drug-fueled insanity of the city's less civilized quarters. The group was completed by guitarist Sterling Morrison, a college acquaintance of Reed's, and drummer Maureen (Mo) Tucker. Artist Andy Warhol served as the band's early benefactor and produced their first album, which was called simply The Velvet Underground & Nico.
The "& Nico" indicated Warhol's major contribution to the band's development, a fifth member about whom Reed and Cale were at best conflicted. The German actress (although she couldn't act) and singer (although she couldn't sing) was so loathed by Reed that he only gave her three of the album's best songs to sing and continued to write and play (as did Cale) for her solo records. While undirected Nico warbling was a major feature of the band's live shows during the Warhol period, besides "Femme Fatale," "All Tomorrow's Parties," and "I'll Be Your Mirror," The Velvet Underground & Nico was completely Nico-free. Hampered somewhat by Warhol's incompetent producing, the first Velvet Underground album is the most dated of the four released during their lifetime. Nonetheless, Reed's great songwriting and the menacing, purposeful drive of the band's noisemaking make its classic status wholly deserved. Free of both Nico and Warhol's influence, 1968's White Light/White Heat is the most uncompromising picture of Cale and Reed's original vision for the band. While the first album tended to alternate its more difficult pieces with catchy numbers that drew unapologetically on Reed's Brill Building period, White Light's mere six tracks mix the pretty moments with the ugly all in the course of a single song. Building on the first album's "European Son," the scalding improvisations of "The Gift" and "I Heard Her Call My Name" raised the bar for would-be guitar torturers everywhere. The closing "Sister Ray," a 17-minute blur of a jam held barely together by Tucker's stalking backbeat, ranks among the all-time great recorded rock performances ever. If producer Tom Wilson (who allegedly walked out during the recording of "Sister Ray") had even less of an idea of what the Velvets were on about than did Warhol, at least he knew how to do his job, and White Light/White Heat also serves as the most experimental of the VU's releases, with sound effects, stereo separation games, ambitious overdubs, and cutting-edge guitar pedals applied on almost every song. Not everything works exactly as it's supposed to do, but it's all thrilling.
Before 1968 was out, so too was John Cale, who perhaps inevitably ran into the proverbial "creative differences" with Reed over the ultimate direction of the band in the wake of White Light/White Heat. Cale's replacement was bassist Doug Yule, much loathed by true-blue Velvets fans since he later tried to continue the band, absurdly, without Reed in the early 1970s. As a sideman, however, Yule was a competent player and a solid vocalist and his playing and singing helped moved the Velvets into the next phase of their ever-shifting career. Never really captured in the studio, the loose, electric sound of the band with Yule comes across with varying degrees of clarity on the oddly sequenced 1969 Live albums, which weren't released until Reed found solo success in the middle of the next decade. With a laid-back tempo and Yule anchoring a more conventional rhythm section, the band's focus moved to the interplay between Reed and Sterling Morrison's guitars, making this particular Velvets incarnation perhaps the most influential for generations of indie rockers to come.
The Velvets' 1969 studio album was even more of a departure. Hushed, almost churchlike at times, The Velvet Underground was a remarkable record that abandoned all of the trademark moves that had initially set the band apart. Reflective and at times explicitly spiritual, Reed wrote the most honest songs of his career for the project. Only "What Goes On" hinted at the groove of the band's live sound at the time, while "Pale Blue Eyes," "Some Kinda Love," and "Jesus" adorned Reed's simple melodies with the most minimalist backing imaginable. The album's repudiation of Cale's noise-rock influence is if anything a little too extreme, with the haunting word salad monstrosity "The Murder Mystery" coming too little, too late, but one of the secrets to the Velvet Underground's enduring appeal is the way no one of their albums sums up their full range of capabilities.
By 1970's Loaded, Reed was more or less checked out of the Velvet Underground, unable to deal with a label change and further personnel upheaval (sadly the pregnant Tucker did not participate in the album's sessions, replaced by Doug Yule's anonymously competent brother Billy). Reed was too strong of a songwriter for the album to be a creative flop, but his ability to turn out decent if unremarkable fare like "Who Loves The Sun" on autopilot has haunted his entire solo career. The enthusiasm in the performances on Loaded belied Reed's overall ennui; apparently if he was leaving the band he was at least going to leave it on a positive note. And leave indeed he did: by the time "Rock And Roll" and "Sweet Jane" finally gave the band some radio hits, Reed was hiding from the public eye at his parents' house on Long Island. Doug Yule continued to haul "the Velvet Underground" (without Tucker or Morrison) out on the road through the mid-'70s, even releasing an album (Squeeze), but the less said about that, the better.
Until quite recently, the history of Velvets re-releases was embarrassingly bad given the band's huge influence and the wealth of fine but uncollected material drifting around in the ether. The 1969 Live albums, which mysteriously repeat some tracks while completely omitting others and jump haphazardly from concert to concert, were only the beginning. Live At Max's Kansas City, recently reissued with an expanded track order, is the only existing document of the band at its very end, although it was recorded with a dirt cheap cassette player and sounds like it.
Between The Velvet Underground and Loaded, the band recorded almost an album's worth of material for MGM that didn't see the light of day until the '80s, spread across the hit-and-miss rarities releases VU and Another View. The first of these, despite horrible sequencing, is well worth getting for the rockers "I Can't Stand It," "Foggy Notion," and "Temptation Inside Your Heart." Another View proves that the barrel wasn't nearly as deep as the bootleggers would have you believe; past "We're Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together," it's spectacularly minor Lou Reed, let alone Velvet Underground material.
Thankfully (and in part inspired by the reunion of 1993, documented on the negligible Live MCMXCIII), in 1995 Polydor put an end to the insanity with the release of Peel Slowly And See, a magnificently assembled box set that includes all four of the albums, all of the material from VU, Another View, and Max's Kansas City that you need to hear, and a generous (though not strictly complete) helping of previously unreleased material. While the first disc, multiple-take demos of Cale and Reed working out early songs in 1965, has almost certainly never been listened to by anyone more than once, the later stuff is nifty indeed. There's "It's Alright (The Way That You Live)," later covered by Yo La Tengo, a superior live version of "Guess I'm Falling In Love," the formerly ultra-rare demo "Countess from Hong Kong," and on the second disc, more warbly Nico psychedelia that any reasonable person really needs to hear in their whole lives. What's more, The Velvet Underground is presented in Reed's preferred "closet mix," a gentler, more intimate take on the material that to my ears really suits the mood, although you could certainly find fans who would disagree. As a practical matter, you can walk into a store, come out with Peel Slowly and the two 1969 albums, and go from having no Velvets to practically all the Velvets you could ever possibly need.
Still ... if your thirst persists, there are more reissues. A double-disc revision of Loaded doesn't contain any huge surprises, although there are a lot of superior VU versions of songs that would later become the cornerstones of Lou Reed solo albums. Many, but not all of these appear on Peel Slowly And See. The "deluxe" edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico is even less essential, adding absolutely nothing to the canon unless you count separate mono and stereo mixes and several single edits (since so very many people experienced the Velvet Underground through singles back in 1967). What's more, it revives yet still more tedious Nico material. Slightly more rewarding is The Quine Tapes, which covers the same period as 1969 Live only with more emphasis on the hairy noise jams. The unprofessional sound quality is at least better than Max's Kansas City -- by a little -- but it's nice that it's there if you want to hear it.
It'd be impossible to write a decent history of the Velvet Underground's recording output without at least a brief mention of the many, many covers of the band's material. The spirit of reinterpretation and reinvention evident in the group's short career (compare the Velvet Underground & Nico version of "I'm Waiting For The Man" with the 1969 Live take, for example) practically invites covers, and Reed through the years has checked in with his endorsements for the very best ones. Reed's favorite is the Cowboy Junkies' deservedly famous treatment of "Sweet Jane," and indeed that's not a bad place to start. Any list should also include Big Star's delicate "Femme Fatale" (and what the hell, Pansy Division's campy take on the same song), Tori Amos's insightful "New Age," the Feelies' reverent "What Goes On," Alejandro Escovedo's heartbroke "Pale Blue Eyes," Cheap Trick's sleazy "I'm Waiting For The Man," Yo La Tengo's "It's Alright (The Way That You Live)" and "I'm Set Free" (and their performance "as" the Velvet Underground in the film I Shot Andy Warhol), RZA's "Fatal" (which samples "Venus in Furs" heavily) and Phish's live cover of the entire Loaded album. If the preceding list of bands hasn't sold you on the enduring influence and shadow of the Velvet Underground, well, then it's time to go seek out their records.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.