Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (24 page)

BOCKRIS:
“Was Sesnick in there strongly pushing this album?”

TUCKER:
“Oh, yeah. He was right up there in the gung ho area.”

BOCKRIS:
“It would seem that here was a product easy to push and you would think it would make some impact, but actually it seems like nothing happened when this record came out.”

TUCKER:
“Yeah, as far as I can remember, they just didn’t distribute it. I remember specifically we played in St. Louis long enough after the third album came out that it should have been in the stores, especially if we were going to play there. We had never played there before and expected thirty people to show up and we really packed the place. It was one of those open ballrooms and a couple of thousand people showed up. The guy who owned the club was ecstatic. He said, ‘Oh shit, I’ve never had a night like this bla bla,’ and the next day we went out poking around and we couldn’t find our record anywhere, and one guy who owned a record store, who had come backstage to talk to us, said, ‘Gee, you know, I can’t get your record. I called,’ and shit like that.”

BOCKRIS:
“That’s a horrible horrible story.”

TUCKER:
“I don’t understand it, I just don’t get it. And now Polydor’s releasing them like crazy.”

BOCKRIS:
“What sort of relations, if any, did you have with MGM?”

TUCKER:
“I didn’t bother with anyone there, of course. Steve used to go down there every day. He’d lay around and make phone calls from their phones.”

BOCKRIS:
“So Steve was really full-time pushing for you and going to the office, but he obviously wasn’t very successful.”

TUCKER:
“No, he wasn’t, and I don’t know the reason. I don’t know if it was like I said before, because his schemes were too grandiose, or if they just didn’t want to have anything to do with him.”

M.C. Kostek, writing in
What Goes On
(No. 1), remembers the first time he ever saw The Velvet Underground in March 1969. He was sixteen: “This next song’s called ‘Heroin’. The thin figure dressed in black on stage looks nervously around. ‘It’s not, uh, for or against it. It’s just about it.’ The two South Deerfield, Mass., cops at the side entrances are momentarily distracted from their evening’s boredom (the only relief provided by teen drunks and gate-sneakers). Now this weirdo with black leather jacket and sunglasses is talking to them about heroin.

“‘This song’s been banned in San Francisco. Hope you like it.’ That small guy in the shades and leather turned out to be Lou Reed, and he didn’t say much all night. Half of what he did say was about this or that song being banned (such as that one up there for
White Light/White Heat)
or maimed. The whole bizarre situation has been highlighted by some dumb local band opening with lame-o versions of ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ (V. Fudge style), and then these strange figures walked through the crowd to the stage, to unleash this … roar. So imagine you’re a kid, and you’re at your second concert ever, and you’re sitting in 1969 with whatever there is of the small farming town area hippie slick of kids. These people with nasty clothes get on stage and BANNNGGO! Such noise! This guy who sings funny is waving a guitar, another’s hunched over the keyboards unearthing some mighty odd sounds, another’s hunched over the bass, and the drummer, who looks like a woman, is playing with big mallets (the kind that kick the bass drum on regular kits), the better to bang her bass drum, turned on its side as a snare, with.”

“From the first screech, I’m transfixed. The songs, about waiting, love, call my name, all fly by in a vicious torrent. During the break, we dare each other to go chat with them. It’s tempting, but they’re too forbidding, and we try to relax.

“A few buzzheads dance near the front of the stage, but the rest of the few hundred hipsters sit immobile on the
floor, trying to deal with this howl. It gets late, and the ‘leader’ says they’re going to do this story-song. He kicks out this riff, and while things before were intense, they are now erupting, they slowly build, and begin to fly. The singer’s yelling something about ‘she’s sucking on my ding dong’, and they kick into a harder, faster wail. The singer’s hand is a blur, stroking and making this twelve-string shudder and scream, the bass player’s got another guitar and is ripping up on that, the organist is leaning, slapping the keys. And the drummer – not only has she stood all night, but she’s pounded steadily with those big mallets all the while, raising one up over her head for the big BAMP-BAMP-BAMP. Steady. I’m not quite sure how long this went on. It seemed a half-hour – but time, space, driver’s-ed meant nothing. I was gone. No drink or drugs, I was flattened by the raw power. It rocked but it was so twisted. Pete Townshend says rock’n’roll is when you stand up and forget where you are – okay, these strange people were playing the loudest crudest music I’d ever heard. They were making lots of ‘mistakes’, but they were obviously much more interested in getting up there and ripping it out. The roar increased, then built until I could hardly stand it.”

Which brings us to
1969 Velvet Underground Live
, considered by many to be among the very best live rock albums. For the next six months they were playing regularly every weekend, coming home during the week, or else touring the south, west, California, Oregon, Canada. They sometimes stayed on the road for weeks at a time.

When they weren’t on the road they were rehearsing and recording. They played small clubs, like the one owned by a rich kid who just asked bands he liked to play there called The End of Cole Avenue in Dallas where some of the tapes that make up the album were recorded, or the Matrix in San
Francisco from which other tapes are taken. They also made tapes at the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin, Texas, but these were lost when the club owner committed suicide. They were covering their expenses, paying the rent and making a little pocket money, but nobody in the band was getting anything like rich.

MORRISON:
“We never cared that much about touring. We did it once in a while by invitation, but we never solicited one. Why play Toledo, Ohio, where no one knows you and where people are not likely to be the least bit receptive? Deep down you do want to be accepted by the audience. I don’t care how much you steel yourself with drugs or whatever. The record companies were always bewildered by our attitude. They were dealing with something they’d never seen before – if you weren’t interested in making money there was no way they could even talk to you. The one big mistake we made was not playing Europe, where we might have found a more receptive audience. But actually the Texas audience sounded pretty enthusiastic.”

REED:
“Good evening. We’re The Velvet Underground. Glad you could all make it. This is our last night here, I’m glad to see that you all showed up. Um, do you people have a curfew or anything like that? Does it matter what time you go home tonight? I mean, do you have school tomorrow?”

AUDIENCE MEMBER:
“No!”

REED:
“Nobody here has school tomorrow?”

AUDIENCE MEMBER:
“Yeah!”

REED:
“Yeah, see. ’Cos we could do either one long set or we could do two sets, you know, whatever makes it easier for you.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER:
“One long one!”

REED:
“One long one? Okay. Okay, then this is going to go on for a while so we should get used to each other. Settle back. Pull up your cushions. Whatever else you have with you that makes life palatable in Texas …”

It is the consensus of opinion that these recordings reveal
the band at one of the peaks of their power. On a good night they were always ten times better live than in the studio.
1969 Velvet Underground Live
is also an especially important document for fans as it not only really captures them live on the road, but also delivers ‘Sweet Jane’ the way Reed originally composed it. He says the recording on this album was done the day he wrote the song. Morrison remembers it was originally written in Lou’s New York loft and later pulled out of his bag of tricks and worked up for the performance. According to Reed the “official” version on ‘Loaded’ was edited after he left the band in 1970. Ditto ‘New Age’. The record also contains never before or since released Velvet Underground productions like ‘Lisa Says’, ‘We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together’ and ‘Ocean’, which later appeared on Lou Reed solo albums. On top of that you get ‘Over You’, ‘Sweet Bonnie Brown’ and ‘It’s Just Too Much’, (which it is).

This double album lasts for 104-minutes 35-seconds and costs the same as a single album. After leaving the band, Lou Reed made a point of taking care of his audience. From 1972-1980 he toured the world constantly, playing a lot of Velvet Underground songs along with new compositions. As a result of his polarising the music the record companies found it in their interest to re-issue the Velvet Underground material.
1969 Velvet Underground Live
features Lou Reed on rhythm guitar.

REED:
“If God showed up tomorrow and said, Do you want to be President? No. Do you want to be in politics? No. Do you want to be a lawyer? No. What do you want? I want to be a rhythm guitar player.”

BOCKRIS:
“In ’69 you actually engineered the separation from MGM. Was it a complicated series of negotiations?”

SESNICK:
“They were ready to let us go if we wanted to,
because of our demands and lack of record sales, in that confusion that they had over their direction. At this point they brought in some fellow from California who had some choral group and was suddenly head of MGM. He’s Lieutenant Governor of California now – Mike Curb. We were about as far away from being able to discuss anything with him as east meets west, so the attorney I had was able to work it out with him amicably, and also with Ahmet. Negotiations with Ahmet were far more complicated. That’s where the time was being spent.”

BOCKRIS:
“It’s been written that there was a period when they didn’t have a label. Is that true?”

SESNICK:
“I think we went from MGM to Atlantic almost in a day. We were into the studio pretty quick.”

BOCKRIS:
“At this crucial time of change in your career, did you still feel Sesnick was doing the right thing for you?”

TUCKER:
“Sterling had been bitching about Sesnick for a while.”

BOCKRIS:
“On what basis?”

TUCKER:
“That he was not giving us money, not doing anything for us, and not telling us where the money’s going. Sterling would storm up to Sesnick’s apartment on East 62nd Street and demand to see the books.”

BOCKRIS:
“So was he one of those typical managers who was living high off the hog while the rest of you had no money at all?”

TUCKER:
“Not totally. I mean, he had a nice apartment, but no furniture.”

BOCKRIS:
“But the rest of you had no money so where was he getting his money from?”

TUCKER:
“That’s what we were trying to find out. And it got to the point to where every time I saw Sterling he’d be ranting and raving, ‘That son of a bitch bla bla.’ So, I said, ‘Sterl, let’s cut the shit and you and I both together go to Sesnick, or to the other two in the group, and say, ‘Come
on, what the hell’s going on? We really want to know, bla bla bla,’ but he would never do it.”

BOCKRIS:
“So at this point even you were beginning to feel a little uncertain about where Steve Sesnick was coming from?”

TUCKER:
“Yeah. I never felt that he wasn’t trying.”

BOCKRIS:
“But he wasn’t pulling it off successfully for you, so you had to wonder what was going on.”

TUCKER:
“Yeah, yeah. That started coming around there.”

BOCKRIS:
“Was there a time when Lou stopped singing ‘Heroin’?”

TUCKER:
“Late ’69. We didn’t just stop singing it, we just didn’t do it every time.”

BOCKRIS:
“At the end of ’69, you went through a period of being without a label. How was the group feeling?”

TUCKER:
“We were feeling possibly pretty low. I can remember being in Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Chicago and having like $2 a day to eat on. We weren’t feeling low, like oh we’re never going to make it, not ready to give up, by any means, but feeling like what the fuck is this? I guess what pissed me off most was, if we had released the albums and MGM had pushed them and played them on the radio and no one liked it, it would be one thing, but whenever we played live we always, always did real well – people swooning in the aisles and things – so I knew, shit, if the record was out there it would sell, and that’s what was discouraging to me – to be at the mercy of these people who just didn’t have any sense.”

BOCKRIS:
“Having put out three great records and had them all mistreated, what did you think was happening?”

TUCKER:
“I think my feeling was that they just didn’t realize what they had. We were not a group who would be written up in magazines every week and things like that, where you could say, ‘Look! Look!’ you had to come out and see us. And I guess they just never did. I remember once in LA two under-assistant west coast promo men from
MGM came out to meet us at the airport and they just went crazy, they loved us. They knew about us, of course, through the albums and the company and they were very polite and cordial and all, but shit they came to see us play that night, they really went crazy! These two, they were funny. Their plan was to go back to their office and start beating some sense into these people. I don’t know if they just didn’t have the power. I just can’t imagine how MGM could have been so stupid.”

MORRISON:
“Everybody’d been beaten. We’d all lost on every possible level. In ’65 and ’66, even in ’68, you could feel that something was about to happen. By now it’d happened … and the merchandisers had gotten rich. We were all shucked, hyped, screwed.”