Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (2 page)

It’s a contradiction so glaring it approaches paradox: a band that left its mark on rock music and musicians in a profound way, but whose music was purposefully snubbed by the major outlets. Industry inertia was nearly comprehensive: record stores, radio stations, the music press, promoters, the marketing personnel and bean counters of the record labels who controlled the crucial distribution networks. Put simply, these people could not deal with this music in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. Coupled with critical indifference and public hostility, it all spelled an absence of commercial reward for the struggling Velvets. Pick your cliché: They Couldn’t Catch a Break; They Couldn’t Get Arrested; If It Wasn’t for Bad Luck, They Wouldn’t Have No Luck at All. One thing is certain: few, if any, bands have ever left such an enduring legacy with less help from the industry they were part of. Bad timing, shitbum luck, mountainous egos—even facing such conditions, the band produced work so powerful that, acting over time through the musicians they had influenced, they eventually transformed a music industry that only began to understand and appreciate them when it was too late.

Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed once said “if you’re going to talk about greats, there is no one greater than Raymond Chandler. I mean, after reading Raymond Chandler and going on to someone else, it’s like eating caviar and then turning to some real inferior dish.” Lou had a simple plan: to “take the sensibility of Raymond Chandler or Hubert Shelby (sic) or Delmore Schwartz or Poe and put it to rock music.”
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And when he formed the Velvet Underground that was exactly what he did. Taking a cue from film noir and pulp fiction, Reed and company would pull back the curtain that separated pop music from the world beyond “moon and June” love songs, creating in the process a new music vérité—
a rock noir,
if you will.

As Raymond Chandler died in 1959, we’ll never know whether the man Reed called “the greatest” would have approved of having his “sensibility” applied to rock music—or if he’d have reciprocated the songwriter’s admiration. I strongly suspect, though, that Raymond and Lou would have been
muy simpatico.
Had he lived, the author of hard-boiled detective classics including
The Big Sleep
and
Farewell, My Lovely,
may well have seen something in Reed that resembled his own archetypal
detective character, as described in his article “The Simple Art of Murder”: “a modern knight … in search of a hidden truth … down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean … he must be the complete man, and a common man and yet an unusual man … he is a lonely man.” This last quality, Cale ascribes to Reed: “he has this thing in his persona about having to struggle alone, not as part of a group.”
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The other characteristics of Chandler’s modern knight aren’t traits typically ascribed to Reed, and the resemblance may not be so obvious as regards the Lou Reed who walked by day, who ate and drank and shat like everybody else and who seems to have pissed off almost everyone who ever got close to him. But it’s clearly discernible in the tough-but-compassionate, curious-yet-knowing voice of Lou Reed the songwriter.

Facing similar challenges, Reed and Chandler sought to mold the raw material of the lowlife, the perverse, the brutal and the beautiful into art. Neither would accept the creative status quo. Rather than conform, both would go on to redefine the style of their chosen field. They did so using a reporter’s eye for detail and nuance—a skill Reed gained by education, and Chandler on the job. From Chandler, and through the likes of
Selby and Schwartz, Reed acquired a fascination with the power of words and phrases; he studied their economic yet bold use of language, a technique he applied and quickly mastered in his lyrics. The result would be songs just as visually—even cinematically—evocative as the books written by Nelson Algren, Hubert Selby, Jr. and Raymond Chandler.

With so much in common despite the separation of decades, and the fact that they operated within immeasurably dissimilar social milieus, perhaps it should be no surprise that Chandler could forecast his admirer’s future with bitter accuracy when he said: “the average critic never recognizes an achievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.”
⁶
The critical reception—or lack thereof—that the Velvets faced was abysmal. The band’s superb interpretation of Reed’s songs accomplished the writer’s mission of bringing literary sensitivity to rock and roll—just as Chandler had successfully struggled to raise the bar in pulp fiction—yet the achievement would go unrecognized in its time, while years later critics would fall over themselves to dissect and discuss it.

Reflecting on the revolutionary album he co-produced in 1966, Norman Dolph found an analogy in the
world of art: “90% of all the pictures that are viewed today as just awesome, the first time they were seen the reaction was ‘this isn’t art!’ … Well, there were people who thought the VU were a waste of oxide on the back of a piece of recording tape.”
⁷

As I write this book, I can sometimes hear the television in the next room. A commercial for a show called
Walk on the Wild Side
catches my ear, and there’s little doubt that the title assumes audience recognition of the Lou Reed song, not the original Nelson Algren novel. Just the fact that reality shows have become so popular hearkens back to Lou Reed’s use of life’s pageant as source material for his work.

The miniscule tattoo I got in 1979 caused a family furor, with dark rumblings about bikers and convicts; when my niece recently acquired skin art that would impress most Yakuza and bring a smile to the lips of a Maori headhunter, nary a peep was uttered. American culture moves so fast it’s more a verb than a noun. It’s absorptive; like the ever-encroaching desert, this year’s fringe will be well within the arid borders of the main
body before too long. Today, the kind of lives deemed permissible for art to reflect upon seem more and more to resemble those that the Velvets explored in their songs. As
Rolling Stone’s
Robert Palmer states succinctly: “Activities that then belonged to a marginalized subculture are now mass-culture concerns.”
⁸
To which I might add, the ones who get there first have to take a boatload of shit for their trouble. Enter the VU.

Rock historians habitually reduce the Velvet Underground to an entity whose brilliance came from cooperation and competition between a pair of gifted pioneers: John Cale and Lou Reed. Enormous roles were played by these mavericks, but it’s a mistake to reduce the VU to the Reed-Cale Show. More than Cale’s avant-classicism versus Reed’s literary lyricism and passion for rock and roll, greater than the simple sum of five musicians playing the revolutionary Reed-penned songs they unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, the Velvets were a
band
in the truest sense.
The Velvet Underground and Nico
was the product of a critical balance between the disparate, often conflicting individuals who created it.

Holmes Sterling Morrison, Maureen “Moe” Tucker, Lou Reed, John Cale and Christa Paffgen (better known as Nico), together with producers Norman Dolph and Tom Wilson, engineers John Licata and Omi Haden—and a catalytic element in Andy Warhol—sparked an alchemy that was unique and stunningly effective. There were other great Velvets records made after the band’s personnel changed, but none offers the magical combination found in this—which many regard as their best record. Chemistry is by nature volatile: add the proper percentage of oxygen to hydrogen and the result is water—but change the ratio even fractionally and the mixture fails.

Lou Reed’s vision for the band was unquestionably successful—just as Nico’s purposeful balance between earthy and ethereal, Sterling’s need to play tear-’em-up rock, and Moe’s goal to provide a hypnotically undeniable pulse (surrounding chaos be damned!) were desires made manifest, materializing as songs that always rock, and rock steady. All of this, while John Cale’s visionary contributions assailed the boundaries confining rock’s instrumentation, his arrangements and textural palate so accomplished that afterward all maps had to be thrown out and all borders redrawn. The Velvets would never have a chance to refine the approach taken on this first album, as the departure of Nico and the band’s break with Warhol meant the absence of ingredients
critical to the formula. But the sounds they made on
The Velvet Underground and Nico
remain. Clear and cool at times, in some passages dark and murky; ebbing in certain places, then suddenly rushing forward as bubbling, boiling rapids in others, it always flows like water. Each and every amazing song.

Musically, the Velvets are the daddies of us all—and by “us” I mean anyone who has played in a rock band since 1977 or thereabouts, the year that Punk crested the hill and changed the music industry forever. Their albums were like alchemical tracts that held secret formulas, passed from one musician to the next, until “Punk Happened,” as the button says, completing the job that the Velvet Underground started. Long before his group Talking Heads carried the post-Punk torch into the 80s, Jerry Harrison was a member of the Modern Lovers. He recalled his induction into the Mysteries of the Underground:

“Jonathan (Richman) really got me into the Velvet Underground … and the Stooges,” Jerry remembers, “and with Jonathan, like with all new bands, much of our focus was on rejecting things, saying, ‘This is what we’re about and these are the only influences we allow and everything else is garbage.’ And a large part of what
Jonathan was about was rejecting anything that was blues-based.” Blotting out the blues, Jerry believes, made the Modern Lovers one of the principal progenitors of punk…
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Harrison is right; the Lovers laid the foundation for punk—but they did it using a blueprint supplied by the VU. They were hardly alone. The list of important artists who have been influenced by the Velvets in a fundamental and important way reads like a
Who’s Who
of rugged individualists, iconoclasts, scene-makers and standard bearers for the rock rebellion. That list includes, by admission or observation and besides the other groups discussed below: Tom Verlaine, Peter Ivers, R.E.M., the dBs, Alejandro Escovedo, the Pretenders, the Cars, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Pixies, Yo La Tengo, Galaxie 500, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Morphine, Luna and the Strokes. Then there’s also Roxy Music, U2, Mazzy Star, Joy Division/New Order—the list could go on. An entire German sub-scene including Neu, Can and Faust was spawned. Add to that the Czech Revolution, where Velvets’ lyrics were said to have been passed around the underground, and all of the other bands influenced by ex-Velvets, particularly Lou Reed and John Cale. These are some of the
reasons—besides the music itself—that people are still writing books about the VU.

Researching this book, I was surprised to find a 1989 interview in which I described for Bill Eichenberger of the
Columbus Dispatch
“the sound I want—kind of like if the Velvet Underground’s and Merle Haggard’s buses collided and the band members got mixed up. That’s the sound in my head!”
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I say I was surprised, because unlike some of the authors in this series, I’m not writing about a record that instantly and fundamentally changed my life, but one that I was affected by tangentially, sychronistically, coincidentally, from a hundred directions before I ever heard it. Why was I eating up valuable column inches in 1989 lauding a group that hadn’t been remotely close to one of my first musical loves? Then I remembered: it wasn’t long before that interview that I bought my first Velvets album. I’d heard the stuff, sure, even covered tunes in other folks’ bands over the years, but it wasn’t until I owned the 1986 post-mortem compilation
VU
that I really fell in love with the band,
mainly through the raw slab of Stax-meets-surf from another dimension called “I Can’t Stand It.”

I did not grow up a fan of the Velvet Underground. I belong to the generation that graduated high school around the time of America’s Bicentennial (my mother painted the entire house, red, white and blue; while painting bocce balls in the yard, she discovered I had accidentally beheaded our Lawn Madonna when the chain from my nunchaku broke). In East Boston all we knew about Lou Reed were his two hits: “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” The latter lived on the jukebox at Jean’s Coffee Shoppe, our local hamburger-cum-bookie joint. There, one after another of my shoe-shine dimes hovered at the edge of the Seeburg coin slot for a moment, before disappearing over the rim, sacrificial victims exchanged for the volcanic pleasure of hearing that intro with its super-cool bass slides (that’s Herbie Flowers, playing two bass parts—an acoustic and a Fender electric harmonizing a tenth above). Eating burgers in East Boston, watching brazenly crooked cops emptying bags of swag from their trunks to be stored in Jean’s kitchen, waiting for the colored girls to “go doo, doo-doo, doo-doo” again, Lou surfaced in my world for the first time on Jean’s Jukebox. (A brief aside: the other song I played a lot at Jean’s was “Lola,” which I now realize makes two chicks-with-dicks tunes on the same box; this unquestionably earns the place the title
of Epicenter of Transvestite Culture in East Boston … but I digress.)

By high school I had discovered the electric guitar, and my spare change was used less for juke fuel than for the subway fare to and from band rehearsal. Eno and Iggy popped up on my radar and turntable. The basement groups I was in covered “Queen Bitch” and Bowie’s version of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” but failed to notice that the former was dedicated to the Velvet Underground, while Lou Reed’s name—not Bowie’s—fell under the writing credit of the latter.

Transformer
was an album we played a lot, “we” being my best friend/first drummer Anthony Rauseo, my dangerously sexually advanced girlfriend Kathy, and a number of brilliant and insane gay high schoolers who constituted an alternate universe to my usual one in Eastie.
Transformer
was the record playing when Mick Abbott’s sixteenth-birthday costume party turned into an omnisexual orgy that was interrupted by a surprise visit from his dad, bringing pizza out to the garage (sur-PRISE!). The (costume) party line was that Bowie was generously helping out his less successful friend when he produced
Transformer.
Who knew that Bowie was simply repaying the enormous debt he owed to Reed, having stitched together the flamboyantly bisexual Ziggy character that made him famous almost entirely from the detached, decadent cloth he’d borrowed from
the Velvet Underground? Bowie praised the Velvets to anyone who’d listen (we didn’t), freely admitting his debt to them and resuscitating Reed’s flagging career, but by then it was too late for the Velvets.