Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (9 page)

Once signed to MGM, according to David Fricke, Tom Wilson booked the band into TTG Studios for two days, to re-do three songs: “Venus in Furs,” “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (John Cale alone adds “All Tomorrow’s Parties” to the list.)
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After hearing the combined tapes, Wilson decided the LP needed one more, strong, commercial tune, so he brought the group back to New York to cut the potential single, “Sunday Morning.”

Paul Morrissey’s
Please Kill Me
recollection of a two-night completion is contradicted by his own statement
in
Uptight
where he puts it at three or four nights. The New York sessions alone are put by Reed and Tucker at one day, by Cale at two, and Morrissey (in a third interview) remembers eight hours being paid for. Reed has said “the first album … was cut in three hours,” but when I asked Jonathan Richman he definitely remembered Lou Reed telling him the album was done in one 9 to 5 workday.
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It was an enigma inside of a puzzle wrapped suitably in black leather. I was grateful to have the chance to ask Norman Dolph, who booked the time, to clear up the confusion:

Licata arranged for us to get four days’ worth of time. The actual recording took place on the first two days, the third day was for listening back to what we had, and on the fourth we mixed. These were not full days by any means, these were business days or parts of them. I don’t believe we used 16 hours, total, and probably more like ten actually recording.

This jibes with Morrissey’s “eight hours paid for” in New York, and indicates that neither Reed nor Morrissey was counting the LA dates, or the following “Sunday Morning” session in New York.

In these days of multitracking, it’s rare for anything but jazz or classical music to be played live in the studio. Most rock sessions begin with a live ensemble performance, but then it’s common for vocals, guitars, keyboards and even bass—everything but drums—to be rerecorded, often one at a time, while the artist and the producer seek the ideal sound and performance. In other words, most pop/rock records made in the past 25 years are a live drum track combined with overdubbed vocals and instruments. No longer the norm, as they were up until the late 1950s, records made from live studio performances seem extremely impressive. Lou Reed has said the album was recorded live, and it has become a part of rock lore and legend that it’s a “live in the studio” LP. But is it?

Did the Velvets’ New York tunes benefit from over-dubs, and how many tracks were used to record them? The answer to the first question may be found on the box holding the album’s master mix tapes, reproduced as the CD cover of the
Peel Slowly and See
box set—a great visual idea, and fortuitous for aural detectives. The various notes and technical instructions written by the engineers and mastering technicians who worked with the tapes over the years includes the comment (on both LP sides): “Noise and Distortion—Too Many Overdubs.”

Les Paul’s invention of multitrack recording was a boon to musicians. It meant one track could be recorded, the tape rewound, and the first part played back while another part was added onto the same tape; the parts were in sync with one another, and to a listener they would sound identical to parts that had been played together simultaneously. The number of parts you could add in this manner depended on how many discreet divisions—known as “tracks”—the tape recorder could handle. Any addition of parts after the first pass (which usually involved the entire band playing together) is known as an “overdub.”

The previous method of overdubbing, known as “bouncing,” called for a part to be recorded on one machine, then, as it was played back, routed to a second machine together with a new part being played live. Unlike multitracking, each successive “bounce” (i.e. added part) adds background hiss which engineers refer to as “noise.” Too many parts stacked this way can also oversaturate the tape, causing distortion. This is one reason why engineers still hold George Martin in awe, considering the number of tracks he built up on
Sgt. Pepper’s
(at times twelve or more) while miraculously avoiding discernible noise, even though he was using this older, bouncing method.

Dolph recalls an Ampex 4-track being used in New York, but not using many overdubs or any bounces;
they “probably either put stuff down on three tracks and left one open … with drums on one, guitars on another, sort of smearing the stuff around on three tracks, and then the fourth track was used on occasion.” Nat Finkelstein’s photos in the booklet for
Peel Slowly and See
also clearly show a 4-track machine in the background at TTG Studios in LA.
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The relatively leisurely pace of those sessions—two days to record three songs—would have left ample time for adding extra parts, but Tom Wilson’s experience (plus that 4-track machine, which allowed noiseless overdubs) should have produced unsullied tracks. So where did the “noise” and “distortion” from excessive overdubbing come from? It implies the noisy sonic footprints not of multitracking (which could be done live), but of bounced tracks to achieve overdubs; so at least one song was bounced as well as multitracked somewhere. We may never know, but Reed’s claim of the album being cut live in three (or eight) hours is contradicted by the technical evidence. No big deal, and I’m not trying to make it out to be some shocking conspiracy—but it would seem that this is not quite a “live in the studio” album.

Other, less technical evidence contradicts a live recording. On several songs the same member appears at
least twice. Nico’s doubled vocal on the single version of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” shows the band had no aversion to overdubbing. And in Sterling Morrison’s story regarding Nico’s serial attempts at singing “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (see below), she is clearly overdubbing her part to the backing track. Norman Dolph recalls: “Overdubbing was minimal, though as you jog my memory I have an image of myself on one side of the glass, and on the other side of the glass is Nico, alone, cutting a vocal.”
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On “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” besides the double-tracked vocal, there’s a piano track and a bass track, and bass and celeste on “Sunday Morning,” and on other songs viola. Live, Sterling Morrison (like Cale) also doubled on bass, and he is credited for bass on the album, so he could be playing bass on those. Dolph believes they used the same line-up as they did live:

I think Sterling did play bass on occasion, at least once. I don’t know why that sticks in my mind. I remember the one that leads off on viola … “Venus in Furs” … my impression, as I close my eyes and remember… what I’m seeing through the glass, and hearing through the speakers, is the same thing that I’d heard the night before [at the Dom], that it was
all there. And Cale is playing viola, so someone else was playing bass in the studio at that point in time.

But how, other than overdubbing, can we explain John Cale’s ability to play both viola and organ on “Heroin”? On “I’m Waiting for The Man,” moreover, there are two guitars, bass and piano—so, either Lou, John or Sterling had to have taken a second pass at the tune.

When considering the caliber of either the album or the players, the fact that the band added a few overdubbed sweetening parts or dubbed vocals later really doesn’t matter. Their technique wasn’t as transparent as George Martin’s Abbey Road wizardry, true. But consider that Martin’s result was
Sgt. Pepper’s
—a record whose finished product owes more to production genius after the fact than to live performance. The Beatles played practically nothing on
Sgt. Pepper’s
as an ensemble, using probably the most technically advanced producer of their day, while the Velvets performed the majority of their record together in single passes while amateur producers Dolph and Warhol managed effectively to capture the unprecedented sounds being made. Spontaneity and a great performance are preferable to flawless recording technique—though it’s wonderful
when you can get both—and
The Velvet Underground and Nico
certainly holds up in those respects. Neither Reed nor anyone else needs to use exaggeration to highlight the brilliance of their achievement.

“Sunday Morning” may be the root of the family tree of songs like “Every Breath You Take” and “Satellite of Love,” whose pretty, lulling melodies mask their true thematic darkness. Sting and Lou Reed have admitted that their gently soothing aural textures mask the ugly expression of an emotion—obsessive jealousy—so powerful it evokes the desire for full-time surveillance of a lover. As for “Sunday Morning,” the music calls to mind a sleepy, quiet Sunday so perfectly that you can listen to the song repeatedly before registering what it’s really about: paranoia and displacement.

The song came together not long after dawn, as Cale and Reed sat before the piano in a friend’s apartment. Actually written on a Sunday morning, the tune took form around 6 a.m., following a Manhattan all-niter. But that relaxed atmosphere doesn’t change the fact that “Sunday Morning” was written to order: the band needed the song in order to complete
The Velvet Underground and Nico.
Producer Tom Wilson had decided after listening to the tapes from the first two sessions that the album lacked a strong potential single. Wilson asked Reed to write one specifically for Nico’s voice, which he found more marketable than Lou’s. In this he was not alone: it was Paul Morrissey’s misgivings about Lou Reed’s ability to front a band that had led to Nico joining the group. It’s amusing that today, right off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen prominent singers who clearly drew their style from Reed’s, but none that seem as heavily influenced by Nico. Be that as it may, Reed agreed to provide a Nico-sung song suitable for release as a single, and a session was booked to cut it.

When Andy Warhol heard an early version of the song, he suggested Reed make it a song about paranoia, at which time Reed added the “Watch out, the world’s behind you” section. Reed has called this sense that someone is always watching you “the ultimate paranoid
statement in that the world even cares enough to watch you.”
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Reed, true to his Machiavellian stealth, waited until the band arrived at the recording studio before announcing that he, not Nico, was going to sing the new song. He was adamant, explaining, “I wanna sing it cause it’s gonna be the single.” Management, as represented by Paul Morrissey, was not happy: “I had a fight with him. I’d say ‘But Nico sings it onstage,’ and he’d reply, ‘Well, it’s my song,’ like it was his family. He was so petty … the little creep … Tom Wilson couldn’t deal with Lou, he just took what came. Victor Bockris adds, “Lou then proceeded to sing the song in a voice so full of womanly qualities that on first hearing it you paused, wondering just who the hell
was
singing.”
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Enhancing the vocal performance is the song’s gently lulling cadence, the lullaby-like tone and the tinkle of the celeste. A miniature xylophone often used by marching bands happened to be in the studio. The soothing bell timbre fit the song so perfectly you might think it was fundamental to the song’s original conception: but Cale, ever the musical innovator, added the
instrument to the recording on the spur of the moment after noticing it leaning in a corner.

Written around the same time as “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for The Man” is a masterpiece of reportorial skill. The composition was finished by 1965, at the peak of Reed’s experimentation with opiates (before he had turned in earnest to a decade-plus of hard-core amphetamine use). This one was written from the trenches. Reed is at the height of his powers, still unfettered by the self-conscious decision he admits to making after the first album to “give it a little push that way, a little street theater.” You get a sense that he isn’t trying to shock
per se,
but to present as accurate a picture of events as possible—whether it’s shocking or not. The events in question being a trip “Up to Lexington, 1—2—5”, or the corner of Lexington Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem, in the days when most heroin remained beyond the skin-color border uptown.

“I’m Waiting for The Man” was one Velvets song that underwent drastic changes between the time Reed brought it in to the band and the version recorded for the first album. The Ludlow version, “I’m Waiting for My Man,” may share lyrics and a general arrangement with the final “I’m Waiting for The Man,” but it plays
like a different song altogether. David Fricke describes it as “a rough chunk of city-fried country blues—the combination of Reed’s acidic vocal delivery and the guitars’ bluesy locomotion suggests Hank Williams looking for a score up at 125th and Lexington—until, on one of the later takes, Cale explodes into a squealing burst of viola that sounds like a subway train hitting the emergency brakes.”
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That viola squeal is about the only clue to the relentless piston-like drive that characterizes the final treatment of the song.

Reed, like most of his generation who owned a guitar, had been intrigued by Bob Dylan while in college. Another Ludlow number, “Prominent Men,” which never made the cut for the Velvets’ set list, features a style and performance so Dylanesque it could convincingly pass as one of Bob’s outtakes. The Ludlow performance of “I’m Waiting for The Man” is steeped not so much in Dylan’s influence as in Dylan’s influences: Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, maybe a bit of Leadbelly. There’s even an acoustic bottleneck slide guitar part, giving this rendition a down-home vibe that would almost sound at home on
Sticky Fingers
or
Exile on Main Street,
or perhaps a J.J. Cale album. There’s also a flavor
of rolling honky-tonk to the chord changes that evokes John Sebastian or Jonathan Edwards incongruously in search of a fix: “Slouch Around the Shanty, Momma, and Get a Good Nod On.”