Velvet Underground

Brian Eno once famously said that almost nobody bought the Velvet Underground albums, but everybody who did formed a band. And it’s true, their reach into music far outweighs their own success as a band. Centered around the desire of founders Lou Reed and John Cale to fuse rock ‘n’ roll and the avant garde (an extremely radical notion at the time), Velvet Underground tanked in their own decade but went on to become an important influence on punk and new wave and alternative – virtually everything that followed them. Their shadow looms large and they are now viewed as not only one of the most important bands of the 60s, but one of the most influential bands of all time.

Too bad they suck so much.

Lou Reed loved rock ‘n’ roll, and worked briefly as a staff songwriter for Pickwick Records, but he also had a strong interest in avant garde music. John Cale came from the other direction, playing violin and viola for John Cage and LaMonte Young, but harboring a fascination with rock ’n’ roll which alienated him from his sniffily high-brow art music compatriots. The two camps couldn’t have been further apart or more hostile to each other, and trying to combine them was seen as commercial suicide. Which, at the time, it proved to be. Andy Warhol caught an early show and, immediately sensing their ability to shock, recruited them to perform with his gigantic multi-media performance art extravaganza The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and they became the sort of house band of Warhol’s notorious Factory, and he became their manager for a couple of years. He also designed the cover of their first eponymous album (there were two), which featured one of his generic mass-produced silkscreen images, this time of a banana. Small letters off to the side instructed “peel slowly and see” (which became the title of their career retrospective box set almost 30 years later). Rumor has it that the first hundred copies of the album had a flap on the banana which, when peeled back slowly, revealed a hit of LSD. Their association with Warhol insured them a certain notoriety, but their music was so difficult and harsh and aggressively uncommercial that it could never be played on the radio (at that time) and, consequently, public success always eluded them. Much of their output consisted of teeth-rattling walls of over-amplified noise with Reed talking his way through his scandalous lyrics about sex and drugs. Although this is the subtext of much rock ‘n’ roll (which was originally a slang for sex, after all), Reed brought them to the forefront in a way that no band had ever done before. He explored his own heroin addiction on songs like Waiting for the Man and the infamous Heroin, and the media, capitalizing on the band’s association with Warhol, were quick to label them dangerously degenerate, which upped their credibility in the urban underground, but never really translated outside of that. Eventually, tensions in the band escalated to the point that Cale was forced out by Reed – which is too bad because it was the creative tension between these two that made much of their music what it was. After four studio albums, the group dissolved, and Reed went on to a successful solo career and became the godfather of the downtown, underground music scene, an idol that many early punks worshipped.

However, with the exception of his later solo hit, Walk on the Wild Side, I can’t stand Lou Reed. He can’t sing but, to his credit, he never really tries. He just narrates his way through endless verses of urban degeneracy in a way that totally rubs me the wrong way. And while I have a high tolerance for certain types of noise, the grinding shriek of electric guitars isn’t one of my favorite flavors, and several of Velvet Underground’s tracks blow up well past the ten-minute mark in an unforgivable display of self-obsessed, solipsistic “artiness”. Maureen Tucker’s drumming is leaden and uninspired (though it’s nice to see a chick drummer – they’re quite rare) and the whole sodden affair just leaves me completely cold. Lou does get points, however, for making it to number two on the worst albums of all time list. A book with that title came out a few years ago, and I was leafing through it to see what made the grade. Lou’s assaultive, abrasive, unlistenably cacophonous double album Metal Machine Music rocketed to almost the very top of the list. Four sides of uninterrupted noise with no rhythm, no melody, no breaks, nothing but the sound of cement trucks running over squealing electric guitars on their way to crashing into cymbal factories while an earthquake rips through a machine shop. Layers upon layers of noise manipulated and tortured into an indistinguishable sludge, the album can not be listened to. Lou himself said that “anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am”. This extreme form of noise pornography might make some sense today, with bands like Sonic Youth and the Boredoms and Pou-Fou dipping their toes into an ocean of feedback, but back in 1975, there was no context for this sort of thing at all, and it’s hard to see it as little more than an extended fuck you. I must admit, after reading about it, I immediately went out and procured a copy and took it home and discovered, to nobody’s surprise, that I couldn’t listen to it at all. Guess that makes me smarter than Lou. The number one all-time worst album ever, according to this book, was something like Fun Onstage with Elvis, in which a small potatoes record company got the rights to release some on-stage patter from a very late Elvis Presley concert, but they weren’t allowed to release any of the actual music. Elvis was well into his bleary, drugged out, incoherent, shooting-at-the-television stage, and the record is supposed to be a painfully embarrassing collection of his ludicrous ramblings and incoherent nonsequitors, a disgrace to his legacy and an insult to his fans. Needless to say, I’d love to get a copy.

There is, however, another side to Velvet Underground. Lou Reed was, after all, a staff songwriter, and you don’t get that job just writing walls of impenetrable noise with lyrics about shooting up and fucking transsexuals in alleys. Every now and then, a sweet, well-crafted song shows up in the Velvet’s repertoire, although it is usually butchered by the ham-fisted band. Nevertheless, even I must admit that All Tomorrow’s Parties and Femme Fatale have their charms, especially if covered by actual musicians. And this song, released years after their break-up on a collection of outtakes called VU, is admittedly wonderful. The melody is sweetly simplistic and the arrangement and performance sounds like something out of a grade-school recital, complete with wrong notes and awkward rhythms, which just adds to its naïve charm. On top of that, in direct contradiction to the form, are the bizarre lyrics about holding up a stagecoach in the rain and hanging from a tree and “soldiers fighting with the Cong”. The amateur harmony singing adds to the charm, and the ending, with the band kicking in over the repeated refrain of “I’m sticking with you” is oddly touching. Too sentimental to be released on their actual albums, I suppose, I’m Sticking with You shows a little seen side of this iconicly cool band.