The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

This one of course is a very big deal for many people, and I suppose I am one, but still I think there's a wide range in the specificity of experience of these things, so here's mine. I actually do remember seeing copies with the peel-away banana skin, at parties I wandered into one way or another in the mid-'70s, which were invariably dark midnight affairs, with candles and gauzy curtains and such, and at least once I was crashing it cold, so didn't actually know anyone. I wasn't particularly familiar with the album for a long time. It was the first Velvet Underground album but it wasn't my first exposure to them—that was 1969. To be honest, this album scared me a little. I always thought the seven-minute "Heroin" laid it on a little thick, and still do, but "I'm Waiting for the Man" (the strange formality of the title proper, a phrase not used in the song), "Venus in Furs," and the closing noise affairs, "The Black Angel's Death Song" and "European Son," actually scared me quite badly, the way horror movies could, somehow instantly conjuring desperate nightmare feelings. The Nico vehicles, "Femme Fatale" and "I'll Be Your Mirror," appealed to me most, as exotic, surprisingly pretty, almost soothing by comparison, yet not without hints of their own brands of malevolence. I did not own a copy of this album until 1982 and then it was a matter of profound infatuation, every day, loud, standing up, jumping around, etc. I thought it was patchy, even the stuff that I liked was patchy by styles. There were often dead spaces listening to it straight through—though not always the same ones, they shifted around some. "All Tomorrow's Parties," for one, was practically a litmus test of my own mood, finding it alternately drony and boring or a place of great power I have been privileged to visit. "Run Run Run" another reason to dance more and dance harder or an impatient "what the fuck?" This made it a little different for me from other such Albums of Great Moment, Freewheeling, Revolver, Electric Ladyland, Sandinista, so on and so forth, which more often tended to be matters of all or nothing. But there's no question this is one of the greats and totally essential. With Andy Warhol pasted all across the surface of it, like the psychedelic light show playing across the band's glum figuratively black and white visages in one of the photos on the cover, it brings an absolutely unique assortment of voices and sensibilities to bear: Nico, Lou Reed, John Cale, Moe Tucker, Sterling Morrison. In its way, and all the careful urban grit notwithstanding, it's an affair of the most blissful harmonies imaginable, in terms of bringing together such a wild array of strands quite this colorfully, a moment unlike any they ever again achieved. Which, I know you can say that about practically each and every one of the Velvet Underground's albums, and that's one of the reasons they remain so interesting, amazing, and vital.