White Light / White Heat (1968)

Of all the major Velvet Underground releases—The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light / White Heat, The Velvet Underground, 1969, Loaded, and VU—everyone has to have a least favorite. This one is mine—yes, and "Sister Ray" notwithstanding. It's not that I don't like the album in a general sort of way, their second ("sophomore effort," as we say) and the first after sidelining Andy Warhol and Nico. In fact, when I came back to White Light / White Heat recently I thought it was better than I remembered, even "The Gift," which has always been my primary article of evidence for not listening to the album more. That track lasts more than eight minutes, with John Cale reading a Lou Reed short story that is trying hard to be bizarre. If you want to stretch a point it might even be a kind of very dry marker for splatterpunk horror. Tensions between Cale and Reed were coming to a head generally during the recording of this album. I can hear it—or think I can—specifically in the production of "Lady Godiva's Operation," based on another Reed short story, this one apparently about trans surgery. Reed has a backing vocal where he comes in for a part of a line at a time, but he's mixed unusually high. It feels like a personality conflict, Reed asserting himself for the sake of his ego not the song. It adds an interesting tension, but it's also an uncomfortable tension. As for the 17-minute "Sister Ray" (or the "White Whale"), yeah sure, stone rock rave-up classic. The raw groove bludgeons. Distortion and fuzz dominate. Pounding monotony is a good thing in this case. Now Reed is mixed way down, as if the vocal can barely keep up, riding the current, under the assault of the band. Halfway in it is hypnotic like a factory machine. Heavy drug references and loopy sexual references abound. At 16:00 it's a horse race with the avant-garde rock equivalent of a photo finish. "Sister Ray" is much revered and perhaps deservedly so. But it has long verged on homework for me, and I've never fully connected with it. Thinking the length of it might be the appeal, I turned to the 38-minute version from the Quine Tapes box set, recorded in San Francisco. It's more slow-paced and methodical and in the style of the 1969 double-live (not surprising as both were drawn from some of the same shows in 1969). Moe Tucker hits and hits. The rhythm guitar strums and strums. Someone's noodling on a guitar. It goes through some changes, which sound at least semi-rehearsed. At one point, from about 8:30 to 15:00, it sounds a little like they're attempting to emulate "Dark Star." Where is Jerry Garcia when you need him? They were right there in San Francisco. The White Light / White Heat version altogether comes off better, much closer to the controlled chaos they appeared to be going for, the formal and conscious antithesis of West Coast side-long tracks like "Dark Star." Someone somewhere once observed that all of the Velvet Underground starts and ends with "Sister Ray," and anyone who claims to be a fan but is indifferent to "Sister Ray" is ... something judgmental. Guilty. But like I say, we all have to have a least favorite, even among the most loved sets of things. You probably already know exactly what you think of White Light / White Heat. But I will still say: Approach with caution.

Songs for Drella (1990)

This is a bit of a solemn project, a memorial album for Andy Warhol that Lou Reed and John Cale collaborated on after many years of estrangement, coming together in memory of their mentor and friend and blowing apart again almost immediately after. Perhaps because of lingering strains between them—or perhaps for some other reason entirely—the result is closer in feel to Double Fantasy than any kind of Velvets redux. Both artists are credited coequally for all 15 songs here but the styles veer about quite wildly, settling in two distinct places, one that sounds like John Cale and the other like Lou Reed. If the old Lennon & McCartney strategy for figuring out the real songwriter applies here, namely, who's got the lead vocal, then it's Reed by 10-5. But because it's not actually that simple (and isn't either with the Beatles), Songs for Drella also works as the Velvets redux everybody wanted. But that is more because the sense of Andy Warhol is so potent, taking off from the manifold images of him that Reed, Cale, and we as listeners carry around with us. They explore his biography, as in the opening "Smalltown," or in "Slip Away (A Warning)," which remembers the aftermath of his shooting. They play with his aesthetics and background milieu on "Trouble With Classicists" and "Images." Mostly they just heap love on him. You can feel it. This is a side of that whole scene that partly got lost in all the mess, but the degree of affection for Warhol that is on every song here, however melancholy, guilty, and defensive, is bracing. It's impossible to miss, the one thing I always take from it again. They liked Warhol. They resented him. They got exasperated by him. But more than anything they admired and loved him fiercely. They are humbled and proud to have been associated with him, and grateful. All that comes through the weird tensions and cross-currents that are nearly as palpable here. It's all good music, for all these reasons and more, but I think Reed has the advantage of Cale (which he evidently pressed with twice as many songs). This is the year after his mini-comeback New York, one of his better periods. He's all over his controlled noisy guitar squall thing here, and when he goes into his Coney Island Baby adorable pouty confessional style at the very end, in the song "Hello It's Me," he gets the last word and uses it to nearly steal the show. But I think the whole dang thing is just prime really, an interesting collaboration and a great album, testament, and set, tender and very moving at its best.

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.

26. Velvet Underground, "I'm Waiting for the Man" (1967)

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The banana album (formally, The Velvet Underground & Nico) was my first real exposure to the band, as before that I hadn't taken the opportunity to examine them closely and by then, honestly, it was already the early '80s, when I finally brought home a copy from the record store. One of those necessity purchases procrastinated, I guess—and I wish I had all those years back now so I could hear it that much more often. After the low-key and utterly pleasant overture of "Sunday Morning" this comes along to set the basic terms: a monotony of driving rhythm with pounding instruments stacked on top, packaged with a patented Story of Gritty Urban Reality™ (in this case scoring heroin out of Harlem). It's full of small wisdoms ("First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait") and sly humor ("Oh pardon me sir, it's furthest from my mind"), and it affords itself a good deal of untoward glee as it wallows in the various indignities and ultimate pleasures of the adventure it describes. But mostly it's fast and rocks righteous hard, functioning like a rave-up with a sour aftertaste, a gathering storm that can blow down houses, a pummeling beatdown you don't soon forget. For me, it always, always rewards turning up the volume, and for the first six months or so that I owned the album I rarely finished listening to this song not standing on my feet. It's one for waving your hands in the air like you just don't care and carrying on like a regular fool, and damn the neighbors pounding on the walls and ceiling.

52. John Cale, "Fear Is a Man's Best Friend" (1974)

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John Cale veered all over the place from Europeanized string chamber music to discordant avant-garde thought experiments to, his own term, dirtyass rock 'n' roll. He was never the main man in the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed saw to that early and often, but he brought something that was sorely missed in his absence, a natural chaos-maker with formal training that helped shape some of their best stuff. (They were also fine without him, as it turned out, just more wonders of that band.) I tend to go for the rock 'n' roll, so I like Fear and Slow Dazzle and the live Sabotage albums probably best. He peaked for me in the mid-/late '70s. Phil Manzanera is playing guitar on this one, and Eno ... is there. "Fear Is a Man's Best Friend" is the first song on the first side of Fear and lets you in on much of what's ahead: the piano miked tight and very bangy, the half-drunken Welsh-inflected stream of sing-along vocals, and the slow-build dynamics, starting with open spaces and Cale working out a simple melody. Then gradually it accrues sounds to its side like burrs until the whole thing is nigh unto a raging behemoth that feels just seconds from a messy explosion of some kind. I'm exaggerating—that description better fits the formidable eight-minute "Gun," which opens the second side of the album. But this is a nice warm-up—more palatable, even sweet, by comparison. Or something. Maybe it's the explicit anxiety. Might as well be right there with it, that's what John Cale seems to be saying. Feel that anxiety. Can you feel it?

Horses (1975)

As exalted as it is earthbound, and on so many levels, Patti Smith's great debut along with a performance I witnessed of her and her remarkable band early in 1976 ushered me into a whole new world of rock 'n' roll at a moment in my life when I needed it badly. This was a very important album for me. I want to point out just three examples of its profound dichotomies, which run through practically every little thing about it. First, the cover shot by her friend Robert Mapplethorpe is a simple enough black and white shot of the New Jersey native posed against a wall with a jacket slung over her shoulder, looking for all the world like some yobby thug stepping from the shadows of one London subculture of bleak horizons or another. Look more closely, however, and you will see that Mapplethorpe carefully set up the shot to create a play of light and shadow just behind her that gives her angel wings. On to the title, a simple common noun evocative of western movies and literature, young girls, agriculture, jousting, rodeos, and other homely matters mostly mundane in their times and places. Yet the horse, of course, is also a potent and deeply embedded symbol that cuts across European, Native American, Arabian, and Eastern cultures. Zimbio tells me that the horse symbolizes "success, freedom, travel, strength, power, nobility, wisdom and loyalty. It is also a symbol of life and death, grace and beauty." Smith harks to most of that one way or another in her remarkable 9:26 "Land" suite here, additionally working in an inscrutable scenario of teen rape, a cover of Cannibal & the Headhunters' 1965 hit "Land of 1,000 Dances" (covered also by Wilson Pickett, in 1966), and a cameo from the sea (which, remember, composes not just 71% of the earth's surface but 71% of our body's composition as well), resorting as needed to simply chanting, "Horses ... horses ... horses," to bring the thing up to full speed. Last, in this quickie survey of mine, the album opens with a cover of the old mid-'60s garage-rock chestnut, "Gloria." But this is not just any old cover of the song that launched one million teen dance parties, as Smith's opening figure—which does not appear in the Van Morrison original—makes abundantly clear: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." This G-L-O-R-I-A has much less to do with somebody in a beehive hairdo snapping gum and a lot more to do with "in excelsis Deo" and the affairs of a church. I'm still not sure which church that is, given the opening remarks, but there was a time when I was convinced it was the one true church, and I desperately wanted to join.

Fear (1974)

John Cale is nothing if not uneven—if you prefer, the more diplomatic way to put it might be "eclectic" or "restless." Certainly it was the most valuable quality that he brought to the Velvet Underground, and the element most sorely missed (by all but Lou Reed) after he was gone. Yet for all that it's when he sets himself to the mission of dirtyass rock 'n' roll that I tend to sit up and most appreciate him. For a fix of that there's Slow Dazzle, there's Sabotage/Live, but most of all there's this. Even when it grows most raw and raggedy, as on the harrowing "Gun," he does it with a riveting level of authority that I'm not sure he ever managed to achieve anywhere else, and that includes the Velvets. The title pretty much strikes the tone in terms of themes, but to me the main draw here is the way it's recorded, with Cale's vocals thundering forth as if it were Yahweh Himself getting biblical from the mountaintops, the pounding piano chords, the texture of Phil Manzanera's scratching guitar twang and abrasive chording, Eno doing his thing invisibly extracting indelible intonations via ... whatever he's doing (the credit is for "synthesizers, Eno," likely the same thing elsewhere characterized as "Enossifications"), and the way so many of the songs reduce themselves to rubble as if of their own destructive power. Lots of stars on hand too: Manzanera, Eno, Fred Smith, Richard Thompson, Judy Nylon. And it's hardly all exploding shards of sound either, even if it tends to live on that way in memory. "Buffalo Ballet," "Emily," and "You Know More Than I Know" are positively elegiac, while "The Man Who Couldn't Afford to Orgy" manages to carpetbag some sneaky pornography into the proceedings, all of which only means that the whole thing is actually quite nicely paced.

The Modern Lovers (1976)

"Pablo Picasso" In retrospect a spectacular confluence -- past and future sidemen and principals of the Velvet Underground, Cars, and Talking Heads, with Jonathan Richman more or less in the starring role. Recorded years before it was released, and with legend claiming Richman was such a fanatic for the Velvet Underground that he attended more of their shows than they did, one really is left wondering almost painfully what could have been. There's not much trace here of the spritely elf that Richman would become. Instead, there's this adenoidal guy who keeps knocking them out of the park: "Roadrunner," "Astral Plane," "Old World," "Pablo Picasso," "She Cracked," "Girl Friend," "Modern World." I'm not like some who kick about what came after, but I can sure see how it's like Lou Reed's solo career without the Velvet Underground. Something vital is missing -- and missed. Which is all by way of seeing this is absolutely essential.

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