The Velvet Underground (2021)

This documentary on the legendary ‘60s rock band—source of Brian Eno’s jokey observation in 1982 that everyone who bought their poorly selling first album started a band—is refreshingly restrained and judicious, basically giving everyone from Andy Warhol to Doug Yule their fair share of the spotlight. It starts with John Cale and Lou Reed, as it must. Reed gets all the credit he deserves, though perhaps not as much as he asserted. Director Todd Haynes traces the Velvet Underground’s most profound roots to the New York world of art and avant-garde music, placing emigrant Welshman Cale in the welter that followed John Cage and La Monte Young. Reed, for his part, was an undergraduate at Syracuse studying under poet Delmore Schwartz. A brief snippet of a Schwartz reading is all we need to hear that influence. Reed and his doo-wop love then went on to house songwriting for Pickwick Records, exploiting the confusion of kids shopping for albums at Woolworth’s (anyone interested in my copy of The Mustang Plays the Beatles Song Book?). Later he would become a student of 2 guitars bass drums. Perhaps most sorely needed in this story, Warhol is given his due as the force behind making that first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (also called the “banana album” for its famously peelable cover). Warhol sewed up the art bona fides and the aesthetic working ethos. He delivered the vision. He never stood near a soundboard, let alone twiddled a knob, but his producer credit was entirely warranted. Reed and Cale say so too. There’s a good argument, expressed here as well as I’ve seen it anywhere, that Warhol is almost solely responsible for producing the Velvet Underground.

There’s a lot of backstory to The Velvet Underground and it takes some time to get to the music proper, but when it does the picture is as generous as anyone could hope. I’ve always thought “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” are more like overrated novelties, but they have their time and place and they may be best appreciated here. “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” certainly appear to be Haynes’s favorites. But most of mine are in here too, such as “Sweet Jane” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” Further principals, from Moe Tucker to Sterling Morrison to Nico, are brought in to the documentary essentially as they were brought in to the band. The banana album gets the most attention, but the entire catalog is featured, including the “lost album” set (now the VU album). The only exception is the very last album, when Reed was gone and Yule was trying to bear the standard ... true confession, I’ve still never heard it. The band’s ever-shifting chemistry was amazing, and it was also amazingly unsuited to its commercial times, which is cringingly obvious on their ill-fated tour of the West Coast with the multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable extravaganza. West Coast pop aesthetics are unfairly derided here—too much hapless hippie hatred for me, but point taken. The Velvet Underground in many ways left them all eating their dust in the long haul. “Sunday Morning” is as good as anything by the Left Banke or the Mamas & the Papas, for example. This documentary is a good way in for novices (born every day, you know) and it’s a very apt summation for fans, particularly those who resent Reed’s hogging of the show for many decades. He was only part of something very big—an important part, but only part. In a very welcome way, this has made me rethink Warhol’s contribution, which I underestimated. It’s massive. All of it, the entire arc, is massive.

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.

Nico, 1988 (2017)

Nico, 1988 suffers from the usual limitations of biopics—a certain inevitable self-satisfaction, and if you know anything about the subject you already know where it's all headed. But credit where due: director and screenwriter Susanna Nicchiarelli has stitched together a lot of effective elements, focusing on the end of the line for Nico (born Christa Paffgen), who died in 1988. Trine Dyrholm delivers a convincing and affecting Nico, there's some nice support from John Gordon Sinclair (Gregory in Gregory's Girl) and Karina Fernandez (Happy-Go-Lucky, Another Year), and the band—an Italian post-rock outfit called Gatto Ciliegia contro il Grande Freddo—is much better than the treatment Nico is shown giving them. Indeed, it is perhaps better than the actual thing, in the way biopics exaggerate and heighten for effect. I seem to know a lot of people who saw Nico on her endless tour in the '80s and the reports are never good, telling tales of a disgruntled middle-aged heroin addict making music with strange uneven powers who couldn't accept that her moment came and went when she played a tambourine and sang with the Velvet Underground (there's a great moment here when someone seems to have her confused with Marianne Faithfull or Anita Pallenberg).  My turn was at Duffy's in Minneapolis in something like 1982. She was pumping at a harmonium on her own while people catcalled for songs they had to know she couldn't do, like "Heroin." That show did not last long, cut off when she left the stage abruptly, angry about something. I think we got five songs. In this movie, the shows are short too. But the high point of the picture is one of them, a mysterious show in Prague in 1986. It's cut short by the appearance of Soviet Czechoslovakian police to hassle the promoter. Nico and at least one other member of the band are suffering withdrawal symptoms because they could not bring heroin across the border and haven't been able to find any there. Nico takes to the stage shaky and coated in a thin film of sweat. They play one song, "My Heart Is Empty," before they have to flee the hall altogether. It is an amazing, roaring performance—I wish I could look at it over and over again tonight. (It has not yet made it to YouTube, but there's a snippet.) Otherwise, Nico, 1988 explores Nico's experience in Berlin as a girl at the end of World War II for general purposes of psychological motivation, and does a bit of dancing around with her white supremacist ways, though not enough. There's also some stuff about her son and her death in 1988, at 49. I wish there had been more of that band.

VU (1985)

This was a pleasant surprise—emphasis on "surprise." I didn't know anyone who expected it or anything like it: an iconic band, whose reputation was even then still on the rise, releasing an album of material from their prime, which no one particularly knew existed. That's one reason I pasted the 1985 release date on it, rather than the more accurate 1969 recording date. I just reflexively think of it as an album of the mid-'80s, not because it sounds like one—no, in fact one of its greatest pleasures was how much it sounded just like the Velvet Underground of the '60s. But it became such an infatuation, and that coincided so neatly with my own burgeoning obsessions with the band, and I played it so much and listened to it so intensely, that now it reminds me of times in my life from 1985 and 1986. Having done a bit of revisiting of the Velvets catalog in recent weeks I can even hear now like I never have before how plainly this is a notch off of all the pillar albums. But the sound quality is so good, and the songs so fresh even if we'd already heard other versions elsewhere (six of this 10 found their way onto Lou Reed solo albums), that the excitement itself must have made up for any deficiencies objective or otherwise. The story is that internal corporate shenanigans related to the labels the band was signed with effectively put this stuff on a shelf and from there it just got lost in the shuffle. It's probably most accurate to characterize it as a rough draft for a follow-up to The Velvet Underground—a lost album, if you will, which should have bridged that eponymous third and Loaded, a complicated story of business and judgment that ultimately involves some three labels altogether (Verve, MGM, and Atlantic). Two of the 10 songs on VU go back to the John Cale days, "Temptation Inside Your Heart" and "Stephanie Says," but there's no John Cale in sight. This is the post-Cale Velvet Underground. And it is in fine form: spry, quick, melodic, mostly stripped down pretty close to the 2 guitars bass drums types of fundamentals that Reed would come to favor. "I'm Sticking With You," like "After Hours," is another showcase for Moe Tucker. There's no particular studio sheen on anything here (with the possible exception of the effects on "Ocean") but it sounds remarkably polished, which I think is at least as much about the songwriting as it is about the fact that it had become a band that at least sounded remarkably comfortable playing with one another. The only false point for me is the version of "Andy's Chest," and that's only because I know Transformer so well and to me it is a Transformer song and certainly not a Velvet Underground one. But that's a very small quibble. If it's not the best Velvet Underground album by a good ways, it still remains the one whose release most thrilled me. Taking the shrink wrap off this and putting it on for the first time is a moment I can still recall for the sheer dumb stupefaction of it.

The Velvet Underground (1969)

I knew most of the songs on this album one way or another but wasn't on intimate terms with the album itself until the '80s. I liked it quite a bit and have found it's one that repays going back to regularly—"the quiet one," I came to think of it, among the core of their releases (compared to "the first one," "the loud one," "the live one," "the best one," and finally, way down the line, those last two orphans). With John Cale out of the picture, Lou Reed may have felt some need to burnish the avant-garde experimental credentials with the longest song here, the talky cerebral "The Murder Mystery," which has never done much for me, except occasionally excite some degree of respect but more often impatience. But the rest is a knockout, a lot of real beauties mixed with performance standards. "What Goes On," "Beginning to See the Light," and "I'm Set Free" are probably closer to the latter, pointing the way to the kind of grooves they laid down with such reliably gentle yet firm authority in their live shows (for the evidence, start with 1969 and continue with The Quine Tapes). Because I knew 1969 before anything else, those versions are still the ones I prefer. They are, as one would expect, a little looser, more freewheeling, stretched out and taken places. They sound fine here in their "studio versions," if slightly prim and airless, but my favorites on this one are all the folkie confessional ... I'm not even sure what to call them. They're quiet like ballads, but with hard clarion edges, such as "Some Kinda Love" and "Pale Blue Eyes" (my #1 favorite Velvets song without hesitation for a time). This is kind of Lou Reed's Leonard Cohen album, and you can feel him straining for the studied literary affect in the lyrics, which actually stand up to the scrutiny if one is moved to examine them closely. They work as poems on the printed page, more or less. But they are more than that, and that is seen perhaps nowhere more clearly than in "After Hours" and especially "Jesus," which really stake out their territory and occupy it. I mean, the year is 1969, and no one is going to mistake anyone in this band for Jesus freaks or any kind of innocents even then. Yet the song "Jesus" is played so achingly straight, with such a perfect absence of irony, pulling hard against the peculiarity of the circumstances of this band doing that song. And it works to that extent, sounding almost like a cover of some old-time gospel standard. But it's a Lou Reed song too. The color scheme for the cover drips with inky black but this album may well operate like the proverbial pinprick of light within the universal blackness. For the most part I think The Velvet Underground makes a reasonably straightforward case for peace and goodness. It is at any rate another excellent way in to this great band.

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.

Loaded (1970)

I knew this was a great album when I finally flipped it over, and yeah, I know I am dating myself with that. The first side is front-loaded with an impressive array of post-John Cale highlights, "Sweet Jane," "Rock and Roll," and "New Age," by name. If you don't know them you should, probably in about that order, not to great preachy or judgmental. They are alone worth price of admission, for sure. But what's on the back has more sides of Lou Reed the tender, fresh and surprising every time they show (he always did appear to know how good that side of his shtick is as two other such, "Who Loves the Sun" here and "Sunday Morning" from the banana album, were designated to open two of rawk's stone great albums). For a time I think I might even have been at least as infatuated with the back of this album as with its front (and that is and remains "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" notwithstanding, though I admit it grows on me). "Head Held High" is about the usual squall (bearing in mind that generally speaking everything here is at least slightly above average), but "Lonesome Cowboy Bill," "I Found a Reason," and "Train Round the Bend" seem to me unique little chapters in all of Lou Reed's catalog, and utterly worthy. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" makes like a kiddy song, with the sing-along invitation of the melody and then cowboys too, as advertised. Riding horses and everything, in rodeos, no less. It's a goof from nowhere and plain charming. "I Found a Reason," by contrast, is serious about its romance and other things eternal, built on more kiddy-style vocal harmonies and tunes. It gives itself away all heartfelt and adolescent on the speech from Lou: "Honey, I found a reason to keep living. And you know the reason, dear, it's you." How Lou Reed was getting away with such adolescent maunderings as a 27-year-old is another question, but lay that to the side. He was, and would for awhile longer. And it doesn't matter: once he's done talking the singing on "I Found a Reason" really starts, and if you know what's good for you you're singing right along. At the top of your lungs if you can manage it. It is really quite a remarkable moment, and it sneaks up on you too. Then "Train Coming Round the Bend" starts grinding its insinuating way in, with the kind of groove that either Creedence Clearwater Revival or T. Rex could drift into as well. And out on the 7:24 of cooing and sighing that is "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" (great title, that one) to polish off the lovely suite and a great side too. That is one of the benefits of liking the first side so much. It leads to additional exposure to the second side and other good things.

7. Velvet Underground, "Sweet Jane" (1970)

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It's practically impossible by definition to pick a favorite Velvet Underground album but if forced I'm going with Loaded. There's a warmth and an unaffected and generous adolescence to it, looking forward to Mott-style glam, that never fails to catch me up. It's an odd affect, particularly coming at the tail end of their ride. It hardly hurts that it piles on upfront with one of the great rock anthems in "Sweet Jane," an allusive tale, supported by a nearly perfect array of acoustic guitar chords, about kids moving to the city and living their lives. In the right moment it is the thrill of a lifetime. I've talked before about how a person may aspire to master the phrasing of certain signature songs, enabling a kind of process of transubstantiation in order to actually become those beloved singers and songwriters (Buddy Holly and Prince), at least for the duration of the songs and one's ability to sing with them perfectly. I have long held strong suspicions that the same holds for Lou Reed and this one, but I have never managed (yet) to entirely duplicate the various asides and chortles and feints and dodges of his deceptive singing in the verses, not for lack of trying. It's a pleasure every time to hear, particularly when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, folksinger Lou Reed style. As loud as you can now: "And there's even some evil mothers / Well, they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt / Y'know, that women never really faint / And that villains always blink their eyes / And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush / And that life is just to die." P.S. Never mind the later metal versions of this, as on Rock n Roll Animal. I insist it's the Loaded version you want.

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.

Velvet Underground Live (1969)

"What Goes On" Every time the Velvet Underground released an album they seemed to reinvent themselves and present an entirely new face. Some of this was surely due to personnel changes, but I don't think it was particularly evidence of an identity crisis. They stayed busy reinvigorating the music to its roots. They wrote the songs. They looked into various abysses. They played it arty, loud, and soft. They played it with the movies playing on them. With this, they removed any doubt about their legacy as a live act (only reinforced decades later with the release of the Quine tapes). This was not the Monkees or the Archies. This was a band: 2 guitars bass drums. And they rocked. They rocked fine.

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