FEATURE:
Run Run Run
The Enduring Popularity of a Masterpiece: The Velvet Underground & Nico at Fifty-Five
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ON 12th March…
PHOTO CREDIT: Cornell University - Division of Rare Manuscript Collections
the world will mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of the debut album by The Velvet Underground and Nico. The American band, led by the principal songwriter Lou Reed, and the German singer Nico created something extraordinary in 1967! This year is often considered the strongest for music. Not only is The Velvet Underground & Nico seen as one of the best albums of the ‘60s; it is one of the most important albums ever released You can buy it on vinyl, or a relatively recent half-speed remaster. Prior to coming to a couple of reviews for the timeless album (whose iconic cover is courtesy of Andy Warhol), getting some story and background is important. Back in 2012, to coincide with anniversary re-releases of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the band’s website gave details about the various release. We also learn more about the impact the album has made in terms of its popularity and influence:
“When The Velvet Underground & Nico album was released in March 1967 on Verve Records, with its Andy Warhol-designed, peel-off banana cover, it was far from a chart-topper. In fact, as the famed quote attributed to Brian Eno famously put it, the album may not have sold many copies, “but everyone who bought it formed a band.” And its reputation as a groundbreaker has only increased over the four-and-a-half decades since its original release.
Universal Music / Polydor will celebrate the now-iconic album’s 45th anniversary on October 30, 2012, with a multi-format, worldwide release October 29th and 30th that includes stereo and mono versions remastered from the original tapes, as well as previously unreleased recordings of the band’s rehearsals in Warhol’s Factory and the subsequent rare April 1966 Scepter Studios recordings captured on acetate featuring early, alternate versions of songs later issued on The Velvet Underground & Nico.
A limited-edition, Super Deluxe six-CD box set will also feature a previously unavailable November ’66 live concert performed by the Velvets’ original, five-person lineup—Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Moe Tucker and Nico—at the Valleydale Ballroom in Columbus, Ohio, and Nico’s Chelsea Girl, an album released in October 1967 (seven months after the Velvets’ disc) which included all the members of the band as well as a teenage folksinger named Jackson Browne. It also includes an 88-page booklet featuring a new essay by band biographer Richie Unterberger. All remastering, tape transfers and digital assembly at the prestigious Sterling Sound Studios in New York were overseen by veteran A&R producer Bill Levenson, who has been involved for more than 30 years in previous Velvet Underground reissues like VU and Another VU in the ’80s, the banana-covered box set in the ’90s and UMG’s first expanded, deluxe edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico in 2002.
The six-CD set captures the Velvets in a crucial period in their development, starting with the band’s Factory rehearsals in January ’66, covering the original Scepter recording sessions that April, then a live show in November, leading up to the March ’67 release, almost a year after the album was finished. Nico’s Chelsea Girl, which came out in October seven months later, completes the set’s almost two-year arc, chronicling the band both before and directly after its historic debut.
The Super Deluxe set allows fans to compare the mono and stereo versions of the album. Longtime Velvets aficionados have touted the mono mix because of its lo-fi quality, with the music coming off even tougher as a result of its compression.
The Velvet Underground & Nico album has achieved many honours since its release;. The Observer placed it number 1 in 50 Albums that Changed the World Uncut placed it a number 1 of 100 Greatest Debut Albums and was placed in the top 10 of Mojo’s 100 Greatest albums Ever Made and it continues to consistently top UK polls.
The Velvet Underground and Nico is considered the holy grail around the world. The release earned the original band a slot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone placed it No. 13 on the list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in November 2003, dubbing it “the most prophetic rock album ever made.” Spin magazine placed it atop its list of the “Top 15 Most Influential Albums of All Time” that same year and the album is one of 225 recordings in the prestigious Library of Congress National Recording Registry.. In Czechoslovakia, the band gave its name to the Velvet Revolution, which overthrew the Communist regime in that country. Globally, the album is seen just like Sgt. Pepper’s and Pet Sounds, as a seminal, influential high-water mark in rock music history”.
How did a band as iconic as The Velvet Underground come together? In understanding the genius of the album – in terms of Lou Reed’s songwriting, the incredible importance of John Cale and Nico, in addition to bandmates Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker -, we need to head back. Classic Album Sundays give some superb background in their story of The Velvet Underground & Nico:
“The era of the late Sixties usually brings to mind the West Coast, naked hippies cavorting in festival grounds, flower power, psychedelia and LSD. But there was a band that resolutely bucked the trend. They were the anti-‘anti-establishment’ and in contrast to sunny California, they resided within the urban decay of New York City’s Lower East Side, instead of festivals, city dwellers danced to their music at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, and rather than hallucinogens, they celebrated heroin. And even though they were derided by the critics and sold very few albums during their lifespan, they later influenced nearly every indie rock band from Sonic Youth to The Strokes.
The Velvet Underground was founded by two contrarians: Lou Reed, a middle class Jewish kid with a troubled upbringing and a BA in English who churned out pop fodder for Pickwick Records, and John Cale, a Welshman who had performed with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music (an ensemble famous for holding a single note for several days and screaming at a plant until it died) and was over in New York City on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study classical viola.
Under the moniker The Primitives, Reed had a small hit with a record he quickly penned for Pickwick who wanted to cash in on the dance craze sweeping America in the mid-Sixties. Asked to perform his single ‘The Ostrich’ on television, Reed had to quickly assemble a real band and brought in John Cale with whom he had had a chance meeting. The two bonded over music and also (in Reed’s words) ‘dope’, and started jamming and writing songs that would later appear on The Velvet Underground albums.
With former Syracuse University colleague and intellectual Sterling Morrison and the quiet younger sister of a friend Moe Tucker solidifying the line-up, the Velvet Underground secured a residency at Cafe Bizarre in 1965. They may have faded into obscurity if Andy Warhol hadn’t been in the audience one particular night. Warhol had been working on a multimedia idea for his Film Festival in which he wanted to project the films onto the actors onstage. His Factory denizens then thought it would be a great idea to add music and VU fit the bill.
The Velvets became the nexus of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and around their performance revolved visual media such as films and a relentless light show which forced the band to wear sunglasses on stage, and in the process created even more of a mystique. Warhol also took on managerial duties for VU and after a host of rejections, he managed to secure them a record deal with MGM/Verve. He insisted that they feature the stunning German chanteuse who had wow-ed the uber-cool Factory family with her detached glamour, Nico.
The band recorded most of the debut album in a few days in Scepter, a decrepit recording studio, for less than $3000. Even though Warhol is listed as the album’s producer, it would certainly be too great a leap to even imagine him sitting at the mixing desk and barking at Reed for another vocal take. John Cale told an interviewer, “Andy Warhol didn’t do anything.”
In 1989, Lou Reed reasoned why Warhol deserved that accolade in an interview with Musician: “He just made it possible for us to be ourselves and go right ahead with it because he was Andy Warhol. In a sense, he really did produce it, because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren’t large enough to be attacked… and as a consequence of him being the producer, we’d just walk in and set up and do what we always did and no one would stop it because Andy was the producer. Of course he didn’t know anything about record production—but he didn’t have to. He just sat there and said “Oooh, that’s fantastic,” and the engineer would say, “Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic, isn’t it?””
Warhol did help finance the album along with Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records sales exec who also acted as an engineer along with John Licata. This may partially explain the lack of clarity and overall fuzziness of many of the songs although the few that were recorded in LA have a cleaner sonic. It has later been said that Tom Wilson produced most of it and the feel and arrangement has been put down to John Cale who himself later produced albums for Patti Smith, The Modern Lovers and Squeeze.
The resulting album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, is unlike anything that came before it. There is the stark, deadpan icy beauty of Nico’s vocals on beautifully cultivated pop-like songs “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Femme Fatale” and then married with the avant-garde on “All Tomorrow’s Parties”.
Rather than more conventional reviews, there are a couple that caught my eye. The second looks at the guitar sounds and musical contrasts through The Velvet Underground & Nico. I want to start with this Soundlab review. They start by making a fascinating point about success and sales. In units sold, the 1967 opus might be seen as underwhelming or a failure. Given the impact it had on countless people who bought The Velvet Underground & Nico, it is one of the most important and successful albums in history:
“What a road this album has traveled! Fraught with technical hassles, ignorance, scorn, and lawsuits, it survived to finally be recognized as one of the most influential albums ever, and for that matter, one of the best. Forget Rolling Stone ranking it as #13 on its “Best Of” list, unless the number is supposed to be symbolic. If it isn’t one of the top five, then just simply skip it!
In almost any recent (re)assessment of it, the first thing that is pointed out is Brian Eno’s comment, so why not repeat it here, because it is absolutely precise: "It (the album) only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought it started a band”. Indeed, it is not a question of who The Velvet Underground & Nico influenced, but rather who it didn’t. From cult acts like The Feelies to absolute greats like David Bowie who even surpassed The Velvet Underground itself; and almost any genre that came after, including glam, punk, lo-fi and drone. Try comparing John Cale’s modified viola sounds on “Venus In Furs” and “The Black Angel’s Death Song” to quite a few sounds produced by Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Musicians even adopted names used in the songs as their own.
It all started with the cards seriously stacked against it. Poor recording conditions (when they started recording, only Lou Reed was able to use headphones in the studio), delays, re-recordings with Dylan’s producer Tom Wilson, lawsuits because of the (back) cover, the album being pulled from the stores for a few months, ignorance from critics, outrage because of the lyrical content, and particularly Andy Warhol’s front cover, which led to just about every radio station in the US refusing to play it at the time.
But, what we all got with The Velvet Underground & Nico is a truly artistic package - musically, lyrically and visually that persisted and only grew through time. Its visions of New York as a symbol of civilizational decadence still rings true, and its combination of Lou Reed’s New York cool, Sterling Morrison’s and Moe Tucker’s punkishness, John Cale’s modern experimentalism, and Nico’s Berlin cool produced a trans-continental view of netherworld at a time when “Cabaret” was still a figment of Bob Fosse’s imagination.
It's all here: the seemingly innocuous balladry of “Sunday Morning” (“Early dawning, sunday morning/It’s just the wasted years so close behind/[Chorus}/Watch out, the world’s behind you”), the drug themes of “I’m Waiting For My Man” and “Heroin,” the kinky sex of “Venus In Furs,” and the pure punk and dystopia of "European Son” (“You killed your European Son/ You spit on those under twenty-one/But now your blue car is gone/ You better say so long”) - it is all absolutely perfect.
All eleven songs that originally appeared on the album represent a fully formed musical and lyrical vision individually and as a part of the whole. While all the available reissues and remasters have raised the level of the listening experience, even if you put on the murky sounding first issue you are in no way able to discern the time period when this album was made - in 1966 when the recording began, today, more than fifty years later or any time in-between. And all that for simply one reason - it is timeless”.
There are so many reasons why The Velvet Underground & Nico remains so adored and popular. The songwriting from Reed; the way Nico’s voice adds so much to the album (she sadly died in 1988); the sonic and lyrical vividness and contrasts. Others will do greater justice to the album ahead of its fifty-fifth anniversary on 12th March. I wanted to add my comments and work to celebrate a legendary album. An album that started to get huge reappraisal a decade after its release. Perhaps people who reviewed The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967 did not give it enough time or were too quick in their judgement. I want to finish with a review by Guutar.com. Of course, as a guitar site, they highlight that aspect of the album. They also remark on how every sonic consideration and avenue is covered and explored:
“Guitar-wise, every one of the album’s 11 tracks has a burst of invention. On Sunday Morning, Reed’s country-folk guitar break has a luminous, comedown strangeness to it, thanks to its slackened strings (several of the album’s songs were in downtuned standard tuning, perhaps to help accommodate Cale’s viola). I’m Waiting For The Man sees Reed build tension with expressive snarls of open strings driving his train-like, distorted rhythm part behind Morrison’s hypnotic, bluesey cycling lead motif. By way of contrast, Femme Fatale’s intro creates the song’s unresolved feel by using contrasting guitar tones, Reed’s rolled off, claustrophobically bassy Cmaj 7 and F maj 9 chords looming behind Morrison’s trebly, static arpeggio.
While the demonic whiplash of Cale’s electric viola dominates Venus In Furs, alongside it are two guitar parts from Reed, one spelling out the ‘chorus’ section in downstrokes, the other a psychedelic, Middle Eastern-inflected droning chord-melody line resulting from his ‘Ostrich’ tuning – a ‘trivial’ tuning where all of the guitar’s strings are tuned to the same note. This was a trick that Reed had picked up from guitarist Jerry Vance and subsequently “filed away”; it also makes an appearance later on in the album, on All Tomorrow’s Parties.
On Run Run Run – one of rock’s most gloriously out-of-tune songs – Reed introduces us to Margarita Passion, Beardless Harry et al over Morrison’s queasy blues rhythm tuned down to D, before unleashing a feral, freeform solo combining squeals of feedback, John Lee Hooker-esque boogie, buzzy tremolo picking, random string bends and god knows what else. At one point, he even detunes his high E string to B mid-solo, while still frantically picking it, which is surely a first.
Warhol favourite All Tomorrow’s Parties finds Reed scratching out a sitar-like drone melody in his Ostrich D tuning on a Gretsch guitar with the frets removed, while John Cale hammers away at a ‘prepared’ piano with paperclips entwined in its strings to alter the tone – again, all in a day’s work.
Meanwhile, on album centrepiece Heroin, Reed and Morrison show just how much can be done with two chords. Every instrument reflects the subject matter: the rhythm-guitar interplay moves through a cycle of repeated rush and release towards its crescendo, Cale’s electric viola descends to hell and back and Moe Tucker’s heartbeat drum accompaniment temporarily stops and restarts.
PHOTO CREDIT: Alamy
Even There She Goes Again – the most conventional of the album’s tracks – finds the time to launch into a raunchy rock ’n’ roll lick at 1:54 that a lesser band would’ve happily used as the basis for a whole song, while the guitar interplay at the foundation of Femme Fatale is revamped for I’ll Be Your Mirror, embroidering Nico’s icy delivery with a regal, shimmering melody part shadowed by a restless bassline from Cale.
The Velvet Underground And Nico opens with the saccharine music-box tinkling of Cale’s celesta and closes with a clatter of abused instruments amidst a rumble of feedback, with its 11 tracks covering every sonic possibility inbetween. Few records before or since could accommodate, say, the hushed and fragile capo’d chords of I’ll Be Your Mirror and the ballistic freakout of guitar violence in European Son without blinking: on an album containing many contrasts, arguably the starkest of all is the discrepancy between the brittle and beautiful and the elemental and chaotic in its guitar parts”.
A great work from a legendary group! I think that bands will form decades down the line because of this album. The Velvet Underground & Nico took a while to make its impact on me. I was a bit reluctant to embrace it but, the more I listen and the more I learn, the greater my respect is for it. On 12th March, we get to celebrate a remarkable album that has helped change the course of music history. Here is to the simply stunning debut album…
FROM The Velvet Underground & Nico.