Brian Eno said, "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." He didn't mean it literally nor had to. The journalist he was speaking to and the readers of the published interview knew well enough that all he meant was that the record was influential. He was right and still is. The figure he quotes might well be accurate but the point is the impact, the resonance. The album has resurfaced many times over the decades as newer waves of musicians cite their influences. None of them need be lying but when the quote's echoes sound now it's more like: only two hundred people bought the LP but all of them formed bands. Only the very feeble will redistribute these tracks in the hope that their immediate social scaffolding will collapse into the shape of a rock band. But the sense of Eno's genuinely witty remark is easily forgotten when the surface of the soundbite gets such a gleam. Few outside of VU fans ever seem to mention the output that followed despite any riches it holds (which is a fair bit, by the way)
Why? Well, there is the music, which I'll get to, but there is also the deathless cache of avant gardism lead by the Andy Warhol brand and working all the way down to guttersnipes dying from heroin cut with bleach in dark alleys: it has edge. It is about people who had edge and it is by them, as well. For devil's advocacy I'll mention a recent putdown of the album that claimed that outside of a few tracks of inspired collaboration John Cale's contribution came across as indulgent noise and Lou Reed's as Brill Building hackery. So, edge or bratty fluke? More bullshit. Nevertheless, to dismiss the sub-cultural context of the Warhol environment and the enthusiasm of the young drivers of the band leaves the picture undeveloped. I think the set of songs stands by itself but when you do add the influences that made the whole package it deserves a decently yelled "wow!" But first the songs.
Sunday Morning would confuse any first-time listener who is listening to hear an avant-roque record. A celeste tinkles through the arpeggio of the progression while a picked bass dive bombs down to the tonic and the band and vocals enter with Lou Reed in wistful sweetness. Any charges of pop-to-order can be laid here as, by the sound alone, it could have been written for the Monkees or Petula Clark. An easy gliding rhythm with a cor anglais accentuating the fourth and na-na-na-na backing vocals that float on waves of reverb provide a pop ballad hobby kit. Drill down to the lyrics, though, and the picture changes. The narrator is pursued by his wasted years, phantoms created by self-consciousness or paranoia dog the footsteps and call from the crowds. Not even safe on a drowsy Sunday morning.
If you didn't think that was intentional just keep listening. Waiting For the Man plunges us straight into the thumping monotony of the title as the chords tonic to fourth repeat on the lower keys of a piano as guitars whine scratchily like mosquitoes to each side. Reed comes in with a very different vocal describing what, at least at the time, most of a life of chemical dependency consists of. He fends off the aggression of the locals in the black neighbourhood who think he's cruising for sex and cringes as he waits because, as Reed well knew from reading Burroughs if not from his own experience (and Lou was an tertiary level reader), that you always have to wait. Finally, the dealer turns up, there's an excruciating walk to the apartment, a quick taste, the nexus and then the hasty exit. It will all happen tomorrow but that's not now. The cleverness of this song, the oppressive shiftless throbbing, the slight but annoying guitars and the tone of the narrator who professes coolness while feeling the hatred or burdensome indifference of everyone around him because if he doesn't feel that he's just another white-boy junkie who'll wake up one morning hairless and middle-aged and still craving or die near the garbage bins out the back, the cleverness is that we feel the warmth of the pose and understand the fear it masks. Reed the writer understood this, that it was so and that you would know, and knew that the lately cute rock medium was the perfect palate for it. Add the rest of the band as they were and you get this. Writing this just then has made me wonder if this album itself with its self-aware drama and characterisation isn't the first rock opera, however undeclared. I don't think that's an important thought (rock operas had influence but were doomed to give way to the eternally returning pop song package model albums that rise to counter every sustained attempt to lift rock music) but it's a diverting one.
Femme Fatale surfaces from the silence between tracks as a late night bossa nova with a pair of major 7th chords played on electric guitars. The treble is rolled off as though they are meant to sound like nylon string guitars but there is a quite clear admission that they are not. Nico's heavily accented droopy voice enters quietly before surprising with a strong voice for the second line, "she's going to break your heart in two," before falling back to the sexy whisper, "it's true". But the whisper isn't sexy, it's just where it would be sexy if Astrud Gilberto were singing it. From Nico it has the sound of a friend delivering hard truths to a broken-hearted other in a smoky three a.m. room. The song is all Lou Reed, a mix of charming melody and biting commentary: "You're written in her book? You're number thirty-seven take a look." And the chorus breaks out with a strong full voice from the lead and a response chorus that sounds like cartoon ravens in the next room. And here's something again. Is this mockery of pop harmonies accidental as it is in early Rolling Stones recordings or intentional. I ask as the lead out of the chorus is accompanied by guitars that are clearly out of tune even though they are being played on the same strings as the verse parts? The band resented the imposition of the model and hangaround by mentor Andy Warhol. Is this their protest? Is it a kind of comment on mainstream pop, adding dissonance to an otherwise sweetly tuneful song? Is it just poor quality control on the part of the band or their nominal but largely absent producer Andy Warhol? I'd veer toward the latter. Even so, none of that can spoil the gentle strength of the song.
The drone and grind of Venus in Furs rises like a theatre curtain and the stage is thick with red light. Even at low volume it sounds loud. The band, bass, drums and rattling guitar haul the riff up a hill before it rolls back down and they have to start again, all the while overseen by the sting of a droning viola. Reed enters without his street cred to describe the scenes from Sascher-Masoch (whose novel gives the song its title and characters) When he tells us in the middle eight that he is weary and could sleep four thousand years it sounds real. Otherwise, his higher register guides us through the scenes of domination, humiliation and pain as Severin takes his punishing pleasure. This is one of the tracks on the album to feature Reed's Ostrich guitar, an electric guitar whose strings are all tuned to a single note at whichever octave is closest to the standard tuning (the E's down a tone, for example, but the B up a minor third). The name is from Reed's Brill building days when he used a guitar with that tuning on a identikit dance song called The Ostrich. This can do a few things but here it emphasises the drone while allowing a multi-octave strumming of the riff as it rises and falls. It's aided and abetted by John Cale's viola part which drones but also puts in a rhythmic screech like it's giving orders. As well it might; the overall burdensome force has a nearly hypnotic power over the listener. This is broken by the two middle eights which surge into the relative major as Reed sings about his weariness and the viola plays long insistent fifths. And then, each time it falls back down the slope and had to be rolled back up. A reiteration of the opening verse closes the vocal - "strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart" - before the grind intensifies with the guitar playing and ugly but beautiful mandolin tremolo but down on the lower frets so that it starts sounding like a jackhammer. And Severin hits the floor and begs for more.
Many years ago I was sitting in what was then the Carlton Hotel's big high ceilinged bar (Queens Street in Brisbane) with another musician. There was table serivce and a guy playing pop standards on a jazz box. He threw in something from The Beatles' Revolver album which I thought was strange and we got to talking about the music of that time and the Velvet Underground came up. I think that was because some of the songs like Femme Fatale had a jazzy guitar feel to them. In a lull he looked up from his drink and said, "isn't Venus in Furs a scary song?" I thought about it. I'd just come out of a couple of years guiding my band through various Eastern and Arabic modes. Drones in songs were something I was known for to a degree. So, when I heard the song mentioned that's what I thought of first but his quiet exclamation carried enough awe it compelled me to reassess. I recalled how Reed breaks his icy observational tone in one verse and sounds much more like an observer. "Taste the whip now bleeeeeeeeeed for me." He finishes the line with a giggle. He's in the audience, at one of the peep holes, his tongue out at the pain, the degradation, the welts and the blood. He's not just the power with the cat o' nine tails, he's the customer. Yes it is. It's a scary song.
Run Run Run hits the groove in a gallop. Apart from the switch to the fourth in the chorus it's all on the tonic. Chunga chunga chunga chunga. At first it's garagey but conventional enough. The verses are about kids getting kicks and then kicking the bucket. That's the life chosen then that's life. Live fast etc. The thing is there's no moral curation unless it's what at that time would have been unthinkable: advocacy. This is not a roll call of the wicked or even a service for the innocent unknowing youth, it's an honour roll. You gotta run run run run run take a drag or two. Run run run run run Gypsy Death and you. Trouble is with this the honour roll doesn't sound like Fanfare for the Common Man. No middle eights, no riffs, no Brill building chops. Just the gallop to the end with a lot of feedback and scratchy tremolo.
All Tomorrow's Parties begins before you realise it's started. A slow, solemn ascent through a major scale, what the basses would be doing in an orchestral version but pizzicato. And then it falls and as it lands back on D, Maureen Tucker's hammer hits the kettle drum (actually a normal kick with a lot of reverb), a quick breath out of time. On four comes the extraordinary piano part devised by Cale of hemisemidemiquavers for four hands playing through the changes. For a long time I thought this was a tape loop but the changes really do happen. That loop would have stretched a few Manhattan blocks. And then the voice.
If Nico sounded whispered and crooned through Femme Fatale she turns the fog horn of her lower range for zero visibility conditions and rolls out a vocal so grand and so cold that it almost obscures the beauty of Reed's melody. The song has a modal tonality, like something from the middle ages. You could imagine it sung by monks. Nico's hard note delivery (actually two deliveries but we'll get to that) forms a solid structure around which we gather and ogle. The monument strikes us with awe and fear as we see the contemporary Cinderella crouching in the shadows until she goes to the ball in scrounged and tattered finery. But the ball is not in fairyland but darkest Manhattan. Nothing to wear for the poor girl, Thursday's child and Sunday's clown who cries behind the door. There is a sneer in the words but Nico's performance presses it out of sight as, week after week, the girl in the song gets further away from the centre of the party but more dependent on it. The death march drum thunders on, the glittering rain of the prepared piano moves like a slow machine and the guitars (combined Ostrich clang and electric 12 string chime) provide the compromised grandeur. The procession continues without seamingly without cease. But stop it must and does, abruptly with a final brittle tremolo flourish. End.
The '80s CD release of the album featured a treat in the form of a mix of this song with a single vocal. Nico's voice on the initial (and almost every other) release is double tracked in the custom of the '60s. Producers would get vocalists to repeat a take as exactly as possible to add body to the sound. While this practice petered out with advances in recording technology by the mid '60s it was still used. The problem is that no to takes are ever going to match exactly. A syllable here or consonant there will always be out. Masters of the approach like the Beatles double tracked so closely that it sounds like expertly managed echo. Nico, never quite comfortable with her vocals until she shed the world's disdain and made strengths of her flaws (of all the ex VU crew her solo efforts are my favourite), was put through the double tracking mill for this song. The result is double the mournfulness and size. There are frequent mismatches but they only serve to indicate the size of the voice. That said, if you're interested, track down an early CD release or Youtube the single vocal version. It will immediately appeal for the sleeker line of the vocal. It isn't better, the original double tracked take still gives us more of what we need, but it is a relief.
The old side two provides no such relief. Heroin begins with a strummed single note (Ostrich guitar) and another clean (and normally tuned) one filling out the chords on the higher strings. This goes for ten listless bars before the rhythm takes form between the two and they diverge between playing a swirling arpeggio and the same grounded chords (C-F) and we notice John Cale's viola creeping in with a drone on C (infrequently thickened with a G). Lou Reed's vocal enters the scene before you notice. "I ....... don't know ...... just where I'm going .... " A few bars later and "but I ...... gonna try for the kingdom if I can cause it makes me feel I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein ..." And everything under and around his drifitng voice begins to speed up. The voice takes energy from this and seems to rise into the light from the dark corner of the room where it began. He feels just like Jesus' son. But "I guess I just don't know. I guess that I just don't know." This is the pattern of the song for the next five minutes: the junkie rises slowly from his torpor through connection and euphoria and into the vision splendid before admitting he doesn't know, isn't sure, can't do anything. Far from repetitive, though, Heroin describes a slow pulsing arc in which the narrator climbs through great ecstasy, each time a little higher and, thanks to Reed's brilliance as a lyricist, believably into a kind of plateau of confidence bolstered by a band rising in increasingly powerful waves of energy and near edible noise that strains until you can't tell the difference between the pain of feedback or the sublime dissonance of the viola, just like the junkie in the middle. He doesn't know. He doesn't know, can't know, won't know, shan't know, beyond knowing as his screaming nervous system variously lifts and drops him. "And thank your god that I'm not aware. And thank god that I just don't care. And I guess I just don't know. And I guess I just don't know...." The bright drone of the viola and the chiming of the guitars slow to a stop, a tiny growl of a chord and it's over. It's where the narrator of Waiting for the Man went when he made his excuses and left and every day after that. By the end the drone could be that of a choir at his funeral.
A bright chord riff stops and starts before bashing into something between a country song and a beat band from the shady side of the street. It's the closest thing on the album to a conventional mid-sixties rock song. A call and response verse with Reed hitting a streetwise sneer and the band in falsetto behind him with a charming ramshackle chord solo some tight playing for once. At first it seems like a misogynist snarl but the "better hit her" line increasingly feels like a taunt to the kind of affected street-level machismo that has brought the woman in the song to this pass. She only falls for the worst ("not just any guy" has a severe ring here), suffers, gets up and falls again. As sordid and dejecting as it is this is a song about a survivor. She is not everywoman, just one and one that comes through, neither spitfire nor victim. I feel an odd kinship between this and Ray Davies' Dandy from the year before where the gadabout for all his shallowness and hedonism is alright in that 1960s hip way. Reed says it too in the fade. "Aw, she's alright."
I'll Be Your Mirror begins with sweet clean electric guitars and a brighter rhythm than Femme Fatale. Nico enters with her deep boom singing a melody that I could imagine Petula Clark or Lulu cooing. There's even a playfully lilting second section to the verses that strengthens the sugar. But this is a song about reassurance in the face of self despair. Is it some fragile Warholian model or just a teenager? It could be anyone but the thing that reaches out to me is that it sounds sincere. "Please put down your hands," she sings to someone who is not warding off a threat nor putting up their dooks but hiding their face. This goes sour at the end of the chirpy chorus when the palm-muted guitars come in with a sprightly rhythm, an audible microtone out of tune, so distinctly wrong that it could only have been intentional. Who knows? It grates. It grates every time I hear it but I know it's going to sound like that and I just let it happen. Intentional or not the dissonance adds to the darkness the guardian angel narrator seeks to clear and that works.
Black Angel's Death Song starts looming guitar under a squeaky viola pattern. Reed's Dyalnesque sneer tells of adventurous but dark choices in a nightmare landscape bloody with violence and gore. While there's a lot here from the literary memory of the English major there's also cinema but it isn't Panic in Needle Park is Bunuel and Bergman at their most fantastical and bleak. Apart from some loud hisses between verses the arrangement keeps to the guitar/viola duo for the entirety and peters out rather than fades or cleanly finishes. This has not been the junkie parade of Run Run Run, it's about the weight of life decisions and, dressed in the language of a ragged epic, bears witness rather than celebrates. It's the song of an angel, not a Gomorrahan.
European Son begins like any other of the rockier songs on the record but quickly spreads out into concrete noise and directionless noodling. Fans of the album often skip it or call it filler or indulgent but those charges only stick if it's offered as a track like the others. My feeling is that, while it might well have come from the kind of jam everyone gets into at the time but can't listen to afterwards thrown on as the last track, it's there as noise, it's meant to be annoying. Anyone who has listened to it in earnest hoping to glean the spirit of free rock a la Ornette Coleman are advised to fast forward to Reed's Metal Machine Music variously dismissed as garbage or defended as genius by Reed himself (it famously got under the skin of critic Lester Bangs who led a crusade against it) Me, it depends. I'll leave it on if it doesn't intrude on what I'm doing (it's the best sex music at twenty but the worst at forty but I was thinking more like washing dishes or the vacuuming) but there are examples in the temporal neighbourhood that outdo it for obnoxiousness like the Stooges' LA Blues or the decades-later hidden track of game noises on Beck's Odelay. Oddly, even though it stands outside of period the timid chaos of it puts it right back. Your choice.
Well, then, after the epics, the junk, the feedback and the cool, what does this album do outside of fulfilling its own cool? For starters it's cool was only very closely local. A handful of gigs outside of the Warhol wings and no radio play added up to no hits nor much attention. The attention came later, after the band had diluted its membership and then parted ways. Then, everyone had been there at the time and that's where the bullshit started. But bullshit is power and can sell itself on the whiff alone and does. The good news here is that this album rises above it. The sprawling mess of Latin beats, funeral drums, debased folk, drones and crafted noise is held together by songs strong enough to be recognisable covered in any genre (well, ok, maybe not European Son) because they are made of real stuff. You can leave the heroin chic, the avant-models, the strung-out cool and the affected sneers and you'll still have a good record. This is a good record despite the unintentionally poor production (accentuated by the moments of decent engineering that also happen) and not because of it. It's a marvel of band-inspiring craft and earsplitting clashes. It's Stockhausen meets the Everly Brothers. There is nothing like it that spans with such ease Revolver-era Beatles and Throbbing Gristle. All of the above but it's still just good.
Listening Notes: Exclusively, as a reference for this article, I used the hi-res master of the 45th anniversary release, bought as a download online. You could scratch around for a original Verve vinyl copy but if you wanted to hear what it sounded like as a mastered sequence the 24 bit 96 kHz is the one to choose. On the other hand this album will never be improved by higher audio presentation as the original production is mired in a series of bad engineering decisions from the time of its production. It will either sound like the Velvets with extra noise (authographic!) or pristine but poorly produced. Up to you.
