The title track starts with everyone at once, a continued blast of four on the floor piano vamp with increasingly noisy rock instruments and a reversed call and response: White light - White light going and messing up my mind. If you played it with the same lineup as I Get Around you might let the attitude and subject matter slide. The two part harmonies are on pitch. The rhythm section is solid. Lou Reed sounds like he might as well be calling a dance from the early 60s with a name like The Spud or The Bangarang but he's talking about the chaos of mainlining speed and he takes us through the thrill of its threats with a constant sense of teetering. Around him, the backing vocals and band close in like the caving senses of the speed freak. Eventually Cale's bass barges into the centre of the mix and does a stuttering riff that has to keep finding its footing but keeps punching until everything quietly collapses. If My Generation was a sped up mod this is the next day in a diary entry of a whole life.
The first thing that you notice about The Gift, especially if you listen with headphones, is that the talking on one side and the music on the other. If you had any hope of the two channels merging into a warm natural stereo mix, forget it. Forget, also, any idea that Cale's solid Welsh coo is going to lift into melody. This means that if you aren't ready to commit to hearing John Cale read out a short story for a lengthy eight or so minutes you should probably skip this one. No, you shouldn't. Just as the headlight-eyed opening track was crucial to the force of this album so this defiantly wrong track is, too.
It's Lou Reed's piece, the tale of a drab boy who is inspired to post himself to the woman he thinks is waiting for him states away. College is over for the year and she has gone back to Wisconsin. The thought of her giving in to any Neanderthal with a will is unbearable so he packs himself up with padding and provisions ("it'd be as good as going tourist") and off he goes. Meanwhile, over in Milwaukee, Marsha Bronson gets a visit from her friend Sheila and they talk idly about their sex lives. The package arrives and ... Seriously, if you've never heard this track I'm not going to spoil a horrifying and funny ending.
The music at first sound like any cruddy jam you've been in where no one wants to stand out and everyone metaphorically bows their heads and gazes at the carpet. But give it more of a listen and you'll hear it's far more concerted an effort. There's a dispassionate grind to it that lends a sort of contempt, a kind of icky confidence. The music's happy enough walking us through but when it's done it's done and you don't get conversation, ok?
This is supposedly Cale's first reading of the story and I've no reason to think otherwise. It is strange to hear such a sneering New Yorker tale intoned like Mr Davies from down the dell. But that's the point. This ain't Under Milk Wood. The alien accent reading out Waldo's nebbish thoughts seems ok but things get screwy as soon as the dialogue between the women starts. Not so, strange, I guess. Lou Reed was always a good writer, a sharp wit and a keen observer of the life around him and his way with speech patterns never abandoned him. It's so strong it reaches through Cale's thick Welsh cooing. The final deadly statement is met with the shrugging end of the music on the other side. The first time you hear this you swear it will be the last. But it won't be.
If The Gift was too much you might want to pretend the next track was being sung in Portuguese or Urdu. Lady Godiva's Operation begins with a gentle modal figure on a very slightly overdriven guitar. Cale again enters but singing this time. His voice is melodic but he sings each phrase as though describing something he's holding between thumb and forefinger but sounding world weary at the same time. In fact he kind of sounds like Nico. The gentle modal tune extends beyond where you would expect and gets no relief form a chorus. The more times you hear it the creepier it gets because you now know what's coming.
The first half of the lyric seems to describe a Lady Godiva as less the serious protester of the middle ages than a local temptress taunting the straight world with an effortless seductive power. The second part is the operation and seems to be a lobotomy which is by no means completely clear. There is a suggestion that the libido of the title character, with repeated listening less of the historical figure (but the confusion is intentional) than a contemporary seductive transsexual. The operation seems a botched lobotomy but it's not that simple either. Is the "great, great decision" the doctor makes one of where and what to cut? This is a song where reading lots of listeners' personal interpretations gets seriously spooky. My favourite is a ghastly one. Lady Godiva was considered a threat to the local boys. When she went in for her sex change the surgeon did as he was bribed and gave her a lobotomy instead. More simply, it might be a lobotomy from the off, her family responding to the era's somewhat medieval approach to sexual difference with draconian psychiatry and then surgery. There are some images of the shaved headed patient who "once was screaming". In the narration of the song the patient wakes on the operating table through sloppy anaethesis, interrupts the doctor who kills with his scalpel. From local radiant celebrity to tortured corpse. Lightless days.
The band plays gently but the guitars and Cale's downmixed viola are brightly distorted. There's an unnerving mix of sweetness and factory-like noise that holds together. As with The Gift, this is not a jam session. Same with the vocals. When the tone of the story changes from wistful admiration to the stark horror of the operating theatre Cale's cooing control is disrupted by Lou Reed's hard American accent speaking as much as singing, sometimes sounding like he's reading out a note to a listener in another room. And worse: towards the end, about the 4:40 mark while Cale is making the hissing sound like a respirator there is a whisper. It's almost completely buried but you can hear it in headphones: a voice, a few times, moves around the stereo image saying, "you're not a girl." This uncomfortable nightmare does not rest easy because its subject cannot.
In case, after the Gift and Lady Godiva's operation, you were ready to lift the needle and quietly replace the disc in its inner sleeve, nevermore to remove it, side one ends with a gentle Latin figure on a clean electric guitar that sounds for all the world like it had been lying around from the first album (though it's a little stiffer, nyuck nyuck). Here She Comes Now retains this gentle gleam as Reed half whispers variations on "if she ever comes now" over the constant floating bossa nova.It could be a sedated resetting of waiting for the man or even the effect of waiting for the rush but it works at its most obvious level as a song about working someone gradually toward orgasm. The giver's own impatience mounts but that's all part of it. The woman seems unresponsive, made out of wood, but he keeps going. But this is not a Doors song and we don't get the money chords. The lulling ebb and flow of the setup just continues to the fade with Reed stuttering the lines in frustration.
Side two blasts straight into I Heard Her Call My Name. The opening is chaotic with Reed's amp on 11 and the tortured signal screaming with too much pain to steady itself. Other instruments are clattering or roaring without any real coherence. Reed repeats the main line from the previous number but chucks in a few troublesome phrases like "gone gone gone". He's ready. His eyes are wide open. It is both literally and figuratively the flipside of Here She Comes Now. The girl plummets into uncontrollable orgasm.
But then it settles into a rough but structured rock song with a call and response like the title track and things get odd. By what he's saying it sounds like he's hearing her call his name not in sexual ecstasy but from beyond the grave or, just maybe, from beyond the point of death but still on the bed. Finally he tells us that his mind split open. More uncontrolled guitar screaming in the breaks and a repeat of the only conventional verse with the garage band style backing vocals singing the title phrase. Is it a memory, a directly recalled moment of orgasm, or maybe just a moment of genuine sudden grief that feels as strong as this without stopping to pick up any softening nostalgia.
Reed's wild playing could sound to today's listener like a mid-life crisis guy in the guitar shop trying to do Hendrix or someone who didn't have a clue but there's a lot more going on here. The unmeasured opening chaos lets us know that the more ordered verse is only part of this track's expression and serves as a couple of visits to dry land while the screaming miasma of the rest of the universe blows around it like a cyclone. Reed isn't trying to mock or emulate the emerging guitar heroes of the day like Hendrix or Clapton, he's found an approach to guitar playing that meets his notions as a composer and arranger. This isn't the more studious opposition of a Frank Zappa where (to my ears, anyway) the subversion has class clown scrawled all over it (early Mothers, at least) it has a far more situationist feel to it and is yet another cue for future generations. Listen to any Sonic Youth from the '80s and feel the familiarity.
Sister Ray is too often given a dismissive wave of a hand, usually to do with its length. At seventeen minutes it's the only other track on side two. Again, the grinding backing (two chords and two chords only) is not a jam in any sense, though its members are free to come in and noise off however they might. As with most of this album's songs this one is about the account, the story Lou Reed tells and directs with mise en scene of raucous but steady garage grind. Though it can feel like it with Cale's left hand parts on the organ or the chugging low string barre chords, there is no bass guitar on this track; the session is a one off, the way jazz was done (until Miles made Silent Way but that's another story). But this ain't jazz.
Reed tells the story of an aborted orgy with local characters, drag queens and sailors. It's told from a few viewpoints like a Rashamon imagined by Hubert Selby. A central event of a drugfucked partier taking out a gun and shooting one of the sailors comes circling back around as does a variation on the response which is not horror but might be shock as someone always says to the shooter that they shouldn't do that as it stains the carpet. Unlike Operation where a pair of voices were used to disrupt a single narration, Sister Ray keeps it all with Reed as he plays several characters per verse (see what I did there?) without annoucement. Refrains help like the one about him trying to fit up some heroin but failing to get his vein while getting a blow job. But he couldn't hit it sideways just like Sister Ray said. It's funny, queasy, sleazy and horrifying by turns and sometimes all at once. It's earnest and it's funny as the sordid tale loops around the way it would in memory while the growl, crashing and grinding goes on like the traffic out the window.
When I first heard this song in the '70s it was out of context, on a compilation that mixed and matched the first three albums. Because of this it just came on out of nowhere and in them auld vinyl days it meant that I'd really want to hear the other song on that side (it was a double LP) to put it on. So I didn't. Much later with the 45th Anniversary hi-res download I was able to hear the whole sequence of the album in one go. I dreaded doing this as my memories of its notorious tracks haunted me but I started doing what I do for all these blogposts: I put it on my phone, went out for an hour long walk and let it come to me.
This always freshens well worn music and debugs less familiar tracts. It took about three of those walks but it got there and I got it. Sister Ray finally sounded like it was at home and the album finally sounded like the big dark obelisk of sound and blackened cinema that it is. And this time I heard, through appreciating the integration of the ideas, a band at its serious best, exploratory and unforgiving. I will always love the first album with its trophy hall of dirges, sweet and sour takeaways, grimness and cheek but White Light/White Heat works better, more like a song cycle than a bunch of songs. It's better produced, more deliberately arranged, more solid in the playing and tougher in the writing. There is no cute sixties-ness about it and it doesn't sound like the metal that grew out of blues at the end of its year. Even the cover was out of time. It was Andy again but instead of a big colourful wink it was a subdued image, hard to see in the shadows (but always seen once seen), black on black, a skull on an arm in a field of black. Hindsight might suggest to you the artwork of Peter Saville at that later Factory and the art he put on the arresting covers of Joy Division or Durutti Column around a decade later. Here in 1969 it might have felt like a postal delivery from the future.
The Velvet Underground released five albums in their initial series of incarnations and they were distinguished from each other by their similarities (even the last one which is really a misnamed solo album by a non-original member). Their differences draw them into a block that testifies to internal strife (a similar "then there were three" sequence that the Byrds were going through) but for me White Light is the only one that feels like a band is making it and at a time that compounded late nights with too much talk and drugs and lunches where all the nightmares and whimsy became articulate and performable. Maybe that's why it's ghosts haunt the future in the grooves of Jonathon Richman, Kevin Shields, Lee Rinaldo and too many more. I've chosen individuals rather than band names there, not because I think those bands were only those people but to give a name to each to renew the perception, to get us arguing again, to get us listening to this kind of record again, to get us grumpy and creative. We owe and the fun is in the paying.
