Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (16 page)

‘Sunday Morning’ was originally composed by Lou Reed and John Cale sitting at a piano together in a friend’s apartment at 6 a.m. one Sunday morning after being out all night (according to Lynne Tillman who was going out with Cale at the time).

‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ is about scoring heroin in Harlem.

‘Femme Fatale’ was written for Nico, with Andy’s encouragement by Lou, partially in collaboration with Sterling Morrison.

REED:
“We wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ about somebody who was one, and has since been committed to an institution for being one. And will one day open up a school to train others.”

‘Venus In Furs’

REED:
“The prosaic truth is that I’d just read a book with
this title by Leopold Sacher-Masoch and I thought it would make a great song title so I had to write a song to go with it. But it’s not necessarily what I’m into.”

MORRISON:
“We do love songs of every description. ‘Venus In Furs’ is just a different kind of love song (Malanga knelt on stage and kissed Mary Woronov’s black leather boots during this song). Everybody was saying this is the vision of all-time evil and I always said, ‘Well, we’re not going to lie.’ It’s pretty. ‘Venus In Furs’ is a beautiful song. It was the closest we ever came in my mind to being exactly what I thought we could be. Always on the other songs I’m hearing what I’m hearing, but I’m also hearing what I wish I were hearing.”

‘Run Run Run’ is about Union Square, a notorious drug park, between 14th and 17th Streets in downtown Manhattan.

‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, Andy Warhol’s all-time favourite Velvets’ song, was also written by Lou for Nico.

‘Heroin’

MORRISON:
“‘Heroin’ is a beautiful song too, possibly Reed’s greatest and a truthful one. It’s easy to rationalize about a song you like, but it should be pointed out that when Reed sings he’s only glamorizing heroin for people who want to die. The real damage, particularly in New York, has been done through the cult of personality. Rock fans have taken heroin thinking Lou took heroin, forgetting that the character in the song wasn’t necessarily Lou Reed.”

REED:
“I’m not advocating anything. It all happened quite simply at the start. It’s just that we had ‘Heroin’, ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Venus In Furs’ all on the first album, and that just about set the tone. It’s like we also had ‘Sunday Morning’ which was so pretty and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, but everyone psyched into the other stuff.

‘There She Goes Again’ is a tough song about a tough chick.

‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’: Lou must have been in love with Nico when he wrote this beautiful, tender love song.

‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ was a precursor in a number of different veins.

MORRISON:
“A good friend of ours who saw many shows (and even played bass in one at the Dom) Helen Byrne ran up to me after the release of the album and exclaimed, ‘“The Black Angel’s Death Song” … it’s got chords!’ Apparently she hadn’t noticed in the live performances. ‘Of course, it’s got chords!’ I replied. ‘It’s a song, isn’t it?’”

‘European Son’: Dedicated to Delmore Schwartz (who hated rock lyrics intensely, which is why the piece employed the fewest words on the album) simply because they wanted to dedicate something to him. John Cale ran a chair into some metal plates which scatter and sound like broken glass on this track.

MORRISON:
“‘European Son’ is very tame now. It happens to be melodic and if anyone actually listens to it, ‘European Son’ turns out to be comprehensible in the light of all that has come since, not just our work but everyone’s. It’s that just for the time it was done it’s amazing. We figured that on our first album it was a novel idea just to have long tracks. People just weren’t doing that – regardless of what the content of the track was – everyone’s album-cuts had to be 2:30 or 2:45. Then here’s ‘European Son’ which ran nearly eight minutes. All the songs on the first album are longish compared to the standards of the time.”

“Their themes were perversity, desperation and death,” reads an RCA press-release for Lou Reed’s ‘Rock & Roll Diary’ (1978) describing The Velvet Underground. “Instead of celebrating psychedelic trips they showed us the devastating power, horror and false transcendence of heroin addiction;
they dared to intimate that sado-masochism might have more to do with their – and our – reality than universal love. Musically as well as verbally they insisted that possibility, far from being limitless, was continually being stifled and foreclosed. At a time when hippie rock musicians were infatuated with the spontaneous jam, The Velvets’ music was cerebral, stylized. They maintained a poignant ironic tension between the tight, formal structure of the songs and their bursts of raw noise between their high artfulness and their street level content, between fatalism and rebellion.

“Though The Velvets overall sound owed nearly as much to John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, it was Reed who defined the bands sensibility, embodied its contradictions. He was a romantic alienated bohemian and anti-romantic pop ironist, a middle-class Jewish kid from Brooklyn who came on like a street-wise punk in tight jeans and shades, a classical piano student turned rock’n’roller, Bob Dylan cum Nelson Algren cum Jean Genet. He talked his songs in an expressive semi-mumble that made you think of James Dean without the naiveté. Not that Lou did not display his own kind of innocence. His songs hinted, when you least expected it, that underneath the meanness and paranoia, the affectless brutality that smothered pain, there was after all the possibility of love. His depictions of urban hell contained occasional glimpses of redemption. Still, the inhabitants of Reed’s universe experienced love mainly through its absence; the glimpses were not only rare but as likely as not to be illusory.

“
The Velvet Underground and Nico
came out the same year The Beatles released
Sergeant Pepper
. It offered an extended tour of the urban underworld that included the now classic ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Heroin’. The latter saga of a man on his way to spiritual death, fighting and embracing it at once, is the most profoundly moving and disturbing drug song ever written.”

Fair enough in the “sensibility embodied by contradictions”
department which is its main point, but the sound was an equal collaboration and anyone wanting to really appreciate the sound captured on their first album should imagine Cale, Morrison, Tucker and Reed in the studio together all banging away and pulling as hard as they can in their different directions, creating out of dissension a tension that lives today, while Warhol encouraged them with his confidence and support. As Danny Fields now says, “What Andy did was very generously reproduce the sound of The Velvets for them, making sure they got it down the way it sounded to him when he first fell in love with it.”

While it cannot produce the effect of the combination of films, lights and dancing interacting with a live performance that was The EPI,
The Velvet Underground and Nico
produced by Andy Warhol is an extraordinarily, classic work arising out of their collaboration. “I was worried,” Andy says, “that it would all come out sounding too professional. But with The Velvets, I should have known I didn’t have to worry – one of the things that was so great about them was they always sounded raw and crude. Raw and crude was the way I liked our movies to look, and there’s a similarity between the sound in that album and the texture of
Chelsea Girls
, which came out at the same time.” The record did not, however, receive the same amount of front page coverage his film
Chelsea Girls
was getting. In fact, the album was banned on the radio in New York because of its content, unacceptable sound, and length of tracks.

MORRISON:
“Even advertising for the album was refused by the fledgling FM rock radio trip in NYC. AM advertising was likewise out of the question. Perhaps a restraint of trade suit was in order, but we just grit our teeth. WBAI (Bob Fass) was the only one who played the album; he would air a few cuts a night for a long time. Then we had a falling out over a bail-fund benefit at Thomkins Park, and even he wouldn’t play it. The silence was complete thereafter on the home front.”

CUTRONE:
“With songs like ‘Heroin’ you’re certainly not going to get any radio play in 1967. The Beatles were singing about broken relationships and ‘all you need is love’. ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ was the heaviest The Rolling Stones ever got. And then you get a group coming out and saying, ‘When I’m rushing on my run/I feel just like Jesus’ son,’ you’re not going to get any radio play – it’s as simple as that.”

It was ironic that the music was banned in New York. They were the only band who spoke for the city, delineating so accurately the love-hate relationship it inspired. New York was an equivalent for The Velvet Underground of what Paris was for Baudelaire. In each case the city provided an existential justification for their creations. However, after the album was banned they refused to play New York with the intent of punishing the city by their absence. After the spring of 1967 The Velvet Underground didn’t play New York City again until they returned to Mickey Ruskin’s Max’s Kansas City in the summer of 1970.

BOCKRIS:
“Did you feel the reaction was flat considering what a striking record it was?”

TUCKER:
“It was rather flat, and I think the problem was it hadn’t been advertised very much, and it hadn’t been distributed properly.”

BOCKRIS:
“Why did MGM sign you up, do such an expensive production job on the package, and then cool off so completely to the product?”

TUCKER:
“I don’t know what the hell their problem was. I think someone had said let’s go psychedelic. So they signed us and The Mothers, then they went after the Boston groups. But I think they just didn’t know what the hell to do with us.”

Despite the attempts of Tom Wilson to render ‘Sunday Morning’ a hit single (in a longer, poppier version released before the album), it too flopped and the album peaked in the
Cashbox
charts at 103.

Cashbox
December 17, 1966 – Newcomer Picks – ‘Sunday
Morning’/‘Femme Fatale’: “The Velvet Underground and Nico have been zooming the length and breadth of the land making a name for themselves and now follow the personal stuff with a potential filled deck. The top side, ‘Sunday Morning’, is a haunting, lyrical, emotion stirring chant. Listen very closely. Eerie, unusual number back here.”

To add to their problems Eric Emerson, whose face was on the back cover in a still from
Chelsea Girls
upside-down just above Lou’s face, refused to sign a release for MGM unless they paid him and further delays in the distribution were caused as Eric had to be airbrushed off and the cover had to be reprinted.

MORRISON:
“The whole Eric business was a tragic fiasco for us, and proves what idiots there were at MGM. Photos by Billy (Linich), Stephen Shore, Nat and others were used in an ‘art’ montage in a show that took place in an art museum (Chrysler). This montage was photographed by Hugo, who sold it to us, who consigned it to MGM. Who even knows who took the original photo of Eric, but MGM was far removed from any liability. They responded by pulling the album off the shelves immediately, and kept it off the shelves for a couple of months while they fooled around with stickers over Eric’s picture, and then finally the airbrush. The album thus vanished from the charts almost immediately in June 1967, just when it was about to enter the ‘Top 100’. It never returned to the charts. We never had a ‘Top 100′ album. As for Eric, he never got any money as far as I know. I don’t think that anyone even bothered to complain about the destructive audacity of his action. He was, shall we say, too far out.”

Some originals did reach the public. A copy of the original cover with Eric’s face and the banana unpeeled, is worth $25 to $30 today.

Considering MGM’s inability, or lack of willingness, to handle the product, one has to wonder why they released it in such an expensive package. The only explanation would
be an attempt to emphasize the Warhol connection, which a rare advertisement they used certainly does, in the hope that it would sell more copies. Most magazines even banned the ad on account of the record’s content. There were few reviews, and no radio spots. It’s not hard to imagine how The Velvets, who were fully aware of the relevance and significance of their music, must have felt to have their product treated so negligently by MGM while the very West Coast bands they despised – Jefferson Airplane, Mothers, Grateful Dead – were beginning to receive national promotion.

The album is still selling today. It is doubtful that it will ever stop selling as long as people listen to records. There are unfortunately no Velvet Underground videos although there are four films (apart from Warhol’s) that are known to exist, though shown rarely, if at all: Rosalind Stevenson filmed some simple footage of them in her apartment in 1965. Jonas Mekas filmed the Psychiatrists’ Convention, the first show they played with Andy Warhol’s choreography, January 8, 1966 at Delmonico’s Hotel in New York. A team filmed at the Balloon Farm, October 1966, and Ron Nemeth filmed at Poor Richard’s in Chicago, June 1966.

Apart from standing out over time and being recognized as an influence on countless other musicians,
The Velvet Underground and Nico
fulfilled the ambitions with which the band had approached the concept of playing together, creating a symphonic rock format in which they would never have to repeat themselves.

CUTRONE:
“The last time we played as The EPI (without Nico, who had returned to Ibiza) was in May 1967 at Steve Paul’s Scene where Tiny Tim used to hang out and Jim Morrison played. Before this people came to watch The EPI dance and play, they were entertained, and got a show. But
when we played at the Scene I remember Gerard, Mary and I were dancing and the audience came on stage with us and totally took over. Mary and I looked at each other and had this look on our faces. It was half desperation-half relief that finally everybody was part of it. I looked at her as if to say, ‘Okay, Mary, looks like this is it.’ And she looked at me like, ‘Yeah, this is it.’ Everybody became part of The EPI. It was a bit sad, because we couldn’t keep our glory on stage, but we were happy because what The EPI intended to do had worked – everybody was liberated to be as sick as we were acting! From that standpoint it was interesting socially that it happened that way. All of a sudden there were no dancers, there was no show; the music had just taken everybody at that point. That was the last time I danced, and I think the last time Mary and Gerard danced. I mean maybe they tried futilely after that, but it didn’t work.”