Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (20 page)

REED:
“We wanted to ultimately work on a tape that would take up every minute of every hour of every day of the entire year! I didn’t bother to figure out how many hours that is. It would just be one extremely long tape and it would fit into your wall and it would be personalized because what would happen is that you would come to us – The Velvet Underground – and say I want a tape from you and we’d say, ‘Here.’ Then you’d take that and we’d take you by the hand over to Gary (Kellgren, engineer) at the recording studio and Gary would stare at them a lot until he figured he knew them and then he would reflect their personality and then they’d take the tape back and they’d install it in the wall and it would be like theirs and it would go on all day like one of Andy’s movies, like
Empire
could be on the other wall, like the music going on all the time. Like John said the other day the albums that should come out would have a colouring book and toys. People are starting to do that but they haven’t really gotten into it. They’re messing around with covers trying to be hip and doing things but they haven’t really started what you could have. But it would go on all the time.”

WILSON:
“You can tell a man by the records he plays.”

REED:
“We’d supply arm-bands and labels. We’d re-classify …”

WILSON:
“Fantastic. It’s frightening and yet enormous and it seems logical in terms of things that are going on now.”

CUTRONE:
“I loved
White Light/White Heat
. Again it was this great understatement. The cover was a darkened photograph of Billy Linich’s tattoo that you had to scrutinize to see the image. It was so cool that people weren’t ready. It was just too cool, it was the coolest thing in the world at that moment. Nobody knew what white light was. People thought it was acid. And white heat? Nobody understood that it was an amphetamine rush that made your toes hot and made your eyes go blind and see just clear white heat. I think the words, the imagery, the subtlety of the album cover confused a lot of people. Again, The Rolling Stones were making 3-D album covers, The Beatles had beautiful little pictures of them looking cute, and then this dark album comes out with a very subdued picture of a tattoo. It doesn’t fit in anywhere, so that was strange.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was The Velvets’ reaction to the reception of
White Light/White Heat?

CUTRONE:
“Everybody’s egos were so strong that they already assumed they were the greatest. In terms of money I’m sure it hurt. I mean it would be great to be successful in terms of money, but musically there was no compromise. It was ‘go on, believe in this, do this,’ and as it turned out twelve years later they proved to be absolutely on target. Now the sales on that album, if it’s even available, are probably phenomenal. I don’t run into too many people these days who don’t know about The Velvet Underground, even just from word of mouth. It’s a pity that some of their records are unavailable because they’re much better than a lot of the stuff that we hear now.”

BOCKRIS:
“Did you feel
White Light/White Heat
was a great record when it came out and people were really going to like it?”

TUCKER:
“I was very happy with it. I thought it was a real good record. We were all disappointed once more by MGM. It was never in the stores, the same bullshit. In certain towns like Boston it did well and everybody loved it. A lot of people who could get their hands on it really liked it. But our record audience was limited to people who saw us live. Because we were never on the radio MGM just didn’t do anything to promote US. I mean the fans that we made then were really crazed. And they still are. I’m stunned by what people still think of us.”

BOCKRIS:
“How did you feel about things at the beginning of ’68?”

TUCKER:
“I was always very positive about the group. I really did believe that we had something special, not in a Beatles way, in a more important way. I really did think we were damn good.”

BOCKRIS:
“And presumably the rest of the group felt that too?”

TUCKER:
“They enjoyed what they were doing. I don’t know if maybe being males they didn’t allow themselves to think, ‘Holy Shit, we’re great!’”

BOCKRIS:
“Were you performing much when the record came out?”

TUCKER:
“I couldn’t swear that in the month surrounding the release of the record we were playing, but Sesnick kept us pretty busy. We went to California a couple of times, and to Canada, St. Louis and Texas.”

BOCKRIS:
“How was Sesnick to work with?”

TUCKER:
“I enjoyed him. I always had fun with him, liked him a lot. He was terribly enthusiastic and incredibly positive.”

BOCKRIS:
“You felt your relations with him were pretty straightforward?”

TUCKER:
“I did at the time. I’m really not sure quite what to think now. I knew he always had our interest at heart and he worked damn hard. I think one reason it just didn’t work,
was that he just had too high of a dream, seeing us as the next Beatles and having people screaming in the streets. Having that big of a dream, he turned down a lot of things, thinking this isn’t the right time to do that.”

BOCKRIS:
“How were relations in the group?”

TUCKER:
“Real good.”

BOCKRIS:
“Wasn’t the developing split between John and Lou causing a lot of tension?”

TUCKER:
“At certain times there’d be a lot of tension between them, but I got along just great with everybody so I never felt, ‘Oh boy, this sucks. I think I’ll quit.’”

BOCKRIS:
“Was Steve Sesnick like a fifth member of the group?”

TUCKER:
“Yes, he was.”

BOCKRIS:
“By the beginning of 1968 were you living in New York?”

SESNICK:
“Yes.”

BOCKRIS:
“Did you all feel very positive about this new beginning?”

SESNICK:
“Yes, we felt very positive, we did, very much so, we thought the record was great. We certainly were shocked when radio stations didn’t think it was so great. But we were used to that. We never had airplay then – it just didn’t happen – so we didn’t care about it.”

BOCKRIS:
“I presumed that you must have felt very positive at the beginning of ’68, yet ’68 was a pretty bleak year in many ways.”

SESNICK:
“Oh, not really, I don’t think so, I went to a party that year with Lou – it was fun.”

BOCKRIS:
“How did people react to the second album?”

MORRISON:
“They were stunned.”

What exactly did they serve up on
White Light/White Heat
, the only album recorded in their original formation without
the presence of any other singers or influences other than their engineer Gary Kellgren and producer Tom Wilson?

‘White Light/White Heat’: A raucous, humorous, celebration of amphetamine. Wayne McGuire, writing in
Crawdaddy
, said: “The track ‘White Light/White Heat’ best illustrates my contention that John Cale is the heaviest bass player in the country today. Most bass players play two-dimensional notes, but John plays three-dimensional granite slabs which reveal an absolute mastery of his instruments and a penetrating awareness of the most minute details of his music.”

‘The Gift’: Author Lou Reed, never puts a foot wrong throughout the piece, possibly inspired by Shirley Jackson’s short story
The Lottery
, which is perfectly related by a deadpan John Cale in his best “BBC voice”.

WILSON:
“Let me hip you to the stereo version of this record. When you’re at home you take that balance-control, you flip it over to one side and you get the information that’s on one groove-wall of your record and that’s the short story by itself without the music. Of course, if you just reverse your balance-control or your channel-selector you’ll get some very groovy music to hang out with somebody you’ll like. And if you’re a mad fiend like we are, you’ll listen to them altogether. That’s where we’re at. We got stereo prefrontal lobes.”

‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’: A Burroughsian rendition of the Lady Godiva legend.

‘Here She Comes Now’ is a rather pretty 4-line dissertation on the possibility that a girl might come.

‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ is an intense declaration of love for a girl who has been dead for some time.

McGUIRE:
“This track contains one of the most pregnant and highly charged moments I’ve ever heard in music: a split-second pause of silence after the second ‘my mind’s split open’ foreshadowing the following feedback explosion.”

CALE:
“Lou’s an excellent guitar player. He’s nuts. It has more to do with the spirit of what he’s doing than playing.”

REED:
“When Jimi Hendrix came over the most striking thing beside his truly incredible guitar virtuosity was his savage, if playful, rape of his instrument. It would squeal and whine going off into a crescendo of leaps and yells that only chance could program. (See, we are extensions of Mr Cage, it’s all so modern and primitive at the same time, how simultaneous.) Anyone who does that night after night must go mad. It was the frenzy of self, for frustration can only be acted out in violent ways, never mime. If any part of it becomes sham, then vital energies are used to mimic the worst aspects of self and both mind and body are soon exhausted.”

‘Sister Ray’ was written on a train coming back from a bad gig in Connecticut.

REED:
“The only way to go through something is to go right into the middle, the only way to do it is to not kid around. Storm coming – you go right through the centre and you may come out alright. Most people don’t even know there’s a centre. All the people I’ve known who were fabulous have either died, or flipped, or gone to India. Either that or they’ve concentrated on one focal point which is what I’m doing. ‘Sister Ray’ was done as a joke – no, not as a joke, but it has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear. When it came to putting the music to it, it had to be spontaneous. The jam came about right there in the studio. We didn’t use any splices or anything. I had been listening to a lot of Cecil
Taylor and Ornette Coleman, and wanted to get something like that with a rock’n’roll feeling. When we did ‘Sister Ray’, we turned up to ten flat out, leakage all over the place. That’s it. They asked us what we were going to do. We said, ‘We’re going to start.’ They said ‘Who’s playing bass?’ We said, ‘There is no bass.’ They asked us when it ends. We didn’t know. When it ends, that’s when it ends. It did a lot to the music of the Seventies. We were doing the whole heavy metal trip back then. I mean if ‘Sister Ray’ is not an example of heavy metal, then nothing is. But we discarded it because we got tired of it. Maureen was perfect on that song. She works for a computer company now, and you can tell from us that she was born to the job. All we wanted was someone who could play on a telephone book.”

“‘Sister Ray’ shows that recorded pop is at last making decisive steps in a direction with far-reaching implications for the creative development not only of pop itself but of ‘serious’ music too,” wrote Tim Souster in
The Listener
, July 4, 1968 (the album had a May release in the UK). The long laudatory review focusing almost entirely on this single track ends, “A final note of congratulations to the producer Tom Wilson for having got onto a record a very creditable replica of a pop group’s live sound. I have never before heard the aura of high frequencies and distortion which binds the sound together into a single phenomenon coming out of a gramophone record.”

Summing up the whole album and The Velvets progress in his
Crawdaddy
article, Wane McGuire writes: “Why is John Cale the heaviest bass player in the country today? Because his nervous system is an aristocrat among nervous systems, because of the deep dark electricity he is able to convey through his bass and viola. And why is Maureen Tucker the perfect drummer for the VU? Because of her spirituality and nervous system. No other drummer in the world could play the archetypal 1234 with such perfection, with a weight that verges on religious ritual (not necessarily a
Black Mass). And it is that ritualistic quality which is a mainstay of the Underground’s powerful stylistic unity, a stylistic element which is immediately recognizable from the initial bar as the driving pulse of a machine-like organism (just listen to one bar of ‘The Gift’). In essence, she’s playing Elvin Jones to Lou Reed’s Coltrane or Sonny Murray to Reed’s Albert Ayler. Lou Reed is fast becoming an incisive lyricist, creating a folk mythology of New York City and our generation which rings deep and true through the pap of fumbling unfocused artificial surrealistic imagery and facile pseudo-mystical-morality lessons produced by most new groups.”

The critics were not completely deaf: but MGM continued to be dumb and did nothing to market their valuable product, so despite a few reviews, the excellent album received sparse airplay and sold less copies than its predecessor, peaking in the
Billboard
charts at 200.

Billboard
Album Review, February 24, 1968,
White Light/ White Heat:
Dealers who cater to the underground market will find this disk a hot seller, for The Velvet Underground (minus Nico) feature intriguing lyrics penned by two of the group, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison. Though the words tend to be drowned out by the pulsating instrumentation, those not minding to cuddle up to the speakers will joy to narrative songs such as ‘The Gift’, the story of a boy and a girl.

WILSON:
“After I see the things that people are willing to buy and do, I sometimes think that a 13-year-old girl who buys a rock’n’roll record may be exercising just as intelligent a choice as her parents are when they do important things.”