Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (23 page)

KRAMER:
“No, I think they had more of a rep with people who were into art, a cultish kind of thing. We had a group of 15–20 of The Mother fuckers there and they’re all rabble-rousing and they’re all MC5 fans and then we had just the kids that had heard our record and come out to see us. There seemed to be two different kinds of energy ’cos everything The Velvets did was more sinister and blue green, whereas our thing was just blast blast blast, real loud. We had these huge stacks of Marshal amps and they probably had little gear that they brought from New York. I seem to remember they went over real well and they had their fans, but it was two completely different things. We were trying to be a show band and we had these spangly clothes and sequins, and The Velvets were very plain looking, with their New York dungarees.”

MALANGA:
“Is there any comparison between The Velvet Underground and the MC5?”

MORRISON:
“I have always liked the MC5 musically. I didn’t like their being associated with narrow political causes. I consider music to be more important than politics, and much more important than pissant politicians like John Sinclair. I thought they were surrounded by and exploited by leeches.”

BOCKRIS:
“As you moved into ’69, did you and the group feel that things were on the up and up?”

SESNICK:
“Definitely. We had at this point made contact with Ahmet Ertegun. I’d been in touch with him all along.
We sent letters back and forth, there’d been phone conversations. We were getting ready for our move to another level entirely. Things were progressing beautifully.”

MORRISON:
“Lou had a place over in the East 60s then. He was paying an outrageous amount of money for it so I thought I’d go over and see what this palace looked like. Well, you know how those high-rise apartments are – they’re real barren. And his was totally unfurnished, nothing except some kind of pallet that he had pushed up against one corner. And a tape recorder, and some old tapes and I guess a notebook, and an acoustic guitar. There was nothing in the fridge except a half-empty container of papaya juice. I mean nothing, not even vitamins. It was just the picture of isolation and despair.”

FIELDS:
“After the glamour died down it was Lou Reed and a back-up band. It was like any other rock group on the road.”

1969 reveals The Velvet Underground in a whole new light. Their third album,
The Velvet Underground
, was released in March. The package itself is mysterious. The front cover, a photograph taken late one night at the Factory by Billy Linich, with whom Reed maintained a close friendship, shows Lou smiling with a copy of a fashion magazine in his hands. The magazine’s name
Harper’s Bazaar
, has been air-brushed out. Yule and Tucker sit to the left, pointedly looking at Lou, while Morrison sits in the foreground to the right, looking down into the right-hand bottom corner of the photograph and definitively away from Reed.

TUCKER:
“As I recall, Lou had just said something about the cover of the magazine and we were listening to him, that’s why Doug and I are looking directly at him.”

The back cover lists the songs, with no writers credits for the first time, and the name of the engineer, the aforementioned Val Valentin. The sole remaining credit goes to Billy Linich (listed as Billy Name) for photos and convolutions.”

REED:
“He’s part of the Factory. He does all our covers.
He’s a divinity in action on earth. He does pictures that are unspeakably beautiful. Just pure space. For the people who have one foot on Earth and another foot on Venus, they would like that kind of picture because it’s out-and-out space.”

The convolutions on the back cover were a sitting-from-the-knees-up-eye-drooping-cigarette-in-hand photograph of Reed which has been cut in half and turned upside-down with one half juxtaposed to the other. No wonder some writers began to see The Velvet Underground as Lou Reed’s backing band. Yet the packaging of the album also suggests, as does the advertising copy, that they are a band who did things together. According to Yule it was Sesnick’s idea that the less said about something the easier it is to change it. Everything was as discreet as possible, i.e., on song-credits he’d ask if anyone helped with a song, if so they got co-credit, even if they only did a little bit. This way everyone was kept vaguely in the dark. There is nothing vague, however, about the record itself.

BOCKRIS:
“MGM switched you from Verve onto MGM for this record.”

SESNICK:
“Correct. That was my doing. Why we did that was very complicated, and eventually led to getting us to Columbia or Atlantic. It was a movement out of the company.”

BOCKRIS:
“So you were already moving in that direction?”

SESNICK:
“Oh hell, we were getting bigger and bigger and they were getting more chaotic with the loss of presidents. I was dealing with a different president every month. They went through presidents constantly, which was good for us at the time because I could call an enormous number of shots and get us the bookings and the support that we needed without having to draw up new contracts. So we were on our way pretty much at that point. Either they were going to really do it for us, and they’d be the company that we would be with, or we would be with another company.”

BOCKRIS:
“Were they actually giving you more support than they had on the first two records?”

SESNICK:
“In reality, yes, they were. They were picking up advertising, hotels and limousines. I managed to get a lot of coverage from MGM because we weren’t making much money, we had no money, and if we had had to cover everything we’d have been in serious debt. We’d have been finished, so I had to really work around that.”

The Velvet Underground
LP was markedly different in both its sound and mood. The music was almost folk-like in its simplicity. It is also a realization of Reed’s view of a rock record as a unified whole.

REED:
“This song would follow this song because this has to do with this and this has to do with that, and this will answer that and then you’ve got this character who matches this character or offsets this character. The third album was really the quintessence of that idea, because it started out with ‘Candy Says’ where this girl asks all these questions. And then the next song is ‘What Goes On’ where this guy says, ‘Wow, you’re asking me all these questions, you’re driving me crazy, you’re making me feel like I’m upside-down.’ And the third thing they’ve decided that they’re talking about is love, so he’s going to give her an example of ‘Some Kinds Of Love’ and he talks about all kinds of love being the same as long as it’s love, and that’s what he says to her over and over and gives different examples of it. He’s trying to reach her and she’s like saying, ‘I don’t understand,’ you know, but that’s stated at the beginning. Then he gets into ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, where he talks about another kind of love which is like adultery. Then you get to ‘Jesus’, which brings in a whole different kind of love, which is like religious love. Then they start thinking, ‘Wow, I’m
beginning to see the light.’ At the end of ‘Beginning To See The Light’ it says ‘how does it feel to be loved’ which means the person doesn’t know, and it also says a number of other strange things, such as, ‘here we go again, I thought that you were my friend,’ you know, which is such a sad thing, especially if you’re going through it with a person twice, I mean that means it happened more than once. Then he says, ‘Wow, I’m set free, everything’s fine!’ Then he says, ‘That’s the story’; see ‘That’s The Story Of My Life’. No difference between the words good and bad, wrong and right are dead, no categories, everything is just fine. So what happens, he runs into ‘The Murder Mystery’. All this unintelligible stuff. You know, but the intent was really noble. I just meant finally after seeing the light, explaining everything and getting things right, and finally saying now I got it right BAM, what happens. A whole new series of problems, y’know new level, new problems. ‘Afterhours’ was like a sum-up, like it was kind of the cap, the frosting on the cake as far as I was concerned. I mean it’s a terribly sad song and I didn’t sing it because I figured people wouldn’t believe me if I sang it. But I knew Maureen, for instance, had a very innocent voice.”

‘Candy Says’ is a song about the late transvestite Candy Darling who would appear in Reed’s classic ‘Walk On The Wild Side’.

‘Some Kinda Love’ is one of the songs with which Lou Reed makes rock lyrics function as literature.

‘Pale Blue Eyes’

MORRISON:
“Cale’s departure allowed Lou Reed’s sensitive, meaningful side to hold sway. Why do you think ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ happened on the third album, with Cale out of there? That’s a song about Lou’s old girlfriend in Syracuse. I
said, ‘Lou, if I wrote a song like that I wouldn’t make you play it.’ My position on that album was one of acquiescence.”

‘Jesus’: (figure it out for yourself)

‘Beginning To See The Light’: Reed discovers, once again, some kind of reaffirmation in the distinction of being loved.

‘I’m Set Free’: Reed’s statement is undercut by his assertion that he has been set free only to find a new illusion.

‘That’s The Story Of My Life’: Even though he accepts Billy Linich’s dictum that the words wrong and right are dead, the difference between right and wrong is the story of his life.

‘The Murder Mystery’: No attempt at explication. Eight-minutes and 35-seconds. A mystery to all for all time (the lyrics were published in the winter 1972 issue of
The Paris Review
#53, as a poem).

‘Afterhours’ is a celebration of afterhours clubs.

MORRISON:
“We did the third album deliberately as anti-production. It sounds like it was done in a closet – it’s flat, and that’s the way we wanted it. The songs are all very quiet and it’s kind of insane. I like the album.”

RADIO INTERVIEWER
(1969): “Any plans for the future?”

REED:
“Not really. Just to play around. We really enjoy playing. I think it’s fantastic that we can play this stuff in public and that people like it. It turns me on that it turns them on. We don’t have any point to prove or any axe to grind. It’s just nice that people show up and that we can play for them. We have fun.”

BOCKRIS:
“Was the reaction to the third record markedly different than the reaction to the second?”

SESNICK:
“Not that I can remember. The mystique of the group was such that no matter what they did it was accepted.
We had set that in motion from the outset. We organized the management and the playing, we knew exactly what we were doing, and we got the response and reaction that we felt were positive without having things on charts or airplay. We had to measure ourselves completely differently to most acts, and look at our progress in a different way. As long as we were continually being recorded and were in demand around the country we were making progress.”

BOCKRIS:
“The third album is a very different record. Was the reaction any different?”

TUCKER:
“Ah, Jesus, I never saw any reviews. I was pleased with the direction we were going and with the new calmness in the group, and thinking about a good future, hoping people would smarten up and some record company would take us on and do us justice.”

“Underground by virtue of their name, the Velvet Underground sound as if they’re about to break through to a large audience. The four man group have a passel of intriguing thoughts to give out with. Good work.”

“The Velvet Underground takes a journey through musical psychedelia, low-keyed in the main, but a trip that should be interesting to a good number of listeners. The Velvet Underground composed, arranged and conducted all selections on the album. Vocally and instrumentally, the group creates an evocative, sensuous sound, and the LP could pick up considerable sales.”

BOCKRIS:
“MGM had switched you from Verve to their larger label. Were they treating you better?”

TUCKER:
“Not that I knew of.”

BOCKRIS:
“It would seem to be the album with which they could have made the attempt to present you in a more commercial way.”

TUCKER:
“Yeah, but still they just didn’t bother putting anything behind it.”

BOCKRIS:
“Well, why were they putting your records out at this point, then?”

TUCKER:
“I don’t know. I used to think they just signed us to keep us away from other people. Which is stupid, but …”

BOCKRIS:
“Were you still living out on Long Island with your parents?”

TUCKER:
“Yeah. I had had an apartment in the city for a little while, and then I moved back because I had no money.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was the financial situation?”

TUCKER:
“Grim.”

BOCKRIS:
“Were you living on $200 a month?”

TUCKER:
“Probably less. I used to go, when I’d be home, and get a temporary job for a week, to make some money. I didn’t need money as much as Sterling, Lou and Doug, because they had their apartments and I lived at home rent free, so that didn’t really bother me. If they got more than me, they needed it. We never got any royalty cheques, that’s for damn sure. Maybe one or two little ones that I can recall.”

BOCKRIS:
“But when you went into the studio to make an album would you get some kind of minimal advance?”

TUCKER:
“Advance! Oh Gee, I don’t think we ever got any kind of an advance.”

BOCKRIS:
“Well, wait a minute, you must have made some money.”

TUCKER:
“We made some but it went pretty fast. I didn’t see shit. We bought new equipment now and then too and we had to use it to travel because MGM didn’t pay for any of that, then we had living expenses. It wasn’t a hell of a lot. We went out playing because that’s where we made money.”