Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (27 page)

‘New Age’ ends the first side of the album with an attempt to present some encouraging statements to a confused audience as the Seventies began.

‘Head Held High’ is a straightforward story about a son whose parents advised him from the age of six to hold his head up high.

‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill’ is a song about William Burroughs.

‘I Found A Reason’: Lou Reed walks hand in hand with himself. Doug Yule does not understand what he is singing about.

‘Train Round The Bend’ is the travel weary plaint of a group that had probably been on the road for too long and missed the true inspiration of their urban roots.

‘Oh Sweet Nuthin’ is a lament, in the tradition of folk-blues, in which the singer mentions a number of characters, cataloguing their poverty and asking the listener to say a prayer for each of them. Coming as the final song on The Velvet’s final album, it also stands as a statement of their own situation.

BOCKRIS:
“
Loaded
seems to have gotten an outstandingly
better reception than the other records. Why do you think that was?”

FIELDS:
“The Velvets always had the critics by the balls, but so what?! They didn’t expect much commercially in terms of airplay, but they hoped for it. They always did. And they tried to make very catchy songs. I was so appalled at the cover of
Loaded
. In retrospect it’s so beguiling.”

SESNICK:
“It was accumulative. The times were catching up to what we represented. A lot of things had fallen by the wayside, in terms of groups and acts that fell apart, who had far more support than we did, enormously more support than we did. They had charts, they had things that record companies could relate to. But they broke up and we were still going, so it was a cumulative thing and it really was culminating very excitingly.”

In 1970 Nico recorded her third solo album and performed one concert at London’s Roundhouse. Cale released his first solo album
Vintage Violence
and collaborated with Terry Riley on
Church Of Anthrax
. Morrison and Tucker continued to play in The Velvet Underground with Yule and a replacement. Warhol produced
Trash
, directed by Morrissey, and did the cover for The Rolling Stones’
Sticky Fingers: a
zipper on a pair of jeans that unzips to reveal a pair of jockey shorts. It was reminiscent of the banana that peeled.

BOCKRIS:
“Do you remember hearing about Lou’s quitting the group?”

TUCKER:
“Yeah, I was at Max’s in fact.”

MALANGA:
“What was your reaction at Max’s and how did you feel when you saw someone else up on stage playing drums?”

TUCKER:
“Glum.”

MALANGA:
“You were pregnant at the time?”

TUCKER:
“No, when I went there I wasn’t. I had had the baby already. And here she stands right next to me 12 years old.”

MALANGA:
“What’s her name?”

TUCKER:
“Kerry.”

MALANGA:
“Were you married at the time?”

TUCKER:
“No.”

MALANGA:
“Did you go more than once?”

TUCKER:
“The night I went was the last night Lou played.
He had told Sesnick he was going to quit and Sesnick told me, then I went and found Lou and talked to him for a little bit. He was really, really upset and I was upset too, of course. He didn’t say much. He didn’t say, ‘Well here’s my reasons.’ He said he felt bad about it, but he had thought about it for a long time and had just decided that he had to go on his own. He was pretty quiet and obviously upset. When I went to go find him he was sitting on the upper section of the stairs at Max’s where people didn’t walk, alone in the dark, and I sat down next to him on the stairs. As I recall I put my arm around him and I said, ‘Louie, what’s the matter?’ There was nothing I could do. I was really saddened by it, but he was not getting along at all with Sesnick at this point. I don’t know really if he just felt Sesnick wasn’t doing anything for us, or if the personalities were just rubbing the wrong way. I think some of each. Lou and Sesnick were real close for quite a while. I basically said if you really feel that strongly about it, obviously you have to do it, and I told him I was real sad about it. I think I said something like, ‘have you really thought about this?’ I had gotten the feeling, and I’m sure this is true, that Doug was really getting on Lou’s nerves. And the little combo of Yule and Sesnick was becoming too much. Doug was getting on my nerves a little, too. Doug’s a very nice guy, okay, but, at the time anyway, he was starstruck, and began to think he was a lot more important than he was and was becoming a pain in the ass. Being pushy and prima donnaish and just a general pain in the ass, and affecting Lou in a whole different way.”

BOCKRIS:
“How could Doug Yule have had such an effect on Lou Reed?”

TUCKER:
“That’s what I meant when I said before about going to hear Doug rehearse and Lou being real excited and saying, ‘Wow! This guy’s great!’ I didn’t know this guy at all, but I just had this feeling, I sensed it somehow, and I said to myself, ‘Holy shit! Take it easy, Lou, you’re going to blow up this guy’s head and we’re going to have problems.’ And
that isn’t my usual MO. But it was just very obvious to me for some reason. And that’s what happened. I remember saying to Lou on the stairs, because I had sensed that Doug was a big part of the problem, ‘Why the hell don’t we just throw Doug out? What the hell are you bothering with this fool for if he bothers you so much?’ I can’t remember if he even answered …”

REED:
“And if it’s true that you can’t live up to everyone’s expectations, and if it’s true you cannot be all things to all people, and if it’s true you cannot be other than what you are (passage of time to the contrary), then you must be strong of heart if you wish to work the problems out in public, on stage, through work before ‘them’ who fully expect and predict in print their idol’s fall.”

“Passion – REALISM – realism was the key,” Lou Reed wrote five years later on the sleeve notes to
Metal Machine Music.
“The records were letters. Real letters from me to certain other people. I’d harboured the hope that the intelligence that once inhabited novels and films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.”

REED:
“If you play the albums chronologically they cover the growth of us as people from here to there and in there is a tale for everybody in case they want to know what they can do to survive the scenes. If you line the songs up and play them, you should be able to relate and not feel alone – I think it’s important that people don’t feel alone.”

TUCKER:
“I guess really I’m just glad I was part of it all, and very proud to have been part. I do have two regrets: (1) We didn’t stay together, and (2) A rather selfish regret, that we never taped our concerts.”

NICO:
“It was all very exciting. That’s all I can say.”

MORRISON:
“It was fun. It was not ‘Mein Kampf, My Struggle’, it was a good time. When it got to be not fun then I didn’t want to do it.”

BARNEY HOSKINS:
“Do you think there is still a cult of The Velvet Underground?”

CALE:
“Yes, and it’s distasteful to me. I mean, all the promise we showed in those two albums, we never delivered on it. I’m sure Lou feels the same way. He’s as stubborn and egocentric as I am.”

REED:
“It was a process of elimination from the start. First no more Andy, then no more Nico, then no more John, then no more Velvet Underground.”

WARHOL:
“It was great. But it’s over.”

When our story left off in August 1970, with Lou Reed’s surprise announcement that he was quitting The Velvet Underground, it left many people suspended. Apart from our readers and the more than a million hardcore Velvet Underground fans, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule found themselves in the reptilian clutches of Steve Sesnick. John Cale and Nico had both embarked on strong solo careers, but they were not unaffected by Reed’s dramatic move. In a way everything about The Velvet Underground seemed left unfinished.

And indeed, the remnants of the band – dubbed by Danny Fields The Velveteen Underground – continued to tour. They even recorded a new Velvet Underground album,
Squeeze
(1973), before they themselves finally quit and all but virtually disappeared from the public eye.

Ironically, or perhaps fatefully, the very year this book was published, 1983, marked the rumblings of early conversations between members of the original band – including Cale – which centred around a restructuring of the vague business contracts that existed, particularly in the matter of songwriting royalties – the vast majority of which had over the years accrued to Lou Reed.

These new arrangements were overseen by a New York based British lawyer named Christopher Whent, who was at the outset John Cale’s lawyer and in time came also to represent Morrison and Tucker in matters concerning The Velvet
Underground. By 1986 new contracts had been signed and all four members of the band were communicating with each other again, if sporadically. “The band went into the black with the record company in about ’83,” Whent told the British reporter, Richard Williams. “That’s when they started spitting out royalty cheques. It’s not a bad chunk of change. Not enough to live on. But a comfortable supplement.”

While the laborious healing of deep wounds proceeded there had, from 1972 onwards, grown a critical recognition of The Velvet Underground’s seminal contribution to rock’n’roll and along with it a growing worldwide audience.
Uptight
was not only published in the UK, but in Germany, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Czechoslovakia and in the USA by two separate publishers, and continues to find publishers in other territories. The Velvet Underground’s albums have been repackaged countless times in countless countries and continue to sell steadily around the world. Simultaneously, numerous bootleg albums have also appeared.

Since
Uptight
was published, the consensus of critical opinion about The Velvet Underground has swung as severely as Poe’s pendulum in their favour. “The Velvet Underground were so far ahead of their time that hearing them now it seems scarcely believable that they’re not a contemporary group,” wrote Lynden Barber in
Melody Maker
.

“They irrevocably changed rock’n’roll, igniting the avant-possibility in pop with a primal-shriek guitar tumult, harrowing balladry and Reed’s candid lyrical discourse on sex, drugs and salvation,” wrote David Fricke in
Rolling Stone
.

“If The Velvet Underground were not the best rock band of all, they may well have been the most influential,” wrote Richard Williams in
The Independent
.

Steve Mass, founder and proprietor of the Mudd Club, the most famous rock’n’roll club in the world from 1978-1983, had befriended Cale and recalled several discussions with him about getting the band back together.

STEVE MASS:
“To me, John Cale was this giant catalyst on
the rock scene. He’d put the whole avant-garde and traditional rock together and that stuck in my mind. And the more I got to know John the more I felt that he was like a Mozart. He couldn’t express himself vocally. He expressed himself through music. As I got to know John I said, ‘You’ve got to get back with The Velvet Underground.’ And he’d say, ‘That’s utter nonsense. That’s bullshit.’ We’d be sitting in a bar and I’d keep harping on it. Obviously there were no royalties coming from The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed controlled the publishing. It was the last thing he wanted to consider. I said, ‘John, you have to do this, you were the resident genius.’”

All these disparate strands of growing interest in the band were gathered together under the umbrella of The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, established in 1978 by a certain Philip Milstein who produced an irregularly published but excellent magazine documenting the group’s history,
What Goes On
. After running the organisation successfully and with some appreciation from band members, particularly Morrison and Tucker, Milstein had passed it into the capable hands of one of its major contributors, M.C. Kostek, under whose auspices it has continued to thrive. Anybody interested in getting in touch with The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society can write to M.C. Kostek c/o The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, 5721 SE Laguna Avenue, Stuart FL 34997-7828 USA.

As the 1980s proceeded, hope grew among the fans and some members of the band that a reunion of some sort might occur in the spirit of that time, during which the Sixties, and particularly the Warhol Sixties and The Velvet Underground’s contribution, was scrutinised and presented in a new, altogether more positive light. Furthermore, in the mid-Eighties, two studio albums, recorded in 1968 and 1969 and culled from the vaults of MGM were released to critical acclaim and steady sales.

This growing interest was capped in 1986 by an excellent
BBC Television documentary on the band made by Kym Evans and Mary Harron. It was the most comprehensive visual documentation of their history, including several interviews with all the members except Reed, who simply gave permission for a brief clip of excerpts from some other interviews he had recently given to be used.

Of all four original members of the band, Reed always seemed the most reluctant to consider, indeed the most troubled by the concept of, a Velvet Underground reunion. Reed became increasingly morose as he was repeatedly questioned about it during yearly publicity tours promoting his most recent solo record. He finally snapped at one journalist that he didn’t like high-school reunions.

However, just as he had picked the band off the sawdust floor of the Cafe Bizarre and transported them into his Cinderella realms of magic and multimedia in 1966, Andy Warhol once again unexpectedly brought the band – or more specifically Reed and Cale – together again by suddenly and very unexpectedly dying on February 22, 1987, a day that will go down in infamy in the history of the American medical profession. Warhol had gone into hospital for a routine gall-bladder operation, but due to a lack of care during the post-operative recovery period, had been allowed to drown in his own fluids.