Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (28 page)

Brought together by ex-Warhol Factory manager and photographer Billy Name at the Warhol memorial service luncheon on April 1, 1987, and inspired by the artist Julian Schnabel at the same event, Cale and Reed joined forces in 1988 to collaborate on a suite of songs which were released in 1990 on an album called
Songs For Drella
(Warhol’s nickname when they had worked with him). An attempt at a new form which Reed dubbed Biorock, the songs covered Warhol’s life chronologically, mixing fact and fiction to portray the relationship between Warhol, Reed and Cale. More than anything else it gave Reed an opportunity to apologise to Andy for turning his back on him in the early
Eighties, after a long love-hate relationship that had raged through the Seventies. It also allowed him to have the last word on the cutting remarks about him in Warhol’s posthumously published diaries.

Songs For Drella
was an artistic success, garnering a large amount of attention in the international press. Coming on the heels of
New York
, Reed’s finest solo work in years, and Cale’s outstanding recent album,
Words For The Dying, Songs For Drella
solidified and brought into focus both of their careers and reputations at the beginning of the 1990s.

It did not, however, appear to build a bridge to a Velvet Underground reunion. If anything Reed became more irritated by the constant questions about it. Unbeknown to the public, the new collaboration between Cale and Reed had actually resulted in a decision on both their parts never to work together again under any circumstances. By the time the album was completed they were, like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the mid-Eighties, barely speaking to each other.

However, something stronger than Reed’s will, or the conflict between Reed and Cale, continued to pursue them in the growing idolatry of Warhol, whose fame multiplied in death like Marilyn Monroe’s and James Dean’s, particularly in Europe where a necrophiliac relationship with American icons has been an established tradition since the end of World War II. In June, 1991, the Cartier Foundation in France staged an enormous Warhol event to inaugurate the opening of his retrospective in Paris and all four original members of The Velvet Underground were invited to attend, all expenses paid. Nico had died in an accident on the island of lbiza in 1988. Reed and Cale had agreed to give a brief performance of some of the
Songs For Drella
at the event. At the last moment, Lou decided that it would – under the circumstances – be churlish not to invite Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison to join them on stage for at least one song.

LOU REED:
“We were scooting around that morning,
going, ‘Hmmm, we could … It’s possible … No, no … Oh, life’s too short.’”

MAUREEN TUCKER:
“Me and Sterling turned up for the show, it got all emotional and five minutes later we were on stage playing ‘Heroin’, totally unrehearsed. I remember thinking, ‘Shit, that’s Lou Reed out there, that’s John and Sterling and this is still the best band in the world.”

It was not, however, until November to December 1992, when the band convened in New York for the first ever business meeting to oversee a growing roster of VU product, that the story of their reformation really begins.

MORRISON:
“What distinguished the business meetings in the past was that they were attended by our lawyers … But this was one we actually convened, in the flesh, and that to me was unprecedented. That was the first time we’d ever done that, John, that was historic!”

CALE:
“Paris was a surprise, inasmuch as it actually happened. Nothing would have gotten done without Lou thinking it was a good idea There was nothing happening for him in 1993 so he decided to try it. So we put together a couple of days’ rehearsal in New York just to see if we could keep time. It was very interesting – there was the sound all over again. It turned out to be fantastic. All the original enthusiasm was there.”

MORRISON:
“So we concluded that we could play. The next question was do we want to?”

A four-week rehearsal period was scheduled in New York for May, 1993. There was some trepidation as to how matters would flow between them once they passed through the initial euphoria of discovering each other again, but things started well. Lou and Sterling, who had talked least during the interim, initially found great joy in re-igniting their guitar partnership. And the combination of Sterling and Maureen served as a buffer between John and Lou that seemed to click perfectly into the emotional engine of the group. Yet to visitors it was obvious that, as one put it, “It’s
Lou’s world. We just live here.” It was undisputed that the reunion would never have happened had it not come from Reed’s desire. And it also appeared that Lou, not John, was now the musical as well as lyrical conductor of The Velvet Underground.

Reed repeatedly said that he was there to have “fun”. Perhaps the others had forgotten what “fun” was for Lou Reed. For the director in Lou, for example, it was fun to pit his wife – and
defacto
band manager – Sylvia, against the other members of the group, encouraging her to treat them like dogshit. It was “fun” to cut into Sterling in front of the others when he had a tuning problem. As the rehearsals neared their end, Morrison was heard to express the emotion that had he known it was going to be like this he would have stayed at home.

What saved the day, perhaps, certainly what brought the band through rehearsals that could have ended the reunion, was the fact that, whilst part of Lou had proudly remained fifteen years old, the other three had matured in the intervening two years. Maureen was a mother of five. John, who like Lou had abstained from drugs and alcohol for years now, and was weathered by working on
Songs For Drella
, had discovered how to pacify rather than pander to Reed’s little chess moves. Both Sterling and John were able to empathise with the psychodrama of Reed’s daily life and thereby handle, rather than strangle, him.

Even Lou appeared to have changed on the surface. On the day he berated Sterling so nastily, for example, he had later apologized, astonishing his long-suffering friend. But the nerve of Lou’s “fun” was inescapably present in the persona of Sylvia, who had by now transformed into what her husband had once been famous for being – a rock monster. She went out of her way to belittle the other members of the band, particularly Cale. Treating him like a know-nothing twerp, she constantly compared John to Lou, pointing out to highly amused observers – since the opposite
was so blatantly true – how much better than John Lou now looked. Sylvia made it as transparent as hydrochloric acid that in her opinion John, Sterling and Maureen were simply Lou’s band, and all owed their lives to Lou’s generosity without which none of them would have existed. In this Sylvia betrayed, for someone in the music business, an astonishing lack of understanding of the mechanics of a rock band and a blind spot about the essential collaboration between Reed and Cale, which had played a larger role in Lou’s life as a musician than any other single force. As Cale would regretfully conclude after the whole “reunion” crashed to an abrupt end later that summer, from the outset measures were taken to separate Lou from the band. As a result, the sad truth is that although Lou played with The Velvet Underground through that June and July in Europe, he never really
re-joined
the band.

As soon as it was announced that The Velvet Underground would undertake a European tour in the summer, requests for interviews poured in from numerous publications in every country they would play, primarily in the UK, where the VU had their most loyal following, with France a close second. This series of interviews was organised with steely control by Sylvia Reed. She refused to allow any access without a guarantee that the band, or Lou, would be featured on the publication’s cover. The results were impressive. The following montage of quotes sets the stage for the drama that was to unfold.

LOU REED:
“Delmore Schwartz wrote this great poem called
The Heavy Bear That Walks With Me
, and The Velvet Underground is going to play with this giant bear coming along with it called
Myth
, and we will confront the
Myth
. The critics are going to have to compare it to the records, then see whether they like hearing it live, or if they think it doesn’t hold up. We will confront the
Myth
… and we will show them something of the human side of it all.”

JOHN CALE:
“It was early February when we first showed
up to play together – in this room. We’ve got together over the years in every possible permutation: me and Lou, me and Sterling, Moe and Sterling, Moe and Lou, me, Sterling and Lou, but never with the four of us. So now we are. Straight away in rehearsals, the sound was there – basically a very good garage band that doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to balance out the instruments. When we tried ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’, everybody was running around trying to get rid of the whistling harmonics on the viola, but with all the technology in the world you won’t tame this thing. When it works, it’s fun. It sounds majestic. When the songs click and we’re just getting our teeth around them, then you remember the great things about being in the band. So we’re in the process of loosening up. Internally we are the same, but externally it isn’t the same.”

REED:
“It’s not a reunion, it’s a continuum. It feels better now than it did then. We’re all wiser. It just sort of happened. I don’t recall anybody saying, ‘Hey, let’s play,’ it just kinda came about. We just mutually thought in our own little worlds that it might be a hell of a lot of fun to do.”

MOE TUCKER:
“This reunion is basically happening because all four of us really wanted it to, even if it’s just for this one tour. I guess you can expect to hear all of those wonderful Velvet Underground hits! I personally don’t think it’s either necessary or expected that we play any new material, but I kind of suspect that John and Lou won’t be happy with just playing old songs. We haven’t made any decision about exactly what we’ll be playing yet. If this was five years ago or seven years ago, I think it might not work. But we’ve all had a lot more contact in the past few years and we realize we all like each other. It sounds remarkably the same, which I’m very happy with.”

MORRISON:
“People have wanted us to play for a long time and there was no real reason not to, if the four of us felt like we wanted to play together. We decided that we did, so let’s do what’s right. We’d never talked about doing it
before. Everybody was too busy doing other things. But certainly it was something that could be contemplated since 1990.”

CALE:
“That’s always kinda the way things happened with us, anyway. There was no massive agenda and there was no great determination … It was like these four people wandering around in a daze and suddenly they decided to do something.”

MORRISON:
“What’s unique about this is that, in the past, the fact of our playing wasn’t newsworthy in itself the way this is. Now, I would rather play well than be ‘significant’! But the attention is nice – it would be misdirected or ill-timed or useless unless we actually do accomplish something musically. Whether it turns out to be a good idea or a bad idea, we’ll find out. It won’t leave me crushed either way. So many bands are playing Velvet Underground material, why the hell can’t The Velvet Underground once in a while if they feel like it?”

JOHN CALE:
“We’re going to attract a lot of ambulance chasers, people who want to see us fail. I read this thing in England which said: ‘Here are some bands who shouldn’t even think about re-forming.’ We were one of them. The British press was always like that. I’m just having a little pokey. ‘Oh, look, The Velvets are re-forming and they didn’t even bother to ask anybody.’ There were four distinct personalities always. I was worried for a while … But one thing that Lou’s doing and he doesn’t normally do in his own work is he’s going to wail a lot on guitar – he’s going to have fun.

“We can take it anywhere we want. There are plenty of ideas floating around. But, for a start, I’ve had to learn a lot of those songs, because I never played them originally. That was the work of the first week. This week we’re starting to perform groups of songs: four, five, six songs in a row, until we’ve built it up and it’s become like a second skin. Then we can throw away the ones that don’t work. And I expect that
when we get out on the road we’ll start trying new things – an improvisation, a song we haven’t rehearsed.”

TUCKER:
“My vision of what the audience is going to be is what keeps me from getting glum about all the hoop-la and the machine. I want them to go away happy. I think we all feel that way. There’s just so many people who have loved us for such a longtime and have continued to buy our records and think so much of us. To me, this is a little bit of thanks.”

REED:
“How long do you need to have it demonstrated that this was for real, completely sincere, above-board and meant in exactly the way it seemed to be meant? Look at the records. They speak for themselves.”

As much as they enjoyed playing together, as the time of their departure approached the tensions that faced all of them became apparent. Old wounds open as easily between collaborators in rock as between lovers. Also, there was the undisputed fact, as one British scribe, Terry Staunton, pointed out, that “The Velvets have more to lose than any other band. No other band in history has been surrounded by so much mythology, no other band has had such far-reaching influence on the music that followed them. It could all be forgotten …”

On May 25, The Velvet Underground flew first class from New York to London. They spent a few days in London rehearsing, then travelled to Edinburgh to face their first commercial audience as a band together since 1968, playing for the first time outside America. Luna were to open for them on the majority of the dates. The group’s Dean Wareham kept a diary of the tour’s progress.