Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (3 page)

LaMonte Young, the second major influence on Cale, is an important American composer whose work has been infrequently heard by his own choice. His 1958 ‘Trio For Strings’, which inspired composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich has, for example, never been recorded.

In 1963, under the aegis of Aaron Copland, Cale was awarded a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study Modern Composition with the Franco-Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis in the Eastman Conservatory at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts. According to Copland they originally met in England where he saw Cale perform and subsequently made possible his arrival in the States for that summer of study at Tanglewood. However, Copland later decided Cale couldn’t play his work at Tanglewood because it was too destructive. “He didn’t want his pianos destroyed.” So John went to New York City and found LaMonte Young, who was writing pieces in which the musician talked to the piano or, in one memorable incident, screamed at a plant until it died.

CALE:
“LaMonte was perhaps the best part of my education and my introduction to musical discipline.

“We formed The Dream Syndicate, which consisted of two amplified voices, an amplified violin and my amplified viola. The concept of the group was to sustain notes for two hours at a time. LaMonte would hold the lowest notes, I would hold the next three on my viola, his wife Marion would hold the next note and this fellow Tony Conrad would hold the top note. That was my first group experience and what an experience it was!

“It was so different. I mean the tapes are art objects. Some
people who came to our concerts know what it was like, but it is the only example of that kind of music in the world. The Indians use the drone also, but they use a totally different tuning system and though they attempt a scientific approach, they don’t really have it buttoned down like we did.”

The members of The Dream Syndicate, motivated by a scientific and mystical fascination with sound, spent long hours in rehearsals learning to provide sustained meditative drones and chants. Their rigorous style served to discipline John and developed his knowledge of the just intonation system. He also learned to use his viola in a new amplified way which would lead to the powerful droning effect that is so strong in the first two Velvet Underground records.

CALE:
“When we formed The Dream Syndicate I needed to have a strong sound. I decided to try using guitar strings on my viola, and I got a drone that sounded like a jet-engine! Playing the viola in the just intonation system was so exciting. The thing that really amazed me about it was that we played similarly to the way The Everly Brothers used to sing. There was this one song which they sang, in which they started with two voices holding one chord. They sang it so perfectly in tune that you could actually hear each voice. They probably didn’t know they were singing just intonation, but they sang the right intervals. And when those intervals are in tune, as they were in The Everly Brothers and our group, it is extremely forceful.”

While he worked with LaMonte Young, John Cale shared a flat with fellow Dream Syndicate member Tony Conrad on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

TONY CONRAD:
“In the Fall of 1964, John Cale and I were sharing an apartment at 56 Ludlow Street, which is now sealed up. We had been working with LaMonte for some time doing very austere regimented things which were pretty intense. We had been talking about serious things like intervals, and Indian music and theory and avant-garde music, but when John moved into my place on Ludlow
Street it turned out that when I went home I sat around listening to Hank Williams records and was blasting a huge 45 collection. John started getting interested in rock’n’roll, although there was a great ambiguity in his mind about how somebody could be interested in both rock and classical music. But there was something very liberating about the whole rock thing, and in a sense 56 Ludlow Street came to stand for a lot in terms of some kind of liberating musical influence.

“There was a guy next door called David Gelber, who was playwright Jack Gelber’s brother (he wrote
The Connection)
, and he had a lot of friends who were weird, dumpy, pasty, party chicks from Queens. He went to their parties, and one day he told us that we should come and meet these people because they owned a record company and they were looking for some people with long hair to form a rock band. We had hair that would now look suitable for business dress, but they thought we were the weirdest things in the world. The upshot of it was that we went to this chick’s party and there were these creepos who we were introduced to. They asked us if we played guitar and were we interested in rock. These guys looked so alien to us we couldn’t believe it. I mean this was the other side of the Queens Life Central. This guy Terry Phillips, who had slicked-back hair, a pencil-thin moustache, a real flaccid manner and weird distance from life, was interviewing us about whether we’re interested in rock’n’roll and we naturally felt like rock’n’roll stars already. He was connected to this record company Pickwick, which is a big record company that would do re-issue albums like Bobby Darin and Jack Borgheimer where there’d be one Bobby Darin song and ten Jack Borgheimer songs. They said did we have guitars and we said no. Did we know a drummer, and we said yeah, so we got Walter De Maria, who’s done some great, great drum work, on this thing and we went out to this weird cinderblock warehouse which was the headquarters of Pickwick Records, in Coney Island. The
place was packed floor to ceiling with records and in the back these sleaze-balls and weirdos wearing polyester suits had a little hole-in-the-wall room with a couple of Ampex tape recorders in it. What had happened was they’d got back there with one of their staff writers, gone crazy one night and recorded a couple of his songs. They’d decided they wanted to release them, but needed a band to cover, because the executives and creepos had made the record so there wasn’t any band – it was a studio shot. The first thing they wanted to do was sign us up to seven-year creative contracts.

“We realized after a narrow reading of the contracts that they would make all our artistic work actually owned by Lee Herridon Productions, which was the parent company that owned Pickwick, so we all refused to sign. But we went over and listened to the record. It was called ‘The Ostrich’. They’d gotten together with this guy and spent the night taking, in their own words, ‘everything’, gotten really wiggy and done this weird mix-down. We refused to sign the contracts, but we agreed to their proposal that we play some gigs to promote the record. Next weekend they came around and picked us up in a station wagon and John Cale, Walter De Maria and I began going out on these gigs trying to break this record in the Lehigh Valley area. There were actually four people in the group because there was also the guy who’d actually written and recorded the song – that was Lou Reed. He was 22.”

By the time Lou entered high school he’d already formed his first band and was playing professionally on weekends. At age fourteen, he released his first record ‘So Blue’ (1957) in a high school group called The Shades on the Time label. The flip side was called ‘Leave Her For Me’.

REED:
“Our big moment came when Murray The K played it, but he was sick and someone else stood in. He played it once. I got royalties of 780. We were still in school. We’d open supermarkets, shopping centers, things like that. We had glitter jackets. It was what was called style – later on
people would call it punk but at that time what we meant by punk was a pusher, y’know, ‘He’s just a fucking punk!’”

‘So Blue’ sunk into oblivion but has since been re-released on a bootleg collection of early Velvets material. Lou Reed always wanted to be a rock’n’roll singer, a rock’n’roll star. He was born March 2, 1942 in Freeport, Long Island, the elder of two children (a sister, Elizabeth) to a middle-income family. His father was an accountant. Ironically his first practical contact with music came from his parents who paid for him to have five years of training as a classical pianist. “They wanted me to do a scholarship and all that but no … not hank you … this is not my idea of what’s exciting.” He began to amass a vast collection of rock’n’roll 45s. Lou was a natural born rock’n’roll animal. Although it should be noted that his tastes in music have always been very Catholic: “When I started out I was inspired by people like Ornette Coleman. He has always been a great influence.”

He seemed quite normal to his high school acquaintances, who remember him as a good basket ball player and occasionally accompanied him on double dates or went along with him to one of his week end shows. His parents, however, seem to have taken a very dim view of the direction in which their unfathomable son was developing. “I went out and did the most horrifying thing possible in those days. I joined a rock band. And, of course, I represented something very alien to my parents.” So alien that at the age of eighteen they took him to a hospital where he was administered a series of electro-shock treatments. “I didn’t have the bad ones where they don’t put you to sleep first. I had the fun ones where they put you to sleep first. You count backwards, then you’re out. It was shocking, but that’s when I was getting interested in electricity anyway.”

In 1960 Reed left home to attend Syracuse University in upstate New York. His career at Syracuse does not seem to have changed the course he was bent on, although he picked up some influences, the major one undoubtedly being the
legendary American poet Delmore Schwartz who became his mentor and drinking partner: “I was friends with Delmore. He wrote great poetry and was an incredible man. Once when he was on a drunken binge with me, he had his arm around me and he said, ‘You know, I’m going to die one of these days.’ He was one of the unhappiest people I ever knew. ‘You can write and if you sell out and there’s a heaven from which you can be haunted, I’ll haunt you.’” In fact Delmore Schwartz did return to haunt Lou on a Reed solo album called ‘The Blue Mask’ released twenty years later, but in an affirmative, encouraging vein.

Sterling Morrison first met Lou when they were students at Syracuse living in the same dormitory. “The first sound I ever heard from Lou was when the ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) were marching in the field behind the dorm in their uniforms.

First I heard ear-splitting bagpipe music from his hi-fi, and then he cranked up his electric guitar and gave a few blasts on that. So I knew there was a guitar player living upstairs.” Lou had been thrown out of the ROTC Program when he’d put a gun to the head of his commanding officer. He had his own show on the campus radio station where he would play old rock’n’roll and R&B records, but Lou was thrown out of that position too, when he made fun of a commercial on muscular dystrophy.

Holmes Sterling Morrison Jr was born on August 29, 1942 at East Meadow, Long Island to a middle-class, two-car, small-town at first but later suburban family of Scots ancestry. He had two younger brothers, Robert and William, and three younger sisters Dorothy, Kathleen and Marjorie.

STERLING MORRISON:
“I began studying trumpet at seven, and continued until I was 12, when my teacher was drafted. Unable to find another good one, and in spite of my promise on the instrument, I switched to guitar, inspired by Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. I liked the rockabilly form that was around(rockabilly
was
rock’n’roll in the beginning)
but was more interested in the guitar work of black musicians. Listened to Alan Freed and Jocko all the time; kept my honky ears open. Doo-wah music impressed me mightily. Later on liked Mickey Baker and T-Bone Walker; Jimmy Reed. Eventually caught up with acoustical blues aces like Lightn in’ Hopkins, but always preferred electric guitar music and special effects. I got a flyer in the mail from Sam Ash Music in Hempstead inviting me to hear a demonstration of newly invented ‘fuzz-tone’. I didn’t have to go because my amp already was doing that on its own. I graduated H.S. with very high numbers and matching low esteem for just about everything but music. I was accepted at Syracuse along with Maureen’s brother Jim, a friend since eighth grade. Regents Scholarships for us both. He went, but I headed west to U. of Illinois (major: Physics). Left there at request of Dean of Men after two semesters, mostly for not attending class and for having been drummed out of ROTC, which was compulsory. Good grades, bad attitude, 3.2 beer. Transferred to City College of New York but left after two weeks due to no place to live. Headed for Syracuse with intent to attend in January. Stayed the Fall term with Jim Tucker at Sadler Hall beneath Lou.”

Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison were both great admirers of Delmore Schwartz, who’d had a tremendous early success marred by deep depressions, pills, booze and subsequent failure. “Delmore was a brilliant poet,” says Morrison, “but he hada clinical case of paranoia. He thought he was being investigated at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller, and eventually he decided that Lou and I and everyone around him were Rockefeller’s spies.”

There was a good music scene at Syracuse with Felix Cavalieri (of The Young Rascals), Mike Esposito (of The Blues Magoos) and Garland Jeffreys among other fellow students. Morrison and Reed played early Ike and Tina Turner numbers together in bands with names like Moses and his Brothers, Pasha and The Prophets, L.A. and The El Doradoes.
L.A. stands for Lou Allen, the name Lou played under at the time.

MORRISON:
“I had gone home to the Island after meeting Lou at Syracuse to raise some money, and went back to City College in the Fall (major: English Lit). Visited Syracuse frequently and played with Lou when I could; spring break; summers. I was always about to enrol but never did. Lou and I had some of the shittiest bands that ever
were
. They were shitty because we were playing authentic rock’n’roll. I was a very sensitive young person and played very unsensitive, uncaring music which is Wam Bang Pow! Let’s rock out! What I expected my audience to do was tear the house down, beat me up, whatever. In the Sixties I had King Hatreds. I was a biker type and I hung around with nasty black people and nasty white people and I played nasty white and black rock & roll music.”