Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (11 page)

Long after the band broke away from Warhol, and after disappointing him by firing Nico, Andy took a wry potshot at Lou Reed. When asked by an interviewer, he responded, “My favorite Lou Reed song is … aah… ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ by Nico. She wrote it, I think.”
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Reed uses the aforementioned Ostrich tuning here, which first convinced John Cale that Lou was some kind of natural musical genius. Had Cale known that Reed had “seen this guy—I think his name was Jerry Vance—tune the guitar where every string was the
same”
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and “filed that one away” for later use, he would presumably have been less impressed, and there might have been no band in the first place. Not to be confused with open D tuning, where strumming the open strings voices a first position D chord, the Ostrich tuning is all strings tuned to D (though I should note that Jonathan Richman distinctly recalls Lou showing him an all B version as well). The droning intro melody is played on that guitar, and it provides the full, rich rumble beneath the entire song as well. Though he no doubt got lots of live mileage out of this particular drone technique, it should be noted that Reed has only ever cited “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Rock and Roll” as songs that benefited from the Ostrich tuning. Here, it fits perfectly.

Cale has described how in 1968, just before Reed forced him out of the band, their styles were clashing: “I was trying to get something big and grand and Lou was fighting against that, he wanted pretty songs. I said ‘Let’s make them grand pretty songs then.’”
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Two years earlier, their differences had produced brilliant songs through creative tension, and if there ever was a grand, pretty song, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is it.

“Heroin” is often cited as the outstanding cut on
The Velvet Underground and Nico,
and as the band’s single greatest achievement in song form. Sterling Morrison has called it “possibly Reed’s greatest song and a truthful one.” There are very few songs in the rock canon that match its power to translate a physical experience into a detailed aural landscape. Not that there was much competition at the time “Heroin” was written (in ’65), recorded (in ’66) and released (in ’67). Even several later efforts, like Dee Dee Ramone’s “Chinese Rocks” or Herman Brood’s “Dope Sucks” are content to catalogue the results of heroin use. “Heroin” stands unmatched as a real-time description of the opiate-induced state. The song is sometimes put forth as the first “drug song,” but blues artists had long recognized the fertile fields of coca, cannabis and poppy. Blues songs like “Cocaine Blues” and “Spoonful” were joined by popular music’s novelty drug tunes—even the original version of “La Cucaracha” describes the Mexican cockroach as unable to travel on “because she hasn’t Marihuana for to smoke.”
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“Heroin” is rock’s first (and probably best) undisguised drug song; but that’s only the most obvious of its strengths.

One reason for the song’s critical lionization is the recognition that it created its own unique category. The song trod upon the white picket fence that separated rock and roll’s moon-June love songs from the multiplicity of topics already available to film and literature, and in doing so it gave songwriters the freedom to write about real life. It would be a mistake to think of “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for The Man” as mere precursors to other songs about drugs and society’s dark underbelly; they are that, yes, but they are so much more. By avoiding the safe, accepted topics and writing instead about life’s extreme situations, Reed made it permissible for all rock music that followed to incorporate both ends of the spectrum and everything in between.

Musically, David Fricke is perhaps most eloquent in describing why “Heroin” is so important in the Velvets’ songbook:

Ultimately, “Heroin” is the microcosmic essence of everything that happens musically on
The Velvet Underground and Nico
—the tumultuous crush of guitar holocaust and viola screech, the see-saw dynamics of outright noise and skeletal lullabye melodicism, the bold, punctuative shifts in rhythmic time and tempo. It is a song of programmatic genius, sucking you into the wake of the addict’s rush with vicious acceleration,
suddenly breaking into a dead calm as the fuck-off opiate state kicks in.
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“Heroin” was the first ram that the Velvet Underground used to batter down the walls hemming in rock lyricists—and it did so using just two chords: D and G. The economy with which the Velvets approached their arrangements would one day make them a major influence on the musical rebellion known as punk. At the time, however, it meant that John Cale had an ideal environment in which to explore the techniques that would become his trademark, such as creating complexity through the repetition of simple parts. The amount of drama and movement that the Velvets evoked using those two chords is amazing, and the band was well on the way to fulfilling one of Cale’s goals: “The opportunity to do something Phil Spectorish with the limited resources of a rock and roll band—four people.”
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The structure also funnels the arrangement’s elements toward an inexorable buildup of energy:

David Fricke:
Reed has often pointed out that even performed solo on acoustic guitar, “Heroin” has an irresistible locomotive tug.

Lou Reed:
It’s just two chords. And when you play it, at a certain point, there is a tendency to lean in and play faster. It’s automatic. And when I first played it for John [in ’64], he picked up on that. Also, if you check out the lyrics, there are more words as you go along. The feeling naturally is to speed up.”
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Prior to its release on
The Velvet Underground and Nico,
two early versions of the song bear comment. On the Ludlow demos, despite a low volume, acoustic performance, the song sounds much the same as it would on the album. Clearly “Heroin” is one song that Lou wrote single-handedly, as distinct from later Velvets’ numbers that either involved significant input from other members or were outright group compositions.

The second noteworthy version of “Heroin” shows the flipside of the Ludlow performance: a live, instrumental take without lyrics performed for the closing credits of a WNET public television special.
Andy Warhol presents The Velvet Underground
was part of the “USA Artists” series, filmed February 7, 1966 in New York. Sterling Morrison recalled the session was filmed on the eve of Warhol’s first
Uptight
show at Film Makers’ Cinematheque in Manhattan, and “it sounded very peaceful and what we were playing was actually an in
strumental version of
Heroin.
The final thing as they were showing the credits and it went droning on.”
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That night Warhol introduced the band, saying, “I’m sponsoring a new band. It’s called The Velvet Underground.”

For Lou Reed’s
Rock and Roll Diary
(1978), RCA sent out a well-written press release, referring to “Heroin” as a “saga of a man on his way to spiritual death, fighting and embracing it at once,” and calling the song “the most profoundly moving and disturbing drug song ever written.” I would agree with the spirit of the last statement, if not the letter. I don’t think RCA needed to use the qualifier “drug song”—that just diminishes the value of their praise. “Heroin” is one of the most profoundly moving and disturbing
songs,
period. It stands as a great song not only because of its journalistic accuracy regarding the drug experience, but also because of the compassion it imparts and the clarity it brings to the individual’s need for extraordinariness, be it chemically or spiritually induced.

That same RCA press release described Reed’s work on
The Velvet Underground and Nico
as a revelation of the “horror and false transcendence of heroin addiction.” Their use of the word “false” sounds like spin doctoring
on RCA’s part to me. I’m not sure Reed regarded dope as any less authentically transcendent than the natural alternatives, especially circa 1964-5 when he was writing and refining the song. Why would he? The disintegration of self that Reed describes has its source in the same wellspring as that which is felt in varying forms by sufi mystics, yogis and junkies alike. The most enduring works of mystical poetry—including those of Jalal ad-Din Rumi—often feature the theme of alcohol or hashish intoxication as a metaphor for spiritual transcendence. Lou’s lyric “I feel just like Jesus’ son” would not sound out of place coming out of a sufi’s mouth. In 11th century Baghdad it was al-Hallaj’s utterance “Ana Al Haqq” (”I am the Truth”)—Al-Haqq being one of the “99 Names of God”—that got him pilloried, burned and beheaded. Likewise, a sufi strives for the penultimate mystical state of Fan’a, or Annihilation of the Self; not too different from Reed’s phrase: “I’m gonna try to nullify my life.” The only difference is one makes room for God, the other dope. So, as far as transcendence is concerned, heroin holds its own, and “Heroin” conveys that powerfully. (In no way is this meant as an endorsement of heroin as a means of spiritual growth! I would point out that transcendence isn’t everything; if you think being a junkie is romantic, just wait until heroin has you “transcending” the ability to keep a job,
maintain a relationship, or control your bowels, among other wicked spiritual stuff.)

As Jim Carroll observed in
The Basketball Diaries,
junk is just another job, it’s just that the hours tend toward twilight. Lou Reed’s objectivity in “Heroin” is intact; he supplies all the information that a listener needs to recognize the inherent darkness of the dope gig. Sterling Morrison-has said that “Heroin” is about spiritual death, and that in it Reed does anything but advocate its use—he makes it clear that only someone who wants to die should turn to it. Despite this, the band was critically pummeled as a pied piper for heroin use, a label it would never really shake. Reed’s following description of the song is succinct, and makes it clear that in describing the experience of getting high he is also laying out the rules of heroin use, with its inevitable conclusion—addiction:

“Heroin” is very close to the feeling you get from smack. It starts on a certain level, it’s deceptive. You think you’re enjoying it. But by the time it hits you, it’s too late. You don’t have any choice. It comes at you harder and faster and keeps on coming. The song is everything that the real thing is doing to you.
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In that sense, “Heroin” manages to convey in a handful of verses what Burroughs needed hundreds of pages to accomplish. But if Reed thought that the song would be understood in the same light as literary works by Poe, Genet or Baudelaire, he was wrong. Critics were not prepared to consider a song that used heroin as its subject to be anything other than an endorsement. Reed has alternately condemned those who took this view and reversed himself somewhat and admitted that he was aware of the misperception and accommodated it. Clean and sober in 1989, reflecting on his work in the ’70s, Reed expressed a combination of both views in
Q
magazine:

I was really fucked up. And that’s all there is to it. It’s like I really encouraged it. I did a lot of things that were really stupid and I don’t know how they could sit and listen seriously to that stuff. But I catered to it for a long time because I thought it was funny.

It was such a big deal, a song called “Heroin” being on an album and I thought that was really stupid. I mean, they had it in the movies in the ’40s—
The Man with the Golden Arm,
for Chrissakes. So what was the big deal? It was like talking to pygmies. People were offended because we did a song called “Heroin” but there’s plenty of stuff about that in literature and no one gives a shit but it’s rock and roll so we must be pushing drugs or something. I thought after all that stuff about “Heroin,” well … If you find that so shocking, take a look at this. It was a stupid, childish
attitude I had but, you know, as long as they were going that way I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll give it a little push that way, a little street theater.” Getting involved in all that was like going along with it, pandering to it. I don’t think it brought out the most attractive features in me.
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Most groups eager for success might be expected to reverse themselves, eliminating anything that their critics and the public found objectionable, in order to bolster their chances. Instead, the Velvets stood behind their work and endorsed Reed’s decision to focus ever more keenly on society’s decadent elements in his lyrics. The typecasting of the band as “sex-crazed junkies,” as one interviewer put it, drew this Moe Tucker response:

It started as a sort of theater which the audience took to heart. Because we sang “Heroin” people assumed that we were junkies; because we played “Venus in Furs” they thought we beat each other. There were no smack heads in the band.
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Lou Reed would come to lament this pigeonholing of the band’s members as druggies, saying in 1974: “There are certain things I just can’t do, image or no
image. I mean, I did go down to Lexington—I did all the stuff then. But I don’t now, and I think it’s kinda sad that people are still caught up in that.”
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Reed seems to recognize the difficulties inherent in charging out of the gate so strong, so young, and so uncompromising. Alluding in 1998 to his pioneering work in bringing literary realism to rock lyrics, he said: “In some ways it makes it a little hard for me now. Because I’ve done that. I can’t write ‘Venus in Furs, Pt. II’ or ‘Heroin, Pt. II’.”
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One thing Reed clearly has not changed his mind about is the pioneering lyrical approach that he began with “Heroin”:

Q:
Where did the notion first arise, for you, that the subject matter of songs like “Heroin” … was something that could be presented in a pop or rock song format?

A:
Well I’d been reading Burroughs and Ginsberg and Selby. I was a big fan of certain kinds of writing. I had a B.A. in English. So why wouldn’t I? It seemed so obvious and it still does. There was a huge uncharted world there. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. That’s the kind of stuff that you might read. Why wouldn’t you listen to it to?
You have the fun of reading that, and you get the fun of rock on top of it.