Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (7 page)

Another important influence was Bo Diddley. Jonathan Richman notes that Diddley was the key influence shared by all four Velvets instrumentalists. An inventive,
original guitarist with a custom-made square Gretsch (as well as another guitar covered with shag carpeting), Diddley contributed his trademark beat and guitar chug to rockers from Buddy Holly to the Yardbirds—and provided a key ingredient in the basic recipe for rock and roll. Three to four decades after “Bo Diddley” hit the charts, the song’s riff and beat would still feature prominently in hits for the likes of the Hoodoo Gurus, George Thorogood, and U2 (“Desire” is a Grade-A Bo lift).

Before she joined the group, Moe Tucker would play along with her Rolling Stones and Bo Diddley records most nights after getting home from work, but it’s the latter that figures so prominently in her Velvets drumming. She also played along with
Drums of Passion
, an African LP that influenced her choice of drums and her highly unorthodox way of setting them up.

Part of the band’s approach was styled by the dozens of times Lou Reed had been to see one of his favorite musicians, the jazz genius Ornette Coleman, whose im-provisational techniques Reed felt had a place in rock as well as jazz. Improvisation, yes, but without the ego-driven selfishness of the San Francisco bands, whose “every man for himself” model resulted in endless noo-dling solos. This San Francisco “free jam” style eventually infected many bands of the era, including one of the greatest English studio bands ever: Cream. Doug
Yule, who later joined the Velvets after Reed forced Cale out, points out that the group’s live improvisation was no rudderless affair: Reed stood firmly at the helm. But it was in many ways Moe Tucker whose solidity allowed their explorations to take place:

There was a lot of on stage improvisation—which you can do if your rhythm section is continuous. Maureen didn’t play a lot of breaks. She started the song, she played through, and then when it ended she stopped like a drum machine, and you can fool around with that, Lou could slow her down or speed her up. Maureen didn’t improvise much … Lou … guided the improvisation, it speeded up when he wanted to speed it up and we went with him.
⁵⁰

Tucker was certainly improvising right along with the rest of the band, and Yule’s comment may be taken as meaning she didn’t use the typical form for extemporizing drummers. Asked by Jeff Clark in 1998 if she’d ever played a drum solo in her life, Moe Tucker laughed out loud: “A drum solo? No, ha ha ha! I couldn’t if I wanted to. Which is the key to learning to play like Moe. Don’t learn how to play right … This isn’t good advice, is it? Just have fun!”
⁵¹

During the same interview, Tucker also noted:

I always hated drummers like Ginger Baker, oh my God, every possible moment smashing something. I just hated that, even before I started playing drums. So, when I started to play, Charlie Watts was a big influence on me, and I don’t think I even realized at the time why I liked him so much. He plays so simply. He never does anything that is unnecessary. I just find it so much more effective.
⁵²

Moe was a workman in the studio, too. Dolph told me, “I don’t remember Moe saying anything, the entire time. The others would say ‘we need to do such and such’ and she’d go climb onto her drum throne and do it.”
⁵³

Yule also noted that the division of guitar labor was relatively fixed and—as far as solos—somewhat improvised, or at least the criteria for assigning the latter escaped him:

Sterl and Lou had no set roles. Lou always played basic rhythm when he was singing and Sterl alternated between rhythm and parts. When it was solo time, they divided the songs up by some method known only to themselves. Sterling always wound up with
the more organized breaks while Lou favored the longer, louder, raunchier ones.
⁵⁴

There’s an intriguing circularity to the way the Velvets’ sound was influenced by African music and American blues, yet their songs seem empty of these styles, and their music remained overwhelmingly white, like that of a band they themselves would influence: the Stooges. In contrast to so many other bands of the 1960s, there were no dominant Afro or Afro-Cuban rhythms. Yet in a fundamental way the Velvet Underground were among the most successful integrators of the
essence
of African music into their sound: repetitive, interdependent parts built around a central, constant rhythm. Most importantly, there was an almost totally successful effort to avoid overtly incorporating the dominant influences of the time—a refreshing absence of hoary “blooz” riffs prevails. While everyone else was lionizing and cannibalizing the blues to build a foundation for their sound, the Velvets were imposing fines at their rehearsals for anyone caught using a blues lick.

Jonathan Richman remains dubious of the Lou Reed statement in
Transformer
that “We actually had a rule in band. If anybody played a blues lick they would be
fined.”
⁵⁵
He suspects misquoting, and says, “I heard Sterling play blues licks all the time.” Since standard lead guitar lines are based on blues scales, most rock solos are, in fact, “blues” solos. And undoubtedly well-versed guitarists like Reed and Morrison were listening to old blues masters—the latter has said as much—but these weren’t the people whose work resonates in the sound of the Velvets catalogue. The band fastidiously avoided the sort of mix and match, direct quoting of signature riffs by bluesmen like Elmore James, Albert King and Muddy Waters that are all over the work of bands like Led Zeppelin, the Yardbirds, Cream or the Allman Brothers. We may be talking semantics here.

The rest of that Lou Reed quote makes it clear he’s trying to point out that the Velvets were more influenced by early vocal and doo-wop groups: “Everyone was going crazy over the old blues people, but they forgot about all those groups like the Spaniels … the Chesters … the Solitaires … all those really ferocious records that no one seemed to listen to anymore were underneath everything we were playing.”
⁵⁶
Reed, at any rate, repeats the “no blues” statement in the 1989
Guitar World
interview cited below.

The creative process of the Velvet Underground was team-oriented, highly competitive, and perhaps at the peak of its operational perfection during the making of
The Velvet Underground and Nico
. The tensions and battles for control endemic to their working methodology were present, but had yet to become more harmful than helpful. Also, in contrast to their later work, Reed seemed far more comfortable working within a group compositional format—even if he was loathe to admit that such a format was in use at all. Asked about Reed’s post-Velvets work, Sterling Morrison had no such hesitation:

Q:
What do you think of how he is now? I think, musically, there’s no comparison between then and now.

A:
How could there be? How could Lou, seriously, be better off without John Cale, and without me, than he was with us … with Cale and I, we were a real creative band. Lou really did want to have a whole lot of credit for the songs. So on nearly all the albums we gave it to him … so now he’s credited with being the absolute and singular genius of the Underground, which is not true.
⁵⁷

The idea of Lou Reed bringing in completely arranged songs, realized precisely as they would be heard on the Velvets’ records, is easily dismissed by one listen to the Ludlow Street demos, where the early versions of the songs are vastly different from their eventual forms. In
Transformer
, Sterling Morrison is unequivocal: “Our music evolved collectively. Lou would walk in with some sort of scratchy verse and we would all develop the music. It almost always worked like that. We’d all thrash it out into something very strong.”
⁵⁸

Working on the album in the studio was no different from the rehearsal methodology, according to Cale, though the feeling of participating in an important event was palpable:

We were really excited. We had this opportunity to do something revolutionary—to combine avant-garde and rock and roll, to do something symphonic. No matter how borderline destructive everything was, there was real excitement there for all of us. We just started playing and held it to the wall. I mean, we had a good time.
⁵⁹

And it truly sounds like they were enjoying themselves. Anyone listening without bias to the Velvets of 1966 would have noticed that they were having a blast: onstage as well as on record. Having way too much fun, really, to be the dark and moody outfit they were hyped as. But most written material still categorized them as such, and interviewers usually needed someone to set them straight—in this case Sterling Morrison:

Q:
Everything I’ve heard about the Velvet Underground made them seem very gloomy …

A:
We used to play the Whisky A Go Go all the time, so how gloomy could we have been?
⁶⁰

In a 1970 exchange with Morrison, writer Greg Barrios proved himself an exception to the rule:

Q:
I think there is much humor in your music.

A:
Oh, there is.

Q:
Many people, however, tend to emphasize the darker S&M qualities.

A:
Yes, but this is not reflected in fact. We’ve made no attempt to dispel them but if anyone asks us, we say, no, don’t be ridiculous.
⁶¹

Enjoying themselves didn’t keep the band from running on the same competitive fuel that propelled rehearsals, though, and Cale said of the “Banana” sessions that “Lou was paranoid, and he eventually made everyone else paranoid, too.” When I asked Norman Dolph if the sessions were fun despite that tension, he recalled: “Not fun in the sense of ‘let’s sit around and order a pizza’, there was none of that … but paranoia, I didn’t sense.” The most notable tension that Dolph remembers came from the other inhabitants of 254 W. 54th Street: “We were working during normal business hours, and the people in the offices around us, even in Scepter’s label offices, were used to hearing the Shirelles coming through their walls … this was definitely
not
the Shirelles, and there were some very strange looks!”

If it wasn’t tense, and it wasn’t quite pizza party fun, what was it like in the studio while this record was being made? Aside from working really quickly, Dolph remembers:

There were three separate ambiences. One was when Lou sang “Heroin” and “Waiting for the Man,” and he was deeply concerned that it not break down—that he got it all down in one shot… and in those there was a great deal of intensity in the room. In the songs that Nico sang, there was a very delicate, deferential “let’s see what we have to do to get this done” ambience … and the third was a workman-like attempt to
recreate just what they had done the night before in the live gig.
⁶²

What of the listener’s perspective? What would it be like to hear the Velvet Underground as their contemporaries heard them, in a club (or through the office walls)? For future producer Dolph, the effect of seeing the band perform for the first time was immediate and visceral. He recalls the words of another groundbreaking artist:

There’s a quote from Baudelaire I can only paraphrase … “If you wish to create true, great art, first you must discover a new shudder.” And the Velvets had! That’s how I felt. This was like nothing I’d ever heard before and it was absolutely intense.
⁶³

When you listen to
The Velvet Underground and Nico
it’s hard to picture the stunned reactions audiences were said to have had upon hearing those songs live, as for example this description of the band’s first ever gig at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey:

“Nothing could have prepared the kids and parents assembled in the auditorium for what they were about to experience that night,” wrote Rob Norris, a Summit student, “… a performance that would have shocked anyone outside of the most avant-garde audiences of the Lower East Side …” As they charged into the opening chords of the cacophonous “Venus in Furs” louder than anyone in the room had ever heard music played, they rounded out an image aptly described as bizarre and terrifying. “Everyone was hit by the screeching urge of sound, with a pounding beat louder than anything we’d ever heard,” Norris continued. “About a minute into the second song, which the singer had introduced as ‘Heroin’, the music began to get even more intense.” According to Sterling Morrison, “The murmur of surprise that greeted our appearance as the curtain went up increased to a roar of disbelief once we started to play ‘Venus’ and swelled to a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment by the end of ‘Heroin’.”
⁶⁴

I’d pay good money to see any band these days that could provoke “a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment” just by playing their two best songs (they also did a third at the Summit gig—“There She Goes Again”). Not everybody found the group so jarring or
alien, though, especially in Boston, where they actually got radio airplay for the first album. Two teenagers there would, in their own opposite way, react unusually to the album.

Having heard the songs with Nico singing on them (probably the single) on local radio shows, Jonathan Richman was only too pleased when his pal Jay Bovis held up a copy of
The Velvet Underground and Nico
and asked him if he wanted to trade something for it. Jay had put the record on his turntable, and before he’d heard more than a few bars of “Heroin,” Jonathan knew that this was “his” music: “I knew right away that these people would understand me.” A deal was quickly struck, and Jay became the proud owner of Jonathan’s copy of the Fugs’ first record. Thrilled by the discovery of his lost tribe, Richman was curious as to why his friend would part with such a treasure. Jay answered, “Ah, it sounds just like everything else!” What they were putting in the water out in Natick, Massachusetts that bred teenagers with such advanced tastes we’ll never know. It’s also interesting to note that the transaction which helped guide Richman on his way toward his inheritance of a part of the Velvets’ mystique—the teen’s-eye rendering of the Underground’s style that is the first
Modern Lovers
record—involved the only two genuine Lower East Side bands of the period, the Velvets and the Fugs.