Celebrating
its 55th anniversary today is the debut album by The Velvet Underground
and Nico, which was released on March 12th, 1967. It was an album that
had limited sales when it first left the gate, but as Brian Eno
famously remarked, pretty much every person who bought it in those early
days went out and started a band themselves, with often revolutionary
results. After over five decades in the world, it is surely one of the
most profoundly influential records ever produced within the realm of
rock and popular music.
It’s an album that came about at a time
when youth culture was intoxicated by the psychedelic swirl of groups
like The Beatles and albums like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The summer of love was about to happen and flower power and hippy
utopianism were all the rage. As such, even though the Velvets were
honing their craft as part of Andy Warhol’s LSD freakout Exploding
Plastic Inevitable “happenings”, the essence of their music was on
another level entirely. Rather than singing songs about peace and love
and togetherness, they were exploring drug addiction, sexual perversion,
sadomasochism, prostitution and a generally darker, New York style
street hustler vibe that was on a completely different wavelength than
the hippies. They dressed in black and seemed like a bunch of dour,
unsettling people. Musically, their sound was harder and sharper and
had a strangeness to it that felt off center and, at times, distinctly
dissonant. They were, quite literally, ahead of their time.
The
kind of attitude that the VU fostered wouldn’t become in vogue until a
decade later, when punk, new wave, post-punk and industrial music sprang
up in the late 1970s. By that time, the VU’s first album, along with
the the ones that followed it, had become musical touchstones for that
next generation. The naiveté of the hippies had long since lost its
sheen. The reality of the crumbling cities and the failure of the
“love” revolution to influence any real change had fostered a deep sense
of disillusionment and that zeitgeist became the perfect ground for the
VU legend to take root and grow.
The album was recorded during
the latter part of 1966 with Andy Warhol listed as the “producer”,
though he actually had no direct hand in its sound. Rather, Warhol was
the band’s facilitator. The credibility his name offered allowed the
group to do basically whatever they wanted with the recordings. That
“hands off” approach, however, is still considered by the band to have
been a valid production technique as it allowed them to realize their
music the way they wanted. However, Warhol did contribute the
distinctive album art for the record, featuring the infamous “peel and
see” banana, which resulted in some exorbitantly expensive and complex
manufacturing in order to realize. It was hoped that Warhol’s name
would help to bolster sales of the record, but even with his branding
firmly affixed to the project, the sales didn’t materialize.
But
it’s not always about the numbers in the bank accounts and The Velvet
Underground and Nico proved that sometimes art requires a long game in
order to realize its potential. One has to wonder if this kind of
influence is still possible in today’s modern music industry. Is it
possible for a group of outsiders like this to set anything in motion
that can flow into so many sub-genres throughout the decades. How many
touch points are there in contemporary music that can trace their roots
back to this album? Are there any contemporary artists around today
that have the potential to plant that kind of seed for the future?
