THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - WHITE LIGHT / WHITE HEAT @ 55

 

Marking its 55th anniversary today is the sophomore album from the Velvet Underground, White Light / White Heat, which was released on January 30th, 1968. It was the Velvet’s most aggressive outing and, while perhaps pushing their production limits beyond their capacity, it still became a critical influence on the worlds of extreme music making for decades to come.

After the disappointing sales for their debut album the year before, the relationship between the band and producer Andy Warhol began to deteriorate. Not that Andy actually did much of anything in the studio to influence the band’s sound, but the decision to dismiss Andy would impact them more in terms of name recognition as they couldn’t leverage Andy’s fame anymore. The band also decided to part ways with Nico, a move which she interpreted as being “fired” as well. For the second album, the group brought Tom Wilson back to produce and set about assembling material largely inspired by the harsh noise jams they’d been exploring during their live performances over the previous year. These excursions would form the conceptual backbone for the new album. The group had also worked out an endorsement deal with VOX, who provided a slew of brand new guitars, amps and, most notably, distortion pedals, for them to exploit.

The feel of the album was designed from the get-go to be opposed to the “summer of love” vibes of the West Coast hippy scene. It was a deliberate bracing against that tide and the group, especially Lou Reed, wanted to push the tone of the record into the realms of excessive volume and distortion. The problem with this disposition was that the group didn’t quite understand how to achieve this effect without compromising the production quality of the album. As a result, when it was eventually mastered, additional compression resulted in an over saturated sound which brought in additional, unplanned levels of distortion. Where the debut album had a balance between their more aggressive nature and softer moments with songs like Sunday Morning, what ended up on WL/WH was pretty consistently harsh and volatile with little relief from the assault.

The album kicks off with the title track, with lyrics referencing the effects of intravenous injection of amphetamines - a speed rush. But the title also references Reed’s interest in certain esoteric teachings which involved healing through the use of a kind of “white light” inspired by Alice Bailey and her occult book, A Treatise On White Magic. It’s a pulsing fusion of doo-wop and proto-heavy-metal. This is followed by The Gift, the first VU track to feature John Cale on vocals. It’s an oddly mixed extended dirge which features the band improvising away on one side of the stereo field while Cale recites a story about a lover who’s surprise for his girlfriend goes terribly wrong. After a few more shorter songs like Here She Comes Now, the album wraps up with a 17 minute jam about a drag queen orgy that goes off the rails. A rather progressive theme when you consider how far ahead of the curve Reed was with the whole trans culture.

Recording of the album was done quite quickly over the course of a couple of weeks and the band didn’t have a lot of songs to work with at the time, thus the minimal track listing. Producer Tom Wilson never worked with the band again after struggling to accommodate their insistence on pushing the volume and distortion throughout the sessions. Reed purposefully wanted to go "as high and as hard as we could" and, though there were brewing conflicts with Cale, which would ultimately result in his leaving the band after this album, during the recording sessions, the band were essentially all pulling in the same direction, though that may have resulted in them going over a cliff, but at least they went as a unit.

The cover for the LP was based on an idea which originated with Warhol, but he was not credited for it. It shows a barely visible tattoo of a skull. The tattoo was that of Joe Spencer, who played the lead role in Warhol's 1967 film Bike Boy. Spencer starred as a hustler in a motorcycle gang and is seen taking a shower in the movie. Reed selected the image from negatives of the film, and it was enlarged and distorted by Billy Name, one of the members of the Factory. Sterling Morrison, however, states that the cover was picked by him.

At the time of its release, it was a commercial failure, selling even less than the group’s debut. References to drugs and sex resulted in numerous stations banning the record and its single from airplay, which didn’t help generate interest. MGM didn’t promote the album much either, which disappointed the band, who came off the session feeling confident in what they’d done. They wanted a record that rejected the “flower power” of the day, but that also meant turning off those record buyers, leaving only a small cult to appreciate its edginess. Rolling Stone refused to even review it and Melody Maker, on the other hand, wrote off the album as "utterly pretentious, unbelievably monotonous”. Not all critics were so negative and dismissive, but those voices were sparse and had no impact on record buyers.

Yet its legacy would eventually make it an inspiration for punk, No Wave and noise music in decades to come. Its brutal aggression, searing distortion and blistering raw energy would inspire future generations, who saw the bankruptcy of the hippy culture and its failure to engender any real change, to use it as a clarion call to arms for a disaffected generation of rejects and rebels. There are few examples in popular music of a band pushing itself into such a starkly confrontational stance and it stands as a rare breed of outsider art.