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.
