THE VELVET UNDERGROUND @ 55

The third, eponymous LP from The Velvet Underground is turning 55 years old this month, being released in March of 1969. After the searing abrasiveness of their previous album, White Light - White Heat, which pinned the VU meters on people's hi-fi systems as it attempted to be the loudest album ever released, Lou Reed was determined to do a complete about face with their third release, aiming for softness and emotional tenderness, with songs focused on relationships and spiritual/religious introspection. For Reed, it was essential to demonstrate the band's versatility in order to thwart any attempts to pigeonhole them into any particular style or sound. The result was an album of predominantly gentle beauty, packed with some of Reed's most memorable songs.

After recording their second album, John Cale found himself on the outs with the band and ended up being fired in September of 1968. His replacement, Doug Yule, was suggested by Sterling Morrison after being scouted by the band's road manager. Yule was warmly welcomed to the group, especially by Reed, who some band members claim may have gone somewhat overboard in his praise and encouragement of the new recruit, inflating his ego somewhat. Regardless, when they went into the Hollywood based TTG studios to record, the mood among the band was jovial, and by all recollections, the process of creating the album was an enjoyable experience for all involved.

Reed was eager to have all of the band members contribute to the album as lead vocalists, even managing to persuade the shy Maurine Tucker to contribute her voice to the album's closing track, After Hours. It was a challenging task for the drummer, who insisted on recording her vocal with a minimum of people present in the studio during her final take. Lou was insistent on her taking on the task though, as he felt her frail, childlike voice was perfect or the song's themes of social anxiety and isolation. After she finished her take, she said that she wouldn't sing it live unless someone requested it.

Though the recording process for the album was a pleasant experience for the band, when it came to mixing, Reed's insistence on doing the mix himself, without consulting the other members, stepped on toes and resulted in a lot of dissatisfaction and animosity from the rest of the band. An alternate mix of the album was done, with both finding their way into pressings, so there's some confusion around as to the preferred mix. Reed's version, dubbed the "closet mix", emphasized his vocals and drowned out the backing parts, alienating the rest of the band. This was the initial mix that was released, but an alternate mix by MGM staff engineer Val Valentin ultimately became the more commonly available version of the album.

With only The Murder Mystery, which featured songwriting and vocal credits from all four members, harking back to their more experimental tendencies, the remainder of the album was accessible enough that the band had high hopes that it would be a breakthrough for them when it came to sales, but poor promotion from their label, again, meant that their efforts would be under appreciated at the time of the album's release, even though it received roundly positive reviews from the critics. It would only be in later years, as the band's influence and legacy grew, that their records would receive the attention they deserved, as generations of new fans continued to rediscover the group and began to comprehend their influence on so many who came in their wake. Retrospectively, the album is considered, not only essential in terms of the band's canon of work, but in terms of landmark recordings from that era, frequently resulting in the LP being counted among numerous "best of" and "must listen" critic and fan lists.
 

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO @ 55

 

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?

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO

It was sometime in 1984 when The Velvet Underground first made a notable impression upon me. I had probably heard the odd song here and there before, but was mostly familiar with Lou Reed as a solo artist for his song, Walk On the Wild Side, which had featured in the "punk" movie soundtrack of the film, Times Square (1980). Other than that, I didn't know a hell of a lot about the group. I just recall one summer Sunday morning, after a long night of warehouse partying when the last dregs of us were lounging around the space that the song, Sunday Morning, came on and it was such a perfect expression of the moment that it burned the groups essence into my mind and I started to look more closely at them and what they had achieved.

I didn't actually get a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico album (on CD) until sometime in the early 1990s, but I would become very familiar with it from copies owned by various friends and acquaintances. I'd also become well aware of the scene around the group at the time of its creation; the Factory crowd, Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia live extravaganzas and the auteur of the scene, Andy Warhol. It was all a big influence on us in the mid 1980s as we were looking to create our own little version of it in Vancouver, occupying disused warehouse spaces and filling them with mind altered denizens of the night, dancing to strange electronic sounds amid whatever setting we could manage to concoct with no money and scraps of whatever.

It was another case where I understood that the revolution in music and art we were seeing in our times was inspired and influenced by something from the past and that it wasn't all happening in a vacuum. The sounds the VU managed to create became massively influential to the most extreme examples of new music we were seeing from our generation. When you understood the connections and heard the linkages, you could appreciate the continuity of culture being expressed through the decades that separated these artists.

Learning about the VU also put their era in a completely new light. Having lived through it, albeit as a child who was only impressed upon by virtue of the media of the day, namely the TV, my biggest sense of culture for the late 1960s was often the caricature of hippies which had managed to permeate the popular shows of the day. Even at that, the hippies were much more subversive in their core, and I'm talking about the Merry Prankster branch here, than what was seen on the small screen. But there was another, much darker tangent to those years which remained hidden and obscured until you took the time to brush away the detritus of popular representations and explore below the surface.

In this regard, The Velvet Underground represented the ultimate "hard core" of the most significant artistic influence to emerge from the decade. While groups like The Beatles would have admittedly massive influence on popular culture in the decades to follow, The Velvets would prove to be far more insidious, perverse and persistent in terms of providing a foothold for subversive evolution within the arts. Personally, I continue to consider them "ground zero" for the most original and alienating strands of artistic expression within the realm of experimental and alternative music.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE STOOGES, FUN HOUSE

Recorded 50 years ago (May, 1970), The Stooges sophomore LP was not my introduction to Iggy Pop, but it was the album that got me to turn my gaze to the past for challenging music and not just look forward. I'd read about Iggy and his antics in various music magazines like CREEM and Hit Parader a couple of years before I bought any of his records, but it was his 1979 appearance on The Midnight Special that got me ready to pull out my wallet in a record store. I think it was the episode hosted and curated by The Cars where they played two of his latest promo videos for his recently released New Values LP. Both Five Foot One and I'm Bored were aired that night and that was all I needed to become a fan of Mr. Pop.

At the time I bought New Values, my attention and interests were firmly forward facing in terms of looking for new music. I wasn't at all interested in what had come before. The zeitgeist of the times, with "punk" and "new wave", was to blast away the past and focus on the future. That said, when I kept reading references to The Stooges and how they were the "first punk band", my obsessive collector nature kicked in and I decided to roll back the clock 9 years and dip my toe in with The Stooges second album, Fun House. I decided to start there because I wasn't quite ready to abandon the current decade and step into the 1960s with their debut, though that would come to my collection soon enough.

Fun House appealed to me, at least superficially, thanks to the insane looking album cover. Iggy looked like he was on a slide, heading into the bowels of hell. The fiery color pallet and posterized graphic style gave the album a look of intensity and the contents didn't disappoint. Within its grooves was a kind of raw rock & roll which was nastier than any heavy metal, and sleazier than what I'd found to that point within the punk/new wave sphere. This was pretty scary music made by disreputable people who probably did questionable things in seedy places. Definitely not the kind of fellows the parents would invite over for dinner. It was stripped down and bare and edgy and way ahead of its time. It also took chances, like the manic finale freak-out of LA Blues, a song that felt like it left your turntable in ruins.

Once I heard this music, my mind was opened up to the reality that challenging music wasn't only happening in the present, but that there were precedents for it in the past and that it was worthwhile for me to turn at least some of my attention in that direction and understand some of the roots of the music with which I was obsessed. From this vantage point, bands like The Velvet Underground, CAN, Silver Apples and many others became fair game for exploration and helped expand my understanding of the way the past influenced the present. It helped me understand that these new bands I was falling in love with were standing atop some pretty impressive shoulders and those needed to be appreciated as well.