The Velvet Underground are the standard example of a band whose importance has nothing to do with how many records they sold. What gets lost in the retelling is how strange the arrangement actually was: a Long Island pop songwriter who had been grinding out knock-offs for a budget label, a Welsh viola player out of La Monte Young’s drone ensemble, and a pop artist who wanted a band the way he wanted a film camera.
Victor Bockris - co-author, with Gerard Malanga, of “Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story” - joins Nate to go through it.
They get into what John Cale actually contributed, which was not decoration but the thing that made an ordinary band extraordinary - sustained tone, drone, and the beat repetition that gave the psychedelic material a rigor nobody else’s had.
They get into Lou Reed writing lyrics as literature rather than as a vehicle for a melody, and what that did to rock and roll.
They get into Angus MacLise walking out because the band agreed to start and stop at fixed times, which he regarded as a line he could not cross.
Then the Warhol years: the Delmonico Hotel gig, an extremely unusual booking for a rock band; the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which Bockris puts ten to eighteen months ahead of anything else happening; Nico, and the oil-and-water quality that made the first album what it is; the worry inside the camp that Lou Reed did not have the charisma to front a band.
And Tom Wilson, the A&R man who was starting Verve at MGM and signed them - the same man who had just signed and produced Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
And then the long unravelling: Cale out, Doug Yule in and doing what he was told, the third album, the management fight with Warhol and Paul Morrissey over publishing, a record sleeve that is a photograph of Doug Yule alone in the studio, and Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker pushed steadily into the background - before the whole thing turns up again, a decade later, as the blueprint for punk.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
“I’m Waiting for the Man” - The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967
“Sister Ray” - White Light/White Heat, 1968
“What Goes On” - The Velvet Underground, 1969 (the third album, after Cale and Nico had gone)
“Sweet Jane” - Loaded, 1970
