Which didn’t prevent the powers that be at Pickwick from discerning commercial potential in the track, particularly when a local TV show invited the Primitives to perform for its on-air dance party. The problem was that the Primitives didn’t exist. That was hardly insurmountable. Terry Phillips, one of Reed’s cowriters, was charged with assembling a band to play the show and some other promotional dates. Phillips rounded up John Cale, a young, Welsh, avant-garde classical musician; the sculptor Walter De Maria; and Tony Conrad, who, like Cale, was a member of minimalist composer La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, which was also known as the Dream Syndicate because of the droning, trancelike music the ensemble created. Phillips evidently assumed that Cale was a pop musician because he had long hair—such were the times. Also in his favor: the Welsh lilt in Cale’s speech could easily have been mistaken for an English accent, an inestimable attraction in those innocent days of the Beatles-led British Invasion.
By any measure, this was an unlikely quartet. Cale, a classically trained musician, had come to the United States on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship in modern composition; he had been interviewed for the position by the composer Aaron Copland. Skilled at many instruments, including viola and keyboards, Cale played bass with the Primitives. For all that, Cale had little more than a passing familiarity with rock and roll. Moreover, Walter De Maria, on drums, and Conrad, who played guitar, were hardly rock musicians themselves. Up for a bit of fun regardless, the four young men did some rehearsals, played the TV show and some other promotional spots, and then disbanded. But the crucial bond between Reed and Cale had been forged.
Though they came from very different backgrounds and had very different styles and tastes, the two men soon discovered that they had much in common. Reed’s long-standing desire was to combine the literary ambitions of writers like Allen Ginsberg and Hubert Selby with the energy and immediacy of rock and roll. Cale wanted to move beyond the insular world of the avant-garde and see what the possible impact of his forward-looking ideas might be on a larger audience. Both found themselves in the right place at the right time. The traditional boundaries between all art forms were beginning to crack, and new syntheses were emerging. As the source and center of so much of the country’s aesthetic activity, New York was the ground zero of those new directions. “It was a period when a lot of new took place,” said Bob Neuwirth, a musician, songwriter, and painter, about New York in the midsixties. “Different aesthetic energies all popped up at the same time. Painting changed. Sculpture changed. Dance changed. Theater changed. Classical music changed. Jazz changed. Folk music changed. Rock and roll changed. It was a typical New York cultural shifting of the ground beneath you.”
Reed was impressed by Cale’s tony credentials and by his avant-garde credibility. Cale was sharp enough to perceive the vulnerability beneath Reed’s know-it-all posturing, as well as his unique talent: “My first impressions of Lou were of a high-strung, intelligent, fragile college kid in a polo-neck sweater, rumpled jeans, and loafers. He had been around and was bruised, trembling, quiet, and insecure.” Reed played Cale some of the songs he was working on, including “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin.” Because Bob Dylan was the rare model for someone with Reed’s aspirations, some of the songs Cale heard initially sounded like folk music to him, a genre whose plainspoken earnestness and relative musical simplicity held little appeal for him. It did not take long, however, for him to comprehend that Reed’s ambitions ran in a different direction. “I missed the point,” Cale said about his initial response to Reed’s songs, “because I hated folk songs, and it was not until he forced me to read the lyrics that I realized these were not Joan Baez songs. He was writing about things other people weren’t. These lyrics were literate, well-expressed, tough, novelistic impressions of life. I recognized a tremendous literary quality in his songs, which fascinated me—he had a careful ear and was cautious with his words. I had no real knowledge of rock music at that time, so I focused on the literary aspect.”
The complicated dynamic of Reed and Cale’s relationship began to take shape as Reed was struggling to move his career forward. Cale encouraged Reed not to see himself as frail and damaged. Reed, Cale recalled, was “seeing a psychiatrist who prescribed a tranquilizer called Placidyl. When I asked why, he said, ‘I think I’m crazy.’ I told him, ‘Fuck, you’re not crazy.’ I didn’t believe in schizophrenia. All I saw in it was a different way of seeing things. Anyway, I could not believe somebody who was writing those songs could be crazy.” Cale began to withdraw somewhat from the downtown avant-garde world he was moving in to concentrate on working with Reed. He became determined to demonstrate to Reed exactly what they could do with his songs by combining Reed’s groundbreaking lyrics and intense knowledge of rock and roll with his own avant-garde approach to sonics. “I would fit the things Lou played right into my world,” Cale wrote. “He was from the other world of music and he fitted me perfectly. We were made for each other. It was so natural. I’d show him something that he could do and he seemed constantly astounded by my ability to bring these things out in him. I felt a little taken aback, but when I first met him he had a great deal of ability that was waiting to get tapped. I tried to be supportive and show him what he was capable of doing. Lou was really low on energy at the time. It was a challenge to help somebody who was depressed by the lack of response he was getting, yet showing a determination to go on. So I found myself in a Svengalian position from the point of view of effort.”
Certainly, Cale’s educational pedigree and musical sophistication meant that Reed would have taken his encouragement seriously. Cale’s intense interest in what Reed was trying to do was a counterbalance to the insecurity and depression that afflicted him. But Reed also served as a mentor to Cale, who was exactly Reed’s age and had just moved to New York from London, where he’d attended Goldsmiths College. New York was not as daunting an environment as it would later become, but it still could be intimidating to outsiders, and Cale had been moving in hip downtown circles, an isolated world. Unsteady as he may have been at the time, Reed was a streetwise native who knew the local terrain. He was ambitious and willing to hustle to get where he wanted to go. Cale recognized those qualities in his new friend, and valued them. “There were certain characters I had in mind all along who I thought would be able to succeed in New York,” Cale later wrote. “In Lou Reed I found one of these characters. To me, he was the kind of person who would survive in New York, and I wanted to learn from him. You might even say that learning was what I really wanted to do, more than achieve. Lou Reed was the first person in America with whom I connected both by example and shared experience.… At first it was mainly about literature and classical archetypes. Lou turned me on to the novel Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby. Lou’s thing was going straight to the unconscious. He was able to talk about a variety of things that were very fresh and original, and he loved conversation.” Before long, Cale stopped working with La Monte Young and “dove into working with Lou. I was terrifically excited by the possibility of combining what I had been doing with La Monte with what I was doing with Lou and finding a commercial outlet. My collaboration with Lou simply overtook my community of interests with La Monte.”
While he continued to live with his parents, Reed began spending more and more time at Cale’s apartment at 56 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. The area consisted of tenement buildings and loft spaces that were increasingly becoming available, legally or illegally, as manufacturing businesses abandoned Manhattan. Rents in the area were cheap, and artists willing to live with few amenities, improvised utilities that skirted safety codes, and often rats, took over these spaces as they became available. Filmmakers, musicians, painters, sculptors, and actors could live and work in the large flats, and would stage performances there as well. The neighborhood was gritty, but, as was so often the case in New York, that rawness mingled with lyricism and glamour. “I had a loft on Spring Street with a little greasy spoon below that I thin
k is a Prada store now,” recalled Eric Andersen, a singer-songwriter who lived in New York at the time. “Jackie Kennedy popped by one day to visit the printing factory upstairs that did art books. And this friend of William Burroughs lived on the top floor. He played sax, so he’d go up on the roof near the alley, and you’d hear this beautiful sax playing at night.”
Reed and Cale began working on songs at Cale’s apartment. As their friendship developed, they realized that they shared interests beyond music and literature, not all of them so high-minded. Reed’s consumption of drugs continued, while Cale recalled that “before I met Lou, I had snorted, smoked, and swallowed the best drugs in New York, courtesy of La Monte, but I had never injected anything. We smoked pot, took acid and other pills, mostly downs or Benzedrine. Now dime and nickel bags of heroin were added to the menu.” Reed injected Cale with heroin for the first time, an intimate initiation into the ninth circle of illicit drug use that bound the two men more closely together. It also led to them being stricken by hepatitis. And Cale became familiar with Reed’s perverse desire to provoke. Reed, he wrote, “enjoyed taking situations to extremes you couldn’t imagine until you’d been there with him. He would befriend a drunk in a bar and, after drawing him out with friendly conversation, suddenly ask, ‘Would you like to fuck your mother?’ I thought I was reckless, but I’d stop at goading a drunk. That’s where Lou would start.” They would travel to Harlem and busk on the streets together, Reed on guitar, Cale on viola.
Various members moved in and out of the group, including a couple of female singers, as Reed and Cale sought to define the music they wanted to create. They named the group the Warlocks, though the possibility of the Falling Spikes—an allusion to the slang use of “spike” for a syringe—seems to have been at least jokingly considered and casually used in some instances. Tony Conrad moved out of Cale’s Ludlow Street apartment and returned to filmmaking, and Walter De Maria, while attracted to the music Reed and Cale were developing, decided to concentrate on his own artistic projects. Cale recruited Angus MacLise, another member of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, to be the group’s percussionist. Reed, meanwhile, encountered Sterling Morrison, his old guitar-playing acquaintance from Syracuse, on the subway, and he and Cale invited him to play with them. Morrison agreed and soon became a member of the group.
The band decided to call itself the Velvet Underground after seeing a copy of a paperback book by that name that Tony Conrad had found in the street. (As with all origin stories, this one is somewhat in dispute: Angus MacLise’s wife later claimed that he had purchased the book and that the others had seen his copy.) Written by journalist Michael Leigh, whose daughter the Velvets would later meet in a Philadelphia club, and published in 1963, The Velvet Underground was very much a product of its time. It purports to explore the subterranean worlds of fetishism, consensual extramarital sex, and S and M, subjects that were far beyond the pale of mainstream publishing at that time. To avoid censorship, the book couldn’t simply be smut; it needed to display an element of “redeeming social value.” Consequently, the book combines a portentous tone of disapproval, an obsessive historical scope dating back to the erotic shenanigans of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and a lurid fascination with the lubricious details of the present-day acts and impulses it describes. The title appealed to the band because the term “underground” was already being used to describe the experimental film scene taking shape in downtown New York, a scene in which the band members had many friends. Applying that same subversive impulse to music could easily stand as a statement of intent for Reed and Cale’s artistic goals. That Reed, who actually read the book, was fascinated, both personally and as a songwriter, with what would at the time have been termed sexual deviance only made the reference, obscure as it would have been to most people, all the more fitting.
No infrastructure existed for rock bands at the time, even at the most commercial level, let alone along the fringes the Velvet Underground inhabited. The band played at clubs around the city for little more than meals, and also performed at happenings staged in their friends’ lofts in which films, visual artwork, and music all combined in a swirling phantasmagoria that presaged both aesthetic trends and the emerging spirit of the times. Tapes of the band’s performances at these events began to circulate, even in Europe, where filmmaker Piero Heliczer, who occasionally played sax with the Velvets and who had them play along with his films in his loft, frequently traveled. In July of 1965, the band recorded demos of six songs—including “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “Venus in Furs”—at the Ludlow Street apartment. Versions of that tape, too, began to make the rounds—along, possibly, with others that may not have survived—as the band sought increased visibility and a record deal. John Cale brought a version of the tape to England and got a copy to Marianne Faithfull in the hope that she would pass it along to her boyfriend, Mick Jagger, or the Rolling Stones’ producer and manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. As inevitably happens, the tape began circulating beyond its intended recipients, and an English band aptly named the Deviants began performing “Prominent Men,” a mild protest song—complete with Reed mimicking Dylan’s phrasing and, unbelievably, harmonica accompaniment—that appeared on the tape.
Barbara Rubin, whose films the band also occasionally accompanied, introduced the group to Al Aronowitz, an influential New York journalist and scenester. In those relatively early days of rock and roll—and for decades after—there was essentially no such thing as conflict of interest on the music scene. Journalists promoted bands they liked in their writing, and often helped those bands get signed to labels. They served as managers and consultants, publicists and critics, friends and lovers. The established worlds of journalism and the music business were, for the most part, equally clueless about the new cultural changes taking shape, so if you were young, in the know, and at all ambitious, there were plenty of gaps to fill. Aronowitz, who wrote for the New York Post and was sufficiently well positioned to introduce the Beatles to Bob Dylan in a New York hotel in 1964, knew everyone on the scene and liked to make things happen. He wasn’t precisely a fan of the Velvet Underground, and when he took his friend Robbie Robertson of the Band to hear them, Robertson was completely dismissive. But Aronowitz was sufficiently intrigued to visit with the group while Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and songwriter Carole King waited in a limousine for him to finish. Whether in an official capacity or not, he became something like the Velvets’ manager for a brief time.
Aronowitz, who lived in New Jersey, also managed a folk-rock band named the Myddle Class, which was based in Berkeley Heights. He arranged for the band to sign to a label run by fellow New Jersey residents Carole King and Gerry Goffin—hence King’s presence in the waiting limousine. Aronowitz had booked the Myddle Class for something like a hometown gig at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey, and he lined up the Velvet Underground as an opening act. It was to be the Velvets’ first paying job: seventy-five dollars, the equivalent of a month’s rent for many people in those days, but still not much given the four-way split. The prospect of a paying gig, however, was enough to drive Angus MacLise out of the band. The Velvets’ pop aspirations would always be in conflict with their avant-garde urges, and that struggle was particularly acute for MacLise. Reed would later joke that MacLise could not accept the notion that the band would be expected to begin playing at a certain time and end at another time—a notion that, given MacLise’s relationship with the open-ended, time-bending performances of La Monte Young, apparently seemed impossibly restrictive to him. As a result, he quit the Velvets shortly before the Summit High gig, plunging the band into temporary crisis.
Reed, Cale, and Morrison needed to find a replacement fast. One name that came up was Maureen Tucker, the younger sister of Jim Tucker, Morrison’s friend from Syracuse University whom Reed had also met. Going from a drummer who had been playing with one of the leading minimalist visionaries of the era to a college friend’
s kid sister from Long Island who had never performed live might initially seem like a step down, but, rushed and unconsidered though the decision was, the choice of Maureen Tucker proved inspired. A rock band with a female drummer was simply unheard of at the time. It could have been seen as a gimmick, except that Tucker’s looks didn’t at all correspond to the eye candy criteria that might have made that notion credible. She was slight, cute rather than conventionally pretty, and boyish-looking. Her drumming, too, was a significant departure from most rock drumming. Though far from a virtuoso, she was an admirer of the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, the relentless tribal jams of Bo Diddley, and the minimalist swing of the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts—hardly the presumed influences of, in the parlance of the times, a “chick drummer.” She played standing up, didn’t use a high hat, never rode her cymbals, and emphasized her tom-toms over her snare. The result was a sound that brought a raw primitivism to the Velvets’ more experimental moments, and added an off-kilter touch to their more conventional pop-sounding songs. That Tucker had a car and an amp, both of which the band sorely needed, didn’t hurt. Reed traveled to Levittown, the Long Island suburb where Tucker was living with her parents, and auditioned her. On the strength of that one afternoon’s performance, she was in.
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