Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  When the sessions were done, Dolph made an acetate of the material they had recorded, which included nearly all the songs that would appear on the band’s debut album. He and Morrissey then attempted to interest record companies in signing the band. It’s hard to describe how different the Velvets sounded from what most bands were doing at the time. Nineteen sixty-six was a year in which some of the most adventurous music in the history of rock and roll came out, including Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the Beatles’ Revolver, the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. However, none of those albums were remotely as daring as what the Velvet Underground was doing. The drones of Reed’s guitar and Cale’s viola; Reed’s fuck-you, deadpan vocals and Nico’s Teutonic incantations; the songs’ steely depictions of hard drug use and outré sexuality—none of those qualities were anywhere to be found in any other popular music. Consequently, record companies’ universal response to the Velvets’ music, even with Warhol’s endorsement, ranged from no interest to outrage.

  One executive was intrigued, however. Tom Wilson had helped define the folk-rock sound that took Simon and Garfunkel to the top of the charts, and he had produced Bob Dylan’s breakthrough hit, “Like a Rolling Stone,” on Dylan’s groundbreaking 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited. Wilson had a background in jazz, was Harvard-educated, and was the only staff producer at Columbia Records who was African American. He could hear possibilities in the music that less adventurous ears missed. He also thought that Nico could be a major star, an observation that did little to endear him to Reed. Wilson had recently left Columbia to move to Verve/MGM, and he wanted to sign the Velvets to his new label, though it’s doubtful he would have wanted the band without Nico, which speaks well of Warhol and Morrissey’s instinct to bring her on board.

  The band signed to the label in early May of 1966. Reed, however, refused to sign the original version of the contract, which stipulated that the band’s earnings be delivered to Warhol and Morrissey. Reed insisted that the band be paid directly, and Warhol and Morrissey would be paid a management percentage out of the group’s earnings. That was and is a far more typical arrangement, and it was a smart business move on Reed’s part. But it also revealed an early crack in his relationship with Warhol, whose feelings about money were complex: he was obsessed with it, but he didn’t like to deal with it. Everything at the Factory revolved around Warhol, and in that boundaryless environment, money took on an emotional meaning that it might not have in a more conventional business situation. Reed clearly saw the Velvets as beginning to launch their career and wanted a professional arrangement, not a feudal one. Warhol worried about money constantly but avoided talking about it. He would not have seen Reed’s move simply in business terms. He took it personally and resented it. Not long afterward, Reed would have the other members of the Velvet Underground sign an agreement that he would receive all songwriting royalties unless otherwise indicated. Feelings were ruffled there as well, but Reed was making his move.

  In a continuing effort to expand the appeal of Warhol, the Velvets, and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), the entire troupe scheduled a two-week engagement at the Trip, a club on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles that catered to the city’s burgeoning hippie scene. If New Jersey and Michigan were stretches for the EPI, L.A. was beyond anything attempted before. Because it was America’s entertainment capital, L.A. was, well, an inevitable stop for the EPI. But despite Warhol’s fascination with classic Hollywood, everything the Velvets represented ran counter to L.A., particularly at that time. If Hollywood was America’s dream factory, the Velvets represented uncut urban realism. If L.A. was all sunshine and pastel colors, the Velvets were nocturnal, dark, and dressed in black. As the club’s name indicated, L.A. was undergoing a psychedelic surge, and the Velvets, of course, preferred speed and heroin. But perhaps the primary distinctions were simply geographical and attitudinal. The Warhol crowd—and the Velvets, in particular—brought every iota of their New York condescension to L.A. And L.A., ever intimidated by and resentful of that stance, responded in its own passive-aggressive way: it was eager to embrace this cool new happening from New York but equally eager to resist the implication that New York was the only conceivable source of such edgy revelations.

  The poster for the two-week run gave top billing, as usual, to Warhol, and on opening night, musicians and actors turned out in force—as everyone had hoped, the word had gotten out. David Crosby of the Byrds, Ryan O’Neal, Sonny and Cher, Jim Morrison of the as-yet-unsigned Doors, John Phillips and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, Tony Hicks of the Hollies—all were in attendance. The EPI put on its standard multimedia extravaganza, and the Velvets played at deafening volume. The L.A. media covered the event extensively and pondered its meaning with predictably little success. Responses from attendees were mixed at best. Cher, who was nineteen at the time, walked out in the middle of the show, and got off the best line about the event. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable would not be the next big thing, she asserted: “It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.” Warhol, of course, loved that line and wanted to use it in future promotions. The EPI caused enough of a ruckus that the Trip was temporarily closed by the L.A. police for mysterious reasons on the third night of the EPI’s residency. According to the rules of the musicians union, the Velvets could be paid their full fee for the three-week stint only if they remained in town, so the group holed up in a Hollywood Hills mansion known as the Castle that had previously housed Bob Dylan and other rock luminaries. While in Los Angeles with little else to do, the band went into the studio with Tom Wilson to work on “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and “Venus in Furs,” and possibly to do some work on the tracks they had recorded at Scepter in New York.

  At the end of the month, the Velvets and the EPI traveled north to San Francisco to perform for three nights at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, resulting in another epic culture clash. San Francisco was in the process of becoming the ground zero of the hippie counterculture, and it lacked the underbelly of cynicism that complicates L.A.’s cheeriness. Graham’s gruffness bruised Warhol’s passivity, and the former’s sense of San Francisco as the center of the musical universe abraded the Velvets’ New York arrogance. “We were pretty much appalled by what was going on on the West Coast,” John Cale said. “The hippie scene was not for us. They were scruffy, dirty people.” The Velvets rolled their eyes at what they felt was the amateurishness of Graham’s light show in comparison with what the EPI was doing, and the band’s ear-bleeding feedback and New York posturing offended the locals. San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason, who would go on to cofound Rolling Stone a year later, attacked Warhol, the Velvets, and their crowd as “all very campy and very Greenwich Village sick.” That he could write a line like that in San Francisco, of all cities, which even then was a gay mecca, is indicative of the kind of horror the Velvets inspired. “I really didn’t need Ralph Gleason landing on me, although I guess it was kind of cool,” Reed said. “Why would people write these incredibly vitriolic attacks against us? Naked Lunch was out there. Allen Ginsberg was out there with Howl. Hubert Selby was out there with Last Exit to Brooklyn. What could the Velvet Underground possibly add to that? It’s that music does something way past what a book could do in the same amount of time.”

  WHEN THE VELVET UNDERGROUND returned from the West Coast, the band’s momentum slowed. Perhaps because of the contract revision Reed had insisted on, Warhol focused his interest elsewhere. Reed then suffered another bout of hepatitis. The Velvets and a skeleton crew of EPI regulars traveled to Chicago without him for what turned out to be a well-received two-week residency at Poor Richard’s in the city’s Old Town district. Reed didn’t make the trip because of his illness, and Nico was off in Ibiza. Consequently, Cale handled the vocals, Maureen Tucker switched to bass, and Angus MacLise rejoined the group on percussion. The shows went so well that the band was held over for a week beyond its initial booking. While in Chicago, the band also pla
yed a daytime show at the Playboy Mansion, a mind-boggling notion. For unknown reasons, Verve did not seem in any particular hurry to release The Velvet Underground and Nico, though in July it put out the single “All Tomorrow’s Parties” backed with “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” The release made no impact whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, but the fact that both songs feature Nico on lead vocals suggests that the label saw her as the band’s star.

  While Reed was recovering from hepatitis, he learned that Delmore Schwartz had died of a heart attack while living at the Columbia Hotel near Times Square. Schwartz’s circumstances had deteriorated sufficiently that his body had lain unclaimed at Bellevue Hospital for two days after his death. Reed had maintained a correspondence with Schwartz and tried to visit him after he returned to New York, but Schwartz refused to see him. The poet’s paranoia had deepened to the degree that virtually everyone he had known at Syracuse was now somehow implicated in the universal conspiracy to destroy him. Reed released himself from the hospital in order to attend Schwartz’s wake with Gerard Malanga. Reed also attended the burial of his late mentor. Later Reed would write, “I was one of the first Medicare patients. A drug I shot in San Francisco froze all my joints. The doctors suspected terminal lupus but this turned out to be untrue. Anyway, it didn’t matter since I checked myself out of the hospital to go to Delmore’s funeral and never went back.”

  “Into the destructive element… that is the way,” Schwartz had written on a bank deposit envelope found in his hotel room. It proved to be an instruction his former student would live by for many years.

  AS 1966 DRAGGED ON, the Velvets were in something of a holding pattern as they awaited the release of their debut album. To this day, the reasons for the delay are debated. The album had essentially been completed while the band was in California in May, and acetates had been done by November, when Warhol passed one along to English rock manager Kenneth Pitt, who, fatefully, gave it to his then-unknown young client David Bowie, who was overwhelmed by it.

  The likelihood is that no single, specific reason predominated, but a number of factors conspired against the album’s coming out. Tom Wilson, who signed the band because of Nico, believed that the album needed more of her vocals. Consequently, Reed wrote “Sunday Morning” for her—as well as to accommodate Warhol’s request that he write a song about paranoia. However, when Reed learned that the song would be released as a single, he decided to sing it himself and made that clear to Wilson in no uncertain terms. Perhaps Reed felt protected by Warhol, but rudely blowing off a request from the label executive who signed you was not a strategy designed to make your album a priority in his eyes. Reed’s decision was right, though: his vocal has a gentleness and subtlety that Nico would never have been able to approach. Perhaps he might have found a better way to handle the situation—but then he would have had to be a different person. He may well have wanted to sing the song simply because Wilson—and Paul Morrissey—wanted Nico to sing it. Regardless, he would speak of Wilson only with enormous condescension for the rest of his life. The single, “Sunday Morning” backed with “Femme Fatale,” was released in November to little response. It’s notable that all three of the songs on which Nico sings lead were released on the band’s first two singles.

  Another possible reason for the delay was that Wilson had also signed the Mothers of Invention, with whom the Velvets had had several run-ins during their recent stay in California. Though the bands could not be more different, at the time they were both groundbreaking groups attempting to blend rock and roll with elements of the avant-garde. At least conceptually, the Mothers’ Freak Out!—the title of their first album—was similar to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. But the Velvets’ association with Warhol put them at a disadvantage. As outrageous as they seemed, the Mothers of Invention were a recognizable band, while the Velvets were still perceived as part of Warhol’s multimedia circus. Being associated with Warhol was an attention-grabber but also made the Velvets seem not quite serious—or no more serious than Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov doing a whip dance. Warhol had no experience dealing with a record company, while the Mothers had a seasoned manager. With the two records ready for release at approximately the same time, it makes sense that Wilson, who produced Freak Out!, would opt to put out that album first, as he did in June of 1966. Pushing the Velvets release into 1967 would help prevent the two albums from competing with each other.

  What’s more, the artwork that Warhol conceived for the cover of The Velvet Underground and Nico might have caused delays as well. The cover was a gatefold, which was still a rarity at that time. More important, Warhol wanted a banana on the album’s white cover that would peel off to reveal a pinkish phallic fruit underneath. Perhaps the most artistically adventurous cover concept for a rock album to date, it was expensive and complicated to produce, possibly leading to further delays.

  FINALLY, VERVE RELEASED THE Velvet Underground and Nico in March of 1967, one of the most important years in the history of rock and roll. With the prominence of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, the notion that popular music could be taken seriously as art had begun to take hold. The release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band just a few months later would enshrine that idea. That wasn’t an album that meant very much to the Velvets—“ Sgt. Pepper was a theatrical statement,” Cale said, somewhat dismissively. But the notion that rock musicians deserved the same level of critical appreciation as artists in any other form was very much in the air. And it was perhaps the primary ambition of Lou Reed’s career. In 1966 he had published an essay titled “The View from the Bandstand: Life Among the Poo-bahs” in which he dismissed the literary poetry of the time (notably exempting by omission his beloved Delmore Schwartz, who loathed rock lyrics) and lauded the words in rock songs. He savaged “Robert Lowell, up for a poetry prize without a decent word ever written. The only decent poetry of this century was that recorded on rock-and-roll records. Everybody knew that. Who you going to rap with. Little Bobby Lowell or Richard Penniman alias Little Richard, our thrice-retired preacher. The incomparable E. McDaniels [sic], otherwise known as Bo Diddley. Giving Robert Lowell any kind of poetry prize is obscene. Ditto worrying about Ezra Pound. And the Yale Poetry Series. The colleges are meant to kill you.” (Ironically, Lowell’s groundbreaking 1959 collection, Life Studies, can be viewed as an important precursor to Reed’s own writing in its explorations of madness and psychosexual family turmoil.)

  With their album out in the world, ready and eager for critical accolades, the Velvet Underground found itself in the odd position of being held back by the same force that was propelling the band into media prominence. Inevitably, the band was perceived as Andy Warhol’s latest gambit. His name prominently appeared on the album’s cover, and his production credit was nearly as large as the band’s own. The back cover depicts the band onstage in front of a light show, and the small, individual portraits are partly covered by polka dots and other “psychedelic” lighting effects. Brilliant as the cover concept was, it somewhat overwhelmed the music. To this day, the Velvet Underground’s debut is referred to as the banana album. Warhol denied it, but it’s beyond a doubt that the cover was a reference to the weird notion spreading through the media at the time that young people had begun to bake banana peels and smoke them in order to get high. It was just the sort of tweaking of hippie earnestness that Warhol would have loved—it just happened to come along at the absolute apex of hippie earnestness. That meant that potential record buyers would perceive the album as a joke, another Warhol put-on. Cultural theorists could debate whether Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, or Campbell’s soup cans were works of art, as Warhol’s paintings suggested. But for the general public, Warhol was perceived as something like an aesthetic hustler—either a zany provocateur or an absolute fraud, depending on your degree of cultural tolerance.

  Neither of those categories has anything to do with rock and roll. The clearly phallic—and undeniably gay and campy—implications of the full-size banana,
which curves upward like an erection, not to mention the pinkish, fleshy fruit underneath the peel-off sticker (a tiny arrow and small type on the cover suggested “Peel slowly and see”), did not help matters. History would eventually catch up to Warhol—as it would to the Velvet Underground. Both would deservedly be hailed as geniuses, and the banana cover would be recognized as among the greatest album covers of all time. But at the moment, the association with Warhol and everything he represented seemed to be holding the band back.

  This attention to the album cover is warranted not merely because of the issues it created for the band and its ultimate historical significance; in the case of the Velvet Underground, the cover was an essential aspect of the marketing of the album. Brilliant as the album is, AM radio, the primary means of exposure for music at the time, would never play it. The music was far too daring. Even the more adventurous FM stations that were just beginning to redefine the airwaves would be unlikely to go so far as to play songs about heroin or kinky sex. Television appearances were out of the question. Print advertising—all based on the slogan “So Far ‘Underground,’ You Get the Bends”—typically emphasized the band’s Warhol connections, declaring the album to be “What Happens When the Daddy of ‘Pop Art’ Goes ‘Pop Music.’” The album’s only commercial hope was word-of-mouth excitement, which is a slow build at best, or people being intrigued by the album cover in record stores. The vinyl format allowed for significant display opportunities. Record stores could place the covers in their windows or show them on their walls. In those days, music fans would flip through record bins and often were intrigued by distinctive album art. Warhol, however, would not speak to such fans in any but a parodic way, so those opportunities were lost. And when Factory scenester Eric Emerson threatened to sue the Velvets’ label because his image was displayed without his permission on the album’s back cover, the record had to be recalled and the cover redone, destroying any market momentum it might conceivably have built. The album ended up peaking at number 171, hardly an impressive showing but the highest any Velvet Underground album would reach while the original band was active.