It was a violent moment in what was increasingly becoming a violent era. Three days after Warhol was shot, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in California after winning the Democratic presidential primary there. Two months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. The war in Vietnam was escalating, and demonstrations and campus protests were growing heated. The optimism of the Summer of Love had faded, and generational warfare grew far more confrontational. While the Velvets always seemed studiously nonpolitical, the firestorm aggression of White Light/White Heat can certainly be heard as an early expression of the traumas of its time. Solanas, meanwhile, was determined to be schizophrenic and spent just two years in prison before being released, a sentence that outraged Reed and terrified Warhol, who lived in fear that she would again try to kill him.
AFTER THE RELEASE OF White Light/White Heat, the Velvets continued the approach to live performance that they had adopted—that is, they avoided New York and concentrated on cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and San Francisco, playing venues where they had developed a loyal, knowledgeable following. “We never had a booking agent who put together three-month tours and so forth,” Sterling Morrison said. “We just wanted to go back to the cities and clubs that we liked.… We didn’t especially want to play for people who didn’t know us from Adam. We thought that was futile.” Reed, however, had not yet completed his consolidation of power in the band. In September of 1968, he met with Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker at the Riviera Café near Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village and told them that he wanted John Cale out of the band. Morrison and Tucker were not only shocked, but opposed Reed’s decision. Reed was adamant. His position was that either Cale was gone or he himself would quit the band. It was a bold gesture, one that Morrison and Tucker ultimately had no way of resisting, since Reed was the band’s primary songwriter. As a further insult, Reed demanded that Morrison deliver the news to Cale.
On the most obvious level, Reed’s removal of Cale was his final gesture of taking control. Cale’s background, temperament, virtuosity, and sophistication ultimately made him, in Reed’s eyes, a rival, not a collaborator. After two albums failed commercially, Reed may well have believed that the Velvets needed to move more toward the mainstream, a direction that would have held little appeal for Cale. Cale believed that Steve Sesnick had been encouraging Reed in his belief that the Velvets were Reed’s band; it’s always easier for a manager to deal with one primary artist than with two or more. Cale had not only established his own artistic reputation; he had married the fashion designer Betsey Johnson, who, even at that early stage in her career, had earned a name of her own in the hipper precincts of Manhattan. She was a hard-charger and encouraged Cale to stand up for himself; she also brought him a significant level of visibility beyond the band, a development that would not have sat well with Reed. Most simply, Reed likely believed that, as with Warhol, he had already gotten whatever he was going to get from Cale. He had grown more confident in his own songwriting and, after making two albums, had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve. He had a manager who believed in his vision. Having to run every decision by an artist who was as talented and accomplished as himself came to seem like a chore. Without question, Cale’s contributions to the first two Velvet Underground albums were as important as Reed’s. Perhaps that was a virtue at one point. For Reed, it had become a problem.
Reed selected Doug Yule, who at the time was playing with the Boston band the Grass Menagerie, to replace Cale. Like Reed, Morrison, and Tucker—and, notably, unlike Cale—Yule was a native of Long Island. He had been a student at Boston University and a musician in local bands. Though Yule had seen the Velvets perform only once, Reed and the other band members would occasionally stay in the apartment he shared with other musicians on their frequent visits to Boston. Sesnick was familiar with Yule as well. Yule claimed that his astrological sign of Pisces—the same as Reed’s—played a role in his selection, too: Tucker and Morrison were Virgos, so two Pisces evened out the pull between practicality and intuition. Given some of Reed’s interests at the time, it’s impossible to rule out that notion.
Cale was such a distinctive musician that it’s hard to think of anyone replacing him, but that wasn’t Yule’s job. Yule was a multi-instrumentalist who could comfortably play bass, guitar, and keyboards and sing, as necessary. He was just twenty-one at the time and delighted to join a band as accomplished and highly regarded as the Velvet Underground. There was no way he was going to create problems for Reed; he had neither the standing nor, by temperament, the desire to do so. The band ran through the Velvets catalog with him, and in a matter of weeks, Yule was on the road with the group. “I knew it would make some difference,” Tucker said about Cale’s departure and Yule’s entry, “but not as much as it did. Lou couldn’t tell John some of the things he could say to Doug.” As he sometimes did with younger musicians, Reed occasionally took on a mentor-like role with Yule, even jokingly introducing him onstage as his “brother,” in part because of their similarly curly hair.
Onstage, the band gained in focus what it lost in range. The Velvets were now a conventional rock-and-roll band in the best sense of that term, and their playing was at once looser, more relaxed, and, in some sense, wilder. Even the band’s most explosive playing—the versions of “Sister Ray” that ran close to forty minutes, for example—amounted to recognizable, rhythmically intense jams, an element that was becoming common in rock shows generally, as the terse concision of rock and roll yielded to expansiveness and virtuosity. The Velvets, needless to say, were not battling soloists like the members of Cream or hippie dreamers like the Grateful Dead. Reed’s guitar playing was primitive and idiosyncratic, while Morrison’s was soulful and cleanly articulated. As a rhythm section, Yule and Tucker deftly complemented each other, her playing irreducibly tribal and her sense of time unerring, and his bass lines melodic and precise. When Yule switched to organ, he often used the instrument as a sustained drone, a simpler but still compelling version of the effect that Cale liked to get on viola. Reed called it “this all-enveloping cloud of heaven music.” The new lineup quickly found its groove, and its live shows became word-of-mouth sensations. “The greatest thing about the Velvets was the holes in the music,” Yule said. “The holes were the music. The space was vast and fun. Maureen was so straightforward—that left a lot of freedom for the bass. And Sterling was a ‘part’ guitar player. He would create something almost like a horn line on the guitar, then hold that for long periods of time.”
In November, the Velvets went into the studio to record what would become their third album, titled simply The Velvet Underground, a gesture that is hard not to read as a slap at Cale. Perhaps as a means of emphasizing their new identity, the Velvets recorded the album in Los Angeles in the midst of doing gigs up and down the West Coast. The album represents a dramatic departure from White Light/White Heat. “I thought we had to demonstrate the other side of us,” Reed said. “Otherwise, we would become this one-dimensional thing, and that had to be avoided at all costs.” Released in March of 1969, the album displays both a delicacy and a straight-ahead rock-and-roll feel that distinguish it not just from the Velvets’ previous work but from the louder, more bombastic sounds typical of rock music at the time. Intriguingly, while Reed had essentially taken over the band, the album opens and closes with songs sung by other band members.
The moving ballad “Candy Says,” one of Reed’s greatest songwriting moments, begins the album with an exploration of transsexual Candy Darling’s desire to escape her birth gender. Few albums open with lyrics as chilling as these: “Candy says, ‘I’ve come to hate my body / And all that it requires in this world.’” The song returns Reed to the world of the Factory, where Candy was perhaps the most beautiful of Warhol’s superstars. As a means of establishing some distance from that world, Reed insisted that Yule take the lead vocal on the song, and he delivers it with gentleness and grace. Reed would explain his reasons for that decisi
on in ways that alternatively flattered and condescended to Yule. Since Yule had never been part of the Factory scene and did not know Candy, his reading of the song would inevitably broaden its meaning. “Yeah, it’s about Candy Darling—and trying to see things from that point of view,” Reed said. “But it’s also about something more profound and universal, a universal feeling I think all of us have at some point. We look in the mirror and we don’t like what we see.… I don’t know a person alive who doesn’t feel that way.” At other times, he suggested that Yule simply didn’t understand the song and that this incomprehension mimicked Candy’s own confusion about who she was. In any event, that track provides a memorable introduction to the band’s new member.
As for “After Hours,” which is almost like a music hall fare-thee-well to end the night, Reed wrote the song specifically for Tucker’s voice. She sings with the unselfconsciousness of a young woman yearning for love, and she wraps up the album on a note of stubborn hopefulness. “You still don’t hear that kind of purity in vocals,” Reed said. “It has nothing to do with singing. It has everything to do with being. It’s completely honest. Guileless. And always was. I couldn’t sing that song. Maureen could sing it, and believe it, and feel much more. Because it’s about loneliness. ‘Someday I know someone will look into my eyes’—it can be so sappy and trite. But with Maureen doing it, especially being just a little off-key, it has its own strength and beauty and truth to it.”
Reed wrote another of his great ballads, “Pale Blue Eyes,” about Albin, whom he “missed very much” and still saw occasionally when she came to New York. She had married someone else, and in “Pale Blue Eyes,” Reed calls her his “mountaintop” and his “peak,” as well as, heartbreakingly, the epitome of “everything / I’ve had but couldn’t keep.” That song, along with “I Can’t Stand It,” which is not on The Velvet Underground but which Reed wrote at around this time, made it difficult for Albin to listen to his music for quite a while. “If Shelley would just come back / It would be all right,” Reed sings on a version of “I Can’t Stand It,” mentioning his former lover by name. He regularly pleaded with her to leave her husband and come back to him, a move she did not want to make. “I didn’t want to hear any of those songs, like ‘I Can’t Stand It,’” she said. “I might have been more susceptible and felt more sorry for him. But there was no divorce in my family. People didn’t leave their husbands. I remember being very depressed at twenty-four: ‘I got married at twenty-three. I’ve ruined my life.’ But never a thought of divorce. You just made the best of it.”
As much of a sonic departure as The Velvet Underground represented, its themes are entirely in keeping with the rest of the band’s work. Three songs on the album—“Jesus,” “Beginning to See the Light,” and “I’m Set Free”—are spiritual in their desire for deliverance from the struggles of this world. There is a simple answer to the famous question that critic Lester Bangs raised in his Rolling Stone review of The Velvet Underground, the first review the band received in that magazine: “How do you define a group like this, who moved from ‘Heroin’ to ‘Jesus’ in two short years?” First, you don’t need to define the band. Second, different as they are musically, those two songs are both prayers for escape and redemption. Even in his most optimistic moments, Reed would always regard himself as among the damned—the addicted, the deviant, the impulsively cruel, the mad. Rising above that condition is a central theme of all his work, including both “Heroin” and “Jesus.”
The most experimental—and disappointing—song on The Velvet Underground is “The Murder Mystery,” a nearly nine-minute verbal landslide that never coheres in any meaningful way. Commenting on the song years later, Reed suggested that he may have been trying to prove that the Velvets could still be an experimental band without John Cale: “I was having fun with words and wondering if you could cause two opposing emotions to occur at the same time. I’d fired John Cale from the VU.”
For the cover of The Velvet Underground, the band chose a black-and-white image by Factory photographer Billy Name, who was a friend and lover of both Reed and Andy Warhol. As befits the album’s stripped-down songs, the shot is simple and spare: the four band members relaxing on a couch at the Factory. In its own small way, an album cover once again proved influential for the Velvets. Dozens of indie bands in the late seventies and eighties would mimic its studied casualness, its refusal to pander to anyone’s conception of what a band portrait on an album cover should look like. Album art was growing increasingly elaborate at the time. Even The Beatles, the 1968 release that became known as The White Album, was something of a grand statement, minimalist as it was. (The Velvets somewhat jokingly referred to their own release as The Gray Album, and borrowed the Beatles’ eponymous title concept.) In the cover shot, only Reed, who is half in profile, is looking at the camera. The other band members are looking down or looking at him. Reed is holding a copy of Harper’s Bazaar, and all four band members are dressed down. Reed looks preppy in a round-collared sweater with his shirt collar outside. It’s an image that, without making a fuss at all, rejects everything about its time and its purpose—which is why bands who later wanted no part of the self-conscious, corporate merchandising of rock and roll gravitated to it.
When the album came out, critics praised it; Bangs’s Rolling Stone review was gushing, an early manifestation of what would be the critic’s lifelong manic-depressive relationship with Reed. Bangs’s enthusiasm was typical of the coverage, but the album, once again, failed to gain any commercial traction. Beyond the clutch of positive reviews, the record was virtually invisible; for a long time it was certainly the least well-known of the original Velvets albums, and it may remain so to this day. The print ads MGM took out dropped the inappropriate hippie garble of their earlier media buys, but this time, along with mentioning the band members’ astrological signs, the copy lurched into rock-crit gravitas. “Their music is just impure enough,” the ad read, “so nervously energetic at times that you can’t help but dance, at others so quiescently balladic that it requires mesmeric attention until you’ve deciphered every single nuance of the lyrics.” That pitch, it seems safe to assume, generated very few sales. But the band persisted in touring, gradually building its word-of-mouth following gig by galvanizing gig.
As they had after White Light/White Heat, when they did a studio session to record “Stephanie Says” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” the Velvets again went into the studio in New York, in May of 1969, just two months after the release of The Velvet Underground. For years, the songs the band recorded at this time and intermittently over the next few months—“I’m Sticking with You,” “Foggy Notion,” “Ferryboat Bill,” “Andy’s Chest,” “Ocean,” “She’s My Best Friend,” “Rock and Roll,” “I Can’t Stand It,” “Ride Into the Sun,” “I’m Gonna Move Right In,” “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” “Lisa Says,” and “I Found a Reason” among them—were rumored to be part of a “lost” fourth album for MGM, or at least demos for one. It’s also possible that Steve Sesnick desired some material to play for other labels, since he wanted the band off MGM, which was hardly desperate to hold on to the Velvets in any case. Regardless, none of those songs, other than “Rock and Roll” and “I Found a Reason,” would appear on a Velvets studio album, though the band was playing some of them onstage. And by April of 1970, the Velvets would be recording their fourth album for Atlantic Records.
EXACTLY HOW THE VELVETS made the transition from Verve/MGM, a label that, apart from having the bravery to sign them in the first place, barely understood them and certainly didn’t know what to do with them, to an industry giant like Atlantic is unknown. Even with Warhol’s support, Atlantic had passed on the Velvets when they were initially looking for a label without giving them more than a glance. Still, in New York circles, at least, Warhol’s glow still meant something. “I think he thought they were Warhol-esque,” Danny Fields said about Ahmet Ertegun, the cofounder of Atlantic. “He was working on sig
ning the Rolling Stones; he was working on getting Andy to do the first Stones album cover for Atlantic. There was that connection. And although the Velvet Underground were no longer connected with Andy, they had that aura.” Since then, the Velvets had made three albums and gained something like a cult following, but Atlantic was not the sort of label that went in for niche bands. The label had launched in the fifties as an R & B powerhouse and, on the strength of hits by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, had helped define the sound of the sixties. Perhaps Sesnick exerted his charm, or someone at the label understood the band’s importance and imagined the possibility of a commercial breakthrough. Whatever happened, the Velvets now had the opportunity to play on a much bigger stage—even if, strangely, their album would be released on Cotillion, a relatively new Atlantic subsidiary best known for hard-core Southern R & B.
When the Velvets entered Atlantic Recording Studios in New York in mid-April to begin work in earnest on their fourth album, they did so with a big handicap. Maureen Tucker had become pregnant with her first child and was unable to play at the sessions. Tucker’s absence is crucial for a number of reasons, not all of them musical. Most significant, even as the band’s sound grew increasingly conventional, her idiosyncrasies as a drummer fought that tendency. Once more-standard rock drummers—and the band used four of them in the studio—became part of the mix, the Velvets lost a rhythmic touchstone of their distinctive, off-kilter sound. Maureen’s absence also diminished the Velvets’ sense of themselves as a band. The new drummers were essentially session players, and Yule, who drummed on some tracks, had not been with the band very long. That left Reed and Morrison as the last remnants of the band’s original lineup. If Reed had been at the height of his powers, he might have been able to firmly take the reins and make the band, and its sound, fully his own, but his insecurities crept up on him. Three albums had now failed to deliver on the hopes he held for himself and the group, and, spotting an opening, Sesnick began whispering in Yule’s ear just as he had done with Reed. What might have been an opportunity for the band to build on its cult reputation instead became a power struggle, both within the band and within Reed himself.
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