Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  BOCKRIS: “How long did it take to record?”

  TUCKER: “Approximately seven sessions over a period of two weeks.”

  BOCKRIS: “How were the group to work with in the studio at that point?”

  TUCKER: “From my end it wasn’t uptight. A few arguments about ‘let’s do this and let’s not’, but nothing major – relaxed and straight ahead.”

  MORRISON: “If you were a producer trying to tell us what to do, that wasn’t too good. What we needed in a producer was really an educator. Everyone in The Velvet Underground was strong-willed, but Mo took a quiet role in our conflicts. She always said there was no reasoning with any of us, that we were all crazy, and there was no sense in arguing. I think basically the band had three uncontrollable personalities, and if you throw drugs into the confusion then you really have problems.”

  REED: “Maureen Tucker’s so beautiful. She has to be one of the most fantastic people I’ve ever met in my life. She’s so impossibly great, but I can never believe it, you know, when we’re walking round the studio and I run into Mo, I just can’t believe it.”

  MORRISON: “I love Lou, but he has what must be a fragmented personality, so you’re never too sure under any conditions what you’re going to have to deal with.”

  REED: “I think everybody has a number of personalities, just in themselves. It’s not just people having different personalities. I mean you wake up in the morning and say, ‘Wonder which one of them is around today?’ You find out which one and send him out. Fifteen minutes later someone else shows up. That’s why if there’s no one left to talk to you can listen to a couple of them talking in your head.”

  BOCKRIS: “What are the effects of a steady dose of meth-amphetamine?”

  CALE: “It changes the muscle structure in your face, so you can’t smile anymore. Your face gets limp and sags. You smile and it looks like a weird, Frankenstein grimace. So people can’t tell if Lou’s joking or not. He’s got a great sense of humour.”

  MORRISON: “Will he be boyishly charming, naive – Lou is very charming when he wants to be. Or will he be vicious – and if he is, then you have to figure out what’s stoking the fire. What drug is he on, or what mad diet? He had all sorts of strange dietary theories. He’d eat nothing, like live on wheat husks. He was always trying to move mentally and spiritually to some place where no one had ever gotten before.”

  BOCKRIS: “How did you rehearse?”

  MORRISON: “We never changed our method from back on Ludlow Street. We would practise the beginning and the end of a song. As we never played it the same way twice – it didn’t matter if we practised the middle. If there was anything weird about it then we went over that. But the songs we practised most – the truly polished pieces – we never recorded. We knew we could do them, so there was no more interest. We wanted to see if we could make something else work. Our best stuff, about 80 per cent of it, was either radically reworked in the studio or written there.”

  CALE: “There’s a lot of improvisation on White Light/ White Heat. Most of the recording was done straight through; ‘Sister Ray’ was one piece. ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ and ‘Here She Comes Now’ evolved in the studio. We never performed them live. ‘The Gift’ was a story Lou had written a long time ago when he was at Syracuse University. It was my idea to do it as a spoken-word thing. We had this piece called ‘Booker T’ that was just an instrumental, so instead of wasting it we decided to combine them. The cover is a very dark picture of a biker’s arm with a tattoo on it – a skull and cross-bones.”

  BOCKRIS: “Did the four of you have a strong connection about the sound you wanted?”

  MORRISON: “Yeah, but we also put each other on the spot. Like you can come up and say, ‘I’d like to try this.’ And then someone would say, ‘Okay, fine, try it,’ but you only got about two tries. And then after that that’s the end of it. We had had a problem with ‘Heroin’ between the one we did initially and the one that we did out in LA. There had been a lot of quick shuffling. So, when we got to ‘Sister Ray’ we solved the problem by deciding there was only going to be one take. Naturally everyone prefers the take where they sound the best. That put an end to that bullshit. So, if you have anything to do you better do it right this second, otherwise we don’t want to hear about it. I do believe that was an accurate representation. One take that would eliminate all arguments. I quit the group for a couple of days because I thought they chose the wrong mix for ‘I Hear Her Call My Name’, one of our best songs that was completely ruined in the studio. Overall I think the album is a technical failure. We didn’t want to lay down separate tracks, we wanted to do it studio live with a simultaneous voice, but the problem was that the current state of studio art wouldn’t let us do it. There was fantastic leakage because everyone was playing so loud and we had so much electronic junk with us in the studio – all these fuzzers and compressors. Gary Kellgran, the engineer, who is ultra-competent, told us repeatedly, ‘You can’t do it – all the needles are on red.’ And we reacted as we always reacted: ‘Look, we don’t know what goes on in there and we don’t want to hear about it. Just do the best you can.’ And so the album is all fuzzy; there’s all that white noise.

  “In the Fall of 1967 I moved in with Martha Dargan and her brother Tom on East 2nd Street. John moved in with Betsey at the Chelsea somewhere around this time, and Lou was here and there, mostly on Perry Street, and later at the loft on Seventh Avenue and 31st Street. Maureen was living on Fifth Avenue and 9th Street.”

  Andy Warhol contributed the cover concept, a photograph of a tattoo on Billy Linich’s upper arm, but otherwise had nothing to do with the record. The group consisted of the original Velvets without Nico, who was already working on her first solo album (for MGM/Verve) Chelsea Girls, and to which, to indicate the continuing spirit of collaboration and support that existed between all these people, both Lou and John contributed songs and played on some of the tracks. Cale received his first solo song writing credit on Chelsea Girls which also contains a song credited to Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, another first.

  In October Brian Epstein made his third approach, offering to set up an international tour of Europe, and The Velvets said that would be fine. However, just as they were about to sign the contracts, he died, effectively closing down that channel. This was particularly unfortunate because going to Europe was one thing that might have had a very positive effect upon the group. It’s likely they would have been more appreciated there than they were in the States, as is evident from Gerard Malanga’s experiences in Italy at the time. According to this letter Lou wrote to Gerard in Italy at the end of 1967 groups were asking for permission to record Velvets’ songs.

  December 23, 1967

  Dear Gerard – hope this finds you well. Have sent you a check for $167.00, your share of last year’s show at the Trip, for which we finally got paid. Know you need it so I sent it by registered special delivery and you should have it by now. Also did write your friends (Equipe 84) to say yes record ‘Heroin’. I think that’s great and it’s nice ofyou to think ofus. You know we used a beautiful picture of Mario Anniballi’s for the back of our new album White Light/White Heat which is coming out in January. The cover is a black on black picture of a motorcyclist tatoo (sic) by Billy. Beautiful. ALL BLACK! I have a loft, you know. You now have my address so write direct to me rather than through Roz who has kept me well informed. It is Xmas soon but in New York it is warm, 58 degrees, nice walking. Ondine, Mary and Irene are in a great play, Conquest Of The Universe and it’s too much and I can’t describe it which gives you a hint. Andy did his 25 hour movie and it was ENORMOUS and beyond. Hope all holidays are delightful as the New Year is inevitable: Do Write – Lou.

  2. 1968 – THE BLACK YEAR

  MORRISON: “I don’t see 1968 as a black year at all, except that we ended it without Cale (an event that blackened it as much as possible, to be sure). I considered it our best year – our touring was successful, and our playing was excellent. Perhaps t
he possibility of real success suddenly became so tangible that we pursued it into megalomania and ruin. Our struggles to succeed on our own terms, once directed outwards at audiences, record execs, radio stations and what not, perhaps turned inward towards the group, with unfortunate consequences. We decided that the major market was here. Success was succeeding here, not in England, Germany, or Scandinavia. It had to happen here first. We were frequently exhorted to go over to Europe for a bit. Perhaps we should have.”

  How did The Velvets feel on January 30, 1968 when their second album White Light/White Heat was released? Cocky and confident say some; paranoid, vulnerable and fragile say others. John Cale was the sort of guy who was afraid to go out on the street. Lou could be bitter, cynical, sarcastic at times. They were the perfect match and the perfect mismatch. They held an adverse attitude toward everything. John and Sterling are both on record as saying the second album was a hype, a technical failure.

  The Velvet Underground were highly appreciated by a very small coterie of alert, intelligent people. For this group, who hung around the Chelsea Hotel and Max’s, they were “our band”. They knew what they were doing was really good but they were dismayed by the lack of support from the record label. They were frustrated by their inability to reach larger audiences, and even had some trouble getting jobs in the aftermath of their emergence from The EPI as a four piece unit. The majority of The EPI shows had been booked after all on the strength of Warhol’s name. Tom Wilson interviewed Lou and John on Boston radio in February of ’68 and asked Lou what his plans were.

  REED: “We wanted to ultimately work on a tape that would take up every minute of every hour of every day of the entire year! I didn’t bother to figure out how many hours that is. It would just be one extremely long tape and it would fit into your wall and it would be personalized because what would happen is that you would come to us – The Velvet Underground – and say I want a tape from you and we’d say, ‘Here.’ Then you’d take that and we’d take you by the hand over to Gary (Kellgren, engineer) at the recording studio and Gary would stare at them a lot until he figured he knew them and then he would reflect their personality and then they’d take the tape back and they’d install it in the wall and it would be like theirs and it would go on all day like one of Andy’s movies, like Empire could be on the other wall, like the music going on all the time. Like John said the other day the albums that should come out would have a colouring book and toys. People are starting to do that but they haven’t really gotten into it. They’re messing around with covers trying to be hip and doing things but they haven’t really started what you could have. But it would go on all the time.”

  WILSON: “You can tell a man by the records he plays.”

  REED: “We’d supply arm-bands and labels. We’d re-classify …”

  WILSON: “Fantastic. It’s frightening and yet enormous and it seems logical in terms of things that are going on now.”

  CUTRONE: “I loved White Light/White Heat. Again it was this great understatement. The cover was a darkened photograph of Billy Linich’s tattoo that you had to scrutinize to see the image. It was so cool that people weren’t ready. It was just too cool, it was the coolest thing in the world at that moment. Nobody knew what white light was. People thought it was acid. And white heat? Nobody understood that it was an amphetamine rush that made your toes hot and made your eyes go blind and see just clear white heat. I think the words, the imagery, the subtlety of the album cover confused a lot of people. Again, The Rolling Stones were making 3-D album covers, The Beatles had beautiful little pictures of them looking cute, and then this dark album comes out with a very subdued picture of a tattoo. It doesn’t fit in anywhere, so that was strange.”

  BOCKRIS: “What was The Velvets’ reaction to the reception of White Light/White Heat?

  CUTRONE: “Everybody’s egos were so strong that they already assumed they were the greatest. In terms of money I’m sure it hurt. I mean it would be great to be successful in terms of money, but musically there was no compromise. It was ‘go on, believe in this, do this,’ and as it turned out twelve years later they proved to be absolutely on target. Now the sales on that album, if it’s even available, are probably phenomenal. I don’t run into too many people these days who don’t know about The Velvet Underground, even just from word of mouth. It’s a pity that some of their records are unavailable because they’re much better than a lot of the stuff that we hear now.”

  BOCKRIS: “Did you feel White Light/White Heat was a great record when it came out and people were really going to like it?”

  TUCKER: “I was very happy with it. I thought it was a real good record. We were all disappointed once more by MGM. It was never in the stores, the same bullshit. In certain towns like Boston it did well and everybody loved it. A lot of people who could get their hands on it really liked it. But our record audience was limited to people who saw us live. Because we were never on the radio MGM just didn’t do anything to promote US. I mean the fans that we made then were really crazed. And they still are. I’m stunned by what people still think of us.”

  BOCKRIS: “How did you feel about things at the beginning of ’68?”

  TUCKER: “I was always very positive about the group. I really did believe that we had something special, not in a Beatles way, in a more important way. I really did think we were damn good.”

  BOCKRIS: “And presumably the rest of the group felt that too?”

  TUCKER: “They enjoyed what they were doing. I don’t know if maybe being males they didn’t allow themselves to think, ‘Holy Shit, we’re great!’”

  BOCKRIS: “Were you performing much when the record came out?”

  TUCKER: “I couldn’t swear that in the month surrounding the release of the record we were playing, but Sesnick kept us pretty busy. We went to California a couple of times, and to Canada, St. Louis and Texas.”

  BOCKRIS: “How was Sesnick to work with?”

  TUCKER: “I enjoyed him. I always had fun with him, liked him a lot. He was terribly enthusiastic and incredibly positive.”

  BOCKRIS: “You felt your relations with him were pretty straightforward?”

  TUCKER: “I did at the time. I’m really not sure quite what to think now. I knew he always had our interest at heart and he worked damn hard. I think one reason it just didn’t work, was that he just had too high of a dream, seeing us as the next Beatles and having people screaming in the streets. Having that big of a dream, he turned down a lot of things, thinking this isn’t the right time to do that.”

  BOCKRIS: “How were relations in the group?”

  TUCKER: “Real good.”

  BOCKRIS: “Wasn’t the developing split between John and Lou causing a lot of tension?”

  TUCKER: “At certain times there’d be a lot of tension between them, but I got along just great with everybody so I never felt, ‘Oh boy, this sucks. I think I’ll quit.’”

  BOCKRIS: “Was Steve Sesnick like a fifth member of the group?”

  TUCKER: “Yes, he was.”

  BOCKRIS: “By the beginning of 1968 were you living in New York?”

  SESNICK: “Yes.”

  BOCKRIS: “Did you all feel very positive about this new beginning?”

  SESNICK: “Yes, we felt very positive, we did, very much so, we thought the record was great. We certainly were shocked when radio stations didn’t think it was so great. But we were used to that. We never had airplay then – it just didn’t happen – so we didn’t care about it.”

  BOCKRIS: “I presumed that you must have felt very positive at the beginning of ’68, yet ’68 was a pretty bleak year in many ways.”

  SESNICK: “Oh, not really, I don’t think so, I went to a party that year with Lou – it was fun.”

  BOCKRIS: “How did people react to the second album?”

  MORRISON: “They were stunned.”

  WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT

  What exactly did they serve up on White Light/White Heat, the only album recorded in t
heir original formation without the presence of any other singers or influences other than their engineer Gary Kellgren and producer Tom Wilson?

  SIDE ONE:

  ‘White Light/White Heat’: A raucous, humorous, celebration of amphetamine. Wayne McGuire, writing in Crawdaddy, said: “The track ‘White Light/White Heat’ best illustrates my contention that John Cale is the heaviest bass player in the country today. Most bass players play two-dimensional notes, but John plays three-dimensional granite slabs which reveal an absolute mastery of his instruments and a penetrating awareness of the most minute details of his music.”

  ‘The Gift’: Author Lou Reed, never puts a foot wrong throughout the piece, possibly inspired by Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, which is perfectly related by a deadpan John Cale in his best “BBC voice”.

  WILSON: “Let me hip you to the stereo version of this record. When you’re at home you take that balance-control, you flip it over to one side and you get the information that’s on one groove-wall of your record and that’s the short story by itself without the music. Of course, if you just reverse your balance-control or your channel-selector you’ll get some very groovy music to hang out with somebody you’ll like. And if you’re a mad fiend like we are, you’ll listen to them altogether. That’s where we’re at. We got stereo prefrontal lobes.”

  ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’: A Burroughsian rendition of the Lady Godiva legend.

  ‘Here She Comes Now’ is a rather pretty 4-line dissertation on the possibility that a girl might come.

  SIDE TWO:

  ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ is an intense declaration of love for a girl who has been dead for some time.