Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  “There was that comment by that guy that I became unplugged from objective reality. Well, that’s not what happened. I plugged into objective reality, and got very sick at what I saw, what I was doing to myself. I didn’t belong there. I didn’t want to be a mass pop national hit group with followers. I knew we could do the high energy rock and everybody can dance. That’s okay. But the last night I was there, when Brigid Polk made her tape, that was the only night I really enjoyed myself. I did all the songs I wanted – a lot of them were ballads. High energy does not necessarily mean fast; high energy has to do with heart.”

  MORRISON: “I had hardly spoken to Lou in months. Maybe I never forgave him for wanting Cale out of the band. I was so mad at him, for real or imaginary offences and I just didn’t want to talk. You know that poem A Poison Tree by Blake?

  “I was angry with my friend:

  “I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

  “I was angry with my foe:

  “I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  “Like that. So in his last days with the group I was zero psychological assistance to Lou.”

  Sterling was taking two courses at City College to earn his BA (he had left there in 1966 without graduating) and spent most of his time reading Victorian novels in the dressing room.

  MORRISON: “I had quit smoking, quit taking drugs, and spent my days playing basketball and doing schoolwork. At night I would pedal over to Max’s from my place on Christopher Street, play (with some enthusiasm, I think), have a cheeseburger and two ales after the show, lock my guitar up on the third floor next to the safe, and pedal home again. An orderly life.”

  The combined pressure of making the record while performing every day would have taken its toll on any group. The Velvets put themselves under a lot of pressure to produce hits and things and were not relaxed in the studio. Maureen’s serene presence was missed. Sterling played on every track except ‘I Found A Reason’, but his commitments to school and playing Max’s didn’t leave him much time and he chose not to hang around until 6 a.m. while Lou and Doug discussed all sorts of possible combinations of ideas they could employ on the record. After laying down his basic tracks Morrison would split. He simply wasn’t as involved as he had previously been in the shape of the record. Everyone was ragged out from the arduous schedule.

  Ironically the press began to respond to them really positively as they began this final series of amputations. “The Velvet Underground plays a hard rock that is powerful and tight as a raised fist; so unified and together that it just rolls itself into a knot and throbs,” said the New York Times. In the face of all this, Lou kept trying to deliver. “Everybody’s trying to do it in their own way and we just play some rock’n’roll and people dance and get some rocks off to it. Fabulous! That’s enough, that’s enough.” Meanwhile he was becoming more withdrawn in the face of Doug Yule’s barrage of suggestions for improving the band’s commercial potential and their big – maybe final – chance to consolidate with a hit album. Morrison did notice that Reed was acting strangely. One thing he didn’t realise was that Steve Sesnick had been pressuring Reed to act more like a rock star on stage – which went against his natural shyness as a performer.

  MORRISON: “We were always anti-performers, and Lou was leaping around and making all those gestures he does now. I didn’t realize it until Lou told me that later on. But Sesnick had often exhorted us all to be more dynamic on stage; I guess he had been working on Lou in particular.

  “We were in a bind, though, and so were a lot of other bands. The problem was caused by the gradual disappearance of the old rock ‘ballrooms’, starting around 1969 or so. The old Boston Tea Party, The Avalon, and similar rooms all over began closing up, and these rooms we had always considered to be best for us – holding 1500 people or thereabouts. We were left with two choices – small clubs, which in fact were too small for us and couldn’t pay enough, or huge coliseums, which we couldn’t fill on our own. With the latter came the real problem, for on those huge stages you would be completely lost unless something theatrical were added to the music; it was no longer enough just to stand there and play the songs. The response of other bands is apparent – the pyrotechnics used by The Who and Kiss, and the truckloads of laser lights and other gimcracks carried around by Wings. Ironically, the wisest course for us in 1970 was probably to revive The EPI, only ‘bigger and better’, load it into a few 18-wheelers, and set out once again across the Hudson! Had that notion occurred to us (which it didn’t), I don’t think that we could have afforded to do it, or that any money would have been left over afterwards if we had. Just another ‘what if …’, I’m afraid.

  “Lou was relying totally on Sesnick, but Sesnick felt Lou was too hard to handle and finally told him, ‘I don’t care if you live or die.’ Lou couldn’t face this. It was like a hard divorce, to be very suddenly slapped in the face by someone you trusted. One night I’m sitting in a booth upstairs at Max’s eating a cheeseburger, and Lou comes up and says, ‘Sterling, I’d like you to meet my parents.’ I was astonished. Lou always had an extremely troubled relationship with his parents. They hated the fact that Lou was playing music and hanging around with undesirables. I was always afraid of Lou’s parents. There was this constant threat of them seizing Lou and having him thrown into the nuthouse. That was always over our heads. Every time Lou got hepatitis, his parents were waiting to seize him and lock him up. So I was thinking, ‘What in the world can this portend?’ and then I went back to the dressing room and kept going on Vanity Fair.

  LIVE AT MAX’S

  On August 23, 1970, Brigid Polk, a long-time friend, fan, and also a close associate of Andy Warhol, with whom she was conducting a series of tape recording ventures, and Gerard Malanga, went to see The Velvets play. Brigid, who was recording everything in those days, recorded the concert on her Sony TC120 cassette recorder and these tapes were later released by Atlantic, the first bootleg ever accepted by a record company.

  REED: “I’ve always arranged it so bootlegs could come out, The Max’s live set, now that’s another album I really love. If you want to know what Max’s was really like – and now you can’t – it’s there, for real, because Brigid was just sitting there with her little Sony recorder. It’s in mono, you can’t hear us, but you can hear just enough. We’re out of tune, per usual, but it’s Sunday night, and all the regulars are there, and Jim Carroll’s trying to get Tuinols, and they’re talking about the war. We were the house band. There it is.”

  Memories and impressions of the Max’s residency tend to be extremely mixed. Mickey Ruskin says it was a non-event and few people came. Debbie Harry, who was a Max’s waitress at the time and aware of the band’s significance, says this is untrue, and people were very excited by it. Richard Meltzer writes: “No other band could possibly have opened up Max’s for live music and no other ambience could possibly have served so well in reintroducing this by now legendary group to the city of its origin (they’d been stuck playing places like Boston and San Diego). Fine. Swell. Everything was metaphorically perfect from every side of the fence. But more important is the whole thing actually worked (whole summer of ’em playing real good almost every night), one of those rare times when anything that rock-predictable was actually worth all the bother.” Danny Fields, on the other hand, says, “The gig at Max’s wasn’t so momentous. It only became that when Lou left the group during that gig. You suddenly realized you were never going to see them again. I thought it was terrific.”

  We can at least hear the music recorded that night ourselves and make up our own minds about what it might have been like. Lou was facing an audience he had played a part in creating and yet he himself felt cheated and betrayed. He says that he enjoyed this night but the ambivalence is evident in the tone of his introduction.

  REED: “Good evening. We’re called The Velvet Underground. You’re allowed to dance in case you don’t know. And uh … that’s about it. This is called ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, a tender folk song
from the early Fifties about love between a man and a subway. I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it.”

  He then does some rather loose and non-committal renditions of ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, ‘Sweet Jane’, ‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill’, ‘Beginning To See The Light’, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, without saying much. Then, sounding fragile and not a little sad and weary:

  REED: “This is a song about … oh when you’ve done something so sad and you wake up the next day and remember it. Not to sound grim or anything, but just once in a while you have one of those days. I seem to have them nearly … This is a song called ‘Sunday Morning’.”

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: “Sunday Morning!”

  REED: ‘Wow! It’s really fun to be able to play these for you … I really don’t get a chance.”

  FIELDS: “The ambience at Max’s during The Velvets gig was one of intimacy. As it turned out as soon as the gig was over the next day they broke up and you realised that was it, because you knew Lou wasn’t coming back. It was serious and the remainder of the group continued without him and that’s when Donald Lyons called them The Velveteen Underground. Suddenly there was no one left. For us it was always Lou Reed. But I think that must have been the general feeling as well because he was the one. It didn’t end when Andy or Nico or John left. It ended when he left.

  “I was responsible for Live at Max’s. That very week they broke up, we realised Brigid had the last recorded performance of The Velvet Underground because it was clear that Lou wasn’t coming back. I persuaded Brigid that we take the cassette to Atlantic since they still sort of had them on the label – this was after they’d recorded Loaded – and this would be their second record and a cheap way for Atlantic to fulfil its contractual obligations. And they could buy this master and all rights to it for I think $10,000. I split it with her and then she started to be mad at me because she thought she had given me too big a cut.”

  EXIT REED

  MORRISON: “A day or two after meeting Lou’s parents, our manager came and told me that Lou had quit the band and gone back to Long Island with his parents.”

  REED: “There were a lot of things going on that summer. Internally, within the band, the situation, the milieu, and especially the management. Situations which could only be solved by as abrupt a departure as possible once I had made the decision. I just walked out because we didn’t have any money, I didn’t want to tour again – I can’t get any writing done on tour, and the grind is terrible – and I’d wondered for a long time if we were ever going to be accepted on a large scale. Words can’t do justice to the way I got worked over with the money. But I’m not a businessman. I’ve always said, ‘I don’t care about it,’ and generally I’ve gotten fucked as a result of that attitude.”

  CUTRONE: “In the end I just think that Lou had what he thought was his job to do, which was to continue making music in the best way that he could do it. Maybe back track a little to catch up with the general public and at the same time expand.”

  LOADED

  Loaded was released in September 1970 on Atlantic’s subsidiary Cotillion label. They had changed labels but not escaped being stuck on a subsidiary of their company. This record is controversial among hardcore Velvets fans for a number of reasons. After it came out Reed complained bitterly that ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘New Age’ were tampered with after his departure and sapped of their strength.

  REED: “On ‘Sweet Jane’ towards the ending it had a minor melody which was so pretty it made sense, but they edited it out. That was sheer stupidity, blatant stupidity. On ‘New Age’ it goes: ‘something’s got a hold on me and I don’t know what/it’s the beginning of a new age.’ That was supposed to go on for a full minute, that was the powerful part of the song, they have it go on for one chorus. How could anyone be that stupid? They took all the power out of those songs. Secondly, I wasn’t there to put the songs in order. If I could have stood it I would have stayed with them and showed them what to do.”

  The album lacks The Velvet Underground trademark of a series of songs setting up questions and answers and working like a series of connected stories that become comparable to a picaresque novel. The album was a blatant attempt to make it and some feel it suffers from this commercial aspect.

  REED: “I gave them an album loaded with hits, and it was loaded with hits to the point where the rest of the people showed their colours. So I left them to their album full of hits that I made.”

  Loaded contains some of Reed’s greatest rock songs (‘Sweet Jane’, ‘Rock & Roll’) and it was hailed by the critics as a masterpiece. This was annoying to Lou since not only were they responding for the first time with unanimous praise to an album he knew was flawed, but his name was listed third on the credits below Doug Yule’s and Sterling Morrison’s and the whole group was credited for authorship of all the songs, a matter which was cleared up when Reed sued and was then granted full rights to all the material. Loaded is in fact many people’s favourite Velvet’s album, probably because it is their most easily accessible. It does work well as a way into the group.

  DOUG YULE: “I had a significant influence on Lou. Lou and I had significant influence together on the group. I, of course, did no more than Lou – he was doing the writing, I was arranger, musical director. I was handling my half, he was handling his. Many said Lou was The Velvet Underground, and in the sense that it was his brainchild he was, he was the main force behind it, but it was a band, and like any band its totality is made up of all its members, not just one person with side musicians. At the time it was going on it was all very crazy, we all had visions of riches and fame and success and general acceptance, but it was kinda warm and dark, lotta late nights, and we had a lot of fun and met a lotta nice people across the country.”

  SIDE ONE:

  ‘Who Loves The Sun’ makes a surprisingly acceptable pop sound at the beginning of this last Velvet Underground album, but its irony cannot be lost on any hardcore Velvets fan.

  ‘Sweet Jane’ is one of the most successful and influential rock’n’roll songs composed by Lou Reed during his Velvet Underground period. The lyrics are a further step in Reed’s development as the poet laureate of New York City.

  ‘Rock & Roll’: It is hard to ignore the possibility that this may be a strictly autobiographical song in which Reed, to whom gender has never made much difference, is writing directly about his own experiences as a child. It would not be going too far to say that Lou Reed’s life was saved by rock’n’roll.

  ‘Cool It Down’: The message of this song, which fits very nicely into the mosaic of the album, is take life at a more relaxed pace.

  ‘New Age’ ends the first side of the album with an attempt to present some encouraging statements to a confused audience as the Seventies began.

  SIDE TWO:

  ‘Head Held High’ is a straightforward story about a son whose parents advised him from the age of six to hold his head up high.

  ‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill’ is a song about William Burroughs.

  ‘I Found A Reason’: Lou Reed walks hand in hand with himself. Doug Yule does not understand what he is singing about.

  ‘Train Round The Bend’ is the travel weary plaint of a group that had probably been on the road for too long and missed the true inspiration of their urban roots.

  ‘Oh Sweet Nuthin’ is a lament, in the tradition of folk-blues, in which the singer mentions a number of characters, cataloguing their poverty and asking the listener to say a prayer for each of them. Coming as the final song on The Velvet’s final album, it also stands as a statement of their own situation.

  BOCKRIS: “Loaded seems to have gotten an outstandingly better reception than the other records. Why do you think that was?”

  FIELDS: “The Velvets always had the critics by the balls, but so what?! They didn’t expect much commercially in terms of airplay, but they hoped for it. They always did. And they tried to make very catchy songs. I was so appalled at the cover of Loaded. In retrospect it’
s so beguiling.”

  SESNICK: “It was accumulative. The times were catching up to what we represented. A lot of things had fallen by the wayside, in terms of groups and acts that fell apart, who had far more support than we did, enormously more support than we did. They had charts, they had things that record companies could relate to. But they broke up and we were still going, so it was a cumulative thing and it really was culminating very excitingly.”

  THE CULT OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

  In 1970 Nico recorded her third solo album and performed one concert at London’s Roundhouse. Cale released his first solo album Vintage Violence and collaborated with Terry Riley on Church Of Anthrax. Morrison and Tucker continued to play in The Velvet Underground with Yule and a replacement. Warhol produced Trash, directed by Morrissey, and did the cover for The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers: a zipper on a pair of jeans that unzips to reveal a pair of jockey shorts. It was reminiscent of the banana that peeled.

  BOCKRIS: “Do you remember hearing about Lou’s quitting the group?”

  TUCKER: “Yeah, I was at Max’s in fact.”

  MALANGA: “What was your reaction at Max’s and how did you feel when you saw someone else up on stage playing drums?”

  TUCKER: “Glum.”

  MALANGA: “You were pregnant at the time?”

  TUCKER: “No, when I went there I wasn’t. I had had the baby already. And here she stands right next to me 12 years old.”

  MALANGA: “What’s her name?”

  TUCKER: “Kerry.”

  MALANGA: “Were you married at the time?”

  TUCKER: “No.”

  MALANGA: “Did you go more than once?”