Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  TUCKER: “The night I went was the last night Lou played. He had told Sesnick he was going to quit and Sesnick told me, then I went and found Lou and talked to him for a little bit. He was really, really upset and I was upset too, of course. He didn’t say much. He didn’t say, ‘Well here’s my reasons.’ He said he felt bad about it, but he had thought about it for a long time and had just decided that he had to go on his own. He was pretty quiet and obviously upset. When I went to go find him he was sitting on the upper section of the stairs at Max’s where people didn’t walk, alone in the dark, and I sat down next to him on the stairs. As I recall I put my arm around him and I said, ‘Louie, what’s the matter?’ There was nothing I could do. I was really saddened by it, but he was not getting along at all with Sesnick at this point. I don’t know really if he just felt Sesnick wasn’t doing anything for us, or if the personalities were just rubbing the wrong way. I think some of each. Lou and Sesnick were real close for quite a while. I basically said if you really feel that strongly about it, obviously you have to do it, and I told him I was real sad about it. I think I said something like, ‘have you really thought about this?’ I had gotten the feeling, and I’m sure this is true, that Doug was really getting on Lou’s nerves. And the little combo of Yule and Sesnick was becoming too much. Doug was getting on my nerves a little, too. Doug’s a very nice guy, okay, but, at the time anyway, he was starstruck, and began to think he was a lot more important than he was and was becoming a pain in the ass. Being pushy and prima donnaish and just a general pain in the ass, and affecting Lou in a whole different way.”

  BOCKRIS: “How could Doug Yule have had such an effect on Lou Reed?”

  TUCKER: “That’s what I meant when I said before about going to hear Doug rehearse and Lou being real excited and saying, ‘Wow! This guy’s great!’ I didn’t know this guy at all, but I just had this feeling, I sensed it somehow, and I said to myself, ‘Holy shit! Take it easy, Lou, you’re going to blow up this guy’s head and we’re going to have problems.’ And that isn’t my usual MO. But it was just very obvious to me for some reason. And that’s what happened. I remember saying to Lou on the stairs, because I had sensed that Doug was a big part of the problem, ‘Why the hell don’t we just throw Doug out? What the hell are you bothering with this fool for if he bothers you so much?’ I can’t remember if he even answered …”

  REED: “And if it’s true that you can’t live up to everyone’s expectations, and if it’s true you cannot be all things to all people, and if it’s true you cannot be other than what you are (passage of time to the contrary), then you must be strong of heart if you wish to work the problems out in public, on stage, through work before ‘them’ who fully expect and predict in print their idol’s fall.”

  “Passion – REALISM – realism was the key,” Lou Reed wrote five years later on the sleeve notes to Metal Machine Music. “The records were letters. Real letters from me to certain other people. I’d harboured the hope that the intelligence that once inhabited novels and films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.”

  REED: “If you play the albums chronologically they cover the growth of us as people from here to there and in there is a tale for everybody in case they want to know what they can do to survive the scenes. If you line the songs up and play them, you should be able to relate and not feel alone – I think it’s important that people don’t feel alone.”

  TUCKER: “I guess really I’m just glad I was part of it all, and very proud to have been part. I do have two regrets: (1) We didn’t stay together, and (2) A rather selfish regret, that we never taped our concerts.”

  NICO: “It was all very exciting. That’s all I can say.”

  MORRISON: “It was fun. It was not ‘Mein Kampf, My Struggle’, it was a good time. When it got to be not fun then I didn’t want to do it.”

  BARNEY HOSKINS: “Do you think there is still a cult of The Velvet Underground?”

  CALE: “Yes, and it’s distasteful to me. I mean, all the promise we showed in those two albums, we never delivered on it. I’m sure Lou feels the same way. He’s as stubborn and egocentric as I am.”

  REED: “It was a process of elimination from the start. First no more Andy, then no more Nico, then no more John, then no more Velvet Underground.”

  WARHOL: “It was great. But it’s over.”

  THE VELVET UNDERGROUND – 1993

  When our story left off in August 1970, with Lou Reed’s surprise announcement that he was quitting The Velvet Underground, it left many people suspended. Apart from our readers and the more than a million hardcore Velvet Underground fans, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule found themselves in the reptilian clutches of Steve Sesnick. John Cale and Nico had both embarked on strong solo careers, but they were not unaffected by Reed’s dramatic move. In a way everything about The Velvet Underground seemed left unfinished.

  And indeed, the remnants of the band – dubbed by Danny Fields The Velveteen Underground – continued to tour. They even recorded a new Velvet Underground album, Squeeze (1973), before they themselves finally quit and all but virtually disappeared from the public eye.

  Ironically, or perhaps fatefully, the very year this book was published, 1983, marked the rumblings of early conversations between members of the original band – including Cale – which centred around a restructuring of the vague business contracts that existed, particularly in the matter of songwriting royalties – the vast majority of which had over the years accrued to Lou Reed.

  These new arrangements were overseen by a New York based British lawyer named Christopher Whent, who was at the outset John Cale’s lawyer and in time came also to represent Morrison and Tucker in matters concerning The Velvet Underground. By 1986 new contracts had been signed and all four members of the band were communicating with each other again, if sporadically. “The band went into the black with the record company in about ’83,” Whent told the British reporter, Richard Williams. “That’s when they started spitting out royalty cheques. It’s not a bad chunk of change. Not enough to live on. But a comfortable supplement.”

  While the laborious healing of deep wounds proceeded there had, from 1972 onwards, grown a critical recognition of The Velvet Underground’s seminal contribution to rock’n’roll and along with it a growing worldwide audience. Uptight was not only published in the UK, but in Germany, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Czechoslovakia and in the USA by two separate publishers, and continues to find publishers in other territories. The Velvet Underground’s albums have been repackaged countless times in countless countries and continue to sell steadily around the world. Simultaneously, numerous bootleg albums have also appeared.

  Since Uptight was published, the consensus of critical opinion about The Velvet Underground has swung as severely as Poe’s pendulum in their favour. “The Velvet Underground were so far ahead of their time that hearing them now it seems scarcely believable that they’re not a contemporary group,” wrote Lynden Barber in Melody Maker.

  “They irrevocably changed rock’n’roll, igniting the avant-possibility in pop with a primal-shriek guitar tumult, harrowing balladry and Reed’s candid lyrical discourse on sex, drugs and salvation,” wrote David Fricke in Rolling Stone.

  “If The Velvet Underground were not the best rock band of all, they may well have been the most influential,” wrote Richard Williams in The Independent.

  Steve Mass, founder and proprietor of the Mudd Club, the most famous rock’n’roll club in the world from 1978-1983, had befriended Cale and recalled several discussions with him about getting the band back together.

  STEVE MASS: “To me, John Cale was this giant catalyst on the rock scene. He’d put the whole avant-garde and traditional rock together and that stuck in my mind. And the more I got to know John the more I felt that he was like a Mozart. He couldn’t express himself vocally. He expressed himself through music. As I got to know John I said, ‘You’ve got to get back with The Velvet Underground.’ And he’d say, ‘That’s u
tter nonsense. That’s bullshit.’ We’d be sitting in a bar and I’d keep harping on it. Obviously there were no royalties coming from The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed controlled the publishing. It was the last thing he wanted to consider. I said, ‘John, you have to do this, you were the resident genius.’”

  All these disparate strands of growing interest in the band were gathered together under the umbrella of The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, established in 1978 by a certain Philip Milstein who produced an irregularly published but excellent magazine documenting the group’s history, What Goes On. After running the organisation successfully and with some appreciation from band members, particularly Morrison and Tucker, Milstein had passed it into the capable hands of one of its major contributors, M.C. Kostek, under whose auspices it has continued to thrive. Anybody interested in getting in touch with The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society can write to M.C. Kostek c/o The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, 5721 SE Laguna Avenue, Stuart FL 34997-7828 USA.

  As the 1980s proceeded, hope grew among the fans and some members of the band that a reunion of some sort might occur in the spirit of that time, during which the Sixties, and particularly the Warhol Sixties and The Velvet Underground’s contribution, was scrutinised and presented in a new, altogether more positive light. Furthermore, in the mid-Eighties, two studio albums, recorded in 1968 and 1969 and culled from the vaults of MGM were released to critical acclaim and steady sales.

  This growing interest was capped in 1986 by an excellent BBC Television documentary on the band made by Kym Evans and Mary Harron. It was the most comprehensive visual documentation of their history, including several interviews with all the members except Reed, who simply gave permission for a brief clip of excerpts from some other interviews he had recently given to be used.

  Of all four original members of the band, Reed always seemed the most reluctant to consider, indeed the most troubled by the concept of, a Velvet Underground reunion. Reed became increasingly morose as he was repeatedly questioned about it during yearly publicity tours promoting his most recent solo record. He finally snapped at one journalist that he didn’t like high-school reunions.

  However, just as he had picked the band off the sawdust floor of the Cafe Bizarre and transported them into his Cinderella realms of magic and multimedia in 1966, Andy Warhol once again unexpectedly brought the band – or more specifically Reed and Cale – together again by suddenly and very unexpectedly dying on February 22, 1987, a day that will go down in infamy in the history of the American medical profession. Warhol had gone into hospital for a routine gall-bladder operation, but due to a lack of care during the post-operative recovery period, had been allowed to drown in his own fluids.

  Brought together by ex-Warhol Factory manager and photographer Billy Name at the Warhol memorial service luncheon on April 1, 1987, and inspired by the artist Julian Schnabel at the same event, Cale and Reed joined forces in 1988 to collaborate on a suite of songs which were released in 1990 on an album called Songs For Drella (Warhol’s nickname when they had worked with him). An attempt at a new form which Reed dubbed Biorock, the songs covered Warhol’s life chronologically, mixing fact and fiction to portray the relationship between Warhol, Reed and Cale. More than anything else it gave Reed an opportunity to apologise to Andy for turning his back on him in the early Eighties, after a long love-hate relationship that had raged through the Seventies. It also allowed him to have the last word on the cutting remarks about him in Warhol’s posthumously published diaries.

  Songs For Drella was an artistic success, garnering a large amount of attention in the international press. Coming on the heels of New York, Reed’s finest solo work in years, and Cale’s outstanding recent album, Words For The Dying, Songs For Drella solidified and brought into focus both of their careers and reputations at the beginning of the 1990s.

  It did not, however, appear to build a bridge to a Velvet Underground reunion. If anything Reed became more irritated by the constant questions about it. Unbeknown to the public, the new collaboration between Cale and Reed had actually resulted in a decision on both their parts never to work together again under any circumstances. By the time the album was completed they were, like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the mid-Eighties, barely speaking to each other.

  However, something stronger than Reed’s will, or the conflict between Reed and Cale, continued to pursue them in the growing idolatry of Warhol, whose fame multiplied in death like Marilyn Monroe’s and James Dean’s, particularly in Europe where a necrophiliac relationship with American icons has been an established tradition since the end of World War II. In June, 1991, the Cartier Foundation in France staged an enormous Warhol event to inaugurate the opening of his retrospective in Paris and all four original members of The Velvet Underground were invited to attend, all expenses paid. Nico had died in an accident on the island of lbiza in 1988. Reed and Cale had agreed to give a brief performance of some of the Songs For Drella at the event. At the last moment, Lou decided that it would – under the circumstances – be churlish not to invite Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison to join them on stage for at least one song.

  LOU REED: “We were scooting around that morning, going, ‘Hmmm, we could … It’s possible … No, no … Oh, life’s too short.’”

  MAUREEN TUCKER: “Me and Sterling turned up for the show, it got all emotional and five minutes later we were on stage playing ‘Heroin’, totally unrehearsed. I remember thinking, ‘Shit, that’s Lou Reed out there, that’s John and Sterling and this is still the best band in the world.”

  It was not, however, until November to December 1992, when the band convened in New York for the first ever business meeting to oversee a growing roster of VU product, that the story of their reformation really begins.

  MORRISON: “What distinguished the business meetings in the past was that they were attended by our lawyers … But this was one we actually convened, in the flesh, and that to me was unprecedented. That was the first time we’d ever done that, John, that was historic!”

  CALE: “Paris was a surprise, inasmuch as it actually happened. Nothing would have gotten done without Lou thinking it was a good idea There was nothing happening for him in 1993 so he decided to try it. So we put together a couple of days’ rehearsal in New York just to see if we could keep time. It was very interesting – there was the sound all over again. It turned out to be fantastic. All the original enthusiasm was there.”

  MORRISON: “So we concluded that we could play. The next question was do we want to?”

  A four-week rehearsal period was scheduled in New York for May, 1993. There was some trepidation as to how matters would flow between them once they passed through the initial euphoria of discovering each other again, but things started well. Lou and Sterling, who had talked least during the interim, initially found great joy in re-igniting their guitar partnership. And the combination of Sterling and Maureen served as a buffer between John and Lou that seemed to click perfectly into the emotional engine of the group. Yet to visitors it was obvious that, as one put it, “It’s Lou’s world. We just live here.” It was undisputed that the reunion would never have happened had it not come from Reed’s desire. And it also appeared that Lou, not John, was now the musical as well as lyrical conductor of The Velvet Underground.

  Reed repeatedly said that he was there to have “fun”. Perhaps the others had forgotten what “fun” was for Lou Reed. For the director in Lou, for example, it was fun to pit his wife – and defacto band manager – Sylvia, against the other members of the group, encouraging her to treat them like dogshit. It was “fun” to cut into Sterling in front of the others when he had a tuning problem. As the rehearsals neared their end, Morrison was heard to express the emotion that had he known it was going to be like this he would have stayed at home.

  What saved the day, perhaps, certainly what brought the band through rehearsals that could have ended the reunion, was the fact that, whilst part of Lou had proudly remain
ed fifteen years old, the other three had matured in the intervening two years. Maureen was a mother of five. John, who like Lou had abstained from drugs and alcohol for years now, and was weathered by working on Songs For Drella, had discovered how to pacify rather than pander to Reed’s little chess moves. Both Sterling and John were able to empathise with the psychodrama of Reed’s daily life and thereby handle, rather than strangle, him.

  Even Lou appeared to have changed on the surface. On the day he berated Sterling so nastily, for example, he had later apologized, astonishing his long-suffering friend. But the nerve of Lou’s “fun” was inescapably present in the persona of Sylvia, who had by now transformed into what her husband had once been famous for being – a rock monster. She went out of her way to belittle the other members of the band, particularly Cale. Treating him like a know-nothing twerp, she constantly compared John to Lou, pointing out to highly amused observers – since the opposite was so blatantly true – how much better than John Lou now looked. Sylvia made it as transparent as hydrochloric acid that in her opinion John, Sterling and Maureen were simply Lou’s band, and all owed their lives to Lou’s generosity without which none of them would have existed. In this Sylvia betrayed, for someone in the music business, an astonishing lack of understanding of the mechanics of a rock band and a blind spot about the essential collaboration between Reed and Cale, which had played a larger role in Lou’s life as a musician than any other single force. As Cale would regretfully conclude after the whole “reunion” crashed to an abrupt end later that summer, from the outset measures were taken to separate Lou from the band. As a result, the sad truth is that although Lou played with The Velvet Underground through that June and July in Europe, he never really re-joined the band.

  As soon as it was announced that The Velvet Underground would undertake a European tour in the summer, requests for interviews poured in from numerous publications in every country they would play, primarily in the UK, where the VU had their most loyal following, with France a close second. This series of interviews was organised with steely control by Sylvia Reed. She refused to allow any access without a guarantee that the band, or Lou, would be featured on the publication’s cover. The results were impressive. The following montage of quotes sets the stage for the drama that was to unfold.