by Mark Greif
The unity of their work has to do with the pleasures of force, both suffering and exerting it, and a theatrical Sadeanism (different from direct sadism) that could be made musical as well as lyrical. This is what Cale really did bring to the band, beyond Reed’s fairly conventional musical instincts. The classical avant-garde is still today mostly content to play down the pain, annoyance, boredom, and nuisance of the willed adherence to dissonance, atonality, minimalism, and clipped or extended duration that are hallmarks of many of its best effects in the twentieth century. Whereas the Velvet Underground—in Cale’s revision of La Monte Young—was able to reposition avant-garde annoyance and aural pain as part of a thematics of being outside and underground. Aural pain went with overt lyrics of willed pain to make avant-garde musical gestures a sonic correlative to squalor, masochism, deviance, and drugs. The essence of the Velvet Underground’s success under Cale would then be really that it provided what it promised—pain.
It would be one thing to hear the order to “kiss the boot,” the “tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you” in “Venus in Furs” if the lyrics were just accompanied by folk-guitar finger-picking. It’s quite another, more effective thing to listen to these lyrics against Cale’s excruciating freaks of viola. The VU are a band that actually causes pain, to accompany the verbal promise of pain. They show that aural pain becomes pleasure especially when listening to it constitutes an act of affiliation with a higher, because worse and more “transgressive,” way of life. The person who doesn’t like being abused by Cale’s viola, or the badly recorded trebly guitars of White Light/White Heat, is stupid, straight. The person who knows (or learns) the pleasure of the abuse, who will listen to the seventeen minutes of “Sister Ray” and then put it on again, has ascended to a higher sphere—or, rather, descended into the underground—simply by the act of listening, with or without actual access to works, spoon, smack, speed, tenements, whips, or leather boots.
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I never felt I could understand the historical meaning of the Velvet Underground, or how it should be that such a weird, and minor, troupe should be set at the head genealogically of such a vast and various posterity, until I started noticing comparisons and uncanny connections to the band, historically, that ought to be their polar opposite—that is, the Grateful Dead. In the musical-historical imagination, with its New York-vs.-California but especially its punk-vs.-hippie oppositions, the groups are antithetical. When I was introduced to punk, people wore T-shirts of the White Light/White Heat album cover (which wouldn’t have existed in reality, decades earlier, when the album was originally released), but the mere mention of liking the Grateful Dead was grounds for deadly ostracism. So I kept my Deadheadedness secret. In the punk-rock schema, the Velvets were Papa (and Mama) punks, while the Dead were Papa hippies. By convention, punks hate hippies.
When you look at the history of both bands at their contemporaneous founding moments in 1965/1966, I think you’ll find, though, that the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead commenced on opposite coasts, in an odd way, as basically the same band. Not thanks to musical training or style, but based on a new function and new kind of emotion they promised. Both bands in fact started with the same name in 1965: the Warlocks. And both were quickly taken up by other cultural movements and artists from other genres to furnish “house bands” for collective projects. On the West Coast, Ken Kesey hired the Dead to provide music for his LSD parties, the Acid Tests. The Palo Alto Acid Test, the first to involve the general public, took place in November 1965, just before Warhol started staging his events. (Kesey had earlier had the Dead, then still the Warlocks, playing in a Santa Cruz living room with everyone dosed.) In New York, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable enjoyed various early incarnations between January 1966 and its first broad-public invitation in April—mostly Warhol’s dancing fools, slide-projector gels, light shows, silent films, and chaos. Both house bands’ music depended on a tight association with drugs, principally LSD for the Dead, heroin for the Velvets (not least because of Reed’s song “Heroin”). But the musicians drew fewer distinctions in their personal lives: Reed had done plenty of acid in college, while in happy California the Dead’s Ron “Pigpen” McKernan was taking heroin with Cass Elliot from the Mamas and the Papas, and Jerry Garcia would have a later, lifelong heavy-duty heroin habit. As Warhol paid for the Velvets’ first album, the Dead’s first album was paid for by an original benefactor from the early scene of communal presentation: Owsley Stanley, supplier of LSD for the Acid Tests. Each album seemed to make drugs part of the sound thematic. This was the heroin “wrapped in fur” slowdown for the VU, including the literal slowing down of the tapes in mastering (something Richard Witts seems to have proven by analyzing the pitches of the recorded tunings); for the Dead, surprisingly, it was an amphetamine-fueled recording of all the songs on their first album at ridiculously fast tempi, though things slowed down subsequently.
The strangest fact, though, is that the Velvet Underground, like the Grateful Dead, too, seem to have started as a platform for extremely long, wandering, repetitive, live improvisations, appropriate to multimedia events. All of the Velvets’ principals from the early years later insisted that they were far superior as a live band than in anything captured on record, alluding to unrecorded work like “Sweet Sister Ray,” a sometimes forty-minute-long improvisational prelude to live performances of “Sister Ray.” (One wonders if this title points to the later-period jam song “Sweet Jane.”) To listen carefully to the VU’s members is to imagine an alternate world in which people could have listened to forty versions of “Sister Ray” as they would listen to forty performances of the Dead’s “Dark Star,” seeking the passages of improvisational transcendence in each, or to thirty-minute VU improvisations like “Melody Laughter,” made up of feedback, guitar, organ, and vocalise from Nico. It’s curious to think of the VU, progenitor of punk, as originating at the same moment and under the same conditions that yielded the much-ridiculed modern-day jam band.
Why, after all, did both bands originally imagine themselves destined for the name “the Warlocks”? Essentially because both had initial visions of sorcery underlain with darkness. (They had to change names, incidentally, because each independently discovered a third band that had put out a record as the Warlocks.) These bands offered a certain kind of alternatively experienced, rather than danced-to or sung-along-to, pop music, whose relation to the audience would be primarily hypnotic and all-encompassing. This is, I’ll say again, unexpected for the Velvets, though not for the Dead. One knows that “Heroin” was supposed to capture a particular kind of experience, but not that the experience might have been infinitely expandable, or should have led to improvisation, or that perhaps it was originally meant to occur live, not on record. Cale claimed in his autobiography, written with Victor Bockris: “The aim of the band on the whole was to hypnotize audiences so that their subconscious would take over.” This provides a rationale for the viola drone, and songs built on long vamps of two chords.
The Grateful Dead wound up providing an alternative world directly, through their unique phenomenon of a mass social affiliation built up through thirty years of steady national and international touring (with just a one-year hiatus in 1975). One could spend a year “on tour” with the Dead, following their itinerary, visiting the community in venue parking lots, and not even needing to see the shows when tickets were scarce or expensive. And they were doomed to this by their way of putting together music and lyrics. From the beginning, the words to their songs, however carelessly put together, were about roads and rivers. They drew out from American music its promise of continual rambling—with the occasional respite of dew-bejeweled meadows, barefoot promenades, or rolling in the rushes down by the riverside. It’s no accident that their first single was “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion),” that their signature song (apart from the tripped-out “Dark Star”) was “Truckin’,” and that the band matured its endless-trip LSD premise into an endless-traveling t
ouring premise, such that both principal experiences could be crystallized in one phrase in the ultimate Dead-lyric cliché: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” They had dark songs, as many songs’ journeys end in death or exhaustion, but even those waver, like “Dark Star,” between annihilation and beatitude. (“Shall we go, you and I, while we can / Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?”) The Dead’s equivalent to classically trained avant-gardist Cale was the classically trained avant-gardist Phil Lesh, but Lesh didn’t double his bass guitar with any higher-pitched string instrument like viola, so the “Phil Zone” emerged as a singularly supple, harmonic, tripped-out deep end, a register of mountainous or tidal wonder. Velvet Underground lyrics, in contrast, are mostly about not going outdoors, and the wish for pleasurable self-destruction (“thank God that I’m good as dead” in “Heroin”), and the music when you’re not wriggling in ecstasy on a broken-down mattress could make you pull a pillow over your head. There is a feeling that their music really can only transpire in private, in places that a fan base of more than three or four couldn’t fit, and in a city, and in a darkened room. The Dead were fated by their lyrics to travel. The VU were fated by their lyrics, in some sense, never to be natural to a mass live audience, but to be passed on, from hand to hand, on record, to be reenacted in private.
It also seems to matter that neither band’s music, in some deep way, is very good, or first-class art. There’s something secondhand and plain about the underlying songs, derivative of bluegrass festivals and folk-rock jamborees (for the Dead) and fifties rock and Tin Pan Alley and the most rudimentary high-school bands (for VU). You don’t take any of the personnel for geniuses—unless mad geniuses. The lyrics are grand, but in the manner of Grand Guignol, and dramatic and silly. The additional factor that makes them singular comes as a kind of extrinsic extremity. A huge appetite for drugs plus Jerry Garcia’s and Phil Lesh’s endless wandering, noodling string-instrument virtuosity. Or drugs plus Reed’s lyrical agony and Cale’s instrumental excruciation.
This last, you could say, is what the California bands were reluctant to do in their psychedelia, deliberately hurt your ears with the newly available techniques, and match this to an ethos of pain within the lyrics. West Coast bands did hurt your ears sometimes (just listen to the Jefferson Airplane), but accidentally. The critic David Fricke recounts the story, apocryphal or not, that Bill Graham, sponsor of the Dead and plenty of other bands who experimented musically with feedback, banned the VU from the Fillmore West after they ended a performance by walking off stage leaving their guitars leaning against the speakers, generating uncontrolled feedback. The insult Bill Graham presumably took from the VU was the causing of pain deliberately and impersonally, cut off from the audience, or reconnecting with it through a gesture of hostility. I remember that by the time, decades later, I was going to see post-punk shows, this gesture of leaning guitars face-forward against an amplifier stack for feedback was the way that every single great band of my youth—Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, My Bloody Valentine—left the stage.
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Punk begins in fear. Maybe that’s why rock is for children, first and always. You have to be that young, and not yet know the world or be jaded by it, to feel this reduction of the world with full intensity, to hear the drumbeat strike and think it’s the world reaching out to punch you.
Punk promised physical experience, a buzzing charge. It seemed to offer a kind of aggression against the listener by the band and singer, but then a much profounder resistance and battle against everybody else—somewhere, in the fallen world—by the band, and singer, and listener, and the whole listening audience, all together. The lyrics often seemed to know that they couldn’t possibly come up to the intensity of the music, or that they gained whatever power they had only from the music behind them. Yet there isn’t a lot of good instrumental punk—surprisingly little, in fact. The yoking of inchoate massive force to frustrated or powerless (or, very often, partly comic and self-satirizing) verbal expression is too important to ever leave the lyrics out. The lyrics could be comic-aggressive, or they could be abject and self-assaulting. Even the best are not complex. In lyrics ranging from “Fuck school fuck school fuck my school” (the Replacements) to “I’m a leper” (Dinosaur Jr.), you get the crude extremes of aggression and abjection—and both modes were simultaneously super-serious and made for laughter. They just said the thing, for better and for worse.
One of the most thriving subgenres when I was young was hardcore. It was particularly scary, because of the ultrafast repetitive drumbeat, the shouted lyrics, the chopped-up guitar, but also, at least initially, because of the shaved-headed culture surrounding the music. Shaved heads meant skinheads, and to a fourteen-year-old in the ignorant 1980s, skinheads meant neo-Nazis, young German and English Hitler-fancying hooligans who ran wild in the streets of Bremen or Leeds; National Front brutes, racists—the people 60 Minutes ran segments on that my parents would watch. In between classes at school, it was explained to me by my peers that not all hardcore was skinhead and that anyway there were antiracist skinheads, although there was racist white-supremacist hardcore, too, in England especially, but that was hard to find, and…It seemed to me an unhealthy fixation, this focus on which skinheads were Nazis and which were not. Why not just have hair? I was told about a world called “straight edge,” a subculture of shaved-headed (or crew-cut) hardcore punks who not only were antiracist but additionally forswore drugs, alcohol, and tobacco (though not necessarily violence), and who Magic-Markered X’s on the backs of their hands in imitation of the policy punk clubs employed to keep underage drinkers from the bar. I didn’t really care; I didn’t put any X’s on my hands. Assorted band cassettes came and went, and at some point my friend Becky K. gave me a tape of the complete works of the great, defunct DC hardcore band Minor Threat. To that recording, I responded. I listened, stunned, and with very little idea what to make of it, but thrilled. Minor Threat’s stance combined liberal guilt with a citizen’s indignation. One song acknowledged being on the wrong side of the racial divide, and the guilt of collusion with evil whiteness (“Guilty of Being White”); and the others were about being a dissenter, an opponent, when all criteria of value were themselves erroneous, not only because “good guys don’t wear white,” but also because they were “Out of Step”:
Don’t—smoke
I don’t—drink
I don’t—fuck
At least I can—fucking think!
I can’t keep up, I can’t keep up, I can’t keep up
Out of step—with the world!
That album woke me up in a way that I still can’t put into words. But I did not feel at home with it. It did not make me feel good. I did not feel entitled to sing along. At fourteen, I did not smoke, drink, fuck, but I eagerly looked forward to all three, and had no experience that would lead me to renounce them. Yet it felt as if these people, close to my age though older, were the only people doing something, saying something, that I wanted done or said. Preparing for something, something I could follow them in doing, though I didn’t know what or how.
The successor band to Minor Threat was Fugazi, formed by its lead singer, Ian MacKaye, with a singer from the great, short-lived band Rites of Spring, Guy Picciotto. To Fugazi, I became committed, heart and soul. The rhythms were more interesting, the rage alternated with a command to stand up and fight back. The critique captured something I could feel in my own life. They spoke of a fully administered world, against apathy, passivity, against a life spent sitting in society’s waiting rooms. I still think often enough of the Picciotto song “Give Me the Cure,” which begins: “I never thought too hard on dying before.” Face-to-face with the fear of sickness, he sings of the ways society promises it could fix it, should fix it—and then can’t or won’t fix it. These are the lyrics that always got to me, from when I was fourteen to now:
But you’ve got to—
Give me the shot!
Give me the pill!
Give me the cure
Now what you’ve done to my world?
MacKaye had founded a record label, Dischord Records, which issued the Fugazi and Minor Threat recordings and those of countless other bands. Prices were always fair, little more than it cost to make the copies. When Fugazi toured, they played only All Ages shows, so that no one would be turned away, often for admission prices of less than five dollars. This kept them from clubs in many cases, and so they helped maintain the alternative network of venues in which bands play in church basements, VFW halls, squats, and community centers. They never had anything to do with the major labels, or television, or advertising. Yet people knew their music, and do still.
In 1991, they held a concert in front of the White House, in the cold and rain, to protest the first Iraq War, while the television spokesmen for the country were masturbating themselves to frenzy to green-grained film of “smart bombs” hitting targets, reports of “turkey shoots” and “shooting galleries” as planes and helicopters burned up overmatched Iraqi tanks and trucks. You can see the footage online. I don’t know anything else quite like it.
That same year I saw Fugazi at a club called the Channel, next to the polluted Fort Point Channel in Boston, with a wooden deck overhanging the black water. It was a Sunday afternoon all-ages show. The joists that held the low roof seemed endangered by the bodies flying and butting each other, in the second of two “pits” of moshing, where I stood, but the columns were shielded partly by chairs and cocktail-style tables piled up irregularly. I forget who opened, but the moshers had already been at it for an hour; there were slicks of sweat on the floor, though no blood was evident. I had turned fifteen. The preparatory or votary dance of the lone adolescents, between confrontations, seducing or challenging the next comers, mesmerized me, in instants when their collisions had given way to the goat dance, knees lifting, boots thudding, cocked elbows windmilling as a survivor started a circuit of the pit perimeter. Then a new array of bodies plunged, or were pushed, in, slamming in, as violence or play, or bobbing frightened or laughing across to the other side, pulling up those who got knocked down, shoving them out of the way. Heads shaved, chests bare, ribs visible, they bobbed up and down, with soaked undershirts or flannels hanging and swinging sideways, out of rhythm, from double-pronged belts.
