by Harvard, Joe
MAMA MOE, PAPA LOU
Musically, the Velvets are the daddies of us all—and by “us” I mean anyone who has played in a rock band since 1977 or thereabouts, the year that Punk crested the hill and changed the music industry forever. Their albums were like alchemical tracts that held secret formulas, passed from one musician to the next, until “Punk Happened,” as the button says, completing the job that the Velvet Underground started. Long before his group Talking Heads carried the post-Punk torch into the 80s, Jerry Harrison was a member of the Modern Lovers. He recalled his induction into the Mysteries of the Underground:
“Jonathan (Richman) really got me into the Velvet Underground … and the Stooges,” Jerry remembers, “and with Jonathan, like with all new bands, much of our focus was on rejecting things, saying, ‘This is what we’re about and these are the only influences we allow and everything else is garbage.’ And a large part of what Jonathan was about was rejecting anything that was blues-based.” Blotting out the blues, Jerry believes, made the Modern Lovers one of the principal progenitors of punk…9
Harrison is right; the Lovers laid the foundation for punk—but they did it using a blueprint supplied by the VU. They were hardly alone. The list of important artists who have been influenced by the Velvets in a fundamental and important way reads like a Who’s Who of rugged individualists, iconoclasts, scene-makers and standard bearers for the rock rebellion. That list includes, by admission or observation and besides the other groups discussed below: Tom Verlaine, Peter Ivers, R.E.M., the dBs, Alejandro Escovedo, the Pretenders, the Cars, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Pixies, Yo La Tengo, Galaxie 500, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Morphine, Luna and the Strokes. Then there’s also Roxy Music, U2, Mazzy Star, Joy Division/New Order—the list could go on. An entire German sub-scene including Neu, Can and Faust was spawned. Add to that the Czech Revolution, where Velvets’ lyrics were said to have been passed around the underground, and all of the other bands influenced by ex-Velvets, particularly Lou Reed and John Cale. These are some of the reasons—besides the music itself—that people are still writing books about the VU.
ROOTS: MY TWISTED PATH TO THE VELVETS
Researching this book, I was surprised to find a 1989 interview in which I described for Bill Eichenberger of the Columbus Dispatch “the sound I want—kind of like if the Velvet Underground’s and Merle Haggard’s buses collided and the band members got mixed up. That’s the sound in my head!”10 I say I was surprised, because unlike some of the authors in this series, I’m not writing about a record that instantly and fundamentally changed my life, but one that I was affected by tangentially, sychronistically, coincidentally, from a hundred directions before I ever heard it. Why was I eating up valuable column inches in 1989 lauding a group that hadn’t been remotely close to one of my first musical loves? Then I remembered: it wasn’t long before that interview that I bought my first Velvets album. I’d heard the stuff, sure, even covered tunes in other folks’ bands over the years, but it wasn’t until I owned the 1986 post-mortem compilation VU that I really fell in love with the band, mainly through the raw slab of Stax-meets-surf from another dimension called “I Can’t Stand It.”
I did not grow up a fan of the Velvet Underground. I belong to the generation that graduated high school around the time of America’s Bicentennial (my mother painted the entire house, red, white and blue; while painting bocce balls in the yard, she discovered I had accidentally beheaded our Lawn Madonna when the chain from my nunchaku broke). In East Boston all we knew about Lou Reed were his two hits: “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” The latter lived on the jukebox at Jean’s Coffee Shoppe, our local hamburger-cum-bookie joint. There, one after another of my shoe-shine dimes hovered at the edge of the Seeburg coin slot for a moment, before disappearing over the rim, sacrificial victims exchanged for the volcanic pleasure of hearing that intro with its super-cool bass slides (that’s Herbie Flowers, playing two bass parts—an acoustic and a Fender electric harmonizing a tenth above). Eating burgers in East Boston, watching brazenly crooked cops emptying bags of swag from their trunks to be stored in Jean’s kitchen, waiting for the colored girls to “go doo, doo-doo, doo-doo” again, Lou surfaced in my world for the first time on Jean’s Jukebox. (A brief aside: the other song I played a lot at Jean’s was “Lola,” which I now realize makes two chicks-with-dicks tunes on the same box; this unquestionably earns the place the title of Epicenter of Transvestite Culture in East Boston … but I digress.)
By high school I had discovered the electric guitar, and my spare change was used less for juke fuel than for the subway fare to and from band rehearsal. Eno and Iggy popped up on my radar and turntable. The basement groups I was in covered “Queen Bitch” and Bowie’s version of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” but failed to notice that the former was dedicated to the Velvet Underground, while Lou Reed’s name—not Bowie’s—fell under the writing credit of the latter.
Transformer was an album we played a lot, “we” being my best friend/first drummer Anthony Rauseo, my dangerously sexually advanced girlfriend Kathy, and a number of brilliant and insane gay high schoolers who constituted an alternate universe to my usual one in Eastie. Transformer was the record playing when Mick Abbott’s sixteenth-birthday costume party turned into an omnisexual orgy that was interrupted by a surprise visit from his dad, bringing pizza out to the garage (sur-PRISE!). The (costume) party line was that Bowie was generously helping out his less successful friend when he produced Transformer. Who knew that Bowie was simply repaying the enormous debt he owed to Reed, having stitched together the flamboyantly bisexual Ziggy character that made him famous almost entirely from the detached, decadent cloth he’d borrowed from the Velvet Underground? Bowie praised the Velvets to anyone who’d listen (we didn’t), freely admitting his debt to them and resuscitating Reed’s flagging career, but by then it was too late for the Velvets.
Before long, I fell under the spell of Boston’s underground music scene, discovering amazing bands like Reddy Teddy and the Real Kids, and records like Live at the Rat and Live at CBGB’s. There were close ties between the Boston and New York scenes (Alpo from the Real Kids caught crabs after stealing a pair of pants from Dolls’ drummer Arthur “Killer” Kane … I’m talking strong ties here). Velvets-influenced New York bands Television, Blondie, Patti Smith and the Ramones joined my local favorites; and by late ‘77 I was standing with one foot in the underground/punk scene, the other foot still rooted in the quasi-metal cover band circuit, playing “Sweet Jane” off Rock and Roll Animal while fellow East Bostonian Amadeo “Ricky” Risti heroically rendered both sides of the Hunter-Wagner double leads. But my stylistic schizophrenia couldn’t go on forever. The Stones and Who covers in our set squirmed uncomfortably next to the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” Patti Smith’s “Pumpin’ (My Heart),” and “Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls.
There are certain records that changed my way of looking at music forever: Willie Loco’s “Hit Her Wid De Axe” and “Mass Ave” singles, The Modern Lovers, The Real Kids, and Patti Smith’s Horses. These records were like neon road signs for me, pointing the way to rock and roll bliss via a new and unknown path. And they all shared one important, unifying element that I was then unaware of (in case you haven’t been paying attention) and that was the Velvet Underground. I had no idea that Willie “Loco” had toured as a member of the last-gasp, Doug Yule-led Velvets, but the four chord sleigh ride to rock Valhalla called “Mass Ave” leveled me. In those days, back before I became aware of the role or importance of a producer, I failed to notice that the same name appeared in the production credits for both Horses and The Modern Lovers—not to mention the first Stooges album we’d scavenged songs from. That name was John Cale. I had no idea that John Felice of the Real Kids had originally been in the Modern Lovers, nor where the primary influence for the inspirational sound of The Modern Lovers sprang from. In an interview with Richman in 1998 he was unequivocal:
Joe Harvard: I heard the Moder
n Lovers long before I heard the Velvets … had they influenced you a lot as far as the sound you were going for on the black record? Or did you sound like that before?
Jonathan Richman: If there was no Velvet Underground there would have been no such record. Does that tell you what you need to know?”11
My musical life had, in fact, been thoroughly infused with, surrounded by and enriched because of the Velvet Underground. I just never knew it. Bowie, Iggy, the New York Dolls, most key Boston and New York underground bands—all had been so strongly influenced that discovering the Velvet Underground’s records was like meeting someone’s parents. Suddenly, a whole lot of things started to make sense. Little idiosyncrasies, unique mannerisms you find attractive in little Junior—here, their source is laid bare, revealed as hereditary after just a few minutes with Mom and Pop. Listening to the Velvet Underground I could hear bits and pieces of the aural landscape of my favorite records, elements of much-beloved bands who inhabited my world. Willie Alexander’s relentless EMI electric piano drone, the monotone vocal-meets-distortion-over-a-jungle-drum-beat of “Pablo Picasso,” the remorselessly unyielding metallic piano of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” screeching seagull squalls from Patti’s “Birdland” and the two chord trip around the world in Jonathan Richman’s “Road Runner.” It was all there, and a whole hell of a lot more, on The Velvet Underground and Nico.
FREE YOUR MIND AND YOUR EARS WILL FOLLOW
In a recent conversation I had with Jonathan Richman he commented on the fact that “folks like to imbibe simulated darkness and decadence, when a guy like John Cale can give them the real thing—using only chords, tones and textures.” Therein lies the true force of great music. Yet Cale, despite his classical training, rejected the classicist’s use of music alone in creating atmosphere and narrative, in favor of working with a lyricist whose words augmented and expanded such musical themes. The success of the Velvets’ “medium is the message” approach is so complete, in fact, that there is a danger of mistaking their songs as being synonymous with the subjects they explore—hence, those who don’t approve of drugs or homosexuality conclude that the band’s material is just sensationalist trash. While I generally believe that pop and rock music is closer to a craft than an art, and that even most of the good stuff is merely artful craft, there’s that tenth of a percent which transcends craft and becomes not just artfulness but art itself. This is where the Velvets’ music has to be placed, and (as much as I hate to say this about anybody’s rock music) any discussion of their material must be framed accordingly: as an exploration of art. Persons far more eloquent than myself have already provided ample, compelling arguments against the idea that exploring unpopular or immoral themes diminishes the work of talented writers and artists. What applies to the peaks of high culture should also do for the busy thruways of popular, “low” art forms like rock music.
Yes, the Velvet Underground wrote songs about heroin, orgies, methamphetamine, bondage and discipline, physical and emotional submission, violence, transgenders, transvestites, transsexuals, and street-wise deviants involved with any or all of the above ingredients. Why? Because no one had done so before, and because these things are interesting. If they weren’t, a lot of film directors wouldn’t be famous, True Crime authors wouldn’t be selling millions of books, and TV shows like Law and Order wouldn’t be so popular. But that’s now. In 1966, when no one was talking (much less singing) about such forbidden subjects, they were by extension even more interesting, and including them in songs aimed at public consumption wasn’t just another cheap thrill, it was a courageous and risky thing to do. It’s easy to climb the mountain after the real pioneers have been tramping a trail up to the peak for 35 years. In 1966, it took balls.
Likewise, the musicians who created these songs, as well as the people who inhabited the milieu surrounding the band and/or orbited like speed-fueled satellites around Warhol’s Factory, were a pretty entertaining bunch. Their personas and personalities matched those of the denizens of the Velvets’ songs. How could it be otherwise, when many of those songs were exercises in reportorial observation on Lou Reed’s part? Characters like the Warhol “Superstars,” Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn and the regulars at Max’s Kansas City—even the band members themselves—made ideal fictional characters for observation, even if they happened to be real. Ambition, addiction, jealousy, passion, betrayal, fame, sex in 32 flavors—while these don’t make for a stable social environment, they do provide great stories. But it’s important to recognize that the controversial subject matter contained in Reed’s lyrics was only one component in a complex, meticulously crafted whole. The Velvets’ music wasn’t merely about shocking staid listeners (though the group admittedly reveled in that), it was about expanding the lyrical choice and voice permissible for rock writers, beyond the limits of “comfortable” topics.
Discussing his feelings about this record some 35 years after he helped make it, producer Norman Dolph remembered a quote: “All great art looks like it was made this morning,” and added, “whatever it is that survives that’s great was modern at the time it was made, and the modernity of it still sits there on the wall of the museum 100 or 200 years later. As you listen to the record today it still sounds modern in that sense of the word.” Try, when you listen to this record, to ignore the group’s infamous reputation, to leave your preconceptions behind, and to let the music do the talking. Sit in a candlelit room, unplug the telephone, and listen to the entire album without interruption. An hour is not much time to give to a great record, considering what it will give back.
[NOTE: if you can get the record on vinyl, do, it always sounds better—and check out the “Peel Slowly and See” article by Sal Mercuri of the Velvet Underground Fanzine, located on the indomitable Velvet Underground Web Page (http://members.aol.com/olandem/vu.html). I highly recommend the ultimate VU starter kit, the 75 song, 5 CD Peel Slowly and See box set, which includes all the Velvets albums (plus the Ludlow Demos discussed later)].
For those who would like to play these songs, Shiroh Kouchi provides transcriptions, including tunings, chords and guitar tablature for these and most other Lou Reed compositions at the way-cool Lou Reed Guitar Archive: http://ww21.tiki.ne.jp/∼wildside/song.htm
Part One:
The Setting
OUR HEROES MEET…
Moe Tucker: I didn’t like that love-peace shit.12
John Cale: By 1965 Lou Reed had already written “Heroin” and “Waiting for the Man” … At the time I was playing with LaMonte Young in the Dream Syndicate and the concept of the group was to sustain notes for two hours at a time.13
Sterling Morrison: I was a very unsensitive young person and played very unsensitive, uncaring music. Which is Wham, Bam, Pow! Let’s Rock Out! What I expected my audience to do was tear the house down, beat me up, whatever. Lou and I came from the identical environment of Long Island rock ‘n’ roll bars, where you can drink anything at 18, everybody had phony proof at 16; I was a night crawler in high school and played some of the sleaziest bars.14
David Fricke, author of the excellent little book that passes as liner notes for Peel Slowly and See writes: “In 1965 rock and roll was a very young, carefree and essentially teenage music—everything Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker had outgrown by the time they became the Velvet Underground.”15 A year after the Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night, and the year they recorded Rubber Soul, former electroshock patient, drug dealer and Syracuse English major Lou Reed graduated, having been nurtured under the mentorship of poet Delmore Schwartz (for his literary skills), and under the influence of every drug conceivable (for his songwriting). Reed got a hack songwriting job at Pickwick Records—a sort of poor man’s Brill Building gig, writing songs for nonexistent bands made up of Pickwick personnel so the label could cash in on the latest musical fads. Loaded to the gills one night, Reed wrote a dance song called “The Ostrich,” credited upon release to the fictitious Primitives. When sales of the record started taking off, the labe
l scrambled to form a band that could support it playing live dates; because he looked like a rock musician, John Cale was approached at a party and asked to “audition.” For laughs—and because someone mentioned a salary—John attended.
Cale was a classical composer and prodigy from Wales, whose first composition was reportedly written on a piece of plywood. A graduate of London’s prestigious Goldsmith College, a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship had brought him to the US. Plainly speaking, he was One Badass Classical Dude. He studied at the Tanglewood Music Center under Iannis Xenakis, a former member of Le Corbusier’s architectural group whose 1954 Metastasis, a work based on architectural design, had been enormously influential. Cale disliked the stuffy atmosphere at Tanglewood, however, and soon moved to Manhattan to explore the avant-garde. There he played with LaMonte Young, proponent of the held notes called drones found in Indian and Arabic music.
