Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico
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Having spent hundreds of hours in rehearsal, working and reworking their songs, the Velvets were eager to get out and play, and the last thing they were looking for was a new lead singer—especially a female one. When percussionist Angus MacLise had departed just before their first show, and Sterling suggested Moe Tucker as his replacement, Cale had balked, railing against “chicks” in the band. It may be assumed that this argument applied as much to singers as drummers. Two facts may have helped change Cale’s mind about Moe: Sterling had initially suggested Moe, and Lou had approved her enlistment after conducting a mini-audition at her Long Island home. But the probable truth is he abandoned his objection because they needed a drummer immediately for upcoming shows. No such urgency existed regarding a new vocalist, so it was left to Warhol to persuade a reluctant band to take Nico on board. That he was able to do so is an indication of how deep his influence ran within the band.
Aside from a few free-form vocals performed live, such as her atmospheric droning on “It Was a Pleasure Then” (later recorded for her debut LP Chelsea Girls), Nico was only given the three songs she sings on The Velvet Underground and Nico, plus “Sunday Morning,” to sing live. The rest of the time she either played tambourine, or merely stood stock-still on stage, prompting Morrison to comment, “we’ve got a statue in the band.” Not surprisingly, Nico soon lobbied for more songs to sing, but the idea of her interpreting material like “Heroin” or “I’m Waiting for the Man” was almost enough to give Lou Reed hives; luckily for his complexion, Nico’s campaign to sing everything was collectively rejected by the band.
Perhaps this earlier rejection explains why Nico kept a low profile in the studio. According to Norman Dolph, she stood somewhat apart: “When she was there Nico would be singing; when she wasn’t singing she sat quietly in the background, by herself usually … but generally if she wasn’t singing she wouldn’t be there …”44
Nico was forced out of the group soon after the album’s release in 1967; it had probably been inevitable since the previous year, when the Velvets received their first major press and it turned out to be a feature on Nico (on the Women’s page of the New York Times). She enjoyed a brief period when her career eclipsed that of her former band, after Warhol gave her a plumb role in the film Chelsea Girls. John Cale maintained a collaborative relationship with her, beginning with Chelsea Girls, the film’s companion album, and they teamed up for four records with Cale as her producer (Tom Wilson also produced one Nico album). Both Cale and Reed had had brief affairs with Nico during her tenure with the group and, after Nico’s career flagged, Cale often berated Reed for not writing her a few songs to help revive it, but Reed never seems to have stopped begrudging her the few songs he’d already let her sing on the first album.
A long time heroin addict, Nico died in 1988 when she was only 49. Riding her bicycle on the island of Ibiza, overdressed in the long, flowing robes she favored later in life, she was found by the road, unconscious, the victim of a brain hemorrhage. It was as if a circle was closing, for it was on this same island, which she adored and made her home, that she had taken the name Nico three decades earlier.
But in 1966, the year she was chosen as Factory Girl of the Year, the ravages of heroin and time seemed a world away. She had intrigued Warhol, she seemed the perfect front person Paul Morrissey felt the Velvets needed, and her star was rising with such momentum that, despite their objections, even the band members themselves could not refuse her.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE: GETTING THE SOUND
John Cale: What we were doing (was) trying to figure ways to integrate some of LaMonte Young’s or Andy Warhol’s concepts into rock and roll.45
Lou Reed: If I hadn’t heard rock ‘n’ roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet.46
Sterling Morrison: Lou and I had some of the shit-tiest bands that ever were. They were shitty because we were playing authentic rock ‘n’ roll.47
Andy Warhol: The whole time the album was being made, nobody seemed happy with it, especially Nico. “I want to sound like Bawwwhhhb Deee-lahhhn!” she wailed, so upset because she didn’t.48
Discussing the two enormously important rock albums released within months of one another in 1967, Robert Palmer had this to say:
… the two albums sound like products of different eras as well as different sensibilities. Sgt. Pepper remains tied to its time, as quaint and dated as a pair of granny glasses; the era The Velvet Underground and Nico calls up is our present one. This is partly a function of its unflinching song lyrics … mostly it is a tribute to music so radical it scarcely seems to have aged at all.49
Many years after he rode a bus from Boston to show up at the Velvets’ doorsteps in New York City, Jonathan Richman posed the musical question “How in the world did they get that sound—the Velvet Underground?” The band drew astounding complexity out of three or four chords, to begin with, through a commitment to playing interlocking parts, juxtaposed with an aversion to playing any song the same way twice. These elements combined made the whole band an organic machine, like a Rube Goldberg device where a change in one component has a rippling effect on all the others.
Who influenced this band that would go on to influence so many others? One answer is Booker T. and the MGs—and their guitarist Steve Cropper in particular. His work with Booker, and as session player behind such soul greats as William Bell, Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, is definitive of the soul guitar. A clear influence on both the tone and style of the Velvets guitar team, Cropper was absolutely rhythmic, a Telecaster master who defined the player willing to sacrifice showboating in favor of a supporting role. Cropper’s enormous legacy includes providing the Velvets with a template of how guitars should work with a rhythm section. The band even had a song called “The Booker T.”—later used as the instrumental backing for “The Gift.”
Besides Cropper, Morrison and Reed were both fans of Mickey and Sylvia, whose hit “Love is Strange” is aptly titled considering the romantic excesses the Velvets explored. Guitarist/heavyweight session man Mickey Baker offered the model of the liquid, sensuous guitar tone later heard on Velvets tracks. Reed and Morrison also admired Jimmy Reed, covering his “Bright Lights, Big City” during their early club gigs. Jimmy Reed’s earthier tunes showcased a guitar style and tone that was both sweetly polished yet unaffected, a harbinger of the Velvets’ own combination of primal rawness with pristine tones.
Early VU shows also featured Chuck Berry covers like “Little Queenie.” Berry’s witty and often slyly subversive wordplay provided early rock and roll’s most literary and poetic lyricism, so it’s no surprise that Morrison has said their interest in Berry was more as a lyricist than as a guitar player. Still, Berry’s use of repeating guitar figures surfaces in the band’s work. Even more so, Reed in particular shared Berry’s ability to draw endless parts from one chord through picking patterns and vibrato. His addition of grace notes to simple chord patterns evokes Chuck Berry’s use of a strong right-hand technique, drawing maximum melodic output from minimal left-hand movement. From the Stones, Reed and Morrison absorbed the Jones-Richards lesson of how two guitars should work as one, and from Cale’s LaMonte Young experience they applied the repetitive rules that upped the ante on the Berry/Cropper returning guitar figures, transforming them into a churning cycle where parts became any number of burning batons handed off in a relay race run by Satyrs.
Another important influence was Bo Diddley. Jonathan Richman notes that Diddley was the key influence shared by all four Velvets instrumentalists. An inventive, original guitarist with a custom-made square Gretsch (as well as another guitar covered with shag carpeting), Diddley contributed his trademark beat and guitar chug to rockers from Buddy Holly to the Yardbirds—and provided a key ingredient in the basic recipe for rock and roll. Three to four decades after “Bo Diddley” hit the charts, the song’s riff and beat would still feature prominently in hits for the likes of the Hoodoo Gurus, George Thorogood, and U2 (“Desire” is
a Grade-A Bo lift).
Before she joined the group, Moe Tucker would play along with her Rolling Stones and Bo Diddley records most nights after getting home from work, but it’s the latter that figures so prominently in her Velvets drumming. She also played along with Drums of Passion, an African LP that influenced her choice of drums and her highly unorthodox way of setting them up.
Part of the band’s approach was styled by the dozens of times Lou Reed had been to see one of his favorite musicians, the jazz genius Ornette Coleman, whose im-provisational techniques Reed felt had a place in rock as well as jazz. Improvisation, yes, but without the ego-driven selfishness of the San Francisco bands, whose “every man for himself” model resulted in endless noo-dling solos. This San Francisco “free jam” style eventually infected many bands of the era, including one of the greatest English studio bands ever: Cream. Doug Yule, who later joined the Velvets after Reed forced Cale out, points out that the group’s live improvisation was no rudderless affair: Reed stood firmly at the helm. But it was in many ways Moe Tucker whose solidity allowed their explorations to take place:
There was a lot of on stage improvisation—which you can do if your rhythm section is continuous. Maureen didn’t play a lot of breaks. She started the song, she played through, and then when it ended she stopped like a drum machine, and you can fool around with that, Lou could slow her down or speed her up. Maureen didn’t improvise much … Lou … guided the improvisation, it speeded up when he wanted to speed it up and we went with him.50
Tucker was certainly improvising right along with the rest of the band, and Yule’s comment may be taken as meaning she didn’t use the typical form for extemporizing drummers. Asked by Jeff Clark in 1998 if she’d ever played a drum solo in her life, Moe Tucker laughed out loud: “A drum solo? No, ha ha ha! I couldn’t if I wanted to. Which is the key to learning to play like Moe. Don’t learn how to play right … This isn’t good advice, is it? Just have fun!”51
During the same interview, Tucker also noted:
I always hated drummers like Ginger Baker, oh my God, every possible moment smashing something. I just hated that, even before I started playing drums. So, when I started to play, Charlie Watts was a big influence on me, and I don’t think I even realized at the time why I liked him so much. He plays so simply. He never does anything that is unnecessary. I just find it so much more effective.52
Moe was a workman in the studio, too. Dolph told me, “I don’t remember Moe saying anything, the entire time. The others would say ‘we need to do such and such’ and she’d go climb onto her drum throne and do it.”53
Yule also noted that the division of guitar labor was relatively fixed and—as far as solos—somewhat improvised, or at least the criteria for assigning the latter escaped him:
Sterl and Lou had no set roles. Lou always played basic rhythm when he was singing and Sterl alternated between rhythm and parts. When it was solo time, they divided the songs up by some method known only to themselves. Sterling always wound up with the more organized breaks while Lou favored the longer, louder, raunchier ones.54
There’s an intriguing circularity to the way the Velvets’ sound was influenced by African music and American blues, yet their songs seem empty of these styles, and their music remained overwhelmingly white, like that of a band they themselves would influence: the Stooges. In contrast to so many other bands of the 1960s, there were no dominant Afro or Afro-Cuban rhythms. Yet in a fundamental way the Velvet Underground were among the most successful integrators of the essence of African music into their sound: repetitive, interdependent parts built around a central, constant rhythm. Most importantly, there was an almost totally successful effort to avoid overtly incorporating the dominant influences of the time—a refreshing absence of hoary “blooz” riffs prevails. While everyone else was lionizing and cannibalizing the blues to build a foundation for their sound, the Velvets were imposing fines at their rehearsals for anyone caught using a blues lick.
Jonathan Richman remains dubious of the Lou Reed statement in Transformer that “We actually had a rule in band. If anybody played a blues lick they would be fined.”55 He suspects misquoting, and says, “I heard Sterling play blues licks all the time.” Since standard lead guitar lines are based on blues scales, most rock solos are, in fact, “blues” solos. And undoubtedly well-versed guitarists like Reed and Morrison were listening to old blues masters—the latter has said as much—but these weren’t the people whose work resonates in the sound of the Velvets catalogue. The band fastidiously avoided the sort of mix and match, direct quoting of signature riffs by bluesmen like Elmore James, Albert King and Muddy Waters that are all over the work of bands like Led Zeppelin, the Yardbirds, Cream or the Allman Brothers. We may be talking semantics here.
The rest of that Lou Reed quote makes it clear he’s trying to point out that the Velvets were more influenced by early vocal and doo-wop groups: “Everyone was going crazy over the old blues people, but they forgot about all those groups like the Spaniels … the Chesters … the Solitaires … all those really ferocious records that no one seemed to listen to anymore were underneath everything we were playing.”56 Reed, at any rate, repeats the “no blues” statement in the 1989 Guitar World interview cited below.
REAL GOOD TIME TOGETHER
The creative process of the Velvet Underground was team-oriented, highly competitive, and perhaps at the peak of its operational perfection during the making of The Velvet Underground and Nico. The tensions and battles for control endemic to their working methodology were present, but had yet to become more harmful than helpful. Also, in contrast to their later work, Reed seemed far more comfortable working within a group compositional format—even if he was loathe to admit that such a format was in use at all. Asked about Reed’s post-Velvets work, Sterling Morrison had no such hesitation:
Q: What do you think of how he is now? I think, musically, there’s no comparison between then and now.
A: How could there be? How could Lou, seriously, be better off without John Cale, and without me, than he was with us … with Cale and I, we were a real creative band. Lou really did want to have a whole lot of credit for the songs. So on nearly all the albums we gave it to him … so now he’s credited with being the absolute and singular genius of the Underground, which is not true.57
The idea of Lou Reed bringing in completely arranged songs, realized precisely as they would be heard on the Velvets’ records, is easily dismissed by one listen to the Ludlow Street demos, where the early versions of the songs are vastly different from their eventual forms. In Transformer, Sterling Morrison is unequivocal: “Our music evolved collectively. Lou would walk in with some sort of scratchy verse and we would all develop the music. It almost always worked like that. We’d all thrash it out into something very strong.”58
Working on the album in the studio was no different from the rehearsal methodology, according to Cale, though the feeling of participating in an important event was palpable:
We were really excited. We had this opportunity to do something revolutionary—to combine avant-garde and rock and roll, to do something symphonic. No matter how borderline destructive everything was, there was real excitement there for all of us. We just started playing and held it to the wall. I mean, we had a good time.59
And it truly sounds like they were enjoying themselves. Anyone listening without bias to the Velvets of 1966 would have noticed that they were having a blast: onstage as well as on record. Having way too much fun, really, to be the dark and moody outfit they were hyped as. But most written material still categorized them as such, and interviewers usually needed someone to set them straight—in this case Sterling Morrison:
Q: Everything I’ve heard about the Velvet Underground made them seem very gloomy …
A: We used to play the Whisky A Go Go all the time, so how gloomy could we have been?60
In a 1970 exchange with Morrison, writer Greg Barrios proved himself an exception to the rule:
; Q: I think there is much humor in your music.
A: Oh, there is.
Q: Many people, however, tend to emphasize the darker S&M qualities.
A: Yes, but this is not reflected in fact. We’ve made no attempt to dispel them but if anyone asks us, we say, no, don’t be ridiculous.61
Enjoying themselves didn’t keep the band from running on the same competitive fuel that propelled rehearsals, though, and Cale said of the “Banana” sessions that “Lou was paranoid, and he eventually made everyone else paranoid, too.” When I asked Norman Dolph if the sessions were fun despite that tension, he recalled: “Not fun in the sense of ‘let’s sit around and order a pizza’, there was none of that … but paranoia, I didn’t sense.” The most notable tension that Dolph remembers came from the other inhabitants of 254 W. 54th Street: “We were working during normal business hours, and the people in the offices around us, even in Scepter’s label offices, were used to hearing the Shirelles coming through their walls … this was definitely not the Shirelles, and there were some very strange looks!”
If it wasn’t tense, and it wasn’t quite pizza party fun, what was it like in the studio while this record was being made? Aside from working really quickly, Dolph remembers:
There were three separate ambiences. One was when Lou sang “Heroin” and “Waiting for the Man,” and he was deeply concerned that it not break down—that he got it all down in one shot… and in those there was a great deal of intensity in the room. In the songs that Nico sang, there was a very delicate, deferential “let’s see what we have to do to get this done” ambience … and the third was a workman-like attempt to recreate just what they had done the night before in the live gig.62
What of the listener’s perspective? What would it be like to hear the Velvet Underground as their contemporaries heard them, in a club (or through the office walls)? For future producer Dolph, the effect of seeing the band perform for the first time was immediate and visceral. He recalls the words of another groundbreaking artist: