by Harvard, Joe
Masoch himself based the novel in part on an incident from his own life. In 1869 he signed a contract with the writer Fanny Pistor in which he pledged himself as her slave for six months, with a stipulation that when she was dispensing discipline she would, whenever possible, wear furs. Filmmaker Joel Schlemowitz, who made a film based on the novel, wrote:
Sacher-Masoch’s imagination was very taken with romanticizing life, not just in the characters in his writing, but in his own life. Through real-life events he created as much fanciful invention as in a novel, and in turn, in this novel, he takes his life and turns it back again, into a sublime example of creating a grand, romantic myth out of one’s own life.90
In those last phrases, Schlemowitz might be describing Lou Reed as much as Sacher-Masoch. “Venus In Furs” is thus a song composed by a writer who bases most of his work on his life, based on a book that is based on its own writer’s life. In other words, “Venus in Furs” is art mimicking art mimicking life (or life mimicking art mimicking life, depending on whether you consider songwriting to be “life” or “art”). Just be thankful that Reed didn’t see Schlemowitz’s film and base the song on that, in which case it would have been—well, you get the picture.
“Venus in Furs” is one of the songs that helped to shape the lasting public impression of the Velvets as deviants, on a par with “Heroin” as far as negative feedback was concerned. Like “Heroin” it also presented a powerful statement of intent on the band’s part. Feedback, the squeal and drone of electric viola, tempos that followed the narrative story and not the other way around, the use of a literary source, and placing arrangement and tonalities fully at the service of the lyrics: all were signposts showing where the Velvets were determined to go.
Unlike “Heroin,” however, “Venus in Furs” underwent a significant transformation in the year between recording the Ludlow demos and the version on the debut album. The multiple Ludlow versions begin with an oddly uptempo rendering, but settle into an even stranger arrangement, one that David Fricke describes as a “stark, Olde English-style folk lament.” He is right on the mark: think “Greensleeves,” but with a somewhat different story to tell: “A-las, my luh-ove, you doooo me wrong, to beat my a—ass so merc’lessly.” Although history has vindicated the abandonment of this pastoral approach in favor of the droning, mysterious atmosphere that the band used for the album, it’s rare that we get to hear the developmental process that goes into a great song: owners of Peel Slowly and See will get a kick out of John Cale’s medieval troubador vocal.
RUN, RUN, RUN
“Run, Run, Run” was written on the way to a gig at the Café Bizarre, when the band realized that even with the addition of covers like “Carol,” “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Little Queenie,” they were still short of material. Lou Reed was scribbling down words on the back of an envelope, and by the time the car reached its destination the song was finished. (This and a similar story about “Sister Ray” from White Light, White Heat reinforce Sterling Morrison’s recollections about Lou’s prodigious ability to compose lyrics.) Perhaps it was playing those great cover tunes every night that gives “Run, Run, Run” the feel of a classic rocker, or maybe it’s the tight harmonies. On this album, only “I’m Waiting for The Man” rocks as hard.
The gist of the song is a trip down to Union Square, one of lower Manhattan’s major drug supermarkets of the 1960s. The protagonists are four denizens of New York’s drug underworld. Each character gets one verse of just four lines, and each one is a brief vignette: Teenage Mary, Margarita Passion, Seasick Sarah (what goes up her “golden nose” isn’t specified, but my guess is heroin, as we’re told “she turned blue,” a reference to the dark pallor that falls quickly over the victim of a heroin overdose), and Beardless Harry. Harry’s in the worst shape of the bunch in “Run, Run, Run,” as he “couldn’t even get a small town taste”—street terminology for a tiny amount of dope (such as might be passed off as a standard bag in a small town).
It should be added that “run” has a few connotations in dope-speak. As a noun, “on a run” indicates someone engaged in an unbroken run of heroin use, enjoying the enviable position of having the cash and supply source needed to get high continually—with no down time, as it were. As a verb, it alludes more to the frantic chase to find money and/or dope to buy. Fiends who talk about “ripping and running” mean being out stealing, conniving and endeavoring in whatever nefarious activity is necessary to get yourself well.
The job of a guitarist is to support the song. Here, Sterling Morrison’s musical importance to the group is evident, something that’s hard to detect at times because he did that job so frighteningly well. As I researched this book I began to get a sense of how cool Sterling was, as a player and a person. My impression is that of a floating center, in the songs and in the politics of the group, wherein he was able to influence decisions without participating in the arguments; standing apart, yet a part of the process, guiding musical and political energies using guitar riffs and words as aikido, affecting every aspect of the music. His personality, it seems to me, must have been a lot like his playing—at least as I hear it—an indispensable glue for everything going on. Dolph called him “the flywheel of the band.” In this song you can really hear that.
ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES
“All Tomorrow’s Parties” was released by MGM in two versions: a single, b/w “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” with more prominent double-tracked vocals and a hyped-up, made-for-radio mix, and the more sedate, album version. It was an appropriate choice for the ‘A’ side of their first single, as it was and would remain Andy Warhol’s favorite Velvets’ song. This isn’t surprising considering that Lou Reed drew 100% of the song’s substance from studying the regulars in Warhol’s clique. Reed calls the tune “a very apt description of certain people at the Factory at the time.”91 He got maximum mileage from his role as an objective observer at the Factory, where he would take longhand notes on overheard conversations, behavioral quirks and the interaction of the habitués of Warhol’s world. He may have been the only person to turn the tables on Andy, whose own role was similar: “I watched Andy. I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things.”92
David Fricke cites “the immortal opening vision of the go-go Cinderella,”93 and there is greatness in Reed’s conjuring of images in this song. Somehow he manages to mock the triviality of the task the “poor girl” faces—choosing her costume for yet another party—while simultaneously dignifying and arousing our sympathies for the character. This is also an accomplishment of Cale’s arrangement, and the restrained strength of the soaring groove laid down by Morrison and Tucker. Fricke calls attention to that “pneumatic pulse,”94 and describes Nico’s approach to the vocal as a “slow burn Dietrich delivery.”95 This is Nico’s finest recorded performance with the Velvet Underground.
John Cale shines on this song. Finding a simple two or three note chord that could be cycled repeatedly despite changes in the underlying chord progression would become a signature component of his style, and a staple ingredient of rock thereafter; Cale himself would apply it to the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Here, the hammered piano bears an unmistakable aura of novelty and excitement, and the song surges majestically forward as Cale’s keyboard shatters the restraint of the intro.
Long after the band broke away from Warhol, and after disappointing him by firing Nico, Andy took a wry potshot at Lou Reed. When asked by an interviewer, he responded, “My favorite Lou Reed song is … aah… ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ by Nico. She wrote it, I think.”96
Reed uses the aforementioned Ostrich tuning here, which first convinced John Cale that Lou was some kind of natural musical genius. Had Cale known that Reed had “seen this guy—I think his name was Jerry Vance—tune the guitar where every string was the same”97 and “filed that one away” for later use, he would presumably have been less impressed
, and there might have been no band in the first place. Not to be confused with open D tuning, where strumming the open strings voices a first position D chord, the Ostrich tuning is all strings tuned to D (though I should note that Jonathan Richman distinctly recalls Lou showing him an all B version as well). The droning intro melody is played on that guitar, and it provides the full, rich rumble beneath the entire song as well. Though he no doubt got lots of live mileage out of this particular drone technique, it should be noted that Reed has only ever cited “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Rock and Roll” as songs that benefited from the Ostrich tuning. Here, it fits perfectly.
Cale has described how in 1968, just before Reed forced him out of the band, their styles were clashing: “I was trying to get something big and grand and Lou was fighting against that, he wanted pretty songs. I said ‘Let’s make them grand pretty songs then.’”98 Two years earlier, their differences had produced brilliant songs through creative tension, and if there ever was a grand, pretty song, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is it.
HEROIN
“Heroin” is often cited as the outstanding cut on The Velvet Underground and Nico, and as the band’s single greatest achievement in song form. Sterling Morrison has called it “possibly Reed’s greatest song and a truthful one.” There are very few songs in the rock canon that match its power to translate a physical experience into a detailed aural landscape. Not that there was much competition at the time “Heroin” was written (in ’65), recorded (in ’66) and released (in ’67). Even several later efforts, like Dee Dee Ramone’s “Chinese Rocks” or Herman Brood’s “Dope Sucks” are content to catalogue the results of heroin use. “Heroin” stands unmatched as a real-time description of the opiate-induced state. The song is sometimes put forth as the first “drug song,” but blues artists had long recognized the fertile fields of coca, cannabis and poppy. Blues songs like “Cocaine Blues” and “Spoonful” were joined by popular music’s novelty drug tunes—even the original version of “La Cucaracha” describes the Mexican cockroach as unable to travel on “because she hasn’t Marihuana for to smoke.”99 “Heroin” is rock’s first (and probably best) undisguised drug song; but that’s only the most obvious of its strengths.
One reason for the song’s critical lionization is the recognition that it created its own unique category. The song trod upon the white picket fence that separated rock and roll’s moon-June love songs from the multiplicity of topics already available to film and literature, and in doing so it gave songwriters the freedom to write about real life. It would be a mistake to think of “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for The Man” as mere precursors to other songs about drugs and society’s dark underbelly; they are that, yes, but they are so much more. By avoiding the safe, accepted topics and writing instead about life’s extreme situations, Reed made it permissible for all rock music that followed to incorporate both ends of the spectrum and everything in between.
Musically, David Fricke is perhaps most eloquent in describing why “Heroin” is so important in the Velvets’ songbook:
Ultimately, “Heroin” is the microcosmic essence of everything that happens musically on The Velvet Underground and Nico—the tumultuous crush of guitar holocaust and viola screech, the see-saw dynamics of outright noise and skeletal lullabye melodicism, the bold, punctuative shifts in rhythmic time and tempo. It is a song of programmatic genius, sucking you into the wake of the addict’s rush with vicious acceleration, suddenly breaking into a dead calm as the fuck-off opiate state kicks in.100
“Heroin” was the first ram that the Velvet Underground used to batter down the walls hemming in rock lyricists—and it did so using just two chords: D and G. The economy with which the Velvets approached their arrangements would one day make them a major influence on the musical rebellion known as punk. At the time, however, it meant that John Cale had an ideal environment in which to explore the techniques that would become his trademark, such as creating complexity through the repetition of simple parts. The amount of drama and movement that the Velvets evoked using those two chords is amazing, and the band was well on the way to fulfilling one of Cale’s goals: “The opportunity to do something Phil Spectorish with the limited resources of a rock and roll band—four people.”101 The structure also funnels the arrangement’s elements toward an inexorable buildup of energy:
David Fricke: Reed has often pointed out that even performed solo on acoustic guitar, “Heroin” has an irresistible locomotive tug.
Lou Reed: It’s just two chords. And when you play it, at a certain point, there is a tendency to lean in and play faster. It’s automatic. And when I first played it for John [in ’64], he picked up on that. Also, if you check out the lyrics, there are more words as you go along. The feeling naturally is to speed up.”102
Prior to its release on The Velvet Underground and Nico, two early versions of the song bear comment. On the Ludlow demos, despite a low volume, acoustic performance, the song sounds much the same as it would on the album. Clearly “Heroin” is one song that Lou wrote single-handedly, as distinct from later Velvets’ numbers that either involved significant input from other members or were outright group compositions.
The second noteworthy version of “Heroin” shows the flipside of the Ludlow performance: a live, instrumental take without lyrics performed for the closing credits of a WNET public television special. Andy Warhol presents The Velvet Underground was part of the “USA Artists” series, filmed February 7, 1966 in New York. Sterling Morrison recalled the session was filmed on the eve of Warhol’s first Uptight show at Film Makers’ Cinematheque in Manhattan, and “it sounded very peaceful and what we were playing was actually an in strumental version of Heroin. The final thing as they were showing the credits and it went droning on.”103 That night Warhol introduced the band, saying, “I’m sponsoring a new band. It’s called The Velvet Underground.”
For Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Diary (1978), RCA sent out a well-written press release, referring to “Heroin” as a “saga of a man on his way to spiritual death, fighting and embracing it at once,” and calling the song “the most profoundly moving and disturbing drug song ever written.” I would agree with the spirit of the last statement, if not the letter. I don’t think RCA needed to use the qualifier “drug song”—that just diminishes the value of their praise. “Heroin” is one of the most profoundly moving and disturbing songs, period. It stands as a great song not only because of its journalistic accuracy regarding the drug experience, but also because of the compassion it imparts and the clarity it brings to the individual’s need for extraordinariness, be it chemically or spiritually induced.
That same RCA press release described Reed’s work on The Velvet Underground and Nico as a revelation of the “horror and false transcendence of heroin addiction.” Their use of the word “false” sounds like spin doctoring on RCA’s part to me. I’m not sure Reed regarded dope as any less authentically transcendent than the natural alternatives, especially circa 1964-5 when he was writing and refining the song. Why would he? The disintegration of self that Reed describes has its source in the same wellspring as that which is felt in varying forms by sufi mystics, yogis and junkies alike. The most enduring works of mystical poetry—including those of Jalal ad-Din Rumi—often feature the theme of alcohol or hashish intoxication as a metaphor for spiritual transcendence. Lou’s lyric “I feel just like Jesus’ son” would not sound out of place coming out of a sufi’s mouth. In 11th century Baghdad it was al-Hallaj’s utterance “Ana Al Haqq” (”I am the Truth”)—Al-Haqq being one of the “99 Names of God”—that got him pilloried, burned and beheaded. Likewise, a sufi strives for the penultimate mystical state of Fan’a, or Annihilation of the Self; not too different from Reed’s phrase: “I’m gonna try to nullify my life.” The only difference is one makes room for God, the other dope. So, as far as transcendence is concerned, heroin holds its own, and “Heroin” conveys that powerfully. (In no way is this meant as an endorsement of heroin as a means of spiri
tual growth! I would point out that transcendence isn’t everything; if you think being a junkie is romantic, just wait until heroin has you “transcending” the ability to keep a job, maintain a relationship, or control your bowels, among other wicked spiritual stuff.)
As Jim Carroll observed in The Basketball Diaries, junk is just another job, it’s just that the hours tend toward twilight. Lou Reed’s objectivity in “Heroin” is intact; he supplies all the information that a listener needs to recognize the inherent darkness of the dope gig. Sterling Morrison-has said that “Heroin” is about spiritual death, and that in it Reed does anything but advocate its use—he makes it clear that only someone who wants to die should turn to it. Despite this, the band was critically pummeled as a pied piper for heroin use, a label it would never really shake. Reed’s following description of the song is succinct, and makes it clear that in describing the experience of getting high he is also laying out the rules of heroin use, with its inevitable conclusion—addiction:
“Heroin” is very close to the feeling you get from smack. It starts on a certain level, it’s deceptive. You think you’re enjoying it. But by the time it hits you, it’s too late. You don’t have any choice. It comes at you harder and faster and keeps on coming. The song is everything that the real thing is doing to you.104
In that sense, “Heroin” manages to convey in a handful of verses what Burroughs needed hundreds of pages to accomplish. But if Reed thought that the song would be understood in the same light as literary works by Poe, Genet or Baudelaire, he was wrong. Critics were not prepared to consider a song that used heroin as its subject to be anything other than an endorsement. Reed has alternately condemned those who took this view and reversed himself somewhat and admitted that he was aware of the misperception and accommodated it. Clean and sober in 1989, reflecting on his work in the ’70s, Reed expressed a combination of both views in Q magazine:
