In the winter of 1964, an article was published in Newsweek in the face of Beatlemania. The article read, “Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments…." It goes on to compliment however, how the Beatle’s “have more showmanship than any group in years”. And the editors of Newsweek are tasteless. And astute. After all, they were onto something.
Not nearly as many people knew about the Velvet Underground as they did about the Beatles; however, they may have received vast swathes more of criticism. Despite the band’s now enormous reputation as a sort of “alternative Beatles,” the mother from which everything punk, new wave, and indie was birthed, never had commercial success. The Velvet Underground released four albums in their five-year history as a group; of those four official LPs, not one managed to crack the Top 100, while two failed to make the charts at all.
The Velvet Underground wanted to engage in musical society, but on their own terms. Though pop-art maven Andy Warhol endorsed their first album and provided its iconic, banana cover image, it wasn’t enough to smooth over the band’s sharp edges: recording in 1966, when shows like Shindig, Hullabaloo and Where the Action Is were providing a diluted version of the rock club scene for television viewers, the Velvets were distinctively unsanitised. They were the band that did heroin when everyone else was doing acid. In 1967 when the Velvet’s released The Velvet Underground and Nico from a competitive and marketing standpoint, the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s album was out, making its colossal impact on the industry and diverting attention away from anything and everything released. While parents collated evidence that in fact Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr were “leading pied pipers creating promiscuity, an epidemic of drugs, youth class-consciousness, and an atmosphere for social revolution”. It wasn’t long before the hysteria reached such a pitch that American Vice president Agnew would attempt to ban “A Little Help From My Friends” having decided it was implicitly a drug anthem. The Velvets, needlessly to say, were doing a lot more than hinting.
Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground, continued to push the boundaries of what was deemed socially acceptable. As part of the Velvet Underground, he paved the way for swathes musicians and artists to lend themselves to the seditious sounds of the city. When he went out on his own, he proved to be a perpetual agitator, never content to be motionless and always looking for a spot to stick the knife in. In 2013 when Reed passed away, he did so as a legend of music, poetry and an icon of the alternative scene. While most rock stars who had once been heroin addicts renounced it with an exaggerated sense of self-importance and fanfare to delve into the pleasures of green juice cleansing and meditation, nobody had previously told the story of the vicissitudes of drug-crazed existence quite so blatantly or prolifically as Lou Reed. Nobody wrote a song called “Heroin.” Nobody had left the music business so abruptly, pleading lethal side effects and an enumeration of near-death experiences. It was a tumultuous and sardonic career and one which began at Pickwick Records roamed through the streets of New York City and settled in global fame.
Part of the genius behind what has often been called the most innovative rock band ever was the deceptive simplicity of their songs, a handful of chords and ineffaceable riffs as a foundation for stories and vignettes that connected Reed to his literary heroes: Ramond Chandler, Charles Bukowski and his college mentor at Syracuse, Delmore Schwartz. The Velvets unified low and high art that disdained the safe and the normal, and made it cool to be not just different, but instead to amplify those differences. Cale called it “a theory of stubbornness”. Almost any left-of-centre band or artist since the ‘70s: the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Spiritualized, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and some that became mainstream giants: R.E.M., U2, Talking Heads all acknowledge a deep debt to the Velvet Underground.
This “stubbornness” to conform that admitted them their afterlife of alternative glory, also cost them success. In an interview given shortly before his death, discussing the group’s of a highly saleable pop sound on Loaded, Sterling Morrison said: “It showed that we could have, all along, made truly commercial sounding records. We opted not to, because our material was incompatible with standard pop music. But people would wonder, ‘Could they do it if they had to?’ The answer was, ‘Yes, we could.’ And we did.”
This, in fact, might be for the best. Maybe, for all the time that has passed, the Velvet Underground is still meant to be passed around more furtively, seemingly illicit and oddly thrilling: an immersive experience, in its own way, but something you experience, you have alone, in your bedroom, or, at most, with a friend.
Written by Siân Tilbury, 11WG
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