The Velvet Underground | Under the Skin
3 short essays on the greatest rock n roll band of all time
The Beatles or the Stones or the Velvet Underground?
I’ve already written in this newsletter about “the Beatles or the Stones”, and made myself very clear it’s a no-brainer.
“The history of rock music is littered with stupid questions. Perhaps that’s part of the fun of it. Answering them can provide generations of fun. (Think of Lester Bangs musing “Diana Ross thinks she’s the best singer in the world when the sad fact is she’s not even the best singer in the Supremes”). But the Beatles or Stones question must finally now be put to bed. It’s the Beatles. Obviously.”
But Todd Haynes’s new movie documentary has had me thinking. The question of the Beatles or the Stones may very well make sense in terms of a marketing strategy designed to get two mop top bop beat groups on the cover of tabloid newspapers, but it doesn’t get to any musical truth. The Stones always walked in the footsteps of the Beatles. To believe the dividing line between them designates a space for those who favour clean cut pop to the hard-bitten grungy blues band is to believe tea with sugar is the opposite to tea without sugar. (I may work further on that metaphor as time goes by). It seems to me now that the real question should have been the Beatles or the Velvets?
The Velvet Underground really did represent something very different to the Beatles, albeit in the same field, and came to be a band arguably just as influential, although in a very different way. They came from a different place, a place where the Beatles were headed, and you could argue vice versa.
The Beatles were pop at their core. They took the white rock n roll music of the fifties and turned it into the more sophisticated and searching pop music of the mid-sixties and beyond. Dylan was doing something similar with folk music at the same time. In the mid-sixties, the Velvet Underground emerged as the love child of long jam sessions between John Cale and Lou Reed. Added to those free-flowing experimental rock sessions was the unique guitar sound of Sterling Morrison, the unconventional drumming of Maureen Tucker, and the managerial divine hand of Andy Warhol. But in the eye of that storm was not the music of the masses. In Cale they had an exponent and devotee of minimalism, a disciple and apostle of John Cage and a driving figure in experimental music scenes of New York of the early sixties (the boy had come a long way from Garnant in Carmarthenshire). In Reed they had a street poet besotted with the idea of being a rock n roll star.
At the same stage Lennon and McCartney could turn a nice lyric, but they’d yet to be opened up by Dylan and pot smoking, and they were educated in the school of rhythm and blues records flooding in from the docklands of their hometown. In Brian Epstein, the Beatles were adopted by a small business owner with (as it turned out) non-delusions of grandeur. He stripped them of their leather jackets and had them tailored and Cuban-heeled. He dug them out of a cycle of sweaty Cavern club gigs and Benzedrine-pepped Hamburg residences and booked them on music hall tours with comedians and ballroom dance competitions. In Andy Warhol, the Velvets collided with a ruthless visionary and darling of the central park elite, an iconic artist who drenched his band in black, lit them up with Barbara Rubin’s polka dots on stage and booked them gigs in galleries and art centres across the mid-west and east coast.
By the time the Velvet’s first album was out in 1967 (recorded in 1966) the Beatles had stopped touring and were focussing entirely on studio experimentalism. But they rarely wandered too far from the mainstream (“Revolution 9” has yet to make it on to any Beatles greatest hits album, as far as I know). McCartney was increasingly interested in classical music, and more and more the contemporary atonal composers like Stockhausen, introduced to him by his high society girlfriend Jane Asher. Lennon was also going off in search of altered musical boundaries, guided by Yoko Ono and his dabbling in primal scream therapy. Two Virgins (1969) and Life with Lions (1969) are both unlistenable rubbish, but they are a part of Lennon’s journey that eventually leads him full circle to his Rock n Roll album of covers in 1975 than in turn clears the way for his comeback album, Double Fantasy, most notable for the syrupy pop music on it, and the fact it was the last thing he released just months before his murder in 1980.
For the Velvet Underground, you could read this in reverse. John Cale had been turned on to rock n roll music by the Beatles and other “harmony groups”. In his mind, they were linked to the tonality of the places he was coming from. It was the feeling of being in a band, of jamming, rather than being in an orchestra and tracing the lines of sheet music, that made him flower into one of the most important studio artists (as performer and producer) of the last sixty years. But those first two Velvet Underground albums, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and White Light/White Heat (1968) sound like nothing before or since. The mix of the harshness of Lou Reed’s worldview, his rage and his degradations, with the meditative slipstream of Cale’s musical evolving ideology creates that rare thing: a unique sound.
The Beatles of course had their own unique sound. It may not sound quite so singular now, seeing as they changed everything that came after them every time they did something, but the pop music of the Beatles, which remained pop music no matter how experimental it became (okay, apart from “Revolution 9”), had its flags planted firmly in the mainstream. The Velvet Underground created music that was as far away from the mainstream, that was the music of the shadows, but through Lou Reed’s song-writing it also developed a strong melodic ideal that had some roots in rock n roll, some in various forms of pop music, and in the classical genre too. So, the question of the Beatles or the Stones is easy – ha! – it’s the Beatles. But the Beatles or the Velvets? It’s a good job we don’t have to choose.
Just How Welsh were the Velvet Underground?
When I was young, I was in a band whose ultimate ambition was to do an hour-long gig that comprised of one song, a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On”. We would play that song true to its five-minute duration, but then we would hammer the three chords of its closure over and over for the remaining fifty-five minutes. We wanted to bring the walls down of any pub or community hall or club who were unsuspecting enough to book us, rattle the foundations like those chords were the terrible reverberations of an industrial drill, a drill the size of the Empire State Building. We wanted to make the music sound like the basic sound of the universe, the undersound, that leftover harumph of the Big Bang.
Two things aren’t quite true about that. Firstly, the band’s ultimate ambition was not to do this for an hour, but to do it for several hours, or indeed, for days, months, weeks, without stopping. Chug chug chuddugug, chug chug chuddugug, chug chug chuddugug, chug chug chuddugug. We wanted it to go on for centuries, like Chinese music, as John Cale says in the new Todd Haynes Velvet Underground documentary.
The second thing that is untrue of that opening memory is that this was a communal ambition. The other band members wanted nothing to do with it. It was just me. They thought I was a bit mad. But I stuck to my guns all through the brief existence of that combo, and carried it forward into the maelstrom of several other bands I would join and found in the following years. Something about that primal chiming of those propulsive chords kept bringing me back to the idea. The Velvet Underground had gotten under my skin.
When I first heard the Velvet Underground – “Venus in Furs” on a compilation tape – it seemed to come from a different place to everything else I’d been listening to. It wasn’t the Beatles and it wasn’t the Blues. It wasn’t classical and it wasn’t psychedelic. It was the music of the earth, of the soil but of concrete too. It was the music of the dank drizzled Welsh streets, hit blind by the fizz of the neon lights. The music of collars pulled up and shoulders hunched up and hands pushed down hard into pockets.
Lest we forget, The Velvet Underground was a quarter Welsh. Or so goes some interpretation of the maths. It depends if you are counting creative input, or whether you’re divvying up the band members into equal parts as sound contributors. And it depends on what you consider to be the definitive line up of the band. At the beginning, The Velvet Underground was a spark that flew because Lou Reed met John Cale. Their creative visions collided to create that unique sound. Sterling Morrison’s guitar style, immediately recognisable as that eerie, exotic, jagged shuffle, lays all across those first two albums like razor wire. Moe Tucker’s distinctive drum technique, heavy and grey, would have likely fitted with no other band of the era so well. After the second album, when Cale was sacked by Reed, the Velvets were just Lou Reed’s backing band. Other members, including Morrison and Tucker, peeled away, either by choice or by circumstance. And before Cale had gone, other iconic figures associated with the band had already departed. Andy Warhol had been sacked as manager and producer by Reed. Nico, the iceberg in the centre of all the muck and dust, had also moved on.
Reed used that early Velvet Underground set up as a springboard to his own singular way of doing things that would become embodied in his long solo career. In Todd Haynes’ movie there are snippets of Reed being generous on this point about his other band members. Loaded (1970), the band’s last album proper, is stripped of many of the drones and right angles of the earlier albums. It is a superior rock album filled wall to wall with great pop songs, but it boasts few of the component parts that made VU so special. It points toward the melodic ideas of his great solo hits just around the corner like Transformer (1972), glammed up by Bowie’s production just as once Reed’s songs had been glammed down by Cale’s grating viola.
I am – I think it’s becoming clear – setting up an argument that the real Velvet Underground is the Velvet Underground of that first album (and, to an extent, the second), and that Velvet Underground was most definitely partly Welsh. Dismiss this as muso chin stroking if you like – what difference does it make if the Velvets were a bit Welsh? – but I think there is value in figuring out the nature of the stuff that went into the sound and vision of the greatest rock n roll band of all time. John Cale was no session player. He was not only a major creative force in those first two albums, but he gave focus and shape to Reed’s creative force. Once Reed could stand on his own two feet, he got rid of those people who helped get him upright.
Lou Reed, that glorious poet of the streets, was a student of Delmore Schwartz who himself was from that school of American post-beats mesmerised by the smithery of Dylan Thomas. Schwartz, a Creative Writing professor at Syracuse during this time, was everything to the young Lou Reed. He showed Reed a way to fit his vision of the world into the art he wanted to make. Reed was turned on by the use of language in Schwartz’s poetry, but even more so in his essays and short stories. Reed understood them as “everyday”. But Schwartz’s writing was far from “everyday”. Schwartz was a mystic in the same way Dylan Thomas was. Craig Morgan Teicher sees in Schwartz’s darkest work the “verbal lavishness” of Thomas. “Schwartz aspired to that kind of music,” Teicher wrote in the Paris Review.
Music. That’s a much more complicated notion than anybody with a passing idea of what the Velvet Underground were may suspect. The rock n roll mind, not to mention the ear, might think the genius of the band was its sonic simplicity, its primal state. But that sound is the result of a wild experimental journey. Reed started out writing cheap rock n roll songs for a “sound-a-like” record label Pickwick Records (some might argue Cale rescued Reed from this gig). If Schwartz opened up Reed lyrically, tapped into what would be Reed’s fount of genius, musically he was nothing special. He played guitar in a band and when he wrecked his hand his bandmates told him he could just sing because he “was a terrible guitar player anyway”. Lou Reed was a writer who wanted to be a rock n roll star, an artist for whom the slow solitary churning of the literary calling would fall far short in his quest to satiate the anger and rage he felt within, the anger and rage that had seen him go through several rounds of electroshock therapy in a range of East Coast sanitoria in his teens. John Cale’s introduction to rock n roll came about because his housemate and co-Dream Syndicate member Tony Conrad had been buying rock no roll records “as a sort of fetish”. Cale heard in the harmonies of the Beatles and the Everly Brothers something closer to the atonal and drone music he had been exploring with the Dream Syndicate. When Cale and Reed were introduced to one another, it was improvisation that proved the fuse. Cale recounts in Haynes’ film that all of a sudden he was in an experience that was raw and energetic, a release from the daily ninety-minute drone meditation he had been practicing with La Monte Young and Conrad at the house they shared in New York for a year and half. “It was great,” Cale said of the connection improvisation gave him with Reed. “I missed that in my childhood.”
At the beginning of Haynes’ film, we see Cale taking the position of puzzle on one of those Guess Who/What/Why American quiz shows that peppered the frontiers of early TV land back then. The panel must figure out why he’s there. He is introduced as “from Wales… a Welshman”, the quiz master half embarrassed and half excited by the sheer exoticism of that sentence. Cale is smart, short hair. Years later when he has moved over to full on beatnik, and his hair curtains down to his collar, Lou Reed will often be heard trying to figure something out himself. “How the hell did we get here, with you from Wales?”
The Primitives, Cale and Reed’s first band, who had a minor dancehall hit with the loop riff stomp of “The Ostrich” was, on the outside, a teen bop garage band, but flip them over and they were the first merging of the John Cage-influenced minimalist experiments of Cale and Conrad and Reed’s intense dark street poetics of the Delmore Schwartz variety.
By the time they are in the Factory, and under the spell of Warhol, and are reconfigured and repeopled as the Velvet Underground, they have distilled that grunge potency and added it to a series of stockpiled songs, some of which Reed has brought to the table, some of which have emerged from their hundreds of hours of improvised jams. But they all end up with the stamp of Reed, because they all end up with his lyrics. And even when Nico is vocalist, she is a spectral puppet for Reed’s aesthetic. But behind that, under that, always, is the genius of Cale.
Todd Haynes, the Velvet Underground, and the Shape of the Avant gard.
If you drew up a list of directors who would take on the subject of the Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes might very well not be on it. Or maybe he’d be your dream choice. If you’d read the profile of him in the New Yorker in 2019, he may have struck you as the perfect left field choice for any documentary about American ’sixties counterculture. He’s not made a documentary before, not a feature anyway, and his most commercially successful films have been the Douglas Sirk-esque melodrama Carol, and the anti-corporate conspiracy true story, Dark Water; both excellently crafted and powerful films, although dutifully conventional in their style of storytelling. But Haynes has an experimental back catalogue, and go back far enough and you’ll even find his younger days an androgynous avant gardist. Sound a bit more familiar?
Haynes grew from that sensibility, but he did not leave it behind. His forays into mainstream cinema almost feel like a director showing he has the control of his medium, like Picasso assembling a physiological sketch in the style of Da Vinci. Break the rules as a mater would do, but also calmly laying claim to the rule that a subject must bend to the demands of the medium it is most at home with. A melodrama would compress and destruct under the strikes of an experimentalist, for instance.
Haynes is also a small town American, an artist who has shown in his work that he understands utterly the sheen of Eisenhower’s middle class, the place that Lou Reed broke away from when he scarpered to NYU. Remove Haynes from time, but not from place, and he would himself have been a prime candidate to join Warhol’s Factory in the mid-sixties.
Haynes made a great fictional movie about the life of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, which included an amorphous and unforgettable Cate Blanchet as Blonde on Blonde-era Bob complete with ray bans, afro, and skinny jeans. So, he knows how to creatively approach unapproachable subjects. Haynes’ VU doc though is flashy, stylish, sometimes a little dreamy in the way it extracts strands of the Velvet’s sound and melds it with voice over. Again, he instinctively understands how structure can enhance the essence of the subject matter. Haynes has created a narrative from an avant Gard approach in the same way the Velvet’s created rock n roll from the same mindset. To that extent, Haynes was the only filmmaker who could have done a job on this band.
Gary Raymond is a novelist, critic, editor, and broadcaster. His latest novel, Angels of Cairo, is out now with Parthian Books.