The Velvet Underground & Nico at 50

Beyond the banana: The inner gatefold of The Velvet Underground & Nico

There was a time in the late 1970's when the first album by The Velvet Underground seemed to be more talked and read about than listened to. The radio only played Sweet Jane and Rock And Roll from their last album, Loaded, which was the easiest of their albums to find - and the most conventional. When discussing The Velvet Underground & Nico, their first album, the most common words were along the lines of "dark," "gritty," "uncompromising," even "scary." So for those of us who were freighted with all this baggage when finally dropping the needle on side one, the initial shock was how unexpectedly gentle it was.

The first song, Sunday Morning, starts with a childlike glockenspiel melody straight out of Buddy Holly's Everyday, accompanied by a sliding bass line soon joined by a viola drone and drums that were more of a hint than a rhythm track. Lou Reed enters, practically whispering: "Sunday morning/Brings the dawn in/It's just a restless feeling/By my side." THIS was the fearsome VU, this was Lou Reed, who taught us to walk on the wild side? Sunday Morning is an absolutely gorgeous study in optimistic melancholy - and love at first listen for me - but clearly, this legendary record was more complicated than we had been led to believe.

Musical pioneer and producer extraordinaire Brian Eno famously said that almost no one bought The Velvet Underground & Nico, but that everyone who did formed their own band. This is partly why the album sounded so different than expected - after living with its influence for 15 years, with some of the resulting music pushing the envelope even further in terms noise and volume, the incredibly nuanced original was bound to take some getting used to.

Now, the second song, I'm Waiting For The Man, was more as advertised. Over a pounding two chord vamp, in an unmistakable New York accent, Lou speak-sings a tale of meeting a drug connection on "Lexington, 125." This was a level of cool that is still, even at this late date, mostly only being attempted and approximated. In March 1967, when the album was released (on the heels of The Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane single), it must have sounded utterly bizarre. I grew up less than two miles away but Reed might as well have been singing about another planet. Besides Dylan, whose producer Tom Wilson worked on this album (and the follow-up, White Light/White Heat), perhaps the only preparation for what was going on here came from The Doors debut, which had come out about six months earlier, and which drew on some similar strains of dark poetry, but with a more radio-friendly sound and image.

Also like The Doors, The Velvets never turned their back entirely on the blues, which is how Jimmy Page was able to fit I'm Waiting For The Man in to the set list of The Yardbirds in their final days. Another early adopter was David Bowie, whose manager had brought a test pressing of the album back from New York. While the gestation was long, Bowie's love of the VU came out in Queen Bitch from Hunky Dory in 1972, and in the many performances of I'm Waiting For The Man (and White Light/White Heat) in the Ziggy Stardust era. The circle was finally complete when Reed joined Bowie to perform both songs at Madison Square Garden in 1997.

One thing that makes the Velvet Underground & Nico so astonishing is that the entire album was in the can and ready to go in April 1966, before The Doors album even came out. Release was delayed for nearly a year by their label, Verve Records, which was more familiar with marketing jazz and was also caught up in putting out the first album by Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention. It's a compelling mind game to imagine the album coming out in an even more innocent context. Maybe it would have made a bigger splash, like a hand grenade in a Disney film, but it's just as possible that it would have been actively suppressed rather than benignly neglected. One thing that is unquestionable, that the VU were consciously going head to head against the Summer of Love ethos. "We were pretty much appalled by what was going on on the West Coast," John Cale has said. "The hippie scene was not for us. They were scruffy, dirty people."

So how did The Velvet Underground come together to create such a unique and prescient sound? The core of the band was made up of Long Islanders Lou Reed (guitar, vocals, lyrics) and Sterling Morrison (rhythm guitar, bass, backing vocals), who had met and played music together at Syracuse University in the 1950's. Out of college and trying to make it in music as a staff songwriter and session player at Pickwick Records, Lou met Welsh violist John Cale (also bass, keyboards, backing vocals) at a recording session and they hit it off. Cale was classically trained, had written symphonies now lost to time, and had washed up in NYC after a scholarship at Tanglewood Music Center brought him to the States. When original drummer Angus Maclise quit on the eve of their first live performance, Maureen Tucker, also from Long Island and the sister of one of Morrison's roommates, was brought in on drums.

That first gig was not a success - they only performed three songs before being given the hook - but they persisted and landed a residency at a Greenwich Village club. The night they were fired from there was also the night Andy Warhol was in the audience and they were soon under his wing and providing a soundtrack to his performance art piece, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Warhol is credited with producing the album, which seemed to consist mainly of insisting the engineers not clean anything up. After Warhol died, Reed and Cale reunited to record Songs For Drella, a richly emotional exploration of their time with the pop art master, which also illuminated his involvement in the VU's early days. It seems that, besides providing the instantly iconic album cover, the other important thing Warhol did for the nascent band was model an incredible work ethic and indomitable self-belief. His example forced them to sharpen their craft and push their art further, so by the time they were in the studio their material was honed to a fine point. There is nothing on The Velvet Underground & Nico that is not meticulously planned and prepared; even the exploratory freak-outs had a roadmap.

The other element Warhol brought to the band was German "It Girl" Nico, essentially untrained as a singer (her credit on the album is "Chanteuse," which is somehow perfect), but with a spectacular look and natural charisma. Lou wrote three classic songs for her that provide crucial variety to the album and in their sensitivity belie his reputation for misogyny. Femme Fatale comes third on the album and demonstrates Reed's complete absorption of 1950's ballad style, down to the backing vocals on the chorus. Of course, in the 1950's there were no songs sung by a Teutonic ice-princess about a rapacious woman's sexual conquests - maybe Kurt Weill comes close.

The title of Femme Fatale also hints at the roots of Reed's lyrical interests - hard-boiled American literature by the likes of Raymond Chandler, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby, Jr. Incorporating their dark themes of transgression, obsession and betrayal into a rock and roll context is perhaps Reed's greatest inspiration and most revolutionary act. He has often said that he wanted to write the great American novel as an album and, besides Bob Dylan, no one else did as much to singlehandedly expand the vocabulary of rock music than Lou Reed.

The fourth song on the album is a perfect example. Venus In Furs was based on the 19th century novella of the same name by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch (from whose name the word "masochism" is derived), which explored themes of sexual dominance and submission. Surely, Reed must have thought, nearly 100 years after Venus In Furs was published, the world of rock and roll was ready for lyrics like "Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather/Shiny leather in the dark/Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you/Strike dear mistress, and cure his heart." Not quite ready, Lou, but thank you for forcing the issue!

Run Run Run, which follows, is blues-based bit of Dylanesque rock, mainly distinguished by Reed's distortion drenched six string shamanism, which, like Roger McGuinn's work on Eight Miles High (1966), was likely based on John Coltrane's "sheets of sound" sax solos. All Tomorrow's Parties comes next, a spooky and hypnotic vehicle for Nico, which presages post-punk explorations by Siouxsie & The Banshees and Nick Cave's first band, The Birthday Party.

As great as the album is up to this point, it can seem like mere preamble when it comes to the next song, Heroin, which starts side two. This novelistic look into the mechanism of addiction, and the mindset of an addict, doesn't just realize Reed's literary ambitions - it propels him into the company of his heroes. The fact that it's set to mesmerizing and (yes) melodic music only makes the band's achievement here more impressive. Such is the power of Heroin that not only were other musicians absorbing its lessons, but authors, too - like Denis Johnson, who titled his breakout book Jesus' Son (1992) after a line from the song.

Sequencing There She Goes Again after Heroin was a wise choice. It's a charming, if somewhat slight song that's probably the closest thing to an actual pop song on the album, and it gives listeners a chance to catch their breath. The final Nico song, I'll Be Your Mirror, is the first of Reed's indelible ballads, and one of the most poetic love songs ever written. So much of Reed's achievement over the years is based in acceptance and compassion, so neatly embodied in the lyrics to this song. For example: "When you think the night has seen your mind/That inside you're twisted and unkind/Let me stand to show that you are blind/Please put down your hands/Cause I see you." Nico's restrained delivery is perfect, and, matched by the band's delicate accompaniment of guitars, bass and tambourine, demonstrates what can be accomplished when convention is set aside to pursue artistic truth.

The last two songs, Black Angel's Death Song and European Son, are examples of the VU at their most avant garde, with the former being the reason for their dismissal from the club after the concert Warhol witnessed. Lou's delivery and stream of consciousness lyrics are direct descendants of Dylan's work, but he goes a little further, spouting nonsense syllables for part of the song. European Son is truly psychedelic music, an attempt to alter consciousness rather than describing a state of altered consciousness, as most psychedelic songs do. The full band receives songwriting credit and it is a bit freeform but moves along and doesn't overstay its welcome. Its complete title is European Son to Delmore Schwartz, name-checking another hero, the poet who wrote "In dreams begin responsibilities" and mentored Reed in college. When European Son ends in a nasty haze of amplifier noise, there is a distinct sense that something has happened, which could be said for the whole experience of listening to the album.

If The Velvet Underground & Nico had been the only album they recorded, The Velvet Underground's place in the music firmament would have been entirely secure. It is hard indeed to imagine how bands and performers like The Stooges (Cale produced their first album), Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith, Suicide, Television, The Ramones, Joy Division, The Feelies, The Pixies, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Pavement, My Bloody Valentine, and many others would have even existed, much less gone on to influence so many others on their own, without the example The Velvet Underground provided on this record, which is well worth celebrating 50 years later.

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Lou Reed

Overdosed On Pleasure: The Book of Nilsson

Biography Schmiography

"Neither of us could stop laughing, and finally I said, 'I can't take any more pleasure, John. I can't take any more pleasure. Stop! It's gotta stop!'" That's John as in Lennon, of course, being yelled at by Harry Nilsson in one of the haunting episodes in Alyn Shipton's fine - and necessary - new biography, Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter. Nilsson and Lennon were in the midst of their famous "lost weekend" and were in the second continuous day of dropping acid and getting up to no good with two young women. This outrageous escapade began when Lennon said to Nilsson, "I'd love to get some girls and some acid and fuck'em," and Nilsson responded by saying he could get it done with one phone call. And he did.

Something about the gluttony described in that story, which Shipton gleaned from Nilsson's unfinished autobiography (a major source of information in the book), resonates with many of the themes in Harry's life and music. Even from his first album proper, Pandemonium Shadow Show, Nilsson was loading on piles of horns, strings, carnival barkers - everything AND the kitchen sink seemed to be the operating principle - enough that even when he's at his best you might find yourself saying "Stop! It's gotta stop." But he was so unique that you'll go back for more in fairly short order.

One doesn't need to be a psychologist (or even a pop-psychologist) to figure that Nilsson's need for surfeit, and ability to provide it, came from the gaping emotional wound left behind when his father abandoned him, an act compounded by his mother's lies about why he had gone. The final blow came when Harry later learned that for part of his childhood his father was nearby and was uninterested in seeing his son. Shipton deals with Nilsson's early life with brisk efficiency in the first chapter which ends as he is recording his earliest demos in 1962. By then he had a respectable job in a bank, showing an early aptitude for the computers that financial institutions were adopting at the time. However, he had already lived a couple of lifetimes at that point: born in Brooklyn, he criss-crossed the country both with his mother and sister and without, played high school baseball with Carl Yastrzemski, knocked over a liquor store to put food on his mother's table - practically the only thing he didn't do for his first 17 years was make music.

Even after he started it still took several years for his career to take off, but when it did it was obvious that a serious talent had arrived. From the beginning, RCA marketed him as "The True One," and even before his smash hit Nilsson Schmilsson album (his seventh for RCA) he had attracted the attention, and eventual friendship, of all four Beatles, had songs covered by everyone from Astrud Gilberto to Glen Campbell, worked on prestige projects such as John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (winning a Grammy for Everybody's Talkin') and Otto Preminger's Skidoo, and created a nationally televised animated special called The Point. By any lights, he was in the midst of an extremely interesting and richly musical mid-level career. "Mid-level" because, despite all his successes, RCA was not really making back their investment on his albums.

Enter Richard Perry, one of a swinging new breed of record producer, with whom Nilsson decided it was time to "'...do some rock and roll and get down." The resulting concoction was Nilsson Schmillson, an album I have dubbed "the white Thriller," both for its quantity of hit songs and its variety of material, which offers something for everybody - and every radio format. It went gold in a matter of months, earned him another Grammy, and has stood the test of time as one of the most enduring classics of the 1970's. The million-selling status of Nilsson Schmilsson may be unique in the annals of rock when you consider that it was achieved without any touring or live performances to speak of. However, it also sowed the seeds for Nilsson's personal and professional destruction, a transition which was stunningly rapid and which Shipton delineates in detailed reportage, with rueful affection but no judgement or sensationalism.

It's hard to imagine the deep feeling of worthlessness that must have fueled Harry's descent into a life of monstrous excess. Since he was joined in his descent by such fellow travelers as Lennon, Ringo, and Keith Moon, there is some entertainment value in the wild tales but it can make for painful reading when you consider the cost to Nilsson's music. Fortunately, Shipton is clear-eyed in his assessment of the patchy years that followed Nilsson Schmillson. The casual listener will likely be unaware of at least five of the seven albums (not including the somewhat bizarre soundtrack to Robert Altman's Popeye) Harry made from 1972 to 1980 - his last album wasn't even released in the U.S. But each one has something to offer and, with Shipton's guidance, I've assembled some of the tracks worthy of reconsideration in a Spotify playlist called Later, Harry. If you want to go all in, The RCA Albums Collection has everything he recorded for the label including many rarities and unreleased material.

One of the most remarkable parts of this remarkable story is Nilsson's third marriage to Una O'Keefe, who he met by chance in NYC when she was a nineteen-year-old on a student visa from Ireland and waitressing at Rumpelmayer's. After waiting for her to finish college, they married and went on to have five children. She stuck with him to the end, and it gives the reader comfort to know there was someone who cared for him unconditionally. Like Una, we have to accept the good Nilsson and the bad, and Shipton's book, along with the must-see documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?, gives us the definitive take on an American original. So, put the lime in the coconut and read it all up.

P.S. Part of the fun of reading the book is running to YouTube to confirm that some of the crazy stories are really true, like the tale of the $5,000 TV commercial:

Multiplicities Of Genius, Part 2: Sly Stone

Am I the only one who felt a slight sinking sensation upon realizing that Scorcese's brilliant film about Dylan, No Direction Home, was not going to go past 1966? One would think that by 2007, it was time to see Dylan's sixties work in context with the rest of his legendary career, which includes over 25 albums since 1970. I'm as capable of fetishizing the sixties as anyone else, but in the case of some of the music legends that came out of that time, it actually diminishes them to confine them to one era.

Sly Stone is another such genius. While his post-Woodstock career is nothing like Dylan's, his later work still deserves to be assessed and not dismissed, as it often has been. In the early 90's a friend sent me an import CD of Fresh, Sly & The Family Stone's album from 1973. Sony/Columbia/Epic had not deigned to include the gold-selling record that contained If You Want Me To Stay and In Time in their first round of CD issues. Why? "Too funky," my friend opined. "Too personal," I thought. Small Talk (also a gold record) and High On You, from 1974 and 1975, were also left out in the cold, along with the three albums that followed. Whatever the reason for the revisionism there has been a gradual correction, if an incomplete one, to the official canon. A huge step in the right direction was made in 2007 when Epic/Legacy put out a box set of the first seven albums, newly mastered and featuring bonus tracks.

It was a delight to hear beautifully prepared releases of Fresh and Small Talk, and to have a real opportunity to consider them in relation to Sly's more lauded work. Even considering the travails caused by his personal problems and addictions, he managed to keep the quality up. While the later albums didn't always innovate on a sonic level, they certainly held their own against the likes of Kool & The Gang and the Ohio Players, to mention just two of Sly's progeny. For the deep fan, however, there was still that twinge: What about High On You (represented only by a demo of Crossword Puzzle tacked on to the end of Small Talk) and the other albums? Shouldn't we have the opportunity, with an artist of Sly's stature (and one who has sold millions of records) to grasp the whole achievement?

Well, now another step has been taken, with the release of Higher, the lavishly packaged four CD set, which includes some pre-Family Stone work and goes right up through Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, the last Sly album on Epic before he decamped to Warner Bros. There's also 17 unreleased tracks, including a few spectacular live performances, and many of the most famous songs are issued in their mono single masters for the first time on CD. There are some real gems among the rare material, like Remember, a swaggering blues that came out of a collaboration with Billy Preston (Free Funk from his Wildest Organ In Town is his version), and You're The One, a hit for Little Sister and performed furiously by the Family Stone on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert in 1973.

The live material from The Isle Of Wight festival is also stellar, but some of the newly unearthed material is strictly for bragging rights, such as a number of so-so instrumentals. There's a telling remark by drummer Greg Errico appended to one of them in the book included in the set: "These aren't instrumentals per se; they are tracks before the vocals were added," and that weren't completed for one reason or another. While the instrumentals aren't that memorable in their current form, they do serve to throw into relief the brilliance of Sly's lyrics, vocal melodies and arrangements. As for the classic material, much of it is well-chosen, although I would argue against including the nearly 14 minute Sex Machine (from the Stand! album), which I've always found leaden. The valuable real estate it occupies could have made room for two or three more songs from the final three albums, represented here by six songs in total, or accommodated one or two cuts from Back On The Right Track, Sly's first album for Warner Bros., such as the wry groove of The Same Thing (Makes You Laugh, Makes You Cry) or It Takes All Kinds.

On the whole, while the true fan will want all the complete albums as well, Higher comes closer than anything else to displaying the breadth of Sly's achievement. The book includes a decent essay, song by song descriptions with many quotes from band members (including Sly), and a timeline, along with great photos of the group and associated memorabilia. If you can find it, the "Amazon exclusive" version of the set is highly recommended as it comes with a bonus disc including six more tracks, including Sittin' On My Fanny from 1975.

While the essay does mention the "excess, strain, and recklessness which sometimes follow fame," there is no visual representation of the darker side of Sly's life. I have often wondered what it looked like as he made There's A Riot Going On, a dark murky album that still managed to produce three or four hit singles. I'll have to keep looking because all the pictures in the book show Sly smiling and seemingly in full command of the situation. This makes it easy to avoid thinking deeply about why Sly fell victim to drugs - was it just brain chemistry and opportunity, or could he feel the walls closing in as the culture's definition of him as a cartoonish avatar of sixties optimism grew more and more sealed? I believe that until we address questions like that head on, we will not be taking Sly's full measure with all the love and compassion deserved by someone who has brought the world so much joy and insight.

The Beatles Thing

"But the Beatles thing is over," Paul McCartney declared in a Life Magazine interview 44 years ago this week. While it was not the official notice of the end, careful readers would have taken note of the finality of his statement and been seriously concerned. And it was true - privately the Fab Four had already determined that they would no longer continue as a group. But the Beatle thing is never really over, is it? Here's some thoughts on why that might be.

I can understand how easy it is to take The Beatles for granted. After all, my mom used to wake me up with a 45 of I Want To Hold Your Hand, which puts them very nearly at the earliest point of my nurture - close enough that I now consider them part of my nature.

Perhaps they are so extraordinary that's it's easier to see them as part of the furniture, so to speak, than to try to grapple with what they really achieved. "The blues is a chair," John Lennon said, so he knew something about music as furniture, but unlike the blues, the universe of The Beatles was essentially created by four very young men who followed their (both creative and commercial) muses never suspecting - at least not until the end - that they were essentially creating a one-band genre.

A defining feature of that genre is that anything went - add a string quartet, put the tape on backward, strip it back to naked human anguish, get silly, sing in French, make a collage, base your lyrics on a poster or a box of chocolates or the Tibetan book of the dead, get angry, write songs, get folky, sing other people's songs, etc. That's why I always say you can use the Fab Four to get exposed to nearly everything music can do. Listening to their music can be the start of a love affair with music, one that the listener can pursue down countless avenues. "I like the way that song makes me feel - where else can I find that?"

This far along from their demise, people are still trying to parse The Beatles, to see where they fit alongside other musicians and separate the strands of what made them work. "How good were The Beatles as lyricists?" or "Where does George Harrison rank as a guitarist?" are typical starting points for articles or blog posts. In the first example, if you examine the lyrics in the cold light of the dissection table, you might find some of them wanting. Not as deep as Dylan, or as clever as The Kinks or The Who, or as dark as The Doors or The Rolling Stones - to name only some of their contemporaries. As for the second example, while his style is quite distinctive and his technique excellent, I wouldn't put George in my top five guitarists.

But the point is, they can't really be parsed. It was the hydra-headed foursome of them that made it all work and the unified quality of their output that astonishes. There is much we know now about the interpersonal difficulties they had, but that just makes it all the more remarkable. More than any other band, it is impossible to imagine The Beatles doing what they did with anybody other than John, Paul, George and Ringo. The dream of human unity - always just out of reach - is exemplified by their remarkable music. Even photographs of the four of them are inspiring.

"Not liking The Beatles is like not liking the sun," someone once wrote in Rolling Stone. While I believe that it takes all kinds to make a world, part of me agrees with that statement and maintains a mild suspicion of those who say flat out "I don't like The Beatles." Then again, being jaded by them might be worse, so dust off that musical furniture and try to listen to The Beatles as if you've never heard them before.