Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground – By Richie Unterberger – Review *****

The first thing you notice about the book is its BIG – we’re talking 1.5 kilos and a likely visit to casualty if you drop it on your toes!

It screams definitive, but BIG is no indicator of Good. So what do we think as we dive into nearly 1000 pages? I’ll tell you now, reading this was like a glorious 2-week summer holiday. The first week seems to take an age to pass, and then once past halfway it goes mega fast, and there’s a sense of sadness that it’s over.

It’s hard to believe that 50 years ago The Velvet Underground were like a guilty secret, and info about them was passed on via Bowie interviews and occasional retrospectives in the music press, like masonic handshakes. Yet no band has exerted so much influence on alternative music, has such an aura of coolness as them, from the clothes to the music to the attitude, and is still rightly revered. This book covers it all.

The author sets out 4 distinct phases that equate to the band’s records with Lou. Phase 1 is the band’s formation and their first Banana album, which occupies over a third of the book.

What’s fascinating, as with the best bands, is the sheer number of variables and chance that bring together both the band and their recordings and the disasters and cock ups that dog them through their career – some willingly self-inflicted, like how they recorded the White Light White Heat album with everything in the red!

Everything is documented from Lou’s writing songs for Pickwick to the Primitives to the fractured recording of the first album – there’s loads of stuff I didn’t know (lots of!) like Lou’s horrific electric shock treatment when young and the fact that the VU constantly played freeform often for the first 30 mins before even playing a song at mind melting volume and distortion, switched how songs were played and Lou changed the lyrics on the spot. They also were prolific writers and had loads more songs that were never recorded or dropped. That the first album was ready to go a year before it actually came out – that there was a fourth album due for MGM. In fact, everything you thought you knew was cool about the VU turns out to be true in spades. In fact, it’s just the tip of the iceberg – their coolness stretches to infinity and beyond.

The book is incredibly easy to read and is a mixture of history and quotes (often contradicting each other) from the past half century.

A couple of negatives

There is a lack of pictures – surely the budget didn’t all go on printing. There aren’t even the album covers, which seems a bit weird.

Secondly – Given the detail about the gigs and the specifics about the songs played, it would have been great to have something in the book to point the reader to. Because a major part of the VU legend described is not only that they had heaps of unrecorded songs, but the versions they played at gigs were amazing; they never seemed to play a song the same way twice.

Luckily, David Katz has done a great job pulling all this together with links on his feature Velvety Bootleg Dreams: Whiplashed Recordings Maded in the Dark

Here’s just one example – Live at The Gymnasium. Amazing song I’m Not A Young Man Anymore and the first airing of their masterpiece Sister Ray. Think about it – The Beatles were writing Sgt. Pepper’s and the Velvet Underground were doing Sister Ray!

Whether you know about the VU or are coming to them for the first time, this book will deliver. I always think a sign of a good music book is that after you’ve read it you’ve got to search out and play the music. I haven’t stopped playing the Velvets, and already I’ve bought two bootlegs. – What an absolute pleasure to read this book was and one I’ll be returning to.

“Of all the books I have read on the story of the Velvet Underground, Richie’s is probably the best. He brings us the voices of the people who were also important to those times, but who either go unmentioned, unheard, or not written about in a balanced way. I also like the way he writes, and some of the many reviews of recordings and live shows were insightful in a way l have not come across in the work of anyone else. Bravo, Richie” Jonathan Richman

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