The Velvet Underground – The History Of Punk
Quite simply everything about The Velvet Underground was astonishing. Take a female drummer with one beat (Mo Tucker), a classically trained Welshman (John Cale), a blonde German beauty who couldn’t sing (Nico), and two buddies from Syracuse University (Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed) who all collided together as a band formed to promote Lou’s song ‘The Ostrich’!
Add another blonde who painted soup cans, a name derived from a novel about sado-masochism and Verve as a major label and you arrive at the VU a band who rewrote the rules for music as we know it.
The band looked and sounded like no other. Dissonant, atonal, provocative and featuring sometimes the tortuous vocals of Nico (God help us she was an acquired taste!) contained in mainly classic songs featuring among other subjects heroin, bondage, more heroin, transvestites and oral sex…Forget The Beatles pissing about with backward tape loops stoned here was Cale running a chair into metal plates to simulate glass smashing! Forget that piano note of ‘A Day in a Life’ that goes on forever here was the sound of pure white noise as the blues were turned inside out for ‘Run Run Run’ with a wall of feedback.
While people developed studio professionalism, here was Cale and Reed turning their instruments up to try and drown each other during their behemoth ‘Sister Ray’ while developing the prototype punk guitar sound everyone wanted in ’77. Forget love and peace, here was a band who on their second album had a cover featuring soldiers going over the top bayonets fixed and with a title about mainlining drugs! If you don’t think ‘Venus in Furs’ is sublime then you have no idea about music and if you listen to ‘Sister Ray’ all the way thru nodding wisely then you are not much better.
The Velvet Underground classics include What Goes On’, ‘Pale Blue Eyes and Sweet Jane. They were the first band to recognise and incorporate the underbelly of life into rock’n’roll and yet able to write emotional & tender songs with Reed’s voice almost breaking at times and yet not sounding twee or sugary. Their first two albums VU with Nico and White Light/White Heat probably sold 30 copies put together but their influence is still felt today. After those first two albums they declined as Cale left and they attempted to take a more commercial direction with the album Loaded that failed but is still loaded (geddit?) with fantastic tunes.
While hippies were singing about flowers and the Beatles were boring us rigid with St Peppers, the Velvets were sticking a spike in their arm and ‘too busy sucking on a ding dong’. They gave us a vision where it wasn’t all harmony sweetness and light, love and the long winding road.
Music could appall as well as appeal. Thank fuck for those ‘evil mothers’!
