Fact #155686
When:
Short story:
The Velvet Underground release their second album, White Light/White Heat, in the USA on Verve Records.
Full article:
Sterling Morrison (guitarist, Velvet Underground] : We had good amps, good distortion devices. We were the first American band to have an endorsement deal with Vox. The White Light/White Heat sound was just us using the Vox amps and playing them emphatically.
We were all pulling in the some direction. We may have been dragging each other off a cliff, but we were all definitely going in the same direction. In the White Light/White Heat era, our lives were chaos. That's what's reflected in the record.
John Cale (piano/guitar/viola, Velvet Underground] : It was a very rabid record. The first one had some gentility, some beauty. The second one was consciously anti-beauty.
We lost sight of the amount of work that went into the first album. When we became a road band, we got lost into this backbeat that was always around.
We rediscovered some of that styling in things like Lady Godiva's Operation. That mix kind of alluded to what we originally wanted to do. But Sister Ray was also there. And everything around the music was turmoil then. Because we had been thrown into the limelight by Andy (Warhol). But the record business was not about to go and follow in Andy's footsteps. They were into business. Andy was into inspiration.
Tom Wilson (producer) had this parade of beautiful girls coming through all the time. I don't know if he was having it off with them in some other part of the studio. But everybody was intrigued by it.
Lou Reed : I wrote the lyric (to Sister Ray) - I think - while we were riding to and from a gig. I just wrote it out straight. It has such an attitude and feel to it, even if sleazy. 'Doc and Sally inside' - Doc and Sally are characters. 'Lookin' for the down-five/Who's starin' at Miss Rayon' - a drag queen. 'Waitin' for her booster' - we all know what a booster is, even today. 'Just got here from Alabama' - and on and on and on.
It's just a parade of New York night denizens. But of course, it's hard to understand a word of it. Which is a shame, because it's really a compressed movie.
Sterling Morrison : When Cale came surging through the wall of sound on his first solo, I remember thinking, 'Where's John getting all that noise from?' I see him jumbling over there with all the stops on his organ. I expected it more to stay at the same volume. And all of a sudden, the organ is way louder than me or Lou. I couldn't turn up; I was already maxed out. At one point, I was down at the bridge pickup on my Stratocaster, so I decided to get a little more oomph on the neck pickup. So I switched to that, which was good. I can hear it in there.
Robert Quine (guitarist, Richard Hell And The Voidoids) : The second album (White Light/White Heat) completely changed my life. Sister Ray, I Heard Her Call My Name. I spent thousands of hours on headphones wearing that out. That was a big influence on me. They were starting to make a big deal about people like Larry Coryell, rock musicians playing jazz, but there was no real fusion going on. What Lou Reed did, he actually listened to Ornette Coleman, and deliberately did off-harmonic feedback and the deliberate monotony of it. This stuff is like Jimmy Reed - it's monotonous or it's hypnotic. For me, it was hypnotic.
(Source : not known)
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We were all pulling in the some direction. We may have been dragging each other off a cliff, but we were all definitely going in the same direction. In the White Light/White Heat era, our lives were chaos. That's what's reflected in the record.
John Cale (piano/guitar/viola, Velvet Underground] : It was a very rabid record. The first one had some gentility, some beauty. The second one was consciously anti-beauty.
We lost sight of the amount of work that went into the first album. When we became a road band, we got lost into this backbeat that was always around.
We rediscovered some of that styling in things like Lady Godiva's Operation. That mix kind of alluded to what we originally wanted to do. But Sister Ray was also there. And everything around the music was turmoil then. Because we had been thrown into the limelight by Andy (Warhol). But the record business was not about to go and follow in Andy's footsteps. They were into business. Andy was into inspiration.
Tom Wilson (producer) had this parade of beautiful girls coming through all the time. I don't know if he was having it off with them in some other part of the studio. But everybody was intrigued by it.
Lou Reed : I wrote the lyric (to Sister Ray) - I think - while we were riding to and from a gig. I just wrote it out straight. It has such an attitude and feel to it, even if sleazy. 'Doc and Sally inside' - Doc and Sally are characters. 'Lookin' for the down-five/Who's starin' at Miss Rayon' - a drag queen. 'Waitin' for her booster' - we all know what a booster is, even today. 'Just got here from Alabama' - and on and on and on.
It's just a parade of New York night denizens. But of course, it's hard to understand a word of it. Which is a shame, because it's really a compressed movie.
Sterling Morrison : When Cale came surging through the wall of sound on his first solo, I remember thinking, 'Where's John getting all that noise from?' I see him jumbling over there with all the stops on his organ. I expected it more to stay at the same volume. And all of a sudden, the organ is way louder than me or Lou. I couldn't turn up; I was already maxed out. At one point, I was down at the bridge pickup on my Stratocaster, so I decided to get a little more oomph on the neck pickup. So I switched to that, which was good. I can hear it in there.
Robert Quine (guitarist, Richard Hell And The Voidoids) : The second album (White Light/White Heat) completely changed my life. Sister Ray, I Heard Her Call My Name. I spent thousands of hours on headphones wearing that out. That was a big influence on me. They were starting to make a big deal about people like Larry Coryell, rock musicians playing jazz, but there was no real fusion going on. What Lou Reed did, he actually listened to Ornette Coleman, and deliberately did off-harmonic feedback and the deliberate monotony of it. This stuff is like Jimmy Reed - it's monotonous or it's hypnotic. For me, it was hypnotic.
(Source : not known)