Fact #67598

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO
by Johnny Black


On release, The Velvet Underground and Nico barely limped into the Billboard chart at 197, before promptly disappearing without trace, but it is now acknowledged as one of the most influential albums of all time.

The Velvets, whose music can now be seen as New York’s brutally realistic street-wise riposte to San Francisco’s hippy dreams, was launched largely from a platform provided by their association with the 60s’ most celebrated pop artist, Andy Warhol.

As an outrageous rock quartet, they had become New York’s hottest rock ticket during 1966 but, by the time they started recording their debut album, they had been joined by Warhol’s protégé, the striking blonde German chanteuse Nico.

Keen to establish Nico as next in his line of ‘superstars’, Warhol financed the album, securing three days at Cameo-Parkway studios on Broadway, at a cost of $2,500. In return, the band would feature Nico as a vocalist and credit Warhol as producer, although he rarely showed his face at the studio.

Lou Reed, the band’s main songwriter, found Nico’s presence hard to take and there were, undeniably, solid musical reasons for not wanting her in the band. A perforated ear-drum made her deaf in one ear and, as a result, she would often lose control of her vocals. The Velvets’ viola player, John Cale recalls, “We’d hear her go off-key or hit the wrong pitch. We would sit there and snigger.”

According to drummer Mo Tucker, time was so limited that most of the tracks were recorded live, with virtually no overdubs. “We went in the studio for just eight hours to do it, and all the gigs we’d done just paid off. It wasn’t a case of ‘Let’s do it again,’ – ‘Let’s overdub here.’ What you hear is exactly what we played, mistakes and all.”

Arguably, though, this was exactly what the music required. Held together by Tucker’s rudimentary pounding drum patterns, The Velvets incorporated lashings of feedback, distortion and screeching electrified viola into songs whose chordal progressions were primitive in the extreme. To invest more time and effort into capturing their crazed cacophonies in perfect hi-fidelity would have been to miss the point.

The recording of Reed’s epic Heroin is a good example of how poor recording facilities served to enhance the visceral intent of the material. “The guys couldn’t have their amps up loud in the studio,” recalls Tucker, “so I couldn’t hear anything. When we got to the part where you speed up, it became this mountain of drum noise. I couldn’t hear shit. So I just stopped and, being a little wacky, they just kept going.” And that’s the version that ended up on the album.

As well as the minimalist, and often discordant, sonic assault of the music, what set Velvet Underground songs apart from the mainstream was Lou Reed’s unblinkingly nihilistic lyrics. Then as now, variations on teen romantic themes provided the lyrics for most chart hits. Although folk-rock had broadened the scope to cover socio-political issues, and the San Francisco bands were exploring free love and dope-related ideas, nothing prepared the public for Reed’s tales of sado-masochism, alienated junkies and teenage girls turning blue.

The completed album was first rejected by Atlantic Records (who didn’t want drug songs), then by Elektra (who hated the violas), before producer Tom Wilson secured them a deal with MGM’s jazz subsidiary Verve, which was trying to re-vamp itself for the psychedelic era. According to Cale, however, Wilson insisted on re-recording some tracks in California, resulting in marked disparities in sound quality across the album.

When the album hit the streets, despite being clad in its famed Andy Warhol banana cover, it was embraced by the more adventurous record critics of the day but rejected by the public, who were not yet ready to move on from pop, protest and psychedelia.

Verve’s commitment to the band wavered, and the label now put its promotional efforts into its other major signing, The Mothers Of Invention. Ironically, as Reed has pointed out, “that was one of the reasons why we could do what we wanted.”

With Nico now removed from the band, what they wanted for the second album, White Light/White Heat, was to go beyond the limits of the first one. “It was a very rabid record,” explains Cale. “The first one had some gentility, some beauty. The second one was consciously anti-beauty.” Cale also notes that the chaotic nature of their lives on the road is reflected in the album. “We decided to go in and turn all the instruments up and fuck the engineer.”

The album’s centrepiece is, unquestionably, the relentlessly churning 17 minute long Sister Ray. There existed already a vogue for lengthy album tracks, which tended to be excuses for bands to show off their ensemble improvisational skills but, in The Velvets’ hands, that notion went out the window. Instead, Reed sets up a simplistic, dirty guitar riff which gets increasingly simpler as the track evolves, while the rest of the band fights for attention.

“When Cale came surging through the wall of sound on his first solo,” explained Sterling Morrison, “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.”

On purely musical merits, Sister Ray is hard to justify, but as an organically evolving, living, gasping sonic monster, it remains unsurpassed in the annals of rock.

Sister Ray alone would justify the album’s place in rock history, but White Light/White Heat also includes Cale’s horrific spoken word tale, The Gift, and the indescribably nightmarish Lady Godiva’s Operation, plus a trio of more conventionally excellent rock workouts.

Despite the poor performance of both albums on release, their influence has been enormous, with bands as diverse as R.E.M., Nirvana and The Strokes having cited them as inspiration.

(Source : by Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Books, 2007)