The Velvet Underground was an American rock band, active between 1964 and 1973, formed in New York The group was briefly managed by Andy Warhol, and served as the house band at the Silver Factory and Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable events from 1966 to 1967. The provocative subject matter and often nihilistic attitudes explored in their music proved massively influential in the development of punk rock and alternative music. Their 1967 debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico featured German singer and collaborator Nico and was called the “most prophetic rock album ever made” by Rolling Stone in 2003. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the band No. 19 on its list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 by Patti Smith. (More from Wikipedia)
When women started showing up in otherwise male rock bands, they were normally the lead singers; but after awhile, women were as often on the musician side as the vocalist side. The roster of the classic line-up of the Velvet Underground – Lou Reed (lead vocals, electric guitar), John Cale (multi-instrumentalist), Sterling Morrison (bass guitar, electric guitar), and Moe Tucker (drums) – makes it seem that this classic band was an all-male group like virtually every other rock band in the 1960’s.
Actually the drummer’s real name is Maureen Tucker; her approach as a percussionist was outside the norm to say the least. Quoting from Wikipedia: “Her abbreviated drum kit was rather unusual: She generally played on tom toms and an upturned bass drum, using mallets as often as drumsticks, and she rarely used cymbals. . . . When her drums were stolen from one club, she replaced them with garbage cans, brought in from outside.”
Upon the death of Lou Reed in October 2013, the Velvet Underground has been celebrated once again. Allmusic calls them “the quintessential bohemian New York band of the ’60s that fused art, rock, and poetry in a fashion that proved incalculably influential”. The proto-punk side of the band is well known – indeed, it is as difficult to imagine punk and new wave without the Velvet Underground as it is to think that heavy metal would have come along without the Yardbirds – but their music was experimental throughout and also ran the gamut from garage rock (“I’m Waiting for the Man”) to ballads (“Stephanie Says”) to old-fashioned pop-rock (“There She Goes Again”, which was covered by R.E.M. – I learned about the song from the version of “There She Goes Again” recorded by the Crawdaddys).
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the Velvet Underground often creates beautiful and mellow songs, and one need go no further than the opening track on their first album to find it – the laid-back “Sunday Morning” is every bit as lovely as a song with that name should be, but it is coming from the same band that created harrowing tales like “Heroin” and “Sister Ray”. A compilation album called VU collected several similarly mellow songs that were intended for the Velvet Underground’s never-released fourth album.
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Album sales by the Velvet Underground were low in spite of the prominent connection with legendary pop artist Andy Warhol at the top of his fame. Though officially their producer, Andy Warhol’s input was evidently minimal, he insisted on their including ethereal vocalist Nico on three songs on their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). Warhol also contributed artwork for some of the band’s album covers, such as the peelable banana on that album. Brian Eno – another highly experimental musician – is the source of the famous quotation about this album: While selling only 30,000 copies, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”.
After the Velvet Underground broke up, Lou Reed mounted a decades-long solo career that started with a bang: “Walk on the Wild Side” is hard to top as an I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-hearing song, but it was as irresistible in 1972 as it is today and made it to #16 on the Billboard singles charts. In 1989, he released his long-ranging album New York; as identified as Lou Reed is with New York City, he needed to bring the goods if he was going to use that album name, and does he ever. Allmusic calls New York the finest solo album of Lou Reed’s career.
Among the eulogies written about Lou Reed are some that compare his contributions to rock and roll to those of Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I can’t really argue with that assessment. Also, many musicians, even great musicians spend a lot of time coasting in their later years, but this doesn’t ever seem to have been true of Lou Reed – he was on his game throughout his career. It wasn’t until after his death that I heard this quote by Lou Reed himself from 1989 that sums up his musical vision perfectly: “My interest – all the way back with the Velvets – has been in one really simple guiding-light idea: take rock and roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With subject matter written for adults so adults, like myself, could listen to it.”
John Cale has also had an important impact on music following his time with the Velvet Underground, though mostly behind the scenes. He produced and arranged albums for a host of important bands and musicians, including three albums by Nico. Cale produced the first album by Patti Smith Group, Horses (1975), which had the kind of impact on the rock music scene that The Velvet Underground & Nico should have had. John Cale produced several proto-punk albums, including the first album by the Stooges, The Stooges (1969), and the first album by the Modern Lovers that Reprise Records refused to release; it was later released on Beserkley Records. Cale’s own solo albums are less well known and include collaborations with Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison.
