The Velvet Underground: What Goes On

307 Pages·2022·1.954 MB·English

by  Sean Albiez (editor), David Pattie (editor)

For Celie, Joe, Jacqui and Cameron
vi
Contributors
Sean Albiez is an independent scholar and a musician. He has published on electronic
music, music technology, punk and post-punk. He is currently researching topics in
electronic music history and has thirty years’ experience lecturing in popular music at
UK universities and colleges. He is the co-editor of Kraftwerk: Music Non Stop (2011)
and Brian Eno: Oblique Music (2016), and contributing editor (Music Technology) for
the Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World. He produces electronic
music as ghost elektron and – with Martin James – as Nostalgia Deathstar.
Glyn Davis is Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK. He is a
theorist and historian of queer visual culture, with a particular interest in experimental
and avant-garde cinema. Recent publications include a special issue of Third Text,
‘Imagining Queer Europe’ (2021, co-edited with Fiona Anderson and Nat Raha), and
Queer Print in Europe (2022, co-edited with Laura Guy).
Mark Goodall is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Bradford, UK. He has
published books on the Beatles (The Beatles, or ‘The White Album’ 2018), music and
the occult (Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation [2013] 2022)
and shock cinema of the 1960s (Sweet and Savage: The World, Through the Mondo Film
Lens 2018). He co-edited New Media Archaeology (2018) and edited a special edition of
Film International (2019). He has written for The Guardian, The Independent, The New
European and Shindig! and plays with the group Rudolf Rocker.
Peter Griffiths is a writer based in the East Midlands, UK. His fiction has appeared
in various anthologies published by Inkermen Press, and he has written widely on
creative writing theory. He is currently seeking a publisher for his first novel, and is
at work on a book attempting to bridge the gap between creative writing theory and
literary criticism. His other interests include the intersection of literature and other art
forms, science fiction and British avant-garde literature of the 1960s.
Mimi Haddon is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Sussex, UK. She is a
musicologist whose work focuses on popular music, primarily on the genres of punk,
post-punk, alternative, folk, jazz, blues, rock and the avant-garde. Her research has
appeared in the journals Twentieth-Century Music, Popular Music, Women & Music:
A Journal of Gender and Culture and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. She
is the author of What Is Post-Punk? Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music,
1977–82 (2020).
Contributors ix
Johnny Hopkins is Senior Lecturer in Music and Media Industries at Solent
University, Southampton, UK. His research interests include music, national identity
and nationalism, John and Alice Coltrane, and the representation of Native Americans
in popular music. He has published research on music marketing and PR, Elvis
Presley, The Who, Swinging London and the rebranding of post-colonial Britain. He
has thirty years’ experience as a PR, live promoter and DJ. He was Head of Press at
Creation Records and has worked with artists including Oasis, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry,
Adrian Sherwood, Primal Scream, Jesus and Mary Chain, Maureen Tucker, MC5 and
the Sonics.
Martin James is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at Solent University,
Southampton, UK. His research interests include music journalism, the UK and US
music press and late twentieth-century alternative musics – specifically punk, post-
punk, electronic music and hip hop. He is the author of French Connections: From
Discotheque to Discovery (2003, 2021), State of Bass: Jungle – The Story So Far (1997,
2020), co-author of Understanding the Music Industries (2103) and co-editor of Media
Narratives in Popular Music (2021). He is a musician, vocalist with Nostalgia Deathstar
and heads the record label and book publisher State of Bass.
Timor Kaul is a teacher of music, history, religion and ethics and a former semi-
professional musician. He lectured at the Universität der Künste, Bochum, on Kraftwerk,
the subcultural techno-video productions of 29nov films and popular music semiotics.
He is undertaking ethnomusicological research on ‘Lebenswelt House/Techno: DJs
und ihre Musik’ at the Institut für Europäische Musikethnologie, Universität zu Köln,
Germany. He has written articles on electronic music history, including ‘Kraftwerk:
Die anderem >Krauts<’, in Lücke, M. and Näumann, K. (eds) (2017), Reflexionen zum
Progressive Rock, and on electronic body music and techno in Hecken, T. and Kleiner,
M.S. (eds) (2017), Handbuch Popkultur.
Elizabeth Ann Lindau is Assistant Professor of Music History at California State
University, Long Beach, USA. Her research explores intersections between avant-
gardism and rock music since the 1960s, particularly in the output of the Velvet
Underground, Yoko Ono, Brian Eno and Sonic Youth. She has published articles and
chapters in Women and Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of the
Society for American Music and the volumes Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions
in Experimental Music Studies (2014) and Brian Eno: Oblique Music (2016).
Toby Manning teaches and writes on popular culture of the post-war period. A former
music journalist for The Word, Q, Mojo, NME and Select, his books include The Dead
Straight Guide to Pink Floyd (2015) and John le Carré and the Cold War (2018). Based
in London, his ‘Mixing Pop and Politics’: A Marxist History of Popular Music will be
published by Repeater in 2023. He is also working on a study, Cold War Culture.
x Contributors
Julijana Papazova is a postdoctoral researcher at the European Scientific Institute-
ESI at the University of La Laguna, Spain. Her research is dedicated to popular music
studies and the history of alternative rock and indie music club scenes. Her recent
research publications include the chapter ‘The Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Alternative
Rock Canon’ in Eastern European Music Industries and Policies after the Fall of
Communism. From State Control to Free Market (2021). She is the author of the book
Alternative Rock in Yugoslavia in the Period 1980–1991 (2017).
David Pattie is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of
Birmingham, UK. He researches and publishes in a number of areas: popular music
performance and culture, contemporary British and Scottish theatre, and the work
of Samuel Beckett. He is the author of Rock Music in Performance (2007) and the
co-editor of the books Kraftwerk: Music Non Stop (2011) and Brian Eno: Oblique
Music (2016).
Thom Robinson teaches English literature at Newcastle University, UK. He has a
research specialism in the work of William S. Burroughs, with articles on Burroughs
published in Comparative American Studies and the Times Literary Supplement, as
well as online at RealityStudio. He is currently writing a book about Burroughs and
nostalgia.
Jeffrey Roessner is Associate Dean of the Hafenmaier College of Humanities, Arts
and Social Sciences and Full Professor of English at Mercyhurst University, USA,
where he leads classes in contemporary literature, popular music and creative writing.
He is the co-editor of Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction (2014). Recent
publications include essays on the Beatles, along with articles on Roddy Doyle, Robert
Johnson, rock mockumentaries, the post-confessional lyricism of R.E.M., and satellite
radio and the re-conception of musical genres. Along with his academic writing, he
has authored a book on songwriting, Creative Guitar: Writing and Playing Rock Songs
with Originality (2009).
Cibrán Tenreiro Uzal is an interim lecturer at the Faculty of Communication Sciences,
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. His research interests focus on the
relations between music and cinema, particularly in fandom and amateur creativity
and local scenes. His recent publications include articles on scene films in punk and
post-punk, and a study of amateur concert videos in the Galician underground scene
in Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem: From Cassettes to
Stream (2020). He also works as a journalist, and as a musician in the bands Esposa
and Ataque Escampe.
Introduction – The Velvet Underground:
What went on
Sean Albiez and David Pattie
Lou Reed died in 2013. To mark the occasion, the Guardian reprinted a 2003 Simon
Hattenstone interview. Generally, the period after an artist’s death is a time for social
reverence; even the most uncomfortable truths about the artist’s life are covered over
or retrospectively downplayed. Not so with Reed; the interview chosen showed him at
his most recalcitrant:
‘You can’t ask me to explain the lyrics because I won’t do it. You understand
that, right.’ … Anyway, he says, this is just the character talking. Yes, but has he
ever considered what his older self could teach his younger self, and vice versa?
‘I can’t answer questions like that. What is it you really wanna know, because if it’s
personal stuff, you won’t get it.’ … I ask him if he thinks of Lou Reed as a person or
a persona. ‘I don’t answer questions like that.’
(qtd. in Hattenstone 2003)
The interview degenerates from there, in a manner familiar to many interviewers over
the years. Reed gives short answers, snaps at Hattenstone over the nature and scope of
the questions and only seems – momentarily – to be more forthcoming when he is asked
a detailed question about music. Throughout his life it is possible to find examples of
Reed responding (or not responding) to interviewers in this way. In Australia in 1975
he answered standard questions (‘What will you play?’ and ‘What’s it like singing to
Japanese people?’) with short, sarcastic or deflecting replies. For example, the recently
blonde Reed had let his hair revert to its natural colour, so a journalist asked him, ‘Are
you happier as a brunette?’ Reed’s deadpan response: ‘Are you happier as a schmuck?’
It is easy to conflate attitudes expressed in interviews with the music Reed produced,
and then, by extension, with the music produced by the Velvet Underground and those
musicians associated with the band. The Velvet Underground, like Reed, are held to
be the avatars of a particularly insouciant version of New York cool – a band whose
influence was undeniable, but whose music frequently seemed designed to discourage
the casual listener. Familiarity with the band’s first album has perhaps dulled the
impact of the music, but the transition, for example, between the conventionally sweet
cadences and melody of ‘Sunday Morning’ and the jarringly aggressive ‘I’m Waiting
2 The Velvet Underground: What Goes On
for the Man’ is still shockingly abrupt. The band’s music could be confrontational (in
Martin Amis’ first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), the callow protagonist tries to
intimidate a pair of hippie girls by playing ‘the most violent and tuneless of all my
American LPs, Heroin [sic] by the Velvet Underground’ (55)); this seemed of a piece
with the band’s attitude, which appeared designed to intimidate not only their peers
but the culture those peers promoted. Asked for the band’s opinion of the music and
culture of the 1960s West Coast, Reed was characteristically acerbic:
We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene … We used to be quiet,
but I don’t care any more about not wanting to say negative things, ‘cause somebody
really should say something. Frank Zappa is the most untalented bore who ever
lived. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, all those people
are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically.
I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke.
(Bockris 2014: 136–7)
It is worth looking at both the content and tone of this dismissal. It is a sweeping
assertion of difference which conceals complexity (it is hard, for example, to imagine
an artist as critical of the 1960s West Coast as Frank Zappa, and The Mothers of
Invention album We’re Only in It for the Money [1968] is a point by point refutation
of the hippie dream). However, it would be difficult to characterize the statement as
vitriolic. Rather, it is cool; the artists are ‘bores’, and Reed is speaking not out of anger
but because ‘someone really should say something’. The quote reads as though drafted
by Andy Warhol and has the artist’s wearily unemphatic tone, the condemnations
delivered without qualifiers but also without any sense of wasted emotional heat. The
counterculture was characterized by colour, carnival, community and overt passion;
the New York scene as personified by the Velvets was cool, monochromatic, alienated
but culturally assured – at least in its judgement of the rest of the nation.
This is one of the narratives that have been woven around the band in the years
since their dissolution. It is, however, not the only possible one. Matthew Bannister
(2010) pointed out that the band were capable of engendering any number of stories,
and without their later resuscitation by enthused musicians and critics, they may have
remained ‘a footnote in rock history’. Lester Bangs and Brian Eno celebrated their
freedom from musical constraint and their deconstruction of musical convention,
and Jeremy Gilbert (1999) outlined their challenges to gender norms in a queering of
rock. Bannister remarks that ‘[a]ccording to these critics … it was the Velvets, not the
counterculture, that were the true “revolution”’. They were more than the incarnation of a
peculiarly urban approach to popular music; the Velvets simultaneously demolished the
form and content of pop, and established the artist’s right to freely express experiences
and modes of being that were taboo, even for the rest of the counterculture. This
reading bears testament to a key part of the band’s story; it was created, by and large,
retrospectively, as part of what might be called a revisionist history of the 1960s – one
that places the Velvets and New York, rather than the Grateful Dead and San Francisco,
at the heart of this history (Gilbert 1999). The band were lucky in their followers; in the
mid-1970s having a cultural tastemaker like Bowie on their side meant that they found
Introduction – The Velvet Underground 3
themselves possessing a substantial cultural cachet almost overnight. They were also
lucky in that the cultural scene they were part of has itself proved to be one of the most
influential in post–Second World War Western culture.
Pop Art – an artistic movement that developed in both the UK and the United
States in the later 1950s – concerned itself with the proliferation of images in the mass-
media culture of the time. Pop artists favoured clear, banal everyday images; in doing
so, they implicitly collapsed the distinction between art and craft, and between the
avant-garde and those images produced as an adjunct to the practices of capitalism.
Warhol, it could be argued, took the idea of Pop to its logical conclusion; his work both
described and was bound up in the processes of mass production that provided the raw
material for Pop Art. The scene that coalesced around him in the early 1960s formed a
cultural counterweight to the developing scenes in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The
Factory – which opened in 1962 on East 47th Street in Manhattan, before moving in
1967 to Union Square – combined behaviour as louche and extreme as anything to be
found on the West Coast, and a commitment to the idea of Art as an industrial process.
As Simon Warner (2012) argues, this apparent contradiction meant that Warhol’s
Factory was both a part of and apart from the cultural trends of the mid and late 1960s.
The artist and those who congregated around him might have embraced the idea of
sexual freedom, of drugs as a necessary lifestyle adjunct, of the hallucinatory power
of popular cultural forms such as music and cinema, but they did so dispassionately,
without heat, rather than with the evangelical zeal of the hippie movement. Warner
portrays the ‘almost Brechtian alienation’ Warhol adopted in distancing himself
from the ‘trash aesthetic’ of his artwork: ‘if the blandly mundane is transposed or
the darkly dangerous is depicted, it is barely engaged with, nor commented upon, a
kind of degradation through banality. If there is ambivalence in the piece on show,
there is also an equivocal morality behind its construction’ (Warner 2012). From this
characterization, one can see the appeal that Reed’s lyrics and the Velvets’ music would
have had for Warhol; the affectless narrator of ‘Heroin’, the protagonists in ‘Sister Ray’,
worried that a sailor’s bleeding body will stain the carpet, placed against music that
seems stuck on a perpetual loop, going nowhere.
As the Factory house band, the Velvet Underground would have earned a small
place in the cultural history of the twentieth century, but the band themselves contained
not just skilled songwriters but also musicians who were influenced by what might be
regarded as competing strands in mid-twentieth-century culture. Reed had a thorough
grounding in literature and, through the influence of Delmore Schwartz (his tutor at
Syracuse) and Bob Dylan, an interest in the interface between literature and music: ‘a
record could be like a novel, you could write about this. It was so obvious, it’s amazing
everyone wasn’t doing it. Let’s take Crime and Punishment and turn it into a rock-and-
roll song!’ (Reed qtd. in Bockris 2014: 66). John Cale had early formal musical training
and studied music at Goldsmith’s College in London, where he organized Fluxus
events, conducted and performed contemporary music, and later worked with the
avant-garde composer La Monte Young. Sterling Morrison shared Reed’s knowledge
of literature and was familiar with the underground cinema and performance scene in
New York. Moe Tucker contributed a drumming style that was experimental in itself;
she played a simplified kit with no cymbals, and she did so standing up. Finally, Nico
4 The Velvet Underground: What Goes On
provided a link to European culture; she had appeared in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960)
and had recorded tracks with Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Warhol, in other words, chose
his house band well. The Velvets’ music was formed from a rich blend of cultural and
musical influences and was performed by musicians willing to employ avant-garde
and unconventional musical techniques (Cale’s use of drones, Reed and Morrison’s
feedback, Tucker’s drumming) alongside a love of the simplest rock and roll chord
progressions.
The Velvets, then, were fortunate both in their first artistic sponsor and in the
influences and approaches each band member brought with them. They were also, it
could be said, uniquely fortunate in the location in which they found themselves:
By most accounts, New York was an unpleasant, dirty, and even dangerous
location to live in the 1960s and 1970s. Through a combination of population
decline, governmental neglect, and bureaucratic tangles, New York City reverted
to a seemingly ungovernable – and unlivable – place. In official, governmental
literature as well as the popular media, New York was portrayed as a city that was
broken.
(Gluibizzi 2021: 2)
This general depredation not only gave Reed and the band their subject matter; as
with the punk scene in the 1970s, it meant that the musicians could actually afford to
live in the heart of New York and experience the rich cultural life of the city. It was a
particularly good time to do so; New York, at this time, was establishing itself as one
of the key centres of contemporary culture. In addition to Warhol and the Factory,
the city had accommodated influential groups of visual artists (chief amongst them
the New York School of abstract expressionists, and the artists following in their
wake), performance groups like the Judson Dance Theatre and Richard Schechner’s
Performance Group, and musicians (John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian
Wolff among them). There was a proliferation of New York Schools running across all
of the creative and plastic arts. Warhol’s Factory was only one of the city’s important
cultural sites, and it was open to the influence of the various artistic currents that
ran through the city. In particular, the performance events mounted at the Factory
(first called Up-Tight, and then given the name the Exploding Plastic Inevitable)
owed much to the emerging Fluxus movement, which grew out of the practices
of composers like John Cage. Fluxus – an art movement notoriously difficult to
define – tended to favour spontaneity and was interested both in the idea of art as
process and in the blending together of different media. The membership of the
movement was fluid and covered a great deal of artistic ground; it could be thought
of both as a loose organizational term, pulling together work by a wide range of
artists, and as a particularly porous network of sites and practices, easily accessible
by younger, emerging artists.
In 1963, John Cale moved to the United States to take up a scholarship at the Eastman
Conservatory at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, where he studied under composer
Iannis Xenakis. On finishing the course (where memorably, during a performance, he
Introduction – The Velvet Underground 5
pulled an axe out of a piano and slammed it into a tabletop) he moved to New York and
contacted John Cage and La Monte Young, both affiliated with the Fluxus movement.
In doing so he was following a path already taken by another musician who played a
pivotal role in the nascent Velvet Underground. Angus MacLise was an actor, poet and
film-maker but it was as the Velvets’ first drummer that he had the greatest cultural
impact, not just because his approach to percussion was as experimental as Tucker’s
but also because he was embedded in the New York cultural scene. MacLise’s cultural
preoccupations marked him out as someone who would be sympathetic to Fluxus and
the kind of multimedia experiments Warhol would undertake at the Factory, and for
the kind of blend of pop and rock chord progressions and experimental music the
Velvets made. As Sterling Morrison stated, ‘Angus was the most rabidly artistic of us
all, with interests in literature, dance, music, film, lights, slides, incense, diaphanes,
and religion – all at once. He mused day and night on a stage spectacle that might
combine them all, and on what the dizzying effects of such a cataclysm might be’ (qtd.
in Unterberger 2009: 12).
Crucially MacLise was also already an integral part of the New York scene: he was
in contact with La Monte Young in the very early 1960s – the composer had read, and
admired, his second collection of poetry. MacLise went on to play in the La Monte
Young trio (alongside Young and his wife Marian Zazeela). Through this connection
he was also part of a larger group of musicians including Billy Linich, who would
later rechristen himself ‘Billy Name’ and become a key member of Warhol’s Factory.
There are no guarantees as to which band or artist becomes culturally significant, but
with connections like these, the Velvet Underground were almost bound to figure
somewhere in the history of American culture. When one considers the music the
band produced, and its relation to the surrounding culture, one could almost say that
there was a Velvet Underground-shaped hole in the cultural story of New York – one
which the band were uniquely able to fill.
The above might explain why the Velvets were so closely woven into the culture of the
city in the 1960s; it also helps explain why the band became key cultural touchstones in
the years to come. As the tide of the counterculture retreated, a succeeding generation
of musicians found in the Velvets the antithesis of everything the hippie movement
seemed to support. As Simon Reynolds (2014) points out, Reed in particular
appealed to David Bowie, not only because the music Reed produced was melodically,
harmonically and rhythmically direct but also because Reed could be co-opted as a
fellow herald of the apocalypse. During a 1972 press conference, in which he introduced
Reed and Iggy Pop as both his key influences and – given their relative career positions,
his protégés – Bowie told the crowd of largely American journalists ‘[p]eople like Lou
and I are probably predicting the end of an era … I mean that catastrophically … We’re
both pretty mixed up, paranoid people, absolute walking messes. If we’re the spearhead
of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good’ (Reynolds 2014:
230–1). An endorsement like this might have given Reed something to live up to (and
it could be argued that, in terms of his performances in the early 1970s, Reed tried and
failed to be the kind of proto-Glam figure Bowie thought he was) but it did mean that,