Warhol Andy - All yesterdays parties: the Velvet Underground in print, 1966-1971

The Velvets were the first important rock & roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience. [If ] this was paradoxical,... the very idea of rock & roll art rests on a contradiction. Its greatest exponentsthe Beatles, the Stones, and (especially) the Whoundercut the contradiction by making the surface of the music deceptively casual, then demolished it by reaching millions of kids. But the Velvets music was too overtly intellectual, stylized, and distanced to be commercial. Like pop art, which was very much a part of the Velvets world, it was anti-art art made by anti-elite elitists.

ELLEN WILLIS, 1978

W HEN LOU REED, JOHN CALE, AND STERLING MORRISON MADE THEIR FIRST recordings as the Velvet Undergroundduring July 1965, in the lofty crash-pad of Cale and Reed on Ludlow Street, at the eastern extremity of Manhattans Lower East Sidethey hardly envisioned inhabiting the same realm as their heroes, those exponents of rock & roll art Willis cites above. From the start, the band existed on that radical borderline still separating pop from serious music (Dylan being days away from dissolving the old order of pop and folk at some tin-poke folk-fest on Rhode Island).

The songs they recorded over the noise of the New York streets that summer afternoonwhich now fill the first disc of the Velvets very own five-CD anthology, Peel Slowly and See (1995)were not merely too overtly intellectual, stylized, and distanced to be commercial, but their subject matter stood a million miles away from the world of radio play. Sex, drugs, politics, and death collide on Heroin, Prominent Men, and Venus in Furs (as well as on another, seemingly lost reel where Black Angels Death Song apparently resides, alongside something called Never Get Emotionally Involved with Man, Woman, Beast, or Child).

There was nothing pop about these prototypical recordings, made barely a month after the ramparts were first raised by Dylans electric marauders on the worlds first six-minute pop 45, Like a Rolling Stone. That Reed was still hiding under Dylans umbrella is evidenced by Prominent Men, as well as by the lopsided folkiness of the trios time signatures. But Reed was already dealing with subject matter at which even an amphetaminized Dylan balked.

Reed had previously been punching the clock (and the wall!) in the Long Island equivalent of the Brill Building, pounding out hit replicants for the Pickwick label under a variety of necessary disguises. But his final Pickwick recording, The Ostrichleading as it did to that serendipitous rendezvous with Calewas a Spitting Image send-up of this whole sorry factory of pop songsmiths. It was time to get serious.

At the same time, John Cale was looking to embrace a little frivolity. His adoption into one of the more idiot-savant credos among New Yorks avant-gardeas ongoing member of the Theater of Eternal Music aka Dream Syndicate, an experimental outfit that centered on La Monte Youngcertainly made for some challenging evenings bewildering Noo Yawks arty-sans, even if the warm drones emitting from Young & Co. lent more toward the eternal than the musical.

Upon meeting Lou Reed and hearing him play the likes of Heroin and Waiting for the Manon an acoustic guitar as if they were folksongsCale admits that he was terrifically excited by the possibility of combining what I had been doing with La Monte with what I was doing with Lou, and finding a commercial outlet (my italics). Here comes that dichotomy rearing up again. (And lest we forget, Cale continued his sonic experiments for his own amusement, recording a series of short instrumental pieces like Loop and Noiseissued in the Velvets name as part of multimedia packagesas well as more ambitious pieces like the forty-two-minute Sun Blindness Music, issued in 2000 as the title piece on the first of three archival CDs of Cales Velvet-era home recordings.)

The kind of contradictions highlighted by Willis were present from day one, inherent in their whole aesthetic. It would center on an in-your-face sonic confrontation, celebrated in the (essentially negative) press quotes proudly emblazoned across the inner sleeve on their debut album. If, at the time, they hoped it might yet prove a selling point, evidence was mounting against them. As soon as they stopped playing to the smart-art crowd and began infiltrating a more pop caucus, they were trying to cry halt on the whole midsixties pop gestaltwith predictable results. Witness Rob Norriss 1979 recollection, in