Sacred Cows And The Elephant In The Room Dept. - The Velvet Underground

I like Loaded, for all the reasons the band didn't. It's a good album. And the first album is worth an occasional spin on the Consolette autochange. But you probably have a few thousand good albums, none of which form part of a revered œuvre from a band on a huge fuck-off pedestal in the hallowed hall of rock and roll. There's Lou, in his eyeglasses with the patented flip-up lenses, looking down on us with that serious artist expression we're always suckered by. Lordy, we love a serious, suffering artist.

It's a popular belief -  popular in the sense of clung to by a few rocktellectuals - that Lou mastered the craft of writing Brill Building pop (so hey, respect) before maturing into the transgressive artiste who changed the course of music history. Yes, it is said, he could toss off pop hits but chose to follow his artistic muse. Well, it wasn't the actual Brill Building - this was no-budget dump-bin Pickwick Records (yes, that Pickwick Records). Being a "staff writer" there carried as much cachet as being staff writer for a fortune cookie company. Have you actually heard these early pocket masterpieces of pop? They are, uh, well, a bit shit. And they weren't hits for anybody, not even The Beachnuts. If they had been, Pickwick would have kept him on the payroll and the course of music would have continued unchanged.

Anyway, he met fellow struggling intellectuals John Cale and Angus MacLise at Pickwick and they formed a band which got picked up (ask yourself why - you'll probably get the right answer) by commercial illustrator turned avant-garde artiste Andy Warhol. Are we seeing a pattern here? MacLise quit the band because principles which the others gave a shit about, so they hired Mo Tucker, about whom never a bad word is whispered because a) androgynous woman in man's world b) brave minimalist style c) stood up at kit, and most importantly d) was in Velvet Underground. Warhol inducted catwalk scag valkyrie and Nazi sympathiser Nico into the band, because of the all-important cool ethic, and she was like a breath of dry ice. But she made John Cale's unlistenable spoken word pieces and viola scraping sound almost like fun. It's testament to the grip Warhol had on the band's balls that they let Nico share the stage with them. Did the Stones make Anita Pallenberg, their own Wagnerian smack vampire, a member of the band?

Warhol, a huge talent (his early album and book covers showed a genius for penmanship, but he was never going to get rich and famous from that) and master manipulator, knew exactly what he was doing. That's his name on the first album cover. It's an Andy Warhol album, part of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia Pop Art project. The PRODUCED BY ANDY WARHOL headline on the back doesn't mean he sat at the mixing desk in his headphones - he always got someone else to do the actual work. It means the band was his product. Both band and impresario benefited from the partnership. Warhol was a boldface celebrity in New York, and everything he did was news - more, it was art. The band were perceived as intellectuals using the medium of rock and roll to make art. They were above the vulgar commerce of the Brill Building. Not for them the crass banality of the hit single! Unless, of course, Reed learned how to write one. But heroin be the death of me, it's my life and it's my wife set out their stall nicely.

The most influential band in rock n' roll history? That quote about only five thousand people buying a Velvets album but every one of them forming a band is pretty clever. They couldn't play all that well, just barely well enough, and when they turned their amps down ("volume as art") their inherent feebleness was all too apparent. The third album has the sonic impact of somebody tapping a cereal box with a pencil. Listen to Loaded and imagine the quantum improvement if played by LA session musicians. There's an actual rock album in there struggling to get out, and this is why they didn't like it. They couldn't play it.

Their unique spin was to camouflage their unmusicality behind the avant-garde art stuff - noise, lyrical shock value, look - the primitive music was inherent to their stance. Anyone can strum a couple of amplified chords over a basic beat for an hour or so. Wear black, wear shades, not smile. And just about anyone did. Easy! Kids saw the Velvets and thought, hey, I can do dis awready! I don't gots to loin nuttin'! Which was the basic appeal of rock n' roll anyway, so nothing new there. But influence is not inspiration. Anyone can be influenced by anything, but inspiring people is something else entirely, and it's never about taking an easy option.

Reed had songwriting chops, but the appeal of the Velvets wasn't in their songs. It was their cool stance, the stark image. And the drugs. This wasn't The Lovin' Spoonful, this was bad time music, and the party drug of choice was heroin. Reed's under-acknowledged achievement was to make heroin, the dumbest, messiest, nastiest fucking thing you can do to yourself, cool. And because he looked like somebody in control, he made it seem controllable. He never came even close to saying, don't do this shit, it'll fuck you right up, and in the absence of that direct message, any claims that he was subtly and poetically expressing his disapproval of heroin are pretty hard to substantiate.  He even made the degrading act of waiting for his dealer into a twisted love song. White Light/White Heat was a refreshing change of subject - it's a paean to meth, hillbilly heroin. Many musicians sacrifice their careers and lives to heroin, it's an old, old story. But Lou Reed made it aspirational, part of the NY boho look, a fashion statement.

The rise of the Velvets represented a shift in New York pop culture, from the open mics of Bleecker Street to the invitation-only loft parties and gallery openings of a self-appointed elite of talentless scag-monkey scam artists and pox-raddled whores. Street-level rock and pop thrived anyway, much of it echoing the Velvet Underground's smack-head chic. But Reed's position as idol, as icon, as pioneering artiste and pop intellectual, was carved in Chinese rock, or rather into the arms of those under the glamor of his spell.

He finally got clean in the 'eighties, embracing Eastern philosophy and Tai Chi, a discipline popular among Central Park mystics. Good for him. I don't know if he wrote any songs about the benefits of his new lifestyle, or used his celebrity and experience to help heroin and meth addicts, but the damage was done. When rock critics today pay the required homage to the great man's work and the influence of the Velvet Underground, they ignore the emaciated elephant in the room, bristling with dirty syringes. 

 

I apologise in advance for this piece. It started out as something else, but the more drivel I read about Andy And His Pals the more angry I became. My advice - skip it.