Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  MORRISON: “I agree. It seemed that it was happening all over to everybody, but really it wasn’t. In a sense it never happened at all. At this moment schoolgirls are being hassled anew by school administrators over the wearing of miniskirts. Sad, but true. Perhaps the Sixties will have to repeat themselves every 10 or 15 years just to keep driving home the same lessons. I used to think everything was obvious, now I think that nothing is.”

  BOCKRIS: “How did everyone feel about Cale leaving the group in September?”

  SESNICK: “I think it was a relief for everybody concerned. I think Lou wrote a line about that in ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. It went ‘down for you is up’. I don’t know if he was referring to my ways or not, but nothing much ever bothered me. Down for me was up. I couldn’t care less what anybody thought. I liked what I was doing, I liked the people I was with, and other people’s views didn’t matter much. So we never really got down and Lou was very impressed that I could take that much, but you’re not taking that much when you’re with people you like. It doesn’t matter.”

  BOCKRIS: “So I gather your involvement with The Velvets was pleasant and enjoyable?”

  SESNICK: “I never lost a night’s rest. Except with John. That was a very critical incident. And we felt badly about it, but there was nothing that could be done to stop it.”

  MORRISON: “I told Lou I’d swallow it, but I didn’t really like it. John was playing great at the time. He was always exciting to work with. If you listen to his bass part on ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ it’s illogical – inverted almost. He had really good ideas on bass. Or take a song like ‘What Goes On’: if you’d heard us play that in the summer of ’68 with Cale on organ you would have known what it was all about.

  “I’d have to say Lou bumped John because of jealousy. One friend said Lou always told him he wanted to be a solo star, Lou never confided that to us, but John and I always knew that he really wanted some kind of recognition apart from the band.

  “There are a lot of songs that I should have co-authorship on, and the same holds true for John Cale. The publishing company was called Three Prong because there were three of us involved. I’m the last person to deny Lou’s immense contribution and he’s the best songwriter of the three of us. But he wanted all the credit, he wanted it more than we did and he got it, to keep the peace.”

  CALE: “Lou and I eventually found the group too small for the both of us, and so I left.”

  MORRISON: “The thing that I didn’t like about what I did was I sat back and allowed myself to watch John Cale leave the band. Essentially the problems came when John left. The band was never the same for me after John left. He was not easy to replace. Doug Yule was a good bass player, but we moved more towards unanimity of opinion and I don’t think that’s a good thing. I always thought that what made us real good were tensions and oppositions. I saw Velvet Underground music as crusading and it was a real personal thing for me. We were not going to compromise and in the sense that we never did, we succeeded. We actually did have an audience though we never did have airplay. The second hurdle was we had to have a commercial success and there’s no way to do that without changing.”

  REED: “I only hope that one day John will be recognized as … the Beethoven or something of his day. He knows so much about music, he’s such a great musician. He’s completely mad – but that’s because he’s Welsh.”

  BOCKRIS: “Was John fired or did John quit?”

  SESNICK: “That’s a real long story and I don’t want to get into it.”

  John Cale played his final gig with The Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party on September 27–28 according to Jonathan Richman, a big fan of The Velvets who was backstage. Doug Yule, who had previously been in the Boston-based Glass Menagerie, came into the band kind of naturally, having been friendly with them for some time. He was living at 63 River Street off Central Square in Cambridge and Sterling had stayed at his apartment when they played at the Tea Party.

  MORRISON: “The River Street place belonged to David Daly, bon-vivant, student of Oriental religions, chef at the Orson Welles Restaurant. I liked to stay there and at Ed Hood’s whenever I was in Boston, which was often. Doug used to stay there too, sometimes, so I knew him a little. I actually thought that Hans brought him into the band, because Hans had been the financial backer of The Glass Menagerie. I recall being asked about him, and I said that he plays well. He does.”

  Doug Yule came down to New York on the Wednesday after Cale’s departure and met the band at Max’s. They jammed on songs till Friday and played their first date at La Cave, on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland on October 2. By October 18–20 they were out in San Francisco playing the Avalon Ballroom again. In November they continued to record the third album at TT&G Studios (now called Sunset Highland Sound) on Sunset Boulevard in LA.

  BOCKRIS: “Doug was brought into the group shortly after John quit.”

  TUCKER: “Sesnick had sung his praises saying he was a good player and enthusiastic and young and pretty. It was fine with me. My concern was that we didn’t really know him. And I was worried about a personality problem with him. Not because I knew him, but because we didn’t know him. We had such a nice relationship all of us, and I know how tenuous those things can be, so I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, here’s someone new. I wonder what he’s going to be like. Maybe he can play the bass well, but is he nice?’”

  BOCKRIS: “What was your initial perception?”

  TUCKER: “I liked him. I was a little concerned because I went to Louie’s loft on 28th and Seventh by Penn Station to help rehearse one evening. Doug had just worked out a bass-part to ‘Jesus’ and when I came in Louie said, ‘Listen to this, it’s great, it’s great,’ and I thought, ‘Oh God, don’t swell this kid’s head before he even gets out in the street.’ I’m not quite sure why that hit me so vividly.”

  BOCKRIS: “I have the sense that Lou had a pretty symbiotic or was it perhaps a clone-like relationship with Doug Yule.”

  TUCKER: “For a while. I think he was just glad to have somebody in the group that he didn’t have to worry about. He liked Doug enough, he was okay and pleasant to be around, but I don’t think he ever thought, ‘Wow I really like this guy!’ To tell you the truth, I’m sure Lou found Doug fairly boring. Except on stage, to be honest.”

  REED: “I was working with Doug’s innocence … I’m sure he never understood a word of what he was singing. He doesn’t know what it’s about I mean, I thought it was so cute … I adore people who are like that, they’re so cute y’know.”

  BOCKRIS: “How different was it to be playing with Doug?”

  TUCKER: “I enjoyed playing with Doug. He was a good musician. And good on stage, because he was a bouncy, smiley little thing. I missed having Cale being crazy on his viola. This is going to sound absurd, but I don’t think it hurt the music that much. I don’t think it changed it to weaker music, it just changed it.”

  BOCKRIS: “I understand that Doug Yule joined the band within a week of John’s quitting. Is that correct?”

  SESNICK: “We were pressed. We were supposed to go on tour.”

  BOCKRIS: “Were you responsible for bringing Doug into the group?”

  SESNICK: “No. I thought Sterling was responsible. I don’t really know. I’d never seen him before in my life. I don’t know if Sterling was friendly with him, but we were in need of somebody quick and it just came up.”

  BOCKRIS: “Talking about the third album, one thing many people comment on is how radically different a record it is. I asked Maureen if Steve Sesnick was a fifth member of the group, and she said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”

  SESNICK: “That was very nice of her.”

  BOCKRIS: “Were you involved in shaping that third record?”

  SESNICK: “I think I was trying to find out more about Catholicism.”

  BOCKRIS: “Who in the group was a Catholic?”

  SESNICK: “Me! And Maureen. I guess Sterling was too, but not practising. Maureen was, and did go
to Church, and I was very mystified by how I had gotten away from going to church as I grew older. I didn’t really know why until I finally figured out why and that record helped me understand things that I already knew and was doing.”

  BOCKRIS: “Why did Lou choose to have Doug sing vocals on the third album?”

  TUCKER: “Well, Doug had a sweet little voice and he could sing certain ones better than Lou.”

  MORRISON: “The main reason for Doug doing the vocals is that Lou’s voice wasn’t up to it when we were in the studio. Lou has never had a durable voice, which is one of the reasons why we tried not to play too often – a long series of one-nighters would be out of the question. Lou had used up his voice at the Whiskey, where we played during the time we were making the album. Since we wanted to get the album finished and since Doug could sing, he got the nod. The same thing happened with ‘Loaded’. Lou’s voice was wasted by the nights spent playing at Max’s. It shows on the vocals he does, and some he couldn’t do at all. Listen again to the Banana album, and note how good Lou’s vocals are. He was well rested because the Trip had been closed down and we had nowhere else to play. We should have been so lucky while making our other records.”

  BOCKRIS: “Was the third record recorded in LA?”

  TUCKER: “Right. We had recorded in TT&G Studios for the first album. I guess we liked it and we got it all arranged so we could record there, and lay around in the sun.”

  BOCKRIS: “How was the atmosphere recording that album as opposed to the previous?”

  TUCKER: “A little less tension.”

  BOCKRIS: “Sterling says his approach was pretty much of acquiescence.”

  TUCKER: “Sterling’s a pain in the ass!”

  MORRISON: “All I mean by ‘acquiescence’ is that I didn’t argue hotly about this or that feature in the album. My contribution was as much as ever, probably more even, but I just didn’t try to get my own way all the time. Perhaps the Cale business left me all argued out, or perhaps I just didn’t feel that strongly about the material one way or the other.”

  TUCKER: “I guess that’s around the time Sterling was beginning to get disgusted with Lou, pissed off, whatever the word is, why I don’t know. It had a lot to do with them being males I’m sure. I know that sounds tacky, but I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think it has a lot to do with it, ego problems and all. I mean if Lou said to me, ‘Mo, try some cymbals on this one, I want to hear what it sounds like,’ fine, that didn’t bother me. But for Lou to say, ‘Sterl, try this,’ didn’t sit quite so well. I think that had a little to do with it. Actually I can’t honestly say that I recall Lou ever saying, try this or do that, to me. I just fooled around until it sounded like I liked it, and as long as everybody else liked what I was doing, fine.”

  BOCKRIS: “You never had any problems with Lou?”

  TUCKER: “No, not at all. We got along very well. I just found it totally acceptable if Lou was being crazy, or being a pain in the ass, to say ‘oh well’ and forget it, whereas Sterling couldn’t do that.”

  December 12–14 they played the Boston Tea Party on the same bill as the MC5. One of their guitarists remembers an incident.

  WAYNE KRAMER: “There was a radical gang of thugs with pseudo-political ideas called the East Village Mother fuckers. They were the East Village equivalent of the White Panther Party – people who thought the Black Panthers were bad because they had guns and were ready to fight it out, so their attitude was ‘we’re bad, we’ve got guns and we’re ready to fight it out’. A guy named Ben Wish had got into a beef with some soldiers in Boston, stabbed one of them and gotten arrested. The Mother fuckers had come into town to try and raise money for Ben’s defence and the revolution, or something like that. And because of our phoney political ideology that we were all sharing they came to our gig and we all started throwing around this militant rhetoric. Some of the Mother fuckers got up on stage after our set and started haranguing the kids, suggesting they burn down the place because it wasn’t large enough to hold their energies, and take to the streets. The Velvets came out on stage and Lou addressed the audience: ‘I’d just like to make one thing clear. We have nothing to do with what went on earlier and in fact we consider it very stupid. This is our favourite place to play in the whole country and we would hate to see anyone even try to destroy it.’”

  KRAMER: “I remember listening to The Velvets. I remember the rhythm because I didn’t really notice in the beginning that it was a girl drummer. That was fairly rare in those days. And I remember I thought she had a good sense of time. I thought the music was relatively minimalist. It was just one or two chords and then a kind of straight ahead chanting. I don’t remember them as being terribly exciting to me as a rock’n’roller because I didn’t really hear rock’n’roll so much as a weird blend of these guys who sort of sounded like folk players with electric guitars and a heavy beat. I must admit I wasn’t really up on Lou or the lyrical thing other than ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Heroin’.”

  BOCKRIS: “There wasn’t any sense of camaraderie between what you were doing and what they were doing?”

  KRAMER: “Not consciously, no. In fact, we had a whole different approach to music. We might have had 600 or 700 in there. It was the first time we had ever played Boston and we were getting a push, because we had just signed with Elektra.”

  BOCKRIS: “So you were hotter than The Velvet Underground in terms of publicity?”

  KRAMER: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that the dressing room was up above at the other end of the room from the stage so you could look down from there and see the stage and I watched them for a while. That’s why I didn’t know it was a girl playing drums because it was a distance away.”

  BOCKRIS: “The Velvet Underground didn’t have a revolutionary rep at all at this time?”

  KRAMER: “No, I think they had more of a rep with people who were into art, a cultish kind of thing. We had a group of 15–20 of The Mother fuckers there and they’re all rabble-rousing and they’re all MC5 fans and then we had just the kids that had heard our record and come out to see us. There seemed to be two different kinds of energy ’cos everything The Velvets did was more sinister and blue green, whereas our thing was just blast blast blast, real loud. We had these huge stacks of Marshal amps and they probably had little gear that they brought from New York. I seem to remember they went over real well and they had their fans, but it was two completely different things. We were trying to be a show band and we had these spangly clothes and sequins, and The Velvets were very plain looking, with their New York dungarees.”

  MALANGA: “Is there any comparison between The Velvet Underground and the MC5?”

  MORRISON: “I have always liked the MC5 musically. I didn’t like their being associated with narrow political causes. I consider music to be more important than politics, and much more important than pissant politicians like John Sinclair. I thought they were surrounded by and exploited by leeches.”

  3. 1969 – THE GREY YEAR

  BOCKRIS: “As you moved into ’69, did you and the group feel that things were on the up and up?”

  SESNICK: “Definitely. We had at this point made contact with Ahmet Ertegun. I’d been in touch with him all along. We sent letters back and forth, there’d been phone conversations. We were getting ready for our move to another level entirely. Things were progressing beautifully.”

  MORRISON: “Lou had a place over in the East 60s then. He was paying an outrageous amount of money for it so I thought I’d go over and see what this palace looked like. Well, you know how those high-rise apartments are – they’re real barren. And his was totally unfurnished, nothing except some kind of pallet that he had pushed up against one corner. And a tape recorder, and some old tapes and I guess a notebook, and an acoustic guitar. There was nothing in the fridge except a half-empty container of papaya juice. I mean nothing, not even vitamins. It was just the picture of isolation and despair.”

  FIELDS: “After the glamour died dow
n it was Lou Reed and a back-up band. It was like any other rock group on the road.”

  1969 reveals The Velvet Underground in a whole new light. Their third album, The Velvet Underground, was released in March. The package itself is mysterious. The front cover, a photograph taken late one night at the Factory by Billy Linich, with whom Reed maintained a close friendship, shows Lou smiling with a copy of a fashion magazine in his hands. The magazine’s name Harper’s Bazaar, has been air-brushed out. Yule and Tucker sit to the left, pointedly looking at Lou, while Morrison sits in the foreground to the right, looking down into the right-hand bottom corner of the photograph and definitively away from Reed.

  TUCKER: “As I recall, Lou had just said something about the cover of the magazine and we were listening to him, that’s why Doug and I are looking directly at him.”

  The back cover lists the songs, with no writers credits for the first time, and the name of the engineer, the aforementioned Val Valentin. The sole remaining credit goes to Billy Linich (listed as Billy Name) for photos and convolutions.”

  REED: “He’s part of the Factory. He does all our covers. He’s a divinity in action on earth. He does pictures that are unspeakably beautiful. Just pure space. For the people who have one foot on Earth and another foot on Venus, they would like that kind of picture because it’s out-and-out space.”

  The convolutions on the back cover were a sitting-from-the-knees-up-eye-drooping-cigarette-in-hand photograph of Reed which has been cut in half and turned upside-down with one half juxtaposed to the other. No wonder some writers began to see The Velvet Underground as Lou Reed’s backing band. Yet the packaging of the album also suggests, as does the advertising copy, that they are a band who did things together. According to Yule it was Sesnick’s idea that the less said about something the easier it is to change it. Everything was as discreet as possible, i.e., on song-credits he’d ask if anyone helped with a song, if so they got co-credit, even if they only did a little bit. This way everyone was kept vaguely in the dark. There is nothing vague, however, about the record itself.