Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  LOU REED: “Delmore Schwartz wrote this great poem called The Heavy Bear That Walks With Me, and The Velvet Underground is going to play with this giant bear coming along with it called Myth, and we will confront the Myth. The critics are going to have to compare it to the records, then see whether they like hearing it live, or if they think it doesn’t hold up. We will confront the Myth … and we will show them something of the human side of it all.”

  JOHN CALE: “It was early February when we first showed up to play together – in this room. We’ve got together over the years in every possible permutation: me and Lou, me and Sterling, Moe and Sterling, Moe and Lou, me, Sterling and Lou, but never with the four of us. So now we are. Straight away in rehearsals, the sound was there – basically a very good garage band that doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to balance out the instruments. When we tried ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’, everybody was running around trying to get rid of the whistling harmonics on the viola, but with all the technology in the world you won’t tame this thing. When it works, it’s fun. It sounds majestic. When the songs click and we’re just getting our teeth around them, then you remember the great things about being in the band. So we’re in the process of loosening up. Internally we are the same, but externally it isn’t the same.”

  REED: “It’s not a reunion, it’s a continuum. It feels better now than it did then. We’re all wiser. It just sort of happened. I don’t recall anybody saying, ‘Hey, let’s play,’ it just kinda came about. We just mutually thought in our own little worlds that it might be a hell of a lot of fun to do.”

  MOE TUCKER: “This reunion is basically happening because all four of us really wanted it to, even if it’s just for this one tour. I guess you can expect to hear all of those wonderful Velvet Underground hits! I personally don’t think it’s either necessary or expected that we play any new material, but I kind of suspect that John and Lou won’t be happy with just playing old songs. We haven’t made any decision about exactly what we’ll be playing yet. If this was five years ago or seven years ago, I think it might not work. But we’ve all had a lot more contact in the past few years and we realize we all like each other. It sounds remarkably the same, which I’m very happy with.”

  MORRISON: “People have wanted us to play for a long time and there was no real reason not to, if the four of us felt like we wanted to play together. We decided that we did, so let’s do what’s right. We’d never talked about doing it before. Everybody was too busy doing other things. But certainly it was something that could be contemplated since 1990.”

  CALE: “That’s always kinda the way things happened with us, anyway. There was no massive agenda and there was no great determination … It was like these four people wandering around in a daze and suddenly they decided to do something.”

  MORRISON: “What’s unique about this is that, in the past, the fact of our playing wasn’t newsworthy in itself the way this is. Now, I would rather play well than be ‘significant’! But the attention is nice – it would be misdirected or ill-timed or useless unless we actually do accomplish something musically. Whether it turns out to be a good idea or a bad idea, we’ll find out. It won’t leave me crushed either way. So many bands are playing Velvet Underground material, why the hell can’t The Velvet Underground once in a while if they feel like it?”

  JOHN CALE: “We’re going to attract a lot of ambulance chasers, people who want to see us fail. I read this thing in England which said: ‘Here are some bands who shouldn’t even think about re-forming.’ We were one of them. The British press was always like that. I’m just having a little pokey. ‘Oh, look, The Velvets are re-forming and they didn’t even bother to ask anybody.’ There were four distinct personalities always. I was worried for a while … But one thing that Lou’s doing and he doesn’t normally do in his own work is he’s going to wail a lot on guitar – he’s going to have fun.

  “We can take it anywhere we want. There are plenty of ideas floating around. But, for a start, I’ve had to learn a lot of those songs, because I never played them originally. That was the work of the first week. This week we’re starting to perform groups of songs: four, five, six songs in a row, until we’ve built it up and it’s become like a second skin. Then we can throw away the ones that don’t work. And I expect that when we get out on the road we’ll start trying new things – an improvisation, a song we haven’t rehearsed.”

  TUCKER: “My vision of what the audience is going to be is what keeps me from getting glum about all the hoop-la and the machine. I want them to go away happy. I think we all feel that way. There’s just so many people who have loved us for such a longtime and have continued to buy our records and think so much of us. To me, this is a little bit of thanks.”

  REED: “How long do you need to have it demonstrated that this was for real, completely sincere, above-board and meant in exactly the way it seemed to be meant? Look at the records. They speak for themselves.”

  As much as they enjoyed playing together, as the time of their departure approached the tensions that faced all of them became apparent. Old wounds open as easily between collaborators in rock as between lovers. Also, there was the undisputed fact, as one British scribe, Terry Staunton, pointed out, that “The Velvets have more to lose than any other band. No other band in history has been surrounded by so much mythology, no other band has had such far-reaching influence on the music that followed them. It could all be forgotten …”

  On May 25, The Velvet Underground flew first class from New York to London. They spent a few days in London rehearsing, then travelled to Edinburgh to face their first commercial audience as a band together since 1968, playing for the first time outside America. Luna were to open for them on the majority of the dates. The group’s Dean Wareham kept a diary of the tour’s progress.

  Nerves were understandably strained to an edge by the time The Velvet Underground stepped out onto the stage in Edinburgh at 8:45 p.m. on June 1. The five minute standing ovation they received before playing a single note appeared to do little to relax them. The first show was by all accounts uptight.

  CAROLINE SULLIVAN: “The surrealism of watching rock history come to life is heightened by the sense of expectation. Can four upstanding, middle-aged citizens still whip up any menace? The world will be watching.”

  ALLAN JONES: “There’s a sense of a band playing with a gun to its head, hostages of their own legend.”

  JOHN HARRIS: “John Cale is dressed in a close-fitting black suit, awkwardly hammering at bass guitar and looking like Peter Cushing with a wedge haircut. Lou Reed’s face, as ever, shows the wounds of his trawl through low-living, and he has the dress sense of a middle-aged suburban professional. Both ooze an inanimate, po-faced academic cool; the kind that comes from knowing you’re a genuine elder. Sterling Morrison looks nothing other than ancient, and so long are the intervening years that Moe Tucker is now a mother of five – and you can see the maternal wisdom in her face.”

  PAT KANE: “The first thing you notice as The Velvet Underground stutter and stumble through their first few numbers – deliberately? incompetently, who’s to know? – is the inappropriate rude health of Lou Reed. He bulges out of his black T-shirt and blue denims like a cross between Bryan Adams and Nosferatu; the pebble glasses make him look more like a pop professor than real pop professors do. Rock’s junkie royal has turned in every detail of his choreography, into an aerobic MTV act.”

  DAVID BELCHER: “Cale was a masterpiece of thespian understatement, deploying the twitchy, upright manner of Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing in a Hammer Dracula movie. Cale also took the departed Nico’s vocals on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and ‘Femme Fatale’, investing both with a bluff grandeur.”

  ALLAN JONES: “At the end, they line up like chorus girls in the cast of The Mousetrap. Cale puts his arm around Lou. Lou jumps. You get the impression that the last time Lou touched him, his fists were probably clenched. There’s still a long history between these two. Lou smiles, an
d puts his arm around Maureen. Sterling taps her on the head.”

  JOHN ROCKWELL: “Those who attended both Edinburgh shows found the second, on Thursday, far superior to the first … Certainly the audience loved it, standing throughout the two-hour set and cheering wildly.

  “Indeed, there was much to cheer. Mr. Reed still sings with the same ominous distinctiveness; Mr. Cale is still the same multi-faceted musical saboteur; Mr. Morrison still contributes a guitar sound of weight and solidity. The revelation on Thursday, though, was the diminutive Ms. Tucker’s drumming.”

  BEN THOMPSON: “Lou Reed seems to be the most invigorated by not having to be ‘formerly of The Velvet Underground’ any more – he’s even got rid of that nightmarish Michael Bolton perm in honour of the occasion. Which would you rather play? ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’ or ‘Magic & Loss’?”

  DEAN WAREHAM: “The Velvets’ June 2 show is very different. They play the same songs, but it is apparent that Lou is going to do a fair bit of improvising, playing with tempo and structure. Sterling Morrison is playing bass on some songs, rhythm guitar on most (and he’s a great player, all upstrokes), and a couple of great guitar solos on ‘Rock & Roll’ and ‘White Light/White Heat’. After the show we meet Sterling, Moe and Lou, who are all very friendly. Lou is especially funny in a very New York way, with a very dry sense of humour.”

  From Edinburgh they travelled down to London where they were booked to play the Forum, capacity 1, 200, and Wembley, capacity 13,000. Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde and Peter Gabriel were among the celebrity audience at the Forum.

  MARK SATLOF: “After the stage went black, a roar of the crowd was quickly silenced by a husky ‘1, 2, 3, 4’ count and the immediate, furiously strummed musical greeting of ‘We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together’. ‘It just seems like yesterday,’ said Lou Reed.

  “Reed especially transformed his songs with radical new phrasing. He repeated lines, or jumped into vocal lines a few beats later than expected, spitting the words out rapidly to catch a later groove. Moe Tucker validated Reed’s quote from a few years back that there are two kinds of drummers -‘Moe Tucker and everybody else.’

  “The next night, at the sold-out Wembley Arena, The Velvets turned in a far more intense performance. They worked together as a band, comfortable with each other, with the audience and with their songs. Seemingly energized by the sell-out crowd, they shrugged off their earlier nervousness and toyed with the songs even more. Cale and Reed, who had traded glares and scowls the previous evening, competed instead with duelling viola and guitar, and faced off on songs like ‘Some Kinda Love’.”

  Ironically, in Amsterdam – which had become one of Reed’s solo strongholds and in which the Dutch music critics had as recently as 1988 voted The Velvet Underground and Nico as the greatest record of all time – there were more doubts about the group’s ability to meet their myth than anywhere else.

  BERT VAN DER KAMP: “People are excited about The Velvet Underground re-forming and coming to Holland, but there is also a lot of negativity. They don’t want their illusions shattered so they don’t want to go. Also, because they play a large venue and they play a small venue they’re charging a great deal.”

  DEAN WAREHAM: “On June 8 we played Amsterdam’s Paradiso with a capacity of 1, 200. I watched the Velvet’s show from the balcony right on the side of the stage. Lou was wearing a white cotton headband, and keeps pouring ice over his head. We briefly attend the after-show party. Lou exits via boat.

  “On June 9 they played Rotterdam, then travelled to Hamburg for two shows. From there it was on to Prague where their show was attended by Lou’s friend, the writer and politician, Vaclav Havel, who invited the band to a private reception following the concert. By now, however, it had emerged, as critics were increasingly wont to point out, that ‘what you hear is not always The Velvet Underground of legendary repute. For about a third of the 90-minute concert we are here in the less demanding presence of the Lou Reed Band.’”

  The tour climaxed in Paris with a three-night stand, June 15-17, at the famed Olympia Theatre where The Beatles, Stones and Dylan had caused riots in the Sixties and where The Velvets surely would have done it too if Warhol had taken them there as part of his 1967 European tour.

  IRA KAPLAN: “‘Sweet Jane’ is followed by a highly tongue-in-cheek little ditty, maybe called ‘We’re The Velvet Underground’, in which Reed sort of introduces the band and claims the reunion is Morrison and Tucker’s idea, that he and Cale think it’s ‘pretentious shit’. As the audience roared and roared, The Velvet Underground gathered centre stage and bowed in unison. Show biz! Cale made that hokey clap-for-the-audience gesture, Reed raised his arms in triumph like an athlete; Tucker waved shyly, seemingly to individuals in the crowd; and Morrison looked both ecstatic and like he’d like to disappear. For the encore Cale sang ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ from the piano, upstaged (for me) by Tucker’s one-handed eight snare whacks to the measure. Next was ‘Heroin’. The members of the VU bowed some more and departed, returning again for a lovely ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, marked by Cale’s viola. Finally came a new song, ‘Cayote’. ‘Could you please repeat that name?’ asked one audience member. ‘Of course,’ replied Reed. ‘We’re The Velvet Underground, we can do anything!’”

  All three nights were recorded for a live album and one was also filmed for an accompanying video. Reed told the American rock writer Lisa Robinson that this was the best show ever. It really was just one of those magical nights.

  After Paris, they were scheduled to play the tour’s last two nights in Berlin.

  DEAN WAREHAM: “Tonight, June 20, is the last show, at a club called Die Halle, capacity 2, 500. The VU are really good tonight. ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ sends shivers, and Lou plays a great eight minute guitar solo to begin ‘Some Kinda Love’.”

  The Velvet’s passage through Europe was outwardly smooth but inwardly bumpy. Although the shows sold out and the press was for the most part over the top positive, there were many older fans who were disappointed by what they saw as a cheap attempt to cash in on their accrued fame (ticket prices were high, astronomically so when they played clubs like the Forum in London and the Paradiso in Amsterdam). In their defence one associate pointed out that few critics had any sense of the immense cost of touring Europe in the 1990s. Apart from a technical entourage of guitar roadies, the expense of putting on the shows and the massive hotel and transportation fees combined with the tax laws of six different countries did not leave anything like as much money for each musician as some critics imagined.

  The real problem was the increasing separation between Lou Reed and the other members and the “iron butterfly” -Sylvia – who stood between them, barely troubling to approach them civilly, let alone allow them into Lou’s private and heavily protected world. The separation between Reed and the band, which harked back to the days in which Steve Sesnick had come between Reed and Cale in 1968, was emphasized by various representatives of Sire Records, who would be releasing the live album recorded in Paris. They never once spoke to any members of the band during the entire tour, except Reed. By the time The Velvet Underground reached Italy to play five opening dates for U2, Lou’s uptightness and the constant tension on stage was something that shocked even Cale – who was further upset in Rome when Lou facetiously gave the crowd a Fascist salute. It was clear to John that Lou was not representing the band, and that he had come to see them simply as his umpteenth back-up band.

  There had been a lot of criticism of The Velvet Underground’s (read Lou Reed’s) decision to open for U2. “The Velvets opening for U2?” queried Jeff Curtis in a letter to Rolling Stone. “Wouldn’t that be like Jimi Hendrix opening up for The Monkees?”

  JOHN CALE: “I look on it as a real gesture of gentility on their part. I see them as supporting us in a way. I’ve always understood them to be big fans of ours and I can’t think of anybody better than U2 to play with.”

  STERLING MORRISON: “We talked about it a bit
, and if we were going to precede a band we decided it had to be one whose major strength is their material, which would be U2 – who pretty much live or die by their material and performance. There’s not a great emphasis on theatricals.”

  LOU REED: “U2 are supporting us, actually. It’s just that the playing order’s reversed. It was their idea, not mine. We’re here to have fun. That’s been the driving force for me, the bottom line is I just want to get off. Turn it up to 11.”

  From Italy they returned to the UK in July to play a short set at The Glastonbury Festival where reviewers, having got over their initial wonder at a reincarnation comparable to a Beatles reunion, caught up with them.

  PAUL MOODY: “As they survey the biggest open-air bedroom in Europe with dull dollar bills in their eyes, it all becomes too obscene to be believed.”

  S.P.: “Before he’s struck a note, Lou Reed’s scrapping with a roadie. ‘Leave it,’ he instructs with headmasterly impatience, ‘leave it, LEAVE IT!’ The audience, as one, makes a mocking ‘oooOOOoooh!’ The Velvet Underground should never have done this, of course. It’s an atrocious idea.”

  KEITH CAMERON: “The Glastonbury Festival appearance was often simply embarrassing, not least when Lou Reed began punching the air and leading the crowd in a ludicrous call and response routine during ‘Rock & Roll’.”

  Part of the critics’ cynicism was due to the fact that throughout the tour ‘Venus In Furs’ had been running on British TV as the soundtrack for an ad for Dunlop Tyres.

  At the end of July the band returned to the States and immediately separated to recover. At first it looked as if the hard work was going to pay off big. Not only was the live album and video scheduled for an autumn release, but an American tour, an MTV Unplugged show and album, and possibly a new Velvet Underground album were all being discussed. Sylvia Reed even went so far as to start setting up US dates.