by Harvard, Joe
There’s a quote from Baudelaire I can only paraphrase … “If you wish to create true, great art, first you must discover a new shudder.” And the Velvets had! That’s how I felt. This was like nothing I’d ever heard before and it was absolutely intense.63
When you listen to The Velvet Underground and Nico it’s hard to picture the stunned reactions audiences were said to have had upon hearing those songs live, as for example this description of the band’s first ever gig at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey:
“Nothing could have prepared the kids and parents assembled in the auditorium for what they were about to experience that night,” wrote Rob Norris, a Summit student, “… a performance that would have shocked anyone outside of the most avant-garde audiences of the Lower East Side …” As they charged into the opening chords of the cacophonous “Venus in Furs” louder than anyone in the room had ever heard music played, they rounded out an image aptly described as bizarre and terrifying. “Everyone was hit by the screeching urge of sound, with a pounding beat louder than anything we’d ever heard,” Norris continued. “About a minute into the second song, which the singer had introduced as ‘Heroin’, the music began to get even more intense.” According to Sterling Morrison, “The murmur of surprise that greeted our appearance as the curtain went up increased to a roar of disbelief once we started to play ‘Venus’ and swelled to a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment by the end of ‘Heroin’.”64
I’d pay good money to see any band these days that could provoke “a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment” just by playing their two best songs (they also did a third at the Summit gig—“There She Goes Again”). Not everybody found the group so jarring or alien, though, especially in Boston, where they actually got radio airplay for the first album. Two teenagers there would, in their own opposite way, react unusually to the album.
Having heard the songs with Nico singing on them (probably the single) on local radio shows, Jonathan Richman was only too pleased when his pal Jay Bovis held up a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico and asked him if he wanted to trade something for it. Jay had put the record on his turntable, and before he’d heard more than a few bars of “Heroin,” Jonathan knew that this was “his” music: “I knew right away that these people would understand me.” A deal was quickly struck, and Jay became the proud owner of Jonathan’s copy of the Fugs’ first record. Thrilled by the discovery of his lost tribe, Richman was curious as to why his friend would part with such a treasure. Jay answered, “Ah, it sounds just like everything else!” What they were putting in the water out in Natick, Massachusetts that bred teenagers with such advanced tastes we’ll never know. It’s also interesting to note that the transaction which helped guide Richman on his way toward his inheritance of a part of the Velvets’ mystique—the teen’s-eye rendering of the Underground’s style that is the first Modern Lovers record—involved the only two genuine Lower East Side bands of the period, the Velvets and the Fugs.
READIN’ OR ROCKIN’?
As for the opinion that the Velvets were some super-cerebral “message” band, Sterling spoke definitively in one 1980 interview:
Look at a recent Rolling Stone—it’s happening to Elvis Costello: “You’re rocking to Elvis Costello, but did you ever sit down, Jack, and listen to the lyrics?” Well no, Jack, I never sit down and listen to lyrics, because rock ‘n’ roll is not sit-down-and-listen-to-lyrics music! Why is it that the Velvet Underground’s celebrated lyric-smiths never published a lyrics sheet? Was that to make you strain to hear the lyrics that you could never hear? No. It’s because they were saying, “Fuck you. If you wanna listen to lyrics, then read the New York Times.”65
Yowsa! Not exactly an opinion you might expect from the bandmate of that “celebrated lyric-smith” Lou Reed! Even at the height of their art rock chic, the band walked a wire between dignifying the songs via lyrical content, and rocking the fuck out. Sterling Morrison clearly shows which side of the debate he’s on:
Q: Well, “Sister Ray” still seems to me like a really perverse song …
A: It’s a good dance song! I presume that nobody can hear the lyrics—I did my best to drown them out!66
This whole issue of lyrics versus rock power is important with regard to the Velvets; so important that it makes me want to have a brief argument with myself over it.
Joe Harvard: Well, Sterling might think the lyrics weren’t supposed to be central to the songs, but on the other hand, it’s good to keep in mind that the final fallout between Lou and Sterling was over precisely this issue.
Me: You mean the now famous “closet mix” as it’s known …
Joe Harvard: Right! Lou went in and remixed the third Velvets album, explicitly to make the lyrics more intelligible.
Me: Sure, he boosted the lyrics and HIS OWN guitar parts. No wonder Sterling said “later fer you.” Remember the Sex Execs’ home studio … before you guys started Fort Apache? They used to call it “Mix Me Up—Mix You Down Studios”! Maybe there was a wee bit of ego at work there, hmmm Joe?
Joe Harvard: That’s very cynical …
Me: Or realistic. I seem to recall Reed would precipitate yet another irreparable break with a collaborating guitarist when he pulled the same re-mix trip on Robert Quine, mixing his parts to obliteration on Legendary Hearts. Quine saw it as a transparent ploy, a negative reaction to the attention he’d been getting since the previous record, The Blue Mask. Reed just hates to share the credit.
Joe Harvard: But that doesn’t mean he isn’t committed to the central importance of the lyric! Look, if you accept the songwriter’s theory that a good song can stand with just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, you could argue that Reed was just trying to emphasize the core of the songs.
Me: Right. But the whole singer-songwriter thing, isn’t that cozying up dangerously close to the folk singer stance that the Velvets were always against, right from the start? And why bother having a terrific band play great parts if you’re just gonna nuke ’em in the mix?
Joe Harvard: You may have a point.
Whether I’m right or I’m right, and whatever Reed or Sterling’s motives, songs like “Sunday Morning,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “Femme Fatale,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” are lush, beautiful, and calming to post-millenium ears, even taking into account the lyrical darkness lurking behind their jangle. Now that some of the more scandalous aspects of their subject matter have seeped up into mainstream consciousness, “Heroin,” “There She Goes Again,” and “Waiting for the Man” rock more than shock. The same process also makes “Venus in Furs” easier to hear for the majestically powerful song it always was. The fact that these songs have lost much of their ability to shock is a tribute to the influence the Velvets have exerted on mainstream music, and in no way means they have lost their power to surprise. To the uninitiated, the Velvets’ songwriting is always a surprise, and for those rediscovering the songs it’s a particular treat that material over three decades old sounds utterly contemporary. “Run, Run, Run” rocks like a classic Chuck Berry road tune, but it could have been written this morning. Of the entire set, as we listen today, only “The Black Angel’s Death Song” and “European Son” provide a clue as to how hard the Velvets stunned the music world during their ‘65–’70 performances.
THE LUDLOW DEMOS
In 1965 the Velvets recorded a demo at John Cale’s Ludlow Street apartment, to give John some ammunition for the trips he was making to England to promote the band. Angus MacLise was still in the group, but was absent on the day of recording. Cale supervised the recording process on a Wollensack recorder. Totaling 80 minutes, these Ludlow Demos show some of the debut album’s songs in early stages of their development, while the band was seeking the most powerful interpretation and best arrangement for each. Included as the first disc in the Peel Slowly and See box set, the six songs represented include four from The Velvet Underground and Nico and provide a compelling insight into the band’s intentions and methodology.
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The tape illustrates a process of crafted evolution. That process was simple: work the songs, then re-work the songs until the arrangements and textures were the most powerful ones possible for that lyrical story. If, as Cale came to believe in the first weeks of their friendship, Reed’s writing was akin to Method acting in song,67 then the Ludlow Street demos are the narrative back-story integral to creating a believable character. The differences between the demo and release versions of these songs underscore the degree to which the arrangements were a team effort. Calling the demos their “most mystifying recording ever,” Velvets authority Sal Mercuri comments:
They offer a stupefying glimpse into the VU before their exposure to Andy Warhol and his world, before Moe’s thunderous beat, before electricity. The performances are unpolished, a bit tentative though not at all self-conscious, and quiet. It’s as if being drawn into the Warhol world liberated them and allowed them to play harder, nastier, louder.68
THE PRICE OF NO FAME
John Cale: I remember that first album with so much hilarity. That the thing actually got done …69
Based on the agreement of all concerned parties, there are some general aspects of the album’s creation that we can confidently site as fact. However, exact details do change with each individual—and at each telling—to the point where “exact” isn’t a term you can apply when discussing the genesis of The Velvet Underground and Nico. Interviews looking for answers to simple questions like who paid for the album and how much it cost—even the studios used and how much time was spent—are contradictory. Many years elapsed before anyone became sufficiently interested in the Velvets’ history to start seeking precise details about that chaotic period, and naturally recollections got fuzzier as the years passed.
One typically inaccurate statement in Please Kill Me quotes (or misquotes) Paul Morrissey as claiming the entire record was done in LA in two days for $3,000.70 Biographer Victor Bockris cites no source but writes that in New York “the recording studio was rented for $2,500 for three nights, enough time to cut the whole album.” One Cale-attributed version has Warhol paying for the LA sessions at Cameo Parkway Studios, while the rest were “paid for by a businessman who came up with $1,500,”71 while another Cale attribution places them at Cameo-Parkway in New York!72 The businessman in question is undoubtedly Norman Dolph, who told me he thought his investment was closer to $600, but may have been a bit more. Maybe Cale just wasn’t wracking his brain to get the details right. Examining the conflicting dates, lengths and locations for the recording of the album turns up many such discrepancies.
With careful sifting, the versions eventually average out to the same story: management paid for ten songs recorded at Scepter in New York, and the re-recording of three of those in Los Angeles—everything except the third and final session, which added “Sunday Morning” to the LP. David Fricke (a trusted source if ever there was one) writes that $700 of Warhol’s money (the remains of the EPI’s Dom earnings) was augmented by $800 from Norman Dolph to pay for the Scepter sessions.73 That makes $1,500 for the original NY sessions, leaving another $1,500 for the Tom Wilson/LA sessions, if Morrissey’s $3,000 total is correct. Even if it’s not exact, the number sounds convincingly close. Paul Morrissey notes that MGM paid for the final “Sunday Morning” session back in New York.
The Velvets were a cheap date for Morrissey’s $3,000. At that time the average cost of a studio LP was $5,000, and their despised label mates the Mothers of Invention had just spent $21,000 of MGM/Verve’s money on their first LP, the double-album Freak Out! 74 Consider that in that same year Brian Wilson spent $16,000 and took six months just to complete one song75, and you start to get a sense of the true scale of the Velvets’ achievement on. their first record.
One last interesting money fact: I asked Norman Dolph if he ever made anything off of his investment:
My sole payment was the picture I got from Warhol, a beautiful painting really. Regrettably, I sold it around ‘75 when I was going through a divorce, for $17,000. I remember thinking at the time, “Geez, I bet Lou Reed hasn’t made $17,000 from this album yet.” If I had it today, it would be worth around $2 million.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
The first sessions for the record were done at the Scepter Records studios in Manhattan. An independent label founded by New Jersey housewife Florence Greenberg because she was bored at home when the kids were in school, Scepter’s catalogue included the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick (with a young arranger named Burt Bacharach), the Isley Brothers, and the Kingsmen’s single “Louie Louie.” In 1965 Scepter had parlayed their label success into new offices, warehouse space and their own studio, at 254 W. 54th Street—a building that would one day house Studio 54. As Scepter was one of his accounts, Norman Dolph made frequent visits there, describing it to me as “everything you’d expect an indie studio to be in 1966: song pluggers and musicians and DJs popping in and out … an unsophisticated place, with basic equipment, up around the tenth floor, with a fair-sized studio and the small control room typical of that time.”
The room’s history of turning out great old rock and roll records must have appealed to Reed in particular, whose collection of rare and obscure doo-wop and rock and roll 45s was one of his most prized possessions. The room had seen better days, unfortunately, and when the group arrived they found it “somewhere between reconstruction and demolition … the walls were falling over, there were gaping holes in the floor, and carpentry equipment littered the place.”76 These first New York sessions produced an acetate that Dolph sent to Columbia, but he got it back with a rejection letter from their A&R Department. The record was then shopped around, until the band made an agreement with Columbia’s Tom Wilson: once he left the label and went to MGM, he would sign the Velvets onto the subsidiary label MGM/Verve. (Whether this Columbia connection had anything to do with Dolph’s overture is uncertain.)
The second sessions for The Velvet Underground and Nico were done in LA, supposedly during a lull in the band’s disastrous May ‘66 visit. The problem I have with this scenario is the timeline.
In the fall of 2003, Norman Dolph was contacted about a record that had been purchased at a Lower East Side flea market. Using the margin etchings Dolph identified it as one—perhaps the only—copy of the Scepter mixes, a mono acetate that he’d had cut to send to Columbia. The acetate is dated April 25th, a Monday. Dolph reckons that this puts the Scepter sessions in the week of April 18th-23rd, as he would have cut the acetate directly after the tracks were mixed. He is also confident that Columbia’s A&R wheels would not grind faster than a business week before a reply was sent, along with the returned acetate (he still has the rejection letter somewhere in his basement). Dolph thinks he gave the acetate to Andy or a band member—maybe it was stolen along with Lou Reed’s record collection in the burglary of Lou’s apartment around that time77, then bounced around for 35 years unnoticed until it reappeared beneath the nose of a remarkably lucky Canadian record buff visiting New York in 2003.
However the recently surfaced acetate survived, it provides the date above. How could there be time to get the acetate to Columbia, await their refusal, shop the record to other labels, find Tom Wilson and get signed to MGM/Verve—all in less than a week, between April 25th and the beginning of May, when the Velvets left for California? Wilson was with Columbia just prior to Verve, though Richie Unterberger writes that he left in late ‘65. Perhaps he somehow got an insider tip that they were passing on the band; or, if Unterberger has his dates wrong, maybe Wilson—knowing he was headed to Verve soon—scooped the group immediately. Perhaps. But I think the accepted version of the Wilson sessions being done during the band’s first LA excursion smells funny, and I wonder if perhaps there was a second LA trip later that has been confused with the first. At the time of this publication, Dolph was trying to reconstruct the “chain of custody” of the tapes and acetates cut in ‘66; with luck, he might clear up the confusion once and for all … and possibly find out if the o
riginal 4-track masters exist in the process.
Once signed to MGM, according to David Fricke, Tom Wilson booked the band into TTG Studios for two days, to re-do three songs: “Venus in Furs,” “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (John Cale alone adds “All Tomorrow’s Parties” to the list.)78 After hearing the combined tapes, Wilson decided the LP needed one more, strong, commercial tune, so he brought the group back to New York to cut the potential single, “Sunday Morning.”
LOSING TRACK OF TIME [OR VICE VERSA]
Paul Morrissey’s Please Kill Me recollection of a two-night completion is contradicted by his own statement in Uptight where he puts it at three or four nights. The New York sessions alone are put by Reed and Tucker at one day, by Cale at two, and Morrissey (in a third interview) remembers eight hours being paid for. Reed has said “the first album … was cut in three hours,” but when I asked Jonathan Richman he definitely remembered Lou Reed telling him the album was done in one 9 to 5 workday.79
It was an enigma inside of a puzzle wrapped suitably in black leather. I was grateful to have the chance to ask Norman Dolph, who booked the time, to clear up the confusion:
Licata arranged for us to get four days’ worth of time. The actual recording took place on the first two days, the third day was for listening back to what we had, and on the fourth we mixed. These were not full days by any means, these were business days or parts of them. I don’t believe we used 16 hours, total, and probably more like ten actually recording.
This jibes with Morrissey’s “eight hours paid for” in New York, and indicates that neither Reed nor Morrissey was counting the LA dates, or the following “Sunday Morning” session in New York.