Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico

by Harvard, Joe

  IS IT LIVE …?

  In these days of multitracking, it’s rare for anything but jazz or classical music to be played live in the studio. Most rock sessions begin with a live ensemble performance, but then it’s common for vocals, guitars, keyboards and even bass—everything but drums—to be rerecorded, often one at a time, while the artist and the producer seek the ideal sound and performance. In other words, most pop/rock records made in the past 25 years are a live drum track combined with overdubbed vocals and instruments. No longer the norm, as they were up until the late 1950s, records made from live studio performances seem extremely impressive. Lou Reed has said the album was recorded live, and it has become a part of rock lore and legend that it’s a “live in the studio” LP. But is it?

  Did the Velvets’ New York tunes benefit from over-dubs, and how many tracks were used to record them? The answer to the first question may be found on the box holding the album’s master mix tapes, reproduced as the CD cover of the Peel Slowly and See box set—a great visual idea, and fortuitous for aural detectives. The various notes and technical instructions written by the engineers and mastering technicians who worked with the tapes over the years includes the comment (on both LP sides): “Noise and Distortion—Too Many Overdubs.”

  Les Paul’s invention of multitrack recording was a boon to musicians. It meant one track could be recorded, the tape rewound, and the first part played back while another part was added onto the same tape; the parts were in sync with one another, and to a listener they would sound identical to parts that had been played together simultaneously. The number of parts you could add in this manner depended on how many discreet divisions—known as “tracks”—the tape recorder could handle. Any addition of parts after the first pass (which usually involved the entire band playing together) is known as an “overdub.”

  The previous method of overdubbing, known as “bouncing,” called for a part to be recorded on one machine, then, as it was played back, routed to a second machine together with a new part being played live. Unlike multitracking, each successive “bounce” (i.e. added part) adds background hiss which engineers refer to as “noise.” Too many parts stacked this way can also oversaturate the tape, causing distortion. This is one reason why engineers still hold George Martin in awe, considering the number of tracks he built up on Sgt. Pepper’s (at times twelve or more) while miraculously avoiding discernible noise, even though he was using this older, bouncing method.

  Dolph recalls an Ampex 4-track being used in New York, but not using many overdubs or any bounces; they “probably either put stuff down on three tracks and left one open … with drums on one, guitars on another, sort of smearing the stuff around on three tracks, and then the fourth track was used on occasion.” Nat Finkelstein’s photos in the booklet for Peel Slowly and See also clearly show a 4-track machine in the background at TTG Studios in LA.80 The relatively leisurely pace of those sessions—two days to record three songs—would have left ample time for adding extra parts, but Tom Wilson’s experience (plus that 4-track machine, which allowed noiseless overdubs) should have produced unsullied tracks. So where did the “noise” and “distortion” from excessive overdubbing come from? It implies the noisy sonic footprints not of multitracking (which could be done live), but of bounced tracks to achieve overdubs; so at least one song was bounced as well as multitracked somewhere. We may never know, but Reed’s claim of the album being cut live in three (or eight) hours is contradicted by the technical evidence. No big deal, and I’m not trying to make it out to be some shocking conspiracy—but it would seem that this is not quite a “live in the studio” album.

  Other, less technical evidence contradicts a live recording. On several songs the same member appears at least twice. Nico’s doubled vocal on the single version of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” shows the band had no aversion to overdubbing. And in Sterling Morrison’s story regarding Nico’s serial attempts at singing “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (see below), she is clearly overdubbing her part to the backing track. Norman Dolph recalls: “Overdubbing was minimal, though as you jog my memory I have an image of myself on one side of the glass, and on the other side of the glass is Nico, alone, cutting a vocal.”81

  On “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” besides the double-tracked vocal, there’s a piano track and a bass track, and bass and celeste on “Sunday Morning,” and on other songs viola. Live, Sterling Morrison (like Cale) also doubled on bass, and he is credited for bass on the album, so he could be playing bass on those. Dolph believes they used the same line-up as they did live:

  I think Sterling did play bass on occasion, at least once. I don’t know why that sticks in my mind. I remember the one that leads off on viola … “Venus in Furs” … my impression, as I close my eyes and remember… what I’m seeing through the glass, and hearing through the speakers, is the same thing that I’d heard the night before [at the Dom], that it was all there. And Cale is playing viola, so someone else was playing bass in the studio at that point in time.

  But how, other than overdubbing, can we explain John Cale’s ability to play both viola and organ on “Heroin”? On “I’m Waiting for The Man,” moreover, there are two guitars, bass and piano—so, either Lou, John or Sterling had to have taken a second pass at the tune.

  When considering the caliber of either the album or the players, the fact that the band added a few overdubbed sweetening parts or dubbed vocals later really doesn’t matter. Their technique wasn’t as transparent as George Martin’s Abbey Road wizardry, true. But consider that Martin’s result was Sgt. Pepper’s —a record whose finished product owes more to production genius after the fact than to live performance. The Beatles played practically nothing on Sgt. Pepper’s as an ensemble, using probably the most technically advanced producer of their day, while the Velvets performed the majority of their record together in single passes while amateur producers Dolph and Warhol managed effectively to capture the unprecedented sounds being made. Spontaneity and a great performance are preferable to flawless recording technique—though it’s wonderful when you can get both—and The Velvet Underground and Nico certainly holds up in those respects. Neither Reed nor anyone else needs to use exaggeration to highlight the brilliance of their achievement.

  Part Two:

  The Songs

  SUNDAY MORNING

  “Sunday Morning” may be the root of the family tree of songs like “Every Breath You Take” and “Satellite of Love,” whose pretty, lulling melodies mask their true thematic darkness. Sting and Lou Reed have admitted that their gently soothing aural textures mask the ugly expression of an emotion—obsessive jealousy—so powerful it evokes the desire for full-time surveillance of a lover. As for “Sunday Morning,” the music calls to mind a sleepy, quiet Sunday so perfectly that you can listen to the song repeatedly before registering what it’s really about: paranoia and displacement.

  The song came together not long after dawn, as Cale and Reed sat before the piano in a friend’s apartment. Actually written on a Sunday morning, the tune took form around 6 a.m., following a Manhattan all-niter. But that relaxed atmosphere doesn’t change the fact that “Sunday Morning” was written to order: the band needed the song in order to complete The Velvet Underground and Nico. Producer Tom Wilson had decided after listening to the tapes from the first two sessions that the album lacked a strong potential single. Wilson asked Reed to write one specifically for Nico’s voice, which he found more marketable than Lou’s. In this he was not alone: it was Paul Morrissey’s misgivings about Lou Reed’s ability to front a band that had led to Nico joining the group. It’s amusing that today, right off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen prominent singers who clearly drew their style from Reed’s, but none that seem as heavily influenced by Nico. Be that as it may, Reed agreed to provide a Nico-sung song suitable for release as a single, and a session was booked to cut it.

  When Andy Warhol heard an early version of the song, he suggested Reed make it a song about paranoia, at whi
ch time Reed added the “Watch out, the world’s behind you” section. Reed has called this sense that someone is always watching you “the ultimate paranoid statement in that the world even cares enough to watch you.”82

  Reed, true to his Machiavellian stealth, waited until the band arrived at the recording studio before announcing that he, not Nico, was going to sing the new song. He was adamant, explaining, “I wanna sing it cause it’s gonna be the single.” Management, as represented by Paul Morrissey, was not happy: “I had a fight with him. I’d say ‘But Nico sings it onstage,’ and he’d reply, ‘Well, it’s my song,’ like it was his family. He was so petty … the little creep … Tom Wilson couldn’t deal with Lou, he just took what came. Victor Bockris adds, “Lou then proceeded to sing the song in a voice so full of womanly qualities that on first hearing it you paused, wondering just who the hell was singing.”83

  Enhancing the vocal performance is the song’s gently lulling cadence, the lullaby-like tone and the tinkle of the celeste. A miniature xylophone often used by marching bands happened to be in the studio. The soothing bell timbre fit the song so perfectly you might think it was fundamental to the song’s original conception: but Cale, ever the musical innovator, added the instrument to the recording on the spur of the moment after noticing it leaning in a corner.

  I’M WAITING FOR THE MAN

  Written around the same time as “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for The Man” is a masterpiece of reportorial skill. The composition was finished by 1965, at the peak of Reed’s experimentation with opiates (before he had turned in earnest to a decade-plus of hard-core amphetamine use). This one was written from the trenches. Reed is at the height of his powers, still unfettered by the self-conscious decision he admits to making after the first album to “give it a little push that way, a little street theater.” You get a sense that he isn’t trying to shock per se, but to present as accurate a picture of events as possible—whether it’s shocking or not. The events in question being a trip “Up to Lexington, 1—2—5”, or the corner of Lexington Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem, in the days when most heroin remained beyond the skin-color border uptown.

  “I’m Waiting for The Man” was one Velvets song that underwent drastic changes between the time Reed brought it in to the band and the version recorded for the first album. The Ludlow version, “I’m Waiting for My Man,” may share lyrics and a general arrangement with the final “I’m Waiting for The Man,” but it plays like a different song altogether. David Fricke describes it as “a rough chunk of city-fried country blues—the combination of Reed’s acidic vocal delivery and the guitars’ bluesy locomotion suggests Hank Williams looking for a score up at 125th and Lexington—until, on one of the later takes, Cale explodes into a squealing burst of viola that sounds like a subway train hitting the emergency brakes.”84

  That viola squeal is about the only clue to the relentless piston-like drive that characterizes the final treatment of the song.

  Reed, like most of his generation who owned a guitar, had been intrigued by Bob Dylan while in college. Another Ludlow number, “Prominent Men,” which never made the cut for the Velvets’ set list, features a style and performance so Dylanesque it could convincingly pass as one of Bob’s outtakes. The Ludlow performance of “I’m Waiting for The Man” is steeped not so much in Dylan’s influence as in Dylan’s influences: Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, maybe a bit of Leadbelly. There’s even an acoustic bottleneck slide guitar part, giving this rendition a down-home vibe that would almost sound at home on Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main Street, or perhaps a J.J. Cale album. There’s also a flavor of rolling honky-tonk to the chord changes that evokes John Sebastian or Jonathan Edwards incongruously in search of a fix: “Slouch Around the Shanty, Momma, and Get a Good Nod On.”

  This kind of observational objectivity, seeing “with the eyes of a child,” may be what Reed began losing after The Velvet Underground and Nico, replacing it with the provocative vignettes of White Light, White Heat—an album of such volcanic, high volume spontaneity that the lyrics were nearly indecipherable. With John Cale’s departure a good deal of the Velvets’ stylistic innovation was replaced with professionalism (albeit the professionalism of a brilliant, master craftsman), a transformation that was complete by the time of the Loaded LP. It was these earlier elements that critics missed on Reed’s early solo albums. Reed regained his initial reportorial clarity, coupled with decisive wit, when he began writing the songs for 1988’s New York album. In any case, “I’m Waiting for The Man” shows Reed at an aesthetic high point, and the band in an especially creative and committed period of its development.

  FEMME FATALE

  One of the VU’s most fully realized ballads, “Femme Fatale” was a product of Lou Reed’s role as a sort of Factory anthropologist—it’s written about the 1966 Factory Girl of the Year. “Andy said I should write a song about Edie Sedgwick. I said ‘Like what?’ and he said ‘Oh, don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou?’ So I wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ and we gave it to Nico.”85

  Letting Nico sing the song was a perfect move. Her voice brought a Continental sophistication to the song that matched its subject, while Reed’s use of major seventh chords imparts a cosmopolitan flavor to the song wholly appropriate to Edie and the other ingenues, wealthy and otherwise, who orbited the Factory. “Femme Fatale” plays like “The Girl From Ipanema” set in hip Manhattan, except that in place of the voyeurism of the latter, Reed’s masterpiece tells a story of narcissism. It’s easy to picture the femme in question discreetly glancing away to catch her own reflection even as she goes about her business of breaking hearts.

  Sterling Morrison told an amusing story of Nico’s displeasure with the mispronunciation of the title when he and Lou sang the backing vocals during the chorus:

  “Femme Fatale”—she always hated that. [nasal voice] Nico, whose native language is minority French, would say, “The name of this song is ‘Fahm Fahtahl’.” Lou and I would sing it our way. Nico hated that. I said, “Nico, hey, it’s my tide, I’ll pronounce it my way.”86

  Despite her objections and corrections, Morrison would always sing “fem fay-tal.” His “my title” comment implies a more prominent role in creating the song than is commonly known, but he has failed to elaborate on this.

  Edie Sedgwick’s story is a sad one. She came from money, and seems to have inherited the tendency toward ennui that comes with the territory. During her time spent with Warhol, her modeling career peaked, and she was a darling of the Downtown party and art crowd. She had an impish sort of beauty, slightly boyish with her hair cut short in the androgynous style of the mid’60s. Photos of her dressed in a silver miniskirt, with silver makeup and hair, are emblematic of the era in which she shone.

  The first of the multimedia shows for which Warhol booked the Velvets (and the prototype for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances that followed throughout 1966) was Uptight, a retrospective of the short films he had been making with Edie as his star. Andy and Edie were the ultra-hip couple in New York for the year before that. She was the undisputed queen among the other Factory Superstars like Ultraviolet and Viva, but her days were numbered. By the time of the Velvets’ association with Warhol, Edie was ticking through the final seconds of her fifteen minutes. She danced onstage with the Velvets at the Cinemateque, and according to Nico even tried singing, but music wasn’t her forte. She never appeared onstage with the Velvet Underground again, and soon left the Factory for good.

  Edie was never really able to adjust to life out of the limelight; after a few chaotic years and relocation across the country, she died of a drug overdose: saddening some but surprising no one. A spoiled “Femme Fatale,” or another unhappy rich kid whose public persona masked her desire for genuine love? Chances are, Edie was a little of both. But her beauty and energy defined that time and place in a way few other women managed.

  VENUS IN FURS

  Although not the first song Lou Reed wrote for the group, “Venus in Furs
” accounts for a number of notable “firsts” in their career. It was one of three tunes played at their first gig; filmed by CBS, it provided their first media exposure as part of a documentary on Piero Heliczer and underground film in New York; and it was the first song that Gerard Malanga danced to on the night Warhol initially encountered the band at Café Bizarre. Additionally, Victor Bockris argues that “Venus in Furs” was the band’s first “complete success in terms of arrangement,” writing in Transformer.

  When Cale initially added viola, grinding it against Reed’s “Ostrich” guitar, illogically and without trepidation, a tingle of anticipation shot up his spine. They had, he knew, found their sound, and it was strong … (Cale) recalled: “It wasn’t until then that I thought we had discovered a really original, nasty style.”87

  Producer Norman Dolph recalls: “It seems to me that ‘Venus in Furs’ is what they started with in the sessions, and that they got the sounds they wanted, then they came back in, and that the overall mix of the thing was not tinkered with too much during the recording sessions.”88

  An article written by Ignacio Julià recalls that Sterling Morrison’s “favorite song was ‘Venus in Furs’: He used to say they had achieved in it, like in no other track, the sound they had in mind.”89 “Venus in Furs” is a fairly literal distillation of the 19th century romantic novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Severin the slave and the Mistress in furs are two of the three main characters from the book. As far as I can tell, the song omits Alexis Popadopolis, the Greek cavalry officer taken by the Mistress as a lover, partly to stoke her slave’s jealousy. Perhaps it was too hard to rhyme much with Popadopolis besides Metropolis. Dangerous territory, even for an English major with a rhyming dictionary who takes so much speed he only needs to sleep every third day.