Some of the great musical works of our time are canonized for associations; cultural importance and gallant artistic ambition, but rarely are they primarily championed for the strength of their content alone. Truly classic albums are strident works of perfection that balance this strength of composition with an often Herculean influence on what followed, shattering everything that came before and after, of which one such; ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico‘, we are still yet to fully recover from today.
As we celebrate the 45th anniversary of ‘the most prophetic rock album ever made’, ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico‘ only steeps ever deeper into its mythical association with the cultural ethos, and its ballooning status as one of the greatest creative bastions of our age. Rock and roll folklore has always been steeped in a mythological trance of ambition, power, spirituality, and a pious adulation for the great beyond, but just how exactly did a novelist songwriter, his experimental partner, a German model and a pop art icon come together to create one of the most vividly transfixing and lyrically polarising albums in rock history?
To be frank, nobody knows. On the surface, it would seem as though the marriage of Lou Reed’s shocking lyrical musings, John Cale’s unorthodox arrangements and Nico’s seductively gruff vocal palette was something that was purely at the hands of destiny, if nothing else. How those three outcasts, along with Moe Tucker and Stirling Mortlock, came under Andy Warhol’s tenure is the stuff of legend. That such an unlikely scenario came about is irrelevant, it’s the gift they bestowed upon us that really matters – the murky and dissonant outer-worldly stew of music that graced the LP, and served as the soundtrack to Warhol’s own Exploding Plastic Inevitable project.
In some ways, discussing the album as a whole or as one cohesive piece of art can be a little overwhelming and hard to grasp at first. For one, the songs themselves are nothing like each other. Like a precarious family of misfits, they each try to bustle in front of one another to reveal their freakish qualities and mysterious characters to the listener as if they are purely looking for a reaction. As such, it feels as though they are continually trying to unsettle us, scare us, charm us, and draw us in only to spit us out, with the only real quality that Reed’s compositions have in common being their ability to completely knock us over and shock us to the very core.
On top of this, most of the tracks have taken on a life of their own as modern high-art musical standards, leaving their parent album behind to embark on celebratory journeys of their own, basking in the glory and adulation heaped upon them. ‘Heroin’, for one, is consistently earmarked as one of the most gripping and strangely convicting songs about drugs ever written.
Throughout the song, the drug becomes a whirlwind agenda from which the protagonist cannot escape over seven unsettling minutes. The object itself isn’t viewed with a moral stance on good or evil, Reed is merely, and in acute detail, sketching out the experience for better or worse.
‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ has gained a similar notoriety, and its paranoid all-in shuffle detailing the workings of a drug deal was verboten in 1967, and still is to a large extent today. It involves a situation in which the protagonist is overthrown with paranoia and anxiety in his pursuit of obtaining heroin, the subject of the song being a dealer that is ‘never early, and always late.’ A testament to its enduring appeal and novelty, the album and its shock-value songs remain as much a cornerstone in underground culture today as they did in 1967, the only difference being that now that they much more widely recognised, and as such, the effects are increased tenfold.
The album’s rap and importance as a whole usually extends to influence and innovation, but how can one summarise the Velvet’s sound or agenda into one freeform category? Whilst ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ has rightly been heralded as a major influence on artists from Nick Cave to The Strokes and beyond, where does that leave songs like the sweet, lush paranoia of ‘Sunday Morning’, or the hollow stomp of ‘Venus In Furs’? The former may have had an effect on everything from David Bowie to Belle & Sebastian, but the latter, along with tracks such as the chilling ‘Heroin’ and ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’, exist in unworldly voids of their own. As such, even Reed himself has to some extent collapsed under the weight of the album and the eternal shadow that it continues to cast on his long, drawn out career.
Nobody really knew what to make of the album when it was released, and like a frightened rabbit in the headlights, the mainstream media decided to completely block out and switch themselves off to anything remotely associated with the it, such was their fear and discomfort once they discovered the lucid truths of its content, and the apparent immoral (yet surprisingly objective) stance that it held on taboo subjects. With no real consequences on its long term reputation, the album and the group’s atypical songs drifted adjacent to the cultural lexicon like ships passing in the night. Had critics of the time that had been so quick to trump up the arrangements of ‘Sergeant Pepper…‘ and ‘Pet Sounds‘ as revolutionary and groundbreaking taken any note to the remarkable, progressive songs of this album, then the course of western pop culture as we know it could be considerably different today. And who knows, maybe the hippie era would never have eventuated – something that would have been much to the Velvet’s delight.
But the album’s relative obscurity and its shoddy production costs at the time of recording didn’t seem to have any negative effect on the songs themselves. If anything, the compressed contour of ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’, ‘Femme Fatale’, and ‘European Son’ lend them to exert more mystery and uncertainty than they would have otherwise – and in fact, the only song that truly called for a richer production was ‘Sunday Morning’, of which it did (being the first single and decidedly the most commercial of the bunch) and it clearly prospered as a result. The collective appropriation of such an unwieldy and remarkable bunch of songs displayed on the album is something that is perhaps unmatched throughout pop history. As such it plays like a greatest hits collection that usurps on various forbidden subjects with both detail and ambiguity, ferocity and ambiance, poetry and prose.
Nico’s contributions to the album are particularly interesting. Unlike other self-contained rock bands of the era who would have preferred to dissolve themselves than to let an outsider onto the recording pedestal, The Velvets were skeptical but ultimately open to Warhol’s suggestion to let one of his self-proclaimed superstars collaborate with them. It was the image, the myth, the character and the famously untrained voice that lent Nico all of her mystery and importance to the album as a whole. Like a siren upon the rocks, she draws in the listener with a dangerous ambiguity, defined by her chilling ability to seduce and enthral. Tellingly, all of the songs in which she takes the lead are associated with dystopian themes of resignation, a morbid acceptance to give in to the will of unseen forces – as if to surrender to a future of abstract nihilism.
‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ for example, details a girl’s quaint dissatisfaction with the hedonistic libertinism of the world she constantly finds herself in. But rather than rejecting the camadarie of her peers, she forlornly gives in and decides to embark on meaningless quests to play up to this image, never confident that she will find something worthy to wear to the parties of her dysfunctional compatriots. She will never find happiness within this environment, but she concedes herself to it nonetheless, and Nico, in all her magnificent drawl, doesn’t expel the slightest hint of sympathy towards the character in the song. Conjuring up images of Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory studio of the late sixties, the droning thump of Moe Tucker’s drums form as a delicious hyperbole against her brooding voice.
On ‘Femme Fatale’, one of the most covered tracks from the era and on the brink of becoming a standard, Nico conveys the dangers of the seductive female with a cautionary nuance, coating a delicately beautiful melody with unforeseen malice and doom, providing for a sinister dichotomy of sorts. It works because Nico, despite singing from a perspective of the third person, is quite willingly one of them, and she’s not here to aid you in her warning, she’s merely telling you how it is, and that no matter what – you will fall prey to these beings, whether you’ve had the wit to figure it out already or not. The result is utterly, super chilling.
Comparatively, her wistful giddy-up blend of playfulness on ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ works on another level entirely. A far-cry from the creature that fuses sadism with power on her other two contributions, like the host of a children’s variety show, she assures us that she’ll be ‘the wind, the rain and the sunset; the light on (our) door to show us home’, and at this point in the album’s running order, such warmth and security is just what we need most.
Lou Reed on the other hand, is no slouch himself when it comes to conveying emotion and feeling. Despite the energy-sapped gravely crackle of which he has become known of late, his voice on the album takes many shapes and forms, displaying both light and shade in the context of his songs. ‘Sunday Morning’, perhaps the greatest piece of work that ever came out of his brief collaboration with John Cale, remains the most vaguely transfixing thing on the album, and its position as the opening track on the LP worked as a significant curveball to listeners and their thoughts on what to expect from the band thereafter.
Reed’s airy delivery on the song explores a surreal language of dreamlike paranoia, his cosy and gentle vocal contour only heightening the themes of placid uncertainty that define the song. Cale’s contributions are no less invigorating, his stirring viola invoking astonishing beauty under Reed’s sugary bleat. His decision to use a celesta that was lying around in the studio as a foundation for the song was a masterstroke; just another testament to his will for expansionist ideas and experimentation.
Strapped with leather, whips and intent to harm, the imposing subject of ‘Femme Fatale’ becomes a volatile beast that refuses to be tamed throughout ‘Venus in Furs’. Reed, who translates the scene in a tone that prefers to encourage than to oppose, speaks of a ‘whiplash girl child’ who boasts ‘shiny boots of leather’, and this is all in just the first two lines. The imagery is paramount, and along with Cale’s viola, which exerts a brazen cacophonous wallop with each shriek of his discordant playing, the subject of the song becomes even more terrifying than Reed could have ever imagined. His electric viola creates similar amounts of chaos throughout ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’, lending its dark philosophical archetype on life and death to exert an eerie, unfathomable grace.
This particular reissue of the seminal 1967 album is the most rewarding yet, with pretty much any recording that was even remotely associated with the making of the LP being heaped up and included into a mammoth six-disc box set. The eleven classic tracks that made up the original release have been presented in stereo and mono format, digitally remastered for stunning effect. The stereo version is particularly impressive; the gentler, more lucid songs sound crisper and clearer, sparkling as if they have all been put through some kind of musical dishwasher. For instance, the compressed and poor quality recording of songs such as ‘Femme Fatale’, where Nico’s vocal peaks and distorts frequently, sound as though they have more space to breathe, more terrain to explore. On the other end of the spectrum, the grating, shuffling noise fusion of ‘European Son’ and ‘Heroin’ sound immensely chaotic, with the strange tone of Reed and Morrison’s guitar arpeggios becoming even more theatric, as if the band are playing in the very room that you are in.
Further additions include the entire ‘Chelsea Girls‘ album by Nico, a peculiar add-on that would no doubt reach out to any fans of the Velvet’s work, casual or otherwise; the famous Norman Dolph acetate recording that surfaced a few years ago at a flea market in New York, and various other gems that range from rehearsals at Warhol’s Factory studio to live recordings of album tracks.
The sheer scale of bonus material included will please even the most disgruntled Velvet Underground fanatics, with the glorious digital remastering bestowing a new life cycle on the songs for receptive future generations. It’s often been said that the roots of nearly all today’s indie music and modern rock and roll can be chronicled back to a certain Velvet Underground recording, sound or technique; and it’s hard to argue otherwise. Although Lou Reed wasn’t the most celebrated songwriter of his era, he was certainly among the most accomplished, and ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico‘ will forever be heralded as his best work. Somewhere, somehow, a band of eccentric misfits were rounded up by a pop culture enigma to produce music that was, in Reed’s words ‘an attempt to write the great American novel in a record album’, the result was utterly perplexing.
Even today it still stands as one of, if not the, most important release in pop history.
Great article, wow. Best writing I have seen on this site…
Fantastic article, from someone who obviously knows music culture and it’s history. ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ also happens to be one of my favourite songs ever. Keep the excellent writing coming Mr Hall….