The end came without fanfare a few weeks ago, in the form of a fax from Lou Reed’s wife and manager, Sylvia:
“Lou and John (Cale) could not see eye-to-eye on certain production issues. Lou feels he accomplished what he set out to do with the European shows, and was very pleased with their success. That being done, he intends to return to his solo work.”
Once again, the Velvet Underground-Reed, Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker-had come and gone before anyone had a chance to say, “Thanks.” Old tensions that had blown Reed and Cale apart in 1968 as they were revolutionizing rock resurfaced last summer when the reunited Velvets toured Europe to wide acclaim.
“There were many blowups,” says Cale, slumping into a living-room chair in his Greenwich Village townhouse. “There have been many. I’m sure there will be many more. …
“Now it’s a cooling out period,” adds the Welsh multi-instrumentalist, who fervently wanted the band to continue. “I think the fax machine should really be taken away from both Lou and me. We have shouted at each other as effectively as anyone over the fax machine.”
Reed declined to be interviewed for this report, but in previous interviews with the Tribune has acknowledged that tensions between him and Cale would make any long-term union unlikely. “I never said it wasn’t a volatile relationship,” he said, not without affection.
“When we’ve worked together, he never left me in the lurch,” Cale says. “We dragged each other into some interesting spaces. So there’s some kind of meeting of the minds and souls that’s very important and I don’t think it’ll ever go away. I read an article on Art Garfunkel where he said some of the problems (with Paul Simon) never get solved, but at least they enriched their lives in the process. And I think Lou and I both realize that.”
The mutual enrichment began in the mid-’60s, when the Velvets altered the course of popular music by blending rock, the avant-garde and brutally honest, yet poetic, lyrics about New York’s underbelly of junkies, pimps and drag queens. The band was met with hostility by the flower-power generation, and Cale quit after two blistering albums. Two more Velvets records would follow with Reed, Morrison and Tucker joined by Doug Yule, and though somewhat gentler in tone, they met with public indifference.
“We were the original alternative band,” Morrison says. “Not because we wanted to be, but because we were shunned into it.”
Now those four studio albums are rock cornerstones, a body of work as influential as the Beatles’, if not nearly as well known. “Only about a thousand people bought the Velvet Underground’s records,” Brian Eno once said, exaggerating only slightly, “but every one of them went on to form a band.”
Last summer, the band ahead of its time was suddenly the band of the hour. When rumors of a Velvets reunion began circulating, the organizers of the Lollapalooza festival-the premier alternative rock concert tour-asked them to headline. They demurred, of course. Rock’s first alternative band wasn’t about to become part of anyone’s bandwagon now.
The quartet did eventually tour Europe for a few weeks, playing sold-out shows to rapturous audiences and critical acclaim, and then opening a handful of stadium dates for U2. Now there’s a 23-song double CD, “The Velvet Underground Live MCMXCIII” (Sire), and 90-minute home video and laserdisc, “Velvet Redux Live MCMXCIII” (Warner Reprise), that demonstrate the tour was about something more than just nostalgia.
“I never thought the reaction would be how it was,” Cale says. “I thought we were asking for trouble-not by going back and performing, but by going back and performing the old stuff. But it worked. We can still kick butt. The chemistry hadn’t changed. It was always, `Climb inside this noise that we’re making.’ That’s what drove us. That happened the first time we rehearsed when we got back together last March. That was the test case, whether we could play together again.”
“Within three minutes, we were like, `Wow, this sounds like it used to be,’ ” adds Tucker, a mother of five who now lives in Douglas, Ga. “So many of those songs sound like they were recorded yesterday. If I had gone to see a group, I’d want to see them play the things I’m familiar with. I’d be ticked off if I went to see the Velvet Underground play and didn’t hear `Heroin.’ “
Unlike many “classic-rock” reunions, the Velvets had no past successes to exploit: the band never had any chart hits, was rarely heard on commercial radio and is perhaps most widely known for the peelable banana illustration by Andy Warhol on its first album cover rather than its music. It was on the stage where the Velvet revolution was fully realized, yet no live recordings from the Cale era have been officially released. If Reed stretched rock’s lyrical boundaries, it was Cale, with his extensive background in classical and avant-garde performance, who pushed the Velvets’ musical envelope.
“I was very excited when I met Lou because I was learning a lot from him about rock ‘n’ roll and about the street scene,” Cale recalls. “I always had a lot of fun improvising music, but I never met anyone who could improvise words and have them be as affecting as Lou could. That was a magic combination, the engaging point of literature and ideas. You could do anything with this, I thought.”
Over a year, on “boring Friday nights on Ludlow Street,” songs like “Venus in Furs” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” took shape, informed by the passing street scene.
“Lou and I were very competitive about risk situations, about how much danger we could actually walk into, create and actually handle without getting ourselves killed,” Cale says. “I never saw anyone who would stir up trouble just for the sake of stirring up trouble. I’d be thinking, `This is hairy in here,’ and then Lou would say something that was the worst thing you could imagine . . .”
“There were some pretty odd things going on; we knew some pretty odd people,” concurs Morrison, who with the band became part of Warhol’s notorious Factory scene of would-be stars, artists, hangers-on and misfits in Manhattan. “The music was all-absorbing and we couldn’t separate the musical activities from stuff that went on off-stage. It was all one continuum.”
It’s among the reasons the band was virtually black-listed for songs like “Heroin.” Although hardly an advertisement for drug use, the song was almost too real.
“Lou had the lyrics to `Heroin’ and two chords,” Morrison recalls. “It was the musical interpretation that was the trick-the viola, the dynamics. We were aware that this was a most unusual `drug song,’ if that’s what you want to call it. All the drug songs before then were sort of comic. This one was clinical, almost nauseating, an unabashed look at the realities of drug abuse.
“But I actually think of it more as a protest song. It says, `I just don’t care about any of it, and you’re better off. Because if I did take action, then the implications are dire.’ It’s a pretty general condemnation of everything. Some people say, `It’s just about a junkie.’ But why is he a junkie? What are his alternatives?”
In retrospect, it’s clear “Heroin” established Reed as Bob Dylan’s peer as a lyricist, while the ebb and flow of the arrangement and Cale’s deranged viola set the band’s music apart from prevailing trends: the California dreamin’ of the Mamas and Papas, the East Coast folk-rock of Dylan and the British Invasion’s rocked-up version of American blues and R&B. But at the time, it was only apparent that the Velvets didn’t fit in. In 1965, “Heroin” was met with a horrified silence at the band’s first gig, in a high school gymnasium.
“We were allowed to play three songs and that was the last,” Tucker recalls. “In each song something of mine broke. I had this horrible $50 drum set and I was very nervous that I would screw up. These weren’t guys out to have a little fun playing covers.”
In contrast to the musically advanced Cale, Tucker brought to the band an almost primitive singlemindedness. Her previous experience consisted of “drumming along to Rolling Stones records in my bedroom,” but her brother was an acquaintance of both Reed’s and Morrison’s at Syracuse University in the early ’60s and she was asked to join without an audition.
“I often thought, `Gee, I wish I could do a roll,’ but now I’m glad I couldn’t,” she says. “When we were around, there were so many bands with Ginger Bakers, smashing things and doing a roll at every opportunity. I knew I was different because I didn’t have a lot of cymbals, and I turned my bass drum on its side. I played standing up so I could get a good, deep sound. I always felt a drummer’s role was to keep everything anchored and not get in the way of the song and the lyrics.”
Tucker’s metronome precision, combined with the dueling guitars of Reed and Morrison and Cale’s versatility on bass, viola and organ, made for a sound that could accommodate everything from bittersweet reveries such as “Pale Blue Eyes” to the tortured dissonance of “Sister Ray.”
“The things we were trying, like most good ideas, seemed so perfectly obvious you wondered why everyone wasn’t doing it,” Morrison says. “We took considerable inspiration from serious artists, painters and composers. Andy was going to do his paintings no matter what happened. He was called a fraud and a faker every day of his life. But he kept going anyway.”
The tour last summer provided a degree of vindication, but the band was just starting to scratch the surface of its potential.
There was talk of a North American tour this fall and some dates were even tentatively plugged in, but first the band was to play an MTV “Unplugged” segment, a weird notion because the Velvets never before had played acoustically. A disagreement arose over who would produce the session. Then came Sylvia Reed’s fax, and the second coming of the Velvet Underground was over.
Some speculate that it was Reed’s way of extricating himself from the Velvets. After working more than 20 years to establish a solo career, Reed wasn’t about to devote a considerable amount of time to something he had abandoned in 1970. Now the possibilities suggested by “The Velvet Underground Live MCMXCIII” will remain just that.
In reflecting on the band’s pervasive influence on today’s rock, Cale said what made the Velvets great is the very thing that keeps blowing them apart.
“Whatever night we were playing, there was a tension there,” he says.
“It was a kind of theory of stubborness, and I think that’s what new bands pick up on from us. The more stubborn you are about a sound, the closer you are to having a style. If you insist on playing it a certain way, that was who you are. And we insisted on playing to the point of breaking equipment.” Or each other.
THE VELVETS ON DISC, THEN AND NOW
“The Velvet Underground and Nico” (1967 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)) is among the most astonishing debuts in rock history, and provides a blueprint of the band’s enormous scope, encompassing everything from brutal noise experiments (“The Black Angel’s Death Song”) to glistening, though still disturbing, pop (“Sunday Morning”).
“White Light/White Heat” (1968 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)) is, by comparison, a one-dimensional freight train. Still one of the most abrasive records ever made, it contains the 17-minute nightmare/masterpiece “Sister Ray.”
Cale’s departure may have had something to do with the mellower sound of “The Velvet Underground” (1969 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)), but the album contains some of Reed’s strongest melodies and most redemptive lyrics.
Although “Loaded” (1970 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2) is the most conventional of the band’s studio records, it contains the classic “Sweet Jane” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
“1969 Velvet Underground Live” (1974 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)) is an essential two-disc document of the post-Cale band on stage, anchored by a mesmerizing “What Goes On,” “Ocean” and “Heroin,” but “Live at Max’s Kansas City” (1972 (STAR)) is dispirited.
“VU” (1985 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR)) contains a batch of fine previously unreleased studio material, and “Another View” (1986 (STAR)(STAR) 1/2) rounds up the leftovers.
“The Velvet Underground Live MCMXCIII” (1993 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2) and the “Velvet Redux Live MCMXCIII” video (1993 (STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2) are the first official live recordings of the Velvets with Cale, whose dry singing and inspired, subversive playing on viola and piano are crucial ingredients.
Reed underlines his deadpan voice with knotted, inventive guitar-playing, and Tucker and Morrison are an implacably pitiless rhythm section.
Recorded only two weeks into last summer’s European tour, these discs find the quartet still sounding a bit tentative.
But the 15-minute “Mr. Rain,” the closing stampede of “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Reed’s scorched-earth guitar on “I Heard Her Call My Name” and Cale’s manic piano on “I’m Waiting for the Man” are glorious, while the closing “Coyote,” the only new song, hints at the metaphysical poignance and dread of latter-day Dylan.
