The 68 songs contained in the Velvet Underground boxed set “Peel Slowly and See” (Polydor) are much more than snapshots from a dimly remembered past, portraits of a band that barely anybody knew while it existed.
They represent a blueprint for what rock would become after the Velvet Underground imploded in 1970, and they persuasively argue that the Velvets–Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen “Moe” Tucker and, later, Doug Yule–are the most influential rock band of all time.
An absurd claim? Certainly it can be argued that bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have exerted a profound influence not just on rock music, but also on the society that has emerged around it. These twin giants, along with (to a lesser extent) the Who, the Doors, the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, have become the bands by which Baby Boomers remember their coming of age. They aren’t just rock groups, but cultural touchstones.
The Velvets, on the other hand, barely made a dent on the public consciousness; their music was never played on commercial radio and their records were poorly distributed by an indifferent record label. When the band toured, it played to a small but enthusiastic group of loyalists around the country, welcomed in cities like Chicago, Cleveland and Boston, but largely viewed as a scourge by the mainstream industry.
“I hope you jerks bomb,” famed promoter Bill Graham told the group as it took the stage one night on the West Coast. The hostility the Velvets provoked almost as a matter of daily routine had to do with many things:
– The band had a “theory of stubbornness,” Cale says, that extended beyond the single-mindedness of its music-making and into how it interacted with the entire music industry, from radio stations and record companies to anyone else who might manipulate them, right down to hapless studio technicians.
During the making of the “White Light/White Heat” album in 1967, the studio engineer abandoned the controls because the band insisted on pushing all of its instruments into the “red,” or distortion, range for every minute of the recording.
– The Velvets’ songs, written by Lou Reed, invariably dealt with subjects that were well beyond the scope of 1960s pop and rock, even the music of the Beatles and Stones. If Bob Dylan took the rock lyric into the realm of the surreal, Reed immersed it in the real, writing with extraordinary, sometimes nauseating, accuracy about the street characters in his native New York: hookers, pimps, junkies, drug dealers, transvestites, sadomasochists. The style was consciously literary in the tradition of novelists such as Raymond Chandler, William Burroughs and Nelson Algren–rather than based on the teen angst that was the stuff of most rock ‘n’ roll hits.
– As a musical entity, the Velvets didn’t just push the accepted boundaries, they shattered them. “It felt like a B-52 was in the room,” says Cale of the band’s experiments with feedback, strange tunings and non-rock instrumentation, such as the viola, in early rehearsal sessions in lower Manhattan. “That’s when we knew we had something that no one else did.”
Everything about the Velvet Underground was an affront to prevailing trends: Their harsh, unsentimental songs cut against the grain of the flower-power era while their experiments with noise and dissonance called into question the very notion of what music is.
Initially the band won attention because of its association with maverick artist Andy Warhol, who designed the Velvets’ first album cover (a highly suggestive image of a yellow banana with a pink interior) and helped put together its multimedia debut tour, dubbed the Floating Plastic Inevitable. The response to the Velvets’ blitz outside New York was overwhelmingly negative. The influential West Coast critic Ralph J. Gleason dismissed the Velvets as representing all that was evil about their hometown.
In a manner of speaking, the band’s career was a slow suicide. After severing its ties with Warhol, the band essentially was abandoned by its record label and left to create in a void of public indifference. The final breakup in 1970, was barely acknowledged by the outside world, much less mourned. It wasn’t until Reed had a hit with “Walk on the Wild Side” as a solo act in 1973 that his former band began receiving belated recognition.
But to a later generation of bands, many of them directly inspired by the Velvets, the very qualities that made the Velvets pariahs in the ’60s–the obsessively self-contained, do-it-yourself record-making and touring; the utter disregard for fashion; the disdainful, distrusting attitude–made them heroes a decade later.
Significantly, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, whose band set out to expose rock as a bloated, self-satisfied fraud in the late ’70s, singled out Reed as one of the few geezers from the ’60s who had anything to say to Rotten’s generation. Even today, says Wayne Coyne of the wiggy Oklahoma band the Flaming Lips, the Velvets’ records remain relevant.
“Hearing the Dream Syndicate in the early ’80s made what the Velvets were doing click,” Coyne says. “I’m not a history buff, but what makes a lot of ideas important is their context. The Velvets never sounded to me like a ’60s band.”
Indeed, in the first great upheaval of punk and postpunk bands in the late ’70s and early ’80s, myriad bands with dissimilar backgrounds–from Bauhaus, the Psychedelic Furs and Joy Division to REM, Sonic Youth and Talking Heads–borrowed and retooled aspects of the Velvets’ sound, from the shattering dissonance of “Sister Ray” and anthemic power of “Sweet Jane” to the parched beauty of “Pale Blue Eyes” and the freight-train-to-your-skull chug of “I’m Waiting for the Man.”
The legacy continues today with acts from such widely varying strata as U2, Luna and Suzanne Vega hearing their muse in the Velvets’ staggeringly diverse repertoire. The rise of alternative rock as a mainstream music can be seen as the Velvet Underground’s crowning legacy, much more so than the Beatles’ or the Stones’.
It’s there for the hearing on “Peel Slowly and See.” All four of the band’s studio records are presented in their entirety, as well as live performances, studio outtakes and even a rehearsal tape from 1965 that reveals the Velvets’ pioneering sound in its spartan infancy.
In listening to this music again, one is struck by the immediacy of Reed’s songwriting, how deftly he manipulated a handful of chords and how utterly unsentimental and unsparing were his lyrics.
As a guitar player, Reed drew inspiration from sonic innovators in jazz, such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. This side of him was drawn out further by Cale, whose viola and organ playing, steeped in classical and avant-garde music, informed the band’s first two albums. When Cale and Reed had a falling out in 1968 and Cale left the band, Morrison emerged as Reed’s foil, creating a tight, two-guitar sound in which Reed’s chaotic impulses fed off Morrison’s terse, classically rooted technique.
Throughout the band’s history, Tucker’s precise drumming was a constant, deep, thumping tone achieved by turning the bass drum on its side and whacking it with mallets. Unlike virtually every rock drummer before or since, Tucker eschewed the snare drum and would go minutes at a time without smashing a cymbal. “I didn’t really play the drums,” Tucker now says of her self-effacing style, “I played the song.”
And the songs hold up, as “Peel Slowly and See” makes clear. The music, which at its most extreme sounded dissonant and terrifying, has aged better than that of many of the Velvets’ peers, perhaps because it’s now clear that the band never used these devices gratuitously. The band’s sonic extremes, from the spare, folkish intimacy of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” to the hellish throb of “European Son,” matched the content. More than just executing Reed’s songs, the Velvets arranged them in brilliant ways, merging traditional chords and melodies worthy of a good Long Island garage band with drones, dissonance and feedback.
Morrison, who died in late August of lymphoma only a month before the boxed set was released, in many ways had the surest grasp of the band’s place in history: “We were the original alternative band,” he said, “not because we wanted to be, but because we were shunned into it. For us there was no alternative.”
