Artists Condensed: The Velvet Underground

Be the First to Comment!
Submitted by msarko on 10/27/09 10:10pm
in

 

As far as I see it, there are three kinds of notable pop musicians. Some are pop stars who exist to sell large quantities of recordings and play massive shows, of whom everyone from Britney Spears to Led Zeppelin are examples. Then there are artists, those musicians who have enough fans to make a career of it but will never, ever fill a stadium. This includes practically everyone with a record contract and no need for a day job. Then, in the most sparsely populated corner of the business, are the pioneers. These are musicians who practically nobody liked when they were actually recording but just so happened to influence whole genres of pop in the future. If any one band fits this distinction, it's The Velvet Underground. Listening to the VU's albums is like witnessing blues giving birth to punk and alternative rock. The truth is that this extremely talented band leaned way too heavily on the faux-country roots that were the bread and butter of any number of their musical contemporaries, but when they broke out they really did something new.

Formed around 1965 in New York, The Velvet Underground was some kind of wandering art project care of Lou Reed and John Cale. Then they started hanging out with Andy Warhol, who was their acting manager for a short time and who introduced them to a German model named Nico. Together they recorded their first album, simply titled The Velvet Underground and Nico. The album is, perhaps more so than any other in the band's catalog, alternately arty and catchy. "Sunday Morning" is as perfect a laid-back pop track as I've ever heard, but the psychedelic hypnotism of the classic "Venus in Furs" has yet to be properly replicated by another artist.

The Velvet Underground's follow-up album White Light/White Heat is a much shorter, much more rocky record. In it you can hear the beginnings of punk rock, especially on the dirtiest of the dirty blues tracks "Sister Ray". Still, the noise and grit fell on the blues side of the equation more than anything. It's like listening to a jam band on a fritzy shortwave radio. The band still wallowed in its strangeness, like the short story cum acid rock track "The Gift".

The band's eponymous third album was effectively a glossy reboot of the skuzzy art-rockers of their Warhol years. The Velvet Underground is so much cleaner and clearer than the previous two albums, but also the most melancholy. At this point John Cale was out of the band and so too were his John Cage inspired experiments in abrasive sound. Rock revisionists usually want to call the Cale/Reed conflict nastier than it really was. The truth is that they were both musicians poised on the brink of solo careers and The Velvet Underground was never really a port of call for anybody.

In 1969 the band was on a promotional tour for their third album and they spent a little time in the studio recording more material. A lot of that stuff didn't get released for over a decade and even then VU seems a little incomplete. The main curiosity on that sorta-album is "Andy's Chest", a snarky track that sounds like Violent Femmes or a good half of all alterna-rock from the better part of the 90's.

  • Who Loves the Sun
  • Sweet Jane
  • Rock & Roll
  • New Age
  • I Found a Reason
  • Oh! Sweet Nuthin'
  • Ride into the Sun
  • Ocean

Chances are, if you've heard The Velvet Underground you've heard Loaded. It's an album full of songs that would have been singles if dispersed over the course of thirty or so years. It's pure pop, but it's amazing, self-conscious pop, like a reconciliation between postmodernism and mainstream culture. By the time it came out, Loaded wasn't quite poised to be influential but that doesn't mean it's not a great album.

 

Soon after Loaded hit the shelves and radio waves, The Velvet Underground basically fell apart. Lou Reed left to start his successful solo career, John Cale was long gone and even Nico had become a minor pop icon in her own right. The three of them played a few concerts together in 1972 while the remaining members of the VU tried to pretend they were still a band. The album Squeeze was credited to The Velvet Underground, but it was by all accounts a solo album by guitarist Doug Yule and it's often not even mentioned in the overall canon. Nico died in 1988, while Reed and Cale have occasionally worked together over the years. The Velvet Underground was basically an experiment that yielded some impressive results, but still just an experiment.