The Velvet Underground: One Of The Most Unique And Underappreciated Bands Of The 60s | Amplified

there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download veli today [Music] [Music] we're sponsoring the new band it's called the velvet underground [Music] [Music] and what they demonstrated so clearly was that something like rock music which was looked down upon and which was reviled or just put off as being insubstantial could be elevated to something poetic the velvet underground one of the most unique bands of the 1960s even though the power and influence of their music has been widely acknowledged they were all but ignored within their own time this is the story of their music and the band who made it [Music] around [Music] the velvet underground formed in new york during 1964 when john kale a classically trained musician from wales met lou reed who was currently working as a staff songwriter for pickwick records the pair quickly recruited sterling morrison on guitar and bass and mo tucker on drums taking their name from michael lee's said a masochistic novel the band quickly attracted the attention of eccentric new york-based artist andy warhol warhol instantly became both a benefactor and an advocate for the group we're sponsoring a new band it's called the velvet underground and uh since i don't really believe in painting anymore i thought it would be a nice way of combining uh and we have a chance to combine music and and art and uh films all together and we're still working on that and and uh well the whole thing is being auditioned tomorrow at nine o'clock and the fourth title might be very glamorous as well as providing the group with a stage on which to perform warhol also controversially introduced a second singer to the band nico a beautiful hungarian shantous had recently arrived in new york from london where she recorded the dylan song i'll keep it with mine on warhol's insistence she took lead vocals on several of the velvet underground songs you got to have a beautiful girl in it and his nico was the beautiful girl you know so this whole thing of forcing that on the group and wedging it in with shoe horns and chisels and spikes it came about and it worked but like lou had to be just about begged by andy to do it and so when we performed you know it was developed underground in nico andy introduced her to us and i thought i thought that the songs she did sing were perfect but we never intended that now it's the velvet underground and nico that it was just that was in our minds of a temporary thing warhol and his entourage quickly developed what became known as the exploding plastic inevitable a multimedia show featuring a live performance from the band [Music] the shows really in fact very often on stage i would think man i'd like to be out there and seeing this it must be really interesting [Music] [Applause] [Music] despite warhol's promotional efforts the band was still no closer to being signed so while still performing nightly with the exploding plastic inevitable the group made the unusual decision to record an album before securing a record contract to facilitate the album's production warhol approached normandolf who is currently working for columbia records i got involved with the velvet underground via warhol because i was working for columbia uh and asked me if i knew how to get such a thing done and i was working for the custom manufacturing division of columbia where they made records for atlantic and warner's and one of the accounts that i handled was scepter they had a studio office on 54th street the guy that was their chief engineer was a guy named john licotta he was a journeyman engineer for scepter and would record whatever they had on the books they'd record gospel in the morning and deal on warwick in the afternoon and marv johnson at night and they they had a deal with with scepter that anytime the studio wasn't booked he could sell himself in the studio to outside clients and and pocket the doe the only restriction was he had to work around the stuff that scepter was doing ordinarily and that was their perk to him and so we we made an arrangement i believe that the budget was 600 bucks which was essentially i believe to be two long days of recording two or three the whole thing took place in my best recollection over parts of four days in one week i remember being in the studio the first time yeah i was very excited it was so different i've never obviously done anything like that john and lou had but that was totally new to me and it was very exciting to be making a record and it was fun but it was also nerve-wracking we only had eight hours so none of us wanted to mess it up or have to do it again or whatever because we just didn't have the time for it in the years since the album was recorded some confusion has grown up around andy warhol's precise role in the records production andy didn't play any role in the first record not a technical role he was always a cheerleader sort of but which was great to have but no he he didn't play any role the musical decisions i would say were made in the in the main by john kale and sterling in terms of the balance uh or or feel-wise in nature i would give them credit for i didn't have a last word on anything except to listen for things that sounded like true mistakes and somebody knocked over a a music stand or where you'd hear something that wasn't mixed right that you just clearly couldn't handle and look at john he said yeah let's start it over and we'd break the take down and start the thing over from the head so in most of those songs there is only one surviving take there may be some some scraps but uh they were done and and then people come in and listen to it and they say either let's do it over from the top or let's buy it and but they were mostly done in in one complete shot takes i think it affected the process or the result on favorably because we didn't have time for nonsense we didn't have time to overdub a solo for instance or things like and i don't think even in those days you had four tracks or two or something so with the record complete dolph took a copy of the album and pitched it to his current employers at columbia records at the end of the at the session they did a mono mix and i took that tape to columbia where we had an acetate cut and that acetate was presented to colombia's a r department i said look there's a new group sponsored by andy warhol uh radical new sound making all kinds of waves in uh in the east village and is this something columbia's in our department want to sign on for and i got the acetate back in about 48 hours with a with a memo saying there's no way in the world any sane person would buy or want to listen or put anything behind this record i i passed it back to warhol and morrissey and it's only about a year or later does it surface on mgm verve now one thing it can never fully be known i guess lurie may be able to shed some light on it but tom wilson the guy who was the spearhead of it at mgm verve had worked for colombia at the time it was shown to colombia now i don't know whether his ears ever heard it at columbia and had an opinion on it or not tom wilson is is a very significant figure on the entire rock scene in the mid 60s i mean here is somebody who's whose real reputation within pop circles of course is as the producer of bob dylan who after all is the cutting edge figure at that point when they first came into contact he he was still doing freelance work for colombia so the story goes essentially he told them no wait i'm going to mgm to verve come with me but what he would have had to work with in terms of the new york sessions what they'd produced wilson seems to have pretty good instincts about what needed to be re-cut they redid three songs they did waiting for the man again they did heroin and they did venus and furs when they finished wilson decided that the record wasn't strong enough and he wanted a single and so that's when he he asked them to write a single specifically for nico and um that would be sunday morning sunday morning was released as a single in december 1966 however it was not to feature nico on lead vocals as tom wilson had wished [Music] it's just a restless feeling by my side [Music] it's just a wasted year so close behind [Music] [Music] it's nothing at all sort of a hallmark of lou's relations with nico at that point that he wrote the song and then when they got into the studio refused to let niko sing it you know when they got there luke sang it in a voice that was so feminine it out you know it was more feminine than nico could possibly have done i think that may have been intentional on his part to pretty it up and say you know we don't need this girl singing i can do it myself so it was it was an attempt really to get a single because they wanted to be successful it's not one of these things where we want to die in obscurity we want to be played on the radio we want people to buy our records so let's give them something that is good and we love um but it is accessible and sunday morning is a beautiful beautiful recording people forget that while the velvets were dark there has a certain heroin shake about them they were certainly decadent up to a point in a very streetwise manner they did have songs like sunday morning which had a very happy happy joy joy pop theme to it the thematics of the velvet underground weren't just trying to sort of push the envelope they also realized that sometimes caressing the envelope could be even more effective [Music] although the velvet underground finished recording in may 1966 due to a variety of legal problems the record was not released until 1967. this delay was further compounded by the record's exceptionally complicated sleeve design which today has become as iconic as the music itself i worked on the first album cover but we did it as a group at the factory andy paul gerard you know we all contributed different images and what have you and if you look on the credits on the velvet underground and nico album i'm listed as billy linek which is who i was in the avant-garde art world before i became billy name of factory fame one of the truly radical things that the album does everyone forgets if you open up the original album it's got all these quotes about the band the only thing is eighty percent of them are really really nasty they hate the band and the band rather than actually burying these attacks on them make them part of the album cover which is an extraordinary radical gesture the album cover for the velvet underground and nico is fun it's a fun record and that's not to say that it wasn't uh calculated because it's a banana what does it look like it looks like a penis right it's a big penis on a record and then the the addition of the the temptation to want to peel this off it's like oh what is underneath and you're expecting something really nasty and dirty and you know you know what it is it's a pink banana underneath right gotcha the velvet underground in nico was released in march 1967 and although the record was famously ignored in its own time it has since gone on to become recognized as one of the most innovative and unique recordings in modern music the velvet underground and nico is is one of those literally handful of albums that you don't really see the precedence for there are literally a handful in rock music where you you put the album on and you don't see where what leads up to it there is nothing that says oh and the next step is the velvet underground and nico and no matter how radical something may sound on first listening most of the time almost all of the time you're going ah yeah they've combined beef art with the mc5 or you know that it's some kind of melange of things that have come before now of course no music is completely new but i dare anybody to say that they heard venus infers on velvet underground and nico and went ah i can hear that's a bit of john cage taken with lamont young mixed in with a little no it's just from nowhere shiny shiny shiny [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and cure his heart i remember the first time i heard venus in first and it was the first time i heard the banana album and the first couple of tracks i was with a couple of friends listening to it and their parents based on an old hi-fi with legs on it really at home and i popped this record on i just purchased it and as we're all talking i'm sort of listening to it in the background then i hear a sunday morning i'm like it sounds like a pop song and i kind of i'm sort of listening to the record and listening to them and i'm and i'm sort of ignoring it until venus inverse comes on and then suddenly everything else is shut out venus infers is the breakthrough and i don't just mean in terms of the velvet negra i mean in terms of rock music um you know that it it probably is the most important rock song since heartbreak hotel you know it it because it essentially kicks open the door it says you don't have to use the same three instruments you don't have to talk about the same subject matters and the fact that it would pick something as relatively dangerous as osaka massax s m novel from the 19th century as a subject to do that in a pop song you know it's such an unimaginably radical gesture [Music] a thousand dreams [Music] [Applause] [Music] before joining the velvet underground john kale had worked exclusively within the classical avant-garde influenced by the music of john cage and lamont young kale had brought these more experimental elements with him to his new band [Music] they had this underlying avant-garde aesthetic that came from cage and lamont young and kale being part of that mindset of the the long tone that long tone uh was the kale gift to the velvet underground that haunting undertone the underground town that sound was not a sound that i'd ever heard or that anybody had that young you know which it's more than a it's an electrified viola but once you know that's what it is but otherwise it could be in you know doom and carnate as far as the sound goes john was you know very inventive and and well let's do that and let me try this and i think he had more i think more to do with um the songs becoming what they were um now of course lou wrote them so obviously he had a lot to do with it too but i think you know the final product i think had a lot a lot more to do with john than people maybe realize i remember being on the other side of the glass you say to myself my god i am seeing exactly what it would be like if i were injecting so the control room wasn't very large it was just john and i and warhol came in from time to time it was a transfixing experience because i believe the other musicians also were in the control room and they had heard it 100 times but it was it was something [Music] i don't know just where i'm going [Music] but i am gonna try for the kingdom if i can cause it makes me feel like i'm a man when i [Music] that i just don't know and i guess that i just don't know he's attempting to communicate an experience that is almost impossible to communicate to somebody who's never taken heroin using the power of language now of course if you can add the power of music on top of that [Music] you really do have something he puts these two chords together in a way that is deceptively simple but he said himself that if you listen to the song which pretty much labeled the velvets as a drug band right out of the gate it's not a pro heroine song by any stretch of the imagination it's it's in a sense more about uh transcendence and surrender [Music] and it doesn't really glorify the dope uh experience but what it does is it presents it in a thematic way very accurately deceptively seductive in the start [Music] beautiful and then the song starts to build in a way sterling had said that it's inevitable that as the song builds that you're singing it faster and playing it faster and it starts this train that you can't get off and much like the drug experience by the time you realize you're on it it's too late to get off [Music] [Applause] [Music] no one maybe ever even notices this but right in the middle of it the drums stop and the reason is because no one ever thinks about the drummer they're all worried about what's the guitar sound like and stuff and nobody's thinking about the drama well as soon as it got loud and fast i couldn't hear anything i couldn't hear anybody so i stopped assuming well they'll stop too and say what's the matter mo but nobody stopped and then you know so i came back in and to this that just i loved that song and when we i loved playing it and having that on the record just kills me the interesting thing about heroin is that it is quite clear when you read the lyrics that it is a poem so this this is something that even if we didn't have reid's first-hand account you would have to imagine was something he wrote as a piece of poetry and that then conceived of a way of performing of all the the lyricists of the 60s if you go back and listen to all i mean i think that the two that stand out are bob dylan and lou reed the ones that are just doing something head and shoulders above what everyone else was writing nobody at the time that reed started as a rock lyricist could fail to be influenced by dylan the difference is essentially um one of angle of attack because reed wants to present a world of brutality and wants to suggest that there is something more ethereal greater you know more spiritual somewhere around the edges of what is a very brutal real world wish that i'd sail the darkened seas on a great big clipper ship going from this land here to that put on a sailor's suit and cab he's so straightforward and he's so simple he doesn't waste any words every word that he uses has an effect it's got it's got a purpose for being there he's a great writer he's not just a great songwriter away from the big cities where a man cannot be free of all of the evil in this town and of himself and those around oh and i guess i just don't know oh and i guess that i just don't know [Music] while living in an apartment on ludlow street a very early incarnation of the band demoed several key tracks in the summer of 1965. among them was a rather different version of i'm waiting for the man but unlike heroin which on those ludlow street demos sounds exactly like the song we all know and love um lose um enamel mint with uh bob dylan probably reached its peak at the point that they were recording this and it sounds for for the whole world like bob dylan doing lead belly so the um vibe if i can sort of give it a shot is something more like well i'm waiting for my man he actually is doing his most convincing lou i'm [Music] even sounds like dylan [Music] um whereas the actual realized version of the song you know lou did have a mastery of integrating his lyrical and subject matter along with kale's um you know cooperation into achieving a sound a rhythmic sound and a pulse with the instruments that reflected that lyrical matter and with uh waiting for the man it's a train and it is definitely you know heading [Music] waiting uptown my man 26 in my hand up [Music] the image is brilliant it's a train ride it's a subway ride and the song does sound like you're on a subway train lou and john used to bust on street corners in harlem with that song and you can hear you can hear just a couple of kids with guitars playing it so when you hear it on the record as a finished product it's like what is this this is so much energy there's so much electricity to it and i think that really has to do with maureen's drumming propelling that song mo tucker like uh tommy or daily tommy ramon in in the ramones 10 years later was an essentially untrained drummer i mean she wasn't i mean i used to think that she had never played at all that turns out not to be true but she was not a full-time drummer with a lot of chops and like tommy or deli was forced to use her brain to do simple things that were effective and that was a crucial part of the velvet underground groove i think the whole band adjusted to her notion of what time was and it made that band sound radically different when we first played together we did a lot of um improvising and just playing a kit just didn't fit i didn't think i also i was probably trying to be a little african that sound you know a deeper sound i didn't want high pitched sounds you know i was the rhythm section and and i always i always hate in songs where the drum stops because now the drummer's banging on the cymbals or i hate that to me it's you know that the drums should be throughout the song um [Music] and i felt like it was my job me and sterl basically to keep for instance it would just be noise if there's no rhythm under there it's just noise moe was a great drummer in a minimalist limited auto didactic way that i think changed musical history i think she is the sword i mean she's where the punk notion of how the beat works begins i know i specifically remember the the nico tunes especially all tomorrow's parties it was it was hypnotic because i was as close to her as i am to you now except there was a glass wall between us right but and and she is mesmerizing with that accent and the this absolute detachment of of her persona and what she's projecting against the actual words that you're hearing her sing which are really quite intense and that that well i don't know juxtaposition between the way she looked and came across and the way she sounded there was no place to fit that it was without a precedent [Music] and what caused [Music] [Applause] [Music] parties [Music] where will she go what shall she do when midnight [Music] she [Music] to me it seems to be like the most perfectly crafted of the velvet underground songs because it seems like everyone does what they're supposed to do you've got um the beautiful um beautiful guitar lines by lou reed throughout they're they're edgy and they're rough but they they take that song to places that you would never think of and then you've got john kale's piano in that which is almost um it's elegant it's it's you know people think of the band as being very noisy and very harsh but i think there's a very there's very uh great deal of elegance to it and especially in that song and then nico brings the whole thing together with this um unexpected european feel to it her voice she's got the accent she's got the that great tone that great germanic tone her voice in a way had a mariam faithful feel and also marlena dietrich timber so it was 1930's decadent german cavalry combined with the 1960's decadent british rock and pop scene perfect and it worked magnificently on something like all tomorrow's parties because it was a bringing together of two you could almost hear the bringing together of two giant talents the louis john kale morin tucker end and knicker on the other side neither of them really knew what they could bring out from the other but were prepared to give it a go despite the album's cult status today on its release it was all but ignored and barely managed to chart at all after the release the velvet underground left the direct management of andy warhol they also stopped performing with nico although both reed and kale would contribute heavily to her first solo album in the summer of 1967 the band came under the management of steve cesnik and began to appear live again however the group made the strange decision to boycott performing in new york instead they began to play the clubs in several east coast cities in particular the boston tea party okay this is the building where the tea party uh was it's on the south end of boston um on a street called berkeley the building was built back in uh you know the 1870s it was originally a church then it became a synagogue a few other things the sound in the room was really fantastic i think that was one of the things that really just distinguished it a lot of the bands that played here would always say like they really loved playing here and the velvets just sounded fantastic here and this is a place they played a lot because it was during that period from 67 which just opened in january 67 through 1970 when they didn't play in new york at all you have to remember the tea party audience at the time was not like say the fillmore which is you know sort of very hippie or for that matter like the dom in new york which is very new york hip boston in a lot of ways was a very kind of backwater town so you had a lot of people going to these dance concerts we called them three bucks get in there and you know dance your butt off all night so the velvets were just a great dance band so you had a lot of like local blue collar kids who just kind of lived in the neighborhood you got students from harvard and bu and who would come over there you get an occasional professor wondering you could just tell and they always brought up a few you know people from new york but it rapidly became a kind of scene where they really settled in and for whatever reason and i think it was because it was just such a great band to listen to and dance to that people in boston just adopted them and that you know ranges from harvard you know graduate students to uh you know tough kids from the neighborhood and that really was the start of their i guess we could call it almost residency because when i became the manager i just started booking them really regularly [Music] at the end of the summer of 1967 the group went back into the studio to record their second album white light white heat the record was released in january 1968 and again failed to become a commercial success on first inspection the album does not boast such a flamboyant sleeve design as its predecessor however the record's cover is in a more subtle way equally as innovative the cover which is uh a black on black of a skull and crossbones tattoo there's black skull and crossbones on a shiny black background that came about because uh when they were going to do the second album lou came to me and said billy i want you to do the cover for the second album for the next album so i said lou you know rather than me trying to come up with a design image why don't i let you look through my all my negative file and you select something and we'll use that uh for the cover image so what he selected was an image from one of um warhol's movies called bike boy with this stud hustler that we we i don't know if we picked him up in times square where we got him his name was joe spencer he was a neat guy but anyway he had that tattoo on his upper bicep forearm and lou spotted it in one of the frames from one of the films from one of the stills i had made on his arm he was like standing in a doorway uh with his co-star and and who brought this negative strip to me and says i want that for the album cover and i said you mean this picture he said no the tattoo on the guy's arm which in a 35 millimeter black and white frame is like this teeny little thing you know and so i really had to like enlarge it enormously so it got totally grainy but it was cool you know it was it was funky looking like that so we used that and i said well let's do it in black on black you know and it became that great famous album cover some people consider white light white heat to be the band in its purest form there's no niko there's no andy warhol there's no gimmicks it's a black album cover there's nothing to peel nothing to goof around with and the music on there is very dense it's what the band wanted to do it was hard and it was fast so as far as that record being the essence of the velvet underground i can see that and i can also see it as being a major major influence on people who heard it then who would then influence the people who would become punks white light white heat is an absolutely great track it's one of the i mean it's a pure rock and roll classic one of the and another another record that really um presages the whole uh uh punk upheaval of the middle 70s [Music] oh [Music] [Music] is [Music] when the velvets are cited as a major punk influence i really don't think that you can go back to development underground in nico for that you might be able to for for a few tracks but i think the real punk attitude comes from white light white heat [Music] i think speed was the the drug of choice i seem to remember sterling telling me a story of of of the night of the white house or the day of the white house she had been up all night doing speed and then the sun came up and when there was a blazing snow storm and they walked out and all of a sudden it was just like white everywhere i remember when they brought the master in one day they came lou came to the factory had the master so we went over to his loft to listen to it you know and he wanted me what do you think this part and listen to this part you know and with the sister sister ray was like we were all just flipping out as we heard it you know it came over so cool [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] who's busy [Music] [Music] i love sister i i loved playing it and i when i listen to the album i still get chills i just absolutely love it it's really the fact that sister ray is the centerpiece of that particular album that it overwhelms everything else that that is contained around it um you know it's such a radical statement in in itself we're going to turn everything up as loud as possible i don't care if i've got more effects than you i'm going to use all of them it's not i'm not concerned about the mix it's going to be as loud as i can possibly get it and you better keep up with me and you can feel that the way they play off of each other you can you can hear the interplay between the organ and the guitars and you can you can you i mean luckily you've got maureen keeping everything down and keeping everything sort of um where it should be so that this thing just doesn't disintegrate into a million parts um so it's a very um it's it's a very telling sort of a track because it does sort of illustrate what was happening within the band and what was to come by the time of the recording of white light white heat reid and kale's relationship had begun to disintegrate and eight months after the release of the album john kale played his final gig with the band john and lori was so strongly willful and no one can draw tell the other one what to do or and nobody can tell either one of them what to do and the whole thing was that they couldn't have been driven like two musical heads there because in the first place their musical heads were in different places but the way those two different places came together in performance was great but when you get to decision making the two different heads didn't come together so john and lou were always like this conflicting thing going on well when john left it was really sad i mean you know i felt really bad um and of course this was going to really influence the music because john's a lunatic but um you know i think we became a little more a little more normal which was fine it was good music good songs was never the same though it was never the same it was good stuff a lot of good songs but just the lunacy factor was gone as witness when john was gone and we'd played the same song it wasn't quite the same there was definitely a piece that was removed from the band that would would not ever be replaced i don't know how you could ever do that where where else would you find a viola playing welshman who was an avant-garde student you know i think it's kind of a tall order to fill but um but once he was gone you lost the drone you lost the the screeching and a lot of the menace that uh that you can you can hear in the first two records um but you also gained uh i i think the band gained something too they were able to open up a bit more i think it was inevitable for john to leave i don't think it could have it could have continued with him and that's the feel that you get on white light white heat is just sort of now it's now or never and as it turns out it was never however the band still had performances booked and so needed to replace kale quickly a multi-instrumentalist from boston doug ewell had befriended the group and quickly became the obvious choice although another more abstract reason would secure his place within the band blue was into the zodiac he was into mysticism and things like that and one of the factors that brought doug eulen to the band instead of another bass player or a singer was the fact that he was a pisces and blue was a pisces and sterling was a virgo and moe is a virgo so to have that balance that that astrological balance meant a lot to them the band was pisces pisces virgo virgo and astrology was all the rage and um so they called me up and uh on a thursday i think it was and asked me if i wanted to join a band he said can you come down right away to new york i said okay dick chandler was just leaving literally to drive to new york so i went and got my stuff together and went down and got in his van volkswagen and we drew which didn't have heat and we drove down this was like october drove down to new york and i met steve and lou at maxis kansas city and as i recall sterling was there too sat we talked this is the deal i said great they said the only catches would you mind playing bass and i said no that's fine so i went home with lou i think it stayed in his loft and we started learning songs and played lacov that fri that friday and saturday it's interesting the first gig that they played at the tea party minus john was on december 12 1968. and the very first tune they play is heroin which is really pretty daring because that is probably the song most associated with john the viola et cetera et cetera they came right out there and played it and bang it was like fantastic with kale their live performances were genuinely avant-garde avant-garde to the point where they must have lost 90 percent of their audience when doug was brought into the band essentially the focus of the band tightened and they could concentrate on what actually were their strengths their real true strengths as a live band little over a month after joining the group doug ewell found himself entering ttng studios on sunset boulevard to record the velvet underground's third studio album i didn't know we were gonna do an album uh we were playing in la and steve said uh you know with the change of plans we're gonna stay over an extra week and do an album and uh so essentially all those songs were already being played because the album itself when it was recorded was done basically as a live album um we all four of us played together to for the tracks um and then we went back and overdubbed the vocals and uh any solos instrumental stuff like that it seemed um to just kind of flow just kind of happened they were all songs we were playing live and it was we didn't you know set out to um you know say well this is what we want to do uh this is what we want to achieve we want to do the you know approach it this way we just said uh what songs you want to do let's do you know and lou said let's do this let's do this let's do this and so we just you know it just it was very organic and i think one of the reasons it sounds it has that particular sound is that it was just pulled out of the band while it wasn't touring you know and so it was there wasn't a lot of time to overthink it it was just play you know just do it [Music] oh [Music] the recording of what goes on with it with its brilliant uh dual guitar solo where the guitar ends up actually sounding like almost like bagpipes so you know shrieking together um happened almost by accident again it was a limitation of the of uh technology at the time they only had a certain a certain number of tracks to deal with not like now where you've got infinite tracks um and lou was playing solos and playing solos and playing solo solos and it got to a point where well if you do one more we're gonna have to take off one of them because we're running out of space so instead of doing that i said once just play them together and see how that sounds and of course it turned out to be this classic beautiful guitar solo which sort of is the highlight of that song [Music] the rhythm guitars in that song are just amazing both sterling and were playing very very fast very very um very sharp rhythm and combine that with the other instruments and you've got this beautiful long propellant great track [Music] the group's self-titled third album which has become known as the grey album was released in march of 1969 reflecting the change in direction of the music the sleeve design had similarly become less extravagant the third one again i was to do the cover and so uh they came over the second factory i did several photo sessions of different head shots uh jumping shots you know on the floor shots and all this stuff so uh also the shots the shot that's actually on the cover with them sitting on the couch at the factory on the cover in lou i think it's harbor bazaar or something he's holding magazine he's looking up that wasn't one of the sets it was just a casual shot i took of them on the couch but that's the one that everyone liked because everything else was too staged or formal or ridiculous you know this was just like a shiny guy as i was walking by the couch they were sitting there and lou looked at me and it was like what they're really like so that worked so that was the third album cover and on the back i did this convoluted uh double half lou reed uh convolution it's it's like a on a deck of cards where the joke the jack has half of his head is this way and the other half is that way you know it's a convolution inversion of lou with really long look on his face on the back of it which i really love that so uh that one i actually got to do our work on the back as well the album represents a change in direction for the group's sound with chaol gone the aggressive avant-garde tone to the music changed and became softer and far more melodic i like to think that the loudness and the and the the discordancy or whatever you want to call it that that sort of typified those first two albums more um maybe were the conflict that between john and lou you know that kind of brought to life in in [Music] in musical terms but but i you know that's just fantasy on my part um but i think that the third album was maybe because i was there and it was um um i was more supportive of lou than uh or or more responsive to lou than john was i don't know whether that's true or not but may allowed that to happen more you know but it's also to a great extent i think what was the group was doing then i mean that's the way we you know we played sister ray live on stage but it was a little bit sweeter so there was always i think a desire on the part of lou and really uh you know sterling and maureen as well to just be able to make good records and even to make a hit record i know there was pressure on them you know from the label from management et cetera et cetera to do that but i think innately in themselves is that they wanted to craft good rock and roll records that people would listen to and if you look at some of the musical threads that go through them from their influences i mean they're very uh yeah they took it into a very far away but you still got the influences of you know beau didly chuck berry rockability doo-wop you know that kind of real basic roots rock and roll you still hear it in them [Music] please [Music] you know lou had a collection of doo-wop records that you know mo has commented on frequently she said i you know i would be like ah who are these bands but people like the spaniels uh and that you know it's it's it's also key because the doo-wop bands of the 50s were very much street bands um most of them were put together by groups of teenagers uh who hung out you know on the corners uh had nothing to do and they would start to throw vocal parts back and forth in a sense musically he was trying to do the same kind of thing take what was really happening in the streets and apply it to their musical style so the doo-wop stuff is of fairly key importance you know remember this is a guy worked at pickwick records writing you know uh replica hits you know replicas of the hits of the day you know this this guy had that background you know he you know he's another paul simon in that sense so i don't think you know you know don't shy away from the fact that he that he wants to write pop songs on the third album now you've got this this beautiful collection of soft quiet songs they're played quietly um they're sung quietly i think i think lou reed does a beautiful job of singing on those songs i think to to get doug ewell in the band and to who was basically a kid and throw him into the mix and say okay this is what we're going to do now um was just worked out brilliantly when you hear doug singing candy says i don't believe lou has ever sung candy says as well whenever he has played it later on as doug did i sang candy says on that and it was um i didn't know i was going to sing that song until we were doing the vocals and he sang one and he came back and said why don't you sing one [Music] all that it requires in this world candice [Music] part of the charm of candy says is that it is such a beautiful melody and such a beautiful song the subject isn't that simple and it isn't uh your run-of-the-mill pop song subject it's about candy darling who was a transvestite and who was having issues with being a man she obviously wanted to be a woman when i sang candy says we'd only been playing the song for a little while and i didn't know what was you know really what was uh what the song is about or or the history involved in it and at some point when lou was you know lou and i were on the outs he kind of made fun of me for that for not knowing what it was when i was singing it and certainly had i known i probably wouldn't have sung it um because it wouldn't have been relevant but and i think part of the reason that it worked was because if for me it meant something totally different i think the fact that you do have other voices now on the record is is kind of proof that lou was much more relaxed with himself and was not fighting with the band he wasn't fighting for control he wasn't fighting to be heard because he knew that his songs would be heard he didn't necessarily have to sing all of them one two three if you close the door the night could last forever leave the sun shine out and say hello to never all the people are dancing and they're having such fun i wish it could happen to me but if you close the door i'd never have to see the day again if you close the door the night could last forever leave the wine glass out and drink a toast to never oh someday i know someone will look into my eyes and say hello you're my very special one i really wanted to do it but i i'd never sung before and i know i can't sing very well but lou wrote that for me to sing and finally i i tried it like six times and finally i had to just tell everybody to leave sterling sterling was in the booth making fun of me in the engineer's booth the engineer was kind of scratching his head like why are we doing this so finally i said everybody everybody has to leave just lu and me because i can't do this i'm really embarrassed and you know blah blah blah but it worked out well everybody likes that song the song itself after hours as lou often always said when he introduced it in live in concert he it's about the the clubs in new york that um that don't open until you know three in the morning and they go till you know 10 or 11 i don't know whatever in the morning so i don't think of it as a real dark song i think of it more of as just a kind of a a whimsical kind of well if you if you don't open the door it's not daytime yet you know you know not like a a heavy philosophical uh you know the night could last forever you know so so for me it's not a it it doesn't have that that aspect i don't see that the change in sound that characterizes the grey album brought to the forefront sterling morrison's guitar playing and its contribution to the group's overall sound have you got a band with lou reed and john kale fronting it there's really no room for anybody else to make a statement you know anybody else is in the background and and really um you know moe and sterling were a phenomenal rhythm section together just absolutely phenomenal we were basically the rhythm section um not the bass and me but the guitar player in me sterling is a great rhythm guitar player i think great rhythm guitar player um yeah mostly he was mostly rhythm he had solos and in a number of songs and i think he's a ex i loved his guitar playing and if you listen particularly to the third album suddenly you start hearing much more of sterling well until that point sterling played bass he played rhythm he was very much in the background sterling really started coming out and i think you know in the early days of that new lineup you know doug was obviously still feeling his way around it's a pretty heavy-duty band to join it's not like you're just your average you know blues band to get in there and you know play the riffs everybody knows this is not your typical band so i think he was feeling his way around and i think it really gave sterling the opportunity to step forward one of the uh great effects of the relevance 1993 reunion tour was that finally people got to see who played what um it may not have been great as far as like as far as being creative or as far as breaking new ground but finally uh entire generation there are people who grew up just hearing those records and uh never ever had a chance to see the velvets and most of us never had a chance to see developments live but now that we got to see them live we got to see what an amazing guitar player sterling morrison was on the existing video of the tour there's a his solo in rock and roll is just unbelievable he could he could probably have played that solo a million different ways and it would have been just as beautiful [Music] [Music] [Music] it might have seemed to be coming more to the fore because this we were playing a lot less songs where you could just go off and do what you wanted to they were at then they became much more structured yes now the solo is 12 bars you know and sterling thought that way sterling is very technically inclined person [Music] despite the epic scope of the velvet underground's first album for many the grey album is in fact the best realized of all the band's recordings that's the album in which he starts to really risk exp the expression of feeling uh for the first time and he does it very very effectively what you get in in the velvet underground is um a cynic a pessimist opening up and uh it's a it's a truly exciting record i don't i don't you know i i like a lot of lou reed solo work i don't think there'll ever be a record as good as that i don't you don't make more than one record like that in your life the reason the gray album is my favorite is because of the sound of it there was a there was a sort of a zeitgeist i don't know it was a a a personality that the group had at that point there was a um a way that the group was together we would travel out every weekend and we'd come back we'd play two or three nights you know and and then once or twice a year we'd go on a longer you know two or three weeks out on the road but but it was very comfortable and warm and you know tight and it was really a band and and the reason i like that album is because it sounds like a band you know it it reflects that it looks i mean it it uh it has that feeling to it you know this intense period of performing is reflected in the velvet underground live 1969 which was compiled from several performances recorded that year i think the live the band live was a band they were really um had the potential to be very exciting and a lot of that was translated into recordings but i don't think it ever the recordings ever equaled what the band could do live [Music] between recording the grey album unloaded the band at some point during 1970 began to record what has become known as the famous lost album although the recordings have appeared on various retrospective collections there is still some confusion even within the band itself as to what the purpose of the recordings was intended to be you're talking about the tapes uh that val valentin engineered at mgm i think those yes those are the ones yeah one with those with those set of songs on yeah we spent um us i think it was a summer sometime in the summer going up to that studio and doing these um recordings and it was as i understood it now again you know i was not in many loops in those days nobody told me very much but my understanding was that we were going to use the mgm studios to do uh to work out this stuff prior to actually going into a studio and recording it we were doing we were taping stuff it was basically tracks and vocals and you know a few instrumentals in there um to [Music] to sort of or get organized for um a recording a regular recording session um so i wasn't surprised when they weren't you know i my understanding was that they were never going to be used they were just for their work tapes um and that's the way i always viewed them the thing about the fourth album is if the intention was not to release that material that they they were trying to get out of their contract with mgm or that they were recording them as demos the problem with that is why did lou reed go to such extraordinary lengths to make sure that those songs became public you know to the extent of making his first solo album effectively a remake of the missing velvet underground album from 1969 by which point the songs are two years old and lou reed we know because you know he recorded 27 new songs which he demoed in 1971 before he ever made the first solo album so he had an awful lot of songs that he could pull from so and yet he makes his first solo album and it's almost a template for the missing velvet underground album so clearly for him to feel that strongly two years later about this material it it must be that he intended that material to come out during the early part of 1970 steve cesnik negotiated the band's release from their contract with mgm and the velvet underground quickly signed a new contract with atlantic records during the early summer the band agreed to play a residency at the new york club max's kansas city it would be the first time that the group had played in manhattan since april 1967 however it would not be the full lineup maureen tucker had become pregnant and was not performing with the group in her stead doug eule's brother billy had been drafted in as a replacement the maxis gig to me was kind of weird first of all no mo right away that's weird you know because you know not to slight billy ewell as a young kid but he was playing a conventional you know kind of rock and roll drums he did a lot of cymbal work you know it just wasn't the other thing about max is it was such a scene that in part the velvets were just kind of the backdrop to people hanging out and doing what they're doing and making the scene and you know being cool et cetera et cetera max's kansas city was the andy warhol crowds watering hole it was their club of choices where they would end it and their nights um long into the mornings and uh where they would go to have fun so it was a perfect place for the band to now play they effectively became the house band at max's kansas city they played there they had started a two-week engagement and extended it to eight weeks i believe because it was so popular but they were packing it with their friends it's not like they were drawing people from um the outlying suburbs or from other states or whatever it was really just a place to play and have fun with your friends now that you're back in town it was it was very small it was very intimate it was fun you know it was it was like playing at a house concert just about half the people there everybody knew you know successful musically you know um there was an opportunity because it was five nights a week and two sets a night maybe maybe three to um to experiment with some stuff to try out new new material you know or different ways of doing new material sometimes lou would say uh why don't you sing that one tonight you know so i would you know and of course i don't know i never knew all the words because i'm not a words person but but you know we do it just for fun while playing at max's the band began recording sessions for what will become their fourth album loaded one of one of the things i remember is is when we're starting the sessions is uh steve sesnick and lou um wheeling one of the sun amps through the streets of manhattan because they couldn't get it in the taxi and they did just didn't want to pay for a truck so they literally it was on wheels it's a big cabinet it was as tall as you are you know and the wheeled it through the streets um from 50 west from east 57th or east 55th over to central park west where the studio the big studio for atlantic was and broke a wheel and doing it but they had to have that for the session we just we're in the big studio we started um tracking the process was very uh introspective and very dissective it was you know pick it apart and put it back together and and build this kind of uh puzzle of a song um which as i was saying before is very different than the third album which was more very organic and you know this was more like grafting fruit trees you know you graft one thing on to another and and see what you get when loaded was being recorded there is a feeling that the band was breaking up it did well you did have maureen tucker missing which was uh she was an essential absolutely invaluable part of that band and with her gone you again you're you're looking at trying to replace someone who was really irreplaceable i didn't play on that album and it was a big disappointment there was a few songs that needed me for instance ocean here come the waves that i was really disappointed that if i couldn't play on that one that i didn't get to end happily this makes me feel very happy um not in a a boastful way or a or a told you so way but um lou and uh excuse me doug have both said since they should have waited for mouth and billy yule fine fine drummer but and too too normal if any one thing i could do over again would be to refuse to do loaded until maureen was well again and not well until she was you know able to play because by her not being there um it wasn't a band anymore and and the thing i like i said before that i love about the third album is that it's a band and the thing i hate about lotus is not a band despite many people's misgivings about the album it does contain several truly remarkable songs amongst these is probably the most recognizable and influential of their entire canon of work there's this idea that loaded may not be as great a velvet underground album as the previous three or certainly as the first one but it did come it did yield a sweet jane which is a beautiful anthemic almost rock song and i believe that for all of the people who claim to have been influenced by the velvet underground i think that if you look at their music they were probably more influenced by the material unloaded than they were in material on the first album [Music] suitcase in my hand [Music] and me i'm in a rock and roll band [Music] riding a studs back at jim you know those were different times [Music] all all the poets they studied ruseverse and those ladies they rode their eyes [Music] cj [Music] rock and roll and sweet chain are uh probably the greatest songs that velvet undercurrent ever recorded uh i mean certainly the most influential songs the velvet underground ever recorded the ones that other people want to sing the ones that people remember that guitar figure was was finalized just around the time we started recording it you know it had been a little different not as strong before that um and after that that that really defines the song playing it live after that was all about that that particular guitar figure and and [Music] you know i mean to this day it if you play that and anybody who's ever heard it will say oh that's sweet jane you know lou wrote a bridge for sweet chain and um when the first version came out it was edited out to you know fit on the record to make it more in line with the short sort of pop song and uh lou you know pitched a [ __ ] that he said frequently the song was ruined by the fact that this bridge was taken out [Music] heavenly wine and roses seem to whisper to her [Music] la la la la [Music] i remember sterling saying to me that you know that they wanted to to prove to everyone that they could actually write classic rock songs that that should get played on the radio in fact they didn't get played on the radio but it's hard to believe when you listen to sweet jane and rock and roll and who loves the sun the run-up to loaded was um [Music] was kind of fraught with or was was uh that the feeling that was going on was that we needed more airplay and this was again was steve sesnick was um he saw that in order to we need to generate more commercial success in order to maintain uh the group and you know it's like a small business you know you've got to grow or you die it was a kind of a constant thing about airplay getting being more commercial being more accepted in the the um the fm world and uh a lot of those songs were engineered were were recorded and engineered and edited and the whole focus was to get airplay they're cut down to you know from maybe five or six minutes down to like two minutes 40 or something just to get that you know into that rotation the the the fm or even the am rotation um the the topics are more poppy um i mean if you listen to who loves the sun that's unloaded right i mean that's a that's a straight pop song straight flat out pops the songs that end up being chosen for loaded are too far down the line they're too they're too much of a commercial compromise and and therefore it's very tempting to see it as reid being pushed into a position where he actually the ambivalence has to go and and with that he can't the compromises are too great reed has to leave the band because essentially that isn't what he wants one night during the group's residency at max's kansas city lou reed abruptly and unexpectedly quit the band lou called me outside and we'd send those stairs that one on the outside of the building kind sort of that went up there and we sat on the steps and he told me he was leaving i didn't say why because i felt he would have told me why if he wanted to so i i don't really know exactly why he wanted to leave um but yeah that was that was quite a shock quite a shock it was a total shock here i mean it was a total surprise he was just one you know one week he was there we came back and literally until the show was about to start um i was expecting him to turn up i thought he was late lou reed's abrupt departure from the band signaled the end of the classic period of the velvet underground although the group continued playing together and even recorded a further doug eul-penned album it was never again to reach the inventive success of the original lineup even though the ban was never recognised within their own time their influence and importance is now universally acknowledged the quote that i open from the velvets to the voidois with lester bangs quote he says modern music begins with the velvet it's a hugely important quote not least because he's absolutely right in other words whatever came before the velvet underground is something else i'm not sure i call it rock music essentially it required bob dylan to make highway 61 and the velvet underground to make velvet and nico for there to be such a thing as rock music um there was pop there was rock and roll there was all sorts of things before that but actually no modern music began with the velvet underground [Music] [Laughter] [Music] i can't explain why it was so influential it's totally a mystery to me it just confused it eludes me because it was just a band it was just a lot of fun and we had you know it was it was amazing that it was going on at the time because we were all saying like wow people are paying us money to do the thing we'd be wanting to do anyway to be honest i would rather it be the way it is than us to have made 10 million dollars and it didn't matter 10 million to be real nice but honestly i really it's great it's great to go play somewhere and have a 18 year old say oh i love your music you changed my life and things like that it's just really wow you know

Channel: Amplified

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Keywords: Amplified, amplified channel, music, pop culture, culture channel, documentaries, music documentaries, pop, film, music interviews, film interviews, velvet underground documentary trailer, nico, lou reed, the velvet underground, john cale, andy warhol, velvet underground, documentary, rock, sterling morrison, maureen tucker, the velvet underground documentary, the velvet underground & nico, the velvet underground and nico, rock music, rock and roll, arts, full documentary, 1966

Id: onTfEZAMZHI

Length: 83min 18sec (4998 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021