screamin' sounds

aycorn

"... they weren't afraid to do what they felt was right. They didn't pander to any record company requests or trends of the time. Their first two albums were revolutionary in their experimentation. At a time when harmony and melody were at a premium, [they] produced drones and primal rhythms. They weren't just an avant-garde band, they were at the very edge of the avant-garde and the intertwining of various art forms into their sphere was truly mold-breaking. The Velvets continued a counterculture mixed-media procession that started with Kerouac and Ginsberg, passed through Dylan, continued with Patti Smith ... their music stimulated the body while the lyrics stimulated the mind." (Rob Jovanovic)

"This was hard to suss out at the time, which is probably why people are still learning from it. It sounds intermittently crude, thin, and pretentious at first, but it never stops getting better ... nobody experimented more successfully than these folks." (Robert Christgau)

"The Velvets straddled the categories. They were nothing if not eclectic: their music and sensibility suggested influences as diverse as Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, Pete Townshend and John Cage; they experimented with demented feedback and isolated pure notes and noise for noise's sake; they were partial to sweet, almost folky melodies; they played the electric viola on Desolation Row. But they were basically rock-and-roll artists, building their songs on a beat that was sometimes implied rather than heard; on simple, tough, pithy lyrics about their hard-edged urban demimonde; on rock-and-rolls oldest metaphor for modern city life - anarchic energy contained by a tight, repetitive structure. Some of The Velvets best songs - "Heroin" especially - redefined how rock-and-roll was supposed to sound; others - "I'm Waiting For The Man," "White Light/White Heat," Beginning To See The Light," "Rock & Roll" - used basic rock-and-roll patterns to redefine how the music was supposed to feel." (Ellen Willis)

In the summer of 1983, I bought 1969: The Velvet Underground Live at the local Recycled Records store. I remember saving my allowance money and riding the bus down to Palo Alto to pick it up. School was just out. I was 17.

I don't know what was in the air in the 80's that caused so many fellow music geeks my age to get hip to the Velvets. But there was something. Me, I got turned on by reading Ellen Willis' essay about them in the book Stranded.

Of course, at the time it was a different story. I didn't know anyone else who dug them. You certainly couldn't hear them on the radio. There were no books about them. There was no internet to look them up on. I didn't know at the time that a fanzine called What Goes On was being published ... by people not much older than myself.

All I knew was that 1969 was one of the most amazing albums I'd ever heard, quite different from anything else I was listening to at the time, and that it was practically the only album I wanted to listen to, all summer long. I say practically, because when I bought The Velvet Underground and Nico a couple months later, it nudged even 1969 aside. VU&N was unlike anything I had ever heard. Beautiful and slightly frightening ... words often bandied about but in this case, actually true.

Unbeknownst to me, the Velvets were turning on an entire generation, a decade+ after their dissolution. Even as Moe Tucker slaved away at Wal-Mart, and Sterling was student teaching, and Lou Reed was climbing back to respectability after a decade of making a clown of himself, and John Cale was cleaning up and changing his daughter's diapers, and Nico - wasn't cleaning up ... even as all that was happening, guys around my age were finding these then hard-to-find albums, and learning from them. And writing their own songs. And starting bands. Bands that would come to dominate the decade. Bands like REM and about five hundred or so (conservative estimate) others. The Velvets are the only band in the "classic rock" pantheon of the sixties who never get played on "classic rock" radio. But make no mistake. Baby boomers may gag, but the Velvets are every bit as important and influential as the Beatles/Stones/Dylan/Who/Kinks/Yardbirds/Led Zep/Dylan/Byrds/CCR/Black Sabbath/Hendrix/Doors and fill in the blanks. It just took 10+ years to sort it out. Today, in spite of their long-ago demise, broken only by the aborted 1993 tour, they are pretty well famous.

And deservedly so, because their music has aged even slightly better than their contemporaries. I think that's because underneath the startling noise and innovation, there's music of great beauty and great maturity. They dug deeper than just the adolescent angst and fury and confusion that fuels most great rock`n'roll. They also found heart. They were indeed the biggest, loudest, hairiest group of all.

Essential Reading

White Light/White Heat by Richie Unterberger

Uptight by Victor Bockris

Essential Listening

The Velvet Underground and Nico