FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
April 18-23, 1966
RECORDING
Scepter Records Studios, 254 W 54th
Street, New York, NY. Producer Andy Warhol; engineers Norman Dolph,
John Licata.
The Velvet Underground finally enter a recording studio for the first
time, laying down the bulk of their classic debut album within the
space of a few days. Exactly which (and how many) days the Velvets
spend at Scepter is unclear: because they aren’t yet signed to a
recording contract, the group are not working within the usual system
of preparing material for release – which tends usually to ensure some
sort of documentation as to when the tapes are recorded and mixed. But
whenever they take place,
these sessions don’t just generate the heart of a classic album: they
also produce one of rock’s rarest and most expensive relics in the form
of an acetate disc (the mere existence of which will not be discovered
for nearly 40 years).
The idea behind the sessions is to produce material
that can then be shopped around for a record deal. The costs are shared
roughly equally between Andy Warhol and Norman Dolph, a Columbia
Records sales executive and art collector who met Warhol in the course
of his side job of supplying music for art gallery shows and openings
with his mobile disco. (He asks to be paid in art rather than cash.)
Dolph’s main job is in Columbia’s Custom Labels Division, which
provides services for smaller labels without their own pressing plants.
It’s through this work that he notices that one of his accounts,
Scepter Records, has its own recording studios, which is how these
sessions come to take place at Scepter’s midtown Manhattan facility on
West 54th Street – later home to the
famous Studio 54 discotheque.
On the first or second night of the Velvets’ stint
at the Dom, Dolph recalls being told, by Warhol, of his plan to “do an
album” with the group. “I said, ‘I can help you with that.’ He said,
‘Oh really? Okay, good. Do it.’ I think he did that with a lot of
people; if he found somebody that could do what he wanted, he’d just
say, ‘Do it.’ And they would, whether it was appear in this movie or go
out for pizza. He never gave a lot of orders that I ever saw. He just
made suggestions and people took him up on it. He had plenty of people
around to do anything he wanted. He didn’t ask me any questions about
‘do you know this studio or that engineer or this producer’ or any of
that. It was: ‘We’d like to make a record,’ and I said,
‘I’ll take care of it.’”
Although the Velvets don’t yet have a record deal,
the intention is to make a releasable album, not just a collection of
demos. “At no time was what we were doing ever referred to by anybody
as a demo,” Dolph recalls. “They were going for the jugular. They
wanted to make a record that sounded like they sounded.”
According to Paul Morrissey, this has to do, at
least in part, with Warhol’s eagerness to see a return on his
investment. “Andy was [saying], ‘There’s no money here. We’re not
making any money. What is happening?’ He was always very uncomfortable
if money wasn’t coming in. Even though they had signed their management
contract before the Dom had opened, it was not easy, and Andy had to
pay for the lawyers and all that. I said, ‘We have to do what everybody
else does. They have to make a recording, and we have to try to sell it
to a record company.’ Again he had to lay out the money for the
recording studio, but it was only two or three thousand dollars for two
or three nights.” (Other sources put the figure closer to $1,500.)
In Joe Harvard’s book The Velvet Underground & Nico,
part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series on classic albums, Dolph speculates
that the sessions take place somewhere between April 18–23. He believes
that the sessions amount to a total of four days: two for recording,
with a third for listening to playbacks and a fourth for mixing. The
Velvets themselves will later give different estimates as to how much
time is involved, but the total recording time probably adds up to
around ten hours. In any case, the sessions must be complete by April
25, as acetates are cut on that day of the finished tracks, with one
scratchy copy later generating an astronomic bid of $155,401 when
auctioned on eBay (see entry for December
8 2006).
However long it takes, the session is a prolific and
momentous turn of the calendar for The Velvet Underground who, after a
lively year of fits and starts, are about to record the bulk of their
first LP in little more than one fell swoop. Crammed, hasty studio
dates such as these are not uncommon in the mid 60s, and not limited to
smaller groups or albums. Ten of the fourteen tracks on The Beatles’
debut album, Please Please Me,
were recorded on February 11 1963, later described as one of the most
astonishingly productive days in the history of rock recording.
Although it won’t receive as much acclaim, the first proper day of
studio recording for The Velvet
Underground & Nico doesn’t rank too far behind.
The Velvets are not exactly studio neophytes when
they walk into Scepter Studios. Lou Reed first worked in a professional
recording environment in 1958, and recently spent about as year as an
all-round
handyman at Pickwick Records. Nico made a flop 45 for Immediate Records
with some of the biggest names of the British Invasion in 1965, and has
worked with top UK session-drummer Bobby Graham and Serge Gainsbourg.
John Cale has recorded extensively with La Monte Young, Angus MacLise,
and others; even Sterling Morrison has worked on home demos with Reed
and Cale. Only Maureen Tucker has no experience of anything approaching
a studio environment; Martha Morrison later recalls that “Moe’s drums
were wiggling around, so I had to go in there and
hold them for her.”
Even so, it’s something rather different to be
recording as part of a band managed, produced, and half-financed by one
of the world’s most renowned contemporary visual artists – or at least
sort of ‘financed’ and ‘produced’ by him. For all the resources at his
disposal, Warhol seems unwilling to invest large sums in the band’s
maiden studio voyage. He and Morrissey put in $700 – culled mostly from
revenue earned by the Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows – toward the
cost of the sessions, alongside $800 from Dolph. Although he is
described by Cale in Transformer:
The Lou Reed Story as a “shoe salesman,” Dolph does at least
have some experience of the record business, which is more than can be
said of Warhol or Morrissey. (Years later, responding to Cale’s jibe,
Dolph tells Joe Harvard, “If you run into Cale, tell him to give you
his foot size, and I’ll send him a fucking pair of shoes.”)
Dolph has no experience as a record producer,
however, so John Licata, Scepter’s in-house engineer, is brought in to
lend the proceedings some semblance of professionalism. Neither man is
credited on the eventual The Velvet
Underground & Nico LP, but both will be listed as engineers
of the Scepter sessions in later CD reissues, even if Dolph’s role is
much more like that of a producer. Licata, says Dolph, “was wonderful,
co-operative, easy to get along with … he was the total antithesis of
The Velvet Underground. At no time did any of the musicians ever tell
him what to do. They went in and played, and he got what they wanted.
On the ‘banana’ album, they credit Val Valentin with the engineering.
He may have done much of the remix or whatever, but he’s certainly not
the engineer that was responsible for the sound of the album at its
basis. When I heard the album [a year later], it sounded to me just
like what we did. It didn’t sound appreciably different from what we
did at Scepter.”
Although the Scepter label is known for out-and-out
pop/rock and soul records by the likes of The Shirelles and Dionne
Warwick, its studios are not quite so state-of-the-art as one might
expect. In fact, the studio is probably only available to the VU
because the building is on the verge of being condemned. “We went in
there and found that the floorboards were torn up, the walls were out,
there were only four mics working,” Cale recalls in his autobiography.
“We set up the drums where there was enough floor, turned it all up,
and went from there. Dolph ran the sessions, but he didn’t understand
the first thing about recording.”
“I was not the producer in any sense that Quincy
Jones is a producer,” Dolph admits. “The only thing I would say is
because they were doing it on my money, and we had limited time
resources fiscally – ’cause we were always bumping up against
commitments that Scepter had in the studio – I kept the thing on the
rails. I think part of the way the record sounds the way it sounds is
because of John and I keeping the damned thing going and moving – you
know, ‘Okay, next take, let’s do it, blah blah.’ That’s my contribution
as a producer.”
According to Dolph, the recordings are made on
half-inch tape. The studio has a two-track machine and a four-track
machine, which are probably used for overdubbing and alternate vocals.
Dolph describes the Scepter studio as “small, certainly by contemporary
studio sound. But they often recorded fairly large ensembles. They
recorded a big orchestra behind Dionne Warwick, and they recorded
gospel choirs in there. But they were always very crowded. It wasn’t
Columbia’s 30th Street [studio] or some such. Once you had everybody in
there, they had to pretty well stay put, because there wasn’t a lot of
room to move around. For a
playback everybody but John and I had to stand, there were no real
seats in the place.”
Recording The Velvet Underground in such an
environment presents its own special challenges. “It seemed to me that
the instruments, as heard live in the studio as opposed to on the other
side of the glass, were being played rather loudly,” Dolph recalls.
“You would ordinarily expect if they were gonna play that loud, they
would be in a much larger room to get some isolation between one and
the other. But there could have been little separation or isolation in
any kind of modern sense in that room, considering how loud they were
playing. The adrenaline quality of it was because we knew we had eight
hours, and they wanted to get on with it, and I wanted to get on with
it. Anytime they’d break down, I’d stop the tape and we’d start over. I
don’t think there are two different complete takes of more than one or
two songs, and I’m not even sure the breakdowns were saved. Because we
were paying for the tape at probably $125 a
roll, usually the broken takes were backed up and recorded over.
Otherwise there would be some interesting scraps lying around.”
The role Andy Warhol plays in the recording studio
during these sessions will be much debated in years to come. He clearly
doesn’t have the technical experience to ‘produce’ a record in a
conventional sense. In a 1970 interview with Fusion magazine, Sterling
Morrison describes Warhol as a producer “in the sense of producing a
film,” helping to finance the sessions and generally keeping the band
afloat and in good enough shape to enter the studio in the first place.
Years later, in a 1986 interview with Ignacio Julia, Morrison will add:
“He wasn’t really with us in the studio much, but he would come down …
He would say what he liked – his main
contribution was to give us confidence.”
As Dolph recalls, “Licata was there 100 per cent of
the time, I’m there 100 per cent of the time, and Morrissey was there
much of the time. Warhol was there on occasion. He had his little tape
recorder, which he carried all the time. I seem to remember him there
probably for about two hours in the aggregate over maybe three
occasions. But he was totally fascinated by what was going on, and I
don’t think he made any aesthetic judgment whatsoever. ‘Gee, that
sounds good’ might have been it. He was a spectator.”
Both Cale and Reed however will later emphasize how
Warhol’s contributions aren’t merely decorative, with Cale praising
Warhol’s insistence that the band stay true to their live sound, and
Reed
appreciative of his refusal to bow to commercial considerations. “What
he did do is he made it all
possible,” Reed recalls in the Transformer
documentary. “One by
his backing. And two, before we went in the studio he said, ‘You’ve got
to make sure – use all the dirty words. And don’t let them clean
things.’ And so, when he was there, they – you know – they didn’t dare
try to say, ‘Hey, why don’t you don’t do that over,’ or, gee, any one
of all the other things they would normally have done never happened.”
Reed’s observation might not wholly apply to this
first session, as there is no record company looking over the Velvets’
shoulders to make sure the lyrics are sanitized or diluted. These
recordings are designed instead to get the group a deal with a big
label. Yet there can be no overestimation of the importance of a figure
of Warhol’s stature giving the goahead to an unadulterated
representation of the band’s sound and songs. That’s certainly what The
Velvet Underground deliver on a set of material that pushes the sonic
and lyric boundaries of rock music into previously uncharted territory,
with the best songs enduring as classics.
Although Sterling Morrison is usually thought of as
a guitarist, he needs to play bass on several occasions during these
sessions while Cale is occupied with other instruments. “I thought he
was quite good [on bass],” Dolph recalls. “If I close my eyes and think
of the session, the first thing that comes to mind is the pieces where
John Cale is playing the viola. Because those drones and eastern
figures that he’d create, which had to have that bass behind him, were
just as locked in as you could imagine. And
so I don’t have any real recollection in my mind of Sterling as a
guitarist. I see him in tandem, in my mind, with John Cale.”
Even by the standards of an April 1966 rock
recording, the production on these dates is rudimentary, due in large
part to the lack of funds available for buying more studio time and
expertise. And yet, as Dolph stresses, the Velvets “were quite clear
what they wanted to do. I don’t know that anybody really told Lou Reed
what to do or what they thought, but you had the feeling that musical
decisions were being made largely by John Cale, sort of in conference
with Sterling. Moe was very quiet in the whole thing. I don’t think I
heard her speak ten words. “Anything to do with a vocal performance
where Lou Reed is singing, nobody influenced that at all,” Dolph
continues. “If it was a thing where he was the focus of what was going
on, he was it. But to the extent that it involved an ensemble, I would
think that the credit fell to John Cale. You had the impression that
John was a studied, learned musician in the sense that he could read
scores and all that sort of thing. Lou Reed was essentially a
performer. I don’t mean that derogatorily, but that he was the Mick
Jagger of the deal, whereas John Cale was the Keith Richards of the
deal.”
In The Velvet
Underground Under Review, Dolph adds, “I didn’t have the last
word on anything, except to listen for things that sounded like true
mistakes – if somebody knocked over a music stand, or you’d hear
something that wasn’t mixed right, that you just clearly couldn’t
handle. And then we’d look at John and say yeah, let’s start it over.
And we’d break the take down, and start the thing over from the head.
[That’s why] in most of those songs, there is only one surviving take.”
In the same documentary, Tucker suggests that the
limited time “affected the process or the result favorably, because we
didn’t have time for nonsense.” According to Dolph, “At no time did
anybody on either side of the glass say, ‘Well, we’ll fix it in the
mix.’ There was never any ‘I don’t know, I’ll play it back tomorrow,
see if I like it tomorrow, and if I don’t, then I’ll redo it.’ It was
all just like they’d just sung it live.”
In the liner notes to Peel Slowly And See, Cale describes
the recording process as “a complete shambles. Norman Dolph is in the
booth making comments like ‘Great! Dynamite! We got it!’ And we’re all
looking at
each other, going ‘Where is it written that he gets to say ‘This is a
take’?” At the same time, as Cale emphasizes in his autobiography, “We
were really excited. We had this opportunity to do something
revolutionary – to combine the avant-garde and rock and roll, to do
something symphonic. No matter how borderline destructive everything
was, there was real excitement there for all of us. We just started
playing and held it to the wall. I mean, we had a good time.”
More time and technical fuss might not be necessary,
as these songs have been perfected in both rehearsals and live
performance for months. The real challenge is to arrive at a blend of
frequencies rarely – if ever – heard in rock music before: a low rumble
of guitars, often lowered from the more common E tuning to D, not to
mention the fretless ‘ostrich guitar,’ on which all six strings are
first tuned to the same pitch and then allowed gradually to detune,
yielding a distinctively clashing, twanging sound; the piercing squeaks
of feedback; Cale’s alternately screeching and soothing viola, not to
mention his pounding, ominous piano; Tucker’s
funereal, minimal drums; and, on the songs Nico sings, her ghostly
voice (and, perhaps, tambourine). Whether it’s Reed or Nico singing,
it’s crucial that the vocals be decipherable, given the pains the group
has taken to preserve such taboo-busting lyrics untouched.
Do they succeed? Well, yes and no. The mix on the
harder-rocking songs in particular is, by conventional standards,
somewhat blurry and murky, if not cacophonous on the largely
instrumental ‘European Son.’ Yet these subterranean clouds of sound
don’t interfere with the effectiveness of the tracks, and in some
respects actually enhance them. ‘Run Run Run’ has the guttural churning
of the New York subway, and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ a dense foreboding
wholly in keeping with the despondent ennui of the song’s sad, empty
debutante. The Nico-sung ballads ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Femme
Fatale’ boast by contrast a clear, clean sound, balancing the vocals,
light percussion, and guitars well enough to indicate that someone in
the control booth knows what they’re
doing.
The big point of contention among the band-members
as they ready first recordings appears not to relate to specifics about
the sound or mix but to how many songs Nico should be allowed to sing.
Cale will later recall that Reed doesn’t want Nico on the album at all;
Paul Morrissey, who carries weight as one of the group’s managers,
wants her to be the featured vocalist. “Lou didn’t want Nico to sing at
all,” Morrissey confirms in Nico:
The Life & Lies Of An Icon. “I’d say, ‘But Nico sings that
song on stage,’ and he’d reply, ‘Well, it’s my song,’ like it was his
family. He was so petty.”
As he will later note in an unpublished interview
with M.C. Kostek and Phil Milstein on the What Goes On fanzine, Sterling
Morrison prefers Nico’s voice “when she sings sort of whispery, like in
‘I’ll Be
Your Mirror,’ as opposed to ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties.’” In the Nico/Icon documentary, Morrison
adds that the voicing of just such an opinion “actually reduced [her]
to tears in the studio because we wanted her to sing in a soft voice,
rather than in a hard, Germanic voice.” According to Warhol, Nico also
keeps bawling that she wants to sing like Bob Dylan – which is not only
a style that she is ill-equipped for, but also one that the rest of the
band have no interest in pursuing.
The group end up doing what Warhol has apparently
been encouraging them to do all along: follow the lines of their live
performances. And so Reed assumes lead vocal duties on most of the
songs, with Nico singing only the three songs she is used to performing
on stage. “It wasn’t enough, but it took an awful lot of arguing to get
that far,” says Paul Morrissey in Nico:
The Life & Lies Of An Icon. Since joining the group, Nico
has pushed to sing tougher Reed songs such as ‘Heroin’ and ‘I’m Waiting
For The Man,’ for which her voice would be totally inappropriate, but
in the end the only official Velvet Underground recordings she will
ever sing lead on will be ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘Femme Fatale,’ and
‘All Tomorrow’s Parties.’
It’s ironic then that, of the half-dozen tracks from
this session that will eventually find release (sometimes in a slightly
altered fashion) on The Velvet
Underground & Nico,
these Nico-sung productions are perhaps the finest. ‘I’ll Be Your
Mirror’ in particular is proof that the Velvets are not just about
drugs, deprivation, and kinky sex set to
a nails-on-blackboard soundtrack. A lilting and quite melodic piece, it
also allows for the possibility of love as a redemptive force, quite
apart from the admittedly compelling degradation of songs such as
‘Venus In Furs.’ The delicately picked guitar, sparse tambourine, and
restrained, magnificently deep vocals work together to create a low-key
masterpiece. These elements are buttressed by muted power-chords at the
stop-start end of the reassuring bridge and high harmonies on the fade.
Although the acetate version probably uses the same
backing track that
will eventually appear on The Velvet
Underground & Nico, the vocal is different, most noticeably
when Nico sings “to show that you’re home” instead of “so you won’t be
afraid” at the end of the second verse, having almost stumbled over the
same verse’s opening line. The falsetto backing harmonies are also much
lower in the mix than on the official release.
‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ almost isn’t completed at all,
however, as Nico keeps breaking down in tears between takes after
failing to nail the vocal. “At that point we said, ‘Oh, try it just one
more time and then fuck it – if it doesn’t work this time we’re not
going to do the song,’” Sterling Morrison will later claim in a 1981
interview with the New Musical
Express. The next take, fortunately, is the one that Nico gets
right.
‘Femme Fatale’ has a seductively bittersweet melody
just as attractive as that of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ and a similar Nico
vocal made up from equal parts gloom and croon. But the lyrics here are
far more downbeat, detailing an icy, remorseless master of heartbreak –
perhaps even modeled on Nico herself, although Edie Sedgwick is usually
acknowledged as the primary inspiration. The song offers further
evidence of the Velvets’ underrated knack for both softly shimmering
guitar-lines and slightly sardonic backing-vocals, pitched much higher
here than on the official version, where the “she’s a femme fatale”
harmonies are mixed down so low that they sound like a Greek chorus
spilling over from the next room. Reed will later claim, in the
November 1987 issue of Creem,
that the lead vocal is given to Nico in part because “she could sing
the high chorus. That’s why, at the end of the song, you get those
‘oh-woa-woe’s.”
‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ is not the most renowned of
The Velvet Underground’s early songs, but this Warhol favorite is a
sleeper contender for the greatest achievement on their debut album.
Lyrically, it’s a six-minute wail of despair, made all the more
chilling by its detached third-person narrative, enunciated by Nico in
her lowest and most booming, Wagnerian tones. Once again Reed is
venturing into virgin territory for rock music, detailing a more
contemporary, urban, and decadent isolation than is usually heard in
laments over failed love: a party girl consumed by enervating boredom,
her façade crumbling into solitary tears behin her door.
Just as important to the odd power of the song’s deathly pallor are the
gothic tune and the inventive arrangement, which features swooping
bass-notes that glide into coffin-slamming thumps; Cale’s
barroom-boogie-from-hell piano, its unusual clipped tone produced by
stringing a chain of paper clips between the strings; and spiky squawks
of guitar culminating in a brief crescendo that cuts off as if the
power
has suddenly cut out. Cleaved in half upon its initial release on the
band’s first single, the full album version of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’
is not as noisy as The Velvet Underground get, but they would never be
more devastatingly disturbing. (The 1986 CD release of the ‘banana’
album uses an alternate mix featuring a single-tracked Nico vocal, as
opposed to the usual doubletracked version.)
“That was John Cale’s arrangement,” Reed later
explains in a 1971 interview with Vernon Gibbs for Metropolitan Review. “The original
song was very folky, he made it very grand and Gothic and then of
course Nico’s vocal changed it around a lot. Fabulous that Nico, she
really is great.” Asked whether the protagonist of the song is a friend
of his, Reed replies, “Well, we knew each other. I wasn’t that friendly
with her. I knew enough about her to stick her in a song. I always just
exaggerate parts of people … I thought Nico and John did it up really
well. If you get into Nico there’s always the danger that you don’t
want to leave.”
Although stories will later circulate of a troubled
relationship between Nico and the rest of the Velvets, Norman Dolph
notes that they “treated her with great respect” during the Scepter
sessions. “Imagine [jazzman] Les Brown and his band of renown, and
Doris Day as their singer,” he adds. “It’s as though when Doris Day
came on, she was a special focus of what that orchestra did.”
Similarly, as Dolph recalls, the Velvets saw Nico as “a jewel in a
setting. It was in no way slapdash or quick or ‘let’s get this broad
out of here.’ It was, ‘Now we’re gonna shift into a quieter gear, and
we’re gonna do Nico.’ Things went into sort of a quiet mode
when she was there. I don’t believe she was in the studio much longer
than when she was performing in the studio.”
Among the other tracks recorded at these sessions
are three songs that aren’t quite up to the standard of the Nico-sung
material, but are certainly impressive and vital to the diversity of
the running order of the eventual LP. ‘Run Run Run’ might not be quite
so notorious as ‘I’m Waiting For The Man,’ but it’s just as hardening
and realistic a look at inner-city lost souls and junkies. The muddiest
and least evenly balanced cut on the album, it has a percolating,
muffled roar carried by one of Reed’s best rock’n’roll vocals (joined
by almost distracted-sounded harmonies in the chorus); unpredictable
bursts of feedback; and strangled, distorted
‘ostrich’ guitar.
The sole Reed/Cale composition recorded at these
sessions, ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ (or ‘The Black Angel Of
Death,’ as it’s still known when it’s recorded) takes the band much
further from the unwritten laws of rock’n’roll. Reed’s declamatory
sing-speak vocal is backed only by Cale’s dance-on-fire viola and a low
guitar-figure that’s strummed with an edginess suggestive of whirling
dervish madness; Cale leans into the mic to hiss viciously and
wordlessly during the instrumental breaks. As odd as all of this is,
the lyrics are even more outrageously weird, Reed’s tongue-twisting
prose a match for any of Dylan’s surreal, poetic creations. (Dylan
however is unlikely to have used such scatological imagery as
bowels-embedded rat tails and suchlike.)
More than any other early Velvets song, ‘The Black
Angel’s Death Song’ reflects Reed’s schooling in the literature of his
early mentor, Delmore Schwartz. So too, less obviously, does ‘European
Son,’ if only by virtue of an implied dedication in The Velvet Underground & Nico’s
liner notes, where the composer credits list it as ‘European Son To
Delmore Schwartz.’ The dedication is somewhat tongue-in-cheek: as
Sterling Morrison will later explain to Ignacio Julia, “Delmore
despised rock’n’roll lyrics, he thought they were ridiculous and awful,
and ‘European Son’ has hardly any lyrics so that meant that was a song
that Delmore might like. He didn’t care about the music part of
rock’n’roll, he just hated the lyrics, so we wrote a song that Delmore
would like: 20 seconds of lyrics and seven minutes of noise.”
‘European Son’ is in some respects the most radical
recording of the Scepter sessions, its manic up-and-down guitar riff
joined by a choppy rhythm as Reed spits out a single verse of bitter
non-sequiturs. An unearthly howl and a mirror-smashing crash then lead
into more than five minutes of frenzied instrumental jamming. Tucker’s
irregular drum-patterns collapse and collide with hair-raising guitar
and ear-piercing feedback, culminating in the thunderous clang of a
discord. Considering the fact that most of it sounds like a group
improvisation, it’s appropriate that the song is credited to the four
band-members heard on the recording: Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker.
The least accessible track on The Velvet Underground & Nico,
‘European Son’ bears little relation to any rock recording before it –
except perhaps The Who’s equally turbulent (but less dissonant)
instrumental ‘The Ox,’ as heard on The
Who Sing My Generation. When ‘European Son’ is placed at the end
of side two of the Velvets’ own debut, however, it will bring
proceedings to a fitting take-no-prisoners climax. It’s surely an act
of perversity then to place it as track one on side one of the acetate
cut from these sessions – the very acetate designed to land the group a
record deal! The acetate version is about a minute longer than the
version on The Velvet Underground
& Nico, from which more chaotic guitar-soloing (perhaps a
little more bluesy than the rest) is cut right after the loud crash.
Despite the relatively primitive technological
conditions of the sessions, one particularly imaginative maximization
of the tools available can be heard on ‘European Son.’ In the third
issue of What Goes On, Warhol
assistant and
EPI dancer Ronnie Cutrone claims that the ‘broken glass’ effect heard
on the song is in fact the sound of somebody (probably John Cale)
running a chair down a grocery-store dolly into a stack of steel
plates. According to Maureen Tucker, however, the noise is simply the
sound of a chair being dragged across the floor by Cale, who then drops
a glass or bottle after stopping in front of Reed. Martha Morrison, a
visitor to the sessions, remembers Reed actually dropping a mirror –
“it had to be perfect timing, it couldn’t have been just anybody” – to
mimic the sound of breaking glass, “and me getting hysterical, and
getting yelled at by Lou. I just thought it was a riot, what they were
doing to
get their sound effects. I wasn’t serious enough.” Seriousness, in
fact, is the prevailing mood as the Velvets work through their first
proper studio session. “It was very tense,” Morrison says. “There’d be
some laughing, of course, but it was a very tense scene. It wasn’t
party time.”
The versions of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘All
Tomorrow’s Parties,’ ‘Femme Fatale,’ ‘Run Run Run,’ ‘The Black Angel’s
Death Song,’ and ‘European Son’ recorded at Scepter will all be used on
The Velvet Underground & Nico,
albeit in different mixes. (Dolph later notes that ‘There She Goes
Again’ is also cut at the same time, but doesn’t appear on the acetate,
and might not be the same recording as can be heard on the Velvets’
debut.)
The Scepter acetate also includes three other songs
which, taken together, are the most famous Lou Reed compositions to
appear on the album. But the renditions of ‘Heroin,’ ‘I’m Waiting For
The Man,’ and ‘Venus In Furs’ laid down at Scepter are not the versions
that will appear on The Velvet
Underground & Nico. Each of these songs will be re-recorded
in May at TTG Studios in Hollywood, with Tom Wilson probably handling
the production. (Years later, there remains some dispute over whether
the ‘official’ versions of these songs were produced by Wilson or
Warhol, or recorded in New York or Hollywood.)
The acetate versions of these three landmark songs
are noticeably different. ‘Heroin’ has a different opening line: “I
know just where I’m going” instead of “I don’t know just where I’m
going,” a seemingly slight alteration that nonetheless completely
changes the song’s meaning. It also has a shorter instrumental intro,
and a different guitar line. “That was the one where Lou Reed needed to
kind of get his head in the right place,” Dolph recalls. “In the
control room, nobody moved a muscle when he was singing that song. You
didn’t want anything to go wrong with that take at all, because if it
had, he would have torn a wall down. Every bit of the energy in the
song, you experienced in his persona at that point.”
In a less significant variation, ‘I’m Waiting For
The Man’ begins with “the man” rather than “my man,” which might just
clear up why the song is so titled. It also has a rather more
conventional, bluesy guitar-solo, and Reed’s memorable final aside –
“walk it home” – is absent. ‘Venus In Furs’ is pretty close to the
version on what will come to be known as the ‘banana’ album, but it’s
possibly a bit faster and slightly less tight, with Reed’s vocal not
quite dripping with as much deadpan venom.
These are admittedly hairline distinctions, so it’s
perhaps most interesting to puzzle over why it was felt necessary to
re-cut these three tunes – particularly since the TTG retakes don’t
sound particularly clearer or more professional than the versions cut
at the supposedly slapdash Scepter date (and this, too, despite the
likely involvement of Wilson, one of the most esteemed producers in the
business). Perhaps Warhol, Dolph, and the Velvets are more competent at
recording themselves than will sometimes be assumed, or maybe the
band’s raw approach neither benefits nor suffers from more experienced
technological supervision.
Whatever the case, the acetate resulting from the
session is an artistic triumph but a commercial failure as it fails
initially to attract any industry interest. A deal with Verve/MGM is
however looming on the horizon, and the session can be seen as a great
success in that it generates over half of what ends up on The Velvet Underground & Nico.
But it will take at least two more sessions, two more studios, and one
more producer to complete the final tracks – and almost a year will
pass until the record is finally released.
