FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
Late November 1969
Shortly before The Velvet Underground’s November 21 concert in
Portland, Oregon, Lou Reed is interviewed on local radio station KVAN.
The surviving half-hour tape of the show is by far the most extensive
circulating audio interview with Reed during his time with the Velvets.
Although it drifts off at points into less interesting, more whimsical
tangents – as is common with rock interviews during the late 60s – it
provides a fascinating insight into how Reed views his work at the time.
Reed clearly already thinks of the Velvets’ output
as a linear body of work. “If you start with the first album, and work
your way, at your own leisure of course, slowly but surely to the
third, it should make sense,” he says. In response to an apparent
backlash against The Velvet
Underground, he notes, “A lot of people said the third album was
so soft, and that we were selling out and doing this and that. And they
wanted another ‘Sister Ray,’ or another ‘Heroin’ and all that. Well …
‘The Murder Mystery’ is all of that, only it’s a lot more. Only you
gotta work for it … which is why it’s a mystery.
“I mean, all the people that really like that side
of us and think that that side’s not there any more, well, they haven’t
listened to ‘The Murder Mystery,’” he continues. “It’s just like, where
can you go past ‘Sister Ray’? … We took the energy thing as far as we
wanted to go. There had to be a step past that, and that’s ‘The Murder
Mystery.’ [It’s] one very long, kind of obtuse circle. But it’s not
impenetrable. You can get into it. You just gotta hustle a little.”
Reed sees a parallel between the simultaneous
narratives heard on ‘The Murder Mystery’ and some of the devices being
used in contemporary literature. “One of the things that Joyce and Cage
and all these people did … [was] like trying to print two things side
by side, or print one thing on top of itself to show that two things
were going on,” he says. “Well, you see, having a record makes the
other thing antiquated. There’s no need to bother even doing that,
because here you got a record with a stereo
channel going. You don’t have to have a printed page with this on top
of it … all you do is you have stereo left channel, stereo right
channel … It’s not an avant-garde idea, ’cause it’s been, you know,
since the 20s. European writers since the 20s have been doing it. But
doing it on record seems to have done it in a coherent, cohesive form.
So the idea was, ‘bam!,’ on the left and right. Two different voices
doing inversions, both of mood and content.”
The Velvets will later be portrayed as a kind of
ultimate anti-psychedelic group, but are in fact very much people of
their time. Reed even steers this particular discussion in a direction
that would find favor with the most spaced-out of hippies. He’s just
had his aura read, he says, and had his previous incarnations revealed
by a ‘reverend’ in Los Angeles, where “they told Doug, for instance, if
you have long hair, you should always get it trimmed a little, get the
ends cut off, because you’d pick up spiritual wasps.” (For the record,
Lou’s aura was white, with “some blue, some green.”) Reed also reveals
that he’s had 1,143 past lives. “Geez, that’s a lotta lives,” the
deejay replies.
Reed goes on to hint at the origin of the “white
light” he sings about in ‘White Light/White Heat’ when he reveals that
he has recently been investigating a Japanese form of healing in Los
Angeles that’s “a way of giving off white light … I’ve been involved
and interested in what they call white light for a long time.” He
briefly talks about Alice Bailey and her occult book A Treatise On White Magic, another
likely source of his interest in white light. “It costs like ten
dollars, unfortunately,” he notes apologetically. (Reed’s interest in
such matters might later seem rather unlikely, given his hard-bitten,
realist image. But Rob Norris recalls discussing “angels, saints, the
universe, diet, yoga, meditation, Jesus, healing with music, cosmic
rays, and astrology” with Reed in the late 60s in an
article for Kicks magazine.
Furthermore, he recalls Reed being a member of the Church Of Light in
New York, which studied Bailey’s work as part of its theosophical
teachings.)
As the interview continues, the conversation turns
to Delmore Schwartz, which leads to a chat of the nature of talent and
how to use it. When the discussion returns to the music to The Velvet
Underground, Reed seems keen to point out that the group has always
mixed aggression and flamboyance with gentle, reflective material.
“There were slow songs on the first and on the second [albums],” he
says. “It’s just, no one had noticed it, ’cause the placement wasn’t so
good. ‘Heroin’ kind of ran away with it, ’cause it was kind of overt
and easy to identify with. But you know, we didn’t want to be put in a
bag of being forerunners of the drug maniacs and all of that. So I had
thought there was a balance, like ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Sunday
Morning’ and ‘Femme Fatale,’ all those kind of things, which didn’t
work out. Then the second album was an energy job.”
Reed also offers some general thoughts on The Velvet
Underground’s modus operandi: “We didn’t put things in, we took things
out, which is kind of the reverse of the way everybody else works,” he
notes. “We never add instruments, we don’t bring people in for
sessions, we don’t basically do anything that we can’t reproduce on
stage.” And he doesn’t see the lower volume of much of the third album
as being such a departure from the complex issues the group has always
tackled. Citing ‘Candy Says’ as an example, he says, “It has its own
kind of tension. It’s about somebody saying, ‘Candy says, I’ve come to
hate my body and all it requires in this world.’ With all that little
pretty music going there, you start figuring, ‘What is that all about?’
And then the whole rest of
the third album is just about that.”
