FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
June 24-August 28, 1970
CONCERTS
Max's Kansas City, New York, NY
Except for a private industry party at the Salvation Club earlier this
year, and a pair of benefit shows (for WNET TV in November 1967, and
for Merce Cunningham’s dance company in May 1968), The Velvet
Underground have not performed in their hometown for almost three
years. The drought ends with a bang on June 24 when they begin what
turns out to be a two-month residency at Max’s Kansas City, perhaps the
hippest club in Manhattan – the longest sustained residency of the
group’s career, even counting their legendary stint at the Dom in 1966.
In subsequent interviews, the Velvets will generally
maintain the view that they deliberately refused to play in New York in
retribution of sorts for the city’s lack of appreciation for the band,
and also for local radio stations’ refusal to give their records much
airplay. In truth, they could surely have found somewhere willing to
book them, and at least a cult audience willing to support them – after
all, some of the Velvets’ most zealous champions live in New York.
Perhaps their obstinacy has to do with a refusal to play on terms than
are less ideal than they can set out of town. Lenny Kaye’s recent New Times article hinted at
lingering grudges with Bill Graham, with whom the Velvets clashed in
May 1966 in San Francisco, and who now runs New York’s most prestigious
venue, the
Fillmore East. “They don’t work New York anymore,” Kaye writes. “If you
ask, they’ll tell you it’s because there aren’t any clubs left to play
here, or that they can’t stand Bill Graham, or any number of other
Official Reasons.”
In the June issue of Circus magazine, Phil Morris notes
that “Fillmore East audiences requested [the Velvets] in a poll,” but
adds that the band “turned the gig down.” Sterling Morrison will later
confirm this story in his 1986 interview with Ignacio Julia. “There
were two reasons for not playing it: it was in New York, that was one
reason, and the other was Bill Graham, a big second reason. He used to
call us up and scream and swear at us for not playing there … I think
we are the only band touring around in the 60s that didn’t play the
Fillmore East at least once. I’ve never even been in the place, I
wouldn’t go in it because of Graham. We
meant business, we meant what we said.” The group’s stance might be
admirable in principle, but turning down a stop at one of America’s
most popular rock venues can’t be helping their attempts at making
inroads into commercial markets, or within the music business itself.
More intriguingly, Doug Yule suggests in his 1995
interview with Pat Thomas that “it was uncomfortable for Lou to play in
front of his past. He had made a lot of compromises with a lot of very
interesting people in New York. I know when we later played at Max’s,
which was the first gig that the Velvets played in a long time in New
York, a lot of that came back to him.”
So why the about-face? It might be borne partly out
of convenience. The Loaded
sessions at New York’s Atlantic Studios are taking longer than those
for any other VU album; playing and recording in the same city makes it
easier to carry on with both. The venue itself also comes into play.
The Velvets first started hanging out at Max’s during the summer of
1966. Plenty of the overspill from Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd hangs
out here on a regular basis, as do some of the rock critics and
publicists Lou Reed knows, including Lillian Roxon and Danny Fields.
Reed even met up with Janis Joplin at the club on one occasion in 1969.
Various other interesting characters stop in at Max’s too, and there’s
even a future superstar, Deborah Harry, working there as a waitress.
What’s more, as
Reed writes in his foreword to Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin’s High On Rebellion: Inside The Underground At
Max’s Kansas City,
owner Mickey Ruskin “was personally responsible for my survival for
three years because he fed me every day. While I sometimes showed up
for the 5pm buffet, it was actually the ‘tab’ that made it possible for
me and a small army of other artists to exist just to the left of the
line that defines more extreme modes of criminality.”
By 1970, Max’s has started to put on live music on
the tiny stage described by Doug Yule in the liner notes to the two-CD
reissue of Live At Max’s Kansas City
as being “not much bigger than a good-sized living room.” There’s no
room on the stage in fact for anything except the Velvets and their
equipment. But the group is a natural fit for Max’s as it establishes
itself as a live venue: they’re well known to the in crowd, and hipper
than any band bar none, but not so big that they’re too big to play in
such a small club. The first few midweek sets aside, however, the room
is usually full to capacity.
“It was very small, it was very intimate, it was
fun,” says Doug Yule in The Velvet
Underground Under Review.
“It was like playing in a house concert, just about, ’cause half the
people there, everybody knew. [It
was] successful, musically. There was an opportunity – because it was
five nights a week and two sets a night – to experiment with some
stuff, to try out new material, or different ways of doing new
material. Sometimes Lou would say, ‘Uh, why don’t you sing that one
tonight?’ So I would. And of course, I never knew all the words, ’cause
I’m not a words person. But we’d do it just for fun.” In an interview
for this book, he notes, “I took over some of his stuff when we were at
Max’s just ’cause he was tired of doing it. There was a time when he
would like to screw around with the audience’s head by switching me for
him in various ways. Sometimes he’d get on and introduce me as his
brother, or stuff like that.”
Lou Reed however has a very different view of the
residency. “I hated it,” he tells rock journalist and future Warner
Bros East Coast A&R head Karin Berg. “I couldn’t do the songs I
wanted to do and I was under a lot of pressure to do things I didn’t
want to and it finally reached a crescendo. I never in my life thought
I would not do what I believed in and there I was, not doing what I
believed in, that’s all, and it made me sick. It dawned on me that I’m
doing what somebody else is telling me to do supposedly for my own good
because they’re supposed to be so smart. But only one person can write
it and that person should know what it’s about. I’m not a machine that
gets up there and parrots off these songs.”
Steve Nelson attends the opening night with his
wife, and later recalls that the intimate in-crowd atmosphere at Max’s
isn’t always an advantage. “It wasn’t like the way that I had seen them
in and presented them when they were a rock’n’roll band, and they had
an audience that came to hear them as a band,” he recalls with some
disappointment. “It was back to what the whole scene had been when they
were in New York and there were all these hip scenesters attracted to
Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The audience wasn’t really
into it, and didn’t really seem to care, frankly. It was a big event in
the sense that they had a great reputation in New York, [and] this was
the first time they were playing there in three years, but for a lot of
people who were there,
they were the event themselves. I think you can hear on the tapes from
[Max’s] that everybody was talking the whole time. If they’d been in
the Fillmore East, I think the audience would have treated them in a
different way, as opposed to kind of background music while you were
making the scene at this place called Max’s.”
For ten weeks from June 24, the Velvets play a
couple of sets a night, five evenings per week, from Wednesday to
Sunday. The shows start at around 11pm and 1am; admission is three
dollars. It starts as a temporary engagement – a July 4 New York Times
article indicates that the group will finish up the following day,
while the original Steve Nelson-designed posters list dates of June
24–28 and July 1–5 – but ends up being extended after the initial run
of shows goes well and generates widespread praise in the New York
press.
Nelson’s poster design is unusual in its
billboard-like rectangular shape, which uses cutout headshots of the
four band-members – including the absent Maureen Tucker – taken from an
MGM press kit. Nelson previously used the full photographs on posters
for the Velvets’ January 9 1970 show at the Paramount Theater. Such is
their iconic power that the images will later be reproduced about a
dozen years later on the front of one of the first widely distributed
Velvet Underground bootlegs, VU Live
’68.
“In a way the inspiration for the layout of the
photos was the [famous] Richard Avedon pictorial of the Beatles that
was in Life magazine,” Nelson
explains. “There was this four-head shot that was sort of draped with a
black cloth or something like that, all kind of linked together. So I
took these pictures, cut them out, and laid them out so all the faces
were really tight together. It’s really meant to mimic the ads that you
see in the subways in New York, where there are these long, horizontal
things posted up in subway cars. I mean, what could be more appropriate
for The Velvet Underground than to be advertised in the New York
subway? Of course, that never happened. Nobody was gonna go pay the
subway system for rights to install these things.” (Max’s owner Mickey
Ruskin does at least give Nelson $1,000 to cover his fee and pay for
the printing of 1,000 posters.)
Such a long day-in, day-out engagement means that
the Velvets really do need a regular drummer, at least on an interim
basis, while Maureen Tucker gives birth to and starts raising her first
child. In their usual impulsive fashion, they call on Doug Yule’s
17-year-old younger brother, Billy, who’s just finished the 11th grade
and is still living in Long Island. Billy has never even heard The
Velvet Underground play; his brother had at least seen them once before
joining in 1968. But after one soundcheck-type practice, Billy Yule
gets himself a summer job with the band. He’s given meals and
complimentary cinema tickets as compensation, but not his daily
roundtrip fare from Long Island (where he’s currently repeating two
classes in summer school.)
“We got the thing at Max’s, and it [was] like, ‘We
need someone to play drums,’” Doug Yule explains. “And I said, ‘Well,
Billy’s not in school right now. He can play.’ In retrospect, it was
probably kind of a stupid thing to do, ’cause Billy was only 17 at the
time. He was a good drummer, but I’m sure we were breaking laws by
having him at Max’s.” Billy is much less of a financial risk than a
legal one, however, as he himself recalls: “From where I was sitting,
Max’s was NOT a ‘professional’ gig as I was not actually paid for it.
Max’s was more like a bar gig with ‘old friends’ showing up – not my
old friends, though some of my friends did
check it out now and then.”
Billy started playing in his school band and/or
orchestra at the age of ten, and joined his first rock band at 14. And
while he’d never seen the Velvets live before joining, he was fairly
familiar with the group. “When Doug joined the band it was pretty
exciting because I had actually heard of the VU,” he recalls. “Someone
brought White Light/White Heat
into school in the ninth grade and played it at lunch. So, I’d heard
that one and the third album, well, because Doug was on it. I wasn’t
too familiar with the first album [but] I must have heard it by the
time we played Max’s.”
Taking the Angus MacLise days as a starting point,
this is the sixth line-up of The Velvet Underground in five years. All
of the previous personnel changes have served the group well, but this
realignment won’t be quite so smooth. Billy is not as experienced as
the other musicians in the band, and because he plays in a much more
conventional style (and with a much more conventional drumset) than
Tucker, he inadvertently pushes the Velvets even closer toward
mainstream rock, and even further from the sound than made the group
unique. As even his older brother admits in the expanded Max’s liner
notes, “Bill was an energetic player
and fit himself well into the band, but it was a very different sound
than the Velvets produced with Moe.” Tucker herself adds, “Technically,
Billy was a much better drummer than me, but I just had a whole
different take.”
“One problem for me,” notes Steve Nelson, “is that
regardless of whether he was a good drummer or not, he just played in a
very different way. Moe had that unique style, pounding on the drums,
as opposed to
more typical [rhythms] with the cymbals and all that. Billy was just
playing much more of a typical rock drummer. So for me right away the
sound was wrong.”
“I know that the Velvets were interested in
attaining some success; more airplay, maybe a hit record,” Yule himself
notes. “To this end, they were trying to think in terms of ‘commercial’
tunes. And isn’t that the point having a band, that is, in most cases
right after meeting girls? So there was pressure, maybe from Steve
[Sesnick], to make Loaded a
bit more mainstream rock’n’roll. It may be that this was the point of
bringing in Doug in the first place. And as the sound was approaching
rock’n’roll as I understood it, it never even entered my head to try
for an imitation ‘Moe Tucker style.’”
Just as was the case when Tucker joined the group in
1965, Billy is uncertain at first whether he will end up playing with
the Velvets for more than a few weeks. “For the first week I was
learning the songs and getting used to the whole thing,” he recalls.
“The second week, which was supposed to be the last week, I was
comfortable but still careful, so it was probably my best time. After
that, I brought in the second bass-drum/fourth tom-tom and just went a
little crazy trying whatever came into my head rhythm-wise, so it was a
bit looser after that.”
In a 2005 interview with Modern Drummer, he adds, “I didn’t
see much difference between Moe’s style and conventional rock’n’roll
style except for the lack of fills or a hi-hat and ride cymbal in
whatever
piece she was playing. Her technique left her no extra hands to work
with. Later on she did take to ‘sit down’ drumming. In fact, she did
come to Max’s one night and played the second set ‘conventionally’ on
my drums.” About Reed, Yule adds, “Lou always seemed complimentary. I
don’t remember anybody saying, ‘Don’t play this’ or ‘Try playing it
this way.’”
Some other, more subtle changes are taking place as
the Max’s residency gets underway that will later be seen as warning
signs that the band’s days are beginning to be numbered. Knowing that
he’ll be in New York for the whole summer for the first time since
1965, Sterling Morrison has signed up for the two summer courses he
needs to get his Bachelor Of Arts degree from City College Of New York.
He’s studying English literature and drama, and starting to think about
applying for graduate school and earning a doctorate.
If playing at Max’s five nights a week, recording an
album, and going to college all at the same time sounds like a hectic
schedule, Morrison’s wife, Martha, notes that he “could do that with
his eyes closed. I remember once he read Ulysses in the middle of a
party, no problem – went to school, passed the test. People drunk all
around him and throwing footballs – it didn’t matter.” She goes on to
say that “there was never any question that [Sterling] was in the band
100 per cent.” But while Morrison plays the Max’s shows with reasonable
enthusiasm, even if he’s often reading books for his classes in the
dressing room, he’s having less and less to do with their decisions in
the studio. His friendship with Reed is dwindling, too, and he’s
beginning to retreat from the band’s creative
forefront.
At the same time, Doug Yule is now definitely making
himself heard on the creative end, which is causing its own
resentments. Reed is growing unhappy with Steve Sesnick, who is keen
for the band’s frontman to be more of a rock’n’roll animal on stage. He
will later claim to have hated playing at Max’s under such tension,
except for the final night – the one captured on tape by an intimate of
Andy Warhol and later issued as Live
At Max’s Kansas City (see August 23 1970). Reed is not looking
forward to hitting the road in support of Loaded, either, and will later cite
the difficulty of writing on tour as one of the reasons why he decides
to leave the Velvets.
With the release of Loaded still some way off, and no
guarantee that it will be the commercial smash everyone hopes of it, no
one is making much money. This might not be so big a deal for the
Yules: Billy’s just a high-school kid filling in, and Doug is still
full of enthusiasm for the band he joined less than two years ago. “It
was a wonderful summer with very little pressure and lots of music,” he
recalls in the liner notes to the expanded Max’s CD. “The nights were very
informal. Lou joked with the audience and the band, throwing out casual
remarks as the muse moved him. Sterling lurked in the background, the
quiet observer, tossing out the occasional terse comment accompanied by
his mischievous smile.” But for the older Reed and Morrison, there’s
been little to show for five volatile years of hard work in the
Velvets, in terms either of finances or widespread recognition.
Alternate career paths – in Reed’s case as a solo artist, and in
Morrison’s in academia, out of the music business altogether – are
starting to look more viable.
In spite of all this, the Max’s Kansas City
residency attracts critical raves right from the outset – even from the
New York Times (see July 4).
An enthusiastic report of the very first show by one of the venue’s
busboys, Dick Pountain, later appears in the November 13 1970 edition
of Friends magazine in his
native Britain. Pountain has only been working at the club for a week
when he sees Lou Reed introduce the Velvets’ first Max’s set with the
words, “Good evening, we’re The Velvet Underground. We’d
like to start with a tune we recorded a few years back to get a hit for
a poor pop artist.” That’s the cue for ‘I’m Waiting For The Man,’ which
is followed by ‘White Light/White Heat,’ ‘I’m Set Free’ (sung by Doug
Yule), ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘Some Kinda Love,’ ‘Beginning To See The
Light,’ ‘Candy Says,’ ‘What Goes On,’ ‘Sweet Jane,’ ‘Cool It Down,’
‘New Age,’ ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’,’ ‘Heroin,’ and a song Fountain
identifies only as ‘A Story Song’ (possibly ‘Sister Ray’). “They sound
something like the old Velvets, the old Who, and Creedence Clearwater
stuck together,” Pountain writes. “Hard-rock with the trademark of Lou
Reed’s Bo Diddley strumming. Maureen Tucker’s stethoscopic drumming
isn’t there, but Doug’s brother swings a lot more.”
“I was living with friends in New York in 1970,
involved in radical politics,” Pountain later recalls. “I ran out of
money and a girlfriend told me Max’s gave jobs to Europeans without
social-security cards: I got a job as a busboy for about three months.
The set changed quite a lot. They were previewing/working on a lot of
the numbers for [Reed’s 1972 solo LP] Transformer,
and Lou Reed was very reluctant to play certain old numbers,
particularly ‘Heroin.’ If the crowd insisted he would ‘do a Dylan’ on
it by playing it at a silly fast tempo. I don’t think the cult was
fully running yet, and few people made a special trip to see them.
There were a few
Factory stragglers, like Brigid Polk, who would be there most nights,
and Candy Darling. Lou seemed pretty miserable all the time I saw them,
and there didn’t seem to be much warmth between the members at all.”
Also in attendance, and similarly impressed, is
Richard Nusser of the Village Voice.
“The Velvets served up scads of crisp, new material, along with what
Lou calls rock’n’roll versions of the group’s old standards, like ‘I’ll
Be Your Mirror’ and ‘I’m Waiting For My Man,’” he writes in the Voice’s July 2 edition. “The first
set was done ‘in concert,’ with the audience seated behind tables, but
in no time at all everyone was fighting the urge to dance. People
started smiling, sometimes in amazement, as the boys began pulling
these incredible notes from their instruments, and then they started
beating time on their knees and bobbing their heads. By the time they
were halfway through the first set people were yelling ‘Right on,’ and
you know what that can do to a performer, especially if he’s white and
the guy yelling is black. The room is very small, and very conducive to
that kind of support.”
A more wary account is provided by Jan Nelson. “Lou
was very flip,” she recalls. “I mean, he was happy to be in New York,
but he was also giving the finger to a lot of people in the audience
who’d written him off and caused him so many problems in the past. They
were just never … at their best in New York.”
