FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
July 4-6, 1968
CONCERTS
Hippodrome, San Diego, California (w/Quicksilver Messenger Service)
The Velvets’ return to this shortlived venue, a converted
roller-skating rink, comes just three weeks after their first visit.
They play alone on July 4, according to the San
Diego Union, before sharing the bill on July 5 and 6 with
Quicksilver Messenger Service. It’s an incongruous match on the face of
it, since Quicksilver are venerated as one of San
Francisco’s finest psychedelic-rock groups, and noted for the
virtuosity of lead guitarist John Cipollina, their clean, intricately
woven guitar-lines, extended instrumental jamming, and hippie anthems
such as ‘Pride Of Man’ and ‘Light Your Windows.’ And yet the
curmudgeonly Sterling Morrison, who has little enthusiasm generally for
Californian psychedelia, is surprisingly lavish in his praise of the
band, and Cipollina in particular.
The Hippodrome usually plays host to San Francisco
groups such as Quicksilver, The Grateful Dead, and Steve Miller, so
it’s perhaps not surprising that at least one young fan in attendance
is let down by The Velvet Underground. Darice Murray-McKay, who 40
years later works as the reference librarian for the Haight-Ashbury
branch of the San Francisco Public Library, reports that the concerts
are quite well attended, so the Velvets “must have been liked and known
to the local community to play the Hippodrome and draw a crowd … [but]
the VU sounded (to me) just like their records, while Quicksilver had
the long improvised jams. I remember being bored. The sets were all the
same: same songs, same beat, same sound, same order … of the depressing
drug-type songs. Very heavy, very dark, very heroin, with a dangerous
(underground) feel … while Quicksilver was light and color and acid and
mind-wandering. The band seemed to be very East Coast: all dark colors,
not a lot of patter between songs, and very serious about the music and
being true to the recorded sound.”
So much, then, for Morrison’s oft-quoted declaration
(to Mary Harron of the New Musical Express in April 1981) that “the
unanimous opinion was that we were ten times better live than we were
on records. We never played a song the same way twice – never wanted
to, never could. And Lou changed lyrics all the time. One of his great
talents is that he can spontaneously generate lyrics on stage – just
like the old blues singers, Lou can go on forever rhyming.”
(Ironically, given Murray- McKay’s remarks, Morrison will also later
cite one of the Hippodrome gigs as the greatest
ever VU show.)
Another rabid young fan in attendance is Lester
Bangs, who will shortly become one of the most widely read American
rock journalists. He supplies a rather different take on the show in a
1971 article for Creem. “In a
way it was the ultimate Velvet Underground concert,” he writes. “The
audience was terrible; those that weren’t downright hostile kept
interrupting the announcements between songs to yell out what they
wanted to hear, like ‘How about “Heroin”!’ and even ‘Play “Searchin’
For My Mainline”’ [i.e. ‘Sister Ray’]!
“They were on with Quicksilver Messenger Service,
and much of the audience was apathetic or put off; they wanted those
California acid-vibes instead of what they took for cold New York
negativism. Lou Reed, himself, came out from the dressing room and
walked around the audience with his hands in his pockets, a slight,
calm figure with a noncommittal expression on his face. Seemingly,
nobody noticed him, because nobody said anything to him – although
almost everybody in that place was so
busy being cool they could barely get up the gumption to dance, so it
probably doesn’t matter. My girl and I wanted to go up and say
something to Lou, shake his hand and tell him how much we dug his
music, but I was afraid. I thought he would be some maniac with rusty
eyeballs or something, the image made me nervous so we didn’t approach
him, even though she said: ‘It seems to me like that was all they
really wanted, for someone to just come up and tell them they
appreciate what they’re doing.’ And as usual she was right, as Lou
confirmed when I talked to him.”
It’s the first of several exchanges over the ensuing
years between Reed and a man who will do for rock journalism what the
Velvets are doing for rock music. Unfortunately the relationship will
grow testy over time, but for now Bangs has already anointed White Light/White Heat the best
album of 1968 in a review he sends to Rolling
Stone (which the magazine declines to print).
This particular gig will become well known among
Velvet Underground aficionados for the unveiling – possibly for the
first and only time – of a new song called ‘Sweet Rock And Roll’ (which
bears no resemblance to Reed’s similarly titled ‘Rock & Roll’). As
Bangs writes, “Right in the middle of all these bad vibes, the Velvets
launched into a new song that was one of the most incredible musical
experiences of my concert career. Lou announced it as ‘Sister Ray, Part
Two,’ but it sounded nothing like the previous song. It was built on
the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling
mournfully, somewhat like ‘Venus In Furs’ but less creaky, more
deliberate and eloquent. The lyrics, many of which Lou made up as he
went along, seemed like fantasy from an urban inferno: ‘Sweet Sister
Ray went to a movie / The floor was painted red and the walls were
green / “Ooohh,” she cried / “This is the strangest movie
I’ve ever seen …”’
“But it was the chorus that was the most moving:
‘Ohhhh, sweet rock and roll - it’ll cleanse your soul.’ That’s classic,
and no other group in America could have (or would have) written and
sung those words.”
As Sterling Morrison will later explain in his 1986
interview for Spanish television with Ignacio Julia, “We also did a
four-track tape when we played with Quicksilver. We did the show and
then went to a party, and Lou and I and John Cipollina were sitting on
this couch. I’m sitting there and I heard Quicksilver – [who] had
played first – and it was fabulous. So then I hear us tuning up and I
said to Lou: ‘Well I think I’m getting out of here!’ I didn’t want us
sounding terrible compared to Quicksilver, and I figured we had to
sound terrible compared to them, because I’d just heard how great they
had sounded. Cipollina is a real good guitar player.
“After tuning, we started with ‘Waiting For The Man’
and it didn’t sound so bad, so I stuck around. Then came ‘Sweet Rock
And Roll,’ which was never recorded and never played again. We wanted
that tape, it sounded so great, so there was no point in recording it.
I think we did it a time or two after that, but it was nothing compared
to this first one. I remember the chords and some words: ‘Sweet
rock’n’roll is good to your soul …’ We used that as a preamble to
‘Sister Ray,’ it kind of just goes along and then hits the chords,
which were very heavy. It was good. It was heavy, serious. Cale played
keyboard on ‘Sweet Rock And Roll,’ and that was really what carried it.”
The song makes for an almost too perfect, typically
Velvetian anecdote: a band so perverse they play a great song only
once, never returning to it live or in the studio in the belief that
this mythical version
can never be surpassed. And yet there is evidence that the song will be
played at least once more. Robert Gold’s review of a show at the Shrine
Auditorium in Los Angeles a week later mentions a “sour, raucous
version of ‘Sweet Rock And Roll.’”
The song must have made an impression on Gold for
him to cite it in his review. But it seems unlikely that anyone else
will ever get to hear the ‘Sweet Rock And Roll.’ According to
Morrison’s unpublished
interview with M.C. Kostek and Phil Milstein of What Goes On, “That was a great
performance … [but] the tape was stolen that very
night. Stolen within seconds, actually. As soon as it ended, it
vanished, never to reappear on earth.”
