FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
Early October 1968
Ever since Lou Reed and John Cale formed The Velvet Underground, new
members have been recruited on almost whimsical impulse. Sterling
Morrison was absorbed into the line-up after running across Reed by
chance in the subway; Maureen Tucker got the call largely because Reed
and Morrison happened to know her brother; Nico was installed in the
group at Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol’s behest. So it goes when the
Velvets need someone to take the place of John Cale. Instead of
considering one of the musicians who have played informally with the
group at the Dom or the Balloon Farm – or even someone who’s already
played in an established recording group – they extend the invitation
to an unknown that even they barely know.
The new recruit, Doug Yule (born February 25 1947 in
Mineola, New York) was, like Reed, Morrison, and Tucker, raised in Long
Island. He grew up in Great Neck, but since his late teens has been
playing in bands in Boston, home of the Velvets’ favorite live venue.
He played organ in a covers band, The Argonauts (with whom he has made
a few unreleased recordings, and who later become known as Argo), and
guitar in a few other acts, including, most recently, The Grass
Menagerie, a group formed in 1967 by two former members of a fondly
regarded mid-60s Boston act, The Lost. (These two men – singer Willie
Alexander and multi-instrumentalist Walter Powers – will later play
notable roles in the Velvet Underground story, but only after Lou Reed
leaves the group.) Yule
himself isn’t an original member of The Grass Menagerie, and in fact
must only have joined fairly recently, as a December 1967 article in
the New England Teen Scene
doesn’t list him in the line-up. It’s possible, however, that he played
with the group at the Boston Tea Party on February 9–10, on the same
bill as singer-songwriter Eric Andersen, and on June 23–24.
The Velvets have gotten to know Yule while playing
in Boston; Morrison and Reed have sometimes stayed at his apartment.
Exactly how (and by whom) he is invited to join the group is unclear,
however. Some will later suggest that Steve Sesnick extends the
invitation, but Sesnick himself claims, in Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story,
that Morrison brought Yule in. Morrison in turn will later speculate
that Yule is brought to the group by VU road manager Hans Onsager (the
son of Lars Onsager, the winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry),
who has invested money in The Grass Menagerie, confirming, in his
interview with Ignacio Julia, that Yule doesn’t have to audition, as
the Velvets already know he can play.
“Sterling’s input would have helped to get Lou’s
attention,” Yule himself recalls. “I think my own value at that point
to Lou was that I was a much more deferential person. I’m much more of
a facilitator than I am a leader. I like to take what’s going on and
make it work, and that really was helpful to Lou, ’cause he’s not an
accomplished musician. He’s a self-taught, self-made, seat of the pants
kind of musician, instinctive, intuitive. I think certainly I took away
some of the stress that was there between John and Lou.
“What I wanted from music all along, was just to be
making music with people who liked to do it and not have to chase a
dream, or be a star. I’m not a performer, I’m really a musician. Lou’s
much more a performer than I ever was. Sterling’s like that too. He was
very content to be in the background, and just stand at the back of the
stage and play his stuff, and not dance around and flirt with chicks.
That wasn’t his thing at all.
“But I think the thing that would have turned it was
that Sesnick,” Yule continues. “[He] was firmly in control of
everything at that point, [and] felt that I looked like someone he
could handle, that he could control pretty well. That’s pretty much
what his outlook at that point was – how to keep this just kind of
under his thumb, so he could keep it going the way he wanted it to.”
Morrison has at least heard Yule playing in the
living room of his Boston apartment, and told Reed and Sesnick how good
his playing is getting, which probably influences the final decision to
recruit him. A more unlikely influence that nonetheless helps seal the
deal is Yule’s birthday. As he explains in 1995 to Pat Thomas, he gets
the job “partly because I was a Pisces and they needed a Pisces to
balance it out. John was a Pisces, Lou was a Pisces, Moe and Sterling
were Virgos, they wanted to have this astrological balance.”
Even more bizarrely, Yule tells the author, at the
time of him being approached to join the Velvets, “I had never played
electric bass. But keep in mind that from fourth grade, my training was
in baritone horn and then tuba, so I essentially played bass all from
fourth grade through the end of high school, in terms of having sort of
intuitive understanding of the lower end of any musical structure. I
still find that, when I play electric bass in a rock band, I have a
very different kind of outlook than your average garage band bass
player. It’s much more harmonic, or a lower melodic structure, than it
is just a rhythmic fill.”
Whichever way the actual invitation arrives, Yule is
certainly quick to accept it. By Wednesday October 2 he’s in New York
for a meeting with the rest of the band at Max’s Kansas City; a day
later, he’s on a two-day crash course of 30 VU songs in Lou Reed’s
loft. “It was very intense,” Yule recalls. “Any day with Lou is
intense, especially then.”
Although Yule has only seen the Velvets perform
once, the decision to join is probably an easy one. The Grass Menagerie
aren’t going anywhere – they won’t ever release a record, despite
cutting material for Vanguard and RCA. The Velvet Underground might not
have sold too many records, but have at least made two albums for a
major label, and are building a solid, cult reputation in several parts
of the country. They’re touring more or less constantly, most often in
Yule’s Boston base, although he’s set to make his live debut with the
group this coming weekend in Cleveland.
In later years, Yule will sometimes be unfairly
characterized as somewhat faceless; an ordinary yet capable musician
recruited out of convenience as much as anything else. Some critics
will also suggest that he’s chosen in part because, unlike John Cale,
he won’t threaten Lou Reed’s leadership of the band.
In truth, Yule is less experienced than his new
band-mates. He’s younger than anyone else in the Velvets – Reed and
Morrison are both a good five years or so older – and has never made a
commercially released record. But to dismiss him as a mere cipher of
sorts is unfair. He will quickly prove himself to be a good
multi-instrumentalist, adept not only on bass, but also organ (on which
he sometimes plays bass parts with his left hand), guitar, piano, and
drums. He also contributes not just backing vocals, but also the
occasional lead vocal, both on stage and on record. This in itself is a
substantial asset, because Reed doesn’t have the most
durable voice – which is part of the reason, according to Morrison, why
the Velvets don’t play all that often, at least in comparison to other
touring bands. Yule even looks a lot like Reed, so much so that Reed
sometimes calls him “my brother Doug” on stage – as he does when
introducing the other musicians before ‘Some Kinda Love’ on the 1969 Velvet Underground Live album
– lending a certain visual symmetry to the band.
Yule might lack Cale’s personal flamboyance and
musical idiosyncrasies, but he plays both bass and organ well, and in
styles that quickly mesh well with the rest of the group, as proven by
both live tapes and the two albums he’ll shortly record with the Lou
Reed line-up. As Maureen Tucker admits in Victor Bockris’s Up-Tight, “I don’t think [replacing
Cale with Yule] hurt the music that much. I don’t think it changed it
to weaker music, it just changed it.” And for all the kudos Cale gets
as the most important member of The Velvet Underground after Lou Reed,
Yule will actually end up playing on more of their commercially
released recordings than Cale does. But it’s Cale, not Yule, who’ll be
inducted into the
Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame with the other Velvets in 1995.
Yule will also shortly begin to take an active role
in helping to arrange and polish Reed’s songs. “In countless hotel
rooms and empty clubs, I sat and played guitar with Lou, working the
kinks out of new songs,” he writes in 69
On The Road: Velvet Underground Photographs. “I picked up the
changes by following his hands and added harmonies over his vocal as we
went along, harmonies that came from years in church choir tempered by
The Beatles and Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers and The Platters. When
he could hear a melody in his head but couldn’t find the chords, he’d
sing it without guitar and I’d fill it out for him, make it whole.”
(Unfortunately, this will later cause friction when certain parties
feel Yule is given more credit than he deserves on the 1970 VU album Loaded.)
“I think [Yule] brought a kind of musicality to it
that wasn’t there before,” notes Steve Nelson, who sees the band
perform with both Cale and Yule on more occasions than most between
1966 and 1970. “He could sing and harmonize, he could play a lot of
instruments. John was also a brilliant musician, but he was kind of
edgier. Doug had more of a pop sensibility. So that whole transition of
them becoming more accessible was really partly due to Doug.
“John’s departure had a huge effect on Sterling,”
Nelson adds. “While John was around, you had Lou and John, and pretty
much everybody else was just a back line. Sterling pretty much was
confined to playing
the bass. Sterling really opened up tremendously, because he had an
opportunity to step forward, ’cause Doug was brand new, so [Doug]
wasn’t going to assert himself. He wasn’t really an assertive kind of
guy, anyway. It also freed Lou tremendously, because he became the
undisputed leader of the band. That whole question went away, there
[was] no conflict over that. He had written most of the material
anyway; it wasn’t that he wasn’t really the leader of the band. But I
think without John’s personality there – ’cause he was definitely a
strong figure – that it was much clearer that Lou was the leader of the
band, and everybody knows it
just became more accessible.”
Steve Nelson also stresses that, contrary to some
later critical assessments of the post-Cale era, “the band [wasn’t] Lou
Reed’s back-up, because of Sterling stepping forward and the interplay
between Sterling and Lou. When they were soloing, the interplay between
them was fantastic. Sterling wasn’t there just playing rhythm and
backing Lou up by any means. Quite the reverse. He was more often on
lead. They used to play those two guitars [on ‘What Goes On’], and the
sound completely twisted your head around. I think live sometimes, even
though you were looking at them, you weren’t sure who was doing what.
Sterling was [a] really fantastic guitar-player. He was sort of
underrated, because he was mostly sort of behind the scenes and kind of
in Lou’s shadow.
“And then Doug added so much to it. They could still
play the hell out of the stuff like ‘Heroin’ and ‘Sister Ray’ – I heard
those things live, and they were still great. That’s a tribute to Doug
being able to fit in there. It’s a pretty hard thing for somebody to
step into, and I think Doug has gotten a bum rap. He was a big part of
the band and brought a lot of musicianship to it, and I don’t think
he’s gotten fair credit for that.”
