FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
October 23-25, 1969
CONCERTS
The Vulcan Gas Company, Austin, Texas
As the most liberal city in Texas, and one that has produced a steady
stream of folk and rock acts throughout the 60s, Austin is a natural
second stop for the Velvets on their maiden Texan tour. According to
Billy Angel, a young Austin musician who will go on to play autoharp in
local psychedelic group Cold Sun and with Roky Erickson & The
Aliens (led by the former leader of The 13th Floor Elevators), the
Velvets have a more extensive following in Austin than they might
previously have
realized. “There was a time, a couple of years prior to that, [when
every] home you would visit [would] have two or three albums on the
coffee table,” he recalls. “The [13th Floor] Elevators’ album, the
Velvet Underground album with the banana, and maybe one or two other
albums; The Fugs is another
one.”
Angel attends all three Austin shows, and recalls
that “it just seemed like all the coolest people suddenly had come out
of the woodwork. I’d never seen that many of the coolest of the cool
all together in one
place in Austin… people that probably wouldn’t go to any kind of rock
show, who weren’t into rock music at all, that were like filmmakers and
future filmmakers – just the hippest of the hip.”
The Velvets apparently play just about every song
they’ve ever released and then some. “Every time someone would yell out
a request,” Angel recalls, “[Reed] announced, ‘We’re gonna play it
all.’” (When Angel then asks Reed if they’ll play ‘Sister Ray,’ Reed
replies, “I said, all of
it!”) Getting into the cow-town spirit, the Velvets’ frontman wears a
straw cowboy hat for the third and final show; otherwise, Angel says,
“he wore the same outfit all three nights – blue bell bottoms, and
maybe a shirt with horizontal stripes. It looked kind of like a
sailor’s outfit in a way.”
As far as Angel is concerned, “Lou Reed as a
performer was probably way beyond what most people expected. I don’t
think there were too many people who had listened to the albums and
expected that level of professionalism live. During one song – I’m sure
it was ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ – the PA let out a little bit of feedback. It
happened once, and then about a minute later it happened again, and
then he stopped playing. He motioned for the band to stop and said,
‘Now look. These people paid their three dollars to hear this right,
and so they’re gonna hear it right. So get it fixed! Take your time,
we’ve got all night, we’re not in a
hurry. We don’t get up early, we don’t have any place to be in the
morning. Just get that fixed,’ or something to that effect. I recall
the guy that was working the PA running around like crazy, scrambling
around, looking kind of embarrassed and uptight. I’d never seen anyone
who played there insist on being such a pro. But he was very friendly
and humble toward the audience, for the most part; Lou seemed to relate
to the crowd like they were in on something, in on it with him.”
In a conscious effort to avoid hippie-rock
clichés, Reed also reportedly tells a member of the venue’s
staff, Tyler Jansen, that he “specifically did not want an
oil-and-water light show happening. One of the directives about the
light show was, no squiggly moving stuff,” Angel adds. “But they did
have a light show, and they had decent lights.” Reed is not much of fan
of Jim Franklin’s poster art – supposed to represent an underground,
velvet-lined coffin – either. Angel remembers him asking the artist,
“Why such gruesome subject matter?” to which Franklin replies, “I don’t
know. Why do you write songs about smack?” Angel adds that
Franklin would later call the Velvets’ shows “the highlight of the
entire Vulcan Gas Company existence. I would agree with that.”
“The amazing thing to me was that Nico was not
there, and John Cale was not there, and yet they sounded really like
The Velvet Underground,” notes Gregg Barrios, the Austin writer and
filmmaker who in 1967 wrote one of the first reviews of a VU record.
“Doug Yule did the Nico songs with such panache. He found that feminine
side in him and did them just really wonderful. He didn’t try to make
[a Nico-sung tune such as ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’] his own, but to just
make it what it was, a Velvets song. I think Lou Reed would have been
very upset if he had tried to take the thunder away from him, because
Lou is that kind of guy. I think too often people forget that [Yule]
was there, because he was so much a part of the group. Tell him that
one of his fans in Austin still remembers the dignity that he brought
to the band."
Billy Angel agrees. “Doug Yule could have done a lot
of things that were wrong, and didn’t,” he says. “He stuck to the bare
minimum, and it was fine, it worked. It was a minimal version of the
sort of stuff Cale had done, sort of a simulation, and he didn’t take
it far enough to take any chances with it. Anybody else probably would
have, and would have probably loused it up, and he didn’t. He did it
real well. And his singing, his stage presence, was really great. He
seemed smart enough to leave well enough alone musically, and a lot of
people, especially at that time, just wouldn’t have done that. They
were lucky to have him, they really were.”
As for the overall reaction from the Austin
audience, Barrios adds, the Velvets “were very well received. They did
a lot of songs that ultimately never came out on [Loaded]. When Maureen did ‘Ocean’
with the cymbals to evoke waves, that was something I had not heard
come from them. They were talking about religion [in] ‘Jesus.’ There
was almost a kind of nostalgia that seemed to be creeping into this, as
if that era that had produced them had moved on.”
At some point during the Velvets’ Austin trip,
Barrios interviews Sterling Morrison; the lengthy Q&A – with some
brief interjections by Doug Yule – eventually appears in the March 6
1970 issue of Fusion.
Morrison admits he still hasn’t heard The Stooges’ debut LP, but cites
The Byrds, The Kinks, and “Dr John’s first album” as favorites; Yule
praises Taj Mahal, The Rolling Stones, and Creedence Clearwater
Revival. Morrison then puts down Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of
Invention at some length, and makes clear how he feels about
suggestions that the Velvets are similar in any way to another pre-punk
band of sorts: the MC5. “That’s a comparison that would drive me to an
early retirement,” he says.
Asked if he’s happy with how things are going with
the Velvets, Morrison admits, “I’d like to see us have a hit single.
It’s really important that you do that. Our singles so far are a joke …
Most of our singles were never distributed. However, where they
appeared on jukeboxes, people have really liked them.” He might be
alluding to the backlog of material cut in recent months at the Record
Plant when he adds, “We have all sorts of strange things lying around
in the can, as they say. We record them and get tired of them before
they’re released. It happens many times. We get demos and we play the
demos and get tired of them.”
Years later, Barrios recalls, “I had a great time
with Lou, but he didn’t want to do the interview. He said, ‘Let
Sterling speak.’ Sterling and I went and had tacos, and he said, ‘I
kind of like Austin. I kind of would like to move somewhere so I can
finish my education.’ I assumed he was just talking. I didn’t think he
was serious.” But he was: Sterling will begin graduate work in Austin
in 1971, when he starts teaching at the University Of Texas.
In his 1986 interview with Ignacio Julia, Morrison
mentions some “terrific recordings” of one of the Austin shows. No such
recordings have come to light in the years since, however, so he might
perhaps have meant the Dallas tapes recorded earlier in the month. If
any Austin recordings are ever discovered, they might include the
45-minute version of ‘Sister Ray’ mentioned in Stephanie Chernikowski’s
article for the July/August
1980 issue of New Yorker Rocker.
Meanwhile, it’s possible that the Velvets also play
at an outdoor festival in Texas at some point during October. As Doug
Yule recalls, the outdoor shots by road manager Hans Onsager included
in 69 On The Road: Velvet
Underground Photographs were likely taken at just such an event
in the state, possibly on a college campus. Even more intriguing is the
fact that the pictures show what Yule confirms to be “an independent
filmmaker wandering around, making films of the whole thing. I think
someone has tried [to track him down], and been unsuccessful.”
