AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
TO WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE
VELVET UNDERGROUND DAY-BY-DAY
“If this is what America’s waiting for, we are going to die of boredom
because this is a celebration of the silliness of café society,
way out in left field instead of far out, and joyless.” – Ralph
Gleason, reviewing a Velvet Underground show in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 1966.
“Sales are not the be all and end all of rock’n’roll … Inspiration and
artistic freedom is the cornerstone of rock’n’roll.” – John Cale, from
his acceptance speech at The Velvet Underground’s induction into the
Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, January 17 1996.
“A tasteless, vulgar review that should never have opened.” – Hitline, reviewing a Velvet
Underground show in Los Angeles, May 1966.
“These are your lyrics, hand-printed and translated into
Czechoslovakian. There were only 200 of them. They were very dangerous
to have. People went to jail.” – Vaclav Havel, explaining to Lou Reed
the importance of The Velvet Underground’s music in the dissident
movement that overthrew communism in the Czech Republic, April 17 1990.
“The first Velvet Underground album, the one with Andy Warhol’s banana
on the cover, has recently been cut out and can now be bought at
unbelievably low prices, like at the Harvard Coop for $1.99.” – The Tech, the student newspaper of
MIT, October 17 1972
“For decades this album has cast a huge shadow over nearly every
sub-variety of avant-garde rock, from 70s art-rock to no wave, new
wave, and punk.” – The website of the National Recording Preservation
Board of the Library Of Congress, upon the addition on March 6 2007 of The Velvet Underground & Nico
to the National Recording Registry, established in 2000 “to maintain
and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound
recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically
significant.”
Perhaps no other musicians of the 20th century were as roundly
criticized and undervalued at their outset as were The Velvet
Underground. When the most famous line-up began performing and
recording in 1966, more listeners than not reacted with disgust or
bewilderment. The group failed to land anything close to a hit record
by the time Lou Reed left in 1970, and had yet to gain a sizable
national following despite increasingly ecstatic acclaim from rock
critics and a growing, fervent cult audience.
Today The Velvet Underground are not so much reviled as revered. Their
status as one of the very greatest rock bands of the 60s – indeed, one
of the very greatest of all time – is uncontested. Their albums have
become catalog perennials and continue to sell to new generations of
fans not yet born when the group were active. They have been cited as a
major influence by countless rockers, from David Bowie and Patti Smith
to Brian Eno. And their music – considered by so many to be shocking
and inaccessible at the time it was produced – is now recognized as
having pioneered many innovations now regarded as standard in rock
music, from the incorporation of avant-garde composition and
electronics to lyrics dealing with drugs, sex, and street-level
reality. The group have become chic enough in some respects to have
infiltrated the mainstream, with a Velvet Underground clothing shop
operating in Santa Cruz, California; a top London record store, Sister
Ray, named after one of their most notorious songs; and a conductor on
the mass-transit BART trains in the San Francisco Bay Area even
announcing to his passengers ahead of a tunnel, “We’re now entering The
Velvet Underground.”
The disparity between the failure of the band to achieve anything near
the success and recognition they deserved in their lifetime and the
stratospheric status they now enjoy supplies the hook to most histories
of The Velvet Underground. So too does the aura of their dark and
mysterious image, their faces often hidden behind dark sunglasses; the
individual members so contrasting and striking, both visually and
personally; their music so enigmatically packaged. On top of that,
there is the group’s renowned – if rather brief – association with one
of the most famous visual artists of the 20th century, Andy Warhol, and
the legendary multimedia shows they pioneered as part of the Exploding
Plastic Inevitable when Warhol was involved in the band’s management
from early 1966 to mid 1967.
For years it was hard to actually find out much about the group, how
they had formed, and how they’d recorded their brilliant music. Even
finding The Velvet Underground’s records was, for a long time after
their demise, something of an adventure, assuming you were even lucky
enough to hear about the band in the first place. Despite Lou Reed’s
subsequent solo stardom and John Cale and Nico’s status as cult icons,
the Velvets’ music was rarely played on the radio. Even basic
information
about the group was ard to acquire, beyond occasional passing raves by
critics in the rock press. If you were a teenager in the late 70s,
buying the VU’s first album unheard, based on its reputation alone –
after scouring for it in a seemingly disused section of a record shop,
as I
did as a 17-year-old in 1979 – was not just an unavoidable
inconvenience, but a solitary rite of passage. Not one person I knew
had even heard
anything of consequence about the band, let alone actually heard them.
Some fans and critics would like that mystique surrounding the group to
remain, and for collecting and listening to the Velvets to continue to
be a somewhat private, elitist pleasure unshared by the huddled masses.
Some would also like to emphasize, above all, the group’s songs about
drugs, sex, sadomasochism, and rock’n’roll – as well as some of the
members’ semi-legendary pursuits along those same lines in their
private lives – as the alpha and omega of what the VU have come to mean
to
popular culture. That’s admittedly a big part of the story, but hardly
the whole story. Getting as close as possible to the whole story about
this fascinating group is what White
Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day is all about.
Certainly this book has a wealth of information about the concerts they
played, the music they recorded, and the events that sparked their
numerous and sometimes fractious changes of personnel and management.
My main reason for writing it was not, however, simply to ascertain as
accurately as possible what happened when, although I did learn a
lot of fascinating and sometimes previously unearthed information along
those lines as well. What fascinates me more is how all of these
stories add up to more than a mere document of the group’s often
confusing, misreported history. Far more important, I think, is the
insight it affords us into the creation of their music – the aspect of
The Velvet Underground’s legacy that is, after all, the most enduring.
It’s partly for that reason, then, that this book includes not only
basic nuts-and-bolts facts, but also numerous behind-the-scenes stories
as to how the group’s songs were written and recorded; how their
strikingly original stage shows were devised; how they were perceived
by reviewers at the time of their 1965–70 heyday (not just in
retrospect); and how the group as a whole underwent a most improbable,
incessantly unpredictable evolution from the most avant-garde of
bohemian origins into a highly accessible yet still boldly creative
rock band by the time Reed left the group.
To draw the whole picture, I felt it was not only necessary to fully
document those years in which Reed was in the group, but also the
individual members’ surprisingly extensive (if mightily obscure)
pre-1965 activities; the solo or extracurricular projects in which they
were involved during 1965–70, which were numerous and often quite
intimately
related to what the group themselves were doing; and the ways in which
the band’s legacy was both influential and expanded upon after
1970, not only via numerous volumes of unreleased Velvets material, but
also through the way the stature of their achievements has grown
and grown with a wealth of posthumous honors and tributes. (The work of
the group between late August 1970 and their dissolution in mid-1973 is
covered relatively lightly in comparison, as is their brief 1993
reunion tour and numerous post-1970 solo projects. It’s really the
years prior to 1971 that count most when you’re surveying The Velvet
Underground’s achievements.)
Although this book is the product of a couple years of intensive
research – involving careful sleuthing through mounds of printed and
recorded material as well as about 100 firsthand interviews – it should
be acknowledged that some incidents might still have escaped discovery
by myself or other Velvet Underground fans. It’s entirely possible,
particularly as the group weren’t granted heavy media coverage while
they were active, that some concert dates have escaped detection, or
that other events took place at different times than those suggested in
this book. With all rock artists, not just the Velvets, some concert
dates are changed or canceled after being advertised; some reviews,
even in major daily papers, contain inaccuracies; and some performances
have yet even to be reported. Corrections, clarifications, memories,
and eyewitness accounts from interested readers will be welcomed at my
email address, richie@richieunterberger.com.
What I most hope this book reveals to the many fans of The Velvet
Underground around the world is a true appreciation of just how
multifaceted
their music is, and just how many myths surrounding their career have
turned out to be more complex than they first seemed. While it’s often
claimed that the group were wildly unpopular in the 60s, for instance,
they did in fact receive quite a few critical raves as the decade
progressed, and sold more records, while gathering more committed fans,
than is usually documented. The Velvets are often perceived as
operating in opposition to or in isolation from the rock trends of the
day, when in fact they did interact with and even influence quite a few
of the era’s greats. And while there is
a lot of drugs, sex, and depravity in songs such as ‘Heroin,’ ‘Venus In
Furs,’ and ‘Sister Ray,’ there is also a lot of beautiful,
compassionate, and highly melodic romanticism in tunes such as ‘I’ll Be
Your Mirror’ and ‘Candy Says,’ as well as flat-out, joyous rock’n’roll
in classics such as ‘What Goes On,’ ‘Sweet Jane,’ and ‘Rock & Roll’
itself.
As Lou Reed admitted in so many words in ‘Rock & Roll,’ his live
was saved by the music. The Velvet Underground’s music in turn has done
much, if not quite to save our lives, then to enlighten and enrich us
beyond Lou Reed and John Cale’s wildest expectations when they joined
forces to co-found the band in early 1965. No rock group becomes as
great as The Velvet Underground without addressing themselves to all
dimensions of human existence. And no rock group has done so with such
unflinching honesty and power.
Richie Unterberger
San Francisco
September 29 2008
unless otherwise specified.
HOME
WHAT'S NEW
MUSIC BOOKS
MUSIC REVIEWS TRAVEL
BOOKS
LINKS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SITE MAP
EMAIL RICHIE
BUY BOOKS