The Mark of True Genius

The Velvet Underground. Maybe the greatest rock band ever. Maybe not. Definitely one of the most influential. They redefined rock music. Redefined "how" to be in a band and created the sound of punk. When all around them was hippy flower peace and love they sung about the city, the bohemian seedy squalor of pimps and pot, hookers and heroin, S&M and submission. Their music came from somewhere else. A fuzzed-up mess of amphetamine aggression one minute, a beautiful sad-eyed lullaby the next. Warhol took them. He saw in them, in their sound, something he never had: truth, creative originality, underground cool, and free-spirited genius. He was all Model T Ford production line rigid, all surface, all pretense. They were real. He had the tricks, the influence, and he knew the game. They had the coolest band in the world.

Before The Velvet Underground Lou Reed had a job at Pickwick Records, a kind of Tin pan Alley song factory, where he churned out pop. The pop-sense is there in the band's work, even in their most caustic noisenik drone punk songs. The drone came from the classically trained Welshman John Cale and his Viola. It came from how this trad. instrument interacted with Reed's experimental guitar tunings and of course it came from the very lack of chord changes. These minimalist chord progressions let the vocals weave in and out of the sound picture. This sonic mesh was underpinned by Mo Tucker's pulsing beats. She drummed, but she stood up, using mostly upturned kick drum and toms, played with mallets. The final corner in the Velvet Underground's square was inhabited by guitarist Sterling Morrison, a college friend of Reed's.

Back to Warhol. He hijacked the band with Nico, the angel faced singer from Germany with the film noir voice. His plan was simple. He wanted to get the band a major label deal. Did he really think they could go mainstream? His next move was to use the band as an art installation in his multimedia roadshow the 'Exploding Plastic Inevitable". The band played as Warhol projected various colors, films, and other work onto them to accessorize and augment acid trips. The results were chaotic.

Nico and the band recorded and released their debut album on Verve Records. It was 1967 and they put a banana on the cover. Full of classic songs (Heroin, Venus In Furs, Femme Fatale, I'm Waiting for the Man, All Tomorrow's Parties) it reached 171 on Billboard's Top 200 charts. Not bad for an art house noise band. Yet momentum was lost when a photo on the back cover, from a Warhol film, led MGM Records to pull the album due to a drug possession charge issued to cinematographer Eric Emerson. They followed their debut with "White Light/White Heat", a raw, fragile and beautiful record featuring the epic no-fi track "Sister Ray". The album peaked at 199.

But Cale wanted the band to go left towards more experimental drone-based weirdness, whereas Reed was moving right, towards pop-based tunesmithery. As they began work on their eponymous titled third album Cale was out and in came Doug Yule. The resulting album was less abrasive than previous releases. Less noise, more tunes.

The band toured but made little commercial impact. They recorded a number of scrapped sessions that didn't see the light of day until years later. MGM Records dropped them as they were seen as being a druggy hippy band and they signed to Atlantic. Then in 1970 The Velvet Underground recorded "Loaded". It included their best known track "Sweet Jane" but compared to previous releases was a pale imitation of their original sound and genius. Reed was not happy during recording and left the band before the album was finished. Tucker was pregnant and played little or no active part in the process.

That was it. Doug Yule went on to record the album "Squeeze" under the name The Velvet Underground but it was critically panned. There have been various successful and less successful reunions since 1990, but none of these have captured the magic of The Velvet Underground's first three albums. At the time they were almost ignored. Now they are seen as one of the most influential bands of all time. The mark of true genius.