The Tragical Blistery Tour

Sorry, Sloth. I've been MIA for a while. Business got, well, busy. Anyway, now I'm back, and it's time to talk about one of the greatest musical phenoms of all time. We're talkin' John Cale droning away on viola, organ or whatever else was at hand. We're talkin' Mo Tucker tap-tapping into some primal rhythmic vein on her drums. We're talkin' Sterlin Morrison's prismatic, serpentine lead guitar. We're talkin' Nico croaking out love songs like some drugged but randy frog. And of course, we're talking about Lou Reed, speaking, in his insectival buzz, of previously unspeakable things.

We're talkin' the Velvet Underground.

So let's get down to it: For years I’ve listened to their music—in various moods, in various states of consciousness, in many different people in many different places. I can’t begin to assess what these records have meant to me.

Still for the life of me, I can’t figure out Loaded. To quote Lester Bangs’s remarkable piece “Kind of Grim,” which dealt with the similarly chameleonic—and problematic—career of Miles Davis: “Perhaps an expository dissection of my confusion can be instructive to you, if you care.” (With considerable emphasis on that last phrase, since I ain’t no Lester Bangs. I lack his insight and so wouldn’t presume to instruct anyone else. But what the fuck…)

I can’t understand why so many people find it to be a great record. I mean, maybe it is a great record—of its kind—but is it a great Velvet Underground record?

The answer to that question depends entirely on what you think the Velvet Underground was or meant as a band. During the group’s very brief existence, it radically changed directions. You can split its recorded output almost perfectly into two pieces: The first two studio albums are a striking experimental assault on the forms and subject matter of popular music. It’s some of the most powerful noise ever made—thrillingly, deeply alive—like nothing that came before it—and its influence on punk and various other types of “alternative” music can’t be calculated.

(Hate that label. It’s lost all meaning. Alternative to what? At this point, most stuff that’s set aside as “alternative” sounds exactly the same as all the other shit on the radio.)

For the most part, the last two albums revel in exactly the mainstream conventions that their predecessors attempted to subvert, with Loaded pushing this trend toward its most extreme point. At best, this approach sought to perfect the pop song, and it resulted in very good music: achingly beautiful ballads, e.g., “Pale Blue Eyes,” alternating with warm, infectious rock and roll like “Cool It Down.”

Now the Velvets were not the first indie-type band to self-consciously pursue a hit record after toiling away in obscurity for some time, as it seems Lou Reed was doing here. And we are talking about Lou, who had absolutely taken over the band at this point. He’d always been responsible for the songwriting, but, depending on who you believe, John Cale had just as great an influence on the sound of the Velvets’ first two records. It makes a lot of sense, when you consider how, increasingly, the band pursued a more commercial direction thereafter. (Except for maybe like, “The Murder Mystery,” but I think that’s just an atavistic fluke—and not particularly relevant to what they were doing at that point.)

We’ll never know exactly why—it could’ve been insecurity about losing his authority, disagreement about the direction the group was going in, or just a simple personal grudge—but ol’ Lou issued an ultimatum to the band’s other two members, Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison. Cale was out, or Lou was leaving. They reluctantly complied with his wishes.

Of course, the Velvets weren't the first band to undergo such a dramatic change in personnel either, but with a mere four record discography, and one member dropping off per album, the stability of the band’s sound was never really great. (Count with me: Nico, Cale, and then Tucker. Andy Warhol’s influence, of course, had also abruptly faded, which may or may not be relevant.) When you look at it this way, it seems odd that listeners often point toward a Velvet Underground influence in the music of other artists. They’re usually referring to only one of the records.

Luna, for example, came so close to the sound of the penultimate Velvets album that they asked Sterling Morrison to guest on a couple of tracks. It’s a nice homage, but they could have just as easily requested permission to sample him, because his leads sound exactly like the ones he plays on songs like “Pale Blue Eyes,” “What Goes On,” and “Beginning to See the Light.” (And of course, this might tend to answer the question of which of the band’s guitarists played the leads in the first place.)

As such, it skirts the dangerously pathetic territory of playacting—creating a Velvet Underground Revue, sorta like Beatlemania and/or that Stars on 45’s Beatles medley that you might remember from your worst nightmares of the 1970s. (And obviously, that's not the only parallel between these two bands that were more than the sum of their parts. When you consider the spotty solo careers of, say, McCartney and Reed, on one side, and Lennon and Cale on the other-- with Harrison, as always, somewhere in the middle-- this principle becomes a given.)

It’s an endeavor that makes everyone involved look a little desperate. Here’s Sterling Morrison, holding onto that one shining moment when, by being caught up in creative forces (not to mention egos) he probably didn’t even understand—he was actually, momentarily relevant in a larger sense. Yep. Bet he never lived that shit down. And worse: here’s Luna franticly clutching someone else’s golden moment like some kinda cultural ghoul and/or little children pretending they are the Velvets in the same way that you or I might have imagined ourselves to be Batman, the Lone Ranger or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. (Sorta the same way in which, in their later years, the Velvets often pretended they were a doo-wop group from the 1950s.)
But that’s probably material best left for some other consideration.

Anyhoo, back to the Velvets themselves—and here comes that cynical studio hack Doug Yule, replete in black top hat and cloak, twirling a well-waxed mustache as he creeps in to finish off the band through a cruel exploitation of Lou Reed’s escalating hubris.

The change in direction seems even more shocking and painful when you consider that the Velvets were such a breath of fresh air on those first two records—a challenge not only to the increasingly decadent pop music of the day, (and yeah, I know there were lots of great things being done in, say, psychedelia and Motown, just to name two random examples,) but to the increasingly oppressive and elitist hippie subculture. They were an utterly unique squall of noise and words that shifted, abruptly, in the last two albums to insipid warblings like “Who loves the sun?/ Who cares what it does/ Since you broke my heart?” backed by overproduced folk-lite or quasi-white-R&B grooves.

It’s not that the Velvets couldn’t produce a reasonably affecting love song in their later years—for instance, Loaded’s “New Age.” Maybe that’s not even the point. It just seems that they settled into this middle of the road groove, cranking out insipid pop songs, as lifeless and forgettable as most of the other crap on the radio. They’d become the Dan Fogelberg of their day, except the radio still did not notice them, which is sorta like poetic justice, I guess.

Ah, fuck it. I don’t know what to say that doesn’t sound like some stupidass cliché—as bad as the worst late Velvet Underground song. That’s why I can’t get at the later Velvets. I can’t even express it. I’m sorry, if you care. It’s beyond me.

We were driving to the grocery store with the iPod on shuffle, and “Oh! Sweet Nothin’” came on. There were the trilling, pseudo-soulful lyrics, (“Say a prayuh fo’ Jimmy Brown…” (What th’ fuck is this, Amos & Andy?) There was the meandering arrangement—while it might have been great primal noise making when the Velvets went for, like, 10 minutes in the old days in songs like “Sister Ray,” here, it had been cleaned up and emasculated, it just seemed simply bloated and indulgent. All of it sorta made me want to puke, frankly. It left me cold and added to my distaste for Lou Reed, who’s repeatedly insisted that the Velvets were his brainchild—his genius. Yeah—whatever. That’s why the last two records blow.

And let me acknowledge that the first two records had some pretty saccharine stuff on 'em too-- "Femme Fatale" and "I'll Be Your Mirror" spring immediately to mind, but come on, freakin Nico sang 'em, which in and of itself forced you to reasses them as songs. Her flat, hoarse rendering is so unexpected, so refreshing, that the songs become simultaneously parodic and touching. It's a remarkable achievement.

Meanwhile, "Sunday Morning" sounds nice and pretty and all that, but there's a lurking paranoia there. Sorta makes sense when you consider Reed's admission that the song is about walking around outside after dropping acid.

So here’s my gist about the Velvet Underground: Don’t make excuses for them, no matter how thankful you might be for those first 2 records and what they did for popular music. Listen to something else—something that’s at least sort of emotionally real and not just an inept bid for a hit by someone who should really know better. I’m talking about Reed—in case that’s not obvious—who would go onto a spotty solo career—not that I’d express much appreciation for what Cale’s done since. (Though he did offer some remarkable turns as a producer of artists like The Stooges, Patti Smith and Nico herself.)

At the outset, I said that all of this was about which Velvet Underground you embrace. I had a friend once, (I no longer do—and while our opinions about the Velvet Underground weren’t the thing that caused the demise of our relationship, I do think they were indicative of a gulf between us,) who, after a rant like this, asked me if we couldn’t have both Velvet Undergrounds. He would never say so, but I believe he preferred the last two records. That was his Velvet Underground. Whenever he’d mention the songs he dug, this was the body of work from which they were drawn. If he put a Velvets record on, it’d be one of these.

Of course, the answer to his question is that you can have both, if you like. But for the most part, I don’t see much reason to waste my time on those last two records. If they’re what get you, have at ‘em. Nothing personal. There’s no accounting for taste. I only speak for myself, but those first two records are some of the best music made, I think. As for the other two, if I’m being honest, I think they are a sneering hat trick with a dead, brittle core—and redundant in the face of better, more heartfelt pop stuff.

I suspect that if these two albums hadn’t followed The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat, the Velvets wouldn’t be a towering archetype in the history of rock. They’d be an obscure footnote—sorta like a band you might find on Nuggets. You’d hear “Jesus” and think, “Hey, that’s not a bad little song,” and that’d be the end of it.

If you wanted to hear good, emotionally raw pop music, there was certainly better stuff out there. (If you want my free advice, that is.) Try the Supremes or Wilson Pickett; try Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell. Try strychnine or the frickin’ neutron bomb, but do yourself a favor and see these records for what they are: utter crap by a great band—or by the remnants thereof anyway, since, apparently, it was less about a group of musicians working together and more like an ever-shifting franchise, like the Detroit Tigers or McDonald’s hamburgers, that’s really nothing more than a brand name.

(Interestingly enough, Doug Yule went on to make another “Velvet Underground” record sans Reed, which, is, I think, only appropriate.)

Try music that was so powerfully delivered that you more than forgave any triteness or cynicism in the lyrics. ‘Matter of fact, it was so powerful that you forgot who you were, listening to something so scarily fucking real. (Where were you the first time you heard, say, “Dock of the Bay?”) No, you embrace those words as emblems of your own human pain.

At it’s best, music’s about heart, and the late Velvets stuff seems virtually heartless.

OK, so having thoroughly bored anyone who might be reading this, lemme move onto a coupla blog-related matters before I go. First, I am gonna change the poll question soon. The old one's been up for, like, ever, and I'm sure any of you returning visitors are probably damn sick of it, if you've seen it at all. (It's way the hell down on the bottom of the page. There's a guestbook down there too, if you're inclined to let me know you were here. All of it may be moved to the top of the page soon, if I ever get off my lazy ass.)

If anyone (hello? anyone?) has an idea for a new poll question, I'd be exceedingly grateful to hear about it, as I haven't been able to come up with dick. (Well, OK, I have been able to come up with dick, but only my own, sadly.) Just post a comment to this entry, if you will, or sign the guestbook. Thanks much.

My second and last blog "annoucment": (Ha! How dumb does that sound?) I've found a place that'll house picture for free, so I may put a few up soon. Consider that a warning or a joyous pronouncement, as you will.

Till next time, Steve Forceman's on the road again...