Original subtitles

We're sponsoring a new band. It's called the Velvet Underground.

And what they demonstrated so clearly was that something like rock music, which was looked down upon and which was reviled or just put off as being insubstantial, could be elevated to something poetic.

The Velvet Underground, one of the most unique bands of the 1960s, even though the power and influence of their music has been widely acknowledged, they were all but ignored within their own time.

This is the story of their music, and the band who made it.

The Velvet Underground formed in New York during 1964, when John Cale, a classically trained musician from Wales, met Lou Reed,

who was currently working as a staff songwriter for Pickwick Records.

The pair quickly recruited Sterling Morrison on guitar and bass and Motucker on drums, taking their name from Michael Lee's sadomasochistic novel, the band quickly attracted the attention of eccentric New York-based artist Andy Warhol.

Warhol instantly became both a benefactor and an advocate for the group.

We're sponsoring a new band. It's called the Velvet Underground. And since I don't really believe in painting anymore, I thought it would be a nice way of combining, and we have a chance to combine music and art and films altogether.

And we're sort of working on that. And with the whole thing as being auditioned tomorrow at 9 o'clock, and if we're excited, we might be very glamorous.

As well as providing the group with a stage on which to perform, Warhol also controversially introduced a second singer to the band.

Nico, a beautiful Hungarian chantuse, had recently arrived in New York from London, where she recorded the Dylan song, I'll keep it with mine.

On Warhol's insistence, she took lead vocals on several of the Velvet Underground songs.

You got to have a beautiful girl in it. And his Nico was the beautiful girl, you know?

So this whole thing of forcing that on the group and wedging it in with shoe horns and chisels and spikes, it came about and it worked, but like Lou had to be just about begged by Andy to do it.

And so when we performed, you know, it was developed underground in Nico.

Andy introduced her to us and I thought that the songs she did sing were perfect, but we never intended that now it's the Velvet Underground in Nico.

That it was just in our minds of temporary thing.

Warhol and his entourage quickly developed what became known as the exploding plastic inevitable, a multimedia show featuring a live performance from the band.

We've mashed God, shall it end the dark?

Seven and you seven comes and bells, please come and say to him, strike dear, his strengths are pure, it is not.

The show's really, in fact very often on stage I would think, man, I'd like to be out there and see in this, it must be really.

Interesting.

Despite Warhol's promotional efforts, the band was still no closer to being signed.

So while still performing nightly with the exploding plastic inevitable, the group made the unusual decision to record an album to force a cure in the record contract to facilitate the album's production Warhol approach, Norman Dolph, who is currently working for Columbia Records.

I got involved with the Velvet Underground via Warhol because I was working for Columbia and asked me if I knew how to get such a thing done.

And I was working for the custom manufacturing division of Columbia where they made records for Atlantic and Warners and one of the accounts that I handled was Scepter.

They had a studio office on 54th Street.

The guy that was there, chief engineer, was a guy named John Lecotta.

He was a journeyman engineer for Scepter and would record whatever they had on the books.

They'd record Gospel in the morning and deal on Warhol in the afternoon and Marv Johnson at night.

And they had a deal with Scepter that any time the studio wasn't booked, he could sell himself and the studio to outside clients and pocket the dough.

The only restriction was he had to work around the stuff that Scepter was doing ordinarily.

And that was there perked to him.

And so we made an arrangement.

I believe that the budget was 600 bucks, which was essentially, I believe, to be two long days of recording, two or three.

The whole thing took place in my best recollection over parts of four days in one week.

I remember being in the studio the first time, yeah, I was very excited.

It was so different.

I've never obviously done anything like that.

John and Lou had, but that was totally new to me and it was very exciting to be making a record.

And it was fun, but it was also nerve-wracking.

We only had eight hours.

So none of us wanted to mess it up or have to do it again or whatever, because we just didn't have the time for it.

In the years since the album was recorded, some confusion has grown up around Andy Warhol's precise role in the record's production.

Andy didn't play any role in the first record.

Not a technical role.

He was always a cheerleader sort of, but which was great to have, but no, he didn't play any role.

The musical decisions, I would say, were made in the main by John Kalen Sterling in terms of the balance or feel-wise in nature.

I would give them credit for it.

I didn't have a last word on anything except to listen for things that sounded like true mistakes.

Somebody knocked over a music stand or you could hear something that wasn't mixed right, that you just clearly couldn't handle.

And we'd look at Johnny Cial, let's start it over.

And we'd break the take down and start the thing over from the head.

So in most of those songs, there is only one surviving take.

There may be some scraps, but they were done and then people come in and listen to it and they'd say,

let's do it over from the top or let's buy it.

But they were mostly done in one complete shot takes.

I think it affected the process or the result favorably because we didn't have time for nonsense.

We didn't have time to overdub a solo, for instance, or things like that.

And I don't think even in those days you had four tracks or two or something.

With the record complete, Dov took a copy of the album and pitched it to his current employers at Columbia Records.

At the end of the session, they did a mono mix.

And I took that tape to Columbia where we had an acetate cut.

And that acetate was presented to Columbia's ANR department.

I said, look, there's a new group sponsored by Andy Warhol, Radical New Sound,

making all kinds of waves in the East Village.

And is this something Columbia's ANR department want to sign on for?

And I got the acetate back in about 48 hours with a memo saying,

there's no way in the world any sane person would buy or want to listen or put anything behind this record.

I passed it back to Warhol and Morrissey and it's only about a year or live a more later does it surface on MGM Verve.

Now, one thing that can never fully be known, I guess, or Lou Reed may be able to shed some light on it.

But Tom Wilson, the guy who was the spearhead of it at MGM Verve, had worked for Columbia at the time it was shown to Columbia.

Now, I don't know whether his ear has ever heard it at Columbia and had an opinion on it or not.

Tom Wilson is a very significant figure on the entire rock scene in the mid 60s.

I mean, here is somebody whose real reputation within pop circles, of course, is as the producer of Bob Dylan,

who after all is the cutting edge figure at that point.

When they first came into contact, he was still doing freelance work for Columbia.

So the story goes, essentially, he told them, no, wait.

I'm going to MGM to Verve come with me.

But what he would have had to work with in terms of the New York sessions, what they'd produced.

Wilson seems to have pretty good instincts about what needed to be recut.

They redid three songs.

They did, waiting for the man again, they did heroin, and they did Venus and Furs.

When they finished, Wilson decided that the record wasn't strong enough.

And he wanted a single.

And so that's when he asked them to write a single specifically for Nico.

And that would be Sunday morning.

Sunday morning was released as a single in December 1966.

However, it was not to feature Nico on Lee Vocals, as Tom Wilson had wished.

Sunday morning brings the dawning.

It's just a restless feeling by my side.

Early dawning.

Sunday morning.

It's just the wasted years so close behind.

Watch out, the world's behind you.

There's always someone around you who will call.

It's nothing at all.

It's sort of a hallmark of Lee's relations with Nico at that point that he wrote the song

and then when they got into the studio, refused to let Nico sing it.

When they got there, Luce sang it in a voice that was so feminine.

It was more feminine than Nico could possibly have done it.

I think that may have been intentional on his part to pretty it up and say,

you know, we don't need this girl singing. I can do it myself.

So it was an attempt really to get a single because they wanted to be successful.

It's not one of these things where we want to die in obscurity.

We want to be played on the radio. We want people to buy our records.

So let's give them something that is good and we love, but is accessible.

And Sunday morning is a beautiful, beautiful recording.

People forget that while the velvet's were dark,

there was a certain harrowing chic about them.

They were certainly decadent up to a point in a very street-wise manner.

They did have songs like Sunday morning, which had a very happy, happy joy, joy.

Pop theme to it.

The thematics of the velvet underground weren't just trying to sort of push the envelope.

They also realized that sometimes caressing the envelope could be even more effective.

Although the velvet underground finished recording in May 1966,

due to a variety of legal problems, the record was not released until 1967.

This delay was further compounded by the record's exceptionally complicated sleeve design,

which today has become as iconic as the music itself.

I worked on the first album cover, but we did it as a group at the factory, Andy, Paul, Gerard.

I mean, you know, we all contributed different images and what have you.

And if you look on the credits on the velvet underground and Nico album,

I'm listed as Billy Linnick, which is who I was in the avant-garde art world

before I became Billy Naim of factory fame.

One of the truly radical things that the album does, everyone forgets.

If you open up the original album, it's got all these quotes about the band.

The only thing is 80% of them are really, really nasty.

They hate the band, and the band, rather than actually burying these attacks on them,

make them part of the album cover, which is an extraordinary radical gesture.

The album cover for the velvet underground and Nico is fun.

It's a fun record.

And that's not to say that it wasn't calculated because it's a banana.

What does it look like? It looks like a penis, right?

It's a big penis on a record.

And then the addition of the temptation to want to peel this off is like,

oh, what is underneath?

And you're expecting something really nasty and dirty and you're like,

oh, you know what? The pink banana underneath, right?

Gotcha.

The Velvet Underground and Nico was released in March 1967,

and although the record was famously ignored in its own time,

it has since gone on to become recognised as one of the most innovative

and unique recordings in modern music.

The Velvet Underground and Nico is one of those literally handful of albums

that you don't really see the precedence for.

There are literally a handful in rock music where you put the album on

and you don't see what leads up to it.

There is nothing that says, oh, and the next step is the Velvet Underground and Nico.

And no matter how radical something may sound on first listening,

most of the time, almost all of the time, you're going,

ah, yeah, they've combined B-Fart with the MC5.

Or, you know, it's some kind of melange of things that have come before.

Now, of course, no music is completely new,

but I dare anybody to say that they heard Venus in Firs on Velvet Underground and Nico

and went, ah, I can hear that's a bit of John Cage taken with Le Montyung

and mixed in with the little, no, it's just from nowhere.

music.

music.

music.

music.

music.

music.

music.

music.

music.

I remember the first time I heard Venus in Firs and it was the first time I heard the Banana album.

And the first couple of tracks, I was with a couple of friends,

listening to it in their parents based on an old high-five with legs on it.

Really, really, really neat thing. And I popped this record on, I had just purchased it.

And as we were all talking, I'm sort of listening to it in the background,

and it sounds like a Sunday morning, it sounds like a pop song.

And I'm sort of listening to the record and listening to them,

and I'm sort of ignoring it until Venus in Firs comes on.

And then suddenly everything else is shut out.

Venus in Firs is the breakthrough. And I don't just mean in terms of Velvet Underground.

I mean, in terms of rock music, you know, it probably is

the most important rock song since Heartbreak Hotel, you know.

It's because it essentially kicks open the door.

It says you don't have to use the same three instruments.

You don't have to talk about the same subject matters.

And the fact that it would pick something as relatively dangerous as a Saka Masak's S&M novel

from the 19th century as a subject to do that in a pop song.

You know, it's such an unimaginably radical gesture.

I am tired.

I can't wear it.

I could sleep for a thousand years.

A thousand dreams.

That would only make me different colors made of tears.

Before joining the Velvet Underground, John Cale had worked exclusively within the classical avant-garde,

influenced by the music of John Cage and Montyong.

Cale had bought these more experimental elements with him to his new band.

They had this underlying avant-garde aesthetic that came from Cage and Lamont Young and Cale being part of that

mindset of the long tone.

That long tone was the kale gift to the Velvet Underground, that haunting undertone, the underground tone.

I had decided a couple of things.

That sound was not a sound that I'd ever heard that anybody had that young, you know, which it's more than a...

It's an electrified viola, but once you know that's what it is.

Otherwise it could be doom and kernate as far as the sound goes.

John was very inventive and, oh, let's do that.

Let me try this.

I think he had more, I think, more to do with the songs becoming what they were.

Now, of course, Lou wrote them, so obviously he had a lot to do with it too.

But I think the final product I think had a lot more to do with John than people maybe realized.

I remember being on the other side of the glass, you say to myself, my God, I am seeing exactly what it would be like if I were injecting.

So the controller wasn't very large.

It was just John and I and Warhol came in from time to time.

It was a transfixing experience because I believe the other musicians also were in the control room and they had heard it a hundred times.

But it was something.

I don't know.

Just where I'm going.

I'm going to try for the kingdom if I can.

Because it makes me feel like I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein.

And I do your things aren't quite the same when I rush in on my run.

And I feel just like Jesus' son.

And I guess that I just don't know.

And I guess that I just don't know.

He's attempting to communicate an experience that is almost impossible to communicate to somebody who's never taken heroin.

Using the power of language.

Now of course if you can add the power of music on top of that, you really do have something.

He puts these two chords together in a way that is deceptively simple.

But he said himself that if you listen to the song, which pretty much label developments as a drug band right out of the gate,

it's not a pro-heroine song by any stretch of the imagination.

It's in a sense more about transcendence and surrender.

It doesn't really glorify the dope experience.

But what it does is it presents it in a thematic way very accurately, deceptively seductive in the start.

Beautiful.

And then the song starts to build in a way.

Sterling had said that it's inevitable that as the song builds that you're singing it faster and playing it faster

and it starts this train that you can't get off.

And much like the drug experience, by the time you realize you're on it, it's too late to get off.

And then the song goes to the door and then the door and then the door and then the door and then the door and then the door.

No one may be agree even notices this, but right in the middle of a good drum stop.

And the reason is because no one ever thinks about the drummer, they're all worried about what the guitar sound like and stuff

and nobody's thinking about the drummer.

Well, as soon as it got loud and fast, I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't hear anybody.

So I stopped assuming, well, they'll stop too and say, what's the matter, Mo?

But nobody stopped.

And then, you know, so I came back in and to this, that just, I love that song.

I loved playing it and having that on the record just kills me.

The interesting thing about heroin is that it is quite clear when you read the lyrics, that it is a poem.

So this is something that even if we didn't have Reed's first-hand account, you would have to imagine,

was something he wrote as a piece of poetry and that then conceived of a way of performing.

Of all the lyricists at the 60s, if you go back and listen to all of them, I think the two that stand out are Bob Dylan and Lou Reed,

the ones that are just doing something, hadn't shoulders above what everyone else was writing.

Nobody at the time that Reed started as a rock lyricist could fail to be influenced by Dylan.

The difference is essentially one of angle of attack because Reed wants to present a world of brutality.

And wants to suggest that there is something more ethereal, greater, more spiritual,

somewhere around the edges of what is a very brutal real world.

He's so straightforward and so simple. He doesn't waste any words.

Every word that he uses has an effect. It's got a purpose for being there.

He's a great writer. He's not just a great songwriter.

Away from the big cities, where a man cannot be free of all of the evil in this town,

and of himself, and those around. Oh, and I guess I just don't know. Oh, and I guess that I just don't know.

While living in an apartment on Ludlow Street, a very early incarnation of the band

demoed several key tracks in the summer of 1965. Among them was a rather different version of I'm waiting for the man.

But unlike heroin, which on those Ludlow Street demos sounds exactly like the song we all know and love,

and it sounds like the song is a very different.

Loves enamored meant with Bob Dylan.

Probably reached its peak at the point that they were recording this.

And it sounds for the whole world like Bob Dylan doing Leadbelly.

Give it a shot. It's something more like...

Well, I'm waiting for my man. He actually is doing his most convincing loo.

I'm waiting for my man. He even sounds like Dylan.

Whereas the actual realized version of the song, Lou did have a mastery of integrating his lyrical and subject matter,

along with Cale's cooperation into achieving a sound, a rhythmic sound, and a pulse with the instruments

that reflected that lyrical matter. And with waiting for the man, it's a train and it is definitely heading uptown.

The image is brilliant. It's a train ride. It's a subway ride.

And the song does sound like you're on a subway train.

Lou and John used to busk on street corners in Harlem with that song.

And you can hear it. You can hear it as just a couple of kids with guitars playing it.

So when you hear it on the record as a finished product, you say, what is this?

There's so much energy, so much electricity to it. And I think that really has to do with Maureen's drumming,

propelling that song.

Mo Tucker, like Tommy Ordele, Tommy Ramon in the Ramon's 10 years later, was an essentially untrained drummer.

I mean, she wasn't... I used to think that she had never played at all, but it turns out not to be true.

But she was not a full-time drummer with a lot of chops.

And like Tommy Ordele was forced to use her brain to do simple things that were effective.

And that was a crucial part of the Velvet Underground groove.

I think the whole band adjusted to her notion of what time was.

And it made that band sound radically different.

When we first played together, we did a lot of improvising.

And just playing a kit just didn't fit, I didn't think.

Also, I was probably trying to be a little African. That sound, you know, a deeper sound. I didn't want high-pitched sounds.

You know, I was the rhythm section. And I always hate in songs where the drum stops because now the drummers banging on the cymbals

or... I hate that. To me, it's, you know, the drums should be throughout the song.

And I felt like it was my job, me and Sturl, basically, to keep...

For instance, it would just be noise. If there's no rhythm under there, it's just noise.

I think she's the sort. I mean, she's where the punk notion of how the beat works begins.

I know I specifically remember the Nico tunes, especially all tomorrow's parties.

It was hypnotic because I was as close to her as I am to you now, except there was a glass wall between us, right?

But... And she is mesmerizing with that accent and the... this absolute detachment of her persona and what she's projecting against the actual words that you're hearing her sing, which are really quite intense.

And that, that... I don't know, juxtaposition between the way she looked and came across and the way she sounded.

There was no place to fit that. It was without a precedent.

And what caused to share the poor good rest?

To order more of my teeth?

And me done this from who knows where?

To order more of my teeth?

And where will she go?

When shall she do? When did not come there wrong?

She turned smart, sunless, calm...

And crying high and blue.

To me, it seems to be like the most perfectly crafted of the level of underground songs, because it seems like everyone does what they're supposed to do.

You've got the beautiful, beautiful guitar lines by Lou Reed's, right? They're edgy and they're rough, but they take that song to places that you would never think of.

And then you've got John Cale's piano in that, which is almost... it's elegant.

You know, people think of the band as being very noisy and very harsh, but I think there's a very great deal of elegance to it, and especially in that song.

And then Nico brings the whole thing together with this unexpected European feel to her voice. She's got the accent, she's got the great tone, the great Germanic tone.

Her voice in a way had a marion faithful feel, and also Marlena Dichricht-Tambour, so it was 1930s decadent German cabaret combined with the 1960s decadent British rock and pop scene.

Perfect, and it worked magnificently on something like autumnary parties, because it was a bringing together of two... you can almost hear the bringing together of two giant talents, the Lou Reed John Cale Morrin Tucker end, and Nico on the other side.

Neither of them really knew what they could bring out from the other, but were prepared to give it a go.

Despite the album's cult status today, on its release it was all but ignored, and barely managed to chart it all.

After the release, the Velvet Underground left the direct management of Andy Warhol.

They also stopped performing with Nico, although both Reed and Cale would contribute heavily to a first solo album.

In the summer of 1967, the band came under the management of Steve Ceznick, and began to appear live again.

However, the group made the strange decision to boycott performing in New York.

Instead, they began to play the club since several East Coast cities, in particular, the Boston Tea Party.

Okay, this is the building where the Tea Party was. It's on the south end of Boston, on a street called Berkeley.

The building was built back in the 1870s. It was originally a church, then it became a synagogue, a few other things.

The sound in the room was really fantastic. I mean, I think that was one of the things that really distinguished it.

A lot of the bands that played here would always say like they really loved playing here.

And the Velvet's just sounded fantastic here.

And this is a place that they played a lot, because it was during that period from 1967, which just opened in January 67, through 1970 when they didn't play New York at all.

You have to remember the Tea Party audience at the time was not like, say, the Fillmore, which is sort of very hippie, or for that matter like the Dom in New York, which is very New York hip.

Boston, in a lot of ways, was a very kind of backwater town.

So you had a lot of people going to these dance concerts, we call them, three bucks, get in there and you know, dance your butt off all night.

So the Velvet's were just a great dance band. So you had a lot of like local blue collar kids who just kind of lived in the neighborhood.

You got students from Harvard and BU and who would come over there. You get an occasional professor wondering, you can just tell.

And they always brought up a few people from New York. But it rapidly became a kind of scene where they really settled in.

And for whatever reason, and I think it was because it was just such a great band to listen to and dance to, that people in Boston just adopted them.

And that ranges from Harvard, you know, graduate students to tough kids from the neighborhood.

And that really was the start of their, I guess we could call it almost residency, because when I became the manager, I just started booking them really regularly.

At the end of the summer of 1967, the group went back into the studio to record their second album, White Light, White Heat.

The record was released in January 1968 and again failed to become a commercial success.

On first inspection, the album does not boast such a flamboyant sleeve design as its predecessor.

However, the record's cover is, in a more subtle way, equally as innovative.

The cover, which is a black on black of a skull and crossbones tattoo. There's black skull and crossbones on a shiny black background.

That came about because when they were going to do the second album, Lou came to me and said, Billy, I want you to do the cover for the next album.

So I said, Lou, you know, rather than me trying to come up with a design image, why don't I let you look through all my negative files and you select something.

And we'll use that for the cover image.

So what he selected was an image from one of Warhol's movies called Bike Boy, where this stud hustler that we, I don't know, if we picked him up in Times Square or where we got him.

My name was Joe Spencer. He was a neat guy. But anyway, he had that tattoo on his upper bicep forearm.

And Lou spotted it in one of the frames from one of the films, from one of the stills I had made on his arm.

He was like standing in a doorway with his co-star and Lou brought this negative strip to me and he says, I want that for the album cover.

And I said, you mean this picture? He said, no, the tattoo on the guy's arm, which in a 35 millimeter black and white frame is like this teeny little thing, you know.

And so I really had to like enlarge it enormously. So it got totally grainy, but it was cool, you know. It was funky looking like that.

So we used that and I said, well, let's do it in black on black, you know. And it became that great famous album cover.

Some people consider white light weight to be the band in its purest form. There's no Nico, there's no Andy Warhol, there's no gimmicks.

It's a black album cover. There's nothing to peel, nothing to goof around with. And the music on there is very dense.

It's what the band wanted to do. It was hard and it was fast. So as far as that record being the essence of the Velvet Underground, I can see that.

And I can also see it as being a major, major influence on people who heard it then, who then influenced the people who have become punks.

White light white heat is an absolutely great track. It's one of the, I mean, it's a pure rock and roll classic, one of the, and another record that really presages the whole,

the whole punk upheaval of the middle 70s.

When the Belvids are cited as a major punk influence, I really don't think that you can go back to the Velvet Underground and Nico for that.

You might be able to, for a few tracks, but I think the real punk attitude comes from white light white heat.

White light, the band wants to come and watch more of that.

I think speed was the drug of choice. I think to remember Sterling telling me a story of the night of the white out, or the day of the white out, which has been an apple night doing speed.

And then the sun came up and went there and it was blazing, snowstorm and they walked out and all of a sudden it was just like white everywhere.

I remember when they brought the Master in, one day Luke came to the factory, he had the Master.

So we went over to his loft to listen to it, you know, and he wanted me, what do you think, this part, and listen to this part, you know, and with his sister, sister Ray, was like we were all just flipping out as we heard it.

You know, it came over so cool.

I said I couldn't hit it that way. I said I couldn't hit it that way. I just like sister Ray, with it on.

So I love Sister Ag. I loved playing it and when I listened to the album I still get chills. I just absolutely love it.

It's really the fact that Sister Ray is the centerpiece of that particular album that overwhelms everything else that is contained around it.

It's such a radical statement in itself.

We're going to turn everything up as loud as possible. I don't care if I've got more effects than you. I'm going to use all of them.

I'm not concerned about the mix. It's going to be as loud as I can possibly get it and you better keep up with me.

You can feel that the way they play off of each other. You can hear the interplay between the organ and the guitars.

Luckily you've got Maureen keeping everything down and everything sort of where it should be so that this thing just doesn't disintegrate into a million parts.

So it's a very telling sort of a track because it does sort of illustrate what was happening within the band and what was to come.

By the time of the recording of White Light, White Heat, Reed and Cale's relationship had begun to disintegrate.

And eight months after the release of the album, John Cale played his final gig with the band.

John and the other, it was so strongly willful. And no one can tell the other one what to do or nobody can tell either one of them what to do.

And the whole thing was that they couldn't have been driven like two musical heads there because in the first place their musical heads were in different places.

But the way those two different places came together in performance was great.

But when you get to decision making, the two different heads didn't come together. So John and Lou were always like this conflicting thing going on.

Well when John left, it was really sad. I mean, you know, I felt really bad.

And of course this was going to really influence the music because John's a lunatic.

But, you know, I think we became a little more normal, which was fine. It was good music, good songs.

It was never the same though. It was good stuff, a lot of good songs.

But just the lunacy factor was gone.

As witness, when John was gone and we played the same song, it wasn't quite the same.

There was definitely a piece that was removed from the band that would not ever be replaced. I don't know how you could ever do that.

Where else would you find a viola playing Welshman who was an avant-garde student?

You know, I think it's kind of a tall order to fill.

But once he was gone, you lost the drone. You lost the screeching and a lot of the menace that you can hear in the first two records.

But you also gained, I think the band gained something too. They were able to open up a bit more.

I think it was inevitable for John to leave. I don't think it could have continued with him.

And that's the feel that you get on white, white heat. It's just sort of now, it's now or never. And as it turns out, it was never.

However, the band still had performance is booked and so needed to replace Kayle quickly.

A multi-instrumentalist from Boston, Doug Yule had befriended the group and quickly became the obvious choice.

Although another more abstract reason would secure his place within the band.

Lou was into the zodiac, he was into mysticism and things like that.

And one of the factors that brought Doug Yule into the band instead of another bass player or singer was the fact that he was a Pisces.

And Lou was a Pisces and Sterling was a Virgo and Mo is a Virgo.

So to have that balance, that astrological balance meant a lot to them.

The band was Pisces, Pisces Virgo, Virgo and astrology was all the rage.

And so they called me up on Thursday, I think it was, and asked me if I wanted to join a band.

He said, can you come down right away to New York? I said, okay.

Dick Chandler was just leaving literally to drive to New York.

So I went and got, my stuff together and went down and got in his van, Volkswagen, which didn't have heat.

And we drove down, this was like October.

I drove down to New York and I met Steve and Lou at Maxis, Kansas City and as I recall Sterling was there too.

We talked, this is the deal.

They said, the only catch is would you mind playing bass? And I said, no, that's fine.

So I went home with Lou. I think it stayed in his loft and we started learning songs and played l'acob that's sad at Friday and Saturday.

It's interesting, the first gig that they played at a tea party, minus John, was on December 12, 1968.

And the very first tune they play is Harrowen, which is really pretty daring because that is probably the song most associated with John, the viola, etc.

It came right out there and played it and bang, it was like fantastic.

With Kale, their live performances were genuinely avant-garde.

Avant-garde to the point where they must have lost 90% of their audience.

When Doug was brought into the band, essentially the focus of the band tightened and they could concentrate on what actually were their strengths, their real true strengths as a live band.

Little over a month after joining the group, Doug Yule found himself entering TT and G Studios on Sunset Boulevard to record the Velvet Underground's third studio album.

I didn't know we were going to do an album. We were playing in LA and Steve said, you know, the change of plans were going to stay over and actually we can do an album.

So essentially all those songs were already being played because the album itself, when it was recorded, was done basically as a live album.

All four of us played together for the tracks.

And then we went back and overdubbed the vocals and any solos, instrumental stuff like that.

It seemed to just kind of flow, just kind of happen.

They were all songs we were playing live and it was, we didn't set out to say, well this is what we want to do.

This is what we want to achieve. We want to approach it this way.

It just said, what songs do you want to do? Let's do this, let's do this, let's do this.

So it was very organic. One of the reasons it has that particular sound is that it was just pulled out of the band while it was touring.

It wasn't a lot of time to overthink it. It was just play. Just do it.

When you're blind, you can't hear it.

I'm not. What goes on?

You're not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. I'm not.

I'm not. You're not.

Recording of what goes on with its brilliant dual guitar solo where the guitar ends up actually sounding like almost like bagpipes.

Shrieking together happened almost by accident. Again, it was a limitation of technology at the time.

They only had a certain number of tracks to deal with. Not like now where you've got infinite tracks.

And Lou was playing solos and playing solos and playing solos.

And it got to a point where if you do one more, we're going to have to take off one of them because we're running out of space.

So instead of doing that, once you play them together and see how that sounds, and of course it turned out to be this classic, beautiful,

guitar solo, which sort of is the highlight of that song.

The rhythm guitars in that song are just amazing. Both Sterling and Lou were playing very, very fast, very, very sharp rhythm.

And combine that with the other instruments and you've got this beautiful, long, propellant, great track.

The group's self-titled third album, which has become known as the Grey album, was released in March of 1969.

Reflecting the change in direction of the music, the sleeve design had similarly become less extravagant.

The third one, again, I was to do the cover. And so they came over to the second factory.

I did several photo sessions of different head shots, jumping shots, you know, on the floor shots and all this stuff.

So also the shots that's actually on the cover would then sitting on the couch at the factory on the cover.

And Lou, I think it's Harper Bazaar or something. He's the whole magazine he's looking up.

That wasn't one of the sets. It was just a casual shot I took of them on the couch.

But that's the one that everyone liked, because everything else was too staged or formal or ridiculous.

This was just like a shot at guy as I was walking by the couch. They were sitting there and Lou looked at me and it was like what they really liked.

So that worked. So that was the third album cover.

And on the back, I did this convoluted double half-loud-read convolution.

It's like on a deck of cards where the jack has half of his head is this way and the other half is that way.

You know, it's a convolution inversion of Lou with a really long look on his face on the back of it, which I really loved that.

So that one I actually got to do our work on the back as well.

The album represents a change in direction for the group's sound.

With Kale Gone, the aggressive avant-garde tone to the music changed and became softer and far more melodic.

I like to think that the loudness and the discordancy or whatever you want to call it, that sort of typify those first two albums more

than maybe were the conflict between John and Lou, you know, that kind of brought to life in musical terms.

But that's just fantasy on my part.

But I think that the third album was maybe because I was there and I was more supportive of Lou

than or more responsive to Lou than John was, I don't know whether that's true or not, but may allow that to happen more.

But it's also to a great extent I think the group was doing that.

I mean, that's the way we played Sister Ray live on stage, but it was a little bit sweeter.

So there was always, I think, a desire on the part of Lou and really, you know, sterling and more green as well,

to just be able to make good records and even to make a hit record.

I know there was pressure on them, you know, from the label, from management, et cetera, et cetera, to do that.

But I think innately in themselves is that they wanted a craft, good rock and roll records that people would listen to.

And if you look at some of the musical threads that go through them from their influences, I mean, they're very, yeah, they took it into a very far out way.

But you still got the influences of, you know, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Rockability, Dewwap, you know, that kind of real basic roots rock and roll.

You still hear it in them.

Lou was a Dewwap fiend, you know, Lou had a collection of Dewwap records that, you know, Mo has commented on frequently.

She said, you know, I would be like, ah, who are these bands?

But people like the Spaniels. And that, you know, it's also key because the Dewwap bands of the 50s were very much street bands.

Most of them were put together by groups of teenagers who hung out, you know, on the corners, had nothing to do, and they would start to throw vocal parts back and forth.

In a sense, musically, he was trying to do the same kind of thing, take what was really happening in the streets and apply it to their musical style.

So the Dewwap stuff is of fairly key importance.

You know, remember this is a guy who worked to pick with records, writing, you know, replica hits, you know, replicas of the hits of the day.

You know, this guy had that background, you know, he's another Paul Simon in that sense.

So I don't think, you know, you know, don't shy away from the fact that he wants to write pop songs.

On the third album now, you've got this beautiful collection of soft, quiet songs. They're played quietly.

They're sung quietly. I think, I think Lou Reed does a beautiful job of singing on those songs.

I think to get Doug Ewell in the band, and to, who was basically a kid, and throw him into the mix and say, okay, this is what we're going to do now, was just worked out brilliantly.

When you hear Doug singing, Candy says, I don't believe Lou has ever sung Candy says as well, whenever he has played it later on, as Doug did.

I sang Candy says on that, and it was, I didn't know I was going to sing that song until we were doing the vocals, and he sang one, and he came back and said, why don't you sing one.

And all that it requires in this world.

Oh, Candy says, I'd like to know completely what all the soul discreetly talk about.

Part of the charm of Candy says is that it is such a beautiful melody and such a beautiful song.

The subject isn't that simple, and it isn't a run of the mill pop song subject. It's about Candy Darling, who was a transvestite, and who was having issues with being a man.

Jack obviously wanted to be a woman.

When I sang Candy says, we'd only been playing the song for a little while, and I didn't know really what the song was about or the history involved in it.

At some point when Lou and I were on the outs, he made fun of me for that, for not knowing what it was when I was singing it, and certainly had I known, I probably wouldn't have sung it, because it wouldn't have been relevant.

And I think part of the reason that it worked was because, for me, it meant something totally different.

I think the fact that you do have other voices now on the record is kind of proof that Lou was much more relaxed with himself and was not fighting with the band.

He wasn't fighting for control. He wasn't fighting to be heard, because he knew that his songs would be heard. He didn't necessarily have to sing all of them.

One, two, three, if you close the door, the night could last forever. Leave the sun, shine out, and say hello to never all the people are dancing and they're having such fun.

I wish it could happen to me, but if you close the door, I'd never have to sing the day again.

If you close the door, the night could last forever. Leave the wine, glass out, and drink a toast to never,

or someday I know someone will look into my eyes and say hello. You're my very special one.

I really wanted to do it, but I'd never sung before, and I know I can't sing very well. But Lou wrote that for me to sing.

Finally, I tried it like six times, and finally I had to just tell everybody to leave. Sterling was in the booth making fun of me in the engineers, but with the engineer was scratching his head like, why are we doing this?

So finally, I said, everybody has to leave just Lou and me, because I can't do this. I'm really embarrassed. But it worked out well. Everybody likes that song.

The song itself, after hours, as Lou often always said when he introduced it in live concert, it's about the clubs in New York that don't open until three in the morning, and they go until ten or eleven, I don't know whatever in the morning.

So I don't think of it as a real dark song. I think of it as more of a whimsical kind of, well, if you don't open the door, it's not daytime yet. Not like a heavy philosophical night could last forever.

So for me, it doesn't have that aspect. I don't see that.

The change in sound that characterizes the Grey album brought to the forefront Sterling Morrison's guitar playing and its contribution to the group's overall sound.

If you've got a band with Lou Reed and John Kale fronting it, there's really no room for anybody else to make a statement.

Anybody else is in the background, and really, Mo and Sterling were a phenomenal rhythm section together, just absolutely phenomenal.

And basically the rhythm section. Not the bass and me, but the guitar player and me. Sterling's a great rhythm guitar player, I think. Great rhythm guitar player.

Yeah, mostly he was, mostly rhythm. He had solos in a number of solos, and I think he's an ex. I loved his guitar playing.

And if you listen, particularly to the third album, suddenly you start hearing much more Sterling.

Well, even until that point, Sterling played bass. He played rhythm. He was very much in the background.

Sterling really started coming out. And I think, you know, in the early days of that new lineup, you know, Doug was obviously still feeling his way around.

This is a pretty heavy-duty band to join. It's not like you're just your average, you know, blues band to get in there and play the riffs everybody knows.

This is not your typical band. So I think he was feeling his way around, and I think it really gave Sterling the opportunity to step forward.

One of the great effects of the Relevance 1993 reunion tour was if finally people got to see who played what?

It may not have been great as far as like, as far as being creative or as far as breaking new ground, but finally, entire generation, you know, there were people who grew up just hearing the music.

And people grew up just hearing those records and never ever had a chance to see the velvet. And most of us never had a chance to see the velvet's live.

But now that we got to see them live, we got to see what an amazing guitar player, Sterling Morrison, was on the existing video of the tour.

There's a solo in rock and roll. It's just unbelievable. He could probably have played that solo a million different ways and it would have been just as beautiful.

It might have seemed to be coming more to the fore because we were playing a lot less songs where you could just go off and do what you wanted to.

They were at then they became much more structured. Yes, now the solo is 12 bars. You know? And Sterling thought that way.

Sterling is very technically an inclined person.

Despite the epic scope of the Velvet Underground's first album, for many, the Grey album is in fact the best realised of all the band's recordings.

That's the album in which he starts to really risk emotion, the expression of feeling for the first time and he does it very, very effectively.

What you get in the Velvet Underground is a cynic, a pessimist opening up.

And it's a truly exciting record. I like a lot of Lou Reed solo work. I don't think they'll ever be a record as good as that.

You don't make more than one record like that in your life.

The reason the Grey album is my favourite is because of the sound of it. There was a sort of a zeitgeist.

It was a personality that the group had at that point. There was a way that the group was together.

We'd travel out every weekend and we'd come back. We'd play two or three nights.

And then once or twice a year we'd go on a longer two or three weeks out on the road.

But it was very comfortable and warm and tight and it was really a band.

And the reason I like that album is because it sounds like a band. It reflects that.

It has that feeling to it.

This intense period of performing is reflected in the Velvet Underground Live 1969,

which was compiled from several performances recorded that year.

I think the band live was a band. They really had the potential to be very exciting.

And a lot of that was translated into recordings.

But I don't think it ever, the recordings ever equaled what the band could do live.

Between recording the Grey album and loaded, the band at some point during 1970 began to record what has become known as the famous Lost Album.

Although the recordings have appeared on various retrospective collections, there is still some confusion even within the band itself as to what the purpose of the recordings was intended to be.

You're talking about the tapes that Bal Valentine engineered at MGM.

I think those, yes, those are the ones with those set of songs on.

Yeah, we spent, I think it was the summer, sometime in the summer, going up to that studio and doing these recordings.

And it was, as I understood it, again, I was not in many loops in those days.

Nobody told me very much.

But my understanding was that we were going to use the MGM studios to work out this stuff prior to actually going into a studio and recording it.

We were doing, we were taping stuff.

It was basically tracks and vocals and a few instruments in there to sort of get organized for a recording, a regular recording session.

So I wasn't surprised when they weren't, you know, my understanding was that they were never going to be used.

They were just for, they were work tapes.

And that's the way I always viewed them.

The thing about the fourth album is if the intention was not to release that material, that they were trying to get out of their contract with MGM or that they were recording them as demos, the problem with that is why did Lou Reed go to such extraordinary lengths to make sure that those songs became public?

You know, to the extent of making his first solo album, effectively a remake of the missing Velvet Underground album from 1969, by which point the songs are two years old.

And Lou Reed, we know because, you know, he recorded 27 new songs, which he demoed in 1971 before he ever made the first solo album.

So he had an awful lot of songs that he could pull from.

So, and yet he makes his first solo album, and it's almost a template for the missing Velvet Underground album.

So clearly, for him to feel that strongly two years later about this material, it must be that he intended that material to come out.

During the early part of 1970, Steve Ceznick negotiated the band's release from their contract with MGM,

and the Velvet Underground quickly signed a new contract with Atlantic Records.

During the early summer, the band agreed to play a residency at the New York Club, Max's Kansas City.

It would be the first time that the group had played in Manhattan since April 1967.

However, it would not be the full lineup Maureen Tucker had become pregnant and was not performing with the group.

In her stead, Doug Yule's brother Billy had been drafted in as a replacement.

The Max's gig, to me, was kind of weird. First of all, no mo. Right away, that's weird.

You know, because, you know, not to slide Billy Yule as a young kid, but he was playing a conventional, you know, kind of rock-and-roll drums in a lot of simple work, you know.

It just wasn't the other thing about Max's. It was such a scene that, in part, the Velvet's were just kind of the backdrop to people hanging out and doing what they're doing and making the scene and, you know, being cool, etc., etc.

Max's Kansas City was the Andy Warhol crowd's watering hole. It was their club of choices where they would end their nights long into the mornings, and where they would go to have fun.

So it was a perfect place for the band to now play. They effectively became the house band at Max's Kansas City. They played there.

They had started a two-week engagement and extended it to eight weeks, I believe, because it was so popular.

But they were packing it with their friends. It's not like they were drawing people from the outlying suburbs or from other states or whatever.

It was really just a place to play and have fun with your friends now that you're back in town.

It was very small, it was very intimate. It was fun. It was like playing in a house concert just about half the people there, everybody knew.

Successful musically, you know, there was an opportunity because it was five nights a week and two sets a night, maybe, maybe three, to experiment with some stuff to try out new material, you know, or different ways of doing new material.

Sometimes, Lou would say, why don't you sing that one tonight, you know, and so I would.

And of course, I never knew all the words because I'm not a words person. But, you know, we'd do it just for fun.

While playing at Max's, the band began recording sessions for what would become their fourth album, Loaded.

One of the things I remember is when we started the sessions is Steve Saznick and Lou wheeling one of the sun amps through the streets of Manhattan because they couldn't get it in a taxi and it didn't want to pay for a truck.

So they literally, it was on wheels. It was as big cabin, it was as tall as you are, you know.

And the wheeled it through the streets from east 55th to east 55th over to Central Park West, where the big studio for Atlantic was, and broke a wheel and doing it.

But they had to have that for the session. We just, we're in the big studio, we started tracking.

The process was very introspective and very dissective. It was, you know, pick it apart and put it back together and build this kind of puzzle of a song, which, as I was saying before, is very different than the third album.

Which was very organic and, you know, this was more like grafting fruit trees, you know. You graft one thing onto another and see what you get.

Oh, we're loaded with being recorded. There's a feeling that the band was breaking up. It did, well, you did have Maureen Tucker missing, which was, she was an essential, absolutely invaluable part of that band.

And with her gone, again, you're looking at trying to replace someone who was really irreplaceable.

I didn't play on that album and it was a big disappointment. There was a few songs that needed me.

For instance, Ocean, here come the waves, that I was really disappointed that if I couldn't play on that one, that I didn't get to end.

And happily, this makes me feel very happy. Not in a boastful way or a told-you-so way, but Lou and, excuse me, Doug, have both said since they should have waited for them off.

And Billy, you'll find, find drummer, but, and too, too normal.

If any one thing I could do over again would be to refuse to do loaded until Maureen was well again, and not well, until she was able to play.

Because by her not being there, it wasn't a band anymore. And the thing, like I said before, the love about the third album is that it's a band.

And the thing I hate about loaded is it's not a band.

Despite many people's misgivings about the album, it does contain several truly remarkable songs.

Amongst these is probably the most recognizable and influential of their entire canon of work.

There's this idea that loaded may not be as great of Elvit Underground album as the previous three, or certainly as the first one, but it did yield Sweet Jane, which is a beautiful, anthemic, almost rock song.

And I believe that for all of the people who claim to have been influenced by the Elvit Underground, I think that if you look at their music, they were probably more influenced by the material unloaded than they were in the material on the first album.

Huh.

Riding a stunt's big at you.

You know, those were different times.

All the poets, they studied, used the verse and those.

Ladies, they rode their eyes.

T.J.

T.J.

T.J.

Rock and Rollin' Sweet Jane are probably the greatest songs of Elvit Underground ever recorded.

Certainly the most influential songs of the Elvit Underground ever recorded.

The ones that other people want to sing, the ones that people remember.

That guitar figure was finalized just around the time we started recording it.

It had been a little different, not as strong before that.

And after that, that really defines the song.

Playing it live after that was all about that particular guitar figure.

And to this day, you play that and anybody who's ever heard it will say, oh, that's Sweet Jane.

Lou wrote a bridge for Sweet Jane and when the first version came out, it was edited out to, you know,

fit on the record to make it more in line with the short sort of pop song.

And Lou pitched a bitch that he said frequently.

The song was ruined by the fact that this bridge was taken out.

The song was made out of a bridge.

The song was made out of a bridge.

The song was made out of a bridge.

The song was made out of a bridge.

The song was made out of a bridge.

The song was made out of a bridge.

Lou wrote a bridge for Sweet Jane and she was made out of a bridge.

I remember Sterling saying to me that they wanted to prove to everyone that they could actually write classic

rock songs that should get played on the radio.

In fact, they didn't get played on the radio.

But it's hard to believe when you listen to Sweet Jane and rock and roll and who loves the sun.

The run up to load was kind of fraught with or was the feeling that was going on was that we needed more air play.

And again, Steve Saznik, we need to generate more commercial success in order to maintain the group.

It's like a small business.

You've got to grow or you die.

It was kind of a constant thing about air play.

Being more commercial, being more accepted in the FM world.

A lot of those songs were engineered, were recorded and engineered and edited.

The whole focus was to get air play.

They're cut down from maybe five or six minutes down to like two minutes, forty or something.

Just to get into that rotation, the FM or even the AM rotation.

The topics are more poppy.

If you listen to who loves the sun, that's unloading.

That's a straight pop song. Straight flat out pop song.

The songs that end up being chosen for loaded are too far down the lot.

They're too much of a commercial compromise.

And therefore, it's very tempting to see it as read being pushed into a position where actually the ambivalence has to go.

And with that, he can't – the compromises are too great.

Read has to leave the band because essentially that isn't what he wants.

One night during the group's residency at Max's Kansas City, Lou Reed abruptly and unexpectedly quit the band.

Lou called me outside and we'd sat on those stairs that went on the outside of the building, kind of, that went up there.

And we sat on the steps and he told me he was leaving.

I didn't say why because I felt he would have told me why if he wanted to.

So I don't really know exactly why he wanted to leave.

But yeah, that was quite a shock.

It was a total shock. I mean, it was a total surprise.

It was just one week he was there. We came back and literally until the show was about to start.

I was expecting him to turn up. I thought he was late.

Lou Reed's abrupt departure from the band signaled the end of the classic period of the Velvet Underground.

Although the group continued playing together and even recorded a further doggy or penned album,

it was never again to reach the inventive success of the original lineup.

Even though the band was never recognized within their own time,

their influence and importance is now universally acknowledged.

The quote that I opened from the Velvet to the Void always with,

unless the band's quote, he says,

modern music begins with the Velvet. It's a hugely important quote,

not least because he's absolutely right.

In other words, whatever came before the Velvet Underground is something else.

I'm not sure I call it rock music.

Essentially, it required Bob Dylan to make high 61 and the Velvet Underground to make Velvet Underground a Nico

and there to be such a thing as rock music.

There was pop, there was rock and roll. There was all sorts of things before that.

But actually, no.

Modern music began with the Velvet Underground.

I can't explain why it was so influential.

It's totally a mystery to me. It just confuses me because it was just a band.

It was just a lot of fun. It was amazing that it was going on at the time

because we were all saying like, wow, people are paying us money

to do the thing we wanted to do anyway.

To be honest, I would rather be the way it is

than us to have made $10 million.

It didn't matter. 10 million would be real nice, but honestly, I really...

It's great to go play somewhere and have a 18-year-old say,

I love your music. You change your life and things like that.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

It's just really loud.

Music in our life is sleep by rock and roll.

Yeah, rock and roll.

Despite all the computation,

you could just ease it to that rock and roll station.

And maybe it was alright.