Sterling Morrison (I think) recalls that the first thing they heard on the radio when they arrived was the bubbly sound of the Mamas and the Papas’ ‘ Monday Monday’. One of the funniest sections in the film is about their tour of the West Coast at the height of flower power. Cale says in one of his clips that it’s important to be antagonistic, because you define what you’re against as well as what you’re for. When Cale first saw the lyrics and heard their early tunes, before the Velvets were a thing, he told Reed that they needed a different sound to match the lyrics.Īttitude matters. The band’s drummer Mo Tucker-with Cale, the surviving member of the first line-up-recalls that radio stations wouldn’t play their songs because of the lyrics. Lou Reed’s lyrics about heroin were unlike anything else being written at the time, but were drawn from his life. The reason that White Light / White Heat sounds the way it does is because the band was bored with playing the songs the way they had on their recent tours. That drone sound carries over into the band’s music, as does the sense of improvisation. ‘Training with’ involved multiple hours of daily playing of drones, which they tuned to the 60 cycles of the fridge, which I think Cale describes as the sound of Western civilisation, but I could be misremembering. Cale in particular was involved in the classical avant garde, training and living with the avant-garde composer Le Monte Young and his wife Marian Zazeela. That’s how Cale and Reed met, but you get the feeling that if it hadn’t been them it might have been another edgy combination. In the Velvets story, 56 Ludlow was significant, with multiple apartments housing artists. It was possible to live very cheaply in New York in the right (or perhaps wrong) parts of town, and that attracted artists of all kinds with no money. This note is more impressionistic-in the keeping of the style of the film-but if you want a more traditional review Richard Williams has an excellent one on his Blue Moment blog.Ĭheap places matter. We were paid two dollars and 79 cents, which is more than we ever made in the Velvet Underground. In fact, there’s a clip of Lou Reed early on in the film (from archive, obviously) in which he talks about his earlier doowop band having a track played on a New York radio station: Watching Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground made me think about cultural innovation, since the band made no money, and didn’t stay together that long, but were vastly influential.
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