THE VELVET UNDERGROUND VELVET UNDERGROUND PATCH
Morrison maintained that the studio incarnation of What Goes On wasn’t a patch on the live versions the band performed with Cale on organ. He wanted a single that might conceivably get on the radio he got a haunting, melancholy sigh of a song, its battered wistfulness and undercurrent of paranoia – “watch out, the world’s behind you” – the perfect encapsulation of morning-after regret. Sunday Morning was written at the behest of Wilson. Its melancholy seems to presage the note Darling wrote on her deathbed in 1974: “I had no desire for life left … I am just so bored by everything.” 14. No one else in 1969 was writing songs remotely like Candy Says, a stunning, tender pen portrait of the transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling set to a gentle doo-wop inspired backing. The suggestion that music will endure “despite all the amputations”, meanwhile, seems to look forward to his departure from the Velvet Underground. It is hard to see Loaded’s driving, joyous hymn to music’s redemptive power – “her life was saved by rock and roll” – as anything other than disguised autobiography on the part of Reed. It sounds like a band overturning the established order of rock’n’roll, almost literally: after two brief verses, it bursts into thrilling frantic chaos with a verbatim crash, like the contents of an upended table hitting the floor. European Son (1967)Įuropean Son isn’t a song so much as an eruption. With their 1968 LP White Light/White Heat. Killer line: “Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” Musically straightforward, sensual in tone, Some Kinda Love is a complex business, part seduction soundtrack, part refusal to be hemmed in by standard categories of sexuality – “no kinds of love are better than others … the possibilities are endless / and for me to miss one / would seem to be groundless”. Buried on side two of Loaded was one of the loveliest of Lou Reed’s loving homages to doo-wop, complete with spoken-word section. It is one of the ironies of the Velvet Underground that the most forward-thinking, groundbreaking band of their era could occasionally sound like old-fashioned rock’n’roll revivalists. There is something folky and vaguely Dylan-esque at the heart of The Black Angel’s Death Song, but by the time Cale had finished with it – alternately strafing it with screeching, insistent viola and hissing into the microphone in lieu of a chorus – it sounded, and still sounds, unique. The latter’s cocky strut is disrupted by a desperate lyrical plea: “If Shelley would just come back, it’d be all right.” 20. I Can’t Stand It (1969)Īmid the Velvets’ songs about drugs and drag queens lurked the plaintive sound of Reed pining for his college sweetheart, Shelley Albin, the subject of Pale Blue Eyes, I Found a Reason and I Can’t Stand It. The twist is that her childlike voice and the cute melody conceals an almost unbearably sad song, ostensibly a celebration of small-hours boozing, but filled with longing and regret. The Velvets’ eponymous 1969 album ends, improbably, with the drummer, Moe Tucker, singing a song that could have dated from the pre-rock era. (Clockwise from top left) Tucker, Reed, Morrison and Cale.
Take your pick from the world-weary, small-hours rumination found on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, or the more epic studio version that the Velvets biographer Victor Bockris suggested was “an attempt to present some encouraging statements to a confused audience as the 70s began”. “It was fun.” A delightful late Cale-era outtake that inadvertently captured Morrison, Cale and Reed’s giggly backchat as they recorded the backing vocals, Temptation Inside Your Heart bears that assessment out. “It was not Mein Kampf – my struggle,” the guitarist Sterling Morrison once reflected of the Velvet Underground’s career. It boasts three chords, a distinct rhythm and blues influence, Reed in streetwise, so-what punk mode and explosive guitar solos somehow potentiated by the rough sound quality. Recorded at the White Light/White Heat sessions, but never completed, the April 1967 live recording of Guess I’m Falling in Love – taped at the Gymnasium in New York – will more than suffice. “If you’re a mad fiend like we are, you’ll listen to them both together,” offered the producer, Tom Wilson. In which the band set a two-chord grind that may, or may not, have been based on their instrumental Booker T in one channel and a blackly comic Reed short story read by Cale in the other. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy 26. The Velvet Underground on stage with Nico.
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