Tag: The Velvet Underground

Optimism is beautiful

I don’t know who wrote this blurb for the Velvets from Hullabaloo magazine, but they were unnecessarily upbeat about White Light/White Heat‘s commercial prospects, as that album notably appeared on the Billboard chart for just one week at position 199. With hindsight, of course, even that looks miraculous. There was no way in hell this album was ever going to make Lou and the gang pop stars, and if our author expected that to happen they were being deeply naive. Either that or they were being deeply sarcastic, of course, which the “happy sunshine” line suggests, cos if there are two words no one with any sense would associate with this album, those words are “happy sunshine”…

Start your year right

Admittedly this wouldn’t work on me cos “Sister Ray” is one of my favourite songs and I would be dancing (or at least making bodily movements approximating to same, seeing how I can’t really dance as such) for the whole length of it if you did that. Still, if your friends are less musically advanced, it might be worth trying on them, especially if you use the Legendary Guitar Amp Tape version:

I think they’ll stain more than just the carpet if they hear that. While we’re on the subject:

White Light/White Heat has always been my favourite Velvets album. My first encounter with them was actually a TV documentary about Andy Warhol which featured a bit of performance footage by them at the Factory (the famous one where the police bust them). I was, accordingly, confused at first by the debut album cos it didn’t really sound like that (I do think it’s a great album, of course, but it took time to come round to it), whereas WL/WH immediately sounded like I’d always thought they would, going by that short bit of film in the Warhol thing. Probably the most obnoxiously recorded album made to that time, and it wouldn’t have much competition for some time to come (its few immediate competitors that I can think of offhand include the Cromagnon album—which the fellow behind the “Sister Ray” video above also has a video on—and High Tide’s Sea Shanties, both from the following year). Favourite VU album, one of my favourites by anyone.

A hand-me-down dress from who knows where

Found this via Twitter. Someone’s taken the various attempts at “All Tomorrow’s Parties” from the 1965 Velvet Underground home demo and synced them up. Kind of like how, when the band recorded “What Goes On” for the third record, they used all of Lou Reed’s different guitar solos together, but also… not. The remarkable thing is that the different takes actually come together more than they don’t (third verse is a little wobbly where they haven’t quite decided on the lyrics), they’re actually remarkably consistent, and brought together in stereo like this they sound pretty big. And John Cale probably benefits even more than Lou does; the mix kind of embiggens them both in a really nice way.