“I didn’t belong”: The album that made Lou Reed quit The Velvet Underground
As a group, The Velvet Underground were all about going against the mainstream and offering something that was able to subvert the norms of popular music through sheer artistic expression without restraint. From the moment they released their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, in 1967, it was clear that their ambitions were not to achieve success on a grand scale, but to challenge listeners with a groundbreaking approach to rock music.
Since the band were made up of art students in the cultural hotbed of New York City, it makes sense that their ethos as a group was the direct antithesis of mainstream, and was designed as a counterpoint to the strictness of how pop music sounded. The Velvet Underground were entirely free in their approach, and didn’t care much for adhering to conventions, and a large amount of this disposition was curated by their leader and primary songwriter, Lou Reed.
While this debut album is now retrospectively considered to be a classic, sales at the time were abysmally low, and this was perhaps due to the impenetrability of some of the material on the record. Their subsequent releases, White Light / White Heat and their self-titled third record, were no more easy on the ears, but they amassed a cult following over the years through this maintained artistic integrity. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened to the band, or indeed the wider musical landscape, had they become famous at the time, but that would have been directly against the point.
They would go on to become hugely influential without needing to be successful, and the number of acts that were birthed as a result of their exposure to the music of The Velvet Underground is staggering. Their impact can still be felt in new acts that break through today, and even though they were short-lived as a group, it’s hard to take away the plaudits for what they did to reshape perceptions of rock and roll.
However, the reason for their demise was a significant change in direction that Reed had perceived going on. While their fourth album, Loaded, is considered as much of a masterpiece as the three that preceded it, Reed saw it as a softening of their original angle. To him, their vision was being clouded by the pursuit of notoriety. It felt odd for the band to be considering what songs they’d release as singles and gun for the big time, and there was nobody who felt more out of place than Reed.
At the end of a two-month residency at Max’s Kansas City in New York, Reed left the stage at the end of a performance and declared his intentions of quitting the band. He’d written a record that he wasn’t pleased with due to how the songs felt more accessible, and the band’s new label, Atlantic, had been insistent on the fact that they try to produce hits. With ‘Sweet Jane’ being the main song targeted as a radio-friendly smash, Reed felt aggrieved by the situation and quickly absconded while he had his pride intact.
“I didn’t belong there,” Reed would later claim, justifying his departure. “I didn’t want to be in a mass pop national hit group with followers.” While he would go on to have an illustrious solo career that veered between popular hit albums and challenging artistic pieces, the bottom line is that Reed was being told what to do, and for someone who has always operated on his own terms, being asked to concede to the powers that be was ultimately the final straw for him.
