The best of The Velvet Underground, according to Jonathan Richman
Everybody has that one artist they love most of all. For Bob Dylan, it’s Woody Guthrie. For Jeff Buckley, it was Bob Dylan. And for Jonathan Richman, it’s Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. In a list he crafted back in 1977 of the songs that inspired him, he dedicated a whole sublist solely to the New York band.
It’s a solid list that seems to make a perfect blueprint for Richman, or really, for any musician. All the foundations are there as he celebrates the impact of a lengthy selection of songs from essential acts like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who and more. As an artist who emerged in the 1970s with The Modern Lovers, it’s clear that this list served as his masterclass, gathering up the best of the 1960s and taking that influence and inspiration into the new decade.
It’s easy to hear plenty of it in Richman’s music. The catchy yet punky edge of The Who is there in songs like ‘Roadrunner’. The rock and roll seduction of Mick Jagger and his troupe is there on ‘Astral Plane’. The band’s variety of sound reflects the range that The Lovin’ Spoonful displayed and what likely drew Richman into their work.
However, on his list of influences, no artist comes up more than The Velvet Underground. As well as counting The Velvet Underground and Nice and White Light / White Heat as one of the albums that inspired him most, Richman also offered up a long list of their best songs.
Seven songs, to be exact, make the cut as the batch that deeply influenced him during the 1960s. It ranges from beloved, well-known hits like ‘Heroin’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ to lesser-known deep cuts like ‘Jesus’, ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ and ‘Foggy Notion’. Clearly plucked from nothing but his own personal tastes, it’s simply a list of his favourite songs by the band and the ones he alone considers to be their best.
But to Richman, these songs were a door opening. “I heard the Velvet Underground, got inspired, took up guitar, and terrorized Boston audiences with my crude playing,” he said, crediting Lou Reed and the band for his whole lengthy musical career.
Reed was a personal hero of Richman’s. Once, as a teenager, he ran into the legend somewhere in Boston, approaching him tentatively to ask, “Excuse me, are you Lou Reed?” He recalled their interaction, how he complimented his music, particularly the way the Velvets would “use the guitars like they were drums.”
Reed seemed moved by the interaction and the attention Richman had played to their instrumentation. He clearly impressed the musician who told his people about this young kid he’d met. “He told his people…” Richman continued to explain, “He said, ‘I met this 15-year-old precocious boy in the street,’ you know. And later, I ran into them and told them that I met Lou, and they said, ‘Were you that boy?’ I said, ‘You mean the one who asked him the questions about music? And they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that was me!’ They said, ‘Oh.’ So, I was in.”
There are clear signs of the Velvet Underground in his work, too. Mixed in with all his other influences, there’s the lesson taught by Reed that music doesn’t have to be polished or properly trained to be impactful. They were a band pioneering the power of DIY spirit, experimentation and following artistic whims. Whether it was a catchy radio-ready rock and roll hit or a long musical odyssey, the band were willing to try and do anything it seemed.
For Richman, that energy is there too, as The Modern Lovers and his solo work subscribe to no one genre or no strict sound. There are no rules as to what an artist like him should be doing. Instead, just as Reed was, he left his artistry to be the guide.
