Chance meetings: How did The Velvet Underground form?
Some moments change the world. Often, it’s the simplest ones. A person walks into a room, two people strike up a conversation, someone learns something new. At the time, it barely registers. Only later does its significance become clear. The moment that The Velvet Underground came together was exactly like that. So simple, it hardly feels like a story.
In a perfect prediction of the legacy they would go on to create, the band didn’t form in any typical rock and roll fashion. They weren’t a group of well-known local players. Unlike many bands who fall together naturally, bonded by a shared scene or mutual inspirations, this group came together in a far more unlikely way.
Instead, it was a series of left-field intrigues that brought them together, an early glimpse of the offbeat band they’d become, stretching the boundaries of rock and roll by simply ignoring them and doing their own thing.
The story begins with Lou Reed, obviously, as the founder and first spark from which the group would grow. He’d done a few musical bits before, singing in a doo-wop group, but never took it any further since his parents weren’t supportive. The strangeness of the tale starts here too, as the band, in a way, have a complete mental breakdown to thank. After initially starting at New York University, Reed was sent home after suffering an emotional collapse so severe it landed him in hospital, where he was forced to endure electroconvulsive therapy.
Only after making somewhat of a recovery could he get back on course, although now with this harrowing experience that would later be turned into art. He enrolled in university again, this time at Syracuse where the teaching of his professor, Delmore Schwartz, would inspire him even more, adding to this arsenal of influence he was growing.
Then, it was 1964. Reed graduated and moved to New York City. Around the same time, in an act of fate, John Cale secured a scholarship that would move him over there too, bringing together the American and the Welshman who wouldn’t have met otherwise. Both were working at Pickwick Records, with Reed declaring them a kind of “poor man’s Carole King” as they wrote songs for others.
But both had the same backing. While Reed was busy being educated in poetry and trauma, Cale had been learning from avant-garde sound artists like John Cage. Both shared a similar backstory of wanting to make music, but never approaching it from a straightforward angle. When they met, it suddenly made a lot of sense. They understood each other while also being awed by the way the other worked, the ideas they had, and the boldness of their experiments.
They also, in another simple moment that probably meant little at the time, decided to live together. It was a move that just made sense then, but made history in the long run. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the two of them chatting at work. Now, Reed was fully embedded in Cale’s social circle, where other key names came around: Angus MacLise, Cale’s old neighbour, and Sterling Morrison, Reed’s old college friend. Then there were guitars, bass, drums and vocals – they were a band. They were The Velvet Underground, a historic act formed almost by accident.
When did Nico join The Velvet Underground?
The group played a few gigs like that, just a simple band set-up. It was enough to catch the attention of the city’s musical crowd, but mostly in a kind of baffled way. No one knew what to do with a group that was too late to fit in with the Beats, but too odd for the rock and roll crowd. They weren’t easily labelled or understood back then. But when The Velvet Underground released their first songs, there was another voice on there, helping to ground them a bit more: Nico, the looming German singer.
That all comes down to another chance moment. In 1965, after happening to meet filmmaker Barbara Rubin around the New York scene, she whispered to her friend about the band. The friend was Andy Warhol, and suddenly, the pop artist wanted to be a music manager on one condition: his new superstar, Nico, had to be in the mix.
They were happy to do it. With Warhol’s connections and reputation, he landed them a record deal and shot them to notoriety. Who knows? Maybe if that meeting had never come about, no one would have ever known the band, never known Lou Reed and never had the hordes of acts that followed in their footsteps since, all thankful for the various accidents and chance moments that made it all work.
