‘Sister Ray’: How The Velvet Underground changed songwriting
Racking up at 17 minutes and 30 seconds, ‘Sister Ray’ is The Velvet Underground’s squirm-inducing answer to The Iliad.
Had the band played for just a couple of seconds longer during their infamous jamming session that birthed the track, they would have surpassed the length of New Order’s ‘Elegia’, though they had already eclipsed David Bowie’s ‘Station to Station’, coming in at ten minutes and 14 seconds, and Primal Scream’s ‘Come Together’, at ten minutes and 21 seconds.
Unsurprisingly, it remains the longest song in the Velvets’ studio discography, taking up nearly all of side two of White Light/White Heat. Taking the listener on a hedonistic journey through drug deals and orgies, in The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, frontman Lou Reed claims the song was “done as a joke”, before refuting to explain, “No, not as a joke, but it has eight characters in it, and this guy gets killed, and nobody does anything. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking some sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear”.
You can feel Reed’s black sense of humour dripping through the story, particularly at the moment the sailor is shot: “He aims it at the sailor, shoots him down dead on the floor. Oh, you shouldn’t do that, don’t you know you’ll stain the carpet?”
By clawing back the curtain and dragging listeners by the heels through the dark corners of society’s underbelly, ‘Sister Ray’ left certain music fans in the late 1960s clutching their pearls. Its taboo themes ensured the song, and by proxy the album, would be banned from most mainstream outlets, but it would go on to inspire a generation of punks eager to challenge the cultural establishment.
In Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, Reed was asked to describe The Velvet Underground’s role in Andy Warhol’s multimedia events, to which he replied, “Andy shows movies, and we fuck dogs on stage”, noting how Warhol’s relationship with the band evidently buoyed their willingness to shock.
It was a close partnership: Warhol had produced the band’s first album and invited Nico into the fold, but took a step back on ‘Sister Ray’, though that didn’t stop him from attempting to steer the band in a certain direction, as Reed recalled: “When we were making the second record, [Warhol] said, ‘Now you gotta make sure that you do the ‘sucking on my ding dong song’”.
By embracing radical experimentation and poking the bear of lyrical controversy, The Velvet Underground knowingly alienated a potential mass audience in favour of creating raw, uncompromising art, a sound and attitude that would later become a blueprint for punk and noise rock.
However, the song’s revolutionary power was encoded not just in its rather unsubtle lyrics, but also in its structure, where the band took a basic, two-chord riff and extended it for over a quarter of an hour, letting it mutate, absorb energy, and reinvent itself again and again. While at the time, their vision for ‘Sister Ray’ didn’t quite translate for the sound engineer, who is said to have set up the recording equipment and walked out, refusing to stay and listen to the onslaught of noise, the track’s freewheeling improvisation, swerving between a-tonal chaos and a hypnotic groove, redefined what a rock song could be: not a tidy, three-minute hit, but a sprawling, experimental landscape.
