The surprising Velvet Underground song Johnny Marr called “simple and perfect”
Not merely the thinking man’s guitar player, Johnny Marr has arguably become the thinking man’s thinking man.
With the vast majority of our other 1980s heroes either in prison, deceased, or disappointingly fictional (thinking specifically here about ALF), Marr has defied the prevailing trends and only reaffirmed his position as the rare musical hero you wouldn’t regret meeting in person.
In stark contrast to, say, a Lou Reed, the notoriously surly and difficult genius who left more than a few nervous admirers in tears, Marr will nod with understanding if you approach him at a bar and mention how you’re currently teaching yourself the riff from ‘Some Girls are Bigger Than Others’. He’s also nice enough to respond when a New Zealand blog invites him to choose a ten-song playlist of favourite tunes, as he recently did for Two Paddocks.
Despite being the anti-Reed in some social respects, Marr has certainly never made a secret out of his fandom for the late musician and his totemic band The Velvet Underground. The Velvets’ song Johnny selected for this particular top ten is quite unusual, however, in that it’s one of the very few in the band’s catalogue on which Reed isn’t noted as one of the songwriters.
‘Foggy Notion’ was originally recorded during a Velvet Underground session in 1969, but it didn’t see the light of day for another 15 years, making it a bit of a deep cut, or, according to some sources, an afterthought that the band never intended to release. It’s easy to see why Marr was drawn to the track, though, as it’s a classically loose and catchy Velvets jam with about a half dozen separate Sterling Morrison guitar solos sewn between a repetitive Little Richard-esque 1950s chorus.
“Simple and perfect,” Marr wrote in his assessment of ‘Foggy Notion’. “If there is such a thing as the coolest band of all time, it would be this band, mostly because they never did anything that wasn’t cool.” ‘Foggy Notion’ certainly feels like a classic Lou Reed lyric, too: “She’s over by the corner / Got her hands by her sides / They hit her harder, harder, harder / Well, they thought she might die.”
So how come the songwriting credits on the song only list band members Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, and Douglas Yule, plus some other guy named Hy Weiss? Why no Lou? Well, Velvet sleuths over the years have determined that the explanation for this, and probably the explanation for why ‘Foggy Notion’ was buried for years, is that Lou Reed had plucked another verse of the song from a very obscure 1955 doo-wop tune by the Solitaires, called ‘Later For You Baby’.“
“Made me do something that I never did before,” Lou sings, either consciously or subconsciously repeating lines from the B-side he’d probably owned as a kid, “I rushed right down to a flower store.” At some point, the owner of the rights to ‘Later For You Baby’, former Old Town Records chief Hy Weiss, must have caught wind of this situation, and a deal was presumably worked out in which Weiss would earn a songwriting credit in order for The Velvets to release ‘Foggy Notion’.
Lou Reed, in turn, most likely said he’d rather have his own name removed entirely from the credits rather than make that sort of concession. And thus, we have a pretty great Lou Reed song that, at least legally speaking, isn’t a Lou Reed song. Having it be one of Johnny Marr’s favourite Velvet Underground songs is a nice consolation prize, at least.
