The 1967 song The Velvet Underground wrote after being “up all night on crank”
As spring approached in 1967, a new type of music graced the world.
The Velvet Underground were true to their name, pairing the silken tones of pop with the darkness of the gutter in a way that was hitherto unknown. Absolutely nobody cared to listen.
Why would they? The capitalist mechanisms of pop culture were already firmly established, and if Tan Pan Alley was now a world of shimmering tower blocks, then the guttural Velvet Underground were little more than vagrants on the street, unnoticed by the millions gazing up at the glitter and the gold on the main thoroughfare.
Attention was never likely to come their way. To some degree, this was an important part of their make-up. It simultaneously liberated them to be more experimental, and it also added a touch of bitter bite to their sound. Sometimes, however, they were perhaps at their best when both of those facets were forgotten in favour of a resigned and weary beauty.
No song captures that mode of the eclectic VU quite as perfectly as ‘Sunday Morning’. As the opening track of the stunning 1967 banana debut, it welcomes you into a world of pop that couldn’t care less about the usual trappings of the genre.
With a rudimentary celeste deployed, the track sounds like a sanguine yawn as a sepia-toned sun rises, but it is not of sound mind. Beneath the F Major melody is a tale of quiet paranoia. As Lou Reed would later explain, “Andy said, ‘Why don’t you just make it a song about paranoia?’ I thought that was great.”
Inspired by their manager’s basic prompts, as they so often were, Reed continues, “So I came up with ‘Watch out, the world’s behind you, there’s always someone around you who will call… It’s nothing at all’ which I feel is the ultimate paranoid statement in that the world cares enough to watch you.”
But that’s also wildly at odds with the luscious tones that barely seem to care that the world is watching. And therein lies the brilliance of the song. It captures the oblivious buzz of a high that remains just about ignorant of its dark, inevitable damage. The substance that causes the paranoia just about subsumes it in a glow of droning, buzzy celeste.
As John Cale would explain, there’s a fitting tale behind that: “The song captures a mood and a specific event. Lou and I had been up all night on crank, as usual,” he told Uncut, “So we decided to visit one of his old Syracuse college pals.”
It was a burdensome visit. “Unfortunately, this guy’s upper-middle-class wife didn’t appreciate visits from old college pals high on amphetamines, at 3am, who wanted to play music,” he continued.
It’s a sober reminder that not everyone in the ‘60s was an unemployed artiste. Whether they were making one of the classic albums of all-time or otherwise, I know I’d fume if I had work the next morning and two intoxicated layabouts rocked up to make a racket for no reason at all.
But fortunately for everyone else, Reed spotted his old college buddy’s guitar. He “picked [it] up and the evening inspired him to write the song.” Just like that, this strange jaunt, high on crank, has been soundtracking far milder Sunday hangovers ever since.
It is a thing of beauty that exemplifies what’s best about The Velvet Underground, something that took the world a while to appreciate: they captured city life with such veracity that it is not only the exacting scenes that prove stirring, but also the moods that go along with them.
