“Nico’s favourite”: the 1967 Velvet Underground song that captured everything “you want in rock ‘n’ roll”
Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll are the three key tenets of alternative culture. But they come in an array of different forms.
For instance, while the triplet might invoke the image of guys with instruments fighting over the same girl, you don’t envisage the instrument in question being a recorder, as it was in the case of The Velvet Underground.
Lou Reed and John Cale were trying to win the affections of Darryl, a “beautiful petite blonde with three kids, two of whom were taken away from her”. They were both in competition to “win her affections”, yet they were also too shy to approach her alone. So, in a curious move that precluded either party’s chance of success, they scurried around her apartment together.
Sadly, they had further competition on the way. “We were at Darryl’s apartment one day and she had this boyfriend who was a Polish hitter, a construction guy who, if you gave him 200 bucks, he’d beat the shit out of someone for you,” John Cale recounted to Uncut.
For whatever reason, while Darryl was sleeping, Reed and Cale were simply idling around in the living room with Pepe, the babysitter to her child. Without warning, her boyfriend showed up. “I’m playing a recorder,” Cale recalls of the manic moment. “He says to me, ‘If you don’t stop, I’ll shove it down your fucking throat’. Lou was beside himself with fear.”
Reed’s disposition is rather understandable given that the guy dishing out the threats was literally a black-market brawler for hire. “I carried on playing and the Pole goes, ‘OK, tough guy, come outside and I’ll show you how to fight’. He taught me a few moves,” Cale continues, ”some boxing feints. Lou said as we‘re leaving, ‘Are you fucking nuts? That guy was gonna kill us both’.”
I’m not sure how, but to me, that tale encapsulates the Velvet Underground. As David Bowie put it, they “represented the wild side of existentialist America, the underbelly of American culture.” In a bizarre way, you’d struggle to capture a more existentialist vignette of amoral existence in the underbelly of America than a bored and broke man with a flute, futilely pursuing sex, only to end up angering a gangster, in a property fractured by the dissolution of welfare.
Tenderness, chaos, violence, and grit all dance across Cale’s curious little story. The anecdote is something and nothing, and in the process, it is a reflection of lived experience. That, in short, is what rock ‘n’ roll at its best is, too: a something and nothing reflection of lived experience. And nobody held the mirror better than the Velvet Underground.
‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’
Perhaps at their most tender end lies ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’. Like most love stories in America – the untold majority – Reed’s words do not paint a picture of adoration aimed towards a confident suitor who knows that they’re worthy. They’re the truer inverse. The words plead with the insecure and disenfranchised to realise that they are actually deserving of love.
Nico, as an eternal outsider who resented her own beauty, adored this sentiment. “This was Nico’s favourite,” Cale reflected. “It’s a song of infinite desire, strangely tender for us.” In fact, I’d argue that it’s more tender than ‘desire’, too. Sure, that lingers in the welter of the rock ‘n’ roll pulse, but ultimately, it is about the utterly selfless, nurturing side of love.
For Cale, that sentiment is perfectly performed in this track, personifying what’s best about the whole movement. If rock ‘n’ roll is the most earnest form of stupid music, then ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ captures it in its totality. “Nico used to sing it in her big Germanic Marlene Dietrich way or, if we were lucky, with this kind of controlled passion,” he says.
Adding, with a profound conclusion, “It’s a very beautiful song, a great interlude for a live show, but we sometimes opened with it as it set the tone between the thoughtful and the thoughtless, which is what you want in rock’n’roll.”
