The band that split opinions among Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention
The East Coast vs West Coast feud in American popular music existed long before Tupac and Biggie entered the fray.
Back in 1966, the contrasting sensibilities of New York and LA were already on full display when Lou Reed and a fledgling version of the Velvet Underground brought Andy Warhol’s ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ experience from NYC to a Hollywood nightclub called The Trip, which was then a prime ‘Freak Out Hot Spot’ of Frank Zappa and the LA-based Mothers of Invention.
In theory, the Velvets and the Mothers should have been fast friends. Both forward-thinking, experimental bands were signed to the same label, Verve, and had worked with the same producer, Tom Wilson. As many people would come to learn over the ensuing decades, however, Lou Reed and Frank Zappa weren’t exactly the most affable, egoless, or welcoming chaps in the music business, and rather than rally around each other as like-minded voices for the counterculture, they both seemed inclined to despise everything the other stood for.
Reed once famously summed up Zappa as “the most untalented musician I’ve ever heard,” calling him “a two-bit, pretentious academic” who “can’t play rock ‘n’ roll because he’s a loser”.
Zappa was no more enamoured with Lou and the Velvets, particularly after the disastrous residency of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable on the Sunset Strip, a show that was eventually shut down by the cops on an obscenity charge, contributing to the eventual financial collapse of The Trip venue.
During the Mothers’ brief crossover with the Velvet Underground at those 1966 gigs, during which the bands performed on the same stage a few times, some attendees recall Zappa openly slagging off the New York headliners in front of his loyal LA audience.
Mothers drummer Jimmy Carl Black couldn’t say for sure if Frank had gone for the jugular on any of those nights, “but he might have. He really disliked the [Velvet Underground],” Black said, as quoted in the 2009 book White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day. “For what reasons I really don’t know, except that they were junkies and Frank just couldn’t tolerate any kind of drugs.”
While Zappa and Reed certainly got off on the wrong foot, the feud didn’t necessarily spread across the other members of both bands. “I know that I didn’t feel that way [about the Velvets],” Jimmy Carl Black noted, “and neither did the rest of the Mothers.”
In his own memoir, Black acknowledged that “[The Velvet Underground] seemed kind of strange to us as they were coming from a totally different angle than we were,” but he felt a bit sorry for the way the group was booed by the Hollywood crowds. “I talked to Nico and I thought that she was nice,” he wrote, “And also I talked to Moe. I especially thought that Moe was a very good drummer because in those days I don’t recall there being any other female drummers on the scene. Lou Reed and John Cale seemed pretty out there.”
The timing sadly hadn’t turned out right for a coming together of two of the most original and influential bands of their era, and by most accounts, the damage done in the first messy meeting of the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention was never really repaired.
Several decades later, an older, wiser Lou Reed did at least seem genuinely regretful about this, as he’d come to a much greater appreciation for Zappa’s work over time, and felt a sincere sadness that the two had never set aside their differences prior to Zappa’s death in 1993. Reed even took the opportunity to give the induction speech for Zappa’s entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, despite Zappa’s own family not approving of it.
“Frank was a force for reason and honesty in the business deficient in those areas,” Reed said at the event. “Of the many regrets I have in life, not knowing him a lot better is one of them.”
