What is The Edge’s favourite song by The Velvet Underground?
Very little of The Velvet Underground‘s work can be considered uplifting, at least on the surface. They were a bunch of steely-eyed, blank-faced misfits making proudly aggressive and inaccessible music. There’s a good reason that the first time they played in Los Angeles during the height of the ‘Summer of Love’, the Haight-Ashbury hippie crowd forming the audience completely despised them.
This was all part of the plan, too. The Velvets came from a completely different background than the largely middle-class hippy crowd. As a band, they had lived through some seriously dark stuff—singer Lou Reed in particular. The Velvet Underground were a band that sought not to put a pleasing bow on such experiences but make music that reflected exactly what those moments felt like.
This made them more than just another rock band of the time, and they weren’t a pop group, either. This idea of making rock music that wasn’t happy-clappy pop, like The Beatles and Elvis, made them such an out-there prospect that they had more in common with avant-garde jazz music than anything else.
There’s a good reason that an artist as visionary and progressive as Andy Warhol took an interest in their music, and it wasn’t due to any thought he could make a buck off of them. However, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find a band that wasn’t afraid to show their softer side, which makes sense. The Velvet Underground were seemingly unafraid of anything, so writing the occasional gentle song wouldn’t have been much of a stretch.
The signs were there in the presence of ‘Sunday Morning’ on their debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico. While most of their second album, White Light/White Heat, veers much more towards the hot end of the thermostat, their self-titled third album is where you’ll find the most human, accessible songwriting of their whole career.
This is, after all, an album that contains two of the most melancholically beautiful songs Lou Reed ever put to paper. The first, ‘Candy Says’, is a tribute to actress and friend of the band Candy Darling and the second, ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, was a lovelorn ballad written about Reed’s first serious girlfriend, Shelley Albin.
However, the album’s high point is the opening track from its second side. The previous two tracks are accessible, but they are both deeply sad. ‘Beginning to See the Light’ might just be the most radical thing in the entire Velvet Underground back catalogue because it’s a song that, dare I even mention it, is happy?!
It’s an upbeat folk rocker that sees Reed celebrating the dawn that inevitably comes after darkness. He intones “I met myself in a dream / And I just wanna tell you, everything was alright / Hey, now, baby, I’m beginning to see the light” over a backing that wouldn’t be out of place on an Archies-style bubblegum pop record.
It’s such a phenomenal number that no less a figure than U2 guitarist The Edge picked the song for a list he outlined for Uncut titled ‘My Life In Music’ where he assigned songs to topics such as, “the record that restored my faith in rock” or “the record I couldn’t live without”, and more.
So, what accolade does this Velvet Underground classic get? “The song I want played at my funeral”. Y’know what? It’s a fine idea, too.
