The story of The Velvet Underground
Casting motives of finance and fame firmly to one side, The Velvet Underground represented the sonic wing of one of the 20th century’s most influential artistic movements. “Underground” as the operative component, a young songwriter named Lou Reed scraped New York sludge from his boot of shiny, shiny leather to reflect the city on a sonic canvas. Meanwhile, a classically trained Welsh export named John Cale cast a dark spell of avant-garde discomfort to nourish the hearts and minds of the afflicted.
Reed first met Cale in 1964 while working as an in-house songwriter at the Pickwick Music record label in Queens, New York. He functioned in the folk medium as presently championed by Peter, Paul & Mary but brought his own brand of gritty Beat-inspired poetry to the fore. The simple acoustic progressions were soon replaced by something more befitting when Reed’s co-worker Terry Phillips introduced him to Cale; as predicted, the pair hit it off, eventually co-habiting a small apartment in the city.
Cale transformed Reed’s early demos, such as ‘Heroin’ and ‘Waiting for the Man’, from their acoustic inceptions to something suitably radical in the instrumental department. The eccentric composer seasoned these urban narratives with keyboards and viola, often protracting climaxes with industrial, droning excursions. The pair clearly had a potent broth on the boil but required two more chefs.
In 1965, Reed and Cale recruited guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker to complete the first stable Velvet Underground configuration. After a short spell on the student gig trail, the band attained a cult following, with emerging pop artist and Campbell’s soup fanatic Andy Warhol among the interested beholders.
“The pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all,” Warhol wrote in his memoir POPism: The Warhol Sixties. “Nobody wanted to stay in one category; we all wanted to branch out into every creative thing we could — that’s why when we met The Velvet Underground at the end of ’65, we were all for getting into the music scene, too.”
Although many wouldn’t come to appreciate The Velvet Underground for another decade or so, Warhol’s progressive eye honed in on Reed’s unconventional assemblage. He soon acquainted the band and swept them into his multi-media art troupe, “The Factory”, in 1966. As the new creative manager, Warhol helped to elevate the group’s status and coordinated its seminal debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico.
Despite the backing of New York City’s most popular emerging visual artist, the album failed to connect on the expected level. Brian Eno, one of the Velvets’ many eminent disciples, once mentioned The Velvet Underground and Nico when examining his own success. “My reputation is far bigger than my sales,” he said in a 1982 interview. “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways.”
While Eno’s comparison is valid, it appears he or Reed exaggerated the figures for dramatic effect. According to an MGM royalty statement published by Jeff Gold, a former Warner Bros Records executive, the album had sold 58,476 copies by February 1969. For a 23-month period, this figure is far from shameful.
All the same, The Velvet Underground persevered in creating a second album. Exhibiting the full extent of his disregard for fame and commercial compatibility, Reed dismissed Warhol and Nico, the German singer whom the manager had proposed to vary the lead vocals on the debut album. The follow-up album, 1968’s White Light/White Heat, abandoned the stabilising mirth of ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ to pursue the filthy high of ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’.
“It was getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between the PR and the actuality because we ended up in the middle of a storm of publicity that we didn’t know was coming,” Cale once told the Red Bull Music Academy. “We got a lot of notoriety very quickly, attached to Andy. I guess Lou didn’t like that.”
“The way [Reed] handled it and the way he did it was really destructive,” he continued, reflecting on Warhol’s dismissal. “I mean, he just like blew up the band and fired Andy without telling anybody, and it was like, ‘What?’”
Aiming the Beatles’ kaleidoscope eyes at a pile of vomit on neon-lit paving before a New York bordello, White Light/White Heat was a more confident step into the abyss. The speed-driven title track is about as commercial as it gets, paving the way towards the esoteric realms of ‘The Gift’, a short story written by Reed and read by Cale, and ‘Sister Ray’, 17-and-a-half minutes of sandpaper masturbation that curiously leaves one ravenous for more.
Unfortunately, there was no more to follow, at least for this classic lineup. As The Velvet Underground set its sights on a third album, they did so without their avant-garde talisman, John Cale. Reed cited this second significant dismissal as a clash of creative interests, but some fans surmise grounds of jealousy. With Cale’s more conventional replacement, Doug Yule, the third album, The Velvet Underground, heard a marked return to pop-consciousness in songs like ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘I’m Set Free’.
The eponymous 1969 album retained the Velvets’ hard-earned identity thanks to Reed’s gritty, often salacious lyrics and Tucker’s unique approach to percussion. In Reed’s eyes, the album was a resounding success artistically. “[It would have been foolish to] make another White Light/White Heat. I thought it would be a terrible mistake, and I really believed that,” Reed once said, as quoted by Peter Hogan in 1997’s The Complete Guide to the Music of the Velvet Underground. “I thought we had to demonstrate the other side of us. Otherwise, we would become this one-dimensional thing, and that had to be avoided at all costs.”
In 1970, the band took yet another step towards commercial exposure in Loaded. This sultry fourth offering severed additional ties with the gritty sound by which the band was initially identified. Tucker was regrettably absent for this chapter due to pregnancy. Doug Yule suggested that his 16-year-old brother Billy step in as a temporary replacement, and Reed consented. However, even during the Loaded sessions, Reed appeared disillusioned. He finally left The Velvet Underground in 1970, a few months before the album’s release.
Dejected by The Velvet Underground’s lack of commercial success, Reed returned to his parents’ home in Long Island. He worked as a typist at his father’s tax accounting firm, scoring a meagre $40 a week. Understandably, he didn’t take much to the weekly grind and returned to music in 1971 after signing a solo recording contract with RCA. In 1972, Reed finally found mainstream success with his second solo album, Transformer, produced by Mick Ronson and David Bowie.
Defiantly, the remaining Velvets continued to tour into 1971 but under a growing sense of misdirection. Under Doug Yule’s leadership, the band recorded one final album, Squeeze, which wouldn’t be released until 1973. This would be the band’s final flourish of activity until a one-off reunion in the 1990s, including Reed, Tucker, Morrison and Cale.
In August 1971, Morrison devised his fittingly unconventional plan to depart The Velvet Underground. After playing a final gig with the remaining Velvets in Houston’s Liberty Hall, Morrison arrived at the airport in Houston with a ticket for New York and a suitcase packed with Yellow Pages phone directories. Unbeknownst to Tucker and Yule, his clothes were still hanging in a cupboard at the hotel. This way, nobody could change his mind, not even himself.
Duly, Tucker and Yule discovered that Morrison had no intentions of returning to New York. “But you have to know Sterling. He was a unique individual in many ways,” Yule later commented. “He was kind of an oddball, so it wasn’t surprising when he did things you wouldn’t expect other people to do.”
Just days before Morrison left his bandmates at the airport, Joe Kruppa, an English professor at the University of Texas, was flicking through a stack of applications when he came across a familiar name, Holmes S. Morrison. Suspicions were confirmed as his eyes listed down to the ‘Past Experience’ section.
“For the past six years, I’ve been involved with a professional musical organisation touring and recording for Verve Records,” it read. “Jesus Christ,” Kruppa remembered thinking. “That’s Sterling. He’s applying!”
Kruppa, a big fan of the band, had met Morrison in 1969 when he and Reed dropped by the university to discuss The Velvet Underground and their collaboration with Andy Warhol for his mixed media class. Naturally, he jumped at the opportunity to welcome the guitarist to the university. Morrison was already in the state when Kruppa called to tell him the good news.
After leaving his bandmates at the Houston airport, Morrison travelled to Austin, ready to begin his new life. “Things weren’t fun for him anymore, he told me that,” Martha Morrison, Sterling’s then-girlfriend, recalled. “He didn’t hesitate, but it was very wrenching for him. And it isn’t that he planned to leave them like that — they just called him while he was in the state.”
While living in Texas, Morrison wound up in the unlikely vocation as a tugboat deckhand. He concluded his educational pursuits with a PhD in 1986 but sustained his beloved role as a tugboat captain until his illness and subsequent death in 1995. These latter years of Morrison’s life inspired Galaxie 500’s classic 1988 track, ‘Tugboat’. Overcast and mournful, the song perfectly bookends the story of The Velvet Underground, one of the most influential bands of the 20th century.
