The Velvet Underground’s first gig sent the audience running: “Retreated in horror”
The Velvet Underground remain the bona fide royalty of alt-pop-rock. Much like the lineage of so many crown-adorned families in Europe, the group were partial to infighting, inbreeding and the kind of chaos that usually ends in pitch battle.
Lou Reed might have been a consummate songwriter making money on his craft, his songwriting partner in crime, John Cale, was also an overly qualified member of the group, but the rest of the band remained largely unchampioned and unpaid as they entered the second half of the swinging 1960s.
The group had begun to gain notoriety, though. Their stripped-back sound, that seemed to subvert the very notion of pop music and douse it in petrol with just the glint of a struck match in their eye, was a tantalising prospect, if only for a handful of dutiful fans. But in 1965, they got to take the next step and actually get paid for performing.
As Jay Lustig points out, it was December of that year when The Velvet Underground were to play one of their first paid gigs and mark the start of their ‘career’ properly. The opportunity came when the band’s manager, Al Aronowitz, asked the VU to take the support slot of an upcoming tour of one of his other projects, The Myddle Class. The gig was to take place at Summit High School, just 25 miles out from the band’s hometown of New York City.
But while some members of the band wanted to jump at the chance of actually earning a few bucks playing their songs, drummer Angus MacLise wanted no part of it. MacLise was uninterested in being told when to turn up and when to perform, and his ideals, he felt, were being compromised by the opportunity of making some money. MacLise promptly quit the band and left the Velvet Underground without a drummer.
The sister of a college friend of Lou Reed was put forward for the role. Her first rehearsal with the Velvet Underground was on the afternoon of December 11th, just hours before their first paid gig. It meant the band’s classic line-up was in place with Mo Tucker, Reed, Cale, and Sterling Morrison completing the list.
The newly completed line-up took to the stage to deliver what would be, on this day at least, a stellar lineup of tracks, including a VU hat-trick of ‘There She Goes Again’, ‘Venus In Furs’, and ‘Heroin’ to a stunned crowd. Let’s not forget, this was in 1965 and outside of the city – although the crowd was made up of mostly teens, it was largely a sheltered audience who would not have ever heard anything as scandalous as the subversive lyrics from the Velvet Underground.
The latter two songs on their own might be enough to raise a quick “Won’t somebody, please, think of the children?” from your local Springfield-resident. Whether it was the utterance of “Whiplash girlchild in the dark” from ‘Venus in Furs’ or “When I put a spike into my vein” from ‘Heroin’, we don’t know, but what is clear is that most of the audience simply couldn’t handle the band.
Much of the crowd headed for the exits before the headline act, The Myddle Class, could make their way to the stage. However, for the people who stayed behind to catch one of the garage rock bands of all time, they found a new sound and a new way to ‘be’. It would’ve had a profound effect, one would imagine, on the small-town teen.
One such teen was Rob Norris, who wrote in 1979: “When the curtain went up, nobody could believe their eyes! There stood the Velvet Underground—all tall and dressed mostly in black; two of them were wearing sunglasses. One of the guys with the shades had VERY long hair and was wearing silver jewellery. He was holding a large violin. The drummer had a Beatle haircut and was standing at a small, oddly arranged drum kit. Was it a boy or a girl?”.
Adding, “Before we could take it all in, everyone was hit by a screeching surge of sound, with a pounding beat louder than anything we had ever heard. About a minute into the second song [sic], which the singer had introduced as ‘Heroin’, the music began to get more intense. It swelled and accelerated like a giant tidal wave, which was threatening to engulf us all. At this point, most of the audience retreated in horror for the safety of their homes, thoroughly convinced of the dangers of rock & roll music. My friends and I moved a little closer to the stage, knowing that something special was happening.”
The band would go on to change rock and roll beyond measure. As part of their residency at Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village, they would work with Andy Warhol and others to create a brand new style and sound. Their influence would know no bounds.
It’s an influence that undoubtedly rocked Summit High in 1965, and this trailer for The Velvet Underground Played At My High School probably proves it.
