Watch rare footage of The Velvet Underground performing at a protest in 1969
The growing legend of New York’s empirically cool alt-pop royalty, The Velvet Underground, has churned up another hidden gem for their fans as a series of rare and previously unseen colour footage has arisen of the band performing during a protest back in 1969.
We’ve all seen the grainy black and white images of the band playing live at Andy Warhol’s Factory, with the singed-at-the-edge images of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Moe Tucker, and the band displaying their best art-rock sensibilities. But this rare colour film shows the band giving it their all in the refreshing kaleidoscopic hues of the 1960s protest movement.
The footage was very nearly lost to the archives of history before being unearthed amongst “hundreds of unmarked, unidentified, or damaged reels” in the G. Williams Jones Film & Video Collection, an archive at the Texas Southern Methodist University. The library doesn’t exactly know how they came into possession of the footage or even why it was originally recorded. Still, they’ve cleaned up and digitised the film for our unusually modern viewing, something very rare when trawling through the clips of the band’s early days.
The Velvet Underground may have been New York royalty with their performances at legendary venues CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, but you wouldn’t often find the band too far south of their Greenwich home. So, when performing a string of shows in Dallas in the October week of 1969, Reed and the group jumped at the opportunity to take part in a local protest against the Vietnam war named ‘Dallas Peace Day’. The event took place on October 15th at the Winfrey Point building, which overlooks White Rock Lake and included acts Stone Creek, Velvet Dream, Lou Mitchel, Lou Rawls, as well as The Velvet Underground.
The footage shows the band performing three classic tracks in the shape of ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, ‘Begining to See the Light’, and ‘I’m Set Free’.
The clip also has an interview with guitarist Sterling Morrison offering the south a few notes on New York protests: “In New York, there’s a tone of anarchy that’s missing here,” he says while admiring the peaceful Southern rallies. The footage also includes some silent footage of Lou Reed and his bandmates offering close-ups and candid shots of the band performing.
See the clips in full below.
