The erotic Velvet Underground song Lou Reed never understood: “I listened to the record and I realised”
It is often said that every mainstream artist yearns for a cult following, and every cult band wishes they had mainstream success, but The Velvet Underground didn’t seem to be striving for either option.
You only need to listen to Lou Reed’s earliest demo recordings to recognise that he was always bestowed with the gift of songwriting. What he lacked, however, was the drive to get that writing out into the wider world. Alongside John Cale, the New York native did everything in his power to render his prose in the most subversive, experimental, and underground sounds that they could possibly drum up.
At a time when American rock was dominated by radio-friendly psychedelia and soft rock, The Velvet Underground boasted something entirely different; their base at Andy Warhol’s Factory might as well have been a Martian outpost.
Inevitably, then, the band were never out to generate pop hits and, to their credit, they never achieved a single entry into the Billboard Top 50, and their only minor hit in the United Kingdom was a 1994 live version of ‘Venus In Furs’ which peaked at 71. Instead, the group were far more interested in creating expansive albums, awash with all the subversive ideas and taboo experiments that they could muster up from the confines of New York’s underground art scene.
Although many fans will argue to the contrary, 1968’s White Light/White Heat was the band at their most inventive and experimental, taking heavy cues from the weird and wonderful mind of John Cale. If you skim through the tracklisting, you will find all sorts covered, from the throes of drug addiction to sadomasochism and drag queens. Particularly against the backdrop of the wider rock scene of 1968, the album was in a league of its own, and its influence has loomed large over everybody from Bowie to Cobain.
Unless you were within The Velvet Underground’s circle back in 1968, though, the chances are you won’t have heard the album until years or decades later. After all, the radio was the prevailing method of musical distribution at that time, and no radio station in their right mind would play anything from that album and expect to appease their various sponsors, let alone broadcasting regulations. The band’s earlier efforts like ‘Heroin’ and ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ were blacklisted from radio play for obvious reasons, but what about the comparatively innocent ‘Here She Comes’?
Perhaps infected by drug-based paranoia, resulting from all the other thinly-veiled drug anthems around at that time, a lot of radio stations dismissed the track out of hand as promoting drug use. Meanwhile, others who examined the lyrics a little more closely found something else entirely. “We put out ‘Here She Comes Now’ in San Francisco and they said, ‘That’s about a girl coming,” Lou Reed told Time Out back in 1972.
Seemingly, this revelation came as a surprise even to Reed himself, despite the fact that he had written the song. “I said, ‘Well no, it’s not, it’s about somebody coming into a room.’ And then I listened to the record and I realised it probably was about a girl coming as a matter of fact,” he shared. “But then again, so what? But we were banned again.”
Whether or not Reed actually wrote the song with the idea of the female orgasm in mind, it is difficult to interpret the lyrics in any drastically different way, especially given Reed’s stuttering delivery of ‘If she ever, ever, ever comes n-n-n-now’. Either way, the song did not succeed in breaking The Velvet Underground into the mainstream charts. Then again, as Reed so eloquently put it, “so what?”
