The Velvet Underground song that became Lou Reed’s musical albatross: “I would never be as good”
When we talk about the most influential bands of all time, a few names are destined to come up, but one that isn’t mentioned enough is The Velvet Underground.
David Byrne previously spoke highly of the band, saying that they were one of the major influences behind Talking Heads. It wasn’t that they had a specific sound to them. Rather, it was the lack of a pigeonholed sound that drew Byrne and co in so much. The band proved that you didn’t have to fit within a particular style of music and could still be successful in the process.
“The Velvet Underground were a big revelation. I realised, ‘Oh, look at the subject of their songs: There’s a tune and a melody, but the sound is either completely abrasive or really pretty,’” said Byrne. “They swing from one extreme to the other. ‘White Light/White Heat’ is just this noise, and then ‘Candy Says’ is incredibly pretty but really kind of dark. As a young person, you go, ‘What is this about?’”
There will have been plenty of bands who stumbled upon The Velvet Underground and had a similar epiphany. In the modern age, when you listen to bands who dance across multiple styles and sounds throughout various albums, they owe something to The Velvet Underground. They made it clear that there should be no limits on creativity, and instead, bands should be open to exploring various aspects within their music, happily embracing the chaos that can come with true creativity in the process.
Of course, while we can look back at the band now and revel in their pioneering attitude towards music, it wasn’t easy for them to originally get off the ground. The band were shrouded in mystery, and their haphazard approach to what they made, despite being hailed now, made it initially difficult for listeners to work out what they were going for.
The cover to their album The Velvet Underground & Nico only complicated things even more, as Lou Reed once admitted, people were confused about who the band members were. “You know, when we started out in The Velvet Underground, people didn’t know who we were,” he said. “Literally. They thought Andy Warhol was the guitar player.”
One of their other issues was that, in the Pollock-like mosaic that was the band’s creative approach was that there were some gems that people latched onto and weren’t willing to deviate from. Given they had so much versatility, a lot of people became attached to these hits and then wouldn’t entertain some of the band’s other music. A great example of this is the song ‘Heroin’, which essentially became a musical albatross for The Velvet Underground, as everything they did after that was slapped with a comparison to this classic track.
“They said I would never write anything as good as ‘Heroin’,” Reed reflected. “And then they said that if I left The Velvet Underground, I would never be as good as I was in The Velvet Underground.”
Songs like ‘Heroin’ weren’t supposed to reflect a certain style. Instead, while there might not have been consistency within the band’s sound, the thing that was a constant was Lou Reed’s honest approach to writing. He wrote ‘Heroin’ as an exploration of the drug, a process which he described as exorcising “the darkness”.
It was this element that made the song such a high point for the band; however, it also proved to be a bar that he was constantly trying to match while allowing Velvet Underground to be artistically open.
