The toddler and the drone: Watch the Velvet Underground jam at The Factory in 1966
Summer of Love may have been a different universe as far as The Velvet Underground were concerned. While the hippy idyll that bloomed from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and flowered across the West Coast yielded the likes of 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, tales of sadomasochism, urban decay, and drug dealing smattered frontman Lou Reed’s lyrical collage of New York’s seamier fringes, immortally documented on their seminal The Velvet Underground & Nico debut LP.
Formed in 1965, Reed would borrow his love of American literature and Beat poetry and lend his uniquely acerbic yet touching songcraft for the newly corralled gang of avant-garde devotees and naive mavericks for a musical project that delighted in their nonconformity and subversive twist on the very notion of the rock band.
Alongside Reed were classical music student John Cale, Reed’s old university classmate Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker’s novel drumming technique that tied the sound together with her trance-like stomp. Regularly playing Greenwich Village’s Café Bizarre, The Velvet Underground’s exotic sound would prick the ears of the city’s art vanguard.
The band’s most substantial collaborator would be introduced to them by filmmaker Barbara Rubin later that year. Under his wing and subsumed into The Factory’s bohemian roll call of artists and “superstars”, pop art visionary and socialite Andy Warhol became the band’s manager. He funded their debut record, pulling them into the same hedonistic mingle with the many eccentrics and radicals that haunted Midtown’s 47th Street arts and party space. Underground director Paul Morrissey and transgender actress Candy Darling—later inspiration for ‘Candy Says’ and Reed’s solo hit ‘Walk on the Wild Side’—all crossed paths with the band, as well as German model and singer Nico.
Arranging their signing onto MGM’s Verve Records, Warhol proved a significant bridge from the arts’ subterranean to a relative music industry presence. Yet, the silver-haired Svengali saw The Velvet Underground as less a band and more a performance piece to be presented under his curatorial authority. Starting in early 1966, the artist’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable series of multimedia shows would tour the country as a travelling exhibit—a leftfield extravaganza that surrounded the band’s gig with screenings of Warhol’s experimental films and various conceptual dance pieces.
Shortly before the Exploding Plastic Inevitable‘s infamous run, Reed and the gang started rehearsals and general jamming at The Factory in early January. Captured on black and white 16mm film by Paul Morrissey and Warhol, 1966’s The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound drips with typical Warholian idiosyncrasy: long, meandering takes where little happens, seemingly amateur camera work, and little in the way of editing. Capturing their droning technique as Nico’s three-year-old boy Ari Boulogne plays beside them, the film’s primitivity documents The Velvet Underground and their manager’s raw counter to the LSD splendours on the other side of the country.
“I thought of recording the Velvets just making up sounds as they went along to have on film so I could turn both soundtracks up at the same time along with the other three silent films being projected,” Morrissey revealed. “The cacophonous noise added a lot of energy to these boring sections and sounded a lot like the group itself. The show put on for the group was certainly the first mixed media show of its kind, was extremely effective, and I have never since seen such an interesting one even in this age of super-colossal rock concerts.”
Persisting with their dissonant jam before local noise complaints forced a stop, the window that’s offered on the fascinating 1966 documentary shows a vital insight into the fertile arena of art and iconoclasm that forged The Velvet Underground, as well as a band set to inspire a whole new thread of popular music without the faintest idea of their lauded creative repercussions.
