Who really said, ‘Everyone who listened to The Velvet Underground started a band’?
Even after half a century of influence, The Velvet Underground are still one of the most underrated groups of all time. While they never had any hope of being the greatest rock band on the planet, their focus on art rock innovation in every one of their albums is the kind of achievement that most indie artists are still working towards creating to this very day. Although they didn’t sell well with critics at the time, there’s a common belief that everyone who heard them play was immediately inspired.
Because the Velvets weren’t going to get very far if they were looking for chart success. Respectfully, Lou Reed’s words and music were far too weird for mainstream consumption, and even in an era where bands like The Doors were seeing success on the charts, a tune like ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ was never going to be a surefire hit no matter how hard they tried.
The people who were listening were the underground artists, usually looking to push the envelope just like they did and managing to explore some new sonic avenues no one had tried before. In their wake, every art rock band, from Talking Heads to Devo, had the freedom to work on new music that didn’t have to cater to what the charts wanted.
This was a new playing field for rock and roll now, and it all came down to those who were on the ground floor with The Velvets in the 1960s. While there’s the common belief that everyone who heard the art-rock pioneers started a group, it can all be traced back to the work of Brian Eno.
Brian Eno on the Velvet Underground
Eno was already looking to break out of the norms when he began in the 1970s. When working as the keyboardist and producer of Roxy Music, Eno made albums like For Your Pleasure, which included some of the wildest experiments anyone had ever heard through his primitive synthesiser. If it weren’t for Reed and the band breaking things down in the 1960s, he admitted that most of the scene he grew up in wouldn’t exist.
In conversation with David Bowie, Eno remembered discussing the group’s massive impact on fellow art rockers, telling The Los Angeles Times, “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
It’s not like Eno is that far off about the group’s debut. While it was slagged off by critics throughout its time in the sun, it has since aged like a fine wine and continues to be the benchmark by which all art rok should be measured going forward. But what makes it so interesting and different from the rest of the artists coming out at the time?
The influence of The Velvet Underground and Nico
Compared to the rest of the rock scene, The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like a hot mess upon arrival. Far and away one of the more flawed production jobs from the time, Reed and John Cale’s work seemed deliberately unsophisticated, as if they were trying to capture the band being as raucous as possible. Where most people saw a band as being unprofessional, artists like David Bowie had found their calling.
This was the kind of slightly dangerous version of bands like The Rolling Stones that most people had been clamouring for. Although Bowie had been an avid fan of the group since the first time he heard them, it was almost like everyone who knew them was part of a tiny club, which only seemed to get larger when acts like Bowie and Eno started to become heavy hitters in the game.
That led to a lot of people going back to those old records, finding out what they heard, and turning The Velvet Underground from a failed experiment that showed promise to one of the craftsmen who paved the way for the future. And just look at the influence that they still have on the modern age, with people like Julian Casablancas of The Strokes counting them among his biggest influences. The critical consensus was that The Velvets were best left forgotten, but Bowie may have had a point when he said that helped create modern music.
