The East-West divide: Why The Velvet Underground were never going to make it big in California
Let’s be real: The Velvet Underground in California was never going to work. Sure, by the time the band emerged, the counterculture was everywhere the eye could see. It was a global movement spreading through the youth like a trippy epidemic, but there were clear dividing lines splitting different scenes into different camps. One of the clearest borders of them all? East and West. New York and California.
California was the land of LSD, hippies in San Francisco, all-day sunshine and music that reflected it. It was still experimental, but the sound was light. It was Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and Papas, the Grateful Dead. It was a merger of rock and roll with long jams designed to let the hippie crowd sway in their trance. It was more optimistic purely because that has always been the Californian way.
The New York way has always been rougher. While the West Coast countercultural scene popped out of the world of spirituality in a lot of ways, New York’s emerged from nihilism. It came from the Beat generation, the academics, the city’s gloomy bars and libraries alike. It was the Greenwich Village scene writing political songs. It was the musicians merging with artists and filmmakers at the Chelsea Hotel. It would swiftly become something else, quickly leaving rock and roll behind to pioneer punk. But even in the mid-1960s, when rock and roll was king, it was different.
In The Velvet Underground’s case, that difference comes down to several things. First, it could be Lou Reed’s origins, perfectly exemplifying the way that the East Coast scene seemed to be more inspired by academics than energy, as Reed’s rock career started in a university poetry class. He had no real interest in being a classic frontman; he wasn’t in it for the ego of that. Instead, he was interested in pushing the limits of form and craft, putting spiralling poems to music.
That boundary-pushing connects to another reason for the two scenes’ differences—Andy Warhol. Warhol’s position in music is another perfect example of how New York was all about defiance. Their view of rock and roll wasn’t as simplistic as good music for good times. When it comes to Warhol and his collaborations with The Velvet Underground, it was always about more than the tunes.
Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable was all about that, and the people of New York had lapped it up. But, to go back to my first point, it was never going to work in California. Featuring the Velvet Underground performing alongside a light show, video footage and the intimidating Nico brandishing a tambourine and singing in her unique timbre, it was a far cry from the kinds of shows the sunny states loved. It was like an acid test, but one designed to give you a bad trip.
“We were on amphetamine and they were on acid.”
Mary Woronov
“A prime example of me bringing in something I don’t like was the Andy Warhol show,” Bill Graham, from The Fillmore Theatre where they performed during their first touch down in the state in 1966, remembered, “It was sickening, and it drew a real Perversion USA element to the auditorium.”
No one got it, and even people in Warhol and Reed’s troupe felt that. “We spoke two completely different languages,” Mary Woronov, one of the dancers, said as the group blasted noise into the space while bodies moved around them with whips and clad in leather. It was a New York-type scene through and through, and so in California, it fell apart.
“We were on amphetamine and they were on acid. They were so slow to speak with these wide-open eyes—‘Oh, wow!’—so into their ‘vibrations’”, Woronov explained. She articulated the cultural divide perfectly: “We spoke in rapid machine-gun fire about books and paintings and movies. They were into ‘free’ and the American Indian and ‘going back to the land’ and trying to be some kind of ‘true, authentic’ person; we could not have cared less about that. They were homophobic; we were homosexual. Their women, they were these big round-titted girls, you would say hello to them and they would just flop down on the bed and fuck you; we liked sexual tension, S & M, not fucking. They were barefoot; we had platform boots. They were eating bread they had baked themselves—and we never ate at all!”
That captures it. The cultural divide between the two cities, despite both being countercultural hotbeds, was too vast for a band so engrained in New York to ever bridge. But perhaps Lou Reed really had no interest in doing so. While everyone is sold on the idea that to make it big, they must make it in Hollywood, Reed didn’t care for the place or its people. He once remarked that the Velvet Underground were “really, really smart” while California bands were “really, really stupid. It was purely a matter of brains”. So he clearly never had any intention of relocating.
