Assessing the impact of two landmark albums released months apart
A PRODUCT OF ITS ERA
Now the “Summer of Love” feels like an artifact, and the Velvets’ vision of a landscape in which primitive rock ’n’ roll merged with literary and avant-garde aesthetics feels fresher than ever. “Sgt. Pepper” was clearly a product of its era, a work that followed up superior Beatles albums such as “Rubber Soul” and, especially, “Revolver.” The studio experimentation that so dazzled contemporaries in 1967 was already in full bloom a year earlier on “Revolver,” thanks to such visionary pieces of music as “Tomorrow Never Knows.” And the songwriting on “Revolver” was extraordinary — the melancholy beauty of “Here There and Everywhere,” the violent cool of “Taxman,” the jangling pop perfection of “And Your Bird Can Sing” — a standard that its more celebrated follow-up could not match.
“Pepper” offered the groundbreaking “A Day in the Life” and the psychedelic visions of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” but much of the rest comes off as slight and overly clever and self-conscious. Songs such as the dance hall homage “When I’m 64” or the mash note to a meter maid, “Lovely Rita,” sound of a piece with the bubblegum of British contemporaries such as Herman’s Hermits or Gerry and the Pacemakers rather than of the group that released the double-sided single “Strawberry Fields”/“Penny Lane” only months earlier.
Expectations were ridiculously inflated for “Pepper.” The album was crafted over 700 hours in the studio — a huge extravagance by the era’s standards (the Beatles spent less than 10 hours making their debut album four years earlier). And it arrived after the Beatles had proclaimed they would no longer tour to focus on recording. So suddenly the world’s biggest band had gone from a breakneck pace of recording three albums a year in between tours to a nine-month span of virtual silence in 1966-67. By the time “Pepper” came out, the response was preordained: It could be nothing less than a masterpiece. That time has demonstrated it fell short can be pinned on outsized expectations more than any failing by the Beatles, who made a pleasant if lightweight album when measured against their own immense standards.
Perhaps its main achievement was its inclusiveness — a warm, welcoming collection of show tunes that even your great aunt could love rather than a groundbreaking rock album for the counterculture. By making an album that would appeal to everyone, the Beatles disappeared inside the fanciful “Sgt. Pepper” costumes they wore on the album cover. A SOLITARY MISSION
In contrast, “The Velvet Underground & Nico” was initially viewed as the work of a diceylooking cult band cooked up by popart icon Andy Warhol, ostensibly the album’s “producer.” Warhol’s role in the band was minimal. He helped foster some of the theatrical elements in the quartet’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” shows, designed the famed banana album art and brought in model-turned-vocalist Nico. Primarily, he provided a kind of insulation from corporate recordlabel interference. He enabled Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker to chase their singular vision, a true melding of high-art ambition and raw rock ’n’ roll, flavored with avant garde, classical and world music elements — only without the recording budget of the Beatles.
The Velvets’ songs provoked outrage. “Heroin” chronicled a junkie’s habit in novelistic detail with an ebb-and-flow arrangement built on Tucker’s tribal drumming, Cale’s scraping viola and Reed’s deadpan vocal. It offered no judgments or pronouncements, only a point of a view from a voice not often heard in popular music. Similarly, there were investigations of the drug trade rendered almost as dark comedy (“Waiting for the Man”) over a primitive rock ’n’ roll pulse that Bo Diddley might’ve admired; a mystical, droning plunge into the world of sadomasochism as depicted in the work of Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (“Venus in Furs”); and the screeching subway car violence of “European Son,” Reed’s twisted tribute to his literary mentor, the late author Delmore Schwartz. And yet there was the icy tenderness of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and the deceptive music box twinkle of “Sunday Morning” and its encroaching paranoia.
These were not particularly comforting songs, nor were they intended to be. The Velvets saw the ’60s as a grand marketing scam, and they were an opposition party of four, wary of youth-culture movements and “flower power” sloganeering. Over time, their music — abrasive yet beautiful, poetic yet punishing — felt strangely accessible to kids picking up their guitars around the world. It would resonate decades later in the music of everyone from the Sex Pistols and the Talking Heads to R.E.M. and the Strokes. As producer Brian Eno once famously said, even though the Velvets’ debut sold only 30,000 copies in its early years, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Indeed, each of its songs now sounds like a jumping-off point for entire subgenres of punk, post-punk, indie and alternative rock.
Yet the Velvets’ mission was a solitary one in 1967, a time when almost every other band aspiring to break into the pop charts wanted to be the Beatles. The Velvets believed in rock ’n’ roll, yet wanted to push it forward on their own uncompromising and widely derided terms. Reed saw it as music that could be as sustaining and artistically ambitious as a great novel or movie. “The Velvet Underground & Nico” saw the world with a ruthless clarity that went beyond mere teen-dream escapism. Next to it, “Sgt. Pepper” — despite its kaleidoscopic sound and studio achievements — sounds almost quaint.