THE WORLD’S coolest (and weirdest) ROCK BAND
Loaded: The Life (And Afterlife) Of The Velvet Underground
One day in the mid-1960s, the classically trained musician John Cale took a rasp to his viola. He wanted to reshape the bridge so he could bow all four strings at once. Except that he didn’t use strings.
When he restrung the viola he used thick metal wires. Then he hooked it up to an amplifier. It sounded, he said, ‘like there was an aircraft in the room’.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Velvet Underground.
Even today, almost 60 years since the band formed, the Velvets remain the weirdest beat combo there’s ever been. In Loaded, his weighty, up-to-the-minute oral history of the band, Dylan Jones lists just a few of the artists they influenced. Everyone from Roxy Music to Nick Cave, the Sex Pistols to Pulp, he says, is in their debt. Fair enough. Yet nobody, not even the Velvets-worshipping David Bowie, has come within a country mile of mimicking their harsh, almost sociopathic soundscapes.
There was more than one Velvet Underground. The band was too full of envy and enmities to have the same line-up for long. Lou Reed, the singer and songwriter, and Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker, who drummed while standing up, were the only mainstays. John Cale, so crucial to the Velvets’ sound, was around only for the first couple of albums. The ‘mildmannered’ guitarist Sterling Morrison left in order to become, first, a medieval historian, then the captain of a tugboat. As for Nico, the leggy, husky-voiced blonde who photographed as well as anyone in the history of pop, Reed dismissed her after just one album.
Which brings us to Andy Warhol, Nico’s champion and the Velvets’ first manager, who figures in Jones’s book almost as prominently as Reed himself. He wanted the band to be the centrepiece of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable sound and light shows. Reed sacked him around the same time he got rid of Cale. Reed, who’d started out as a jobbing songwriter at Pickwick International – ‘Writing stuff like what was in the charts… surf songs, automobile songs’ – decided the Velvets were too arty for their own good. He wanted to get back to the close-harmony doo-wop sound that was his real love.
The joke was that the Velvets’ subsequent, more melodic albums ended up selling even fewer copies than their avant-garde stuff. Jones affects puzzlement – but really there is no mystery. Whether poppy or punky, the Velvets were never pleasant.
Reed, whose accountant parents found him such a troublesome teen they forced him to have electroshock therapy, was one of pop’s great wrong ’uns. Certainly the stories of his sex life are best avoided by anyone who wants to eat that day. And as Jones points out, Reed, who always wore shades, not in order to look cool but so that he didn’t have to look at the audiences he loathed, bore an uncanny resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster. Add in the fact that Cale looked like a hungry vampire and Nico one of his victims and you have yourself a Hammer Horror tribute act.
Loaded is a lot of fun, but it can be repetitive. The same stories get told by different people – often enough just after having been rehearsed in Jones’s introductory sections. But like one of Cale’s thumping bass lines, the book chugs along nicely – before dissolving, inevitably, into a litany of deaths. Of the Velvets’ original members, only two (Cale and Tucker) aren’t now underground for real. Thankfully, the music lives on.