- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- The Velvet Underground is a giant leap ahead of nearly all 1960’s American bands, with an inestimable influence on rock music that continues even today.
The Velvet Underground – Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground Featuring Nico (1971): This is not the debut album by the Velvet Underground, called The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), even though it has a similar name, Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground Featuring Nico and bears the date 1967. This is rather a retrospective double album that was released in the U.K. in 1971. The Velvet Underground is a giant leap ahead of any 1960’s American band that you care to name, with an inestimable influence on rock music for decades that continues even today. Andy Warhol’s connection with the Velvet Underground was comparatively brief, when they were the house band for Warhol’s studio called the Silver Factory – also known as the Factory – and also provided music for Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable events from 1966 to 1967. Andy Warhol did contribute artwork for some of the band’s album covers, such as the peelable banana on The Velvet Underground & Nico and the series of Coca-Cola drawings on Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground Featuring Nico.
None of the four Velvet Underground studio albums were big sellers; experimental musician Brian Eno is the source of the famous quotation about their debut album: While selling only 30,000 copies, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”. In England, the Velvet Underground was even less well known, although Andy Warhol was a big deal; so, Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground Featuring Nico plays up the Andy Warhol angle. When women started showing up in otherwise male rock bands, they were normally the lead singers; but after a while, women were as often on the musician side as the vocalist side. The roster of the classic line-up of the Velvet Underground – Lou Reed (lead vocals, electric guitar), John Cale (multi-instrumentalist), Sterling Morrison (bass guitar, electric guitar), and Moe Tucker (drums) – makes it seem that this classic band is an all-male group like virtually every other rock band in the 1960’s. Actually, the drummer’s real name is Maureen Tucker; her approach as a percussionist is outside the norm to say the least. Quoting from Wikipedia: “Her abbreviated drum kit was rather unusual: She generally played on tom toms and an upturned bass drum, using mallets as often as drumsticks, and she rarely used cymbals. . . . When her drums were stolen from one club, she replaced them with garbage cans, brought in from outside.” Richie Unterberger writing for Allmusic calls the Velvet Underground “the quintessential bohemian New York band of the ’60s that fused art, rock, and poetry in a fashion that proved incalculably influential”. The proto-punk side of the band is well known – indeed, it is as difficult to imagine punk and new wave without the Velvet Underground as it is to think that heavy metal would have come along without the Yardbirds – but their music is experimental throughout and also runs the gamut from garage rock (“I’m Waiting for the Man”) to ballads (“Stephanie Says”) to old-fashioned pop-rock (“There She Goes Again”, which was covered by R.E.M. – I learned about the song from the version of “There She Goes Again” recorded by the Crawdaddys). Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the Velvet Underground often creates beautiful and mellow songs, and one need go no further than the opening track on their first album to find one – the laid-back “Sunday Morning” is every bit as lovely as a song with that name should be, but it is coming from the same band that creates harrowing tales like “Heroin” and “Sister Ray”. A compilation album called VU collects several similarly mellow songs that were evidently intended for the Velvet Underground’s never-released fourth album; their actual fourth album Loaded (1970) comes from recordings that were made at a later date and for a different record label. All four albums by the Velvet Underground are rated five stars by Allmusic, as is VU. The Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked the Velvet Underground #19 on their list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”.