Invisible Hits is a column in which Tyler Wilcox scours the internet for the best (and strangest) bootlegs, rarities, outtakes, and live clips.
Talent, vision, fearlessness, a touch of genius: they’re all necessary ingredients for the creation of a classic album. But you’re also going to need a lot of luck. The Velvet Underground & Nico, released 50 years ago this month, is a prime example of this. The lead-up to the album, a classic if ever there was one, is filled with right-place-at-the-right-time moments, chance encounters, and timely accidents. Remove one of these elements and the LP’s edifice crumbles. Via a handful of fascinating rarities, we can piece together how The Velvet Underground & Nico came together in a highly unlikely fashion.
Pickwick Studios // Queens, NY // May 11, 1965
After graduating from Syracuse University in 1964, Lou Reed landed a job as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records in Queens. The Brill Building it wasn’t. “We just churned out songs, that’s all,” he said later. “Never a hit song—what we were doing was churning out these rip-off albums… I mean we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let The Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’” The curious can check out Soundsville! (a faux compilation), or the (frankly awful) Surfsiders Sing The Beach Boys SongbookLP, both of which feature a number of Reed contributions.
At some point Reed convinced his bosses to let him (and his new pal, the Welsh wunderkindJohn Cale) cut a demo of his most taboo original composition: “Heroin.” On The Velvet Underground & Nico, “Heroin” has a luminous grandeur, Reed’s first-person narrative of a junkie’s rush-and-run matched perfectly by Cale’s droning, electrified viola and drummer Maureen Tucker’s insistent thump. The Pickwick version, unheard until it was played as part of Reed’s 2013 memorial service, is radically different: an acoustic talking blues that—subject matter aside—could have turned up at one of NYC’s mid ’60s folk clubs. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott meets Hubert Selby, Jr., perhaps. It’s not the Velvet Underground, but it’s proof positive that Reed had his sights set on much more than doo-wop pastiches and Beach Boys knock-offs. (Listen here)
Ludlow Street // NYC // July 1965
After bumping into him on the subway, Reed asked his Syracuse classmate Sterling Morrison to join him and Cale on their musical wanderings. The earliest fruits of their collaboration can be heard on a surprisingly clear summer of ‘65 tape of the trio rehearsing in the unheated NYC flat they all shared. The recording, released as part of the Peel Slowly and See boxed set in 1995, gives us an intimate glimpse of the Velvets. Several of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s songs are here, but in drastically altered form. With Cale on lead vocal, “Venus In Furs” takes on a solemn English folk feel. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” lacks the majestic nature of the released version, Reed and Morrison’s guitars chiming a bit like the Byrds, who were flying high on the charts at the time. Best (and weirdest) of all is the country-inflected version of “I’m Waiting for the Man.” It sounds more like Hank Williams heading up to Harlem to score, with Cale’s viola bursting in like a hillbilly on speed. Overall, the Ludlow Street tape shows an almost entirely unexplored direction for the Velvets, one closer to the Holy Modal Rounders or the Fugs than what was to come. It’s also a treat to hear Reed, Cale, and Morrison cracking themselves up at various points—just friends frittering away a summer night, fumbling and false-starting towards greatness.
Andy Warhol’s Factory // NYC // January 3, 1966
Another random occurrence. In December 1965, Andy Warhol caught the Velvets (now with Maureen Tucker on percussion) during the group’s short-lived residency at the Café Bizarre, a tourist trap in the Village. Captivated by the raw immediacy of the VU’s sound, Warhol almost immediately brought the band into his then-thriving Factory fold. But the artist’s valuable patronage (both in cachet and actual dollars) came with one big change: Warhol and his collaborator Paul Morrissey suggested adding a German singer named Nico (born Christa Päffgen) to the mix. Surprisingly, the famously stubborn Velvets agreed, and we can eavesdrop on what is probably one of the augmented group’s first rehearsals on this Factory tape, most of which was officially released on the “super deluxe” edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico in 2012. It’s a revealing listen. At several moments, you’ll hear Reed teaching Nico the lyrics to some soon-to-be-classics. In what has to be an intentionally mocking moment, Lou recites the lyrics of “Venus In Furs,” his ode to S&M, to the singer, while Morrison and Cale vamp on “Love Is Strange” in the background.
There are also interesting nods to current pop music of the era, demonstrating that the VU was not hermetically sealed in some avant-garde downtown NYC bubble. Morrison tries out the riff to the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” and the whole group jams loosely on Booker T. & The MG’s’ “Green Onions.” The highlight, however, is the nasty, one-chord boogie “Miss Joanie Lee,” an off-the-cuff number which was quickly discarded by the band (probably in favor of the similarly styled “Run Run Run”). Notice Reed’s self-destructing noise guitar scrawl prefiguring the No Wave movement by at least a decade.
The New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry’s Annual Dinner // The Delmonico Hotel // January 13, 1966
“SHOCK TREATMENT FOR PSYCHIATRISTS,” reads the headline of the New York Herald Tribune’s review of the Velvet Underground’s live debut with Nico. It probably wasn’t far off. In the posh environs of the Delmonico Hotel, the Velvets—accompanied by dancers Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga and a blinding light show—made an unholy racket in front of 350 psychiatrists in formalwear. Avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas was on hand to capture some of the proceedings on Super8 (with fuzzed out sound coming from a performance a few months later), but it’s Adam Ritchie’s photos of the event that give us a less chaotic view all these years later. “Why are they exposing us to these nuts?” one unnamed psychiatrist asked a New York Times reporter. Of course, the reason was obvious: publicity. Soon, Warhol and the Velvet Underground were riding their newfound notoriety across the country.
Symphony of Sound + “Chic Mystique”
The Velvet Underground & Nico ends with “European Son,” a song that devolves into a white-hot free-form raveup, kicked off appropriately by the sound of shattering glass. It was just a taste of the improvisational hijinks that the Velvets were capable of. Cale was the likely instigator for this side of the band. Having played with La Monte Young’s legendary ensemble the Dream Syndicate, he was eager to apply a rock‘n’roll backbeat to the minimalist drones that Young pioneered, developing a sound unlike any other rock group operating in 1966. Of course, the Velvets weren’t just any band—they were part of the Warhol-sponsored, multimedia extravaganza known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and just a small fraction of the sensory overload the show subjected its audience to. As a result, they had the freedom to do pretty much whatever they wanted.
Filmed by a zoom-happy Warhol and Morrissey at the Factory in early 1966, Symphony of Sound is a riot of dissonant sound. But the film is lent an unintended levity by the impassivity of the Velvets, all hiding behind shades, not to mention Nico’s toddler son Ari running rampant amid the chaos. Fittingly, the NYPD shows up about 40 minutes in and shuts down the whole affair, leaving the band and various Factory personalities to wander about aimlessly for the rest of the movie.
“Chic Mystique,” meanwhile, is taken from an April 1966 NYC performance a few months later, and was later used as the soundtrack to Jonas Mekas’ film “Walden.” Tucker lays down an immovable proto-motorik (protorik?) pulse, as Cale, Reed, and Morrison wreak havoc all around her, sounding close to the exploratory krautrock Can, Neu! and Faust would get into a few years later. You can almost see the strobe lights.
Sceptre Studios // NYC // April 18-23, 1966
It’s the kind of find that record collectors dream about. In 2002, Warren Hill is idly flipping through the records at a Chelsea flea market when he comes across an acetate with “The Velvet Underground” and the date “4-25-66” handwritten on the label. He pays a whopping $.75 for the item and soon discovers that it contains previously unheard recordings from the Velvet Underground’s very first professional recording sessions, which took place at NYC’s Sceptre Studios. His $.75 purchase will later sell at auction for just over $25,000. The music itself is soon widely bootlegged and eventually given canon status on the “super deluxe” 35th anniversary edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico, released in 2012. While the differences from the album versions are sometimes negligible—minor lyrical changes, alternate mixes, and slightly altered guitar lines—the acetate is still an invaluable document, peeling back the Banana Album’s layers for a closer look. Most of all, it demonstrates just how far the Velvets had come in less than a year. Thanks to an array of difficulties and complications, The Velvet Underground & Nico wouldn’t be released until the spring of 1967, robbing the band of its momentum and (possible) commercial success. But the LP’s reverberations are still being felt today.