POP
On Velvet
DUNCAN FALLO WELL
While browsing through an Oxford record shop in 1967, I came across an album captioned The Velvet Under- ground and Nico, pro- duced by Andy Warhol. With Warhol as a tag it seemed promising. I bought it, and played it, and realised I was on to something rather big. So I forced as many friends as possible to buy it too; and an involuntary cenacle arose, the last word in dark sophistication, admission to which consisted merely in having this record.
But the Velvet Underground, who were they? And why had nobody apart from us ever heard of them? In fact small groups of devots must have been gestating at strategic points round the country along with us but we never met them and it was another two years before I discovered a reference to the Velvet Underground in a music paper.
It was that first album, rather than the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper of the same year, which persuaded me that there could be more to rock than a simple tra-la-la-baby- baby, that vast new regions of experience awaited exploration and settlement. Never• before had 'pop' driven so deeply or so sud- denly into the uncertain bedrock of the psyche and with such sinister results. The music was moody and violent by turns, dredging up the sickest sediments from some mad electronic Hades far below. And if all this should appear over-dramatic, I can only say that the Velvet Underground are an almost exact musical counterpart to the world of William Burroughs, whose grim powers few would dispute.
In 1968 their second album, White Light/While Heat, was yet more dislocating, especially Sister Ray, a seventeen-minute juggernaut which put one's head through a meat mincer. Four years on, the vu's first two albums still kick too heavily against mind and stomach for most people, and they remain a minority group. Sister Ray is still the toughest trip in rock music, Yoko Ono notwithstanding.
As the rest of pop began to catch up, the vu perversely mellowed. Their third album had nasty moments but by their own supremely nasty standards was nowhere near so disconcerting. And their fourth? This is called Loaded and has at last been released by Atlantic (Q.15). The rumbling and grating rhythms have not been lost but are now interspersed with broad splashes of kitsch and mock rock (again Burroughs comes to mind). It is still a superb album and, although Andy now has little to do with it, even closer to the Warhol thing than they were in the days of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (Warhol's total predicament circus which danced round America in the mid-'six- ties, a model for all happenings since). And no one can blame them if, after heaven knows how many nervous breakdowns, the vu are trying to grab a bit of serenity (Lou Reed, the king pin, withdrew to a mental hospital some time ago and may still be there). But I did miss the meat mincer.
Their corrosive energy has now been taken over by certain European groups, notably by the Can, an unquestionably brilliant and maddeningly elusive band from Germany. The group's line-up has changed too. Nico returned to Europe soon after the first album and can be found in a film, La Cicatrice Interieure. John Cale, a Welshman who joined the group after travelling to America from the Royal Academy on a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship, has also returned, hav- ing released a solo album there, Vintage Violence (available only on import). He and Nico prepared her latest collection of songs. Deserts/more (Warner Brothers £2.15) which in an entirely new manner recreates some of the psychotic glory of the early Velvet Underground. What happens now is anybody's guess. But- if they should disap- pear in a black tornado, never to be heard again, the Velvet Underground have already had enormous influence if little widespread acclaim.
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