Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (13 page)

“European Son” is very tame now. It happens to be melodic and if anyone listens to it, it turns out to be comprehensible in the light of all that has come since, not just our work but everyone’s. It’s just that for the time it was done it’s amazing. We figured that on our first album it was a novel idea just to have long tracks. People just weren’t doing that—regardless of what the content of the track was—everyone’s album cuts had to be 2:30 or 2:45. Then here’s “European Son” which ran nearly eight minutes. All the songs on the first album are longish compared to the standards of the time.
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With all due respect to Morrison (and I believe he deserves limitless amounts of it), “very tame” is not a quality I would ascribe to this song in any context. For listeners today, as for listeners in 1966 or ’67, the song is a jarring trip that provides authentic surprises. After
Sterling Morrison’s death, Lou Reed reflected on the man he called “the Warrior Heart of the Velvet Underground.” “When he had played his passionate solos, I had always seen him as a mythic Irish hero, flames shooting from his nostrils,”
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Reed said. Listening to “European Son,” it’s easy to envision that description.

Though dedicated to Schwartz, the song would be fitting as a tribute to Andy Warhol. Its progression from a fairly danceable piece of pop music into a dark, cacophonous explosion seems a perfect aural metaphor for the
EPI,
whose shows transformed discotheques into laboratories synthesizing frenzied, psycho-social catharsis. Perhaps because of the dearth of lyrics, the song encourages a listener to close his or her eyes and allow the music to provide a story in image form.

On their live gigs, according to Jonathan Richman, the band’s set lists would read “Hooker” instead of “European Son.” As in John Lee Hooker, the bluesman with the guttural voice, due to the group’s belief that the main riff sounded like a Hooker song. To me it starts out sounding like the cheesy riff used in every mid-’60s TV show when a character turns on a transistor radio to hear “rock and roll.”
Bewitched! My Favorite Martian! The Munsters
episode featuring the Standells!
Suddenly, assassin dervishes grab the tinny radio and retune it to a station only they can find, a mystical signal lying between the lines where the song is the same but angels and djinn join in the din. A jarring noise like someone flushing glass down a metal toilet announces that they control the horizontal, they control the vertical; this bus is now making some unscheduled stops.

Behind Door Number One is an accomplished musician, melding Arabic and Indian drone scales with crunching rock double stops: rockabilly rhythms from the foothills of Mars. Just back of Door Number Two, however, is a very stoned 13-year old kid who has never played guitar. A go-go dancer keeps closing one door and opening the other; Alice in reverse, she grows larger by the second. Hers are the boots that can split the marble floors of libraries, hers are the boots that can build a Fascist state. Her eyes begin to glow with inhuman ferocity, her body shifts from flesh to vinyl, now hard, shiny plastic and beyond: aluminum, iron, steel, plutonium! This is “These Boots Are Made for Walking” as a football chant for warrior droids of the future.

Janus-like sits the European Son, with Warhol’s face on the front of its head and Lou Reed’s on the back. Bo Diddley rides in on horseback, but it’s too late for him to save the old rock and roll, and he’s chased from the high school gym by the go-go golem tearing up the bleachers, wearing Seven League tank crushers on her
feet. The European Son cocks back a metal head with white vinyl hair and opens a mouth full of razor blades and number two pencils. What comes out is … silence. As Lou Reed will also learn one day as he stands among the ashes of the VU: to be victorious is to be alone.

“European Son” features perhaps the most obvious integration of the Fluxus tenets John Cale brought to the group. Among these was the idea that spontaneous noises, such as a passing car, were a natural component of the listening experience, hence part of the song. From there it’s only a short step to writing those sounds into the arrangement. Here the distinctly jarring noise was made by a metal chair being scraped on the floor by Cale, who then plowed it into a pile of aluminum dishes an instant later. But I still think it sounds like a picture window being flushed down a toilet.

Morrison:
I was never more excited about anything, and used to call up
Cashbox
to find out our chart position before the magazine hit the stands.

Moe Tucker:
MGM fucked up … they really didn’t distribute it at all.
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The VU released four studio LPs in their five-year history as a group (if, like most, you believe the band’s true demise occurred upon the departure of Lou Reed). Of those four official LPs, not one managed to crack the Top 100, while two failed to make the charts at all.

Timing is everything in the music business, and the Velvets’ timing sucked. Recording in 1966, when shows like
Shindig, Hullabaloo
and
Where the Action Is
were already providing a diluted version of the rock club scene for television viewers, the Velvets were distinctly unsanitized. As the record masters languished on the shelves at MGM, the Byrds released “Eight Miles High” which sparked a nationwide, anti-drug-song backlash. To no avail the Byrds insisted that the song was simply an account of a transatlantic flight to London (they were two miles off on the actual altitude, but what the hell, I’ll bet David Crosby made up for it with a preflight regimen that included everything
but
Dramamine). The machine of self-censorship was now in place, a Venus Fly Trap just waiting for an album to alight that had the nerve to pile homosexuality and deviant sexuality on top of
several
unrepentant drug songs.

When MGM finally got the album into stores, in March of 1967, they mounted a distinctly lackluster promotional campaign, and later cut the budget even further in the face of industry hostility. With the album’s content guaranteeing a tough sell, the obvious hesitancy of the record company did nothing to deter magazines from banning their ads, or stop radio stations from refusing to playlist the LP. Most reviewers even refused to give it column space. Still, with the dice so heavily
loaded against them, the Velvet Underground almost pulled it off. Almost. By May they were charting in
Cashbox,
threatening the Top 100. And then disaster struck.

On the back of the album was an
EPI
photo of the band with a slide montage projected on them, including an image of Eric Emerson, a Warhol Superstar who’d recently been busted and found himself in need of cash. Emerson promptly threatened suit, refusing to sign a release until MGM paid him. After delays in manufacturing due to the need for a special machine to create the Warhol-designed cover whose banana could be peeled, and the considerable costs involved in creating one, it remains a mystery why MGM didn’t just pay to shut Emerson up. Victor Bockris speculates:

Considering MGM’s inability, or lack of willingness, to handle the product, one has to wonder why they released it in such an expensive package. The only explanation would be an attempt to emphasize the Warhol connection, which a rare advertisement they used certainly does, in the hope that it would sell more copies.
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In
Uptight,
Bockris quotes Sterling Morrison, whose frustration is evident at the muddleheaded way that
MGM approached the already-delayed release of
The Velvet Underground and Nico:

The whole Eric business was a tragic fiasco for us, and proves what idiots they were at MGM … who even knows who took the original photo of Eric, but MGM was far removed from any liability. They responded by pulling the album off the shelves immediately, and kept it off the shelves for a couple of months while they fooled around with stickers over Eric’s picture, and then finally the airbrush. The album thus vanished from the charts almost immediately in June, just when it was about to enter the Top 100. It never returned to the charts.
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Reed in particular was frustrated by the problems surrounding the album. He had worked for his father’s accounting firm, and more than the other Velvets he kept his eye on the bottom line. The delay in release exacerbated the tension between Lou and the management team, and the relationship with Warhol (which had peaked during the April 1966 shows at the Dom and the recording sessions that same month) deteriorated. Had there been no year-long delay in which Reed could mull over the deficiencies of Morrissey and Warhol’s management skills, the Velvets may well have continued working with them. But it was not to be.

Paul Morrissey:
Verve/MGM didn’t know what to do with
The Velvet Underground and Nico
album because it was so peculiar. They didn’t release it for almost a year … Tom Wilson at Verve/MGM only bought the album from me because of Nico. He saw no talent in Lou.
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In 1967, after the delay of a year in getting it released, the commercial climate was even worse than it had been when the album was actually recorded. From a competitive and marketing standpoint, the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s
album was out, making its colossal impact on the industry and diverting attention away from anything and everything else released that year. Lots of other shrewd managerial types were sussing out the enormous new rock market, and records (some worthwhile but most mere product) began flooding the stores. Suddenly it was getting hard to be noticed, in marked contrast to the fairly wide-open sales market of the year before.

In terms of the moral climate for the Velvets’ album, ’67 was also worse than the previous year. Twelve months of press coverage had centered around San Francisco’s counter-cultural youth movement and the rampant drug use within it. Yet another generation of parents discovered the devil’s hand behind the music
their kids were listening to. The John Birch Society revealed the startling truth that the Beatles were merely beards for an evil think tank of brilliant behavioral scientists who actually wrote their songs (ah-ha!). The purpose: brainwashing, plain and simple. These “leading pied pipers creating promiscuity, an epidemic of drugs, youth class-consciousness, and an atmosphere for social revolution” clearly weren’t working alone!
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It wasn’t long before the hysteria reached such a pitch that American Vice President Spiro Agnew would attempt to ban “With a Little Help from My Friends,” having decided it was clearly a drug anthem. As the
Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll
points out: “The issue that united radio programmers and record companies—what amounted to a conspiracy—was drugs … drugs were a middle-class bogeyman, and even the hint that a song had ‘drug lyrics’ was enough to get it banned from the AM airwaves …“
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The Velvets, of course, were doing a lot more than hinting. And their other major subject, sex, was also under intense attack from radio programmers around the country, although this was not as intense or as new a phenomenon as the anti-drug backlash. “Making out”
and “going too far” were ’50s clichés, and if such lukewarm phrases could send programmers scurrying to their playlists and songwriters back to their typewriters—as with Lou Christie’s “Rhapsody in the Rain” that year—what hope did “Venus in Furs” have? MGM/Verve would come under new, ultraconservative stewardship soon, and the Velvets and Mothers would become casualties when the rock wing of the label was reduced to those wanton, milk-besodden rebels the Cowsills. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but maybe the writing was on the wall, and the lack of support for the record was part of a tacit plan to let the label’s most “embarrassing” signing die by slow, promotional starvation.

Perhaps the final cog in the machine grinding the Velvets beneath its spiked wheel was the failure of even their hometown New York radio stations to support the group through airplay. After getting screwed out of the Dom, this piece of local treachery was too much. The Velvets returned the favor: At the height of their powers, as Sterling Morrison has quipped, the group instituted their own three-year boycott of New York City. Hard-core New Yorkers by birth or choice, they wouldn’t relocate, but they became a touring band whose fan base and favorite place was Boston. The band found succor in that city, which was home to future bass player Doug Yule and future manager Steve Sesnick.

“Boston was the whole thing as far as we were concerned … it was the first time somebody just listened to the music, which blew our minds collectively,”
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Lou Reed has said, and Danny Fields points out the band was “phenomenally popular in Boston … they could really make a living,”
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which they couldn’t in New York.

The appreciation Bostonians had for the group’s music may have forestalled the dissolution of the band long enough for them to double their recorded output. Unfortunately, with no record industry in Boston, nor the Big Apple press machine that New York and LA labels kept abreast of for breaking developments, the Velvets’ self-chosen second home couldn’t supply what the band had needed all along back in Manhattan. Still, as a native East Bostonian, it makes me proud that Boston was one place that recognized how great the Velvets were—in their own time.

Any book on the Velvets contrasts the commercial failure of the group with its role as musical pioneers, and this one is no different. Numbers don’t lie—or do they? Seeing this album still selling briskly, and being far more influential than nearly every one of its contemporaries,
makes you wonder what “commercial” really means. Clearly to a record company, whose bean counters tend to think in terms of dollars spent this year versus dollars made this year, “commercial” means a record capable of making a whole shitload of money in one big lump. Longevity, it seems, does not enter into the equation. It’s an odd standard for an industry that habitually earns large chunks of its revenue from releasing material from old catalogues. A successful house stands for fifty, a hundred, two hundred years; a successful oil well spits out a bit at a time for a quarter of a century. A successful album—by record company standards—need only stand a year, as long as it’s one obscenely fat, lucrative year. Could this be why so many major label releases have become the aural equivalent of the crappy, pre-fab housing you expect to find around an army base, shoddy constructions whose clapboard looks split after a handful of seasons, decrepit within a decade?