Dec 12 2009
NYT, Suck My Banana
So I went to take a look at today’s headlines when I noticed an item on the T Magazine Style Blog titled Notes from the Velvet Underground. “Oh, goody,” I said to myself. “I wonder what the style news is on the great VU.” I thought it might be a guide on where to buy great striped sailor shirts- I saw a girl looking hot in one on the street in the freezing cold last night in Soho. But I was horrified by what I read. Horrified!
Apparently Rizzoli has produced a coffee table book about the band. And apparently this is the first coffee table book ever about the history of a band. I don’t think that’s actually true, but there’s something sadly ironic about the VU being reduced to a coffee table tome in the post rock age. Even more depressing: the deluxe version of the thing, which includes a 7-inch single- why?, retails for $300. I’m pretty sure that means that the price of 3 books equals the entire original recording budget for The Velvet Underground & Nico. It’s full of VU “ephemera: posters, screen prints, photographs, ticket stubs, record covers, alternative record covers, film stills, letters and lyric sheets — essentially a lavishly printed and protracted set of liner notes.” They’re also making a trade edition that will sell for $50.
There are baffling weirdnesses in the post, like yesterday being the 45th anniversary of the VU’s 12/11/65 debut at Summit High School in NJ (it was the 44th). I guess they don’t bother to have anyone fact check these things, because that piece of stellar accuracy was in the opening sentence. But none of this was what horrified me, oh no. I will now quote the part that offended me beyond the pale. Please note the italicized sections- and enjoy your outrage (italics mine):
”In the 45 years since the band started, and in the 23 since Andy Warhol, the group’s founder, died, it’s easy to underestimate the artist’s influence on the band. Opening with a classified ad Warhol placed in the Village Voice in 1966 (it reads, “I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, cigarettes, tape, sound equipment, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, RECORDS, anything, film and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY—love and kisses, Andy Warhol, EL 5-9941.”), the book firmly places Warhol, along with Phil Spector and Lou Pearlman, as one of the producers who most changed music in the 20th century. He micromanaged every aspect of the Velvets — from where they played (like at the the New York Society for Clincial Psychiatry convention, reviewed by The Times in 1966) to the slide shows projected onto a wall while they played — and in the process cannily invented a new kind of pop-music product.”
* And my response:
It’s absolutely inaccurate to say that Andy Warhol founded the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison had tried three different band concepts/names before Reed was given the novel The Velvet Underground by Tony Conrad**. The band was called the Velvet Underground before Mo Tucker joined, and Mo Tucker joined before Andy got involved. A simple Wikipedia search, folks- that’s all it takes. Isn’t this [the NYT] supposed to be the blog of record?
“Leave the curse words in” does not count as brilliant production technique- although it may or may not have helped make the record great in that the band was free to create exactly the record they wanted in the studio. But the production credit? That was part of the deal Warhol made with Verve Records to convince them that the record might have some commercial appeal- the most substantial thing he ever did for them, besides maybe feed them. Sure, he suggested things like adding Nico (not necessarily a good idea, depending on your point of view and an unsustainable contribution in any case), the go-go dancers at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows and the psychedelic slideshow backdrop. But as manager, his job was to market them, and he failed pretty miserably at that. He mostly helped them get some press and notoriety for a little while, and then they carried on without him after only one record- albeit a very, very important one.
That first record was hugely, almost unbelievably influential- among a tiny band of mostly local LES proto-hipsters who occasionally went on to form bands that did become successful (along with some even hipper folks in the UK). There is in fact a downtown legend that every single person who bought The Velvet Underground & Nico when it first came out started a band. Some of those bands became very successful indeed, and that’s why this book has been made and why the Velvet Underground are important- because they introduced a negative sensibility into what had hitherto been an almost uniformly positive medium. And they did it in a way that managed to combine chaotic noise, adult themes and an uptight, anti-hippie attitude with a musical underpinning that still referenced the pop styles of the ’60s while diverging from them. If those early adopters hadn’t gone on to be successes, and if the negative sensibility that the VU ushered in hadn’t been taken up by bands like the Stooges, the Rolling Stones (who were still pretty lightweight in 1965), Ramones, the Psychedelic Furs, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, the White Stripes- and that’s just the short list- the Velvet Underground would just be the unsuccessful band Lou Reed was in before he made Transformer. As it is, pretty much every edgy band in the rock canon owes some debt to The Velvet Underground & Nico.
I’d love to hear exactly what Warhol ever did in a recording studio that would designate him “one of the producers who most changed music in the 20th century”. I would even challenge Phil Spector’s claim to that title (Lou Pearlman? Seriously? That’s a joke, right?). In the Greatest Music Producers of the 20th Century steelcage deathmatch, I’ll put up Phillips, Wexler and Martin against your Warhol, Spector and Pearlman any day of the week and beat the pants off you before sunrise, dude!
Lou! Write these chumps a letter, please, and set them straight. Death to revisionism! Or if I’m wrong, correct me?
Are they insane at the New York Times? I could continue to go on about this all day- Warhol “micromanaged every aspect of the Velvets…and in the process cannily invented a new kind of pop-music product”? Bollocks! Big, pendulous, bloody bollocks! The Velvets didn’t become a pop-music product until the ’90s, as their influence and the influence of their spawn expanded over the decades. And the fact that the Times can be smug about sending a reviewer to a VU show in 1966 just irritates me all the more. It just shows that when it comes to avant-garde art (at the very least), some things at the Grey Lady never change: it’s not that they’re unaware of what’s cool- they just don’t truly get it.
It’s true that their music was never again as uncompromising as it was on that first record, but the band quite naturally wanted to eat; an attempt at a more commercial sound, plus the tensions between Reed and Cale probably made that inevitable. But most of that record was written and rehearsed before Warhol became interested in them. He had no hand or real, producer-like influence in creating their sound and songs. It was never what Warhol did with the VU but rather what he didn’t even try to do that made his association with them great. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just…wrong.
* This is not exactly the way the comment appears at NYT.com. In my excitable state of rage, I refer to The Velvet Underground & Nico album as The Velvet Underground, which is actually the 3rd album. Now I have to go back and post a mea culpa. Drat.
** The filmmaker who gave Lou the book and thereby the name. I didn’t mean to imply that Tony Conrad wrote the book, but it could be misinterpreted that way. Oops.
