Friday, 12/4/09

The Man Can’t Bust Our Music. That’s the advertising campaign Columbia Records launched in 1969. Actually, though, this wasn’t quite true, as I’d learned the year before. One night in April of 1968 (just a few months before the Democratic Convention), when I was 15 years old and our parents were out of town, my brother Don and I went to the Electric Theater on Chicago’s north side (later known [after a lawsuit] as the Kinetic Playground) to see the Velvet Underground. This was just a couple months after the release of their second album, White Light/White Heat. After the show, as we were leaving and heading back to the car, we were stopped. The Man. Unmarked Car. Busted—curfew rap.

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Next Tuesday, Lou Reed and other members of the Velvet Underground (Maureen “Mo” Tucker, Doug Yule, David Fricke [no John Cale]) will be appearing at the New York Public Library, for an event that’s being promoted this way:

The Art and Soul of The Velvet Underground

In the historic ferment of Sixties rock, the Velvet Underground were the perfect band in the right city, New York, at a crucial time.

For five years – 1965 to 1970 – singer-songwriter and guitarist Lou Reed, bassist and viola player John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, with the German vocalist Nico and bassist Doug Yule (who replaced Cale in 1968), broadcast the real life of their home town – the sex, drugs and art; the furious street energies, hidden pleasures and desperate romance – in an unprecedented pop music of vivid storytelling and transgressive excitement.

On stage and on their four influential studio albums, the Velvets invented the many futures of rock – punk, drone, free improvisation, lyric candor – in songs and performances that made the group notorious, with the pivotal help of their early manager and mentor, Andy Warhol. Legendary status came later, after the group broke up and Reed and Cale went on to bold prolific solo careers.

Today, the Velvet Underground are the stars they always deserved to be, with a rich and still mysterious story that continues to unfold: in the new visual collection, The Velvet Underground: New York Art, and tonight, in this unprecedented reunion of Reed, Tucker and Yule – the words, music and rhythm of The Velvet Underground.

Talk about breathless: “[h]istoric ferment,” “unprecedented,” “transgressive excitement,” “the stars they always deserved to be.” Maybe they could begin the evening with an introduction I heard, many years ago, when Martin Mull played the Quiet Knight (making the singular plural [unless, that is, Lou thought the singular would suffice]):

Here he is, Ladies & Gentlemen . . . a legend in his own mind . . .

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The Velvet Underground

“Sunday Morning”

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“I’m Waiting For The Man”

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“Beginning to See the Light”