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Monday, December 04, 2006
HEROIN (WITH VIOLA)
Lou Reed and John Cale
Paris Rehearsal : January 1972
[Unreleased]
HEROIN (WITH ORGAN-FURL)
The Velvet Underground
Poor Richard's : June 1966
[Unreleased]
ANDY SAYS/VENUS IN FURS/HEROIN
Andy Warhol/The Velvet Underground
WNET : February 1966
[Unreleased]
INTERVIEW
Lou Reed
KVAN, Portland, Oregon : 1969
[Unreleased]
INTERVIEW
The Velvet Underground
Fondation Cartier, Paris : June 1990
[Unreleased]
Is Mel Gibson's film a quandry for Oscar voters? I dunno. But if by "saved your life" you mean, connected me to the world outside and interesting people around me, then I suppose the Velvet Underground is the band that saved my life. I found them when I was fifteen or so. I'd pay $127,000 for the acetate.
HEROIN (DIFFERENT TAKE)
VENUS IN FURS (DIFFERENT TAKE)
I'M WAITING FOR THE MAN (DIFFERENT TAKE)
EUROPEAN SON (DIFFERENT TAKE)
FEMME FATALE (DIFFERENT MIX)
The Velvet Underground
Norman Dolph Acetate
Scepter Studios : April 1966
[Buy It]
I think people overlook how important VU was to the Factory, and how heavily the Factory played into their lives and music (and so, by extension, our lives, and the music we love). Talk about ubiquitous. And, talk about compassionate - it's like, Andy Warhol went around flattening everyone around, with Lou Reed trailing after to breathe the life back in.
Believe it or not, I also think that people also underestimate just how good, and original, VU were. (If anyone can tell my why Joe Carducci excludes them from the rock and roll running, I'll be obliged). To me, the only band they were consciously tring to sound like most of the time was Booker T. and the MG's. I hear a lot of the Stones in VU's music - not as much as in the Stooges, but a lot; There She Goes is a straight steal from the Stones' cover of Marvin Gaye's Hitch-Hike. (And Femme Fatale is, essentially, a riff on Del Shannon's Little Town Flirt.) But VU didn't really need the Stones in the way that, say, the Stones neaded the Beatles (and vice-versa, though I've seen Keith Richards talking about how songs like Stray Cat Blues were just VU rip-offs). And their groove - always collapsing, ever-insistent, with Moe Tucker playing hard and simple and always behind the beat - is the backbone of half the records in my collection. (I sometimes think that the two most influential albums of the mid-eighties were VU and Another View.) Ellen Willis wrote about them beautifully, for Greil Marcus's desert island discs book. "The Velvets were the first important rock-and-roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience," she wrote. If so, why do I seem to hear them every time I turn on the radio?
posted by Alex
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