(The Velvets hated Frank Zappa, so no pun intended.) Haynes appears to have vacuumed up every last photograph and raw scrap of home-movie and archival footage of the band that exists and stitched it all into a coruscating document that feels like a time-machine kaleidoscope. It’s called “The Velvet Underground,” and among other things it’s a fascinating study in how necessity becomes the mother of invention. The albums are there for all time, but as a historical presence the Velvets can seem a bit like a group of ghosts.īut now, the great director Todd Haynes has, at long last, made a documentary about the Velvet Underground. (It’s quite an irony considering that Warhol, the band’s mentor, was the first person to be notorious for filming everything around him, but there you go.) The Velvet Underground, whose music was a mesmerizing midnight trance-out, had no radio niche, no publicity, no “media,” no backstage verité Pennebaker or Maysles. Every time I’ve raised the subject with those in the know, the explanation comes down to: “There’s no footage.” What they mean is: There are random bits of footage, and plenty of photographs, but if you want to see the Velvets in their prime performing “What Goes On” or “White Light/White Heat” in a steamy rock club, or get a taste of what it was like to see the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (the hypnotic chug-a-chug of the band, the psychedelic blobs and Warhol films) at the Dom in New York City in 1966, or to see any full-scale concert clip that would allow you to experience the Velvets in a you-are-there, that’s-what-they-were-like way, you’re out of luck, because those clips basically don’t exist. There’s a reason we’ve never seen that film. So surely they deserve to be captured and memorialized in a film that does them justice. They are, along with the Beatles and the Stones, one of the three seminal groups in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. "The truth is that I really, really, really loved it," Reed told Pitchfork in 2007.For years, I’ve been longing for someone to make a documentary about the Velvet Underground. However, as Pitchfork notes, "Metal Machine Music" serves as a "logical endpoint" of the drone music that he began experimenting with using the ostrich guitar. Rumors circulated that the album had been made so Reed could get out of his recording contract, or that it was intended as a direct attack on his fans. However, 1975's "Metal Machine Music," a sprawling double album of noise and distortion - with no actual songs or any vocals, as noted by the BBC – was received so badly that many assumed it was a joke. Ever looking to experiment, Reed followed "Transformer" with 1973's "Berlin ," a double album chronicling the dissolution of a marriage (Reed's own marriage was also breaking apart at the time, per The Guardian). The bleak record was a commercial flop, though, per Pitchfork, Reed's audience returned for his highly successful live album, 1974's "Rock 'n' Roll Animal," and a follow-up studio album "Sally Can't Dance. Their fourth album, 1970's "Loaded ," was an attempt to "load" an album with potential hits, but it still failed to sell, and Reed left the group shortly after, per Ultimate Classic Rock.īut, in a turn of events that would become the usual mode throughout Reed's patchwork career, the unadulterated acclaim was not to last. 1967 was the year of the Summer of Love, and as groundbreaking as his early music is considered today, in the hippie era Reed's artsy band failed to make any commercial breakthrough. Warhol went on to produce their debut album, 1967's "The Velvet Underground & Nico ," for which Warhol convinced Reed to incorporate as a co-vocalist a German chanteuse, Nico, according to udiscovermusic. The same source notes, however, how, despite their artistic successes, the music of The Velvet Underground failed to chime with the trends of the day. The group - originally consisting of Reed, John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Angus MacLise, who was soon replaced by Moe Tucker, according to All Music – gained a modest but well-connected audience with their avant-garde and taboo-breaking take on rock 'n' roll, which also brought them to the attention of Andy Warhol. "Heroin," a song detailing Lou Reed's experiences of using the drug, became a cornerstone of The Velvet Underground's early repertoire.
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