In November 1969, America’s greatest rock’n’roll band played at a converted pizza shop, the Matrix, in San Francisco. The audience numbered from thirty to 100 in size, 100 being the small club’s maximum capacity. The Velvet Underground were in label limbo; they had made their last record for Verve/MGM but were not yet signed to Atlantic/Cotillion. Unlike The Beatles, where every session has been completely documented, it was difficult to find concrete information about the making of their records, who played what, who engineered and mixed, etc. There were a couple of momentous decisions that Lou Reed made in the band’s short career. The first: parting ways with Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The Warhol-Velvets association had been quite good for both, but it soon became something of a negative circus that took the focus away from the band and their music. More than half a century later, the cult of The Velvet Underground continues to build and build. They are the granite support of the independent rock foundation. Thirty years ago, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Twenty years ago, their first album was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. According to Lou Reed, many powerful figures that control our society: "They’ll be the death of everyone," he warned us. As a lifeline, there’s rock’n’roll.
To dance to, to make everything all right. But for Lou, it wasn’t enough just to listen and dance. He had to make a different type of rock music. ‘Rock & Roll’, like everything The Velvet Underground recorded, wouldn’t be a hit record. But the group he co-founded and led would transform rock’n’roll just as much as it had transformed him, helping to save countless numbers of other lives along the way. Lou Reed personally soaked the rock’n’roll explosion up, maybe more avidly than anyone in his musical crowd. “The only decent poetry of this century was that recorded on rock-and-roll records,” he wrote in late 1966 in Aspen, his tone rising to a manifesto. “Everybody knew that it’s the music that keep us all intact,” he continued. “It’s the music that keep us from going crazy. We all made love to the music. And the word love was used in all that music. Over used, again and again, because that’s where it was at.” Although Reed studied classical piano for a few years as a child, by high school rock’n’roll was his focus, and guitar his instrument. He began to play in groups like The Shades, and made then his first attempts at songwriting. Rock’n’roll would be his ticket out of Freeport into an entirely different social sphere.
Stressed his good friend and high school bandmate Allan Hyman in an unpublished 2022 interview with filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig, “All of this nonsense about Lou's parents wanting to give him electroshock therapy so that they would in effect prevent him from being gay, it’s all bullshit. In those days, that was a treatment for depression. They were concerned that he was so overwhelmingly depressed that that was like a last resort thing to do. They were too smart to think that electroshock therapy would be sufficient. That was crazy.” The problems between Reed and his parents, and particularly his father, however, can’t be entirely dismissed as the usual family tensions during adolescence. “Lou’s father was really a scary person,” said Victor Bockris. “I talked to him on the phone a couple of times. He scared me by just using certain words. There was something about him that would scare you.” Robert Quine, a major Velvet Underground fan who first met Lou in 1969, told Bockris “we were walking in the Village and bumped into Lou’s parents. Lou started to shake and went completely pale, and lost his power completely.” Reed would allude to the shock treatment in the first line of The Velvet Underground & Nico’s closing track, ‘European Son’– perhaps a veiled reference to his parents killing their European son. Off stage Reed found some fellow bohemians to hang out with, but one in particular served as a reminder that eccentricity could teeter on mental illness. As a sophomore, his roommate was Lincoln Swados–leaving Syracuse after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
When The Velvet Underground were still in operation, Lou’s ex-roommate played a more indirect part in Reed’s life; he met his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, in the late sixties while visiting Swados at Creedmore hospital. In Syracuse, the Lonely Woman Quarterly’s illustrations were drawn by Lou’s longtime girlfriend Shelley Albin, to whom he wrote daily letters when she returned to Chicago during summer break in 1962. Some featured short stories, most notably ‘The Gift’, a macabre tale of a young man who mails himself to his girlfriend, only to meet a gruesome end on the other side. Five years later, it was the basis of a Velvet Underground song of the same name on White Light/White Heat. Albin inspired some other songs he began writing around this time. The doo-wop-flavoured ‘I Found a Reason’ eventually surfaced on Loaded; the more emotionally complex ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, a highlight of their third LP in 1969, was also kindled by their romantic relationship, and essentially finished by 1965 at the latest demo. Inasmuch as anyone as wilful as Lou could have a mentor, he found one in poet and author Delmore Schwartz, whose career was in a tailspin of depression and alcoholism. He’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at one point in the late fifties, and though he’d managed to gain a teaching position at Syracuse, even that might have been a comedown as he’d formerly taught at the more prestigious Harvard University. In June 1964, Reed graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.
Lou nonetheless admired Schwartz a great deal, going as far as to praise him as “my spiritual godfather” in a letter to him shortly after graduation. When Schwartz held court with Lou and other students at the Orange Bar just off campus in the early sixties, he likely wouldn’t have advised Reed to follow the path the youngster chose. Delmore didn’t know or care about rock’n’roll. He did make a point of promising to haunt Reed from his grave if Lou ever sold out. And Reed never sold out when he led The Velvet Underground between 1965 and 1970, nor there were any appreciable musical compromises in his solo career. Reed’s skills as a fingerpicking acoustic folk guitarist are surprisingly accomplished on his 1963–64 tape recordings – not an ability he’s been usually noted for, nor one that surfaces much in his Velvet Underground or post-VU work. In the May 1974 Circus, he huffed, “I’ve never seen Dylan except in the old days, and that was enough.”
In 1975, he slagged Dylan in the Dutch magazine Oor as a “Woody Guthrie impersonator. He changed his name because he wanted to be someone else.” About his departure from Pickwick Records, Reed said: “I really liked doing it, it was really fun, but I wasn’t doing the stuff I wanted to do,” he recalled. Yet as he confirmed in his KZEM-FM interview, “In the meantime I was writing all the stuff that came out on the first Velvet Underground album.” On his Pickwick sides, whether deliberately or subconsciously, he still couldn’t help let some of his individuality seep into the singing and songwriting. This is particularly true of four tracks featuring Reed’s lead vocals: ‘Merry Go Round’ and ‘Cycle Annie’ credited to The Beachnuts; ‘You’re Driving Me Insane’ by The Roughnecks; and ‘The Ostrich’ by The Primitives. Even had there been no credits whatsoever, they’re unmistakably Lou’s. They could belong to nobody else. Nor could the streak of unhinged glee in these tunes. ‘The Ostrich’ could be considered a deliberately ironic mockery of rock’n’roll at its most vapid, along the lines of Lou's future rival Frank Zappa’s early efforts. At a time when dance craze records were on the wane in the wake of the British Invasion, a disc that urged listeners to get down on their faces and make other people step on their heads seemed to take the genre to its most ludicrous extreme.
There’s more going on here than meets the ear, however – The guitar that kicks off the track clangs like a metallic siren with an insistence that’s bordering avant-garde. It’s followed by a murky, garage rock variation of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, with a circular riff inspired by the hook of The Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me.’ As Cale explained in his 1998 BBC Wales interview, Reed was “very concerned about being paid $25 a week to write songs in the style of anybody they decided were fine at the time while the songs he really wanted to record would never get recorded. And in a very heroic mode I said, ‘Hell with them. Let’s go do it anyway.’” But probably John Cale is over-amplifiying his role in Lou's departure from Pickwick. Terry Phillis, producer of Pickwick recalled that "Lou sometimes brought strange looking girls to the studio, some I thought they were his girlfriends, and the ladies who worked as receptionists complained constantly, the staff was really scared by those druggy looking girls." Cale said in the December 2009 issue of Uncut, “I thought if we combined Lou’s literary side and my classical training and what I’d been doing with La Monte Young with the excitement of rock’n’roll and put the furthest reaches of these propositions together, it would take us where no one else had been and no one else was going.” It’s not known exactly when Reed’s association with Pickwick ended, but Philips confirms that “basically, Lou was disappointed, and I was disappointed with what was happening there. The bottom line of it was, I was a good guy and released him. I didn’t have to, I could have held on to his contract.” In Bob Ragona’s view, “The superiors at Pickwick didn’t recognise Lou’s talents. That’s why he left. Everybody else knew.”
As another passing notion, Reed invited another woman, Daryl Delafield (whose looks had a touch of Jean Seberg), to join the band shortly after the Elektrah Lobel experiment. Daryl is also mentioned in Cale’s autobiography, although he writes not about her musical abilities, but her engagement in simultaneous romantic affairs with both him and Reed. Daryl didn’t join the band, but might have inspired one of Lou’s most durable compositions, as in 2006, John told Uncut that ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ was written about her. If so, Reed was quickly learning to pick up ideas from the odd, colourful characters he was meeting in the New York underground. As much as Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey liked The Velvet Underground, they felt the group needed a new lead singer. Given Lou Reed’s subsequent fame, not to mention how well his voice and delivery fit his songs even then, it might be hard to believe they thought a change was necessary. Morrissey recalled telling Warhol, “The problem is these people have no singer. There’s a guy who sings but he’s got no personality and nobody pays the slightest attention to him. They need someone with a bit of charisma.”
In late May 1964, Nico had her first brush with a major music icon when she and Bob Dylan had a brief affair. “My meeting with Lou Reed and John Cale was very important – perhaps especially for them,” Nico immodestly asserted in the February 1972 issue of the French magazine Rock & Folk. She was impressed by their dedication, adding in the same piece to Paul Alessandrini, “they believed very strongly in what they were doing, as if possessed by their music. They projected their entire life onto it: the drugs, the despair, the hope – because they found hope in the drugs.” Enigmatically reflecting her own attraction to the drugs that would hasten her post-Velvets downfall, she declared, “It’s when we don’t take anything that it’s the opposite.” ‘There She Goes Again’ exhibits Lou’s natural, nearly unsurpassed gift for street-tough vocal swagger as he spins almost cinema vérité-like vignettes, powered by propulsive riffs. Yet it’s not devoid of the nervy attitude at the fore on Reed’s more controversial songs, with a double entendre that could mean either physically hitting a woman or “hitting” her up with drugs. In a 1977 Penthouse interview with Mick Rock, Lou contended it reflected “just how violent America is,” adding, “I write songs I don’t agree with, or with the characters. It has to do with a movie I saw, or a character who was a certain way. Or somebody I read about in the paper, or met at a party. I put him in a song and I act him out.”
Richard Goldstein, then a rising rock journalist who’d write the first in-depth piece about the Velvets’ music later in 1966, describes The Factory crowd as “intensely sadistic and often cruel, seemingly waiting for the next suicide or overdose or whatever.” Lest The Velvet Underground be lumped in with their new friends, Goldstein made sure to add, “I didn’t find this to be true at all of the Velvets.” Even Lou Reed “didn’t seem that way to me. I didn’t see any gratuitous cruelty in him.” Edie Sedgwick might have been one of the most notorious casualties of The Factory, but she left an imprint on The Velvet Underground’s legacy when Warhol suggested Reed should write a song about her, asking if he agreed Edie was a “femme fatale.” The resulting song was a highlight of The Velvet Underground & Nico, helping to balance the band’s more ferocious and confrontational material with some much needed – albeit often overlooked – tenderness and delicacy. Lou Reed and Nico had a romantic fling which ended abruptly, after Nico delivering the devastating putdown “I cannot make love to Jews anymore” at a rehearsal.
Reed took something valuable from the relationship, however: after Nico told him “I’ll be your mirror,” he used the line as the title and inspiration for a great romantic ballad that ended up on, and helped balance, their debut album. That’s one version, at any rate. His Syracuse girlfriend Shelley Albin later contended ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ grew out of a conversation with her when she and Lou were in college. Another of Lou’s early girlfriends, Barbara Hodes elaborates, “I met Lou in the Factory, I think Lou was a bit into astrology. And a friend of his from Syracuse who became a friend of mine, filmmaker Roz Stevenson, was also into astrology. My feeling is that a lot of the songs are just conglomerates of different things and different people. I don’t think that there are that many that are only about one event or one person.” Whatever ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’s intentions and origins, there’s no doubt it held a special place in Reed’s heart, and that he even was delighted that Nico was taking the lead vocals. Asked in an interview for the May 1974 issue of Circus to name “your favorite Lou Reed song,” Lou simply replied, “I like Nico doing ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’” It was one of Nico’s favorites as well, the singer telling Twen, “I can identify with that one,” finding its meaning as “to only see the beautiful, without the ugly.” Reed revealed, in the November 1987 issue of Creem, that the lead vocal was given to Nico in part because “she could sing the high chorus. That’s why, at the end of the song, you get those ‘oh-woa-woe’s.”
Tom Wilson muddied the matters when he spoke about the MGM deal almost a decade later in the January 31, 1976, issue of Melody Maker. After producing The Mothers of Invention’s debut album Freak Out!, he remembered, “We went on a cross-country tour and sold 47,000 copies. I had to sell it or lose my job. Then a few weeks later Lou Reed came by.” Michael Watts reported in the same article, “Reed bore with him a copy of his first album, which Wilson proceeded to buy for $3,000.” But Wilson certainly got some of the details wrong. As Freak Out! wasn’t released until June 27, there’s no way he could have met Reed and bought the album – presumably the Scepter session tapes – after the Mothers’ LP had sold 50,000 copies. The Velvet Underground signed with MGM nearly two months before Freak Out!’s release. As Sterling Morrison later admitted, MGM’s negligent attitude towards The Velvet Underground might have actually given them the leeway to get away with take-no-prisoners music that other labels may never have allowed. “The people at MGM didn’t even know us by name,” he told Creem in 1969. “Obscurity at MGM gave us freedom to do what we wanted to.” The Velvet Underground didn’t get along with Frank Zappa, the leader of the opening band, The Mothers of Invention. Cale later remembered Zappa putting down the headliners on stage, igniting a long-running animosity between Zappa and the Velvets. Mothers' drummer Jimmy Carl Black: “He really disliked the band. For what reasons I really don’t know, except that they were junkies and Frank just couldn’t tolerate any kind of drugs.”
Some members later accused MGM/Verve of pushing their debut LP back so it didn’t interfere with the promotion of the debut album by The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out! In 2009, Cale told Uncut, “They said, ‘We’re not going to promote the record, the promotion money’s going to Frank Zappa. Why do you need money? You’ve got Andy and Frank needs help.’” In his April 1981 New Musical Express interview with Mary Harron, Sterling Morrison suggested “the problem was Frank Zappa and his manager, Herb Cohen. They sabotaged us in a number of ways, because they wanted to be the first with a freak release. And we were totally naive. We didn’t have a manager who would go to the record company every day and just drag the whole thing through production.” Such speculation didn’t just grow out of decades of bitter hindsight. Even in November 1968, in an interview with Open City, Lou Reed complained “our first album was released six months late… because the record company was afraid of ‘Heroin’ and, two, because the manager of the Mothers didn’t want Frank’s album to be like our first one, and theirs was coming out first… I’m not saying anything evil toward anybody, but there was panic, and ours came out six months later.” It actually came out eight months later. Such was the vitriol towards the Mothers’ leader from the Velvets’ camp that in a 1970 interview with Third Ear, Reed called Zappa “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s a two-bit, pretentious academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything. He can’t play rock’n’roll, because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself and I think he’s right.”
Reed explained: “We want an audience who understands what’s going on and who has seen rock music stretch and change and grow. If what we do is confined too much to one state of mind, it won’t last. If rock is used only as a vehicle for something else, like protest, the audience turns off. But profoundness and complexity in music won’t put anyone to sleep. Our performance is approached technically and emotionally.” Sterling Morrison claimed that ‘White Light/White Heat’ was banned in San Francisco. So did Lou Reed while introducing the song at a March 1969 show in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Cale later contended that both ‘White Light/White Heat’ and ‘Here She Comes Now’ suffered radio bans. Even Doug Yule, who wouldn’t join the Velvets for another year, claimed ‘White Light/White Heat’ “was banned on every major and minor station in the whole United States in about 1968. As Lou Reed explained in a November 1968 interview with The Georgia Straight, ‘White Light/White Heat’ got banned because “they said it was a drug song. And the other side, ‘Here She Comes Now’, they said that was dirty.” In an interview with Ian Hoare of Time Out in May 1972, Reed added, “We put out ‘Here She Comes Now’ in San Francisco and they said ‘that’s about a girl coming,’ and I said ‘well, no it’s not, it’s about somebody coming into a room.’ And then I listened to the record and I realised it might be about a girl coming as a matter of fact, but then again, so what? But we were banned again…”
‘Stephanie Says’ certainly wasn’t a standard love song. An interior monologue by a mysterious woman, it offered more than its share of Reedian enigma, hinting perhaps at a globetrotter facing a tragic fate with bravery. As to why people call Stephanie Alaska in the lyric, that’s part of the enigma, though it's probable that was inspired by Nico. ‘Stephanie Says’ was hardly a sure-fire hit, but would have made for a reasonable A-side. But Verve decided – with the same inscrutable logic it brought to many of its dealings with The Velvet Underground – to leave it on the shelf. It wouldn’t be released until it was unearthed for the 1985 outtakes compilation VU. The other track from these sessions, ‘Temptation Inside Your Heart’, presented the Velvets playing in the studio as a good-time, fun-loving rock’n’roll band. ‘Temptation’ is a rousing soul-rock tune with an audible debt to Motown, specifically Martha & The Vandellas, whom Reed cited among his favourite acts in his December 1966 article for Aspen. In a 2023 interview with the author, Jonathan Richman expounded upon what was unique in the Velvets’ use of volume and dynamics. “The Velvet Underground would shock you, not just with the volume of their guitars, but the cacophony of all the instruments loud a making wild overtones together,” he observed. “They would also shock you by playing kinda quietly behind the singer (Lou Reed), and then Lou or Sterling might step on fuzz boxes and the volume would triple.”
John and Lou came to blows, according to Sterling Morrison, at one of their shows at Chicago’s Kinetic Playground after Cale accidentally stepped on a distortion box and multiplied the volume of Morrison’s guitar fourfold during his solo on ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. Cale then shut it off and kicked the effects box across the circular stage. It wasn’t the first time Reed and Cale had physically fought; another omen that whatever stage they shared might have been too small to hold both. It couldn’t have helped their mood when, as Susan Pile recalls, the audience “didn’t like them. I think they did one entire set of ‘Booker T.’, as if to say ‘fuck you!’” The Velvet Underground were taken far more seriously when they made their second set of appearances at Cleveland’s La Cave, drawing more than three hundred fans, though just forty-three came on the third night. The American Federation of Musicians contract for the shows made it clear Lou Reed remained their official leader, as he’s named as such in the document.
“I remember seeing Lou and the Velvet Underground at La Cave,” wrote Lou’s sister Bunny in her ‘About My Brother Lou’ essay, “when I was at college. Picture maybe twenty people in the audience. Picture not a lot of them liking it. But Lou was Lou. He couldn’t have cared less.” A particularly rabid young fan of the band, Lester Bangs, also supplied a different take in a 1971 Creem piece, writing: “My girl and I wanted to go up and say something to Lou, shake his hand and tell him how much we dug his music, but I was afraid,” he continued. “I thought he would be some maniac with rusty eyeballs or something, so we didn’t approach him, even though she said: ‘It seems to me like that was all they really wanted, for someone to just come up and tell them they appreciate what they’re doing.’ And as usual she was right, as Lou confirmed when I talked to him.” It was the first of several exchanges over the ensuing years between Reed and a man who’d do for rock journalism what the Velvets were doing for rock music. Although the relationship grew testy over time, Bangs had already anointed White Light/White Heat the best album of 1968 in a review he sent to Rolling Stone – though the magazine declined to print it. As Bangs wrote, “The Velvets launched into a new song that was one of the most incredible musical experiences of my concert career. It was built on the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling mournfully. The lyrics seemed like fantasy from an urban inferno: ‘Sweet Sister Ray went to a movie / The floor was painted red and the walls were green / “Ooohh,” she cried / “This is the strangest movie I’ve ever seen…”’ “But,” he concluded, “it was the chorus that was the most moving: ‘Ohhhh, sweet rock and roll – it’ll cleanse your soul.’ That’s classic, and no other group in America could have written and sung those words.”
The underground press, and the still-young serious rock press, was starting to catch on in a bigger way as well. “Put quite simply, the Velvet Underground is the most vital and significant group in the world today,” wrote Wayne McGuire in the August issue of Crawdaddy, hailing John Cale as “the heaviest bass player in the country today” and Lou Reed as “an incisive lyricist, creating a folk mythology of New York City and our generation which rings deep and true through the pap of fumbling unfocused artificial surrealistic imagery and facile pseudo-mystical-morality lessons produced by most new groups.” He concluded, “They are lyrics which breathe of real life, not empty conjecture, and reveal a very human and loving side, an almost Wagnerian sentimentality.” Oddly, in his New York Times essay, Tony Lioce didn’t recall the Velvets being as popular at the Tea Party as many claimed: “Almost no one came. There’d be maybe forty people on a good night. And generally the same forty people night after night, including one girl who always showed up in a wedding dress.” In the same article, Lioce also remembered often going backstage to hang out with the band, who gave him and his pals a friendly welcome. “Lou was gracious and kind, talking about everything from a weird diet to his love of Dion and his total dislike of Frank Zappa. We’d talk a lot about music, who he was listening to, and he’d ask us what other bands we thought were good (The Jeff Beck Group, we told him, and he nodded knowingly). But we’d talk about other stuff, too: New York, where he still lived; Boston, which he liked because he’d found an attentive audience. He could be very easy to talk to, a good listener, as interested in us as we were in him, or at least polite enough to pretend to be.”
The closest the public ever came to an explanation from MGM itself was printed in the May 1971 issue of Creem, in which a Los Angeles representative of the label told Lester Bangs, “The Velvets’ lead singer is the most absolutely spaced person I have ever met in my entire life. I think he was on heroin all the time they were here. And on top of all that, he had the nerve to tell me what a fucked-up company MGM is, how much he hates the way we’re handling ’em, and why don’t we give ’em any promotion – he’s sitting there running down the people who are giving me a paycheck every week! What am I supposed to do, agree with him?” Maybe the Velvets talked their way out of any good graces the label might have been able to grant them, although the L.A. rep’s comments didn’t address whether MGM actually gave them promotion. If not a ballad on the order of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ or ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, ‘I Love You’ testified to Reed’s oft-overlooked romantic side as a songwriter. “I know that his soft ballads were his favourites,” says his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, who began a relationship with Lou in 1968.
“He used to call them his soft songs. Lewis was a teddy bear, to be perfectly honest with you. He was a sweetheart of a man. It was very, very difficult to see what all the drink and the drugs were doing to him. I’m glad he didn’t spend his entire life using them.” ‘Walk and Talk’ would also end up on his Lou Reed album, where it was renamed ‘Walk and Talk It’, a more satisfying, streetwise roots-rock effort. Like ‘I Love You’, it signalled a slight move towards the more mainstream sound of most of the Loaded sessions. As to why it didn’t make the cut, “It took long to get it to be performed correctly,” Reed told BBC radio in 1972. Geoff Haslam who co-produced Lou Reed's landmark 1970 album Loaded made it clear how much he admired Reed’s abilities. “He was one of the most talented songwriters ever to appear on the scene. He had an incredible gift to communicate a lyric in a completely individual way. He was a rock and roll musician who sang like a jazz musician. He was brilliant, absolutely.” The Loaded version of ‘New Age’ still has merit, but the 1969 Velvet Underground Live performance is far superior, with a far more resonant aura of mystery. ‘Head Held High’ is a pretty blustery hard rock by Velvets standards, but there’s a slight knife-twister – Reed refers to his parents as “disfigured” when evaluating their well-meaning advice. Lou’s vocal is about as frayed and manic as it gets. Reed retreated to, of all places, his parents’ home in Long Island. “He had a nervous breakdown,” was Barbara Hodes’s straightforward explanation. “He was very fragile, and he was very unsure about the future. I think New York became too much for him.”
Within a few days he was nonetheless urging Sterling Morrison to form a new band with him, without Yule or Sesnick. But Morrison, still angry over Reed’s defection and about things in general, turned it down. “Lou suggested after he left that he and I pick it up and start all over with a different manager, get back to the way it was at the beginning,” he explained to Ignacio Julia. “But the way it was at the beginning wasn’t going to include Cale, we weren’t going that far back… Lou at the time accepted the responsibility for the tensions in the band, he said it was his fault because he was on these crazy diets. I had already thought that perhaps we had accomplished enough – to start all over would be like rolling the rock uphill again. One of the lines I used to Lou, I guess I was trying to tell him not to leave,” he continued, “was that even if we did do it, that it would take us three years to get back to the point that we were. And there was no certainty that we would do it anyway. I was very disillusioned.” Why didn’t Reed simply replace Doug Yule (as Maureen Tucker had already suggested), fire Sesnick and continue The Velvet Underground with Morrison and Tucker? He would certainly have been in a good position to call the shots.
It might have taken him a while to get back to where the Velvets were on his own, but a Lou Reed-less Velvet Underground couldn’t ever hope to get to that point without him at the helm. Perhaps legal obstacles prevented him from cutting ties with Sesnick and Yule, and carrying on with The Velvet Underground name, which Sesnick soon owned as a result of an out-of-court settlement that saw Reed win back sole songwriting credits for material on Loaded. Sesnick, as Yule confessed to Oor, “credited me as songwriter on Loaded, which is complete nonsense, because they’re all Lou’s songs. I was ashamed when I saw it.” In the February 2000 issue of MOJO, Doug admitted Sesnick “was hoping I would be Reed’s replacement, which we all know could never be the case. All the credits were designed to minimise Lou.” In Diana Clapton’s Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground, critic Richard Meltzer even remembered overhearing Sesnick discussing the possibility of removing Reed’s vocals from the album altogether when Meltzer dropped by Atlantic’s offices to pick up an advance pressing. In Sounds, Reed claimed, “I gave them an album loaded with hits, and it was loaded with hits to the point where the rest of the people showed their colours. So I left them to their album full of hits that I had made.”
“I would touch base with Lou and called him, and I got him to come into the city sometimes,” remembers Barbara Hodes. “But he was very fragile. Yet as a writer and musician, what was he gonna do, become an accountant with his father? Or take an office job?” Reed’s first public appearance since leaving The Velvet Underground would not be a musical performance, however, but a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village. Reed recited some new material about his future wife Bettye. A recording made at the reading is in the Lou Reed Archive. According to Bettye Kronstad, the audience “weren’t interested in hearing his heartfelt poetry, and it hurt him deeply. He’d been at his parents’ home for a year at that point, and he either had to go one way or the other, in terms of his career – to try to just work as a writer, or go back to rock’n’roll and write there. He couldn’t live off them forever, he said. I also think that living there, without the pressures of the city, all the people, their expectations, he was better able to build a career as a songwriter, which is incredibly difficult, but throwing it all away and beginning all over again as a writer at his age he thought was impossible. I think he had gotten his strength back by taking the time off and going home where he wouldn’t feel any pressure about a career, and was genuinely restored enough to get back out there again. It was just a matter of which path he was going to take – solely as a writer, and drop rock’n’roll – or as a writer in rock’n’roll.”
It might be tempting to view The Velvet Underground as the Van Goghs of sorts of rock’n’roll – unsuccessful in their lifetime, and hailed as geniuses half a century later. The Velvet Underground’s music has reached and influenced many more listeners than ever, as it will for new generations to come. Ultimately, it just was too good to remain a pure cult band. The themes the band addressed so brilliantly were too universal to remain ignored. Their bold sonic melding of experimentation with pure rock’n’roll energy gave their work a timelessness that has made it sound perfectly contemporary well into the 21st century, enduring far longer, with a far greater multi-generational appeal, than most 1960s acts who sold far more (millions) records at the time. To paraphrase their song ‘Some Kinda Love’, they had the courage to truly face and do what they, and we, fear most. —"Do What You Fear Most: The History of The Velvet Underground" (2026) by Richie Unterberger
“What was so great about the ‘60s and why were people so fabulous? Because it was an incredible time of abundance; there was great openness and mobility, people from all walks of life had access to each other. There were fewer barriers, socially and financially. For a short period, everyone met. There was a breakdown of barriers that had never existed before. There was this fabulous change that happened in cinema and music. You know it happened and it’s almost over. Now it’s running its course. It’s fading away. And then there were all those fabulous people, and one of the reasons they were fabulous was that they were in the audience and everyone could have access to them. Now you can’t anymore. The people are still fabulous, but you no longer have the chance to really get to know them.” -Lou Reed (April, 1976) for Rock News magazine
“Just as the elevator doors closed, Lou shouted out, ‘Sally Can’t Dance is a subversive album. This album is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done! People have always been happy that I’ve been happy. I mean, maybe the attitude is: If Lou Reed can get it together, then who can’t?” -Lou Reed (November 1974) for Circus Raves magazine
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