The Velvet Underground released its first album in 1967 and lasted ,with Reed as a member ,only through 1970.The music the band created during that brief time,however ,has had an impact on the course of popular music that is rivaled,among the groupīs contemporaries,only by the work of the Beatles,the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.
The sheer range of the groupīs influence is extraordinary.Among the artists who have covered the songs are:R.E.M.,Mott The Hoople,the Feelies,Bryan Ferry,David Bowie,Patti Smith,Mick Ronson,Mitch Ryder,Tom Tom Club,the Cowboy Junkies,the Method Actors,Gang of Four and Echo & the Bunnymen.More significantly,the Velvet Underground-which consisted of Lou Reed on guitar,John Cale on Bass,piano and electric viola,Sterling Morrison on guitar,bass and organ,and Maureen Tucker on drums,with Doug Yule replacing Cale in 1968-essentially invented the notion of underground (or avant-garde,or alternative) rock & roll.Any rock artist who has defined a style in oppositionto prevailing commercial and artistic trends since the late Sixties and hoped to be taken seriously owes a debt to this band.One eloquent testament to the groupīs profound influence is the oft-repeated remark attributed to Brian Eno,that while the Velvet Undergroundīs first album only sold a few thousand copies,every person who bought it formed a band.It also seems sometimesthat everyonewho ever bought any record by the Underground ended up writing about the group.The Undergroundīs history is so well documented that perhaps a consideratioan of why that history matters-and why these songs have such lingering power-is more to the point now.
The Velvet Underground has proven inspirational,a fertile soucer for so many types of artists,partly because the bandīs sound was comprised of so many varied styles.Nico,the female singer who performed with the group on its 1967 debut album,The Velvet Underground and Nico,lent an element of chilling Euro-decadence to songs like "All Tomorrowīs Parties," a dirge-anthem for the downtown scene,and "Femme Fatale." a song for whose title character she may well have provided a model.Yet her affecting reading of the tender ballad,"Iīll Be Your Mirror," demonstrates that,while her voice may have been coolly monotonal,her emotional range recognized no such limits.
From very start ,of course,Reed has been among rock & rollīs most ambitious songwriters.A netherworldly epic like "Heroin" owes far more to literary sources like William Burroughs and Nelson Algren than to any element that had previously manifested itself rock.A stark,amoral journey through the mind and soul of a drug addict,"Heroin" boldly stretched the thematic boundaries of popular music.At a time when forces in our society are working to narrow those boundaries once again,the uncompromised artistic force of "Heroin" is,if anything,even more bracing than it was more than two decades ago.Alternating passages of gorgeous lyricm and groundbreaking noise-rock experimentalism,"Heroin" also defined within itself the two opposite poles of the Velvet Undergroundīs music.
"Iīm Waiting for My Man," "Run Run Run" and "White Light/White Heat" (the title track of the VUīs second album,released in 1968) are exuberant studies of minimalistic rock c roll.Their unrelenting energy, rigorous spareness and grim themes (scoring heroin,suffering from hip desperation,shooting methedrine,respectively )provided an essential blueprint for the punk aesthetic.
The haunting ballad, "Pale Blue Eyes," from the third,eponymous Velvet Underground album,also released in 1968,is perhaps Reedīs most conventionally beautiful song.In a voice that seems weary from the emotional weight it bears,Reed designs an epistemology of loss in which anger,confusion,self-doubt,moral condemnation and sheer psychic pain are explored from an analytic distance the singer is hardpressed to sustain." I thought of you as everything I had,But couldnīt keep," he sings in one verse-and says it all.
"Stephanie Says" and "Lisa Says"-recorded in 1968 and 1969,respectively,but unreleased until 1984,when PolyGram issued the VU album-are two dramatic portraits from Reedīs extensive gallery of downtown damsels in distress.The equivalents in song of Warholīs filmic "superstars," Lisa and Stephanie are poor,little rich girls whose conversations reveal a desperation they alternately seek to confront and escape.
"Sweet Jane" and "Rock & Roll," from 1970īs Loaded,the last album the Velvet Underground released,may well be Reedīs bestloved songs.After all the self-conscious decadence of his earlier records, "Sweet Jane" roundly denounced cynics who proclaim that "everything is just dirt."Frankly sentimental in its nostalgia for a time in which "poets studied rules of verse/And the ladies,they rolled their eyes," "Sweet Jane" humanized the Velvet Underground and suggested that Reed might not be quite fearsome figure he had seemed."Rock & Roll," of course ,charmingly captures one of Reedīs damsels in distress at age five,entrapped in her upper-middle-class suburban prison,and destribes "one fine morning" on which rock & roll from " a New York station" becomes her deliverance,her salvation.