Original Creators: The Velvet Underground

Each week we pay homage to a select "Original Creator"—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today's creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields. Bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: The Velvet Underground.

Despite having only recorded four albums during their not-quite-a-decade-long run from 1964-1973, The Velvet Underground broke monumental ground in the art of music-making and songwriting. With pivotal grace and a ruffian flair, The Velvets have been credited with planting one of the first seeds to sprout what would become punk music, as well as many other affiliated genres like industrial, grunge, and even shoe-gaze. The raw, unbridled energy of their unique sound was an earth-shattering inspirational experience for all who encountered it. As Brian Eno put it, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

The nihilistic, New York-street saturated narratives and eclectically electronic drones ringing in your ear precisely define the reigning influence of The Velvet Underground. But the band was revolutionary for more than just their music. Their early multimedia performances and experimental films, the product of having Andy Warhol as their producer, can be said to have been the precursor to the music video a good 20 years or so before MTV went on the air.

Stepping back to late 1964: a smoky, dim-lit, acid-infused ambience, the party that would inseminate the salient roots of a commercially unrecognized and unaccredited one-band movement—the meeting of Lou Reed and John Cale. At the time producing manufactured tracks for Pickwick Records, Reed had coaxed the classically-trained Welshman Cale with his avant-garde urban-realist lyrics and La Monte Young-inspired experimental guitar drones. His musical stylings were refreshingly different from the calculable lexicon of 1960s easy-breezy flower-power folk and trudging on several steps ahead of what would be expected of street-savvy rock and roll music.

Together, this seminal union would first evolve into The Primitives with the Reed-penned single "The Ostrich." And soon after with the additions of Sterling Morrison on guitar and Angus MacLise on drums, the beatnick foursome would evolve from The Warlocks to The Falling Spikes, and then very shortly into The Velvet Underground, a name based on Michael Leigh's 1963 sadomasochist paperback classic.

Heroin

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The Velvet Underground and Nico

(1967)

By 1965, the newly named band would receive their first paying gig at Summit High School in New Jersey and welcome a new drummer, the up-turned bass mallet-smashing Maureen "Mo" Tucker in place of MacLise, who claimed that money for art was just the same as selling out. And so, Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker, having established a fixed gig at the Café Bizarre, felt fate’s demise with Andy Warhol falling smitten to the band’s utterly unconventional swagger. At this point, solidifying the birth of a (pop)culturally iconic band, the band at once becomes part of an underground, superstar hedonism under the management of sedated, starry-eyed Warhol.

Bringing forth some of their most seminal tracks, we follow the wavering progressions and regressions of The Velvets.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

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The Velvet Underground And Nico

(1967)

Floundering in new and fleeting stardom, The Velvets, under Warhol’s direction, join with German-monotone and La Dolce Vita muse, Nico, for their debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico in 1967. Here, the infamous banana album cover: peel slowly and see.

European Son

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The Velvet Underground And Nico

(1967)

Dedicated to Delmore Schwartz, this song makes a nod to The Velvet’s dynamic influences, including a riff of Chuck Berry’s, as well as an experimental sample from John Cage.

Here She Comes Now

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WhiteLight/White Heat

(1968)

Ties deteriorated with Warhol, the band records its last album with their violist founder, Cale, as he describes it as “a very rabid record…The first [album] had some gentility, some beauty. The second one was consciously anti-beauty.” Morrison explains this time of their lives in chaos being reflected in the record.

I’m Set Free

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The Velvet Underground

(1968)

Pale Blue Eyes

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The Velvet Underground

(1968)

By 1968, an artistic rift between the temperamental egos of Reed and Cale ushered Cale out of the band, replacing him with Doug Yule from The Grass Menagerie. Much more conventional to their standard of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, The Velvet’s third album sees a prominence of Reed’s personality seeping through lyrically and structurally.