Review: Vinylphyle Edition of 'The Velvet Underground & Nico'

Universal Music recently announced a new audiophile multi-artist reissue series called the Vinylphile series. Each title is mastered from the original master recordings using an all-analog process. They're pressed at the renowned Record Technology, Inc. plant and on 180-gram black vinyl. 

The plan is to release two albums in the series per month, though the inaugural slate includes four covering a pretty wide range of styles: Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song, The Band's Northern Lights–Southern Cross, Bob Marley & the Wailers' Exodus, and The Velvet Underground & Nico. 

Review: Vinyl Reissues of Nico's 'The Marble Index' and 'Desertshore'

Nico had little control over the beginning of her music career, when she sang a couple of pop songs for Andrew Oldham's Immediate label. Another Andy gave her a shotgun marriage to The Velvet Underground, with which she had nearly no creative input despite being the comely commercial face of the band. Nevertheless, her unforgettable turns on the few songs she got to sing were definitely steps in a more natural direction for Nico and her avant garde sensibilities. 

When she got to make her first solo LP a few months after The Velvet Underground & Nico was released, members of the VU (as well as future MOR superstar Jackson Browne, of all people) still provided most of the songs and instrumentation, and she ultimately expressed a distaste for the prettiness of it all. The one song Nico co-wrote on Chelsea Girl, "It was a Pleasure Then", gave a taste of her true ambitions: uncompromisingly dark, borderline queasy music seemingly designed to give her listeners a severe case of the heebie jeebies. Plus, harmonium. Lots and lots of harmonium.

Nico finally got the chance to fully express herself and her harmonium on The Marble Index. Frazier Mohawk, who co-produced the album with former-Velvet John Cale, reportedly said that he made sure it didn't push too far beyond the thirty-minute mark because he was afraid that listeners would start killing themselves if subjected to any more of her ghoulish dissonance. 

Review: 'Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol'

Andy Warhol was the most famous artist of his generation, but he was often criticized as an empty vessel replicating vacuous images of soup cans and celebrities. He was the best-known artist, but he was also seemingly unknowable. He was instantly recognizable because of his iconic look (wan demeanor, white skin, white wig) that seemed to be as much about personal branding as it was about personal style, but he was stoic, and when he did become relatively chatty during interviews, he tended to spin yarns or sell others’ stories as his own just as he sold the Campbell’s company’s designs as his. 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 247

The Date: June 3

The Movie: I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

What Is It?: Mary Haron may have consciously tried to lionize a deeply ill person who committed a heinous act, but it was most likely that Lili Taylor was just so fucking good as would-be murderer Valerie Solanas that it’s her fault. Whatever the case is, this is magnetic viewing. Yo La Tengo make a cameo as The Velvet Underground, though Lou Reed understandably condemned the picture.

Why Today?: On this day in 1968, Valerie Solanas did the thing she does in this movie’s title.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 14

The Date: October 14

The Movie: Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

What Is It?: Gloriously repulsive take on Mary Shelley’s classic with the gloriously weird Udo Kier as a Dr. Frankenstein who believes the only way to know death is “to fuck life in the gall bladder”!

Why Today?: On this day in 1944, Udo Kier is born. The world still has not recovered.

Review: 'White Trash: Uncut'

Try as they did to puke forth the impression they didn’t give two shits about the sentimentality of pop past, the punks started documenting themselves almost from the very start. 1977 saw the release of Wolfgang Büld’s Punk in London, likely the first punk documentary. That same year photographer Christopher Makos published White Trash, a collection of stark, B&W images of such scene staples as Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, John Waters, Divine, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, and the New York Dolls, as well as key influences Warhol, Jagger, and Bowie. A collaborator of Warhol’s, Makos wasn’t necessarily looking to eulogize punk. He’d just snapped some photos of his friends in LA and NYC over a week in 1976. It just happened his friends would all become punk icons.

As originally published, White Trash was not purely Makos’s baby. Art director Fred Meyer had his way with the images, cropping them in angular, punk style. Glitterati’s new edition of White Trash affixes Uncut to the title because Makos’s photos are finally allowed to breathe full frame without Meyer’s crops. Yet we still get a very cropped series of images. Makos favored close ups, not just of faces (and he really forces you to appreciate the lush beauty of Hell’s lips), but of other body parts. A pair of tits here. A crotch bulge there. Patti Smith and Sylvan Sylvan’s dancing feet. Debbie Harry’s thigh on the cover. The approach de-eroticizes the erotic, makes the normal odd. The photographer’s knack for catching people like Grace Jones, John Waters, and Divine at their most disarmingly casual normalizes the odd. That’s pretty punk.

Review: ‘The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side’

Is there something inherently wrong about a coffee table book covering the history of The Velvet Underground? Glossy, colorful, souvenir books like Jim DeRogatis’s The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side seem more befitting a group with a cuddlier reputation, such as The Beatles, who have been the subjects of many coffee table tomes. Yet, wasn’t the VU initially promoted as Andy Warhol’s latest pop art project, an entity not terribly far removed from Warhol’s style-over-substance soup cans or Edie Sedgwick? And didn’t Warhol essentially force them to perform with Nico because she looked good? And— let’s face it—didn’t the Velvets look pretty great all on their own, decked out in their matching, too-cool-for-uptown wraparound shades and black togs? And can’t the content of dope and S&M celebrations such as “Sister Ray”, “Heroin”, and “Venus in Furs” be deemed cheap exploitation on some level? And let’s also not forget that the drugging, womanizing Beatles were hardly as sweet as the toys, cartoons, and coffee table books they inspired ever suggested.



So DeRogatis’s book doesn’t violate what The Velvet Underground represented, just as the band’s more exploitative aspects don’t dull the keenness of Lou Reed’s gutter poetry or the completely organic wildness of the band’s noisy attack or the stark beauty of their ballads. But is it necessary? The band’s tale has been told many times before in far more complete form, particularly and definitively in Richie Unterberger’s White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day. A lot of the photos in An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side, which are the real selling points of any illustrated history, can be found in Unterberger’s book. However, “1966: The Year the Velvet Underground Went Pop”, Warhol’s personal memoir about his band’s earliest days, is only excerpted in White Light/White Heat. It is presented in its lengthy entirety in An Illustrated History… and is an absolute must read for anyone who missed out on attending The Exploding Plastic Inevitable him/herself. There’s also a good interview with Sterling Morrison conducted by the guitarist’s former bandmate, Bill Bentley, some fabulous shots of Reed’s original sheet music for “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs” (Jesus Christ, the guy fucking wrote out those songs like he was Cole Porter or something! How many other Rock & Roll songwriters did that?), and an amazing photo of Warhol silk-screening the legendary banana. I also love the totally tacky faux velvet wraparound banner included with the book. It reminds me of Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables that actually turns into a coffee table. Warhol would surely approve.