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: 'Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust'

David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust is as notable for the look of the glammed-out alien as it is for the spectacular music Bowie made during the Ziggy years. That would be irritating if Bowie hadn't brought such high artistry to the bizarre makeup, outfits, and hair dyes he donned while in character. Bowie believed that no photographer was nearly as qualified to capture his Zigginess as Mick Rock was. Bowie paid Rock the highest compliment an artist of such visual audacity could pay a photographer when he said of Rock "[he] sees [me] the way [I] see [myself]... [he sees me] through [my] own eyes."

Bowie freaks with cash to burn could see Rock seeing Bowie through his own eyes to their hearts' content when the duo published Moonage Daydream: The Life and Times of Ziggy Stardust in 2002. A luxurious volume with text by Bowie and images by Rock, Moonage Daydream was a remarkable insiders' view of the alien, although its limited edition release made it extremely hard to come by. It sold out in just months.

For Moonage's twentieth anniversary, and Ziggy's fiftieth, Genesis Publications is reprinting the book in a larger format and in larger quantities. It's a beautiful package full of great pictures from studio shoots, candid ones, live shots, and even music videos stills. Bowie appears with Lou Reed and Jagger and Lulu and Marianne Faithfull (in her nun's habit, of course), and Rock includes some stray shots of compatriots such as Iggy Pop and Roxy Music to illustrate the narrative. Bowie discusses how Daniella Parmar, Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, Kabuki, Lindsay Kemp, and Bewitched (yes, Bewitched) influenced the look the book celebrates. There is also a comically high number of shots showing Bowie fellating Mick Ronson's guitar. But my favorite bit is a short anecdote about a potentially disastrous, underpopulated gig in St. Louis that turned out to be what sounds like a magically intimate affair shared between artist and audience. In some ways, that's what Moonage Daydream is too.

Review: 'Rock Critic Confidential by Jeffrey Morgan'

Somewhere between the juvenile and patronizing "Good beat. Should make the charts" mode of rock criticism and the dry, historically informed, humorless yet neatly organized paragraphs of AllMusic.com, a fresh breed of drug-eating pranksters at rags like Creem truly believed they were revolutionizing rock criticism. Jeffrey Morgan was one of these types, ostensibly reviewing the latest by Bowie in the guise of a pulp novelist or making some sort of nebulous commentary on the state of rock and roll in a parody X-Files script or mock Bob Hope USO show monologue. This stuff certainly revolutionized rock criticism, but the point and the humor are generally lost on me, though that might be because I'm just not hip enough, maaaaaaaaan. I guess I'm also not hip enough to agree that Morgan's rambling Lou Reed interview from 1976 in which the Velvet Fog keeps shoving his foot in mouth with racist slurs and bleary non-sequiturs is the definitive one because if abject stupidity and narcissism are Reed's sole defining characteristics I might as well throw out all my VU albums. A 1987 talk with an unapologetically racist, homophobic, and downright psychotic Ted Nugent, however, is truly definitive because that guy actually doesn't have anything to offer other than repellant verbal diarrhea. 

So, kudos to you, Jeffrey Morgan. You've written some real head scratchers and interviewed some real pricks. You've also  snapped some pretty decent photos of people like Bowie, Debbie Harry, Bob Dylan, the Stones, The Who, etc. too, so Rock Critic Confidential by Jeffrey Morgan does not have to solely rely on its text. Apparently it's the first lavishly illustrated collection of rock criticism. I'm not sure why there are photos of Courtney Love in her underwear on the front cover and Wendy James in crop top and short shorts on the back when Morgan neither took these pictures nor mentions these artists in his text. Just kidding. I know exactly why.

Review: '1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love'

The intriguing progress Rock & Roll started displaying as soon as The Beatles busted out in 1964 hit an ecstatic, elastic, multi-colored peak three years later. Any existing rules were incinerated as the pop song busted well beyond its two-minute structure, guitars were regularly muscled aside to make room for Mellotrons and sitars, and love songs were often sidelined for tunes based on Joyce’s impenetrable Ulysses or ditties about gnomes named Grimble Crumble. The LP officially displaced the single; stereo started doing the same to mono, making way for the ritual of consuming high-concept albums through headphones…possibly while under various influences; and bland band portraits plastered onto jackets no longer sufficed. In other words, Rock & Roll became art with a vengeance in 1967.

Harvey Kubernik pays tribute to the auditory and visual arts of ’67’s revolutionary music in his new book 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. That title is actually misleading unless one regards 1967 as twelve months of summer—and the Californians Kubernik favors probably did. The book is actually a month-by-month chronicle from January through December, dropping details about the year’s major music releases, festivals, innovations, main characters, and attitudes in stand-alone chunks. The book is also something of an oral history, as Kubernik’s own observations are more than supplemented with old and new commentary from the likes of Andrew Loog Oldham, Mary Wilson, George Harrison, Barry Miles, Michelle Phillips, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Roger McGuinn, Ravi Shankar, Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, Ram Das, Ray Manzarek, and many others. There is little effort to link the multitudinous topics, but that’s to be expected when dealing with a year that was probably a puzzling jumble of disconnected ideas and events for a lot of its participants. You know what they say about people who remember the sixties.

A coffee table book at heart, 1967 supplies a vibrant lot of images from pop’s most imagistic year, though some of the year’s phantasmagorically rendered album covers would have made for an even more kaleidoscopic visual experience. Kubernik should still be commended for covering the vinyl within the sleeves as thoroughly as he does—referencing the obvious (Sgt. Pepper’s dominates the June topic along with the Monterey Pop Festival) and the more regularly overlooked (The Hollies’ Butterfly, Donovan’s A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, Captain Beefheart’s Safe As Milk, the Stones’ Between the Buttons, etc.) in kind. The one inexplicable oversight is his failure to even mention The Who Sell Out, my personal pick for the finest album of pop’s finest year. Maybe Kubernik has a hole in his memory where that album belongs because he had a little too much fun in ’67.

Review: 'David Bowie Treasures'

Ignorant critics have regularly accused David Bowie of being an artist of greater style than substance. Truth is, he is has both in spades. Mike Evans's David Bowie Treasures, has no aspirations of substance, but it pulls off the style pretty well. Like all books in the Treasures series, this slip-cased installment is light on biography, heavier on photos, and augmented with pockets containing removable reproductions of posters, concert adverts, tickets, and contracts. The interesting thing about Evans's book is that so many of the photos capture the primary artist with others famous people: Jagger, Dylan, Lennon, McCartney, Mercury, Townshend, Tina, Iggy, Lou, Bing. One almost gets the sense that the author (assuming he was the one who chose the photos) wasn't sure if his subject was a big enough star to carry the book on his own (obviously, he is). Nevertheless, we get some pretty neat shots, my favorite being one of Bowie and Liz Taylor, who looks like she just finished raiding his closet. 

Farewell, Lou Reed

Sad news to report today as one of Rock's genuine pioneers has died at the age of 71. It would take at least two decades for the fruits of his influence to fully sprout, but Lou Reed pioneered so much when The Velvet Underground screeched waves of black noise across the Technicolor psychedelic late-sixties years. Someone may have eventually taken the initiative to invent punk, Goth, alternative, indie, and noise rock had Lou Reed and his band not helped do it first, but we'll never need to speculate about that since they most certainly did. In an age of legends, giants, and gods, The Velvet Underground are still something that not everyone might agree The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, and even Dylan and Hendrix still are: cool. And with his anti-hippie cropped hair, black duds, icy talk-sing style, and shocking tales of junkies, hookers, dealers, and death merchants, Lou Reed embodied that cool more than any of his band mates. He'd go on to a solo career that may never have quite lived up to the greatness of his work with the Velvets but was very often tough, challenging, and beyond the scope of popular tastes. And when he was done crushing your skull with Metal Machine Music, he'd put it back together again with songs like "Perfect Day" or "Vicious" or "Sweet Jane" that reveal the craftsman always lurking behind the outré hipster's shades. 

We're still waiting to find out the specific cause of death, but Reed had a liver transplant last May and was reportedly "dying" at the time. So long, Lou Reed. You made the world a darker and cooler place.

Review: The Super Deluxe Edition of 'The Velvet Underground and Nico'

The Velvet Underground and Nico was one of the two most important albums of 1967, arguably the most important year for the LP in Rock history. It is the year that the album once and for all replaced the single as Rock’s chief medium. With such a distinction, and such incredible music, The Velvet Underground and Nico is easily deserving of one of those multi-disc, “super deluxe editions” that maximize profits on a band’s back catalogue. There’s no question that everything in this new six-disc set deserves release. The Velvet’s debut is presented in both its original stereo and mono mixes expanded with bonus mixes, several of which appeared on singles (believe it or not, even the most underground group played that game… not that it gave them any hits). There’s a disc of even more alternate mixes, a few alternate takes, and some rehearsals. There’s Nico’s debut album Chelsea Girl, on which Lou Reed and John Cale provided much material and musical accompaniment. Rarest of all are the two discs capturing a set at Ohio’s Valleydale Ballroom recorded in November 1966.

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.

Meet the Song of the Day: "The Ostrich" by The Primitives

Even with all those grotesque tales of addiction, decadence, and coprophagia, the weirdest chapter in the Lou Reed myth may be the time he spent as a sub-Tin Pan Alley hack for the Long Island, New York, label Pickwick. The guy best known for penning such freaky excursions as “Heroin”, “Sister Ray”, and “The Murder Mystery” spent time in ’64 and ’65 cranking out made-to-order surf and pop tunes for ex-Phil Spector roommate and wannabe pop mogul Terry Phillips. Phillips paid Reed $25 per day to hole up in a tiny studio with collaborators Jerry Vance and Jimmie Sims and write disposable novelties like “Cycle Annie”, “Johnny Can’t Surf No More”, and “Hot Rod Song”. While one number actually went on to achieve classic status among garage rock fanatics, the great “Why Don’t You Smile Now?” (co-written by future Velvet John Cale) recorded by The All Night Workers in the US and The Downliner’s Sect in the UK, the one that most suggested Reed’s upcoming work was a dance tune begging the listener to “put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it … do The Ostrich!”



Recorded by “The Primitives” (i.e.: Reed but soon to include Cale, guitarist Tony Conrad, and drummer Walter De Maria), “The Ostrich” is notable not only for its bizarre lyrics inspired by an article about the ostrich feather fashion craze, noisy wall-of-sound, and keening harmonies, but for what has become known as Reed’s “ostrich guitar”. This describes a tuning rather than a unique instrument: Reed tuned all his guitar strings to a single note, a technique he’d employ later on the Velvet Underground tracks “Venus in Furs” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. A live performance of the number at a high school in Leigh Valley, Pennsylvania, inspired a local DJ to shout, “These guys have really got something—I hope it’s not catching!”

July 12, 2010: Psychobabble recommends ‘White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day’

The contemporary trend in Rock & Roll retrospectives is the day-by-day chronicle; exhaustive accounts of the where and when of every doing—both major and marginal— of Rock’s hugest institutions. I’ve read books of this nature about The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and The Monkees. All of these have been essential and valuable reference guides even if they don’t provide the fluid reading experience of a straight biography.

Published last year by Jaw Bone Press, Richie Unterberger’s Velvet Underground chronicle delivers even greater OCD exhaustiveness than these other books, while also dragging the genre closer to the realm of classic biography. As such White Light/White Heat is the most traditionally readable day-by-day chronicle I’ve perused, tethering all of those dates and details about recording sessions and concerts together with insightful critiques of the band’s records and shows, as well as personal information that truly attempts to answer every conceivable lingering question about the freaky East Coast horde. If you’re still wondering why John Cale quit, how and why the band made such a radical transition from hedonistic avant-gardists to a pop group that could record stuff like “Who Loves the Sun?”, or how they fell into the hands of Doug Yule, Unterberger does his damnedest to answer you. As a Brit Rock fanatic, I was tickled to read about the Velvets jamming on stuff like “Day Tripper”, “The Last Time”, “My Generation”, and “I Can’t Explain” and Lou Reed’s effusive praise for The Easy Beats and Something Else by the Kinks. This certainly cleared up the pop question for me.



Along with covering all relevant incidents pertaining directly to The Velvet Underground, Unterberger allows no periphery detail escape him. Amusingly, he even mentions the BMI registration of a song written by one Lewis Reed— who clearly is not the Mr. Reed relevant to this book. I also like the way he gradually folds the various stars who will be most influenced by The Velvet’s into the story, particularly David Bowie, Jonathan Richman, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Patti Smith. Such artists are crucial figures in VU history since a good deal of the band’s significance lies in how heavily they altered Rock & Roll by inspiring a new generation of artists.

As fine as White Light/White Heat inarguably is, all but the most devoted fans may still find themselves skipping around a bit. The incredible number of concert overviews gets a bit repetitious and I quickly lost interest in all details regarding pre-fame Velvet Angus MacLise, whose activities are chronicled here long after his departure from the band. Still I was greatly appreciative of how closely Unterberger followed Nico and John Cale’s post-VU careers (I can’t wait to pick up a copy of The Marble Index!). The writer’s obsession with cult acts, which made his earlier books Unknown Legends of Rock 'n' Roll and Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers so indispensable, fully flourishes when detailing Rock’s ultimate cult act. Maddeningly definitive.