On December 11, 1965, the Velvet Underground played their first paying gig in a high school auditorium in Summit, New Jersey—and mostly cleared the room. It was a three-song performance that “accelerated and swelled like a giant tidal wave, which was threatening to engulf us all,” one attendee later remembered. The Velvets insisted on their outsiderness; their rejection of the mainstream was pointed, their misfit freakishness made larger than life. When the band hooked up with Andy Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable performance series, they inserted themselves into settings so incongruous, they read now like pitches for a Hunter S. Thompson story: the “world’s first mod wedding happening” at the Michigan State Fair Coliseum, a noontime fashion show at the Playboy Club in Chicago, a fundraiser for a New Hampshire town’s fire engine, a convention of psychiatrists, Beverly Hills High School. It is a shame the Velvets never made it to Disneyland.
I grew up in a small town in western North Carolina well after the Velvet Underground but, thank god, before the internet. I first heard the VU because R.E.M. covered three of their songs on Dead Letter Office and I had to know who this band was and once I did, well, that was it: life saved by rock’n’roll. The Velvets became the secret badge that allowed me to survive high school, plant a seed of a record collection, and find my way to punk rock. I showed up on the first day of college in another small Southern city wearing a Velvets banana T-shirt, black cutoffs, black tights—a real deal dyed-in-the-leather VU fan. It was the music that delivered me, all of it—that relentless, raw, searing, locomotive noise; its primal, pared-down melodies; the dark humor of the lyrics and the riskily plaintive ones, too. And sure, I later read Warhol’s droll, gossipy diaries and Please Kill Me and Lester Bangs on the band, but in those first listens I didn’t give a damn about the Velvets’ impact on the culture (I was, at the time, blissfully unaware of the “the” in culture). I liked the Velvet Underground better when I first heard them, precisely because so few people I knew in my sheltered little world even knew who they were.
I don’t doubt that the curators behind “The Velvet Underground Experience,” which debuted in 2016 at La Philharmonie de Paris, are equally grateful fans, perhaps even more so than me. But the New York iteration of the exhibit, open from October through December, is a baffling and dispiriting one—so unfocused that it fails to tell a cohesive story, so concerned with historical context that it neglects the music. “Revisit New York City in the early 1960’s[sic] to explore how this iconic American rock band influenced modern music, fashion, art, and popular culture in frontman Lou Reed’s native city,” the website promises—you could, of course, substitute any band from the era in that sentence. In Manhattan, the show occupies a 12,000-square-foot space on Broadway across the street from NYU, the exterior of which is sort of glam and topped by band members’ faces rendered graphic (and therefore technically “iconic”). Around the corner, on E. 4th Street, is the greatly missed Other Music, and further down the block is the multistory space that once belonged to Tower Records. Inside, passing by a rehabbed cashier counter and signage crediting cosponsors Citi and Bandsintown, it is hard not to shake the sensation of being in a recently vacated record store. Perhaps that was intentional—revisit New York?—but it gave me an instantly hollow feeling as I tried to envision myself as someone encountering the band anew.
Occupying two sprawling floors and a mezzanine on a third, the show has been described elsewhere as an “immersive exhibit.” It’s not, but honestly I wouldn’t have minded being dropped straight into the music like some kind of dark reverse baptism, in the same loud and disorienting way that the first bewildered tourists at the Café Bizarre, or those Summit High School students, were subjected to the band back in the day, the way I was when I first lowered the needle on “Sister Ray.”
Instead, the show starts with a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s America, written in 1956. Ginsberg and the Beats were a major influence on Lou Reed, but Reed wrote some of the most salient and frequently referenced lyrics in music. Ginsberg front and center feels like a cop to the classic hedge of the biopic genre—a heavy lean on cultural history rather than trusting the music to tell the story. It may well also be a cover-up for a lack of primary archival material. Unlike the Victoria and Albert Museum’s traveling “David Bowie is” extravaganza (and certainly the New York Public Library’s recent exhibit of Lou Reed’s archives), curators Christian Fevret and Carole Mirabello apparently had less access to firsthand artifacts. Where there might have been a deeper section on the albums, there’s an exhibit on the free press in the 1960s. Where there could have been oral histories culled from band members and associates, there’s a strained 13-minute essay read aloud by Reed’s sister about her brother’s electroshock treatment (“A Family in Peril: Lou Reed’s Sister Sets the Record Straight About His Childhood”). Why does this telling become the one of record instead of Reed’s own, so viciously rendered on the Sally Can’t Dance version of “Kill Your Sons”?
The mostly two-dimensional works on view include signage with copy errors obviously struck out and photos often as poorly reproduced as record-store promo posters (again, that failed retail feeling). A little rawness in presentation could’ve worked here and there, but it tends to just read as sloppy. Each of the core band members (including Nico, Angus MacLise, and Doug Yule) and key associates (including Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Gerard Malanga) is introduced via wonky, oversized scrapbooks containing mini-biographies and some pictures. They’re worth paging through if only for a reminder of the time John Cale smashed a table with an ax mid-performance, or for a typewritten letter from Reed to his Syracuse professor and “spiritual godfather,” Delmore Schwartz, to whom he’d later dedicate “European Son.” I had looked forward to seeing Stephen Shore’s photographs, made when he was a young regular at the Factory, but a suite of 17 framed Shore prints are crowded on a wall, some placed so low you have to crouch on the floor to see them.
Similar interference occurs when I try to watch the documentaries made for the exhibit, or concert footage of the 1972 Le Bataclan performance by Reed, Cale, and Nico. Even with headphones on, it is impossible to tune out the sound of VU covers playing nearby, next to a wall-size collage depicting the pop cultural “impact” of the band—the Velvets as Peanuts characters (excellent), plus obvious kindred like the New York Dolls but also (and ugh) 24 Hour Party People and the White Stripes (really, a bit of a reach). Other displays are devoted to the Velvets’ supporting players, like trans Warhol superstar Candy Darling and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a friend of the band whose films sometimes projected behind their performances. A few Mekas films screen downstairs and his photographs of performance artist/Velvets interloper Barbara Rubin are worthy additions; less so, the sad row of listening booths with dedicated iTunes playlists of VU and their influences.
By the time I reach a display of Velvets posters mixed in with covers of LIFE and, no kidding, images of the moon landing and Woodstock, the bummer retail feeling gives rise to genuine blood boil. Can future makers of biopics and bio-exhibits please agree the world has collectively seen the same stock ’60s newsreel? (Moe Tucker in Please Kill Me, on the band’s reception in San Francisco: “I didn’t like that love-peace shit.”)
Back on the main floor I climb into a wood-frame structure and lie on a silver mat (a nod to the silver-painted and aluminum-foiled walls of the Factory) to watch a projection of short films featuring the band (finally!) and a slideshow of photographs by the enigmatic Factory dweller Billy Name. It is as close to a Velvet Underground experience as you are likely to have within these walls. Surrounding the structure are rare Velvets 45s and first pressings of their albums, including a signed copy of the famous untitled “Banana” album with its “Peel Slowly and See” caption and Warhol’s panel of yellow flesh. Another copy, showing the inner pink layer, is displayed in its original brown paper mailer, addressed to Paul Morrissey at the Factory. These are all wonderful to see, but why save them for the end? And where are the stories behind these records, not to mention Reed and Cale’s sublime solo albums? My high school pre-Velvets self leaves feeling a little confused, a whole lot cheated.
To exit the exhibit, you end up near the beginning, in a Velvets-themed gift shop with a sparse display of patterned banana sweatshirts, T-shirts, coffee mugs, VU phone protectors. You can buy reproductions of a few Velvet Underground photographs and, inexplicably, a picture of the original Nathan’s Hot Dogs location (an oblique reference to Reed’s “Coney Island Baby,” perhaps?) and, for $14 apiece, the clothes hangers on which the $210 sweatshirts are displayed. There might as well be a Velvet Underground banana dildo, too.
What you cannot buy is the music. Apart from a mysterious handful of vintage albums (only a couple by the band) displayed on an upstairs mezzanine, there is no music for sale at “The Velvet Underground Experience.” No vinyl reissues of the albums that are displayed under glass and which in retrospect seem even more fossil-like. There are none of the books by or about the band members—how easy it would have been to unlock that universe, too. If you’re going to commodify a band or scene, at the very least, sell the music, sell the books, do full diligence in perpetuating the actual work that the exhibition celebrates. Instead, a familiar murmur bleeds over from the start of the exhibit nearby. As I let the reality of the existence of Kiss the Boot laptop cases sink in, the reading of Ginsberg’s America hangs in the air like a too-pointed metaphor: America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
A week earlier, I had gone to see the Feelies play an 18-song set of Velvets covers in Jersey City. At the time I had no idea the concert was among a number of events in conjunction with the exhibit; to see their renditions of “What Goes On” and “Rock and Roll” was enough reason. Until I heard Glenn Mercer utter the first sonorous verses of “Sunday Morning,” I hadn’t imagined precisely what a perfect storm of music this would be. This was just as clear on the incandescent strumming of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” as it was in the band’s second set, all Feelies songs—a sense of direct lineage running through like electric current, a testament to the essential greatness of both bands. How strange it was to recall that the Velvets had made their real debut on another Jersey stage 20 miles away, and almost 53 years ago. How alive and unbound those songs were made again, without the pressure to mean more than they already do.
