The legacy of the Velvet Underground

The band existed, for all intents, from 1964 to 1970, on the margins of the rock scene.

But in the past three years the Velvet Underground has been the subject of three “super deluxe” repackages of its first three albums. The latest, the eponymous titled 6-CD “The Velvet Underground,” was released late last month on Polydor/Universal Music. That makes 15 CDs, among other bells, whistles and booklets, for a band whose leader, Lou Reed, once told me, felt mostly “vilified” back in the day.

“Going back to year one,” Reed told me, back in the ’90s. “At the time, (what we were doing) was considered a very negative thing – the lyric matter and all the rest of it."

The lyric matter is part of it, yes; that was a big part – New York stories about the tawdrier end of life. The “rest of it”? That might include the minimalistic, three-chord sound and repetitive riffs. The distortion that crept in and sometimes overwhelmed. The fact that the singer, Reed, was not what you’d call a superlative singer. Reed’s vocal range was limited, a talk-singing baritone that in 2009 earned him (along with Tom Waits and Bob Dylan) a spot as one of the “top 10 great singers who can’t sing” from the UK paper the Daily Telegraph.

The Velvet Underground took shape during the dawn of the hippie era – singer-guitarist Reed and Welsh-born, classically trained violist/pianist John Cale co-founded it – but it was the antithesis of the peace-and-love movement of the times. The group was not universally loved. In fact, from a commercial standpoint it barely made a dent.

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Its first album, “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” featured two songs about hard drugs, “I’m Waiting for the Man,” about the nervous expectation of the deal, and then “Heroin,” about the comfort and pleasure the drug gave at first and then the pain and eventual surrender it demanded. It wasn’t Jim Morrison trying to light the night on fire or Grace Slick singing about Alice in “White Rabbit.”

“My feeling was that these songs, particularly ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’ were frightening,” recalls former Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz. “These songs were not at all typical of what popular music was back then or now, for that matter. I found the dark subject matter scary. I didn’t want to flirt with heroin or amphetamines or sadomasochism. In fact, I barely understood what the songs were going on about. Scary stuff to a kid who loved soul music and Mersey Beat.”

Suzanne Vega, who played a Reed tribute show in Austin last year, discovered Velvet Underground, as many did, in retrospect, after hearing Reed’s lone Top 40 hit “Walk on the Wild Side” on the radio. “It only took a minute for Lou’s work to sink in,” Vega says, “but then I became a real fan. So transitioning from later Lou to the earlier VU was fairly easy.”

What she heard, Vega adds, “enticed” her.

“It made me feel that nothing was taboo in terms of subject matter, and that excited me. Also, I wasn’t inclined towards drug use, but it made me feel that I could live vicariously through the songs.”

The core of the VU was Reed, Cale, (the late) guitarist Sterling Morrison and stand-up drummer Maureen “Mo” Tucker. “The Velvet Underground & Nico” featured the dark-voiced German model Nico taking lead vocals on three songs at the prompt of the band’s manager, Andy Warhol. Reed kicked Cale out after the second album, “White Light/White Heat,” replacing him with bassist-singer Doug Yule. (Yule would front the VU through its fifth and final studio album, following Reed’s departure.)

“The Velvet Underground: Super Deluxe Edition” is, logically enough, the third in the series of 45th Anniversary Velvet Underground repackages; “The Velvet Underground and Nico Super Deluxe” came out in 2012; the “White Light/White Heat Super Deluxe” 6-CD package came out in 2013. One can only presume in a year we’ll have the “Loaded” bundle, though the label publicist couldn’t confirm.

The first disc is a re-mastered stereo mix done by MGM house engineer “Val” Valentin and the second disc is the “Closet Mix,” which Reed once described as “unfiltered … it’s sitting across from you.” The third disc is a promotional mono mix, the fourth is the “unreleased” Velvets album, recorded in 1969 – several songs ended up on the Velvets fourth album, “Loaded,” and Reed’s first solo album. And there are two live discs recorded at the San Francisco club the Matrix Nov. 26 and 27, 1969, by club manager Peter Abram. We hear material from all three Velvets albums done to date, including an alternately calming/frenetic 37 minute-plus mesmerizing version of “Sister Ray,” to say nothing of “Heroin.”

“If anything ‘The Velvet Underground’ is softer and less scary,” said Frantz, “but compared to other rock ‘n’ roll of its time, it is still thematically thoughtful and daring.”

“The third album was my introduction to them,” said the Feelies guitarist Bill Million. “I just thought they were the coolest, most energetic band out there. From beginning to end, they were doing something completely new, whether it was the way Lou sang ‘Beginning to See the Light,’ that hit me right. That song is amazing and that was the jumping off point – his vocals and the guitar sound on that album which is distinctly different than the first two. I think it’s more open, more folk-sounding, more relaxed. Songs like ‘What Goes On’ and ‘Some Kind of Love’ are quite a departure from ‘White Light/White Heat.’ That was more about noise and how they can (mess) with the equipment.”

Reed, who died last October, always thought he was just writing rock ‘n’ roll songs for adults, taking the same liberties any novelist might. He was miffed people thought he’d over-stepped rock ’n’ roll’s good-time boundaries. “Why,” he asked rhetorically, “would you want to listen to what an 18-year-old is getting off on?"

In 1992, I was talking to Reed about his album “Magic and Loss,” but what he said could pertain to a line of criticism that had dogged him for years. "I keep getting told, ‘This is too depressing,’” Reed said “‘It's about death and it's depressing.’ You know, I must say if you look at it that way, ‘Hamlet’'s synopsis would seem pretty down, too. ‘Macbeth’ would seem pretty awful. I think of ‘Magic and Loss’ as about love and friendship, and it's a very up thing. It is very emotional, also. These are not bad things. And I don't see why a contemporary work of music can't contain all these things. But when they do contain these things, you're thought of as being too cerebral, or too down.

“I remember reading this book by Saul Bellow where he was quoting Walt Whitman and he said, ‘Until Americans and American poetry can deal with death, this is a country that has not grown up.’ There might be something to be said about that."

Some people, I noted, had the old-school perception that rock ‘n’ roll was supposed to mean simply “let the good times roll.”

“I'm saying you can have a real good time,” said Reed. “Just on a different level. Be able to have that level of writing plus the fun of rock.”

“The Velvet Underground” was a step in that direction: Still adult-oriented music, but not as steeped in the New York underbelly and way less cacophonic and dense than the preceding “White Light/White Heat.”

This is where the VU got less dark and noisy, more melodic, restrained, stripped down. And it’s here that you begin to feel the Velvets’ prevailing reputation – that their music is relentlessly down and distorted – may be overstated. There’s folk and country strands – and there’s genuine joy too. When you listen to one of the live discs in the package you hear, “Beginning to See the Light,” and Reed singing, “There are problems in these times/But – whoo! - none of them are mine!/I’m beginning to see the light” as the guitars churn and chime, upwardly, blissfully.

The New Jersey-based Feelies (see sidebar) and the Los Angeles-based Dream Syndicate were two of the many ’70s/’80s and beyond bands influenced by the Velvet Underground.

“I really liked the third album,” said Dream Syndicate singer-guitarist Steve Wynn. “It was equally shocking musically just because it was so simple, so pure, so unafraid of saying complex, difficult things in such a transparent way.”

“The first thing that attracted me would be the interplay between the guitars, the drumming style, just the primitive aspect of it,” says Feelies singer-guitarist Glenn Mercer. “I’ve always been attracted to minimal rock. They had that simplicity I guess, and obviously the rhythmic qualities, tribal, kind of like Bo Diddley.”

As to “The Velvet Underground” album, Mercer says, “I started getting into the band more. It was a chance to explore different things. You could hear each part. It seemed more clean, sparse and intimate than the previous two records and has almost a spiritual quality to it – above and beyond the song called ‘Jesus.’ There’s kind of a meditative quality, too. And everything revolves around the groove, when they got that going there was no need to disrupt it with fills and stuff.”

Million, Mercer’s Feelies partner, says he was a fan of the Stooges and MC5 first. “But I remember thinking when I heard the Velvet Underground they had this other kind of energy that wasn’t as blatant and as upfront,” he says, “but it was certainly there, particularly on that third album. It was almost restrained energy that had this feeling of being ready to burst. But you could hear it coming through.”

And the Feelies drummer, Stan Demeski (not surprisingly perhaps) credits drummer Tucker: “She helped show me what not to play and I learned some important lessons on repetition from her and the VU.”

Wynn – who played the same Reed tribute as did Vega last year – recalls his first Velvets moment: “I was at a rehearsal with my college new wave band back in 1979. We were all around 18-years-old except for our bass player who was 10 years older. He was pretty hip, had been around and, to us, it seemed like he was old and knew everything about music. He came to rehearsal one day and had the first Velvets album. From the first 10 seconds that the needle landed on ‘Sunday Morning’ it was like an epiphany. I knew my life had changed. The whole record just spoke to me and where I was at right then and what I wanted to hear. A Rosetta Stone to where I was going next.”

“I think that the Velvets made me more fearless and less reverent as far as how to present Dream Syndicate songs,” Wynn continued. “I didn't mind taking one of my simple, melodic, hooky, emotional songs and then blowing the hell out of them, adding distortion and feedback and noise. I may not have had that fearlessness or curiosity to vandalize my own songs without being so entranced by the Velvets. It made not being a virtuoso (though we certainly knew how to play) a virtue rather than a liability. Let's face it – ELP (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) or Genesis are not going to be a huge influence on your band if you don't play like that. But I could play guitar and sing like Lou, and that made it more approachable.”

Added Vega: “I am not a trained musician so the simplicity of it all thrilled me and made me feel that I, too, could do that. When I first came on the folk scene someone referred to me as an ‘acoustic Nico’ and once I discovered who she was I liked the idea of that.”

“Both Lou and John Cale were regulars at Talking Heads shows at CBGBs,” said Frantz. “VU was a source of inspiration to us, not only because they seemed so cool, but because the topics of their songs were very interesting and not typical of what we had come to expect in rock ’n’ roll music.”

Remember what Reed said about vilification? By the mid- to late ’70s – and continuing on through, well, now – the Velvet Underground rank as one of the most profound influences on modern music.

“It's very flattering,” Reed told me. “Just being given credit for what really was, as opposed to what people accused it of being. With some bands, when I hear the Velvets thing I say, `That's really great.’ It seems such an obvious way to get a two-guitar, bass-drum thing going – two incredibly really cool guitar parts. It’s not R&B, but it's also not white bread.

Was the Velvet Underground legacy ever a burden, something he had to match every time out?

"Not really,” Reed said. “What could be a cooler thing to be a member of? It's like playing for the New York Jets when Namath was there.”