New York’s Underground Art: The Velvets

“New York has never been a utopian place. It’s grittier, more crowded, less pleasant. People who come here don’t come to be comfortable. They come to be excited.” -Robert Christgau.

It was the early 1960s when New York’s underground art scene sprouted from the ground. In a country swept up in Beatlemania, it was clearer than ever that the mainstream audience had become a commodity and, if you wanted to cash in on it, mass-appeal, easy-to-swallow art was key. Consequently, a movement took shape in downtown Manhattan dedicated to art that defied this convention art that very deliberately wasn’t for everybody. In fact, if you didn’t get it, that was kind of the point. Enter the Velvet Underground: a band formed by two young musicians with diametrically opposite backgrounds, but a shared fascination with the esoteric rumbling emanating from the Lower East Side. After being taken under wing by New-York-underground-founding-father Andy Warhol, the band dove straight into the heart of the scene.

From avant-garde music to pop art to the sexual underground (fetishists, drag shows, and smut films), the Lower East Side was buzzing with artists trying to shock, alienate, confuse, or even make fun of their audiences. This was all in an effort to make a statement, but what was that statement? And what exactly was the right way to make it? The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, Lou Reed, and eventually Andy Warhol were torn between their fascination with the inaccessible and their aspiration for recognition and success. The band was destined to fracture and implode under the pressure as each of its creative leaders stubbornly clung to their own incompatible interpretations of the New York underground ethos. Lou Reed had what his biographer affectionately calls “an innate desire to shock”. At Syracuse University, he was kicked out of clubs, edited his own course requirements, sold drugs, and otherwise pushed the university’s tolerance to its limit. After graduating (with honors in spite of everything), he moved home with his parents in Long Island. Reed wrote to his professor, famous poet Delmore Schwartz, describing his fascination with the deviant sexual underground of New York, and his urge to explore it. Reed also expressed a desire to focus on his music career, integrating his literary ambitions with his love of rock & roll.

Although he claims that much of his income at the time “came from selling envelopes of sugar to girls I met at clubs, claiming it was heroin,” he soon got a songwriting job at Pickwick Records, a budget record label. Pickwick’s staff wrote and recorded songs based on specific pop trends and released them under fake band names. The goal was to get gullible teens to buy them, thinking these were real pop artists. In this trial-by-fire setting, Reed developed a sharp ear for a diverse range of pop music and a real love for it too. Apparently, one of Reed’s compositions, “The Ostrich” by The Primitives, was a little too convincing, as Pickwick received a request for the band to perform on a local TV show. In classic sitcom form, Pickwick was forced to scrabble together a fake band.

One artist they approached to impersonate The Primitives was John Cale, a young avant-garde classical musician who came to New York on a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship for Modern Composition. He was Welsh, but was largely recruited due to his being mistaken for British. In New York, Cale had been indoctrinated into La Monte Young’s avant-garde “Dream Syndicate,” which would congregate in Young’s house and play single-pitch drones, sometimes for days. La Monte, the self-described “darling of avant-garde” was deeply entrenched in the New York underground once holding a music series in Yoko Ono’s loft (with whom he was having an affair). The flyer warned: “THIS IS NOT FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT.”

Although only possessing a “passable familiarity” with rock & roll, John Cale was immediately attracted to Reed’s unique creative choices. On “The Ostritch.” Reed’s guitar strings, all tuned to the same note, reminded Cale of his work in Young’s group. In the documentary NYC Punk Revolution, music author Richie Unterberger suggests, “I think they both realized simultaneously, the distance between garage rock music and avant-garde music is really not so great after all.” Reed jumped to show him songs like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” which Pickwick Records refused to record. There was a “literary quality” to Reed’s lyrics, an ability to inhabit the lives of misfits and outsiders without judgement, which fascinated Cale. He saw in Reed a long-sought opportunity to expand beyond the insulated world of avant-garde. In a Rolling Stone interview, Cale recalls, “I wanted to cross-pollinate rock with the avant-garde, and then I met Lou Reed, and that was the solution.”

As for the songs Pickwick rejected, Cale suggested they just record them with a tape recorder at his apartment. Reed was taken aback. At the time, this kind of do-it-yourself recording just wasn’t done. However, Reed’s fascination with the esoteric was only growing, so they went for it. As the two brainstormed in Cale’s Lower East Side apartment, Cale stripped Reed’s songs of their Dylan-esque folksiness (no more harmonica), and added his signature viola drones. The six demos they recorded would soon become the basis for the Velvet Underground’s first album. By 1965, Lou Reed was spending more and more time at John Cale’s Ludlow apartment in the heart of the burgeoning art scene. Cale saw deep insecurity behind Reed’s know-it-all façade, and encouraged Reed to marry his two loves: literary aesthetics and rock & roll. Reed, in turn, mentored Cale on the street-smarts and grit required to survive in the city. Cale recalls absorbing the enjoyment Reed got from pushing situations to their limits 'he’d befriend a drunk in a bar and, after drawing him out with friendly conversation, suddenly ask, ‘would you like to fuck your mother?’”

The band, originally called The Warlocks, took on new members. Sterling Morrison, a friend of Reed’s from Syracuse was on guitar. Morrison’s friend’s younger sister, Maureen Tucker, was on drums. While hardly a master, her unique style became fundamental to the group. Influenced by the tribal sounds of Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunje, she played standing up and favored her toms over her snare. This gave the songs the minimalist, almost primal vibe they’re now known for. The name came from a book found in the street about the underground world of S&M and fetishism it was called The Velvet Underground. Their first paid show was a high school dance in New Jersey. The audience was disturbed by their dark, unpolished sound which was so contrary to the crisp, upbeat rock of the time many even leaving the room.3 The Velvets didn’t mind, emboldened by the artistic values of the experimental underground film scene they were emulating both in name and ideals.4 Al Arnowitz, who landed them the gig, said “Most musicians at that time came with all these high-minded ideals, but the Velvets were all full of shit.”

All the while, the band became more entrenched in the scene around them. Rent was dirt-cheap, so filmmakers, musicians, painters, and actors could live in large apartments, frequently staging performances there. Cale’s neighbor, underground film director Piero Heliczer, shot explicit scenes in their apartment for his film “Venus in Furs,” which the band also appears in. They performed at the showing, the first in a line of gigs affiliated with art films. It was at Barbara Rubin, an 18 year old experimental filmmaker’s showing at the Café Bizarre that the Velvets first met Andy Warhol.

Punk Revolution claims that “Warhol was vital to the very essence of the emerging New York Culture that the band would become a part of.” He earned a reputation as the pioneer of the Pop Art movement a cold, satirical style that took popular culture as its subject. With saturated prints of mundane objects like Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo pads, Pop Art gained notoriety as the larger art community questioned whether it was even art at all. To Warhol, that was the point. He saw art as something that had become heartlessly commodified, and his hyperbolic embrace of superficiality was to be a reflection of how wrong it had all gone. Warhol openly admitted to having no emotional connection to his work. He sold mass-produced prints, and had no problem working on commission for any millionaire that wanted a “genuine Warhol” in their penthouse (a cardinal sin to most artists working at the time). He became filthy stinking rich.

Effectively, Warhol’s critique of morally-bankrupt commercialism also became an embrace of it. Prospering off the work of nameless assistants that created his copies, he was the delegator of a machine that benefited him alone. He never said more than a word in interviews, allowing the models he surrounded himself with to speak for him. Warhol became fixated on the image, the big picture, leaving the details to his minions. Nonetheless, his smug indifference towards those who didn’t “get” his work resonated with the young, weird, and disillusioned of the downtown. The underground movement wouldn’t have been what it was without him and neither would the Velvets. It was at Barbara Rubin’s Café Bizarre showing of her shockingly explicit film Christmas in New York that Warhol first saw the band. He had abandoned visual art, and the Velvets’ indifference towards an alienated audience hypnotized him. Reed, a true rocker, prided himself on their stubborn, “who-gives-a-fuck” attitude. Their art was about truth, not image. However, to Warhol, ever-fixated on brand, that stubbornness was an image. These opposite ideals looked deceptively similar in that smoky East Village club. That night, as Warhol became their manager, all were confident in a shared vision that didn’t quite exist.

The partnership was great at first. Warhol created a multimedia show around the band called “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Warhol’s clout, which extended into the mainstream, allowed them opportunities to perform in front of demographics they could count on to be disturbed. After a performance for the New York Society For Clinical Psychiatry, an audience member was “ready to vomit.” Warhol empowered Reed and Cale to never, ever compromise their art validation they had long sought after. However, in the studio for their first album, Warhol’s questionable, “big-picture” philosophy reared its head.

Warhol was the producer of the record, but only in name. As the Velvet Underground recorded, he mostly just left them alone, occasionally giving superficial recommendations like, “don’t forget to include more swears,” or “here’s 14 titles, go write something for them.” Feeling that they “needed beauty” in the band, he recruited Nico, a German model in his orbit, to be the new lead singer. Reed, invested in the idea of stardom, saw himself as the front man and didn’t want her around. Despite Reed and Cale’s reluctance, the attention Warhol brought them convinced them to agree. Cale looks back, saying, “What he did with Nico was he created a disturbance in the band. I think not knowing what was happening next was one of the causes of the destruction of the band.” The album, “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” gathered dust for a year after its completion as Warhol obsessed over making the banana on the cover a peel-able sticker. It was increasingly clear that Warhol was interested in the band’s image above all else. These were not the “art-over-commerce” ideals that the Cale and Reed started with.

The first album finally came out in 1967, when their “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” notoriety had already dissipated. Warhol’s fame wasn’t enough to save the album from an audience that didn’t want to hear it. Songs like “Heroin,” with its themes of drug abuse, sadomasochism, and death were extremely out of sync with the summer of love. The song was blackballed by radio stations, and the album removed from many stores. The band, still on tour with “Exploding Plastic,” grew tired as an increasingly-absent Warhol lost interest in the project. This abandonment only worsened growing resent between Nico and Reed. Reed, worried the band had simply become an appendage of Warhol’s work, severed ties with him, and Nico as well.

The Velvet Underground continued to work after the departure, but the damage was done. Lack of success continued to brew resentment between the four remaining members. Reed had grown tired of the avant-garde, drawn back to his roots in straight-up rock & roll. By the time their second album, “White Light/White Heat,” proved another commercial miss, the divergent tastes of John Cale and Lou Reed once a perfect harmony now pulled the band apart. Reed soon fired Cale without consulting the rest of the band. Ultimately, Cale, Reed, and Warhol were brought together by the underground but misguided in assuming that made them the same. The Velvets rejected image over truth, Warhol did the opposite, and no one could tell the difference until it was too late. Years after, John Cale reflects that “it wasn’t our style to discuss what we wanted to do. It was totally absurd. The worst kind of band you’d want.” It would be years before the true influence of the Velvet Underground would become clear. Artists across the globe like David Bowie, The Flaming Lips, The Sex Pistols, and Joy Division internalized the Velvets’ crazy sound and brought it back to New York for the next phase of the underground scene. In a way, Andy Warhol was right: all that mattered in the end was the final product.

Works Cited

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