Velvets goldmine
New notes from the Underground
BY DOUGLAS WOLK
Important as they were, the Velvet Underground were remarkably
under-documented. Their four canonical studio albums are from very different
phases of their career, and despite the universally received notion that they
were way better live than in the studio, most of the evidence for that notion
has come from crappy-sounding bootlegs. This has just changed, with the legit
release of seven discs' worth of (more-or-less crappy-sounding) live recordings
that fill in some blanks in their history with unexpected answers.
Robert Quine, later a guitarist with Richard Hell & the Voidoids and Lou
Reed himself, was a huge Velvet Underground fan, and he recorded a bunch of
their St. Louis and San Francisco shows in 1969. Four hours of those recordings
have just been released as a three-CD set, The Velvet Underground Bootleg
Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (PolyGram), and it reveals a weird and
uncomfortable truth about the Velvets: the godfathers of punk rock were
actually a jam band, or at least had become one by the end of the '60s. The
average song length on The Quine Tapes is 10 minutes, and a lot of old
favorites are converted into vehicles for extended guitar soloing. ("I'm
Waiting for the Man," originally a primal stomp, appears twice: once slow and
once near-catatonic.)
On White Light/White Heat, the Velvets' signature song, "Sister Ray,"
was a one-take, one-riff, 17-minute blowout -- the wreckage left by a garage
band in full attack mode. On the three half-hour-long versions here, they slow
it down, mutate it, and noodle noodle noodle until they recall Quicksilver
Messenger Service or Canned Heat. "Follow the Leader," a new addition to the
canon, is straight-ahead boogie -- not at all bad, but a reminder that they'd
once been the house band for Andy Warhol's marathon parties and could pass for
a party act when they wanted to. Even through the distant amateur recording,
you can hear bursts of raw invention here, the bandmembers shifting into a
colossal noise monster at whim, or challenging one another to approach an old
song in a new way.
Meanwhile, there's a second, less-heralded new Velvets boxed set: Final V.U.
1971-1973 (Captain Trip). Reed left the Velvet Underground in late 1970,
but they didn't break up then; with bassist Doug Yule leading the band, they
toured Europe, recorded another (awful) album, Squeeze, and staggered on
for a few more years. Final V.U., assembled from Yule's personal
archive, documents four concerts from the post-Reed period, all of which lean
heavily on the Reed repertoire -- they all begin with "I'm Waiting for the
Man," and we get three more versions of "Sister Ray." (As a bonus, the lyric
book includes the legendary mistranscriptions from the first Japanese edition
of The Velvet Underground and Nico: "Whoop on me, sir it spins from my
mind/I'm just looking for two different of mine.") Singleminded drum goddess
Maureen Tucker is along for the first two shows, as is inimitable Boston rocker
Willie Alexander; by the third disc, there are no original members left in the
band; by the fourth, even they aren't calling themselves the Velvet Underground
any more. Yule told me a few years ago that his 1973 band's promoter booked
them as the Velvets against his instructions, and they played Velvet
Underground songs because "we didn't want to be lynched, and it's real easy to
do 'em.' "
The surprising thing about Final V.U. is that even the post-Reed,
post-John Cale, post-Sterling Morrison, post-Tucker band sound like the
Velvet Underground -- arguably more like the Velvets of cultural memory than
The Quine Tapes does, if a lot less inspired. And, wretched sound
quality aside, some of the performances aren't bad at all. (Well, they're not
so hot by VU standards, but plenty of bands would be justly proud of them.) The
joke that Yule ruefully cites in the liner notes is that he was Reed's "evil
twin," and a couple of his original songs are egregious Reed imitations, but he
was actually more the lost sibling of the band who had played at the Factory in
1966. The error of Yule's Velvet Underground wasn't that he continued the band
without the founders; it was that part of VU's genius had been the way they
evolved beyond their roots, and he tried to go back to the place they'd left.
Issue Date: November 2 - 8, 2001
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