Velvets Ephemera # 1: Before The Banana

Above we see what could well be the earliest known photograph of The Velvet Underground, taken in 1965, before Mo Tucker joined, before Andy Warhol & co rescued them from the coffeehouse circuit. From L to R that’s Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed, John Cale and Angus Maclise, all hanging out on a picturesque NY rooftop and, you’ll note, all carrying the tools of their dubious trade. (Click for a larger view - looks like a radical axe Sterling's got there!)

I’ve been meaning to find an excuse to post this photo ever since I nabbed it from If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.. a few months back, and now I’ve got one. Over the Christmas holidays, I finally got around to reading Uptight, the Victor Bockris/Gerald Malanga book about The Velvet Underground. Though a pretty good read, it’s not exactly the comprehensive work on the band that I’d been hoping for. It’s very good on mapping out the momentum behind the band’s formation, their interaction with the Warhol set and the rise and fall of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (as you’d expect, what with Malanga being very much the man on the scene), but coverage of the post-Cale era is sketchy, and detail on the musical side of things is lacking throughout. Call me a geek, but, whilst the explosive mixture of characters and circumstances surrounding the Velvets is fascinating in itself, I would dearly love to find out more about when, where, how and why the different sets of songs had their genesis, what equipment the band was using, exactly who played what on different recordings and tours and what brought about the drastic changes in direction that seemed to take place between each studio album.

Beyond a few tantalising details and interview quotes making reference to customised guitars, mishandled song-writing credits and unconventional recording techniques, the Bockris/Malanga book largely ignores such issues, concentrating instead on the personalities and assuming the music was just THERE, the end result of these guys just doing what they do, because they’re, like, y’know, geniuses and whatever.

Perhaps a better way to gain an understanding of the group’s musical development (or else to deepen the mystery further) is to do what I’ve been doing over the past year or so, and take the plunge into the labyrinthine world of Velvet Underground bootlegs, demo recordings and other such ephemera.

Now, given their position as the – ahem – ‘ultimate cult band’, with over three decades worth of obsessive pre-internet fandom behind them, trying to get an angle on the Velvets bootleg scene is a grim and forbidding business to say the least. There seem to be literally hundreds of discs out there, most baring mysterioso, fan-baiting titles and misleading (deliberately or otherwise) track info, all essentially concerned with repackaging what is in fact a pretty slim body of unreleased material and decent live recordings in various states of disguise and disrepair. In addition to this, there’s also quite a lot of worthwhile extracurricular material that HAS been granted official release, but that still lies beyond the grasp of the casual fan, tucked away as it is on the difficult to find ‘Another View’ album, or the pointless/expensive ‘Peel Slowly And See’ box set.

Hence the idea behind this series of posts is that I will attempt to save you the effort by highlighting (and, where appropriate, posting) some of the most eye-opening and essential pieces of Velvet Underground ephemera in roughly chronological order, writing some stuff to put them in context, and simultaneously warning you of other boots worth avoiding.

Does that sound good? – well, either way, I’m gonna do it, so let’s crack on!

Going way back in the Velvets timeline, to before even the above photo was taken most probably, we have the extraordinary ‘demo reels’ that appear on disc # 1 of ‘Peel Slowly And See’.

From glancing at the box set’s tracklisting, you might assume these tracks were just rough sessions for the banana album, but they’re a LOT more interesting than that, and are in fact entirely unlike anything the Velvets recorded subsequently, offering a fascinating insight into the group’s earliest incarnation as what was essentially an open-ended Reed/Cale songwriting partnership that developed shortly after the two met whilst promoting Reed’s Pickwick Records quickie ‘The Ostrich’.

In the Bockris/Malanga book, brief reference is made to Cale making tapes of the band’s earliest material which he sent to some of his contacts in the UK, apparently sparking “great interest” in some quarters, shortly before the band hooked up with Warhol and embarked on a different course entirely, failing to follow up said “interest”. Now, I may be completely off-base here, but I would ASSUME that what we have in front of us is those very tapes, presented in awkward documentary style on the box set as a series of lengthy tracks, each comprising multiple takes of a single song, complete with false starts, abandoned versions etc.

It is immediately obvious is that, whilst the bare bones of some of their best known songs may be in place, the version of the Velvet Underground that made these recordings sounds strikingly different to the one that was playing for Warhol’s crowd but a few months later. For all that Lou may have subsequently liked to frame the Velvets as growing out of “just another Long Island rock n’ roll band”, and for all that Sterling Morrison may have taken every opportunity to badmouth the notion of folk music in interviews and declare his dedication to the darkest, dirtiest rock n’ roll, there’s no avoiding the fact that these recordings are, well…. folk music. Pretty weird, unconventional folk music admittedly, but no electric instruments, percussion or even a hint of r’n’b muscle are present. It’s obvious that neither Maclise nor Moe are featured on these songs, and it seems likely that Sterling wasn’t around for them either. With each track featuring just Reed & Cale’s vocals, a single acoustic guitar and one additional instrument per song (slide gtr, viola, harmonica, or just a hand pounding a desk to keep time), I strongly suspect that this is just John and Lou sketching out their song ideas on tape.

The other thing that’s obvious here is, to put it to you in eight letters, JOHN CALE. Taking lead vocals on all of the best songs, and sounding as compositionally/lyrically involved as he is musically, he definitely comes across as the stronger force in the partnership here, making his subsequent retreat to the position of musical sideman, and all those ‘Reed’ song credits on the first album, seem even more suspect.

Cale’s vocal on ‘Venus in Furs’ in particular is beautiful, as the song is drawn out into a eerie psych-folk lament, his delivery of the “I am tired / I am weary..” section managing to transcend the shabby S&M subject matter altogether, echoing the kind of sonorous, mist-shrouded celtic plainsong that he would go on to explore from time to time in his solo career. It really makes me wish that he’d been able to sing on the album version – perhaps the only thing that could have made that extraordinary track more haunting, weird and timeless than it already is.

‘Prominent Men’, with Lou taking lead vocals, is, I’m sad to report, a fairly obvious Dylan rip off, and, despite being played with gusto and a few fruity lyrical lines, doesn’t really move much beyond that status. Perhaps it was for precisely this reason that it was dropped from the Velvets roster of songs pretty swiftly and, to my knowledge, has never been heard since.

Even more curiously, ‘Waiting For The Man’ is performed here in a manner that seems somewhat derivative of The Fugs (who were pretty much the kingpins of ‘underground’ music in New York when the Velvets were starting out), with Lou’s voice still sounding kinda nasal and Dylan-y as he and John holler along together and the music approaches a kinda rough, jaunty beatnik swagger, incorporating harmonica breaks and some utterly insane Cale viola destruction in the middle. Of all the songs here, this is the one whose tone changed the most over the course of the following year. Also, listening carefully, there are definitely two guitars here, so I guess Sterl might have been around for this one too.

Musically, ‘Heroin’ adheres pretty closely to the version we know and love, although at this stage it seems to have had a quite different set of lyrics (markedly less interesting ones than those used later), and lacks both the slow-burn build-up and incendiary descent into improvised noise that help make the final version so definitively mindblowing. It'll still give you the same old shivers though, if you can get over another Dylan-ish vocal.

‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ seems to be the song they had most trouble bringing to life – the guitar arrangement is quite complex, and the full track on the box set bears witness to near twenty minutes of abandoned takes, false starts and cursing.
The melody has a far folkier, more organic feel to it than the stark collapsing-glass-skyscraper majesty of the Nico led version on the album.

The most exciting find here though is the superb rendition of ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams’, a song that featured in many early Velvets set-lists and was eventually recorded by Nico for her ‘Chelsea Girl’ album. Although the song is initially striking simply for it’s minimal, folk-derived melody and sinister, dirge-like repetition (which needless to say, Nico made the most of), I think ‘Wrap Your Troubles..’ reveals itself here as an incredibly distinctive and beautiful song, contrasting verses filled with increasingly desperate images of brutality and decay with a calm, mantra-like chorus that, much like ‘Heroin’, seems to be urging a comforting, solipsistic escape from external woes. True, some of the lyrics verge pretty heavily into teenage quasi-symbolist garbage (“..excrement filters through the brain / hatred bends the spine..” anyone?), but nonetheless, the song is as perfectly realised as any of the early Velvets material, carrying with it the kind of baroque atmosphere and singular power that would have fitted in perfectly on the banana album.

For your listening convenience, I’ve cut each of these songs down to one complete take, and am posting them as mp3s below. Well worth a listen.

The Velvet Underground – 1965 Demos

Venus In Furs (take two)
Prominent Men (take one)
Heroin(take one)
I’m Waiting For The Man (take three)
All Tomorrow’s Parties (take three)
Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams (take two)



The only other significant set of pre-first album Velvets recordings that persistently pop up are the ‘Rehearsal at the Warhol Museum’ tapes, supposedly from a tape recording made by Warhol himself of the group practicing at the Factory sometime in ’66.

These are, sad to report, a definite ‘hardcore fans only’ concern, proving, if nothing else, that even the most inspired bands have their off-days. Recording quality is roughly dictaphone level, with vocals and percussion largely inaudible and Cale’s bass predominating. It sounds like a pretty shitty, soul-draining rehearsal too for the most part, as the band shamble through a few sloppy, nameless blues jams, throwing in the odd cheesy ‘lick’ and stopping occasionally to mutter despondently. A bit of a downer.

I recall reading somewhere that these recordings were first heard when they were broadcast at some sort of Warhol retrospective/memorial event, where they were illicitly recorded by some guy pressing a tape recorder against the speaker, leading to what I can only imagine must be the most pointless and mystifying boots in rock history – a lo-fi tape recording of a public broadcast of another lo-fi tape recording of a really crappy band practice. I’ve not heard that one, but I suppose it could well venture into territory where the scuzz and ambience of a recording, the sense of unfathomable chronological and cultural distance, becomes far more affecting that the music itself – a theme we’re sure to return to in later instalments of this series.

A couple of moments of interest on the Warhol museum tape:

There’s a bit where you can hear Lou apparently trying to teach Nico to sing Venus In Furs, without much success, as Sterl and Cale jam rather slickly and horribly around the song’s central theme. There’s also a pretty interesting attempt at a really nice sounding Reed song called ‘Walk Alone’ – it’s only appearance as far as I know.

The best bit is a try-out of a song called ‘Miss Joanie Lee’ (another abandoned Reed original?), a tight John Lee Hooker-esque boogie that prefigures ‘Run Run Run’ and ‘Foggy Notion’ as Lou and Streling’s guitars momentarily coalesce into some definitive Velvets drone/choogle, like the blinding sun emerging from cloud, before the whole thing sinks into a bunch of weird, interminable noise. ‘Blues jam’ = URGH.

Here are those two bits, anyway.

The Velvet Underground – Rehearsal At The Warhol Museum

Walk Alone
Miss Joanie Lee

NEXT UP: The holy grail to some, but it does exist: some seriously good shit from the Exploding Plastic Inevitable era.

First though, I'm gonna post some stuff about new bands, just to even out my karma.

Labels: 1960s, ephemera, The Velvet Underground