Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

Didn't the Modern Lovers cover a bunch of then-unreleased VU song JR had learned from seeing them live?

"Foggy Notion" was one. A live recording from 1972 at Long Branch Saloon in Berkeley, CA can be found on those live albums compiled from that show and a few others from the Boston, MA area.

This one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPn8SGqH6tE

I actually got Ernie Brooks to sign my copy of this album earlier this year - he's been doing local shows all year with everyone from Steve Shelley and Thurston Moore to members of the Dream Syndicate.

I also was unaware of the extent of Richman’s VU fandom. A friend, who’s watched the doc, says JR saw them “60-70 times”(!?)

I actually didn’t even know they played that many shows in their career…

(Richman's also in the BBC/PBS series to which the book served as a companion, appearing in the episode spotlighting the VU.)

That doc series was formative for me, and that episode (on "Theatrical Rock", starting w/the Doors and running through the VU->Stooges/Iggy->Bowie etc.) might be the best of the lot.

Come to think of it, iirc Richman didn't appear until the beginning of the next episode (Punk), but he did bring up the VU there.

Come to think of it, iirc Richman didn't appear until the beginning of the next episode (Punk), but he did bring up the VU there.

That's probably right. My memory slightly conflates the punk episode with the glam/theatrical rock episode (IIRC Alice Cooper was also in that episode). I'm not sure if it's because they're linked more strongly in the book (for the simple reason that you're reading through the chapters instead of getting a day or week-long gap between broadcasts) or because of Heylin's oral history From the Velvets to the Voidoids, which I highly recommend as well. Regardless, the VU and Iggy/Stooges could have easily started the punk episode.

A lot of the Cleveland Proto-Punk bands also picked up those unreleased tracks from seeing them live and making tapes.

XP, to be fair, more so than any other episodes of the series, those two eps really felt like halves of a whole.

Because almost everything is on YouTube, here's the first 45 minutes of the Punk ep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugtkNLgUJlc

Richman doesn't bring up the Velvets, but we do see Patti Smith do "Real Good Time Together".

...and here's Pt. 1 (of 6) of the Glam/Proto-Punk one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPvWoEiaEqU

I also was unaware of the extent of Richman’s VU fandom. A friend, who’s watched the doc, says JR saw them “60-70 times”(!?)

I actually didn’t even know they played that many shows in their career…

they played 80 shows in 1968 alone!!

http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/vu/live/1968/perf68.html

they busted their ass on tour for years, basically

i had no idea they toured that much

it was funny seeing them talk about being booked as art exhibitions and half the auduence leaving = a good show

Xxposts a piece of trivia: when the reunited VU played the gig at Glastonbury they played Jonathan Richman's song "Velvet Underground" right before taking the stage.

really liked Haynes' approach to this and the dense period footage. made something so over familiar seem fresh. feel the heavy Cale involvement made the downplaying of the Yule years inevitable but that's a mistake imo, the 2 eras should be given almost equal weight

That doc series was formative for me

In case any Britisher ILXors need a memory jog, this series was broadcast as 'Dancing In The Street' by the BBC. Well worth a watch.

xp I love how Yule's closeout capsule bio just said he put out one live album, er how about SQUEEZE BY THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, huh? I mean, it exists. If Cale/Reed/Nico at the Bataclan is Velvets canon then an album under the band's name is.
I checked and apparently Yule declined to participate.

Probably another reason for this front loading might be there was no Factory footage for later years, Andy having been fired. Although maybe they could have dig deeper into the Steve Sesnick vault.

_Thought Lou...didn’t need any meetings_


Lester Bangs wrote about seeing him at AA meetings.

I liked almost everything about this but the moment I knew it was going to be good was when they played “The Wind” on the soundtrack near the beginning. I once had a brief conversation with Jonathan Richman before a show he did at The Bottom Line during which he mentioned he had been listening to Nolan Strong a lot.

Steve Sesnick has declined to particpate for the last 50 years tbf.

Lol, I knew exactly which fish that bait would bring.

This movie was like watching an Andy Warhol doc waiting for the Velvets to show up except they are the whole movie.

I learned long ago of Jonathan Richman’s Velvets fetish from an article in Trouser Press about The Modern Lovers. He used to go to NYC and sleep on their couch or couches, iirc. Don’t know if it is on the TP website but it was definitely scanned to their FB page a while ago.

Slept on Steve Sesnick’s couch, actually.

http://falsedawn.blogspot.com/2004/02/theres-no-shadow-where-you-stood-1998.html?m=1

since when were zappa and the mothers an emblem of hippie culture?

there was a fascinating JR piece in a recent Ugly Things magazine where he drew out the velvet's stage equipment longhand, including lou reed's precise guitar setup.

Clinton Heylin's "From the Velvets to the Voidoids" is basically an entire book about how often the Velvets performed in Boston and Cleveland and why after the Velvets were over the American proto-punk think sparked in those two cities before igniting back in NYC.

He was basically their No. 1 fan, moved to NYC because of them and everything. I also think he used to play them his songs backstage after gigs and got a lot of encouragement from them.

(xp)

Yes, this is all true. Feel like their number two fan was Bob Quine and we all know what happened to him.

Does this link work? https://trouserpress.com/magazine-covers-5/
In any case, you can go to that website and find Issue 44 and read the scan.

i had no idea they toured that much

That was a frustrating omission from the documentary, which wasn’t too surprising seeing how the Doug years, and his role/importance, were glossed over. They criss-crossed the US several times in ‘68-‘69, and as much as they hated hippies, they played in San Francisco more (probably much more) than they played in NYC.

Re: Richman, he’s quoted in Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga’s Up-Tight, saying something about how Lou gave Doug (I think?) a pickup off his Gretsch guitar saying, “Now that’s brotherhood.” Seems he’s been a kind of go-to Velvets interviewee since at least the early ‘80s.

Maybe it wasn’t TP 44 but an earlier issue and article actually about the VU themselves.

One person at least talked about what a good musician Doug was in the new doc, already can’t remember who it was, Moe maybe.

Going to get this on physical media when it's released but meanwhile... There's a bad rip doing the rounds on the file sharing sites and a good one. Bad rip was made by someone who randomly selected a frame, sized their whole file based on that, turning it a very narrow widescreen & cutting off the top of people's heads in the other scenes and most of the "voice of xx" + name labels at the bottom. The good one is 1.78:1.

i dunno, past all the visual bells and whistles of the visual approach i'm not sure the doc had more than a received, not particularly perceptive appreciation of the velvets' music. basically drones + gritty but literary street lyrics. which is what everybody says, but it was much more than that. didn't hear much about lou's guitar approach (except that he couldn't sing or play) or their groove or the uncanny calm of that third album etc. etc.

richman did talk about the cadence of lou reed's voice. that was nice.

I hear what you hear saying TSF, but I wasn’t really expecting that from this doc, more an evocation of that time and milieu, which I got in spades.

You didn’t see them back in the day, did you? Probably not quite old enough.

i think i did hear somewhere that JR was a huge VU fan, but doesn't that make perfect sense? the modern lovers are the most VU-sounding band of all time, and they did it immediately after the VU broke up. always though modern lovers were the bridge between VU and punk

Yes, I don’t know why anyone would be surprised at all by that, unless they only knew him from There’s Something About Mary.

I heard "Roadrunner" the summer I discovered "Sister Ray."

The Sex Pistols version?

Richman's.

xxxxp me? no, i wish. i didn't start seeing concerts until 1972 and those were the types of shows my dad could drive me to.

Richman's.

I think I posted this before: some graph Jonathan Richman made before anybody knew who he was (reproduced in Ryan Walsh's Astral Weeks).

https://phildellio.tripod.com/richman.jpg

you wonder if vu would have continued to asymptotically approach beatles or if they would have crossed.