Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

.. in the UK, that is, I assume nobody bought it in the US.

haha…the National Review movie critic is not impressed

Liberals hold to a fantasy of bold oppositional attitudes, so Haynes celebrates VU’s dubious revolution. The Velvet Underground indicates that what Bob Dole later called “the culture of depravity” has won. When Warhol actress Mary Woronov talks of “where the artist comes in, because he’s not with society, he’s different,” she recalls a different world from today. Yet Haynes ignores the fact that, 50 years on, and many pop evolutions after VU infected the culture, Millennial pop today tends toward compliance, conformity, and elitism. All those negatives that now accrue to VU’s legacy describe why Haynes’ tribute fails.

National Review movie critic = Armond White

To make Berlin, Lou subsequently had to deliver two 'Commercial' albums to RCA, which is how Sally Can't Dance and R'n'R Animal (and by accident, Lou Reed Live) happened.

Is Lou Reed Live just some more of the same stuff recorded for RnRA?

National Review movie critic = Armond White

I have cracked “The Murder Mystery”! It was the Libtards , in the New York Public Library, with the Lewis Allan Reed Collection.

XP Yes, it's most of the rest of the show, and is most recently available under the title "Extended Versions". A couple more tracks were added to the R'n'R Animal reissue.

Thanks. If I have never warmed up to RnRA would I like this one? I kind of prefer that album with, what are they called, The Tots.

Probably not? There's a grooved-out "Oh Jim" jam that hits 10 minutes, plus a few Transformer numbers and a brief "Waiting For The Man".

I ended up watching that PBS Glam thing on YT last night, there's a cool live clip of Glam Lou doing "Vicious" in it.

thoughts after seeing in cinema:

1. Mary Woronov steals the show, she is fantastic and I love her

2. the ambience is superb, total immersion in NYC 60's culture

3. I can't believe they actually got Young & Zazeela to interview!!

4. Nico is well served here, which was nice

5. Mo and John are both great, very human and touching

6. "not recommended for photo-sensitive audience members" lol

7. some very cool snippets I was unfamiliar with, early versions of "Waiting" and "Heroin" among other stuff

*audio* snippets, to be clear

8. Jonathan Richman is such an adorable dork

9. Mary and Mo both essentially saying "we fucking HATED hippies" within 30 seconds of each other in the (superb) edit flow

as jbr pointed out on faceplace, the Velvets were posing as much as the hippies were, acting like what they were doing in NY w sunglasses & heroin was that far removed from San Francisco’s flowers & …heroin.

hmm idk at least they were honest abt their nihilism rather than cloaking it in feel-good rhetoric?

like the saying, "punks are nice people pretending to be mean, hippies are mean people pretending to be nice"

is is def true that heroin was a common denominator tho. I like that the film specifically mentioned that there was an audience that was into both the VU and the Dead (who actually played together at least once)

idk the nihilism was as much of a pose as loving everybody

either way they were both just pretexts for dudes to convince their girlfriends to have threesomes

I have usually adhered to the party line as represented here by Moe and Mary, but over the years I have grown to like the Airplane and their unfined blues licks for one thing, so I appreciated JBRs take on facepalm.

How can Mary tell me what to do
When she and Paul are Eating Raoul?
And Moe she don’t know
Unless it pertains to Babatunde O

xxp lol yes this also got touched on with the ex-gf from Syracuse who was also very good as an interview subject

Shelley Albin!

But if Shelley she would just come back, it’s be all right.

Apparently Mary Woronov would get really mad at Paul Bartel when he would say that the two of them were married in interviews, or at least assent to it when asked.

LOLing at James’s Supremes rewrite

I've long known *some* nice punks and hippies, long-term committed to living on the edge of the grid, urban and country, also committed to good causes (punks more about animal rescue, hippies more about solar, wind power, community gardens etc)

And yeah there were always some people (eventually incl. me) who liked the Dead and VU, also Television.

Shelley seems to have had Lou’s number way before Laurie.

One of those Syracuse friends in the doc, Richard Mishkin, apparently sat in on bass with the Velvets at the Dom, either because John was sick or to free up John to play something else and not make Sterl or Moe have to fill in.

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

🖼

One thing that is somewhat misleading in the doc is that the Velvets continued playing for a bit at the new venue when the Dom became the Balloon Farm, they weren’t frozen out by the new management as John makes it seem.

Ah, but they were scheduled to play for something like the last three weeks of October 1966, but quit after about a week, Sterling describing the experience as “repellent.”

But there is a still a club downstairs from the Balloon Farm in the Dom where Nico is playing solo shows and, while each of the male Velvets is called upon to accompany her, they resent doing so and furthermore are forbidden by Lou to do so, so she finally ends up singing along to a tape recording of John playing, with a live male Velvet perhaps appearing every once in a while under duress. Eventually Tim Buckley becomes her accompanist but he does like it much either at which point teenage Buckley disciple Jackson Browne steps in, perhaps at the behest of Paul Morrissey.

ty for your service, good background there

Sorry, I saw one too many strobe lights and drank a little energy drink called White Light/White Heat and am having some trouble coming/calming down.
(xp)
Thanks, you’re quite welcome.

there were so many things that were touched on without any words at all

- Andy's literal chest scars

- Lou & Laurie

- the 1993 reunion (and the '72 Bataclan thing)

also very cool to see that live Texas footage from '69 with Mo in the NY Jets shirt

(it's silent, I know, but they did a good job)

feels like the doco did what a good doco should, which is spark up the fires of love and make it feel fresh again.
I would like to have seen a little more in-the-studio imagery and some mention of what went down with the missing fourth album, especially how Cale felt about his involvement, but that's not the main story I guess.

I hadn't seen the b+w footage with Yule closest to the camera before. Wondered for a moment if it was actually VU before it became clearer that Lou was also there.

Also I thought Sterling was involved with at least some of the post Lou live stuff at the turn of the 70s. Thought he was on that box set of recordings from the era.

Also didn't Sterling wind up driving tug boats for a while. Thought it was something I read several decades ago.

Yes to all of that. Apart from the boxset of recordings, I don't know if he's on that. Talking of 'something I read once', I'm sure I read that Sesnick had them playing some kind of ski lodge after Lou left - Sterling was still in the band then.

... seek and ye shall find.

http://songpoemmusic.com/vuforum/AlpineSkiLodge/01.jpg

Doug Yule: There's very little difference between a ski lodge and a bar - a ski lodge is a bar in a ski country. We played at one place where I met my first wife; we played on a stage that was as big as a dining-room table, in the corner. It was jammed with people attempting to dance and attempting to drink themselves into oblivion; it was, in fact, one of the more popular ski bars. We played the Alpine in North Conway [New Hampshire] for weeks, many weeks. We played there so long that I learned how to ski. There was no record company footing the bills and Sesnick was having trouble booking the group. So he got whatever he could.
[in Afterhours: the twilight of the Velvets, MOJO #75, February 2000, p. 44]

Sterling's not on the Final V.U. box set - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_V.U._1971–1973

https://untappedcities.com/2014/07/10/fun-maps-the-velvet-underground-map-of-new-york-city/?fbclid=IwAR0yoPxdfxa0iZ8xTHdAC6-3mRvaFun6OOhBnITRvnbIFTbDcmw_iCRMBAc

I gotta say that sounds like the best gig imaginable

following JB's influence again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oR3AHkl9EI

Heh. I found a quote from Martha Morrison about it, but didn't bother posting as it was very similar to what Doug said.

I was just pondering that the Velvet Underground had three different people who played bass, none of whom liked playing bass and would all have preferred playing another instrument. Two of their most famous recordings have no bass guitar.

I couldn’t find the image of this graph in my ecopy of the book, although it is mentioned in a footnote

This one?

always been something fascinating about Jonathan Richman's teenaged Velvet Underground fandom. thinking about this drawing he made for an article in a fanzine in 1968, when he was 17, predicting their trajectory pic.twitter.com/HeZfNASRMn

— Mark Richardson (@MarkRichardson) October 17, 2021

If you follow the lines, the Beatles would likely intersect with the VU right around when Big Star covers "Femme Fatale."

Dylan's been known to play ski bars too! Hopefully there's footage, w sweaters.
I wonder if Jackson B also resented playing with Nico? Still wondering about this, from my paste upthread:
Noonan mentions seeing boy Browne as accompanist for Nico and El Cohen (singing together, I hope): http://www.richieunterberger.com/noonan.html

xpost w Steve Cropper sitting in.

xxp confused by the "Airplane" line on JR's graph - he thinks they took a dive before Volunteers(?)

Curious what the divergent Who lines mean. Also, Richman apparently rates them higher than the Velvets through WL/WH, which I wouldn't have expected.

(And the PBS Rock & Roll / BBC Dancing In The Street series mentioned upthread doesn't mention the Who once, not even in passing.)

This was really drawn in 1968? So does hitting that "death" baseline mean he predicted Hendrix's early death (off by a year)?