Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

*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)?

(And the PBS Rock & Roll / BBC Dancing In The Street series mentioned upthread doesn't mention the Who once, not even in passing.) Surprised by this. You'd think they'd at least get a mention in the British Invasion episode.

I guess (based on the "Made-It Line") he is thinking about commercial success/death?

What would he have considered "Art-Rock" in 1968? The Left Banke? Moody Blues? Forever Changes?

You'd think they'd at least get a mention in the British Invasion episode.

Nope, but to be fair, the Who were late -- didn't get to the US until 1967. I think it had to do in part with the focus of each episode. The Who weren't blues purists, so they weren't covered in "Crossroads"; nor were they psychedelic, so no mention in "Blues in Technicolor." But the producers managed to shoehorn Kiss into the same episode that covered the Velvets, so...?

Frank Z?

Richman's chart needs a Z-axis for The Red Krayola.

Nope, but to be fair, the Who were late -- didn't get to the US until 1967. I think it had to do in part with the focus of each episode. The Who weren't blues purists, so they weren't covered in "Crossroads"; nor were they psychedelic, so no mention in "Blues in Technicolor."

Makes sense. I noticed something similar with other important artists besides the Who. For example, no way was Robert Palmer going to let Prince go unmentioned, but given the way the series was set-up, they basically shoehorned him into the hip-hop episode with a brief clip from Sign 'O' the Times and a one or two-sentence mention about taking rock "to new heights" with his edgier content. I don't want to knock the series because it's great - MUCH better than the reactionary knock-off produced for home video by Dick Clark Productions - but the way it's set up means certain artists aren't going to fit well into the narrative flow. The biggest omission as pointed out by Michael Azerrad is how the entire '80s underground gets NO mention at all, a huge gaping hole between '70s punk and the alternative era.

The biggest omission as pointed out by Michael Azerrad is how the entire '80s underground gets NO mention at all, a huge gaping hole between '70s punk and the alternative era.

Yeah, I haven't watched that episode in a while, but I seem to remember it went from the Pistols to a clip of David Byrne to "and then for a long time nothing happened. Until Nirvana."

I get that lines have to be drawn in terms of who gets left in/left out, but like you said, the whole way the series was set up meant that glaring omissions were inevitable. I think Springsteen only got a (somewhat dismissive) passing mention. But it is definitely vastly superior to that other awful series, and the funk episode in particular is almost perfect.

Isn't Cale quoted in places as enjoying playing bass during the 60s. He just was also the guy who would need to be playing either viola or keyboards where they were used during his tenure which was why Sterling would need to take over bass from him when he did play those other instruments. I can't find the quote but remember having read it.

Yes, I think Cale enjoyed playing the bass, Sterl was the one who hated it.

“That’s my brother Sterl on bass” just doesn’t quite have the right ring to it.

If I recall, Robert Palmer didn't give a shit about The Who. I just checked my copy of the book of Dancing in the Streets, and they only get a single mention, in a sidebar, and only in relation to what Jeff Beck did in the Yardbirds scene in Blow-up. The Velvet Underground however were very much his thing, part of what made him move to New York, and he told a story about how he was set to audition for them when Cale left, but missed the appointment because he was wasted.