Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

He’s still a hyperactive kid, inside and outside!

So I guess we are going to talk about Jojo until tyler or at least Alfred comes back and weighs in.

I was sad when I learned relatively recently that Leroy Radcliffe had passed, leaving Jojo as the only man standing from the second classic lineup.

I always thought of Richman as sort of a parallel figure to Alex Chilton, a weird dude who glommed on early to other weird dudes and their weird music (I don't know who was first to cover the VU, but Big Star had to be close, right?), who made linchpin music early in their career before totally turning their back on it and doing their own (other) weird thing.

and Chilton was just as sober!

lol

The few times I've seen him the audience has been shouting for teh coume to be turned up while he asks for it to be turned down.

Both artists who I had really weird interactions with until they finally said "look, it's not you, it's me."

well, they didn't actually come out and say it outright, it was just the preponderance of evidence talking.

Apparently The Yardbirds were the first to record a VU song in 1966 as Jimmy Page had worked with Nico in 1965.

Video has footage from 1966 but audio is apparently from 1968.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLNSMtpfTx4

I don't know who was first to cover the VU, but Big Star had to be close, right?

David Bowie told a story about how one of his early managers had been sent an advance copy of VU & Nico which was passed along to him, and his band at the time covered a song or two at their last shows in late '66, before the album had officially been released ("...and that's the essence of Mod!" Bowie concluded.)

The Yardbirds did "Waiting For The Man" live in '68. Jimmy Page was a fan.

There were some other released covers in the early days. The first one was probably a Dutch(?) group doing "Run Run Run" in '67. Notable early '70s covers where Mitch Ryder's Detroit doing "Rock'n'Roll" in '71, and the Mott "Sweet Jane" a year or so later.

XP!

definitely charmed when Richman was breaking down the different components each member brought to a VU song on his acoustic guitar.

Anyone know where/when that clip of them doing "Heroin" at the very end is from?

I think that’s Le Bataclan 72?

I seem to recall Eno getting his hands on an import copy of the first VU when (or before?) he was in Roxy. He much later did some charity cover of "White Light," which I've never heard:

The Velvet Underground was the band that decided me on becoming a rock musician, because they offered the prospect of creating some unity between the ideas that I'd been interested in from avant-garde music and the visceral excitement of rock music. There's no viscera in avant-garde stuff. The other thing was what they chose not to write songs about love and relationships of that kind. I'd always been fed up with that, and I still am; it still forms 96 per cent of pop lyrics - it's just sheer laziness, sheer lack of imagination.

"White Light/White Heat" is not actually my favourite song. But if you had to name one Velvet Underground song, probably that would be the one people would name. I'm playing some kind of a game in making the song: what I've done is reverse something that Lou Reed does. He sings the verses and then throws away the choruses - they're sort of throw-away scat choruses and you can't understand what he's saying at all. I've tried to decode what he was saying there, which is close to nonsense actually, and I've arranged them so that they are sung by a choir. So these things that were almost incoherent become very clear and with very precise diction and timing.

In fact there's a message in that, funnily enough. I say: "I first heard 'White Light/White Heat' on the radio, it was a Saturday, it was probably the John Peel show, it was early 1968." And then it says, "and I thought" and breaks into another song that I wrote, which is like a piece of gospel, where I say "Upon this rock I shall build my church". And I keep saying that. And then it says: "The whole album took one day to record - that was one day in New York, in autumn 1967. I just spent almost that long trying to hear what Lou Reed was saying in the choruses."

The point is that it took the Velvet Underground almost no time to do. But the amount of listening time that thing has received from me and all the other people who have listened to it consolidates it into something much, much bigger than it was ever made as.

The song is sold with a CD cover I designed; it's the only copy in existence but it is to be sold with full exploitation rights. That means if somebody buys it they can release it; just like with an ordinary record, whoever releases it can take the profits that a record company would take, which are for the sales of the actual object itself, but as always, they pay a royalty to the artist. And these will go to War Child. What a sucker, eh - it will probably be my only hit ever.

I'm convinced "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is the Stones riffing (so to speak) on "Heroin." Very similar two chord progression, very similar subject matter.

Downliner Sect cover Reed/Cale preVelvets. Spiritualised had the same song on an early single.

Pretty sure Bowie covered VU before anybody. He heard an acetate or a test pressing and was covering Waiting for the Man before it was released.

Ack, nevermind

shit that yardbirds cover is like proto stooges

Jagger later said the drone-y ness of "Stray Cat Blues" was Velvets-inspired.

When John Cale went to England to shop their demo, he tried to give a copy to Jagger, but he wasn't home and passed it along to Marianne Faithfull instead.

The Plastic People of the Universe covered the Velvet Underground all the time, and that was behind the Iron Curtain, there's a YouTube of them playing "Run Run Run" in 1971.

It's not like they were completely obscure.

Anyone know where/when that clip of them doing "Heroin" at the very end is from?

― TO BE A JAZZ SINGER YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SCAT (Jazzbo), Thursday, October 21, 2021 10:55 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think that’s Le Bataclan 72?

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Thursday, October 21, 2021 11:06 AM (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was another minor disappointment for me about the film. That's a fine version of the song, but I felt that a 1993 "Hey Mr. Rain" -- duelling Cale & Reed, with Moe and Sterl driving -- was not just a better performance, but would've been more effective as an ending.

I forgot that the VU more or less reunited for one more performance following Sterling's death at the R&R HOF. (It took them three nominations to get an induction, and Sterling would've been there had it taken one or two tries.) IIRC, they composed a tribute to Sterling (and maybe to Nico and Warhol too?) in the form of a poem or a spoken word piece with musical backing. So if you really wanted to include the reunion and end the film with a less sour ending, that would give you one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-50pwpfmJfA

They look shattered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na6-GZxfABg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXI3bFTgtSc

^^Right before

Got my ticket for Saturday.

They look shattered.
Schmatte schmatte etc.

that HoF performance was very moving

it's funny how much moe really is VU. cage and reed have done so much music but when she's on drums it becomes velvet underground.

I love when Cale misses his cue and Reed, in an uncharacteristically generous gesture, shoots him a look like, "All good, bro, I got you."

The Fresh Air review, now posted was pretty good at explaining VU to the 0 FA listeners who didn't know, and hitting marks for us jades, also incl. apt choices of dovetailing Cale and Reed interview excerpts---although the reviewer feels the absence of Cale, and even says that Loaded was "a good rock album, but not transcendent." Also thinks this might be why the doc loses something while covering the later years. Glad that he shared his own take, not just chanting a nice neutral-ish overview, as can happen on NPR, but I certainly don't agree about Loaded---and Lou said, somewhere, "It's a lot of people's favorite, and I'm not even on it!" Sure you are, I think? Anyway, reminds me:
from Rolling Stone, David F's "Fricke's Picks" column, 2010:
On the third and fourth Velvet Underground albums, 1969's The Velvet Underground and 1970's Loaded, bassist Doug Yule was the gripping boyish voice in Lou Reed's dramas "Candy Says" and "New Age." Yule now lives in Seattle and plays the fiddle (he builds them, too). But he still sings real-life songs in RedDog, a Seattle old-timey-folk trio with mandolinist Cary Lung and guitarist/banjo player Tom Collicott. Their fine debut, Hard Times (OldDog), is all public-domain tunes, antique blues and backwoods fables flecked with a purist's grit. Yule's voice has aged a bit, but the high yearning I know so well in "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" is still there.

wiki sez:
His lead vocals can be heard on the band's fourth album, Loaded (1970), Yule's role became even more prominent, singing the lead vocals on several songs on the LP ("Who Loves the Sun", "New Age", "Lonesome Cowboy Bill", and "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'"), and playing six instruments (including keyboard and drums).[citation needed]

Yule's brother Billy also joined in on the sessions as a drummer, as regular drummer Maureen Tucker was pregnant and therefore absent for most of the recording. His lead vocals can also be heard on the song "Ride Into the Sun", which was featured on the Fully Loaded CD reissue of Loaded that was released in 1997.[citation needed]

it's funny how much moe really is VU. cage and reed have done so much music but when she's on drums it becomes velvet underground. I love her solo album "Waiting For My Man": the voice, still (as with Ella Fitzgerald and Sheila Jordan) sounding young, not just "ageless," startles here, with a vulnerable persistence---she will stay here waiting, even creeping around to look out there for him at times.

*version of*, not album.

Check out the backdrop in the HOF induction - a wall of lava lamps! It's like walking into a cheap souvenir shop, but I guess lava lamps were more exotic/unique in the '90s?

Love Cale's speech "this event makes an astonishing point to all the young musicians in the world - that sales are not the be-all end-all of rock 'n' roll..." The current chair really chucked THAT concept into the trash.

And Lou even smiles at the end of the tribute to Sterling, which was actually a song, and all three pitched in all vocals! So yeah, for those who wish the reunion was in the film, just mentally use that as the happy ending.

still bullshit Doug Yule isn't there

yeah that was shitty, on par with fleetwood mac icing out bob welch

I hadn't seen that HOF clip before, and yeah, that performance would've been a far superior way to end the film. Nothing at all wrong with the Bataclan thing, but there's no context given for it: when did this take place? Why is only half the band playing? What's the significance of this performance? Why is this the end to the film?

In the grand scheme of the last 50 years of rock and roll, the Velvets weren't really that obscure in their own time, just in relation to the expectations set by the British Invasion and California bands, right? I get the sense that their profile in the sixties was like, say, Joanna Newsom or Dirty Projectors in the aughts - loved or hated by those in the know, and spreading by journalism and word-of-mouth rather than airplay. Operating in a world were Hendrix was the highest paid act going, I'm sure they wondered why *their* noise never got them there. But they weren't Index.

yeah, again, Mick Jagger and Dylan knew (of) them.

Learning how much Reed loved Morrison has sort of touched me!! I remember the obit he wrote in 1996 or 1997 recalling how he visited him in the hospital and holding his hand. Seems like Sterl and Moe are among the few people he loved unconditionally.

still bullshit Doug Yule isn't there

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, October 21, 2021 3:01 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

OTM. He played a far larger part in the Velvets than many fleeting-member inductees did in their respective bands.

Was it the HOF or Lou that said Doug shouldn't get in? (My money's on Lou, but I know the HOF pulls stupid shit like that all the time, e.g., "If you wanna be inducted, you can't include ____.")

"What Goes On" is my favorite Velvets song and Yule's an essential part of it.

The third album's my favorite and Yule's an essential part of it.

It's delicious that Cale and Eno ended up collaborating; their respective former bands went on to fruitful transformations after their departures.

still bullshit Doug Yule isn't there

I double-checked the HOF site and they don't even include Nico (who did less, but the rest of the band seems to frequently treat her as a former member elsewhere).

Even though Yule wasn't in the reunion (despite at least Sterling and Cale wanting him to join in), this is probably the HOF committee's doing. It was suggested elsewhere that initially the HOF committee was really firm on deciding who gets in and not letting the inductee(s) have any input. It wasn't until the Grateful Dead that they got some firm pushback (the Dead wanted EVERYONE in their history to be inducted, otherwise they weren't going to show up), and though the HOF caved, they were still pretty strict about deciding who gets in for years.

Feel like I read an interesting thing about Steve Miller and his dealings with the HoF, but don't feel like trying to find it right now.

I think Doug wasn't fussed about the HOF, but I guess he'd have gone if he'd been asked.

Would have been interesting if he'd chosen to inform the documentary, maybe not going into the ski-lodge gig era, but giving a better sense of how Reed started sharing vocals and such.