From the Velvets to the Voidoids

The Birth of American Punk Rock

By Clinton Heylin

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 1993 Clinton Heylin,
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55652-575-9

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Acknowledgements,
Preface Credit Where it’s Due – the Appropriation of Punk,
History,
Precursors,
1 Happiness Is a Warm Drone,
2 All the Needles are on Red!,
3 Energy Freak-Out Freeform,
4 This is the Modern World,
5 The Underground Jukeboxes,
6 Suicide is Painless,
7 Trash!,
The First Wave,
8 From Horizontal Arsonists to Neon Boys,
9 Jesus Died for Somebody’s Sins …,
10 The Neon Boys Turn On New York,
11 The Cadillac Pulls Out of the Graveyard,
12 Look Out Cleveland!,
13 In the Flesh,
14 Gabba Gabba Hey!,
The Second Wave,
15 Down at the Rock & Roll Club,
16 This is Radio Ethiopia,
17 Living on Chinese Rocks,
18 The Artistics Come to Town,
19 Looking into the Heart of Darkness,
20 Fuck Art, Let’s Rock!,
21 A Punk-Rocker Parade,
No Wave – Goodbye!,
22 Instant Sires from Private Stock,
23 The Last Adventure,
24 The Final Wave,
25 Into the Void,
26 Doing the Modern Dance,
27 Touched by the Presence,
28 Thrashing at the Waves,
Appendix 1 – A CBGBs Chronology,
Appendix 2 – Bibliography,
Appendix 3 – Dramatis Personae,
Appendix 4 – Discography & Bibliography (impertinently,
annotated),

CHAPTER 1

Happiness Is a Warm Drone

Modern music begins with the Velvets, and the implications and influence of what they did seem to go on forever … The only thing I think would be a mistake … would be romanticizing them too much.

– Lester Bangs

Like other forms of ‘art’, high and low, the history of popular music contains its fair share of fractures, moments when fissures appear in the edifice of accepted forms and something new and . significant spouts forth .from the cracks. Sure, what Elvis Presley recorded in Sun’s studios in Memphis had clearly discernible antecedents, but what he produced was so much more than the sum of previous parts.

When Lester Bangs recalled the formation of the Velvet Underground as the beginning of something new, he was placing them in a position of preeminence not recognized by contemporaries. The Velvets were an entirely underground phenomenon during their actual existence. When they were finally rent asunder (by the usual ‘musical differences’), five years after their formation and four years after recording rock & roll’s most revolutionary debut album, they had never even risen to the intoxicating heights of the Billboard Hot Hundred.

The revolution instigated by The velvet Underground and Nico was still germinating. Even as the Sixties were keeling over, the Velvets remained steadfastly left-field. They had nothing in common with either of the two ‘rock’ sounds to dominate the period when they were at their creative peak: Folk-Rock (1965 – 6), largely a phenomenon of New York and Los Angeles, and its wandering son, the San Francisco Sound (1966 – 7). Not for the Velvets the folk sensibility, the righteous calls to action, nor the symbolic obtuseness of Dylan and his fellow Village folkies; nor the West Coast’s predeliction for lilting, Beatlesque harmonies. The members of the Velvets approached music from four unique perspectives, with just one strand in common – rhythm & blues. Out of synthesis came innovation.

The Velvets’ singer-songwriter Lou Reed, born in Brooklyn, New York, in March 1942, showed an early commitment to rock & roll, recording a single with a high-school band called the Jades when he was just 16. But his fervour for the music seemed to wane as he moved on to college. When attending Syracuse University in the years 1961 – 4 he kept his love of rock & roll known only to a select few. After all, ‘pop’ music was puerile, ‘kid’s stuff’, teen fodder in the eyes of his classmates. Reed seems to have shown an uncharacteristic willingness to conform to the college stereotype.

Sterling Morrison: He liked it to be known that he studied literature and wrote poetry, but he never mentioned anything about playing music.

In fact literature had not entirely subverted Reed’s first love. During his time at Syracuse he assembled several brief-lived combos, all playing a watered-down form of black rhythm & blues. These outfits spent considerably more time jamming than playing live. They generally had one other regular member – Sterling Morrison.

Sterling Morrison: We had to change the name continuously so people would keep calling. We used to do covers of black music. When the Rolling Stones appeared we liked them. They did the same thing we did, only better.

Though Morrison himself briefly attended Syracuse, within two semesters he decided that he preferred the less orthodox discipline of New York’s City College. He still made regular sorties out to Syracuse, to play with Reed and hang out with mutual friend Jim Tucker at Reed .and Tucker’s fraternity house.

The Syracuse Reed did not confine his musical interests to rock & roll. He had developed extremely catholic tastes. His love of black forms of popular music was the only common thread in his exploration of rhythm & blues, less traditional forms of jazz music (‘I was a very big fan of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp …’) and doo-wop. If later statements are to be believed, he even dipped into the avant-garde, listening to Stockhausen while just a sophomore.

With such an eclectic background of musical interests, his next move seems all the more surprising. On graduating from college; he returned to his parents’ home in Long Island. From there he commuted daily to Pickwick Records’ HQ on Staten Island, where he was one of a rota of hack songwriters churning out formulaic, copy-cat compositions for Pickwick to release on budget-bin compilations. As Phil Milstein observed in the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society’s critical discography, ‘In many ways, this is the craziest part of the entire crazy Velvet Underground story. No work Lou has done is so trivial, so pre-fabricated, so tossed-off.’

Yet it would be Pickwick that would provide the vital link between Reed and John Cale, the other primary architect of the Velvet Underground.

It would be difficult to conceive of backgrounds more markedly different than those of Cale and Reed. Born in South Wales in December 1940, Cale’s undergraduate education at London’s Goldsmiths’ College was in classical music, even if he did display an early leaning towards more avant-garde modern compositions. Under the direction of his tutor Cornelius Cardew, he began to learn about the works of Stockhausen and John Cage, seemingly unaware of the revolution in rock & roll taking place within spitting distance of his place of study. From 1960. to 1963, as other young London art students discovered American rhythm & blues, he completed a classical music degree.

In the summer of 1963, having finished his studies at Goldsmiths’, Cale was awarded a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study Modern Composition in Lenox, Massachusetts, but once in Lenox he failed to’ establish a rapport with Aaron Copland, under whose auspices he had secured the scholarship.

John Cale: Copland said I couldn’t play my work at Tanglewood. It was too destructive, he said. He didn’t want his piano wrecked.

Cale was soon on his way to New York, where his first activity was to work with John Cage in an eighteen-hour piano marathon that involved playing a short piece by Eric Satie 888 times, something that required a relay of hardened piano players.

If the actual performance was long, Cale’s association with Cage was extremely brief, though he soon became embroiled in a long-term project with New York’s other notable avant-garde classical composer, La Monte Young. In May 1963 Young, hand-drummer Angus MacLise, vocalist Marian Zazeela and violinist Tony Conrad had begun rehearsing together and that month, with four other musicians, performed a piece of music with no evident beginning or end, Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, at George Segal’s farm in New Jersey.

The following month the quartet began to play a few concerts at the Third Rail Gallery in New York. In August, Young and Zazeela found a large loft downtown where they could rehearse all night. Cale, an enthusiast of Young’s ,work, sought him out shortly after his arrival in New York in September. He was soon enlisted into the ensemble, Young convincing him to adopt the electric viola. The Theatre of Eternal Music, nicknamed the Dream Syndicate by its members, was born. As Alan Licht has written, in his definitive history of the group in Forced Exposure, its aims were not merely unorthodox but largely beyond the bounds of classical structure:

The group’s work with excessive amplification, light projection, and Indian music-derived drones in the early Sixties predates nearly all other examples of their use in Western music … Young developed an unusual approach to modal blues, which retained the usual I – IV – I – V – IV – I progression, but left open-ended the amount of time spent on each chord.

Though membership of the Theatre was always in a constant state of flux, the basic core was always permed from Young, Zazeela, Cale, Conrad and MacLise. The concept of eternal music also remained a perpetual undercurrent and the ensemble’s approach was always entirely improvisational. As Licht has observed:

In rehearsal and performance, Young would define the harmonic structure (which notes could and couldn’t be played) and the group improvised under those rules … [Their major work] The Tortoise [His Dreams & Journeys] … would continue unchanged forever. To help get across this idea at concerts, the group would start to play before the audience was allowed to enter, giving the impression that the piece was continuing, not starting … The amplified viola drone, the numbing volume, the helter skelter piano of the Velvets all stem, to a certain extent, from the Theatre’s work.

By the beginning of 1965 Cale had devised a unique approach to the electric viola. He had flattened the bridge of the instrument so that he could bow three or four strings simultaneously. He also used electric guitar strings on his viola which, combined with the overwhelming amplification the group was using, achieved ‘a drone like a jet engine!’ The trademark Cale viola would prove to be the most distinctive element in the Velvets’ early sound.

Yet Cale suffered from a nagging .feeling of dissatisfaction. Just as he had previously reacted against his orthodox classical training, he began to realize that New York’s so-called avant-garde was just another esoteric clique, influencing nobody. In transcending the avant-garde, he sought to locate a more populist means to fulfil his musical ambitions.

John Cale: There was a certain futility in avant-garde music that was really mystifying, people were really interested in extreme statements … performance pieces like Climb into the Vagina of a Live Female Whale. But there is no futility in rock & roll, it’s too urgent, that’s what’s great about it.

According to Tony Conrad, with whom Cale shared an apartment in the fall of 1964, a large part of Cale’s dissatisfaction with the avant-garde stemmed from his discovery of rock & roll at the hands of Conrad, who, after a day of rehearsals, was wont to: return home and sit around listening to records from his huge 45 collection.

Tony Conrad: [When] John started getting interested in rock & roll … there was a great ambiguity in his mind about how somebody could be interested in both rock and classical music.

John Cale’s eventual meeting with Lou Reed confirmed in him the need for a new direction. It was the result of a chance encounter between Tony Conrad, John Cale and Reed’s fellow Pickwick hack Terry Phillips, at a party. Phillips was looking for a band of musicians to promote a single recorded by the non-existent Primitives, a Reed spoof on dance crazes entitled ‘The Ostrich’.

Why Phillips . should hit on Conrad and his room-mate Cale as possible members of this imaginary ensemble remains a mystery. It was hardly the sort of music they were used to playing! Nevertheless Cale and Conrad, after enlisting Walter DeMaria, sometime drummer for the Theatre of Eternal Music, were escorted out to Pickwick’s Staten Island headquarters to meet the author and singer of ‘The Ostrich’. As soon as Reed began to teach the song to the newly constituted Primitives, there was an unexpected connection.

Tony Conrad: [Reed] said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s easy to play because all the strings are tuned to the same note,’ which blew our minds because that was what we were doing with La Monte.

Though Conrad, Cale and DeMaria joined Reed for a few out-of-town gigs, it quickly became apparent that ‘The Ostrich’ was going to remain with its head in the sand: Thus endeth The Primitives. However, Cale and Reed were fast forming their own mutual appreciation society, realizing that they had the common ground necessary to create something genuinely innovative and exciting.

John Cale: When I first met Lou, we were interested in the same things … We both needed a vehicle; Lou needed one to carry out his lyrical ideas and I needed one to carry out my musical ideas … This was about 1965, and he’d written ‘Heroin’ already and ‘Waiting for the Man’, but [Pickwick] wouldn’t let him record it.

Cale and Reed had already started ‘rehearsing’ together at Tony Conrad’s Ludlow Street apartment when they ran into Sterling Morrison on a subway train. He was still attending City College and had not seen Reed in over a year, so was presumably unaware of Lou’s Pickwick sabbatical from rock & roll. He was more than willing to return with Reed and Cale to the Ludlow Street apartment and indulge in some spontaneous music-making.

Conrad had already made it clear that he was uninterested in playing with Reed and Cale. His interest in rock & roll did not extend to making a career of it. Reed quickly became a permanent resident at Ludlow Street and by the spring of ’65 Conrad was moving out. Morrison was soon recruited into the fledgling outfit. His musical influences were considerably more mainstream than Cale’s and his guitar-playing brought a requisite hardness to the duo’s sound.

Sterling Morrison: A good guitar riff is better than a solo. There are songs like ‘The Last Time’ by the Stones that are just one big riff.

The use of the Ludlow Street apartment and Cale’s previous avant-garde associations meant that the new combo’s first percussionist was an obvious choice. Angus MacLise had shared membership of the Theatre of Eternal Music with Cale, and was a true experimentalist. His idiosyncratic approach to percussive sound made him an ideal foil for Cale’s sawing viola. And, frankly, they had few other potential candidates.

Sterling Morrison: We played once a week, twice a week, three times a week, until we finally ended up living together on Grand Street … At Ludlow Street, Cale never played keyboards, just viola, bass, and sometimes guitar. The minimalism in our sound was already apparent, and things just kept getting more and more weird.

Spring had barely turned to summer when the new outfit made its first recording. In July 1965 Cale, Reed, Morrison and MacLise recorded a demo tape, featuring prototype versions of the three central songs on the Velvets’ inaugural album – ‘Heroin’, ‘Venus in Furs’ and ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’ – plus ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams’ (later recorded for Nico’s first album) and a song (now lost) apparently entitled ‘Never Get Emotionally Involved with Man, Woman, Beast or Child’.

The fact that by the summer of 1965 Reed had already written ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’, perhaps – with ‘Sister Ray’ – the most important songs to result from the Cale/Reed association, is certainly significant. In 1965 nobody wrote songs called ‘Heroin’ – though it would not be accurate to suggest that Heroin was the first ‘drug-song’ ever to be written, nor indeed rock & roll’s first ‘drug-song’. The Byrds were at number one on the Billboard singles chart with a song widely interpreted to be about a ‘drug-induced experience’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.

The harrowing nature of ‘Heroin’ lies in its sheer matter-of-factness. Reed sings about addiction to hard drugs in a wholly believable, first-person manner which has the addict on the one hand rationalizing his habit – ‘When I put a spike into my vein/I tell you things aren’t quite the same’ – and at the same time showing the addict’s awareness that only the ultimate escape awaits him – ‘I’m closing in on death’. (It is tempting to consider the song to be not about a single fix but The Final Fix, that the addict’s vision of a sailor on a clipper ship is not merely a drug-induced vision but a near-death experience.)

Likewise, in the song ‘Venus in Furs’, in many ways a straightforward recounting of Sacher-Masoch’s tale of masochistic fervour, the use of the first-person viewpoint for Severin, cowing at the feet of his mistress Wanda, is totally convincing as a means of detailing the psyche of this willing underling.

Reed was aware that such subject-matter was potentially shocking. Indeed, the ability to shock was a key element in the Velvets’ aesthetic.

John Cale: There was commitment there. That was the powerful advantage that all of Lou’s lyrics had. All Bob Dylan was singing was questions – How many miles? and all that. I didn’t want to hear any more questions. Give me some tough social situations and show that answers are possible. And sure enough, ‘Heroin’ was one of them. It wasn’t sorry for itself.

Reed, like all of rock & roll’s great wordsmiths, was reflecting his own concerns in these songs. When it came to the band choosing a name, it was no coincidence that they took their moniker from a book which claimed to be ‘a documentary on the sexual corruption of our age’, the cover of which consisted of a picture of a whip, a high-heeled shoe, a mask and a key. The book was entitled The Velvet Underground. Though Morrison later denied that they chose the name because ‘of the S&M theme of the book’, Reed clearly considered dealing with such taboo subjects to be an integral part of the band’s radical stance. His well-known penchant later in his career for more androgynous aspects of sexual identity presupposes a budding interest as early as 1965.

(Continues…)Excerpted from From the Velvets to the Voidoids by Clinton Heylin. Copyright © 1993 Clinton Heylin,. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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