The Velvet Underground -The Velvet Underground

Tue 25th Oct, 2005 in Music Reviews

As Lester Bangs tells a young Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous, the only true currency in this world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool. When you’re heartbroken, suffering an existential crisis or just generally feeling like shit, you don’t want to go an ice queen like Debbie Harry or an aloof indie-poet like Stephen Malkmus. You want the misfits, the defeated, the nerds – You want Micah P. Hinson, Nick Drake or Elliott Smith. They’ve been there, they understand, they’ve written a song about it. But there’s an exception to every rule and the Velvet Underground’s 1969 self-titled album is one such glorious exception, proof that behind the midnight shades and the fug of smoke, there was a real beating heart to this most cool and exclusive of rock bands.

Overlooked and underrated, The Velvet Underground has long existed in the shadow of The Velvet Underground and Nico, a staple in every list of greatest albums, White Light/White Heat, their most accessible song cycle, and The Velvet Underground Live, considered one of the definitive live rock records. It may not single-handledly send the credibility level of your record collection soaring as Velvet Underground and Nico does but without it, rock music would be different, lesser. The time for it to be acknowledged as a five-star, fully-fledged rock masterpiece has truly come.

By 1969, The Velvets were without uber-cool chanteuse Nico and the visionary John Cale their financial situation, never a healthy one, was positively dire. Drummer Maureen Tucker was living with her parents and working odd jobs, while Reed lived in a bleak high-rise apartment with a few miserable pieces of furniture and a near-empty fridge. The album they recorded was as featureless as Reed’s living quarters: a stripped-back, early hours sound described by guitarist Sterling Morrison as “anti-production”. It was an approach which shone the spotlight firmly on Lou Reed’s songs instead of the mind-bending soundscapes or on-stage extravaganzas that had once been their trademark.

Reed has talked of the narrative undercurrent of - the questioning narrator in Candy Says and What Goes On, the discovery of love in the album’s unhurried mid-section (“the possibilities are endless”), the revelation of Beginning To See The Light and I’m Set Free and the final return to the dark streets and all-night bars of After Hours, albeit now with a knowledge that there is some redemption out there, whether religious revelation or some kind of love worth roaming through the sleepless nights and confusion to find. While never really considered a ‘concept album’ Reed’s explanation of the record’s storyline makes perfect sense. Indeed, this self-titled work stands as their most coherent record and one of the definitive examples of a thoughtful track listing improving an album.

It’s a record where standout songs are virtually impossible to choose, not only because there isn’t a single average song, but because it works so beautifully as a whole. But there are lyrics that linger, like Reed’s New York hipster throwaway line in Some Kinds of Love:

“Like a dirty French novel that combines the absurd with the vulgar”.

Then there’s the heartbreaking: “I thought of you as everything I’ve had but couldn’t keep” taken from Pale Blue Eyes, which also includes one of those deceptively simple lyrical twists that few writers are capable of

“The fact that you are married only proves you’re my best friend
but it’s truly, truly a sin”.

Some bands create followers. The Velvet Underground created whole genres. The slow-core movement, including  Low, Spain, Micah P.Hinson, American Music Club and their languid likes all owe a debt to the mid-section of this record. The narcotic, meditative drawl of Pale Blue Eyes, one of the great left-field love songs, and Jesus were art-rock landmarks, sad but warm marvels that opened up new possibilities for those to follow. When Lou Reed sings “Jesus help me through my weakness/’cause I’m falling out of grace”,  not even the most irony-hardened of indie-kid hearts could remain unmoved. It is this surprising warmth and candour, coupled with some of Lou Reed’s best-ever songs that makes The Velvet Underground a masterpiece, albeit a relatively unheralded one.