The Velvet Underground: a New York Art

The Velvet Underground: a New York Art
By Johan Kugelberg

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/02/velvet-underground-band-york

Reviewed by Tim Burrows
29 January 2010

In December 1965, Andy Warhol chanced upon the Velvet Underground
while visiting the Café Bizarre at the invitation of the film-maker
Barbara Rubin. Their union was serendipitous, and mutually
beneficial. Warhol acquired a band dressed in blank attire on which
to project the movies and light shows of the Exploding Plastic
Inevitable. In return, he gave the group an immediate and intense
direction, plugging them straight into the upper echelons of hip New
York society.

One series of photographs published in the rock monograph or, as Lou
Reed puts it better, coffee-table book The Velvet Underground: a New
York Art shows the band performing at the annual dinner of the New
York Society for Clinical Psychiatry at the prestigious Delmon­ico
Hotel on Park Avenue and 59th. Ed Sullivan, the TV host who
introduced America to the Beatles, lived at the Delmonico. Lennon,
McCartney et al were staying at the hotel when they made their
breakthrough appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.
Screaming girls lined the streets outside. Bob Dylan paid the boys a
now-mythic visit, turning them on to marijuana in their hotel room.

It seems fitting that while their more lauded peers indulged their
becoming-God status inside rooms upstairs at the hotel, the Velvets
used the venue to attack the senses of an elite group of New York
doctors as they ate. Rubin and her mentor Jonas Mekas rushed around
the hall with a film crew as the band played, asking guests questions
intended to provoke, such as "What does her vagina feel like?", "Is
his penis big enough?" and "Why are you getting embarrassed?" One
picture depicts the shadows of the band looming over the black-tied
psychiatrists and their gowned wives like B-movie monsters. Newspaper
clippings tell of the audience reaction to the onslaught. One doctor
described the music to the New York Times as a short-lived torture of
cacophony. Another reasoned: "It seemed like a whole prison ward had escaped."

Yet, as Jon Savage notes in an essay written for this collection - "A
Mirror Reflection: Andy Warhol, the VU and 1966" - the band shocked
people precisely because they reflected society's sickness back to
it. In a fascinating trawl through Warhol's time capsules during the
band's virgin year with him, Savage uncovers a series of newspaper
cuttings kept by Andy that dwell on an apparent surge in senseless
acts of violence during the mid-Sixties. America's first high-profile
school shooting happened in the summer of 1966, when 16 people were
killed and 31 injured at the University of Texas campus in Austin. It
was, as Savage puts it, Vietnam come home to America. Three months
earlier in Britain, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderers,
had been sentenced to life imprisonment.

A particularly paranoid issue of Time, kept by Warhol, reflected the
mood. Under the headline "The psychotic in society", the magazine
identified a new type of madman, one who could snap at any time,
anywhere. Potential killers are everywhere these days, warned a
psychiatrist from Houston. They are driving cars, going to church
with you, working with you. And you never know it until they snap.

The Velvet Underground were on the side of the dispossessed. Lou
Reed, long typecast as rock's grump-in-chief, is repositioned as a
spokesman for the rights of youth in the essay "The View from the
Bandstand", written by Reed and first published in Aspen magazine in
1966. Draft only those over 40, he implored: "It's their war, let
them kill each other." The dispossessed responded with adulation.
Zine articles about the group by a young VU super-fan, Jonathan
Richman, later of the Modern Lovers, are also included here, as is a
poem about the band by a young Ian Curtis.

The book's editor, Johan Kugelberg, is a pop archivist par excellence
and the ultimate VU fan­boy. As a result, the range of artefacts
presented here is comprehensive. Some are fascinating, such as the
pre-Andy photographs of the band appearing in the poet and film-maker
Piero Heliczer's underground film Venus in Furs in 1965. Reed, John
Cale and Sterling Morrison perform topless and painted, Rubin is
dressed as a nun, and Maureen Tucker, before she had joined the band
as drummer, wears a mourning veil. Elsewhere, Morrison, the guitarist
who was to die in 1995, remembers an improbable CBS news item, hosted
by Walter Cronkite and broadcast on New Year's Eve 1965, that
featured footage of the same performance - the strains of "Heroin"
followed Cronkite's catchphrase: "And that's the way it is."

In his introduction, Kugelberg offers Picasso's Demoiselles
d'Avignon, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and the recordings by the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band as works of art that brought our
collective consciousness into the 20th century. The Velvet
Underground, he suggests, heralded the departure from it. Kugelberg's
theory is tight. As the century wore on, the cult of the Velvets
spread from Bowie to Pavement via punk, and today the band remain the
epitome of cool.

The shock factor of the Velvets, however, has been surpassed by the
ever-growing visibility of the myriad horrors of the 21st century:
24-hour news; ubiquitous porn; the general, dull panic that dwells in
the stomach pit of a generation faced with rising tides and debt.
Society does not need a mirror to reflect back its own hypocrisy; we
are swimming in it.
--

Tim Burrows is the author of "From CBGB to the Roundhouse: Music
Venues Through the Years" (Marion Boyars, £9.99)
--

The Velvet Underground: a New York Art
Johan Kugelberg
Rizzoli, 320pp, £35

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