Velvet Underground

In 1966, the year they began work on this album, the Velvet Underground had already earned a reputation as one of the most outrageous bands on the New York scene. Their jagged, avant-garde sound was indigestible to the record industry of the time. So Reed and co. had no choice but to remain an "underground" act. They performed at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village. But their lyrics, steeped in drugs and sex, were judged too scandalous. One night, despite an explicit ban, they played "Black Angel's Death Song" and were fired on the spot. That night, however, they would find a new fan: Andy Warhol. It was the master of pop art himself who launched them into a multimedia show, "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable". It was the prelude to the birth of their debut album, "The Velvet Underground & Nico".

Recorded in the second half of 1966 and released in 1967, the album benefited from Warhol's "aesthetic" supervision: he was the creator of the famous banana on the cover (which in the original pressings could even be peeled, since the yellow part, the peel, was a sticker). It was also Warhol who imposed on the Velvet Underground his protégée Nico, a German singer with a "spectral" register, who would go on to launch a magical solo career sponsored by John Cale.

The album, released in a limited pressing, was almost completely ignored by the public, but immediately won over the critics of the time. It was word of mouth, along with the band's gradual emergence from the shadows of history - helped in no small part by the fame Lou Reed had since acquired - that eventually brought it back to the surface. Today "The Velvet Underground & Nico" is practically the sole permanent fixture in every ranking of the greatest rock albums of the 20th century.

The Velvet Underground were an explosive amalgam of musicians: the guitar pairing of Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, the "factotum" John Cale (viola, piano, bass), the fatal "chanteuse" Nico, and the most famous female drummer in rock history, Maureen Tucker. Out of this line-up came "The Velvet Underground & Nico": an urban nightmare, a sick and depraved ritual played out in a chilling atmosphere. More modern than any of their contemporaries, yet steeped in a savage primitivism, Lou Reed and co. forged a sound that was unique - and unheard of - built around an electric viola, a guitar drenched in distortion with the volume permanently maxed out, a peculiar tom-tom pulse, and a second guitar backing up the first, cutting through the band's sound like a blade. This was "cultured", aristocratic music, one that a generational fringe far removed from the West Coast's "peace & love" hippies could identify with. "The Velvet Underground & Nico" is to the acid-blues of Jefferson Airplane what decadence is to romanticism. There's no more room for hope or dreams, only a desperate nihilism, portrayed through stories of alienation, loneliness, physical and moral ruin, amid sadomasochistic love affairs, drugs, prostitutes, violence and murder. Urban decay dresses itself in the surreal colors of pop art and the sounds of LaMonte Young's minimalist avant-garde to become a work of art. The West Coast sun sets in the basements of New York, making way for the darkness of the Velvet Underground.

And yet the album's opening gave no hint of such darkness: "Sunday Morning" is, in fact, an ethereal, delicate nursery rhyme. Reed's voice, layered through numerous overdubs and a reverb effect, turns effeminate (the song was originally meant for Nico to sing) and almost unrecognizable. The vocal is left to float free, accompanied only by tambourine and xylophone. There's a subtle metallic undercurrent sowing unease, and a sense that this seductive voice belongs to nothing more than a perverse enchanter. Music-box tones, a relaxed rhythmic backing, and a muffled sound nonetheless make the track less "raw" than what follows, enough to allow it a brief life as a 45. Lou Reed takes the helm again on the following "Waiting For The Man", stripped-down, feral rock'n'roll, all on the downbeat, with a monotone rhythm and a detached, repetitive vocal delivery: a guiding star for all the later Detroit-sound of Stooges and Mc5. "The man" - in the slang popularized by Jack Kerouac - is a drug dealer ("I'm waiting for my man/ 26 dollars in my hand") lurking around Lexington Street.

But this isn't yet the prelude to the bacchanals to come, because there's the sweet melody of "Femme Fatale", entrusted to the enchanting voice of Nico - doubled by doo-wop-style backing vocals, with a spare accompaniment of tambourine and organ - which fools us for a moment into thinking this isn't a nightmare after all. A seductive ballad with a vaguely retro flavor, dripping with melancholy, yet behind all that apparent tenderness, ominous signs of perversion seep through, so much so that it would later be regarded as the prototype of the "bitch-oriented song". And Nico embodies, in her own inimitable way, the figure of the "femme fatale", by turns an angel and a wicked witch.

Every ray of sunlight that has appeared so far is definitively extinguished in "Venus In Furs". It's the masterpiece within the masterpiece, inspired by the novel of the same name ("Venus in Furs") by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the writer from whom the term "masochism" derives. John Cale's electric viola drone conjures apocalyptic scenarios, with a melody that coils in on itself, giving rise to a kind of "psychedelic madrigal". Lou Reed's calm, cynical spoken delivery, narrating a morbid and diseased tale of sex, adds a further layer of anguish to the track, blending perfectly with Maureen Tucker's primordial drumming and the deathly thud of the bass drum.

With the sadistic ceremony of "Venus In Furs" now over, giving in to the beat rhythms of a song like "Run, Run, Run" might seem almost like a breath of fresh air, but behind Reed's apparently innocuous crooning lurks a surreal atmosphere straight out of expressionist theatre, heightened by a driving rhythm and brief guitar solos played with the frenzy of a free-jazz trumpeter.

But it's only a distraction, before plunging once more into the dark bowels of the metropolis, with the funereal nursery rhyme of "All Tomorrow's Parties," the "cornerstone" of every "dark" sound. A splendid psychedelic opening, barely smudged by a few flashes of noise, accompanies the entrance of Nico, more than ever a priestess of the night, with her spectral, emphatic singing. The pace is stately and hypnotic, with the surreal undertow of repeated piano, the drums beating out a martial cadence, the dry arabesques of guitar and a bass darker than ever. Impossible to resist the allure of a ritual steeped in spiritualism and black magic. Impossible not to sink into this climate of decadence, darkness and, ultimately, death. Only a few years later, during a concert, Nico would scream at the audience: "Tonight I want to die with you." Quite so. An overwhelming track, then, light years ahead of the harmless "ballads" of its time.

But the descent into hell certainly doesn't stop here. Indeed, it presses relentlessly on into the abyss of manic decadence with “Heroin”: seven minutes of pure paranoia, in which existential despair is clothed in majestic sound and raw lyricism. The track opens with a tight, driving guitar arpeggio and percussion tolling like funeral bells; the rhythm then grows steadily tighter, while Cale's viola moans in the background. Reed enters with his baritone drawl, singing of needles and poison in the veins, of fleeting ecstasies and perpetual anguish. So much desolation springs from self-destructive impulses (“I've made a big decision/ I'm gonna try to nullify my life”), but also from a desperate search for liberation (“when the heroin is in my blood/ and the blood is in my head/ I'm better off than dead/ and I thank your God I'm not aware”). We're a far cry from the hippy philosophy that promotes drug use as a means of understanding the world and expanding perceptual abilities: here the only goal is unconsciousness, sleep, death. Reed's urban poetry reaches its peak of lucid despair here, while the band paints a fresco of electronic psychedelia far removed from any harmonic dogma: an orgy of floating sounds, in which Tucker's lascivious tom-toms, Cale's taut viola and the jingle-jangle guitars all conspire to conjure an atmosphere of apocalypse.

The mood turns more relaxed with "There She Goes Again", which is nonetheless the record's only misstep, its carefree chorus feeling almost jarring amid so much desolation. Far better is the delicate nursery rhyme of "I'll Be Your Mirror", its melodic arpeggio tracing a sweet, poetic pattern. It's Reed's act of love for Nico: a magic mirror for her statuesque beauty. But it's also the last chance to catch a breath. The finale, in fact, is marked by the Velvets' most brutal bacchanals, with "Black Angel's Death Song" and "European Son".

The first track is an acid dive into the noisiest, most dissonant psychedelia, where John Cale's characteristic tendency toward obsessiveness and minimalism comes to the fore. The cutting viola drills deep into the darkest recesses of the human soul, and within its grooves rises Reed's Luciferian figure, with his perverse, unsettling half-sung, half-spoken delivery. The melody is horribly disfigured, the percussion like heartbeats growing ever more frantic. "European Son" is the journey's final stop: a free-jazz maelstrom of noise, distorted guitars, feedback and propitiatory tom-toms, spilling over into a finale of pure cacophony. In the album's early pressings, the track's title was accompanied by a dedication to the writer Delmore Schwartz, among other things one of Reed's university teachers, who died in 1966.

"The Velvet Underground & Nico" is the first album to successfully blend rock and blues, psychedelia and the avant-garde. A work that learns from the past while projecting itself into the future. It's no coincidence that it became a cornerstone for punk, new wave and even post-rock bands. The noisy deconstruction of rock, the artistic-musical synaesthesia, the violently urban and literary stories in the lyrics all make it a singular work. A totem of rock that has been imitated countless times. So much so that, if you listen closely, you can catch a trace of "The Velvet Underground & Nico" in almost every single track of modern rock.

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13/11/2006