La Monte Young and the Velvet Underground

Introduction

The possibility of pursuing new sonic material capable of exploring still-untouched areas of inquiry, of overcoming the boundaries usually drawn between different musicological and sociological categories, of creating something entirely new and unexpected: these are traits that can equally be attributed to La Monte Young and the Velvet Underground. Figures who seem worlds apart, especially on a superficial glance, but who reveal numerous points of contact once examined more closely.

The first and most obvious shared trait is the geographical and cultural environment in which La Monte Young and the Velvet Underground found themselves living and making music, albeit with completely different backgrounds: New York in the 1960s. A metropolis that, in the words of Woody Allen, seemed to be "a metaphor for the decadence of contemporary culture, […] a society desensitized by drugs, blaring music, television, crime, garbage"[1]. And it's especially the first two factors of desensitization listed by Allen that seem to have been fundamental for the figures under examination: drugs and loud music. There is indeed no shortage of evidence of drug use in their lives. La Monte Young has admitted in several interviews to having used LSD, hashish and marijuana, while the list of narcotics habitually used among the members of the Velvet Underground (Lou Reed in particular) would be so long as to include almost every chemical and natural substance available in the United States at the time. Finally, both Young and the Velvets made extremely loud music one of their defining traits. Heavily amplifying voices and instruments allowed them to exploit frequencies (especially low ones) that couldn't be heard at lower volumes, to make harmonic overtones audible even to an untrained ear (something La Monte Young in particular made massive use of, amplifying his own voice in concert), to increase the distortion and reverb of the sounds, and to create a kind of auditory/sensory confusion that could simultaneously stun the audience almost to the point of disorientation, catapult them into a world different from the one their senses were used to, and keep their attention alert and their involvement intense.

The unusual length of the pieces is another feature shared by the work of La Monte Young and the Velvet Underground. The point of this approach is to immerse the listener in sound, surrounding them completely in a sonic universe to the point of altering their perception of time. As the first extremely long minutes pass, the piece becomes detached from any sense of temporal measurement, and indeed refuses to be timed at all. Once the initial difficulty of an almost painful listening experience has been overcome, the sense of time becomes elusive: we can no longer recall how long ago the piece began, how long that drone has been accompanying that melody, how long that feedback has been grating on our ears, how long our attention has been held captive by those very few repeated notes. And it's precisely thanks to this continuous repetition that we're able to catch every tiny variation, every step off the path that was laid down in those first, very long minutes of listening.

If the artistic and musical affinities are significant, so too are some important differences.

Improvisation is essential to both artistic experiences, but it takes on two very different guises in the work of La Monte Young and that of the Velvet Underground. In Young's case, while this aspect is indeed fundamental, it remains secondary to preparation, study, and the countless hours of rehearsal his group was required to put in. Improvisation, strange as it may sound, was rigorous: it had to stay within certain notes and certain keys, certain voices and certain instruments. In Young's compositions every detail is meticulously reasoned out, nothing is left to chance, nothing is allowed to compromise the artistic (and often dictatorial) vision of the group's leader.

The same cannot be said of the Velvet Underground, who often devoted an entire performance to improvisation, and who repeatedly stated that they never played the same song the same way twice in a live setting. In their case, this improvisational freedom may also stem from the lack of a true leader within the group, of a guiding figure, and of a clear awareness of which artistic and musical path to pursue (all aspects that were crystal clear in Young's setup). In their live performances (and often in their studio recordings too) you can practically hear each member's desire to outdo the others, to drown out someone else's noise with their own, to step out of the shadows of the stage and place themselves centre stage, in full light. There is no hierarchical order left, no pre-assigned lead instruments, no cue to signal the start of a solo. All that exists is the skill, determination and ability of the musician to rise above the background noise.

While improvisation can still be considered a shared element, the cultural background and musical training behind La Monte Young and the Velvet Underground are entirely different. Young studied at UCLA, then at Berkeley, took a summer course in Darmstadt taught by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and became interested in electronic music in New York working with Richard Maxfield. Throughout his artistic journey he was heavily influenced by the twelve-tone theories of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, by the musical avant-garde of John Cage, and by traditional Indian music.

The members of the Velvet Underground, on the other hand, had no background whatsoever in musicological studies: all of them were born and raised in New York and first got into music by listening to jazz and rock and roll broadcasts on the radio. The one exception was John Cale, a Welshman with a diploma from Goldsmiths College, trained in a classical, academic approach, with no interest in rock and roll or chart-topping tunes. As we shall see, it was precisely Cale who served as the main link between the "highbrow" avant-garde of John Cage, La Monte Young and the other contemporary composers, and the popular music of the Velvet Underground in the early '60s.

Part One: La Monte Young

To accept that music could be - also - something different, something alien to classical composition while at the same time still belonging to it. Something capable of engaging an audience hungry for novelty, an audience that doesn't passively endure the musical choices of composers but tries to understand them, an audience willing to follow new paths, willing to accept the open provocations of the new generation of experimental composers without covering their ears and crying scandal.

The path of La Monte Young, with all the detours and alternative routes he took over the course of his career, seems to lead precisely here: a desire to guide the audience toward something new and different, something unknown yet deeply fascinating. Over the years Young went as far as burning a violin onstage (well before Jimi Hendrix did the same with his guitar), releasing butterflies into the concert hall to listen to the sound of their wings, creating a deafening racket by dragging furniture across the stage boards, writing compositions in which a single note was held for several minutes, and writing an entire piece built on just one chord.

Boredom and violence, nonsense and highbrow references, melody and chaos: these are the ingredients of his work, blended with great skill and never left to chance, which make La Monte Young one of the most interesting and daring American experimenters of that period.

But let's start from the beginning. La Monte was born on 14 October 1935 in Bern, Idaho, in a wooden cabin costing 5 dollars a month, the son of a Mormon couple.

Seeking their fortune, the whole family moved to Los Angeles in 1941, where La Monte began studying saxophone, joining the school orchestra.

As the years went by, La Monte had the chance to frequent jazz clubs, form his own band with some college friends, and make a name for himself in the scene for the distinctiveness of his improvisational style, already marked by an evident interest in sustained notes and by a greater focus on the harmonic and timbral aspects of the instrument rather than its melodic and rhythmic possibilities.

The first composition to openly reflect this harmonic research is "Octet For Brass", written in 1957, by which time Young had already left his studies at Los Angeles City College to transfer to UCLA. The influence of Webern, traceable above all in the palindromic, symmetrical structure of "Octet For Brass", and of serial music studies, is still evident, but for the first time the interest in sustained notes and in how they intertwine with one another, the drive to turn a sequence of notes from simple melody into complex harmony, seem to take the upper hand. Young begins to develop his own poetics, to embark on a personal musical experimentation, to build a sonic world of his own.

The following year he composed "Trio For Strings" (1958) for violin, viola and cello, a piece halfway between what would become future minimalist experiments and the usual twelve-tone lineage of Webern. The characteristic timbres of the three strings are deliberately flattened, stripped of any distinguishing feature to achieve the greyness of anonymity. Vibrato is banned, there are no clearly recognizable pulses, and the piece's dynamics exploit every possibility, from ppppp to fff. Young's aim is to make every sound unrecognizable as a single entity with characteristics of its own, granting each sound a role that matters only within the construction of a chord, constantly renewed by the entrance of a new sound and the calculated exit of another. In this way the whole composition achieves a heavy stasis alongside a freshness that is continually renewed through its ongoing transformation into new chords. The result is the complete elimination of any melodic line in favour of a more refined harmonic consonance, and the exploration and experience of long minutes of silence.

Symbolically, it is precisely these long minutes of silence that progressively distance La Monte Young from the academic world of Leonard Stein, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, the world of serial and twelve-tone composition, pushing him instead toward more contemporary experiments and younger composers, among whom John Cage was certainly the most prominent figure[2].

In Young's view, a sound - any sound - has its own existence, lives its own life, independent of any human listening. Precisely because it exists, any sound is interesting in itself, individually, in its own uniqueness, without needing to be related to another sound according to the usual musical rules, or fitted into a listening experience regulated by the academic, Eurocentric notions of melody, harmony, dissonance and tonality. The only way to estrange a sound from its habitual musical context is to render it non-musical: to stretch its duration as far as possible, to strip away every evaluative category until the sound is heard for what it is. This is the only way to try to understand something from it, the only way to stop listening to a note and start listening to a sound.

"Trio For Strings" is probably La Monte Young's most important work of the period. It quickly circulated among insiders and became well known within California's academic world, but it was only consecrated in 1962 - four years after it was composed - in New York, by which time Young had already permanently left behind the academic world of serial music and had become one of the most enigmatic figures on the avant-garde scene. It was precisely thanks to the premiere of "Trio For Strings" that Andy Warhol first drew close to the world of musical avant-garde (in 1962 the Velvet Underground hadn't even met yet), and he was so struck by the experience that he asked Young to write the music for some of his films: "Kiss", "Eat" and "Sleep". The collaboration between the two artists never actually happened, but Andy Warhol's interest in music, and his desire to turn experimental music into pop art, gradually drew him away from painting - which by then seemed to bore him - toward creating a total work of art, a space where music, film, dance and painting could coexist, express themselves and influence one another. He would finally manage to create that space a few years later, as we'll see further on.

In July 1959, La Monte Young left the United States for Germany, for Darmstadt, immediately after learning he had been accepted onto the courses taught by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is often said that the most important encounter La Monte Young had at Darmstadt was not so much with his teacher, Stockhausen, but with another iconoclastic composer: John Cage. In fact, Cage was not present at the 1959 courses, having attended the previous year's instead. If a first encounter between Young and Cage did indeed take place in '59, it was a purely symbolic one: an encounter with two of his compositions, "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" and "Fontana Mix", and with two of his writings, "Lecture of Nothing" and "Indeterminacy".

However platonic, this encounter immediately caught Young's attention, and he soon began a correspondence with John Cage. These letters reveal not so much an artist's admiration for a master, but rather a direct and sincere exchange of ideas and opinions, along with encouragement from Cage for the younger La Monte to experiment - even in the most aggressive ways.

Certainly aggressive is "Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. (or other sound sources)", composed in 1959. With this work, Young's iconoclastic path reaches a point of no return. Every musical skill, every academic training, every rule of musicology is suddenly swept away and rendered useless. First to disappear are the instruments: there are no more violins, cellos, pianos or trumpets. The instruments are now chairs, tables, benches and stools dragged across the floor or slammed against walls. Beyond the usual instruments, every form of musical notation is also completely erased: no more eighth notes, quarter notes, rests or clefs on the staff. In fact, there is no staff at all anymore, replaced instead by prose instructions.

In the winter of 1960, Young moved to New York. Everyone in the artistic circles and scenes orbiting the downtown elite had heard of him and admired the boldness of his experiments. Before long, Yoko Ono - at the time still known only as an artist and much admired within the scene - asked La Monte Young to become the musical director of the series of concerts and evenings she organized in her loft, arguably the most important and interesting art happenings in the city (and beyond) at that moment.

Alongside his musical experiments with New York collectives and the happenings in the lofts of Manhattan's avant-garde community, La Monte Young pursued a new kind of conceptual experimentation: a form of composition in which notation was entirely replaced by prose, mixing on every page theatrical and musical experiments, gags bordering on the absurd, heartfelt mysticism, philosophy and humor, open provocation and brazen mockery. This was in 1960, and each of these compositions was titled "Composition 1960", followed by an increasing number depending on the date of composition:

Composition 1960 #3

The performer (any number) sit on the stage watching and listening to the audience usually looks at and listens to performers.

In "Composition 1960 #7", Young pushes his exploration of long sustained notes to the extreme, conceiving an entire composition built on a single fifth chord and the instruction to be held for a long time. In this way, sound loses every musical function, every timbral characteristic and every connection to the history of music. There are no longer two notes played simultaneously, but a single sound, meant to be played and listened to for as long as possible.

If there are connections running through all the prose compositions of 1960, if we can find common traits across all the performances, they are probably to be found in Young's ongoing sonic research, in the transformation of non-musical objects into elegant sound instruments, in the ironic exchange of roles between audience and performer, and in focusing our attention on hearing with our ears something we normally see with our eyes.

In 1961, Young abandoned the path of conceptual prose compositions to return to writing "real" music: "Death Chant", a moving chant for male voice, accompanied by bells or chimes or sung a cappella. There is no actual text; the singer simply intones simple syllables, slowly, striking his legs with his hands at specific points in the melody indicated in the score, repeating each of the piece's four sections many times, or ad infinitum. "Death Chant", in fact, seems to anticipate the repetition that would become fundamental to the development of the earliest minimalist music experiments[3] by Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, combined with Young's ever-present interest in long notes and the harmonic interplay that can arise between them.

In 1962 La Monte Young returned to playing the saxophone, composing "Early Morning Blues" and "Sunday Morning Blues".

This renewed passion for the soprano sax drove Young to continue down this path, experimenting with new possibilities for merging jazz music with his own sonic research. This gave rise to the Dream House project, a meeting place, a space open to everyone (musicians and non-musicians alike) where people could live together and create music collectively.

Soon the entire New York art scene took interest in the project, which saw the participation of numerous artists from every discipline: painters, choreographers, actors, directors, poets, writers, and of course, musicians. Among these, the most active were certainly Angus MacLise, Simone Forti, Billy Linich, Tony Conrad, John Cale and Miriam Zazeela, who would soon become La Monte Young's partner.

It's interesting to note that four of the six artists most actively involved in this project would be equally involved, a few years later, in the birth of another artistic and musical phenomenon that also emerged from the Downtown New York lofts: the Velvet Underground. As we'll see later, Billy Linich – who soon changed his name to Billy Name – became a regular fixture at Andy Warhol's Factory[4], as did Tony Conrad, who played in the Velvet Underground for a while. The same goes for Angus MacLise and John Cale, who became full members of the band, though the former only briefly and without ever recording a single track in the studio.

The Dream House project quickly turned into a proper band, which kept playing and organizing happenings in the Church Street loft where La Monte Young and his wife Miriam Zazeela lived. This is how "The Theatre of Eternal Music" was born. It's 1965, and the sax-drone improvisation grows increasingly controlled, calculated down to every nuance by Young's will and his interest in exploring the musical possibilities of sustained sounds in a precise, methodical way.

From this point on, every composition is defined by two distinct compositional phases: a first phase in which the notes to be sustained as drones throughout the entire piece are identified – these constitute the true protagonist of the whole composition – and a second phase in which it's decided which of these notes will be used for improvisation and which are deemed unsuitable, and will therefore be played without the solo instrument overlapping the drone.

La Monte Young's strong personality, his determination to pursue his own personal project and follow through on his ideas, his conviction and the passion he poured into every detail, and his refusal to acknowledge the importance and contributions of the other band members automatically placed him in a position above the others, and soon the professional and personal relationships built over years of collaboration began to crack, eventually leading, years later, to lawsuits over the distribution of royalties.

But in 1964 the passion for music was still the primary force holding this new group of musicians together. This is the year that saw the birth of "Pre-Tortoise Dream Music", the first of the many explorations of tonality that would characterize all of La Monte Young's future compositions, and a few months later came what would become one of the most famous and celebrated experiments based on continuous drone sound: "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys". As in "Pre-Tortoise Dream Music", the study of the effects a continuous sound can have on the ear and on human perception continues, with an ever more obsessive focus on the creation of harmonic notes, which can be more easily heard by using specific frequencies and volumes, aided also by certain electronic equipment. The novelty in "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys" is the absence of solo improvisation on the sopranino sax: the entire work is based exclusively on the sustained sound of the drone. To explore every harmonic possibility of this sonic vessel, public performances could last entire hours, since the author never specified the piece's actual duration. For this very reason, La Monte Young also conceived of "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys" as a possible perpetual sound installation, electronically powered and made possible by electro-acoustic instruments capable of producing the sustained sounds that define the drone.

These early years in New York, besides being marked by an ever more pronounced desire to upend the way music was listened to and conceived, to widen the boundaries between music and noise until they intersected, and to create a performance that held within it the sacredness of ritual, the imagined mysticism of an exotic world, and the concentration and commitment demanded by a symphonic concert, were also marked by an increasingly excessive use of drugs.

Over time, the first disagreements began to surface among the members of the Theatre of Eternal Music, related above all to the nature of their collaboration and the meaning of their musical journey and experiments.

The group's initial collective vision was turning into the solo project of an authoritarian artist, backed by a handful of mere collaborators – who, understandably, did not feel like mere collaborators at all.

In 1965, during a tour along the East Coast of the United States, John Cale decided to leave the Theatre of Eternal Music (which would disband for good the following year)[5] to dedicate himself fully to a new project in which he would finally take center stage: The Velvet Underground.

Parte seconda: The Velvet Underground

The story of the Velvet Underground begins one night in 1965, during one of the many parties held in New York in those years.

Lou Reed was at the time writing and recording "novelty songs on an assembly line, piecework, for Pickwick International, in whatever style happened to be fashionable at the moment, and then they'd record them and turn them into LPs that sold for a dollar at Woolworth's"[6]. One of these "novelty songs" was "The Ostrich"[7], inspired by a newspaper article about the latest fashion craze: ostrich feathers.

Unexpectedly, the single achieved a fair amount of success, so much so that a live version was requested for a TV show devoted to dancing. Pickwick executives, satisfied with Lou Reed's look but not with that of the musicians, set out to find replacements.

It was during a party on Manhattan's Upper East Side that the musicians deemed fit to back Lou Reed for the live performance were recruited: two guys with the right look, with the alluring bohemian style of the New York underground. The two in question were Tony Conrad and John Cale, both members of La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music – a "detail" that Pickwick's executives had certainly overlooked.

The following day, Cale and Conrad went to the record label's studios together with a drummer friend of theirs: underground artist and filmmaker Walter De Maria.

The group – the Primitives – was short-lived: after a brief tour of the US East Coast, it soon gave up on any promotional shows. But Reed, Cale, Conrad and De Maria kept in touch, turning what had started as a cold, professional relationship into genuine respect and friendship.

The Cale-Reed pairing perfectly embodied the two faces of contemporary music, the highbrow and the popular, academic culture and street culture, controlled passion and animal instinct. John Cale came from the world of avant-garde composition[8], Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and, of course, La Monte Young. Lou Reed, on the other hand, represented the world of rock and roll, seductive America, the professional musician, the New York of the bohémiens. Reed and Cale embodied the union of two worlds that had always been kept apart, able to blend genres, influences and paths that snobbish, superficial attitudes had previously kept distinct, making their sound unique precisely because of their such different, yet unusually complementary, experiences.

The group was soon joined by a former college classmate of Lou Reed's, Sterling Morrison, and the four musicians began rehearsing regularly at John Cale's apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Working on Lou Reed's lyrics gave John Cale a way to express his own musical ideas, as he tried to find his own poetic path while keeping in mind the teachings of La Monte Young and his experience with the Theater of Eternal Music. For Reed, on the other hand, the spontaneity with which his partner set his words to music, and the artistic symbiosis they seemed bound by, seemed the easiest and most rewarding way to give room to his own demons, freeing his lyrics from the cramped confines of the written page.

It's curious to note that the first name the group chose to perform under was The Warlocks, the very same name the Grateful Dead were using on the other side of the country to record their first demo tapes. Within a few years, the Velvet Underground would shock flower-power California with their dark, nihilistic shows, full of violence and sexual ambiguity, which had nothing in common with hippie culture, peace and love, or the 60s West Coast sound.

There are several points of contact with the work of La Monte Young, probably unknown to Lou Reed but still clearly exerting a strong influence on the artistic lives of the other members of the group (Cale, Conrad and Mac Lise): a constant pursuit of novelty, sonic experiments at extremely high volumes, an evident interest in the ritualism of Eastern religions, Indian religion in particular, and the pursuit of one's own artistic path without trying to please anyone.

At a newsstand in Times Square, Tony Conrad – who had already stopped playing with the group – found a cheap second-hand pulp paperback with a cover photo of whips and leather boots. Even though probably no one bothered to actually read it, the title of this novel struck everyone as the perfect name for the band: "The Velvet Underground".

The attention of the Lower East Side art scene in Manhattan was entirely focused on the group. Rehearsals continued in John Cale's loft at 56 Ludlow Street, and in July the group recorded a first demo containing early versions of six songs: "Heroin", "Venus In Furs", "Black Angel's Death Song" and "Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams".[9]

These early recordings still reveal plenty of insecurities, especially in Lou Reed's singing, which isn't always spot-on in pitch, and in Angus Mac Lise's drumming. The sound is not yet the one that would become characteristic of the Velvet Underground, but is instead a folk sound clearly inspired by Dylan, harmonica included. The truly new element – besides the presence of an instrument like the viola in a rock group – is the rawness of the lyrics, the force of a lyricism that turns street culture into its winning weapon, a poetry loaded with contemporary imagery.

When the Velvet Underground landed their first real booking, however, the first problems within the group began to surface. Angus Mac Lise had a different vision of the direction the group should take: he believed wholeheartedly in the idea of "art for art's sake" and had no intention of letting their creative process be contaminated by legal obligations, schedules and – above all – money. Without hesitation, he backed out and left the group.

A few days before the show, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison remembered an old college friend from their Syracuse days, Jim Tucker, whose sister played drums and lived in New York. That's how Maureen Tucker joined the group, completing what would become the definitive lineup of the Velvet Underground for the years to come.

After watching one of their shows at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol's agent and friend, convinced the Velvet Underground to take him on as their manager, promising the group a booking and a string of shows, along with the enormous exposure they could gain by linking their name to Andy Warhol's.

Getting Lou Reed to accept a new member into the group proved trickier: a German girl who had recently come into contact with the Factory world, a model, actress[10] and singer[11]. Paul Morrissey, in fact, wasn't entirely convinced by Lou Reed's stage presence and singing, and thought it might be interesting to set the Velvet Underground's raw, violent image against the icy beauty of Nico.

After the initial, natural wariness wore off, Nico was allowed to sing a few of the songs in their repertoire and simply stand on stage during the performance of all the others.

The first documented record of the Velvet Underground and Nico[12] is a 70-minute black-and-white film shot by Andy Warhol at the Factory during one of the group's many rehearsals: "The Velvet Underground And Nico: A Symphony Of Sound". The film also shows the rehearsal being broken up by the police, who intervened after complaints about the unbearable noise the Velvets were making.

The first months of 1966 were pivotal to the Velvets' success: known only to a small artistic circle, and perhaps appreciated by even fewer people, the band needed all the publicity it could get. To put it in Oscar Wilde's words, "there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about," and if there was one person with a natural gift for getting people talking, it was certainly Andy Warhol.

These were his words in an interview following one of the Velvets' first concerts: “The music had seemed to them very unusual, supersonic, fast and intense, and the effect of the sound produced by the group vibrated through the whole audience; they added that when they had gone out onto the street, these vibrations had stayed in their ears for a good fifteen minutes, especially the last piece, 'Nothing Song', which was just noise, feedback, screeches and squeals generated by the amplifiers."[13]

“The Nothing Song”, of which some live recordings have been released on a few more recent compilations, is not actually “just noise,” as Andy Warhol claimed. “The Nothing Song” represents one of the first moments in which experimental music breaks out of the narrow confines of New York's bohemian lofts to be heard by people who don't necessarily belong to the art world, who have nothing to do with contemporary art, and who may never even have seen an Andy Warhol silkscreen.

With these early Velvet Underground performances, something finally clicks. Pop music is no longer just chart music, made to be played on the radio and sold to as many people as possible. The band's audience is no longer made up of tourists who happened to wander into a club in the Village, but of people who consciously choose their music, who look to them for the novelty everyone is talking about, eager to experience their world of exploding sounds, images, dances and lights.

Convinced that the Velvet Underground could reach even more people and become even more famous, Andy Warhol and his right-hand man, Paul Morrissey, looked for a suitable space to open a new club, where the Velvets would play every night and where Andy could simultaneously showcase his new work. They found it on St. Mark's Place, in the East Village: the Dom.

A few days before the opening, Paul Morrissey came up with the perfect name for the new show: Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

The first night was a mix of all the ingredients Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground had already tried out in previous shows: music played at deafening volume, films and slides projected simultaneously onto the walls, the audience and the stage, dancers dressed in black leather brandishing whips and S&M gear, blinding lights tracing strange geometric patterns over the crowd, photographers and film cameras everywhere. A night poised between the “amphetamine” poetry of Bob Dylan and the perversions of the Marquis de Sade, skilfully orchestrated by Andy Warhol, who watched proudly over his new creation from the gallery.

John Cale describes these early experiences in the show Andy Warhol put together for them in these words: “I'd never seen anything like it. I didn't pay attention to it and just played. Lou and I brought an almost religious fervour to what we were doing, trying to figure out how to fuse some of La Monte Young's and Andy Warhol's ideas with rock'n'roll. It was exciting because what Lou and I were doing worked. What he turned into words, what I turned into music, and what the band put together — the combination of it all, and the mindset it implied — was mind-blowing."[14]

After the great success of the shows at the Dom, the next step seemed obvious to everyone: the time had come to record an album. Andy Warhol, who by then had all but abandoned painting and film to throw himself entirely into the Velvet Underground project, took on the role of the band's manager and, on top of that, improvised himself as producer of the record.

During the first recording session, in a small studio on Broadway, they only had time to record four songs, which would later appear on their debut album: “All Tomorrow's Parties”, “There She Goes Again”, “I'll Be Your Mirror” and “Waiting For The Man”.

After the first three consecutive weeks spent playing at the Dom in April 1966, the Velvet Underground landed a four-week booking at the Trip in Los Angeles. The reactions there, however, were not quite the same as during those magical New York nights. Los Angeles could not have been more different from the decadent, disenchanted Manhattan that Lou Reed and his bandmates were used to. In 1966, the West Coast had just been swept up by the flower power wave, by the bright, colourful clothes of the hippies, by peace marches and by the long guitar solos of the new Californian rock. The invasion of an army of people dressed in black, hidden behind dark sunglasses, flaunting their sexual ambiguity like a banner, could only throw off an audience used to something entirely different.

1966 was probably still a year in which the crowd that packed the dance floors for rock and roll and the one that sat quietly to listen to art music hadn't yet mixed — and perhaps hadn't even crossed paths at all. It's interesting to note how the bewildered reactions of the Californian audience to a Velvet Underground show coexisted quite naturally with the same state's academic world applauding the new compositions of La Monte Young, who in those very years was pushing his research into drones and sustained notes — heard for hours on end — to its furthest extremes. One of the Velvet Underground's undeniable achievements is having made these two seemingly worlds apart — the more intellectual world of art-music experimentation and the more visceral world of the rock song — coexist perfectly.

Suddenly, nobody liked their music anymore — not the club owner, not the journalists, and certainly not the audience.

Tired of the audience's lack of attention and the boos that kept ringing out across the room, the Velvet Underground decided to provoke and irritate their audience even further. On the second night at the Trip, after playing their last song, they cranked the amplifiers up to full volume, abandoned their instruments on stage, and walked off, leaving a deafening wall of feedback ringing out behind them. If the audience wanted to keep complaining, now they had a good reason to.

The gratuitous hatred the Velvet Underground harboured towards Frank Zappa spread, during their time in California, to the entire West Coast rock scene. These were Lou Reed's words in an interview: “We had a lot of objections to the San Francisco scene: it's boring and talentless. They can't play and they certainly can't write songs. I keep telling everyone that, but nobody seems to care. […] I mean, people like the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead are simply the most talentless bores to have ever come along. But look at them physically too; I mean, can you really take Grace Slick seriously? It's a joke! A joke! They're making fools of the kids.”[15]

But it was in San Francisco itself – home of the counterculture, of the hippies, of Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia – that they were brought to play at Bill Graham's Fillmore Ball Room, with Graham's persistence even managing to convince Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey to travel up from Los Angeles for two more dates. Opening the shows at the Fillmore were the "tedious and talentless" Mothers Of Invention and Jefferson Airplane. For the Velvet Underground it was far from a dream come true, and the same went for the rest of the entourage travelling with them: Gerard Malanga was arrested on a charge of possessing an offensive weapon (the whip he used during performances) and sentenced to a night in jail, and the band was fired by the very same Bill Graham who had done everything to bring them to San Francisco, shouting "You New York germs with your disgusting ideas!"[16]. The hatred the "New York germs" felt for the hippie capital was clearly mutual.

On the night of May 27, 1966, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable came to an end, and the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol and the rest of the crew went back to New York separately, leaving behind lighting man Danny Williams, who took his own life just a few days later. Nico left for Ibiza, Lou Reed was hospitalized with a serious case of hepatitis, and Andy Warhol returned to his old passion, film directing.

A few days later, Denis Deegan, a friend of Malanga's, got in touch from Paris, offering the Velvet Underground a series of bookings for Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows on French soil. The offer, however, was never taken seriously by Andy Warhol, and the whole affair came to nothing, a great opportunity squandered.

In one of the many recordings Nat Finkelstein made at the Factory, Lou Reed lays out the ideas he'd had together with his partner John Cale, somewhere between avant-garde composition and unrealizable fantasy: "We had a lot of ideas about different things: we wanted to get a bunch of cheap Japanese guitars and string them up and tune them the right way, with a bunch of amplifiers; that way they'd all give off a hum at different pitches and we could play over that. John had an idea inspired by the photoelectric cells you find in supermarkets: when you walk through them, the door opens. Well, if we had a photoelectric cell that changed pitch, powered by sunlight, then playing outdoors the pitch would be determined by the weather, by cloud formations and all that. The music of the earth. We want to play in a concert hall because that's where rock belongs, as opposed to the serious music of serious, dead people. Now that's really terrible."[17]

While Lou Reed and John Cale's ideas come very close to contemporary experiments in the musical avant-garde – aleatoric music, tonal experimentation – Lou Reed immediately distances himself from it, dismissing art music as serious music made by serious, dead people. The Velvet Underground's music, however far it strays from the three chords typical of the blues and however openly it winks at entirely different kinds of music, remains for Reed simple rock and roll, with nothing to do with the learned circles of academic music. It's one more of the many provocative stances the American artist would enjoy taking throughout his career, needling artists, musicians, critics and listeners alike.

Once the recording of "The Velvet Underground And Nico" was completed, the record label Verve – an MGM subsidiary – delayed the album's release with a series of unlikely excuses, including the difficulty of producing Andy Warhol's famous peel-away banana cover and the temporary loss of one of the band's master tapes. In reality, this delay and the constant postponing of the release date were more likely due to the fact that in the summer of '66 Verve had just released "Freak Out!", the debut album by Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention, and had poured all its energy and money into promoting it, not wanting to flood its own market with another decidedly "outlandish" product.

The influence of contemporary "art music" experimentation is easy to spot in many of the recorded songs, where Cale's arrangements clearly take center stage, openly winking at his old mentor.

La Monte Young's lesson is immediately recognizable whenever John Cale sets aside bass, piano or organ to pick his viola back up. On "Venus In Furs", the drone he had experimented with so extensively alongside his Theatre Of Eternal Music colleagues gets a chance to make its entrance again, but this time in a completely new guise. The viola is stretched to breaking point, evoking through glissando the whip-cracks and masochistic practices described in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel of the same name. Lou Reed's guitar, here too, is tuned to a single note, exactly as it was when Reed and Cale recorded their first song together back in the Pickwick days, "The Ostrich". The precise hits of the bass drum and the ever-present tambourine give the song a ritualistic, religious quality, like a morbid, sickly modern madrigal.

"Heroin" is probably the most important song on the whole of "The Velvet Underground And Nico", both musically and lyrically. For the first time in a pop song, heroin use is described openly, with no euphemisms, no hidden allusions, and no need for a knowing reading between the lines to understand what you're hearing. A graduate in English literature, Lou Reed packs into a single song what Burroughs, Genet and Ginsberg had spent years filling page after page of novels with. Going beyond the usual subject matter of 1960s pop songs, breaking through the categorical barriers separating the arts, and drawing freely on the creative possibilities of cinema and literature, the New York artist hands his successors the chance to tackle real subjects, even the rawest and most extreme ones. Over these seven minutes of perfect experimental pop songwriting, John Cale manages to craft a brilliant arrangement whose strength lies in building complexity out of the repetition of simple parts. The whole track has no fixed key of its own, shuttling instead between just two chords, D and G, sustained for nearly five minutes by a single drone note straight out of Young's playbook, at the end of which the viola plunges into a noisy, feedback-laden experiment, blending with the other instruments to raise a Spector-esque wall of sound. The rhythm keeps building until the final collapse and the dead calm that brings the song full circle, ending exactly as it began.

"The Black Angel's Death Song" plunges us back into the chaotic, anguished bacchanals typical of the Velvet Underground. In search of just the right sound, John Cale strips the strings from his viola, swapping the usual gut or nylon for a combination of guitar and mandolin strings. He also decides to file down the instrument's bridge so he can play up to three strings at once, something he had already experimented with during his drone work with La Monte Young. Both guitars are tuned a whole step below standard tuning, giving the whole track an even darker, more anguished tone. The repetitive, minimalist, acidic dissonance of John Cale's viola melody merges with Reed's spoken, unsung delivery, in perfect beat-poet style.

"European Son" is, musically, the most experimental track on the whole album, closest to avant-garde composition and long free-jazz improvisations. It opens with a powerful bass line followed by a guitar riff halfway between John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley's electric blues and chart-topping beat songs. After barely a minute, John Cale decides to record what's clearly a tribute to his old Theater Of Eternal Music colleague and Darmstadt-era friend, citing – perhaps for the first time in a pop song – the contemporary experiments of the avant-garde composers he'd spent years associating with: La Monte Young and John Cage. To do so, he records himself forcefully dragging a chair across the floor and knocking it into some metal objects, which fall and bounce on the floor, creating an evocative sound reminiscent of shattering glass. From this point on, the song turns into pure free-jazz improvisation dominated by cacophony, with every instrument straining to make as much noise as possible, the rhythm growing ever more relentless, accompanied by feedback and recorded noise.

Warhol and Morrissey's managerial incompetence, unable as they were to sort out the ongoing problems with MGM, while the label itself was running national ad campaigns for new releases by the much-loathed Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa, together with the Velvet Underground's refusal to play a proposed run of promotional shows in their own city, cooled relations between the two sides, leading to a gradual mutual falling-out of interest.

The Velvet Underground's luck seemed to have run out: Warhol decided not to bring them to Europe for the premiere of the film "Chelsea Girl"; Michelangelo Antonioni took an interest in them for the nightclub sequence in "Blow Up", but Andy lost all interest in the idea; Barbara Rubin managed to land the Velvets a booking at London's prestigious Albert Hall, but this great chance to play for an English audience was squandered yet again by Warhol, who had evidently grown bored with his beloved rock band and was more absorbed in chasing his new passion for film directing.

In September 1967, right in the middle of the summer of love, the Velvets went back into the studio to record the darkest, most anti-melodic album they had made up to that point: "White Light/White Heat".

It took just three days in the studio to finish the recordings, each one carrying with it all the band's grime and roughness, the free-jazz improvisations, the relentless, precision-hammered rhythm, the total distortion of the sound.

Poor Gary Kellgren, the sound engineer, had to constantly fight with the band to limit the damage, but listening to the album, it's immediately clear he didn't win that battle. The sound is dirty, ruined, badly recorded. The band only cared about getting the highest possible volume and the hardest possible music; it didn't matter if the needles were always in the red, if the sound came out too distorted — everyone was trying to push their instrument to the max. There's no clarity, no focal point. There's no clean, crisp sound: everything is saturated, deeply corroded and beyond repair. And perhaps it's precisely all these flaws that make "White Light/White Heat" such a fascinating album.

That winter the record was finally released. After the colorful covers of "Their Satanic Majesties Request" and "Magical Mystery Tour", both out the previous month, in January '68 the Velvets put out on the shelves (very few of them, actually) a record with a completely black cover, featuring a skull tattoo darkened in the same color. While that same year all their peers seemed to be playing with dreamy, lysergic references, flowers and Lsd trips, the Velvet Underground once again released a dark, gloomy, angry album. An even less graceful elaboration of their previous work, one in which every trace of melody was wiped out. Another page in the history of music, with themes, characters and sounds typical of the experimentation they had begun a few years earlier.

"White Light/White Heat", the opening title track, is an immediate gut punch. A rock and roll rhythm driven by a granite-hard, obsessive bass, building to a distorted explosion at the end. Reed's lyrics are an open reference to amphetamine use, and by the end it almost sounds like a satirical anti-progress commercial, with that "Everybody get it", almost an invitation to every right-thinking citizen to step into the world the Velvets know so well. The music races forward, paired with lyrics that swing between optimism and anguished paranoia.

"The Gift" is a story Lou Reed likely wrote back in his Syracuse days, dripping with his trademark black humor, set to the music of an old song never used on an album, "Booker T". The mix was done so that you hear only John Cale's narrating voice — in perfect BBC style — on the left channel, and the musical backing on the right, so that, if you want, you can adjust your stereo to hear just one channel. The song tells the story of a boy who, jealous of his girlfriend, paranoid, tired of their constant separation and too broke to afford the trip, decides to have himself secretly shipped to her in a box. Unable to open it, the girl decides to help herself with a box cutter — slicing open the boy's skull in the process.

That same cruelty resurfaces in "Lady Godiva's Operation", once again handled by Cale's voice, joined by Reed's toward the end. The story follows a transsexual who decides to have an operation, to free herself and finally become who she truly wants to be. But the operation goes wrong: the anesthesia tube springs a leak, and the patient's scream tears through the operating room in a macabre finale much like the one before it.

Next comes the album's most delicate arrangement, "Here She Comes Now", a repetitive, hushed phrase looped throughout the song, about a girl who never "arrives", free to be read in a thousand different ways.

Then it's the turn of "I Heard Her Call My Name", and everything turns violent, distorted and angry again. The guitar solo is unlike anything else in the history of rock: complex, atonal, loaded with aggression and feedback. The drums never miss a beat, fast and precise throughout the song. It's impossible not to think of the great free jazz experiments, of the search for a new melody no longer tied to tonality but to pure sonic exploration.

If with these five tracks "White Light/White Heat" could already stand as a major work of avant-garde music that was also pop, with "Sister Ray" the album closes with yet another masterpiece of experimental music. Seventeen minutes of pure improvisation, a storm of distorted sounds, a battle of timbres where every instrument tries to assert its own personality over the others. Eros and Thanatos, precision and chaos, catharsis and nightmarish horrors. The lyrics are built around a story Lou Reed had written some time before, recounting one night in the life of a group of transsexuals, drug dealers and sailors, amid orgies and doses of heroin. Cryptic and dark as only Lou Reed could be, it's raw prose that holds up even without the wonderful musical backing. There's no redemption for Reed's perverse characters; the narration constantly shifts from one subject to another in a polyphony of viewpoints echoed by the musical improvisation, in an unfolding of characters, narrative perspectives and soloistic detours — an internal struggle that can have neither winners nor losers.

When it came time to record "Sister Ray", the band agreed there would be no other takes: it had to be right the first time, and if anyone wanted to do something, they had to do it right then. And it's precisely from this premise that the internal struggle running through the whole track stems, with timid hints of solos swallowed up by more powerful sounds — the organ won't give way to the guitar, which in turn does everything it can to drown out the drums. If Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor had formed a rock band, they surely would have recorded music like this.

"White Light/White Heat" sold even less than the previous album, peaking at No. 200 on Billboard for a couple of weeks, hampered as usual by scant promotion and radio stations refusing to play a record so far removed from anything commercial.

Time, however, has proven the Velvet Underground right: that pop music had to follow that direction no matter what, that no rock band would tread such experimental ground again for a long time, and that if we're still talking about the Velvet Underground today, there's a reason for it — and there always will be. What remains is their passion for music, for provocation, for noise and for melody, for the most aggressive and atonal experimentation and for a modern street literature, for their relentless searching, their drive to tear down every absurd boundary and finally open their eyes to what is truly beautiful.

The Velvet Underground's paths split one August afternoon at the tables of a bar in the West Village, when Reed simply announced that John Cale would no longer be part of the band.

The Velvet Underground went on to release three more albums (one of them even after Lou Reed's departure), taking a completely different path, setting aside their early experimentation to focus more on the new guidelines set by Reed. A pop sound that remained sophisticated, songwriting that remained elegant yet always so urban — a combination that would go on to define the incredible solo career of the New York rocker.

Cale, meanwhile, carried on with his own musical path, arranging songs for Nico, producing an album for her, launching his own solo career, and occasionally returning to play alongside his old mentor La Monte Young in his "Dream Syndicate".

By chance — or by fate — it was John Cale who ended up actively taking part in the musical journeys of two of the most important groups in 1960s experimental and avant-garde music: first absorbing the sonic research, obsessive precision and new musical frontiers explored by La Monte Young's Theatre Of Eternal Music, and then channeling the Velvet Underground's energies toward a more personal, refined path — far from typical chart-topping songs yet closely tied to pop music, distant from the academic circles of classical composition yet attuned to the new research and possibilities opened up by contemporary experimental music.

La Monte Young's work undoubtedly influenced numerous young composers, who quickly recognized him as the "father of minimalism". Artists such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, each in their own distinct and personal way, embarked on a path of sonic research akin to Young's, building a complex and fascinating experimental project out of the simplicity of repeating short sound cells.

Over the years, groups such as Soft Machine, Henry Cow, Faust, Can and many others proved sharp and deliberate in fusing together, once again, experimental music and popular music, new sonorities and established rhythms, high and low, sacred and profane, showing – just as the Velvet Underground had before them – that not all pop songs should be dismissed as trivial and predictable, that not all pop musicians are utterly clueless about music, and that the most interesting and daring experimental paths don't always come out of conservatory and academy classrooms.

Today, the renewed and ever-growing interest in electronic music, which has travelled from the early experiments of Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna all the way to contemporary clubs, film scores and video game soundtracks, has led young artists and producers to shape their own musical path by following in their predecessors' footsteps, continuing a journey begun at the start of the last century, now enriched by the possibilities offered by new technology, by modern culture, and by that same passion for novelty. Artists such as Flying Lotus, Four Tet, Tim Hecker, Daniel Lopatin, Nicolas Jaar and other electronic music producers knowingly revive the use of repeating short melodic or rhythmic cells typical of the early minimalist experiments of the '50s and '60s, reinterpreting them in a more dance-oriented key, bringing these sounds closer to the more modern techno and minimal soundscapes and environments that are closer to today's artistic and musical sensibility. This process is of course helped along by the virtually endless possibilities offered by modern music technology nowadays. The flip side, in an era when anyone can produce music without being able to read a score or without having achieved any mastery of a musical instrument – or indeed without ever having so much as picked one up – is the obvious risk of flooding the music market with products of dubious quality and little artistic value. But that's a whole other conversation for another time…

As for the influence the Velvet Underground had on future generations of musicians, the list is perhaps even longer and better known, spanning more than two decades of music: from their contemporaries in Stooges' Iggy Pop to their friend David Bowie, from the punk generation of the late '70s to countless post-punk, new wave, shoegaze, noise-rock, psych-rock bands and more.

The scant recognition the Velvet Underground achieved during their career – especially with their first two albums – has now, rightly, been replaced over the years by the appreciation of an ever-growing crowd of fans and admirers, of new generations of more attentive and passionate listeners, and of journalists and music scholars who have finally granted the New York outfit's musical and artistic journey, its provocations, its never-random experiments and its dual instinctive-and-intellectual soul, the recognition and credit they deserve.

Bibliography

Young 1965

La Monte Young, Lecture 1960, «The Tulane Drama Review», vol. 10, n. 2, 1965.

Burroughs 1966

William Burroughs, The Soft Machine, New York: Grove Press, 1966.

Cardew 1966

Cornelius Cardew, One Sound. La Monte Young, «The Musical Times», vol. 107, n. 1485, 1966.

Smalley 1967

Roger Smalley, La Monte Young, «The Musical Times», vol. 108, n. 1488, 1967.

Young-Zazeela 1969

La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Selected Writings, Munchen: Heiner Friedrich, 1969.

Nyman 1974

Michael Nyman, Experimental Music. Cage and Beyond, Cambridge: The Press Syndicate, 1974; Italian trans. (consulted) La Musica Sperimentale, Milan: Shake Edizioni, 2011.

Warhol 1975

Andy Warhol,The philosophy of Andy Warhol. From A to B and back again, Orlando: Harcourt, 1975; Italian trans. (consulted) La Filosofia di Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Milan: Costlan editori, 1983.

Warhol-Hackett 1980

Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett, POPism. The Warhol ‘60s, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980; Italian trans. (consulted) Pop. Andy Warhol racconta gli anni Sessanta, Padua: Meridiano Zero, 2004.

Condon 1982

Jim Condon, What Goes On n. 3, 1982.

Bohn 1983

Chris Bohn, Lou Reed on the Mild Side, New Musical Express, April 1983.

Bangs 1987

Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll, New York: Random House, 1987; trad. it. (consultata) Guida ragionevole al frastuono più atroce, Roma: Minimum Fax, 2005.

Walker 1987

John A. Walker, Cross-Overs. Art into Pop/Pop into Art, London: Methuen & co, 1987; Italian trans. (consulted) L’Immagine Pop: Musica e arti visive da Andy Warhol alla realtà virtuale, Turin: EDT, 1994.

Mertens 1988

Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music. La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, London: Kahn & Averill, 1988.

Middleton 1990

Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990; Italian translation (consulted) Studiare la popular music, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2009.

Vowell 1993

Sarah Vowell, Reading a Poker Face. Books on Andy Warhol, Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 33, n. 4, 1993.

Bockris 1994

Victor Bockris, Transformer. The Lou Reed Story, New York: Da Capo Press, 1994; Italian translation (consulted) Transformer. la vita di Lou Reed, Rome: Arcana, 1999.

Bockris-Malanga 1995

Victor Bockris, Gerard Malanga, Uptight. The Velvet Underground Story, London: Omnibus Press, 1995; Italian translation (consulted) Velvet: i Velvet Underground e la New York di Andy Warhol, Florence, Milan: Giunti Editore, 1996

Duckworth 1995

William Duckworth, Talking Music. Conversation with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers, New York: Schirmer Books, 1995.

Schwartz 1996

K. Robert Schwartz, Minimalists, London: Phaidon, 1996.

McNeill-McCain 1997

Legs McNeill, Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me. The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, London: Penguin books, 1997; Italian translation (consulted) Please Kill Me. Punk in the Words of Its Protagonists, Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2006.

Branden 2002

Joseph W. Branden, “My Mind Split Open”. Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Grey Room, no. 8, 2002.

Fabbri 2008

Franco Fabbri, Il suono in cui viviamo. Saggi sulla popular music, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2008.

Tagg 2009

Philip Tagg, Everyday Tonality. Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear, New York: The Mass Media Scholar Press, 2009; trad. it. (consultata) La tonalità di tutti i giorni. Armonia, modalità, tonalità nella popular music: un manuale, Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2011.

Grimshaw 2011

Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow it. The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bassotti 2012

Paolo Bassotti, Lou Reed. Rock and Roll. Testi Commentati, Roma: Arcana, 2012.

Harvard 2004

Joe Harvard, The Velvet Underground and Nico, New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004; trad. it. (consultata) The Velvet Underground and Nico, Milano: No Replay, 2008.

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[1] Manhattan, Woody Allen, 1979.

[2] In 1952 John Cage had already explored the boundary between music and silence with his composition 4’33’’, and by 1958, the year Trio for Strings was composed, his name was certainly already known to Young, even though the two would only meet in person some time later.

[3] When La Monte Young was asked whether it would be correct to consider him the father of minimalism, his answer, with his usual veiled sarcasm and strong ego, was: “I think it’s true. I think I would have never started without me. Terry Riley was the person who began the kind of repetitive phase-shifting music that is known as minimalism, and there’s no question in my mind or Terry’s but I was the primary influence on him”. In Duckworth 1995, p. 239.

[4] Grimshaw 2011, p. 88.

[5] Except for a brief reunion in 1969, which saw the group embark on its first proper tour outside the United States as well.

[6] Bohn 1983.

[7] The ostrich.

[8] Thanks to his studies at Goldsmith College in London, John Cale also came into contact with Cornelius Cardew, a composer close to the new experimental currents who had already graduated from the Royal Academy of Music. In 1963 Cale and Cardew together organized A Little Festival Of New Music in London, presenting works by John Cage, La Monte Young, George Brecht and other Fluxus composers.

[9] Two of these early versions of songs that would later appear on their first LP – Venus In Furs and Heroin – were collected in 1995 on Peel Slowly And See, along with Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams, which was not released at the time.

[10] He could indeed boast a role, albeit a marginal one, in the film La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini.

[11] She had already recorded a single (I'll Keep It With Mine) written for her by Bob Dylan.

[12] The Velvets never saw Nico as a true member of the group, and from the start they made sure to keep their names at a proper distance from hers. Nico was not part of the Velvet Underground; her presence was imposed by Andy Warhol, and as an addition to the group, the wording The Velvet Underground and Nico was further proof of Lou Reed and John Cale's determination not to let the singer into the band.

[13] Andy Warhol in Bockris-Malanga 1995, p.37.

[14] Bockris 1994, p. 120.

[15] Bockris-Malanga 1995, p. 57.

[16] Warhol-Hackett 1980, p. 193.

[17] Bockris-Malanga 1995, p. 73.

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Mattia Brenna, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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