Tag: velvet underground

‘The Velvet Underground’: Film Review | Cannes 2021 – The Hollywood Reporter

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IN a minute they will dazzle. Any second they could blow your mind.

The wealth of archival photography and footage of news and cultural events that shaped the era is extraordinary. Haynes’ use not just of clips from the work of Warhol, Mekas and Smith, but also Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Barbara Rubin, Shirley Clarke and others — often playing in mind-bending juxtaposition on multiple screens within the screen — makes this an uncommonly cine-literate music doc and a rapturous homage to experimental art. Mekas says it all in one succinct interview snippet: “We are not part of the counterculture. We are the culture.”

Source: ‘The Velvet Underground’: Film Review | Cannes 2021 – The Hollywood Reporter

Blog, Music

Graded on a Curve: John Cale, Vintage Violence – The Vinyl District

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One of my all time favourite albums and certainly favourite songwriters.


Having split the Velvet Underground, John Cale might easily have packed up his viola and avant garde bona fides and disappeared forever into the obscure realm of experimental music. Instead he’s had it both ways, interspersing LPs like 1997’s Eat/Kiss: Music for the Films by Andy Warhol with more traditional art rock (God I hate that term) albums like Vintage Violence. Lou Reed went on to join the greats, but by any standard Cale’s albums of the early to mid-1970’s stand up to those released by Reed during the same period. There’s much to be said for Reed’s aggression, but Cale’s emotional detachment also has its lure. In “Hanky Panky Nohow” Cale sings about “seducing down the door.” Which to my way of thinking is just as good as Reed’s approach, which was to kick it in.

Source: Graded on a Curve: John Cale, Vintage Violence – The Vinyl District

Music, Review

White Light/White Heat: How The Velvet Underground Foretold The Future

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“It may have taken years to gain traction, but nothing would ever be the same after White Light/White Heat – not least the Velvets, following Cale’s enforced departure in autumn 1968. It’s one of a precious handful of albums that helped rock music turn a significant corner… before dragging it down an alley and beating sense into it.”

Read the whole story at Source: White Light/White Heat: How The Velvet Underground Foretold The Future

Music, Review

Interview: Lou Reed on the Velvets, Bowie… and his love of heavy metal | Louder

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It is not wholly beyond the realms of possibility that you could have become a critic yourself. Could you live with such a horrifying prospect?

No. It’s interesting. I was learning the triangular paragraph, and that was it for me. You’re not supposed to have an opinion of the triangular paragraph. So I moved from the triangular paragraph of journalism to the theory of triangular staging in drama – in the sidelines, there is always a triangle going. That’s it. So it was easy. What was difficult for me was interviewing Hubert Selby and President Havel. First I was just worried: “Is the battery going to die on me, right in the middle of everything? Should I have a back-up machine just in case?”

Welcome to my world.

It’s just too nerve-racking. My God… As if I don’t have enough to worry about.

read it all at Source: Interview: Lou Reed on the Velvets, Bowie… and his love of heavy metal | Louder

Music, People

Lou Reed Rising | The Village Voice

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“We Never Die.”

No “legendary” rock band of the 1960s has proven more legendary than the Velvet Underground. The name alone (before it was abbreviated by fans into “the Velvets”) carried a special resonance, evoking Genet decadence, whip-and-leather s&m, Warhol chic, and European ennui. And even though other urban bands (the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Rascals) were more commercially successful at the time, the best songs of the Velvets (“Sweet Jane,” “Candy Says,” “Waiting for the Man,” “Beginning to See the Light”) have an emotional texture and a sharply defined drive which propel the songs beyond the time in which they were written.

Yet when one tries to think of the Velvet Underground photographically, one draws a grainy blur. The great rock stars of the ’60s live vividly in our memories through their photos; one thinks of the Beatles first in their suit-uniforms, then in their glossy Sgt. Pepper outfits, of Hendrix in his black-nimbus Afro and layers of scarves, of countless shots of Jagger pouting and preening and hip-thrusting. Yet the Velvets, except for the imperially lovely Nico, seemed not to occupy visual space at all. Even when one listens to their live albums now, it’s impossible to imagine what they looked like playing their instruments — they don’t come into focus. This shadowiness makes the power of their music all the more provocative since it means that not theatricality but its absence is what gives that music its current urgency. The Velvets didn’t have a strong stud-star at center stage (as did the Stones and the Doors) and didn’t provide a good-vibes community atmosphere (as did the Dead and the Airplane) and didn’t attempt to stagger the audience with histrionics (as did Alice Cooper and just about everybody else). What makes the Velvets vital now is not only what they had but what they lacked: stylishness, ornamentation, politics, and a hedonistic ethos.

Source: Lou Reed Rising | The Village Voice

Music, People