Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (10 page)

This kind of observational objectivity, seeing “with the eyes of a child,” may be what Reed began losing after
The Velvet Underground and Nico,
replacing it with the provocative vignettes of
White Light, White Heat
—an album of such volcanic, high volume spontaneity that the lyrics were nearly indecipherable. With John Cale’s departure a good deal of the Velvets’ stylistic innovation was replaced with professionalism (albeit the professionalism of a brilliant, master craftsman), a transformation that was complete by the time of the
Loaded
LP. It was these earlier elements that critics missed on Reed’s early solo albums. Reed regained his initial reportorial clarity, coupled with decisive wit, when he began writing the songs for
1988’s New York
album. In any case, “I’m Waiting for The Man” shows Reed at an aesthetic high point, and the band in an especially creative and committed period of its development.

One of the VU’s most fully realized ballads, “Femme Fatale” was a product of Lou Reed’s role as a sort of Factory anthropologist—it’s written about the 1966
Factory Girl of the Year. “Andy said I should write a song about Edie Sedgwick. I said ‘Like what?’ and he said ‘Oh, don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou?’ So I wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ and we gave it to Nico.”
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Letting Nico sing the song was a perfect move. Her voice brought a Continental sophistication to the song that matched its subject, while Reed’s use of major seventh chords imparts a cosmopolitan flavor to the song wholly appropriate to Edie and the other ingenues, wealthy and otherwise, who orbited the Factory. “Femme Fatale” plays like “The Girl From Ipanema” set in hip Manhattan, except that in place of the voyeurism of the latter, Reed’s masterpiece tells a story of narcissism. It’s easy to picture the femme in question discreetly glancing away to catch her own reflection even as she goes about her business of breaking hearts.

Sterling Morrison told an amusing story of Nico’s displeasure with the mispronunciation of the title when he and Lou sang the backing vocals during the chorus:

“Femme Fatale”—she always hated that. [nasal voice] Nico, whose native language is minority French, would say, “The name of this song is ‘Fahm Fahtahl’.” Lou and I would sing it our way. Nico hated that. I
said, “Nico, hey, it’s my tide, I’ll pronounce it my way.”
⁸⁶

Despite her objections and corrections, Morrison would always sing “fem fay-tal.” His “my title” comment implies a more prominent role in creating the song than is commonly known, but he has failed to elaborate on this.

Edie Sedgwick’s story is a sad one. She came from money, and seems to have inherited the tendency toward ennui that comes with the territory. During her time spent with Warhol, her modeling career peaked, and she was a darling of the Downtown party and art crowd. She had an impish sort of beauty, slightly boyish with her hair cut short in the androgynous style of the mid’60s. Photos of her dressed in a silver miniskirt, with silver makeup and hair, are emblematic of the era in which she shone.

The first of the multimedia shows for which Warhol booked the Velvets (and the prototype for the
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
performances that followed throughout 1966) was
Uptight,
a retrospective of the short films he had been making with Edie as his star. Andy and Edie were the ultra-hip couple in New York for the year before that. She was the undisputed queen among the
other Factory Superstars like Ultraviolet and Viva, but her days were numbered. By the time of the Velvets’ association with Warhol, Edie was ticking through the final seconds of her fifteen minutes. She danced onstage with the Velvets at the Cinemateque, and according to Nico even tried singing, but music wasn’t her forte. She never appeared onstage with the Velvet Underground again, and soon left the Factory for good.

Edie was never really able to adjust to life out of the limelight; after a few chaotic years and relocation across the country, she died of a drug overdose: saddening some but surprising no one. A spoiled “Femme Fatale,” or another unhappy rich kid whose public persona masked her desire for genuine love? Chances are, Edie was a little of both. But her beauty and energy defined that time and place in a way few other women managed.

Although not the first song Lou Reed wrote for the group, “Venus in Furs” accounts for a number of notable “firsts” in their career. It was one of three tunes played at their first gig; filmed by CBS, it provided their first media exposure as part of a documentary on Piero Heliczer and underground film in New York; and it was the first song that Gerard Malanga danced to on the night Warhol initially encountered the band at Café
Bizarre. Additionally, Victor Bockris argues that “Venus in Furs” was the band’s first “complete success in terms of arrangement,” writing in
Transformer.

When Cale initially added viola, grinding it against Reed’s “Ostrich” guitar, illogically and without trepidation, a tingle of anticipation shot up his spine. They had, he knew, found their sound, and it was strong … (Cale) recalled: “It wasn’t until then that I thought we had discovered a really original, nasty style.”
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Producer Norman Dolph recalls: “It seems to me that ‘Venus in Furs’ is what they started with in the sessions, and that they got the sounds they wanted, then they came back in, and that the overall mix of the thing was not tinkered with too much during the recording sessions.”
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An article written by Ignacio Julià recalls that Sterling Morrison’s “favorite song was ‘Venus in Furs’: He used to say they had achieved in it, like in no other track, the sound they had in mind.”
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“Venus in Furs” is a fairly literal distillation of the 19th century romantic novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Severin the slave and the Mistress in furs are two of
the three main characters from the book. As far as I can tell, the song omits Alexis Popadopolis, the Greek cavalry officer taken by the Mistress as a lover, partly to stoke her slave’s jealousy. Perhaps it was too hard to rhyme much with Popadopolis besides Metropolis. Dangerous territory, even for an English major with a rhyming dictionary who takes so much speed he only needs to sleep every third day.

Masoch himself based the novel in part on an incident from his own life. In 1869 he signed a contract with the writer Fanny Pistor in which he pledged himself as her slave for six months, with a stipulation that when she was dispensing discipline she would, whenever possible, wear furs. Filmmaker Joel Schlemowitz, who made a film based on the novel, wrote:

Sacher-Masoch’s imagination was very taken with romanticizing life, not just in the characters in his writing, but in his own life. Through real-life events he created as much fanciful invention as in a novel, and in turn, in this novel, he takes his life and turns it back again, into a sublime example of creating a grand, romantic myth out of one’s own life.
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In those last phrases, Schlemowitz might be describing Lou Reed as much as Sacher-Masoch. “Venus In
Furs” is thus a song composed by a writer who bases most of his work on his life, based on a book that is based on its own writer’s life. In other words, “Venus in Furs” is art mimicking art mimicking life (or life mimicking art mimicking life, depending on whether you consider songwriting to be “life” or “art”). Just be thankful that Reed didn’t see Schlemowitz’s film and base the song on that, in which case it would have been—well, you get the picture.

“Venus in Furs” is one of the songs that helped to shape the lasting public impression of the Velvets as deviants, on a par with “Heroin” as far as negative feedback was concerned. Like “Heroin” it also presented a powerful statement of intent on the band’s part. Feedback, the squeal and drone of electric viola, tempos that followed the narrative story and not the other way around, the use of a literary source, and placing arrangement and tonalities fully at the service of the lyrics: all were signposts showing where the Velvets were determined to go.

Unlike “Heroin,” however, “Venus in Furs” underwent a significant transformation in the year between recording the Ludlow demos and the version on the debut album. The multiple Ludlow versions begin with an oddly uptempo rendering, but settle into an even
stranger arrangement, one that David Fricke describes as a “stark, Olde English-style folk lament.” He is right on the mark: think “Greensleeves,” but with a somewhat different story to tell: “A-las, my luh-ove, you doooo me wrong, to beat my a—ass so merc’lessly.” Although history has vindicated the abandonment of this pastoral approach in favor of the droning, mysterious atmosphere that the band used for the album, it’s rare that we get to hear the developmental process that goes into a great song: owners of
Peel Slowly and See
will get a kick out of John Cale’s medieval troubador vocal.

“Run, Run, Run” was written on the way to a gig at the Café Bizarre, when the band realized that even with the addition of covers like “Carol,” “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Little Queenie,” they were still short of material. Lou Reed was scribbling down words on the back of an envelope, and by the time the car reached its destination the song was finished. (This and a similar story about “Sister Ray” from
White Light, White Heat
reinforce Sterling Morrison’s recollections about Lou’s prodigious ability to compose lyrics.) Perhaps it was playing those great cover tunes every night that gives
“Run, Run, Run” the feel of a classic rocker, or maybe it’s the tight harmonies. On this album, only “I’m Waiting for The Man” rocks as hard.

The gist of the song is a trip down to Union Square, one of lower Manhattan’s major drug supermarkets of the 1960s. The protagonists are four denizens of New York’s drug underworld. Each character gets one verse of just four lines, and each one is a brief vignette: Teenage Mary, Margarita Passion, Seasick Sarah (what goes up her “golden nose” isn’t specified, but my guess is heroin, as we’re told “she turned blue,” a reference to the dark pallor that falls quickly over the victim of a heroin overdose), and Beardless Harry. Harry’s in the worst shape of the bunch in “Run, Run, Run,” as he “couldn’t even get a small town taste”—street terminology for a tiny amount of dope (such as might be passed off as a standard bag in a small town).

It should be added that “run” has a few connotations in dope-speak. As a noun, “on a run” indicates someone engaged in an unbroken run of heroin use, enjoying the enviable position of having the cash and supply source needed to get high continually—with no down time, as it were. As a verb, it alludes more to the frantic chase to find money and/or dope to buy. Fiends who talk about “ripping and running” mean being out stealing, conniving and endeavoring in whatever nefarious activity is necessary to get yourself well.

The job of a guitarist is to support the song. Here, Sterling Morrison’s musical importance to the group is evident, something that’s hard to detect at times because he did that job so frighteningly well. As I researched this book I began to get a sense of how cool Sterling was, as a player and a person. My impression is that of a floating center, in the songs and in the politics of the group, wherein he was able to influence decisions without participating in the arguments; standing apart, yet a part of the process, guiding musical and political energies using guitar riffs and words as aikido, affecting every aspect of the music. His personality, it seems to me, must have been a lot like his playing—at least as I hear it—an indispensable glue for everything going on. Dolph called him “the flywheel of the band.” In this song you can really hear that.

“All Tomorrow’s Parties” was released by MGM in two versions: a single, b/w “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” with more prominent double-tracked vocals and a hyped-up, made-for-radio mix, and the more sedate, album version. It was an appropriate choice for the ‘A’ side of their first single, as it was and would remain Andy Warhol’s favorite Velvets’ song. This isn’t surprising considering that Lou Reed drew 100% of the song’s substance from
studying the regulars in Warhol’s clique. Reed calls the tune “a very apt description of certain people at the Factory at the time.”
⁹¹
He got maximum mileage from his role as an objective observer at the Factory, where he would take longhand notes on overheard conversations, behavioral quirks and the interaction of the habitués of Warhol’s world. He may have been the only person to turn the tables on Andy, whose own role was similar: “I watched Andy. I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things.”
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David Fricke cites “the immortal opening vision of the go-go Cinderella,”
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and there is greatness in Reed’s conjuring of images in this song. Somehow he manages to mock the triviality of the task the “poor girl” faces—choosing her costume for yet another party—while simultaneously dignifying and arousing our sympathies for the character. This is also an accomplishment of Cale’s arrangement, and the restrained strength of the soaring groove laid down by Morrison and Tucker. Fricke calls attention to that “pneumatic pulse,”
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and describes Nico’s approach to the vocal as a “slow burn
Dietrich delivery.”
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This is Nico’s finest recorded performance with the Velvet Underground.

John Cale shines on this song. Finding a simple two or three note chord that could be cycled repeatedly despite changes in the underlying chord progression would become a signature component of his style, and a staple ingredient of rock thereafter; Cale himself would apply it to the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Here, the hammered piano bears an unmistakable aura of novelty and excitement, and the song surges majestically forward as Cale’s keyboard shatters the restraint of the intro.