Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (12 page)

Q:
It seems obvious now, but …

A:
It seemed obvious then. Well, to me.
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Of all the songs on this amazing album, this is the one that has always amazed me the least. And very little has been said about the song by the band. Described by Victor Bockris as “a tough song about a tough chick,”
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it has its strong points, to be sure. The backing vocals (the characteristic tight harmonies the Velvets used to great effect) are nice enough. And I have to admit that the band sounds tight as hell on it; but I confess I never realized just how tight until I read Sterling Morrison’s description of the song:

Metronomically, we were a pretty accurate band. If we were speeding up or slowing down, it was by design. If you listen to the solo break on “There She Goes Again,” it slows down—slower and slower and slower. And then when it comes back into the “bye-bye-byes” it’s double the original tempo, a tremendous leap to twice the speed. We always tinkered with that.

Listening back to the song, a little skeptical, I heard what Morrison described. So although I still think it’s the weakest composition on the record, I recognize that it’s a brilliant piece of group coordination. The tightness of this performance may be due to the veteran status of the tune in the band’s set—remember, it was one of the three songs they played at their debut Summit High School show.

There’s a detachment to the events in the song that I find unsettling, though, with Reed taking a neutral position on the “she’s down on her knees” and “you better hit her” lines. It makes it tough—for me at least—to figure out what the hell is going on in this song. Street prostitution? Domestic violence? Women’s liberation versus male misogyny? Maybe Lou was being purposely obscure, or maybe I’m just thick. But with the thematic clarity sparkling through on the rest of these songs, and with the avant-garde edginess of the more obscure numbers (”Black Angel …,” “European Son”), this one seems neither here nor there. And for once I’m not digging Lou’s objectivity, which seems too distant on this track for my tastes.

It’s worth recalling that Reed was a songwriter educated as a journalist and trained in part by a poet. The journalist in Reed encourages him to stick to the facts. The poet in him insures that these facts are presented in a collage of evocative images, often beautiful yet at the
same time harsh; this quality seems absent, or diluted, in “There She Goes Again.” I think Reed’s earlier songs are considered his best specifically because of the type of reporting that he was offering at the time. While I would never describe him as an innocent, there
was
more innocence in his approach then than there would, or could, ever be again after his entry into the world of Lower East Side debauchery, and later into the Upper West Side intrigue surrounding Andy Warhol and the Factory. It isn’t so much that the reporting differed, but the reporter certainly did. Here, he sounds prematurely jaded.

As a writer and consummate observer, Lou Reed has always made himself available to drama, soaking up situations like a sponge to squeeze them back out, one shot-glass at a time, into his songs. Reed the songwriter is inextricable from Reed the reporter, but to me he resembles the journalists of his grandparents’ time more than those of his own. His ability to describe what he sees (and does) with a zealot’s enthusiasm make his early work reminiscent of the Muckraking journalism popular at the turn of the 20th century. Like Reed, writers Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens and Ida M. Tarbell were young turks who re-invented their profession, covering for the first time those things previously considered taboo. Reed’s ability to focus on the dark underbelly of life with objectivity and compassion evokes the work of Riis,
the slum reporter whose photo-essay
How the Other Half Lives
revealed the squalor of turn of the century tenement life in Manhattan’s Lower East Side so powerfully it helped launch the American reform movement. What Riis brought to newspaper journalism, and then mainstream book publishing, Reed brought in his own way to rock and popular music. Another proponent of social realism, and a close friend of Lincoln Steffens and other Muckrakers, was Hutchins Hapgood. Hapgood wrote what, sixty years later, could pass for the motto on Lou Reed’s coat of arms: “When a man seeks his stuff for writing from low life, he is at least sure of one thing—namely, that what he sees is genuine.”
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But Reed has most in common, I think, with Lincoln Steffens, who authored
Shame of the Cities
in 1902. Like Reed, Steffens cut his father out of his life for no comprehensible reason, a decision that seems to have affected his attitude toward authority. Like Reed, Steffens was a young man on the cusp of a profession about to challenge (and reverse) the parochial preoccupations which had long limited the subject matter it dealt with; and like Reed he would have an enormous role in affecting
that change. Both men found their primary subjects in—and did their finest work under the influence of—New York City. Each was a representative of the intellectual, sexual and artistic liberation that Greenwich Village underwent in their lifetime. And both have been called vital, creative, striving, and magnetically charming at times. Steffens wrote his finest work as a challenge to the “hypocritical lies that save us from the clear sight of ourselves.”
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Later, when Reed decided to cater to those shocked listeners who were vocally indignant over songs like “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs” and “I’m Waiting for The Man,” an element of tabloid excessiveness crept into his work. While ensuring his post-Velvets success and lionization by ’70s audiences hungry for cartoon decadence, that sensationalist element corrupted the purity of Reed’s earlier lyrics. It was not until the late ’80s that Reed would return to work that offered such clarity. Perhaps his newfound sobriety had him seeing things from a fresh, unaffected perspective once more. Many long-time drug users describe the experience of sobriety as being like a rebirth, and I can attest to the powerful
sense which comes over you—especially during the early stages—that everything suddenly looks new and different.

At one point in the early days of her tenure with the Velvets, Nico and Lou Reed became lovers in a relationship described by John Cale as “both consummated and constipated.”
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Not surprisingly, with so many egos and so many drugs, the tense and rarified atmosphere in and around Warhol’s retinue was less than ideal for romance, and the bloom was soon off the rose. The big chill that settled in between Reed and Nico from that point on made it clear that it was only a matter of time before she would be forced out of the group. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” was written during the early, happier time.

While it has been said that Lou wrote the song especially for his one great love, Shelly Albin, there’s no doubt that the lyrical impetus for the song came from Nico. Reed recalls Nico approaching him one night at the end of 1965 and saying, “Oh Lou, I’ll be your mirror.”
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Intrigued by the statement, and channeling
his infatuation, Lou wrote the song especially for her to sing. Her performance defined the song to the point that in 1971, after Nico, Cale and Reed had all left the group, replacement bassist Doug Yule still used her inflections:

Greg Barrios:
Last night as Doug was singing “I’ll Be your Mirror” I detected the Germanic accent…

Sterling:
Oh yeah, we mimic the way she did it. She never said, “I’ll be your mirror,” it was - “I be your mirrah.” It’s amazing how those songs are still so good.
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Before Nico mastered the song, however, there were some rocky moments. During the studio sessions for the album, Nico insisted on using what Sterling Morrison called her “gotterdammerung voice” instead of the “wispy voice” he liked; the Velvets weren’t having any:

Sterling:
She kept singing “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in her strident voice. Dissatisfied, we kept making her do it over and over again until she broke down and burst into tears. At that point we said “Oh, try it just one more time and then fuck it—if it doesn’t work this time we’re not going to do the song.” Nico sat down and did it exactly right.
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Performance pains aside, Nico truly made the song her own. One reason she was able to fit into an already formed and highly insular band and stake her claim to any song assigned to her was her combination of intelligence and empathy for Lou Reed’s lyrics. Reed said, “She has an amazing mind,” describing her work as “… fantastic … when I gave Nico a song of mine to sing, she would totally understand what was being said and perform it from that standpoint.”
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One of Andy Warhol’s ideas for “I’ll Be Your Mirror” never saw the light of day, and indicates that his conceptual ideas were far beyond his grasp of the mechanics of what was possible in a recording studio in 1966. Andy’s suggestion: that the record be “fixed with a built-in crack so it would go ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ so that it would never reject, it would just play and play until you came over and took the arm off.”
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The song is still considered one of Lou’s finest ballads—it’s Norman Dolph’s favorite song on the record, and one that Reed himself clearly favors: “‘Candy Says’ … ‘Pale Blue Eyes,’ those are my songs, from my personal experience. And ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ … when people think of the Velvet Underground
they think of ‘Heroin.’ I was always more fascinated by ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’”
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Further proof of Reed’s affection came in 1989, when he was putting together an acoustic set for his new band. Working with a pool of approximately 500 songs, he selected “I’ll Be Your Mirror” for the new set list.
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“The Black Angel’s Death Song” is one of the numbers on
The Velvet Underground and Nico
that has lost none of its power to surprise over the past thirty-five years. In 1965, Lou Reed and original percussionist Angus MacLise described their band as “the Western equivalent to the cosmic dance of Shiva. Playing as Babylon goes up in flames,”
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and it’s easy to imagine this song as the soundtrack to a Babylonian conflagration.

The Velvets often experimented with alternate tunings. “Black Angel’s Death Song” is one of several in which the guitars are downtuned a full step, creating a heavier sound that Cale has described as “sexy.” Unlike certain other things considered sexy (say, thong underwear), downtuning was practical, too. The band frequently
dropped a half or whole step to match the tuning range of Cale’s viola. Instead of gut or nylon, John was using a combination of guitar strings and mandolin strings on his instrument, and to try tuning it to standard guitar pitch would bow—if not eventually break—the viola’s neck. It was worth the risk, as the first time Cale plugged in his restrung and amplified viola he heard “a jet engine.” Cale’s contribution to the
sound
of the Velvet Underground, to the entire direction they moved in, was arguably greater than that of any other member, and he was clear in his attribution of where it all began:

The sound of the Velvet Underground really comes from the work that was done with La Monte Young … We found out what a great orchestral noise we could get out of bowing a guitar. We applied it to viola and the violin, and then I filed the bridge of the viola down and played on three strings … it made a great noise; it sounded pretty much like there was an aircraft in the room with you.
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Stylistically, this may be the one song that contains the strongest elements of the Beat poetry that influenced Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, as well as John Cale’s involvement with the Fluxus movement and John Cage.
The best-known story surrounding the song is how it got the Velvets fired just two nights after Andy Warhol came to see them for the first time.

The band had been managed for a brief time by Al Aronowitz, who thought they would benefit from the tightening up that came with a regular residency. Besides a guaranteed gig and paycheck (five dollars per member per night!), playing several sets a night, every night, is the best workout a band can get. The Beatles had clearly profited from their Hamburg tenure, as had the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds during their residencies at the Richmond Hotel in London. The Velvets, however, were less than ecstatic about their Café Bizarre engagement. They had added some cover tunes to their set, and even agreed to have Moe Tucker abandon her drums for a tambourine—a concession to the unmanageable volume levels inherent in such a small space. But after being forced to work on Christmas, the band was less than enthusiastic about carrying on. Sterling Morrison tells it this way:

We were fired from our first gig as the Velvet Underground. We played “Black Angel’s Death Song” and the owner came up to us on a break and said, “You play that song one more time and you’re fired.” So we opened with it next set. The best version of it perhaps ever played. We just wanted to do whatever we wanted to do. And some people came up and said,
“Hey, would you like to have a record contract?” We said, “Might as well.”
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John Cale adds:

“Black Angel’s Death Song” was a slap in the face, confrontational: “We don’t care where you are, we’re over here”—very defensive. It’s trying to have as many levels as you want in a song, not just those that pop songs seem to fall into.
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“European Son” is dedicated to Lou Reed’s Syracuse friend and literary mentor, Delmore Schwartz. The once-renowned poet disdained rock lyrics, so much so that right up until Schwartz’s death Reed kept secret the fact of his involvement in rock music and the Velvet Underground, fearing that knowledge of his musical activities would gravely disappoint his former teacher. The Velvets had wanted to dedicate a song to Schwartz, and—given the latter’s aversion to rock lyrics—they chose the cut with the least number of words in it (just over fifty). That lyrical sparseness gives the song plenty of space for John Cale to apply some of the techniques of
the avant-garde Fluxus movement which had originally drawn him to New York, and Reed and Morrison rose to the occasion with some inspired guitar chaos. The song stands as a key influence on bands like Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and the Violent Femmes (whose “Country Death Song” evokes “European Son” whenever I hear it). As Sterling Morrison has reflected: