I’m Waiting for the Man

I guess I don’t have to tell you what man Lou is waiting for and why. I can only comment that $26 went a much longer way ’67. You couldn’t buy very much heroin for $26 today, and also I’m afraid that all the shady characters have been swept away from Lexington Avenue long ago. Nevertheless, the general intent hasn’t changed much over the years. I’m sure what Lou Reed put to paper in 1967 remains a universal experience, amirite? I mean, who hasn’t trekked to the bad side of town to buy drugs before? Whaddya mean not all of you have bought heroin!? In any case, if the jangle and feedback of the Velvets isn’t alienating and culty enough for ya, check out the cover Nico cut. She, more than anyone else, understood the true meaning of the song – most likely a lot better than Lou Reed himself ever did. Nico was neck deep in heroin by the time she recorded her 1981 album Drama of Exile, and her attitude was very much in keeping with the material:

[Aura label head Aaron] Sixx admitted that Nico “didn’t give a shit what happened to the LP, she just wanted the money for drugs.” Yet despite these unconventional circumstances, Drama of Exile would see Nico receive some of the best reviews of her career.

— Dave Thompson, Better to Burn Out: The Cult of Death in Rock ‘N’ Roll

Waiting for the Man was certainly a brilliant choice for her. She didn’t have very much contribution in the recording of The Velvet Underground & Nico, having been roped in by Andy Warhol for glamour purposes, but she lived that album for the rest of her life. Lou Reed never did as many degenarate things as his songs lead us to imagine and in no time at all he was living the high life with David Bowie. Speaking of whom, there he is with Lou, still having a real good time together. It’s great to see those two jamming together on a particularly rockin’ mid-90s David Bowie song – oh wait, that’s a cover of Waiting for the Man that mysteriously just sounds exactly like a mid-90′s David Bowie song.

I’m Sticking With You

I bet a lot of you didn’t even realize that The Velvet Underground had a girl drummer. At least not at first. Once you started learning a little bit you found out that Maureen Tucker was really a trailblazer, one of the very first women to play an instrument in a band without becoming a hyper-sexualized focal point. She went by the name Moe, kept her hair short, dressed plainly and studiously avoided whatever small amount of spotlight was afforded by being a Velvet Underground member. She looked like one of the guys and was accepted as one. Her approach to drumming was one of radical simplicity. She used a stripped down kit and eschewed cymbals as too show-offy. The minimalism of her style was an integral part of the Velvets’ sound, which took them absolutely nowhere at the time, but has since been celebrated as one of rock’s biggest influences. Tucker didn’t gain much glory from her pivotal years with the Velvet Underground, nor did she do anything glamorous with the rest of her life. She made a couple of low-key solo albums and played sporadically with old friends like John Cale, but mostly she just lived an anonymous life. She married, had five children, settled down in Georgia and spent years working at Walmart. All par for the course for someone who had no interest in being a superstar. Her handful of vocal contributions with the Velvets will never be radio hits, but they have gained an increased following, thanks to being featured prominently in the film Juno. That movie besides being, like, the cutest, made a hit of its eccentric soundtrack of quirky and twee music by the likes of Kimya Dawson, Cat Power and this long-forgotten gem of a Moe Tucker vocal.

I’m Set Free

“I’m set free to find a new illusion”

This must be the most mournful song about freedom ever written. There’s depths of meaninful deepness to be delved into here. “What is the nature of freedom?” we could ask “is it even a real thing?” Then we’d have real in-depth philosophical discourse about how freedom is itself an illusion because man cannot exist without something, someone, somewhere to be beholden to. Maybe you don’t think of Lou Reed as a philosopher king, but he really hit the mainline this time. What sort of freedom he meant only he knows, but I infer that it’s the spiritual and/or emotional kind. If you want to be pedestrian in your interpretation, it kind of sounds like a breakup song. Which totally works, because that’s exactly how it goes in relationships – you breathe a sigh of relief to escape from one and immediately hop off to find the next one. I suppose that could just as easily apply to belief systems. You become disillusioned with whatever faith or creed you’ve been living with all your life, and vow to think for yourself from now on, but before you know it you’ve joined a cult or something. Because most of us don’t have the intellectual wherewithall to think for ourselves and form our own opinions. We all need some guidelines for living, someone to teach or tell us who to be. So life is an ongoing cycle of falling in and out of a series of illusions, be it the romantic sort or the philosophical. Dwell on that if you will, while I go eat a cup of Ramen.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

I can’t think of a more inspiring song. I wish there was somebody that comforting around, and I wish I could be that comforting. I guess it’s for anybody who doesn’t see the goodness inside themselves. They need someone to offer them a mirror. Sometimes you wish they could see themselves the way you see them, and sometimes you wish they could see you that way, when they do neither. That’s sad, and you want to help, but don’t know how, don’t know if they’d let you. Which are all kind of depressing thoughts, but that doesn’t make it not a good aspiration, to be someone’s mirror, in case they don’t know. In that sense, yes, this is an inspiring song, in another sense a sad one. I find it very comforting to hear, but maybe that’s just my reaction to Nico’s voice.

I Can’t Stand It

“I live with thirteen dead cats, a purple dog that wears spats“

What have I been telling you about Lou Reed? One of America’s greatest poets, living or dead, that’s what! Oh give it up, he was really young when he wrote this one. It was one of the earliest Velvet Underground demos, and Reed later revived it on his first solo album. The Velvet Underground version resurfaced on the Peel Slowly & See collection. Both versions are good, the older one obviously being very raw and abrasive on the ears. Even though it’s kind of a silly song, it’s certainly a common enough sentiment, expressed with originality. So, points for that.

Hey Mr. Rain

Enough with these famous great songs everybody knows the words to. You think you’re good because you know Heroin? Here’s a Velvet Underground song nobody knows, and it’s one of their best. As you oughta know, the Velvets only put out four proper albums, but they recorded a ton of great material that didn’t make the cut in that limited amount of space. A lot of unreleased songs later surfaced, in a much shinier form, on Lou Reed’s solo albums. Many, many more original demos and never released songs finally saw the light of day on the Peel Slowly and See compilation. That box set is, as far as I know, the definitive Velvet Underground collection. There may well be some bigger, better more recent box set I’m not aware of, but I think Peel Slowly is the gold standard. If you need to start a decent record collection, this is where to start. It’s all the original four classic albums, augmented with bonus tracks, most of which turn out to be pretty classic themselves. The demo disc isn’t great listening, but it is an educational look at the creative process, allowing you to track a song’s progress from raw idea to fully formed. Yeah, I really think you should buy this box, if it’s still in print. I remember when my dad bought it from BMG Music Service, which is a thing that used to be a thing back when purchasing cds was a thing, and we listened to it a lot and it was my best introduction to the Velvet Underground. Not my first, but my best. Then I got a little older and had to buy one of my own. I usually don’t advocate for buying physical things when you can just download, but this has a peel-off banana sticker on the box, so it’s obviously worth buying.

Heroin

In 1967 The Velvet Underground deliberately shattered every pop music convention. They were atonal, they were inharmonious, they wallowed in feedback, they were deadpan, they wrote songs about all the wrong things. Not many people noticed them back then, but those who did had their consciousness irrevocably expanded. It’s hard to underestimate how unacceptable a song about heroin was in those days. Even the wildest experimenters of the times wouldn’t dare to go there. Never mind that it was more likely than not an exercise in journalistic verisimilitude on Lou Reed’s part. No one had ever written about taking heroin before, or at least not openly. And though the Velvets are now credited as earth shakingly influential, in reality not that much has changed. Most people still don’t know who they are, can’t abide their weirdness and aren’t even interested in the most diluted of their musical progeny. The Velvet Underground remain an acquired taste unpalatable to the mainstream. So far ahead of their time the world will probably never fully catch up. Nor do we want it to. What then would we ‘in the know’ have to talk about?

The Gift

If I ever got drunk enough to do karaoke without dying of alcohol poisoning, this would be my song. No singing required, for The Gift isn’t really a song. Or it’s two songs in one. Or a song and a story. It’s designed, if you have the two-channel, two-speaker stereo setup, so that on one speaker an instrumental song is heard, while on the other John Cale reads a short story. That neat effect is kind of lost if you’re listening on a crappy iPod dock or boombox or similar low-rent kit. The Velvet Underground did a lot of experimentation with using speaker channels for striking effect. On The Murder Mystery four speakers are optimal to fully enjoy the unrelated, overlapping vocals. It’s the opposite of the wall of sound, where layers of vocals and instruments are meshed perfectly into a seamless whole. The story, written by Lou Reed for a college assignment, takes name and influence from O. Henry, with swift characterization and abrupt surprise ending. I’m convinced Lou Reed could have found his way into the pantheon of great American novelists, had he not chosen to tell his stories in verse. Not everyone who’s good at poetry excels at prose, but Reed’s songs are on the edge between – any one of his songs could be punched and molded into story form. Which could be a cool project for him in the future, I think. I’d like to see him sit down and write a book. Maybe we could find out what happened when Marsha Bronson opened that box.

Femme Fatale

There’s songs you like and enjoy and songs you love, and there’s songs that get inside your head and affect your life. This is one of the latter kind, rare as they are. There are only a handful of songs that I heard as a child and internalized as life instructions. There may be more but the ones that come to mind are Bob Dylan’s She Belongs To Me, in which the subject clearly does no such thing as belong to anyone, and Joe Jackson’s Is She Really Going Out With Him? which has been the basis of my entire romantic life. And Femme Fatale, supposedly an ode to Warhol’s shooting star Edie Sedgwick. I guess I’ve always thought a femme fatale was the ultimate thing to be. Though I don’t want to be cruel like the woman in the song, Edie or whoever she may be. She sounds like a bitch. I don’t try to bring anyone down. But I’ve secretly always wanted to be that one woman who turns all the heads and makes the boys turn on each other and cuts a swath, so to speak. Which is a pretty universal desire, I think. Every woman wants to be wanted, and plenty go about creating as much drama as they can to reinforce that self-image. Now, I’m not one to make drama just to entertain myself, but I’ll confess I do relish those times when drama springs up with no bidding from me. But being a femme fatale is just a generic female fantasy that everyone indulges in every once in a while. What really got into my head was the line “You’re written in her book, you’re number 37, have a look.” Not only is Edie eating men for breakfast, she’s also keeping score in a book. Whether 37 refers to chronological position or is a performance-based score is unclear, but either way, the number’s not good. I decided, as a kid with no clear understanding of the implications, that I would grow up and keep tabs in a book of the lovers I had. And I do, only not in a book but the modern way, with photos on my hard drive. You can tell me that’s a very cavalier attitude to have towards romance. I know. That’s kind of the meaning of femme fatality. Then you can tell me I’m an idiot for having habits that are based on words I heard in a song. Maybe I’m crazy, but wait till I tell you the damage Joe Jackson has wrought. If it’s something Lou Reed thinks Edie Sedgwick would do, then it must be impeccably cool. Guide to life; one, make conquests; two, keep track of them. And isn’t it interesting the random and seemingly innocuous places that our adult neuroses and idiosyncrasies spring from? Who knows what will stick to a young mind and put roots there and keep driving them for the rest of their lives?

Beginning To See the Light

 

The Velvet Underground: Great at music; terrible at thiniking up names for their albums.