![]() Remembering their 1966 shows with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention at Graham’s famed Fillmore West venue, Tucker says, “Boy, he hated us. There wasn’t much West Coast love for the Velvets either, especially not from Bill Graham, promotional patron saint of the psychedelic scene. “They’d leave in droves, these were rich society people and artists and stuff, and they didn’t want to hear a band, let alone what we were doing.”Ĭlick to load video 6. “There were so many times when we’d play some kind of art show and they’d invited Andy and we were the exhibit,” laughs Tucker in the film. The Velvets eventually built up a reputation in New York, but in mid-1966 they toured as part of their manager/producer/mentor Andy Warhol’s experimental multi-media extravaganza The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, an experience encompassing music, film, dance, and light show. The first real Velvet Underground tour was a train wreck Listeners were commanded to “do The Ostrich,” with instructions like, “Put your head between your knees.” It didn’t exactly become the next Twist, but the Velvets reportedly adopted the tuning for slightly less danceable songs like the S&M saga “Venus in Furs” and “Heroin.” 5. Reed allegedly created a custom-made tuning for the track that involved tuning every string to the same note. When Reed and Cale first hooked up they had a band called The Primitives and cut a single called “The Ostrich” for the low-budget label Pickwick, where Reed was still employed as a staff songwriter. Lou Reed and John Cale tried to start a dance craze Koussevitzky, she was in tears.” The classical music mainstream was clearly a less than glove-tight fit for Cale. “I remember that one of the people in the front row got up and ran out,” he says in the film, “and that was Mrs. The piece ended with Cale taking an ax to the piano. The audience was full of people a young composer would want to impress, like Olga Koussevitzky, widow of composer and Tanglewood bigwig Serge Koussevitzky. John Cale killed his classical career with an axĪnother 1963 avant-garde dust-up for John Cale came when he performed a piece of his own at legendary Massachusetts classical venue Tanglewood. “Which in fact turned out to be a lot more than I made with the Velvet Underground.”Ĭlick to load video 3. “We got a royalty check for $2.79,” remembered Reed of his first-ever recording. At 14, guitarist and backup singer Lou (then billed as Lewis) wrote the B-side to the band’s only single, a doo wop-tinged stroll that features R&B giant King Curtis on sax. In the 50s, Lou Reed was a teenage rock’n’roller, living on Long Island and working with a band called The Jades. Lou Reed was already making records at 14 Despite his unstinting earnestness, Cale ultimately inspired only titters of nervous laughter from the studio audience. He even did a brief demonstration on the studio’s piano, but early-60s American TV viewers weren’t ready for minimalist musical concepts. An epic John Cage-produced performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (comprised of a simple phrase repeated 840 times) earned Cale an appearance on TV game show I’ve Got a Secret, where celebrity guests had to guess his distinction. In 1963 the Velvet Underground co-founder was deeply embedded in the avant-garde music scene. A pre-Velvet Underground John Cale made America laugh on TV Listen to the official soundtrack to The Velvet Underground, out now. Here are just a few of the juicy tidbits revealed in The Velvet Underground. In the process, some annals are amplified, others debunked, and new ones unveiled. Interviewing surviving members John Cale and Maureen Tucker along with tons of the band’s intimates, influences, peers, and proteges, Haynes gets the inside scoop on the Velvet Underground’s story, stitching it into an intoxicating tapestry with the avant-garde film, art, writing, and music that were part of the band’s transgressive milieu. So Haynes seems like the ideal auteur to document the most unconventional rock legends of the 60s in The Velvet Underground. The last time director Todd Haynes tackled an American musical legend, he redefined the musical biopic with 2007’s I’m Not There, his leftfield look at Bob Dylan’s legacy. “That’s not what we were doing.” Probably no other band has had such a drastic disparity between initial reception and posthumous notoriety, and more than 50 years after their final album, it’s finally time for a major Velvet Underground documentary. “We didn’t expect to sell records,” said Lou Reed about the Velvet Underground.
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