--excerpted from The Velvet Underground’s entry in Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia (Grosset & Dunlap, 1969)

In reducing rock and roll to its harshest essentials, the new wave took Lou Reed’s aesthete-punk conceit to a place he never intended. For the Velvets the aesthete-punk stance was a way of surviving in a world that was out to kill you; the point was not to glorify the punk, or even to say fuck you to the world, but to be honest about the strategies people adopt in a desperate situation. The Velvets were not nihilists but moralists. In their universe nihilism regularly appears as a vivid but unholy temptation, love and its attendant vulnerability as scary and poignant imperatives. Though Lou Reed rejected optimism, he was enough of his time to crave transcendence. And finally-- as "Rock And Roll" makes explicit-- the Velvets’ use of a mass art form was a metaphor for transcendence, for connection, for resistance to solipsism and despair.

-- from Ellen Willis’ essay on The Velvet Underground in Stranded: Rock And Roll For A Desert Island (edited by Greil Marcus; Knopf, 1979)

They may have been using a "mass art form," but The Velvet Underground (Lou Reed, guitar and lead vocals; Sterling Morrison, guitar and bass; John Cale, bass, electric viola and keyboards, replaced in late ‘68 by Doug Yule; and Maureen Tucker, drums) sure had a hard time reaching the masses with it. Of their four original albums-- The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), White Light / White Heat (1968), The Velvet Underground (1969), and Loaded (1970)-- only the first and the last made so much as a token appearance on the Billboard Top 200 LP chart. Their records didn’t get much radio play, not even on the new "underground" FM stations. Their first two albums were released on Verve, a jazz label that had no idea what to do with them and so did nothing; for the third they moved to Verve’s parent label, MGM, whose big acts at the time included Herman’s Hermits and The Cowsills. They never had a hit single, and aside from their stint as part of Andy Warhol’s mixed-media event The Exploding Plastic Inevitable they didn’t tour much. During their "career" relatively few people even knew The Velvet Underground existed-- and one imagines that of those relative few, many were probably put off by press notices like Miss Roxon’s (not to mention the hostile / bewildered EPI reviews with which their first LP cover was defiantly annotated).

Yet in the years following the band’s demise, it was the critics who were largely responsible for redeeming The Velvet Underground, for establishing The Legend. Lou Reed is fond of defending the trashier of his ‘70s efforts (Transformer, Rock ‘N Roll Animal, Sally Can’t Dance) on the grounds that he "had to get famous, so that the Velvets stuff would get reissued"-- and it’s true that his solo success (and notoriety) did much to focus attention on his former group. But I’m inclined to assign more credit to CREEM Magazine-- from the dawn of the ‘70s to when the mag first folded in 1987, they scarcely let an issue go by without at least mentioning The Velvet Underground. (They even put them on the cover-- in 1987!) In particular the late great Lester Bangs, an early convert, almost single-handedly convinced his devoted readership (which included pretty much all of his fellows in the rock fourth estate) that the Velvets were not only good (at the time there wasn’t even critical consensus on that point!) but, ahem, Important-- and in this case at least he did have some genuinely deep and brilliant music with which to fortify his sometimes credibility-straining enthusiasm.

And such is the power of the press (not to mention the music) that although not one of those four original albums has so much as gone "gold" yet, they’ve also never gone completely out of print. They’ve been joined in the marketplace by several volumes of out-takes and lo-fi live recordings (not to mention countless bootlegs), and of course the exquisite box set Peel Slowly & See. The Velvets have even been inducted into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame (surely the least-commercially-successful act of the post-Elvis era to receive that dubious honor).

Critical consensus now reckons The Velvet Underground to be the most influential group in rock history bar The Beatles (and maybe / maybe not The Rolling Stones). It’s hard to argue with that consensus. The Velvets’ progeny include Jonathan Richman, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Patti Smith, The Stooges, Spacemen 3 and its outgrowths, Pere Ubu, Stereolab, Can (and virtually every other German and East European rock band of note), Joy Division, David Bowie, REM, Roxy Music, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, Yo La Tengo, The Dream Syndicate, Cowboy Junkies, Television, Bailter Space, Galaxie 500 and Luna, literally hundreds if not thousands of others-- though precious few of them can boast even a fraction of the Velvets’ grace (spiritual or rhythmic). (The above roll call doesn’t even take into account the exponentially greater number of bands who were influenced by bands who were influenced by The Velvet Underground...)

So perhaps rock criticism can be a force for Good. But the fact remains that people with nothing better to do than write rock criticism (and who are, essentially, paid by the word) inevitably tend to be people who talk a lot better than they listen (I am, of course, exempting myself from this accusation-- for one thing, I’m not paid at all); and when it comes to historical matters, they’re a lot more likely to parrot someone else’s "research" than to think for themselves. Despite the laudable efforts of Ellen Willis and a very few others, the popular image of The Velvet Underground is still not at all far removed from Lillian Roxon’s. So let us now attempt to take a fresh look at The Velvet Underground and see if we can determine What Really Makes Them Important, using received rockcrit wisdom as our guide:

"They expanded the musical vocabulary of rock, introducing feedback, dissonance, drones, white noise, extended improv, atonal / aleatory / free-form blah blah blah..." Bushwa. Even if conservatory-trained John Cale was one of the few rock musicians who knew what "aleatory" meant, rock was clearly headed in noisy directions well before they came on the scene-- "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" and "My Generation," The Yardbirds’ (and Cream’s) rave-ups, "See My Friends" and all that raga-rock, "Eight Miles High," The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators (if that damned electric jug wasn’t atonal, what was?), "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Strawberry Fields Forever"... all came out months before The Velvet Underground & Nico. (Bear in mind that back in the ‘60s, pop music progressed more in five months’ time than it does in five years’ time in the ‘90s. You can look it up.) And while it’s true that VU&N was more difficult to listen to than those records, one suspects that had more to do with the haste in which it was recorded (each of their Verve / MGM albums was begun and completed in not much more than a day) than with any conscious attempt at audience alienation-- some of Bob Dylan’s mega-successful ‘65 recordings had been at least as harsh and shrill. And while White Light / White Heat remains an over-the-top masterpiece, the band members to a person were disappointed in it from a technical standpoint-- Cale: "We always played loud... but the loudness was supposed to bring clarity, and that wasn’t true of the second album..." Morrison: "...the album is all fuzzy; there’s all that white noise."

"They broke new lyrical ground for rock, singing about such previously taboo subjects as hard drugs and unorthodox sexual practices..." Well, there really has never been another song like "Heroin," and "Venus In Furs" can still make people squirm. But in the interests of historical accuracy: The Fugs were in there with their picks and shovels before the Velvets even existed.

"Their world view was dark and nihilistic at a time when everyone else was singing about peace and flowers..." A notion eloquently refuted by Ellen Willis (see above quote), and I’m with her. Besides, The Doors (whose first album was a hit when VU&N was released) had a darker vision than The Velvet Underground! Even Jefferson Airplane, whose Surrealistic Pillow LP defined for the time capsules the romance of the Hippie Moment, didn’t turn a blind eye to the dark side of the counterculture-- a scant year-and-a-half later they were to produce Crown Of Creation, which along with The Mothers’ We’re Only In It For The Money served as the Hippie Moment’s most caustic and incisive post-mortem (both remain unsettling listening experiences three decades on). And the Airplane and The Doors were the most popular bands in America during the Velvets’ time.

"Their musical style was utterly unique-- no one else at that time sounded remotely like The Velvet Underground..." Very true, and perhaps Important inasmuch as a lot of bands now do sound remotely like the Velvets. They were a true band, meaning that the whole was substantially more than the sum of its parts-- none of them were technically brilliant (not even Cale), but they played extraordinarily well together, with a distinct band personality and a second-natural knack for rhythmic, melodic, and dynamic interaction. And you could say exactly the same in regards to each of the other period bands I’ve mentioned, or for The Grateful Dead or The Lovin’ Spoonful or Country Joe & The Fish or... you get the picture. And speaking of pictures--

"They dressed all in black, and always wore shades..." You think I’m kidding? For English observers this is at least as important a consideration as their music! Fact is, it was mainly during their Exploding Plastic Inevitable tenure that they wore shades-- and mainly because of the strobe lights. And I’ll just add that on the aforementioned CREEM cover (a 1969 photo) they’re sporting colorful paisley shirts. And blue jeans.

Don’t get me wrong. I came not to bury The Velvet Underground, but to praise them-- and to do my little bit to try to maybe keep them from being buried.

Maybe it was useful at one time-- but after a quarter of a century all that they-were-X-number-of-years-ahead-of-their-time-and-they-were-the-first-to-do-this-and-they-did-that-before-Eno crap, even when it’s true, becomes just so much embalming fluid. It fixes their achievement in time and space, like a museum installation-- or, for that matter, like a Rock Encyclopedia; it imposes, retrospectively, a simple, linear, empirical logic on something of multi-dimensional shape and scope that was largely made-up-as-they-went-along. More to the point, it makes a big fuss over things that are finally irrelevant; formalism is not the heart of rock and roll (or of art). In other words, it doesn’t really matter what, say, the first rock and roll record to feature guitar feedback was, if the record doesn’t have anything else going for it.

Ultimately, the Importance of The Velvet Underground lies not in what they did or when they did it, but in what their music NOW DOES-- to, and for, YOU, the lucky audience.

The Velvet Underground. Not a probe... not an exploration... not an experiment... but a whole, complete reality. ["I’m Set Free" fades out in mid-guitar solo...] The Velvet Underground.

[the organ-drenched rhythm-jam from "What Goes On" fades in...] The Velvet Underground. This is you. You’ll find your love... your hope... YOUR reality. The Velvet Underground on MGM Records will tell you how to feel. LISTEN... [music crescendos abruptly, then fades...]

It can be said without exaggeration that, like 5-year-old Jenny (Ginny?), my "life was saved by rock and roll"-- probably more times than I even realize. That ad’s meant to be funny, of course, and it is (although those who were under the impression that The Velvet Underground made liturgical music for black masses might conceivably have been unnerved by it...), but like a lot of funny things it’s also pretty true, at least for me. Mind you, The Velvet Underground never ever tried to tell anybody what to feel; but in times of great desensitization (and the ’90s have been even worse than the ‘70s in that regard) their records can indeed seem to allow you to feel... maybe even to feel good, and feel like you’ve earned that much. Ironic, when you consider how much the Velvets have been credited with contributing to our notions of Cool (i.e. cold, withdrawn, passive, passionless behavior and style-- must have been the shades...).

Or perhaps that’s getting a little too heavy-- after all, isn’t rock and roll supposed to make you feel good? The Velvets may not have been hedonists per se, but when it came to rockin’ they was champs. You don’t have to pick up on the lyrical content at all to be drawn in by the sheer glorious physicality of their sound... of course, that’s part of "feeling," too.

One of the most remarkable things about the Velvet Underground’s body of work is that, though they have an immediately identifiable sound and style, no two of their albums seem at all alike. The Velvets had the same kind of artistic restlessness The Beatles had, and within a much briefer time frame.

That said, The Velvet Underground & Nico (the latter being a Warhol-recommended "chanteuse" who departed after the album was released to pursue an even more quixotic solo career) does function as a kind of "map of their music" (to paraphrase The Doors’ description of their own debut LP). The overall impression created is dark, noisy, more than a little paranoid and seemingly amoral (as opposed to immoral)-- "Heroin" makes a point of being neither for nor against, but simply about; similarly, no specific judgment is passed upon the characters in songs like "I’m Waiting For The Man" and "Venus In Furs." The album concludes with "The Black Angel’s Death Song" and "European Son," likably self-indulgent exercises in sonic (and verbal) envelope-pushing. But the ballads Lou wrote for Nico to sing (including the album opener "Sunday Morning," which Lou ended up keeping for himself) provide a disarmingly sweet balance, and even a specific reassurance: "When you think the night has seen your mind, / That inside you’re twisted and unkind, / Let me stand to show that you are blind-- / Please put down your hands, / ‘Cause I see you-- / I’ll be your mirror..."

White Light / White Heat pushes the Velvets’ dark ‘n noisy side to new extremes. It’s easily their bleakest and most chaotic album; for those with a sufficiently warped sensibility, it’s also madly funny, particularly Cale’s reading of Reed’s short story "The Gift," and the epic "Sister Ray." (I gotta admit it. "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is one thing, but fifteen years on I still have trouble getting through all seventeen minutes of "Sister Ray"; and after fifteen years I’m still inclined to believe that this must be a failing on my part, rather than on the Velvets’. Such is fandom.) My own White Light favorites are "Here She Comes Now, " the album’s lone ballad and possibly the most uptight ballad ever recorded, and the downright psychotic "I Heard Her Call My Name," whose left stereo channel is completely dominated by Lou’s electroshock guitar. (Sterling reportedly quit the band because of that mix, but he got over it.) That song, even more than the rest of the album, is LOUD no matter what volume setting you play it on. (Freshman year of college, my roommate and I were forced to share a dorm suite with a pair that would broadcast Lionel Richie’s "All Night Long" at liver-calcifying volume several times a day; we soon took to retaliating with White Light and Kick Out The Jams. They had the better stereo, we had the louder music; we inevitably prevailed. We were not very popular in our dorm.)

The Velvet Underground, by contrast, is quiet no matter how high you crank it. It’s a bona-fide song cycle that takes up where the first album’s ballads left off, though not all of these songs are ballads. The songs raise a lot of thorny questions about love, sex, identity, reality, illusion, enlightenment, delusion, sin, redemption. Typically, Lou proffers no answers, which is good. He ain’t no guru, and concrete answers to existential queries are not to be trusted in any case. The overall tenor is reserved, stoic, yet confidential; mysterious as a castle explored by candlelight; a tad blue, but ultimately comforting. Of all my favorite Velvet Underground albums, my very favorite.

If The Velvet Underground is a discontent-of-winter type album, Loaded represents the first warm windows-open days of spring. An album of hope and renewal; an album of downright hilarity. The Velvets had finally gotten signed to a proper rock label (Atlantic, more specifically their Cotillion subsidiary) that actually understood and liked what they were doing. They even had plenty of studio time for a change, and the resultant album shows it-- it’s positively (some would say negatively) swamped with overdubs of multiple guitars, keyboards, percussion, and backing vocals (even the occasional extra lead vocal!). To their credit, this doesn’t seem to have interfered with their spontaneity, at least not Lou’s or Sterling’s-- indeed, to these ears it just makes the record that much more of a hoot. (Admittedly, not everyone wants that out of a Velvet Underground album, but ya gotta lighten up sometimes.)

Unfortunately, / Ironically, / Tragically, the band was falling apart at the time. There were policy disagreements between Reed and the band’s manager; there were reportedly ego problems with newest member Doug Yule, who ended up singing a number of songs on the album that he probably shouldn’t have because Lou’s voice was blown; Maureen Tucker was heavily pregnant and unable to drum on the album sessions. Lou would soon quit the band for good, just as the album was nearing completion, and would later complain bitterly that "Sweet Jane" and "New Age" were butchered in his absence.

But you’d never know of the behind-the-scenes machinations to hear Lou sing (or try to) on Loaded-- croaking and laughing his way through "Jane," "Rock And Roll," and "Cool It Down" (twice), pulling off a perfect John Kay impression (perhaps it’s all his voice could do that day) on "Head Held High" and a sly, sweet-despite-himself recitation on the doo-wop-worthy "I Found A Reason," drawl-bellowing around his own squirrelly guitar riff and a peculiar pushme-pullyou rhythm track on "Train ‘Round The Bend," he sounds like everything’s gonna be alright forever. A finer final testament you’ll not find.

A too-brief but nonetheless full and shapely body of work.

The box set Peel Slowly And See is virtually everything a veteran or neophyte Velvet Underground fan could hope for, and more. Sure, I could quibble, but let’s face it: if it were up to me this thing would be ten CDs rather than a mere five, and I sure can’t complain about what did make the cut.

Besides the four original albums in their entirety (even Loaded is here, on loan from Atlantic-- and they even went to the trouble of restoring the bits that were excised from "Sweet Jane," "New Age" and "Rock And Roll" on the original release!) and most of the out-takes that first saw the official light of day on the 1985 collection VU (and one track from the follow-up, Another View), there’s scads of previously unreleased (in most cases unbootlegged, even) material, including a full "bonus" disc of early Reed / Cale / Morrison demos (that are fun for the longtime fan to hear, at least once, but prove conclusively that the Velvets were not ready for a recording contract in 1965) and a slew of fine Loaded out-takes that make one wish that had been a double-LP.

Though The Velvet Underground were truly unfortunate in the ‘60s to be stuck with a clueless company like MGM / Verve, they get the last laugh-- for that company’s catalog is now in the hands of PolyGram, and PolyGram’s reissue man Bill Levenson is a Velvet Underground fan. For over a decade now he’s been trying to see to it that the Velvets (and their ever-expanding audience) are done right by; Peel Slowly And See is nearly as much a testament to Levenson as it is to the band. (And let us not forget Bill Inglot and the other good folks at Rhino, current custodians of the Atlantic catalog-- without them this collection would have been a mere four discs rather than a mere five.)

Everything here-- everything-- sounds noticeably better than it ever has before, and the whole shebang is packaged in a thoughtful and exquisite manner. The front features a precise reduction of Andy Warhol’s infamous "banana device" (that’s what it says in the credits here: "The name `THE VELVET UNDERGROUND’ and the banana device are registered trademarks..."-- hee hee!) and the booklet includes some killer photos that even I’ve never seen before. Even (perhaps especially) if you already have most of this stuff, you should buy the box. It’s that reet.

Dionysians / Apollonians; avant-garde chamber group / rock and roll dance band; violent nihilists / compassionate humanists; white noise tornado / neo-folk tonic; satanists / moralists-- The Velvet Underground, all things to all people (well, some people), and all present and accounted for in a handy 6 x 12 cardboard box (with banana device). Honey, I’ve found a reason to keep livin’. Some people work very hard and eventually do get it right. Watch out!-- the world’s ahead of you. Believe what you hear and start shakin’ to this fine fine music-- it’ll be alright.