But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

The history of the Velvet Underground is so incidental that it almost doesn’t matter. That is the first clue to the band’s immortality, the very idea that their story is so offhand that it cannot eclipse the total impact of their music. The second clue is this: the very inadvertency of their actions is the best definition of the band’s meaning. It’s as if the Velvets’ lack of foresight had, in some way, to be compensated for by an abundance of critical hindsight.

There is no tribute to the Velvet Underground that hasn’t already been written, no praise that has not already been sung. Yet, as with the Beatles and Elvis Presley, the Velvets approach so close to the borders of myth that their story remains amorphous, adrift on the time of retelling. To write about the Velvets is to discover the frustration of Borges’ Book of Sand, a nightmarish text that never ends.

Many feel that the Velvets introduced (to steal the band’s phrase) a New Age to rock and that with them modern rock truly began. (It didn’t, of course. It began with the Beatles, and even after the assassination of Lennon, modernism in rock still has us in its clutches.) However, the real gift of the Velvets was out-and-out cultism, the beginning of an era when private obsession and solipsism would be the rule of thumb. “The Velvets were basically a cult group,” Lester Bangs once wrote, reviewing them posthumously before he set out on a series of slugfests with their former leader, “which means that they were not particularly commercial and had a hard-core coterie of fans who heard them in a way that other people perhaps did not.” Ellen Willis has pointed out that the Velvets ran counter to the tradition of rock ’n’ roll as mass art. “The Velvets were the first important rock ’n’ roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience,” writes Willis, “...the Velvety’ music was too overtly intellectual^ stylized, and distanced to be commercial. Like pop art, which was very much a part of the Velvets’ world, it was anti-art made by anti-elite elitists.”

Needless to say, we are in the midst of an age of cultism which treasures a sense of discovery and proprietorship above all else. Too much of what is regarded as objects for cult worship, though, is afflicted with the malady that Andrew Sarris has called “terminal cultism” (i.e., Rocky Horror, Joy Division, and Celebrity Skin). As Sarris observed in the December 18, 1978, edition of the Village Voice:

The big difference between seminal and terminal cultism is that the former tries to develop a sense of historical continuity whereas the latter revels in the orgasmic uniqueness of the particular occasion. Seminal cultism involves evaluation as well as elucidation. The good m ust still be sifted from the bad in the realm of aesthetics. Terminal cultism eventually degenerates into mindlessly uncritical incantation as the distance diminishes between the dosing sensibility of the viewer and the illusory inevitability of the spectacle.

Although Sarris’ point of reference is cinema, his pronouncements still ring true when applied to the entire barrage of American cults. Even if their history seems accidental, the Velvets did intentionally cater to the idea of becoming a curio of cultism (why else name a rock group after an obscure paperback about sexual depravity?), and as a result, they became the first example of a seminal cult band in rock history. The question is not why the Velvet Underground remained a cult band during their brief existence (1965-1970) — that was obviously what they wanted and perhaps secretly what their fans wanted, too; the question is, what essentially prevented the Velvets from becoming just another case of terminal rock cultism a la the Savage Rose, Slade, or Van Dyke Parks?

THE ESSENTIAL VEVET VINYL

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

The Velvet Underground-Etc." (Plastic

Inevitable)

The Velvet Underground and Nico (Verve)

White Light/White Heat (Verve)

The Velvet Underground (MOM)

Loaded (Cotillion)

1969: Velvet Underground Live (Mercury)

The Velvet Underground Live at Max's

Kansas City (Cotillion)

Velvet Underground: 1967-1969 (MGM/

Golden Archive Series)

The Story Of. .. Velvet Underground (Poly

dor import, Germany)

LOU REED

Lou Reed (RCA)

Berlin (RCA)

Rock 'n' RollAnirnal (RCA)

Coney island Baby (RCA)

Street Hassle (Arista)

The Bells (Arista)

Rock and Roil Diary 1967-1980 (Arista)

JOHN CALE

Vintage Violence (Columbia)

Paris 1919 (Reprise)

Fear (Island)

Guts (Island)

NICO

Chelsea Girl (Verve)

The Marble index (Elektra)

Desertshore (Reprise)

The End (Island)

(For more on the Velvet Underground, write for copies of the finest VU fanzine extant, What Goes On. Send $2.00 for a samp1e issue to Phillip Milstein, 15 Green St., Apt. 3, Cambridge MA, 02139. Much of the information contained in this article was gleaned from What Goes On's archaeological groundwork

An illumination of this enigma requires a synopsis of some historical data. By and large, the Velvets belonged to the garage band tradition, this fact a well-kept closet skeleton until the discovery of a cheap anthology entitled Soundsville on Pickwick Records’ subsidiary label, Design. Herein are the roots of the Velvets—“Cycle Annie” by the Beachnuts and “You’re Drivin’ Me Insane” by the Roughnecks, created by Lou Reed and his Pickwick pals incognito. Further, there is the mysterious single, “The Ostrich” b/w “Sneaky Pete,” released in late ’64 on Pickwick (#1001) by the Primitives. These songs bear the indelible stamp of Reed’s light-headed sarcasm and were undoubtedly a product of his cash-and-carry employment as a writer with Pickwick. He landed this job after graduating from Syracuse University, and of this experience he has said (quoted in the liner notes to the bootleg collection, “The Velvet Underground—Etc. ”), “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs, then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly.” Certainly it was Reed’s sojourn at Pickwick that would enable him to see the Velvets through periods of pressure, his outrage finally culminating in the ultimate response: the recording of White Light/White Heat in a single day.

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What’s important here are not the dates or the Velvets’ early manifestations (whether as the Primitives, the Warlocks, or the Falling Spikes), but their attitude from the outset. Sterling Morrison has gone on record saying that the Velvets were not much more than a great garage band. And then there’s the story about how drummer Maureen Tucker played entire sets on garbage cans (which prompted a reviewer to label the Velvets as purveyors of “garbage music”). Speaking strictly historically, though, the Velvet Underground’s first live performance (under the name appropriated from Michael Leigh’s sleazy book) occurred on November 11, 1965, at a high-school dance in Summit, New Jersey, where they opened for the Myddle Class, a mid-’60’s punk band for sure.

But the Velvets were not merely an artistic version of the Seeds or the Sonics, for the band refused to be confined by the restrictions of a genre, the necessary transcendence that separates the immortals from the morons. If they were an extension of garage music, they were also an antidote to punk’s by-product, psychedelia. While truth was being sought through love, peace, and flowers (particularly on the West Coast), the Velvets were finding harder truths by not even seeking them—through images of death, the sounds of the city, and flowers of evil.

The Velvets’ first album seemed almost designed for the Museum of Modern Art. There were Andy’s peelable banana, critical accolades where liner notes should have been, and color photos of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable light show exploding cartoonishly all over the band. Judging by its surface, the work appears garish and pretentious, a mere period piece.

Warhol envisioned the Velvets as something more than that, of course. He picked them up off the street, so to speak, and planted them as a prop beside his films. Around that idea evolved the concept of mixed media—slides, amoebaeic lighting, strobes, and dancing whips competing in a chichi arena that predated other multimedia events. This was all pure form, somehow cold and deliberate like Warhol’s art.

To many, the addition of the German chanteuse Nico was the final proof that the Velvets were simply Warhol’s band—distanced, humorless, and removed from the land of the living. (About Nico, in an article called “A Quiet Evening at the Balloon Farm,” Richard Goldstein once wrote— “She sings in perfect mellow ovals. It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning.”) After the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico one year too late, Nico (along with Warhol) abandoned the group. She went on to make her own “banana album,” Chelsea Girl (with “It Was a Pleasure Then” as haunting an example of controlled distortion as “European Son”), and then saw herself through a series -of almost narcissistic recordings, frozen not only by their own reflections but also by the sound of their own droning medievalism.

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Nico is the key to understanding why the Velvets remained obscure and misinterpreted. She was an integral part of Warhol’s scheme, an actress in his films and a glamourous graduate from La Dolce Vita. But in the Velvets, she was an outcast among outcasts. “Everybody thought she_ was very beautiful,” Maureen Tucker stated in an interview published in Holland. “But we didn’t get along much with each other... Besides, she thought she could sing really well, ha-ha.” The split between Nico and the Velvets was assuredly mutual but at some cost. For as long as Nico was around, the Velvets were easily identifiable, even marketable. They were still involved in a scene, Warhol’s camp. Yet without her, there was no point of reference.

But there never really was a point of reference. It is time that the word so frequently bandied about in discussions of the Velvets—decadence—finally be put to rest. The Velvet Underground was a band of-contradictions and juxtapostions. They have been labeled both “folk-rock” and “art-rock,” but they were neither—their music cannot be hyphenated. The Velvets embodied both Lou Reed’s street-sense and John Cale’s classical background; as a result, the band has come to represent dualism, dialogue, and the process of exchange. Their music deals with body/soul, heart/mind, white blank hate/dark religious compassion. In practically every song, the Velvets alternate between concealment and revelation, as it is to say that their choice is not to choose. If in their earliest incarnation they wore black leather and shades (Goldstein’s “a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade” was the favorite formula for categorizing the band), it should be noted that this too was denied: Lou Reed has repeatedly claimed he only wore sunglasses because the lights hurt his eyes.

The final irony is that the Velvets created more art in less than five years than Andy Warhol, the man who stamped his approval on their beginnings, has accomplished in a lifetime. To call that art decadent is to demean its impact.

The basic components of the Velvet Underground’s sound were Lou Reed’s experiments with feedback and electric dissonance, John Cale’s sustained piano and viola, Maureen Tucker’s plain almost monotonous drumming, and perhaps even Nico’s blase vocals. The rhythms were repetitive, built upon a beat that, as Ellen Willis has observed, “was sometimes implied rather than heard.” This “implied” beat was the Velvets’ secret invocation: it suggested ancient rituals, sanctification, religious passion at its most febrile. It was what would become regarded as the band’s ?s/ey Harding, it .may only be fortuitous, but it’s also revealing that the British two-record compilation of the Velvets’ “greatest hits,” Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground Featuring Nico (as well as its German twin, the Story Of...), concludes with the band’s most joyous epiphany, “Beginning To See The Light.” “I just wanta tell you,” Reed sings with a laugh, “everything is all right!”

From the perspective of the rock audience in the late 60’s, however, the Velvets were about as close to the realm of religion as the antichrist. (He would not emerge for another decade in the form of a rotten demon, cantankerous and ceaselessly preaching the gospel df nihilism, a hideous shape not even the prescient Velvets could foresee.) This was the unfortunate misunderstanding, the reason the band was doomed to the clutches of cultists. For most people, the Velvet’s world was only one of dark perversions, of utter despair, of drug paranoia, of black depravity... of total breakdown. These were the pathways to the band’s music, and to follow them was to become a member of a scene. Yet the Velvets’ music was never so much about a lifestyle as it was an evocation of it in sound. “Heroin” only works, within its seven minutes of spiritual torture, because the sound of the whole song becomes a metaphor for the drug rush. Through manifestation—through the transformation of a public scene—the Velvets could attain a certain distance from their environment, and thus obtain a sense of salvation. On “Heroin,” the singer can claim he feels like Jesus’ son, but that would only seem artificial if the song itself did not sound like it was headed toward a blissful state of transcendence.

Unfortunately, the Velvets did not make their need for redemption apparent. until nearly all the band’s members had departed —by then, it was too late. The album, Loaded, was their last studio release; the song, “Rock & Roll,” going by its innumerable cover versions and the general attention it garnered, might just as well have been their first. In 1970, the world was suddenly ready for the Velvets’ vision, but John Cale and Lou Reed had already called it quits. “Rock & Roll” was a felicitous summation of what the Velvets had always been saying, and it seemed to herald a second coming. A life saved by rock ’n’ roll—it had been said before, of course, but never so concisely and never with so much eagerness and compassion. Even more surprising, on songs such as “Sweet Jane,” “Cool It Down,” and “Head Held High,” the Velvets were claiming that life was blooming with affection and that all complications cduld eventually be surmounted. Many read this as a change within the Velvets, and so, embraced them wholeheartedly. The fact of the matter was that the band barely existed; Doug Yule and Reed were at such odds they were on the verge of taking their differences into a wrestling arena.

There’s no irony, though," behind “Rock & Roll” being the Velvets’ final yet most successful statement—it would appear that that was intentional (perhaps the band’s most purposeful act). The Velvet Underground had unlimited opportunities to reveal their message of rock ’n’ roll as salvation, and to have provided a conspicuous link with Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis would have been their saving grace, possibly negatingtheir cult status. But the Velvets were fond of obfuscation—they saw it as a necessary part of their image, recognizing in it our desire for detection, our love of a good mystery. For them, therefore, revealing everything meant virtual suicide. “Rock & Roll” was Lou Reed’s way of saying not that the Velvets’ cover should be blown but there was no longer any point in maintaining that cover.

Hence, decoding the Velvets’ music is a process not unlike reading runes—the band’s cryptic code beckoning us like a good mystery novel. Significantly, the Velvets understood that, by cloaking their identity in mystery, a myth could be sustained. And thus, as critic Richard Cromelin once observed in a discussipn of this selfsame mystery, “They would be whatever you wanted them to be because you couldn’t know what they were.”

Knowing this, though, does not help you solve anything, but then again, an explanation should not be what you’re after. It is enough, the Velvets consistently suggest, to look, and though the clues may never fall into place, at least through observation some insight can be gained into the persistence of an eternal mystery.

Here, then, are a few clues worth delving into: Lou Reed’s legendary limousine ride with Brian Epstein (as reported in Danny Fields’ recollection in No One Waved Goodbye); the Motown references on the bootleg song, “Inside Your Heart;” the movie Venus In Furs (1971, “Musician is baffled to see a woman who had been previously washed ashore in a mutilated state; poor mystery may have some scenes cut for TV”—description courtesy of Maltin’s TV Movies) ; the way “There She Goes Again” is built upon a riff from Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike;” John Cale’s Vintage Violence; the offhanded manner of “Foggy Notion,” “Over You,” and “We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together”; Lou Reed’s entire pre-Velvets career; the subterfuge and the circumstances behind the official bootleg, Live At Max’s Kansas City; John Cale’s production of the Modern Lovers, the Stooges, and Patti Smith; the bubblegum elements of “Who Loves The Sun”; and, the narrative crafts of “The Gift” and “The Murder Mystery. ”

The intention of these clues, nevertheless, is to confuse, to darken any glimmer peeking through the crack in the door. The Velvets have inexorably employed this tactic from the outset. “Sunday Morning,” the very first cut on their first album, does not even seem to fit into the body of their work. As an introduction to the uninitiated listener, it could have led one astray; as gossamefy it was a far cry from “The Black Angel’s Death Song” as well as virtually every song that would follow. Indeed, with the Velvets, there were rarely outright hints (and even the red herrings were only alluded to).

What, for instance, are we to surmise from the cover of the Velvets’ second album, White Light/White Heat? Seemingly completely black, the cover—when held under an infrared (black) light—would depict a skull' made visible. Perhaps the band was saying that truth could be made known if one knew how to look for it. Or, perhaps they were implying that truth could only be revealed by concealing it. Either way, it amounted to the same thing.

Yet, as any detective soon learns (and the Velvets assumed we were all defectives at heart), most leads can be traced. In the Case of the Evasive Velvets, one in particular is worth pursuing—it sheds more light on the band than the sudden appearance of a tacky skull.

THE CONSUMMATE CLUE. “European Son” is dedicated to Delmore Schwartz, an established poet and a mentor to Lou Reed when he was in school. Schwartz was also somewhat of an authority on T. S. Eliot, and this certainly must have influenced Reed’s own thinking. Critic Richard Mortifoglio has pointed out that “Reed’s unique combination of plain talk and elegant late-medieval imagery suggests T.S. Eliot as an influence.” Mortifoglio argues that this fact proves there’s a classical severity in Reed’s makeup that should counteract the cries of decadance.

Further, Reed has expressed his astonishment that Eliot could write the brilliant, timeless “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at the vigorous age of 25. “That is not what I meant at all,” says the voice of Eliot’s poem again and again. We can hear that remorseful voice echoed in “Heroin” as Reed ends each verse with the still refrain, “And I guess that I just don’t know. ”

We can also turn to the opening passage of Eliot’s masterful poem and read: “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent/To lead you to. an overwhelming question.../Oh, do not ask, What is it?’” What is the strange “New Age” really all about? What is the kind of compassion that “Candy Says” defines? What is the Velvets’ essential quest? Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

And yet.. .over a decade after the Velvet Underground has ceased to exist, we are still searching through the ruins, tirelessly digging for a clue and settling instead for its shadow.