STERLING MORRISON

STERLING MORRISON

FEATURES

Thomas Anderson

Take a walk down Guadalupe Street in Austin, Texas and you’ll find record stores with the Velvet Underground’s albums among their selections, not to mention T-shirt shops where that familiar Warhol banana hangs alongside more recent R.E.M. and Violent Femmes designs. In the bars, local bands slog out versions of “Sweet Jane,” “Heroin,” and the other classics. If former Velvet Underground guitarist Sterling Morrison came to this town hoping to leave the past behind him, one wonders if he ever regrets his choice.

But it’s here he has lived since leaving the post-Loaded Velvets in 1971. He’s known now as Dr. Sterling Morrison, having spent the past several years pursuing and earning a doctorate in English, in addition to working on a harbor tugboat in Galveston. Recent times have seen the release of V.U. (15 years after its recording), the Another View compilation, digitally re-mixed versions of the first three Velvet Underground albums, as well as the long-awaited compact discs. Of all the ex-Velvets, he and Lou Reed were singled out for contributions to the release of V.U. in the sleeve notes. Regarding his participation, Morrison says, “I always knew that the material was in the can. I just provided some information—a few suggestions about the selection of available material—what the stuff was, and things like that.”

The album’s material mainly came from tapes for a fourth album that was abandoned when the band left MGM in 1969. Morrison seems content with the choice of songs, though he does mention one exception. “Well, they really had no choice. There were a couple of boxes that had no tapes inside, so there’s a lot of missing material. ‘Sad Song’ was the best song of the sessions that mostly constitute the V.U. album. I think they have the multitrack master with no vocal, for some reason or other.”

The same “Sad Song” that Lou Reed did on Berlin? “Yeah, but as is pointed out, Lou’s covers of this material are inferior to the V.U. versions. It’s especially true in the case of ‘Sad Song.’ I don’t know if Lou subscribes to any of this; he may think that his versions are in every way vastly superior. But even something like ‘Andy’s Chest’ on Transformer becomes sort of self-conscious. I’m not wild about that lyric anyway, but I do like the guitar sourd on the V.U. record.”

Raising e issue of his and Reed’s guitar duties ith the Velvets strikes a nerve in Morrison, since he feels he’s been overlooked by history. “People that don’t know anything about the band say ‘Lou Reed, we know what he does and is capable of doing, and John Cale, he’s documentable... ’ and then there’s me. So anything that’s good, they tend to ascribe to Lou or John, and if they don’t like something, they conclude that must be me. Both Lou and I liked playing rhythm, and both of us liked playing lead. We don’t have any songs that exist solely for the sake of a hot solo. Take something like ‘Cool It Down’ on Loaded, for example. There’s a perfect hole there for some hot guitar notes, but the whole point of the song was ‘cool it down,’ so we just used the piano.”

Does he ever hear from the other ex-Velvets these days? “Oh yeah. Not Lou, but John and Maureen. I played with Cale at the Armadillo and Club Foot (nowdefunct Austin clubs). I didn’t the last time he was there, though, because I had the flu. Still, I would hate people to think that every time Cale comes into town, he’s obliged to let me flail away with him, so I don’t do it more often than not.”

Doug Yule? “I’ve talked to him a little bit. I know that he’s in New York. I’ve been just kind of holed up in Austin.”

Though he’s performed with Cale and is still interested in music, Morrison plans no return to the recording world. “No. Why should I? The corporate foolishness in record companies astounds me. It’s assumed at every level that if a particular course of action will result in more money, that you will naturally pursue it. We didn’t swallow it so much, which made them think either we were crazy, hard to work with, or something like that.”

Likewise, the Velvet Underground were always wary of any promotional stunt concocted by their management, which is probably why there were no Miller beer commercials. “We were on Upbeat (a syndicated late ’60s rock TV show),” remembers Morrison. “We did a song called ‘I Guess I’m Falling In Love.’ Terrific song featuring a ‘fuzz solo’ by yours truly. But we almost never went on those shows because you had to be a pop success—which we never were. I always dreaded the day we might have to be on one. The playing would have been OK, but what if they asked us to do some comedy?” (Sterling also added that “Guess I’m Falling In Love” turned up without vocals on Another View because the master tape was damaged.)

If Sterling Morrison had to pick one favorite Velvet Underground song, what would it be? “ ‘Venus In Furs.’ For outlandish originality, I think it’s untouched. That’s the album (The Velvet Underground & Nico) I thought would never exist. I didn’t think anybody would ever let us make a record, so we made it ourselves. Then I never thought anybody would ever release it. It got released. Then I never thought anybody would buy it, but they did.

“I like White Light/White Heat in concept. I just wish its recording had come out better. What we were trying to do was to really fry the tracks, but I thought they’d come out a little bit cleaner than they did. In studios back then, you couldn’t record the kind of things we were trying. Supposedly, the digital stuff cleans it up some, so maybe now it sounds a little bit more like what we thought.

“I’m glad that V.U. came out. When we made the tracks, we intended for them to be released. The response to the record kind of surprised me. But if people are suddenly such diehard Velvet Underground fans, I’d like to see them get out White Light/White Heat. If they can get behind that, then they are true belivers.”