Reviled by their hippie contemporaries, barely acknowledged by their record company, pegged by the media as a pop nightmare sprung full-blown from the pasty forehead of Andy Warhol, the members of the Velvet Underground worked hard and paid heavily for their place in rock history. It seems incredible now that in the band's troubled lifetime (basically extending from late 1965 to the release of Loaded in 1970) they managed to record four of rock's most enduring albums, zigzagging between dramatically ugly guitar noise and transcendent moments of folk-pop beauty. The Velvet Underground and Nico, recorded nearly twenty years ago, remains the official road map of New York City's
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bohemian underworld. Artists as diverse as David Bowie, the Cars, New Order and R.E.M. have openly drawn on the Velvets' legacy and singer-guitarist Lou Reed's historic repertoire. Most hard-core and No Wave fringe rock today has nothing on
White Light/White Heat for sheer industrial discord and locomotive propulsion.
But if the Velvets' influence has never been matched in sales or thoughtful record-company promotion, the release of V.U. – a collection of newly discovered tracks from 1968 and '69 – and the repackaging of the group's first three albums helps redress the imbalance. The remastering (from high-quality Japanese pressings) of The Velvet Underground and Nico, White Light/White Heat and The Velvet Underground is certainly a blessing for anyone whose original pressings are now at death's door. Unfortunately, no quality control at this stage will ever compensate for the inability of studios at the time to cope with the Velvets' death-ray fuzz guitar or the evil scrape of John Cale's viola in "Heroin" and "European Son" on the Nico album. But the refreshing clarity of these new versions frequently provides revealing glimpses into the guts of the Velvets' remarkable sound and prophetic vision.
In "Sunday Morning," also on the Nico album, you can hear much more clearly the mournful bowing of Cale's viola under the abrupt Duane Eddy cluck of Reed's guitar. Together, these two elements illustrate the precarious balance between the smudged elegance of the band's pop essence and the graphic honesty of Reed's drug and sex tableaux. The mad barrelhouse piano comping in "I'm Waiting for the Man" practically leaps out of the brittle mix, while the eerie doubling of Nico's breathy Dietrich vocal heightens the haunting air of the song's sad martial cadence.
As a statement of artistic purpose, indeed rebellion, considering the year it was made (1967), The Velvet Underground and Nico is still a powerful summation of art and fear – rock & roll reduced to its most primitive state to grapple with New York's brutal realism. Some of the record's original savagery and wonder has eroded with time, becoming too familiar through imitation. However, the simple physical impact of the band's c
