The Velvet Underground Pictures, Biography, Profile, Facts, Discography, Filmography, more.

The Velvet Underground were one of the first rock music groups to experiment with the form, and to incorporate avant-garde influences. Credited with establishing a genre known as 'anti-pop', the group's often raw sound would influence many later punk, noise rock, and alternative music performers, and singer Lou Reed's lyrics brought new levels of poetic sophistication and social realism to rock.

Members:

Willie Alexander: Keyboards, vocals 1971–1972

John Cale: Bass guitar, electrically amplified viola, keyboards, vocals 1965–1968, 1992–1994

Angus MacLise: Percussion 1965

Sterling Morrison: Guitar, bass guitar, backing vocals 1965–1971,1992–1994

Walter Powers: Bass guitar, backing vocals 1970–1972

Lou Reed: Vocals, guitar, piano, harmonica 1965–1970, 1992–1994

Maureen “Moe” Tucker: Percussion, vocals 1965–1972, 1992–1994

Doug Yule: Bass guitar, keyboards, guitar, drums, vocals 1968–1973

Songwriter/singer/guitarist Lou Reed had gone from college at Syracuse University to a day job as a staff composer and musician for Pickwick Records. Reed could turn out songs to order in any number, and with days spent writing in an office, and evenings making quickie singles and albums in Pickwick's small studio.

Reed's "The Ostrich" became a surprise hit in New York. The bassist for the new Primitives was Welsh-born John Cale, classically trained and already experienced in avant-garde and performance art (including playing piano in a relay with John Cage). Reed and Cale hit it off, and as The Ostrich lost its plume and the Primitives disbanded, they started to consider more serious musical work, beginning when Reed played Cale a selection of songs they'll never publish, including the unapologetic Heroin. As Reed and Cale began to write together, one afternoon they bumped into a college friend of Reed's; fellow guitarist and anti-authoritarian Sterling Morrison, in Manhattan. Morrison soon joined in, and somewhere along the line they began referring to their group. With the addition of 'Angus MacLean' as drummer, the Falling Spikes, Warlocks, etc., began making song demos, and playing locally.

College friend, Jim Tucker came to visit the group at their loft, carrying a paperback book he'd found in the street en route; a sexual exposé by Michael Leigh titled The Velvet Underground. Later, work picked up for the Velvet Underground. With a show pending, someone luckily remembered Jim's sister Maureen Tucker played drums, had her own set, and didn't already belong to a band.

Their audience included artist Andy Warhol, who'd come to meet the band Gerard Malanga had been telling him about. Warhol had been looking for an underground rock group to use in his multimedia shows, was intrigued by their name and persona (though he soon re-christened them the Velvets), and was impressed enough to want them to start right away, although they were booked to play through to the end of the year at the same locale. The Velvet Underground was instantly let go, and soon after showed up at Warhol's Factory. They were put to work not only as musicians, but sometime subjects and helpers for Warhol's film and art projects.

Warhol soon brought European beauty 'Nico'. Warhol wanted Nico to sing with the band, play along if she could (harmonium and percussion), and otherwise just stand around looking beautiful. Reed wrote songs for Nico, like I'll Be Your Mirror and Femme Fatale. The overall band situation looked promising, but there was already noticeable friction between the band members and the Warhol circle, which included Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Mary Woronov, and Betsey Johnson. The Velvets and Nico hit the road in 1966, as part of Warhol's pop-art roadshow, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and with Warhol expected to produce their debut album.

Appearing in January 1967 (with a unique peelable-banana cover, which was Warhol's main contribution to the record; his studio involvement was as minimal as much of his art, while producer's duties were mostly filled by Lou Reed and 'Tom Wilson' ), the first Velvet Underground album seemed condemned to instant obscurity. Advertising was cancelled or declined in most of the usual places, mostly because of the stark, matter-of-fact content and subject matter of its songs (drugs including speed and heroin, the club scene, unconventional sex and relationships and life on the fringes of the pop-art world). The Velvets were hard to classify, and harder to understand, for most pop music followers. To add to the downside of things, a lawsuit brought against MGM by a Warhol associate whose image appeared in a back-cover photo stopped distribution of the album, until the cover could be retouched and reprinted, at considerable cost and delay.

The Velvet Underground continued to work with Andy Warhol and Nico into 1967, and over the next year, they parted ways with both. Most of the album's sound was distorted and noisy, with the band preferring to play at high decibels in the studio as onstage, and often only allowing one take per song. With Warhol out of the picture, the band found it hard to get work in New York, and began appearing more in Boston, where they found acceptance.

The third Velvet Underground album, eponymously titled and appearing in 1969, with Reed and Yule sharing lead vocals, and for the American market, mixed by Reed with almost no echo or reverb.

Between 1969 and 1970, the Velvets continued to tour, and prepare material for a fourth album, recording both in the studio and live on the road. With their next album nearly ready to go. Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records came to the rescue, and the band was signed to their subsidiary label Cotillion (fresh from its success with the Woodstock (1970) film soundtrack), remaking many of the last year's songs.

As Yule pressed for more of a leading role in the band, Reed let him take it, and as the Velvets wound up the recording of Loaded in 1970, and their summer residency back in New York at Max's Kansas City, Reed decided he'd had enough. One night after the last set at Max's, Reed's parents picked him up; he briefly introduced them to his band-mates, and headed home, leaving it to the next day to tell anyone he was out.

With Reed gone, and Morrison not interested, Doug Yule became front man for the Velvets, who were still under contract to tour and record. Willie Alexander took Doug Yule's place, while Yule became something of an imitation Lou Reed, writing and singing in Reed's style; before long the new line-up was being derided as the Velveteen Underground. When Morrison and Tucker saw opportunities to leave, they took them, with Morrison ditching the band on the road when he learned he'd been offered a position teaching English at Texas A&M, and Tucker deciding to go when changing the band's name became a topic of discussion. Yule ended up being the only member to arrive in England during 1971, to record the album Squeeze (not released in the US), which he completed with help from Deep Purple's Ian Paice.

Long-time Velvets fan David Bowie encouraged RCA to support Reed, and threw himself into the production of Reed's breakout album Transformer, which included Reed's signature hit, A Walk On The Wild Side. John Cale, Nico, and later Maureen Tucker also recorded successful solo albums, while Sterling Morrison occasionally jammed on guitar with his students, and sometimes allowed access to his personal Velvets archives.

It wasn't until the late Seventies, with Lou Reed's career firmly established and the beginnings of punk rock, that the Velvet Underground finally began to get the recognition they deserved, for their originality and their dedication to the spirit of rock-n-roll. New artist after new artist, when asked to name their influences, would include the Velvet Underground, while the first Velvets album eventually earned (but didn't receive) a Gold Record award, with half a million sales.

With the advent of digital remastering and improved studio technology in the early 1980s, the three Velvet Underground albums from the 1960s were prepared for reissue by PolyGram, which had bought out the MGM label. As an experiment, the tapes were mixed not to 60s, but to 80s standards; the results demonstrated that the Velvet Underground had been considerably ahead of their time, musically at least.

After Andy Warhol's death in 1987, Lou Reed found himself stumped in trying to write a tribute to his old friend and mentor, and contacted the one person he knew understood Warhol the way he did; his old bandmate John Cale. Songs for Drella, their joint Warhol tribute released in 1989, was a triumph, and Reed and Cale began performing the album live on tour, with selections on television.

By 1992, continued interest in the Velvet Underground prompted the best line-up (Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker) to re-form for a possible tour, with Tucker and Morrison moving back to New York to join Reed and Cale. New generations of fans (and budding musicians) discovered their music, now considered classic, and proto-punk; finally, an apt description.

In 1996, the Velvet Underground was given some long-awaited official acclaim, with their entrance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Unfortunately Sterling Morrison wasn't able to see this happen, having died of lymph cancer only months earlier.

Velvet Underground Composer Filmography:

Amour, l'argent, l'amour, L' (2000) ... aka Amour, L' (Germany) ... aka Love, Money, Love (USA)

Malanga (1967)

The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966)

Chelsea Girls (1966)

Salvador Dalí (1966)