Let’s hear it for 1967. This month (two days ago) in that
year, Velvet Underground with Nico
was released. Also known as Peel Slowly
and See, it’s the album with the iconic banana on the cover, silkscreened
by Warhol, that you were supposed to be able to peel slowly and reveal . . . a
naked banana. And them’s good eatin’.
Today’s song was, in shortened form, released as a single in
1966. The album version is the only version I know (apart from the demos). I chose it today
because it’s the definitive song featuring Nico’s vocals, as well as the kind
of dirge-rock sound that VU patented. And so much since has come from there.
It’s in those tom-toms and tambourine of drummer Moe Tucker;
it’s in the “prepared piano” of John Cale, who doubles on bass; it’s in the
echo-y recording quality, with Nico double-tracked to sing with herself. That
almost expressionless vocal with the Teutonic accent—it sounds both icy and crisis-y.
Could anything be more perfect for a song about having to dress up for parties
when costuming is so important? It could be your poor girl wanting to wear
what’s required—think of proms, think of belle of the ball attire, or think of
Goth accessorizing, maybe—but it could also be your poor TS having to put
together a costume that would make him a her. In any case, what stays in play
is that “hand-me-down gown / Of rags and silks / A costume / Fit for one who
sits and cries / For all tomorrow’s parties.”
When Cale sings the vocal on the demos, it has a more
madrigal-like feel, so that the costuming starts to seem like something vaguely
medieval. That’s not unfitting either, for the Sixties, where being a folk
princess was all the rage. But that’s not the case on the released version
where Nico’s inflections seem to befit the reigning Ice Queen. All the more
effective, then, that this song dwells on someone who will “cry behind the
door.” Or “cry beh-hiiind dadore.” We
get a glimpse of how Cinderella felt after midnight, y’know, with that pumpkin
and one less glass shoe.
The song was also covered by Nick Cave (artist featured
yesterday) on his very interesting LP Kicking
Against the Pricks. One might surmise that all the artists he covers are “the
pricks”—no, not that kind of prick, though maybe, if you like, but rather the “pricks”
the Bible speaks of when Christ says to Saul that it is “hard to kick against
the pricks”—or “goads.” Y’know, the
annoying, stinging pricks that guide the ox where it must go . . . . So, let’s
consider VU a “goad” for Nick, and for so many others (though, yeah, Lou could
be a prick, and let’s not get started on Andy . . .). Anyway, here’s the link because Nick does it
full justice with an even stronger sense of its dense, metronomic drone, and
lots of cool effects.
The VU version is actually somewhat sweet. Which, oddly, is
true of all the songs Nico sings on the LP. What makes those numbers
particularly interesting, to me, is that they are like negative versions of the
typical chanteuse type songs that girl singers were singing all over the radio
back then (think of someone like Lulu, or Joey Heatherton, or Nancy Sinatra), all those blonde pop girl voices, and then if you add those Specter-produced
tunes with girl groups. . . You can see how off-kilter Nico is, where, as
here, she drones rather than croons. But it’s still got something so Sixties
about it. Cue the montage of Mary Quant originals.
Time has only improved the first Velvet Underground album.
When I first heard it in 1976 or 1977, I preferred the VU of Live ’69. The pressing I had left a bit
to be desired. I can vouch for the re-issued mono LP as the best you can expect
to find, now. The stereo re-issue for the VU CD box set is good too. There is
no album that better establishes, aurally, the brave new world of rock to come.
Velvet Underground with Nico is a
one-time deal, like most works of art. Even though promulgated by Pop meister
Warhol, who believed religiously in the work of art as mechanical reproduction,
the first VU album, though certainly endlessly reproducible, in that sense, was
impossible to duplicate, in the sense of “do another,” though it was, in so
many ways, imitated.
For me, the sound of this album is like the sunshine you see
in black-and-white movies from the mid-Sixties. It’s so gone, and yet it’s
still there. And there is a little memory frisson that tells me I once shared
that time, though not that place (New York). And that’s important because, if
you were then, you know how nothing like this album already existed. Now, there’s
so much “like” it, it’s kind of hard to see this clearing for all the trees
around it. And yet it’s there, then. It’s the first album, the only album, by
the Velvet Underground with Nico. And it’s
forty-seven fucking years old.
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| Nico, Andy Warhol, Moe Tucker, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, in CA |
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