Back in May I wrote a bunch of posts about the 50th anniversary of the Velvet Underground’s debut album. Here’s another Velvety post, celebrating the great John Cale. Here’s the word from a recent Rolling Stone interview celebrating the anniversary…

The way John Cale tells it, he had a revelation one day in the mid-Sixties. He’d dedicated the majority of his first two decades to classical and avant-garde music, to such an extent that, he says dryly, “I may have missed out on my puberty.

“I woke up one day and said, ‘Wait a minute, there are people running around singing Beatles songs,’” he recalls. “The Beatles Invasion was going on. All the enjoyment that I’d gotten as a kid out of rock & roll was receding, and I thought, ‘Let’s put something together that blends the two.’ I wanted to cross-pollinate rock with the avant-garde, and then I met Lou Reed, and that was the solution.”

The union of Cale’s musical wanderlust, spurred on by collaborating with minimalist composer La Monte Young, and Reed’s rock-steady songwriting, which he had been exercising as an in-house songwriter at Pickwick Records, became the soul of the Velvet Underground. This weekend will mark the 50th anniversary of their most daring experiment – their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico – the Andy Warhol–produced LP that found Cale, Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker fusing gritty garage rock with overdriven viola noise and, on some songs, the lilting, expressionistic vocals of German chanteuse Nico.

The record, whose songs vividly described drug abuse and sexual deviance at a time when the Beatles were dominating the charts with a gentler, more whimsical countercultural vision, was far from a commercial hit, but its influence over the past half century has been undeniable. Artists ranging from David Bowie to Duran Duran have covered its songs, and Brian Eno is fabled to have once said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

Read the whole article at the link above and watch this documentary to find out more about Cale’s extraordinary career in the Velvets and beyond…

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This weekend we opened the Pikes Project 1 exhibition at Red Arrow gallery in Nashville, capping-off about 5 months of work and organizing with a great opening reception. I recently told a reporter I hoped the show of photography, paintings and video art focusing on Nashville’s historic roadways and the communities they connect would make people cry. I didn’t see any tears on Saturday night, but there were lots of rave reactions to the show’s iconic images and plenty of folks talking about what these sometimes overlooked spaces mean to them and their relationship with Nashville.

All of this to say that I’m a little bit exhausted and brain dead as I’m transitioning back into my usual weekly routine and normal blogging schedule. I didn’t plan to add any new VU posts, but then I came upon this great concert video of the band’s 1993 reunion tour. Here’s the set list:

Venus in Furs
White Light/White Heat
Beginning to See the Light
Some Kinda Love
Femme Fatale
Hey Mr. Rain
I’m Sticking With You
I Heard Her Call My Name
I’ll Be Your Mirror
Rock N’Roll
(Sweet Jane)
I’m Waiting for the Man
Heroin
Pale Blue Eyes
Coyote

Once again, celebrating the 50th anniversary of their debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico, here’s The Velvet Underground’s Live MCMXIII…

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I’m fascinated by the career of lesser-known music producer Tom Wilson. One reason Wilson is so fascinating is the fact that he played a central role in the development of crucial musical movements of the 1960′s, but even today’s most informed music maniacs offer only blank stares at the mention of his name.

That’s why I was so excited when I saw this Daily Beast article which is the longest, most informative piece I’ve ever read about the man. Here’s the gist…

After tenures at United Artists and Audio Fidelity, Wilson was hired as a staff producer for Columbia in 1963.

“This guy played like the dumb guys. But then these words came out. I was flabbergasted. I said to Albert Grossman, who was in the studio, ‘If you put some background to this you might have a white Ray Charles with a message.’”
Wilson began producing Dylan, the folk sensation who’d become a mainstream star on the heels of his lauded second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, in 1963. Their first album together was Dylan’s first LP of all-original compositions, The Times They Are A-Changin’. Wilson became Dylan’s producer for the next three albums, helming the records that would shift Dylan’s sound and image tremendously; as the singer-songwriter evolved from folkie protest singer to abstract hipster poet rocker.

In the summer of 1965, Wilson produced Dylan’s latest creation, a sneering anthem that would become one of the ‘60s defining songs, the opus “Like a Rolling Stone.” With that single, Dylan’s transformation into bonafide rock star was complete; but it would be the last track Wilson would record with Dylan. The notoriously headstrong star became frustrated with Wilson’s hands-on approach to producing, culminating in a heated exchange in the studio over Al Kooper’s organ-playing. Wilson was replaced with Bob Johnston when recording on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album was resumed.

But there was much more to Tom Wilson’s legacy than Bob Dylan classics. Shortly after meeting Dylan, Wilson started session work with Simon & Garfunkel, as the duo was readying their debut album. Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was a commercial failure, but after the acoustic ballad “The Sound of Silence” began getting widespread airplay, Wilson remixed the folk-pop tune with rock instrumentation—in the spirit of The Byrds’ hit “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Using the backing musicians that had played on “Like a Rolling Stone” earlier in the day, Wilson added rock instrumentation to “The Sound of Silence,” and the remixed song was released as an official single. His assertiveness may have sometimes led to annoyance (as it did with Dylan), but it oftentimes paid off. Simon & Garfunkel had no idea the song had been remixed until after the single had been released, but almost a year after Wednesday Morning’s release, “The Sound of Silence” became the No. 1 song in America.

Being named the East Coast A&R Director for Verve Records in late 1965, Wilson produced tracks for the Velvet Underground on their classic debut The Velvet Underground and Nico, though his heavy-handedness again caused some concern after he remixed the group’s “Sunday Morning” without their consent. Wilson also had an eye for talent and a knack for spotting diamonds in the rough; he was instrumental in signing jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention—a group that most labels considered too “out there” even for the psychedelic 60s.

The end of Wilson’s life is as mysterious as his career. He died at the young age of 47 and is buried in Texas, his home state. Of course that’s one of the reasons why his story is so compelling — every now and then I find another nugget that helps to piece together my understanding of the man and his work. In addition to the Daily Beast piece, I also found this 1967 interview between Wilson and Lou Reed discussing the origins of The Velvet Underground…

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The Velvet Underground’s self-titled third record turns 45 this year and has just been rewarded with The Velvet Underground – 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition treatment. The third album marks the end of the band’s classic lineup, the departure of John Cale and the arrival of Doug Yule. It also marks an abrupt 180 away from the experimental art music and noise that defined their first two records in favor of what sounds at first listen to be a straight forward collection of pop songs. This change in the band’s sound has often garnered the album negative reviews when compared to its predecessors. While the departure of Cale allowed Reed to take control of the band and transform it (pun intended) into a vehicle for more mainstream-sounding music, the lyrics here are as dark and bizarre and grating as any of the feedback on White Light/White Heat and if you think “Candy Says” is just a pretty song about a pretty girl you need to listen again. Here’s the word from Pitchfork…

From the very first second of The Velvet Underground, everything about the group had changed from where they left off with the epochal squall of White Light/White Heat’s “Sister Ray”. Reed and Sterling Morrison’s amp settings were dialed down from 11 to 1; Maureen “Moe” Tucker’s thundering thump was softened into a breezy brushed-snare sway; and Reed’s ding-dong-sucking snarl was replaced by the melancholic whisper of Cale’s successor Doug Yule. It’s like returning from a holiday only to find your rat-infested apartment building had burned down and been replaced with a white-picket-fenced bungalow. And even though the song Yule was crooning, “Candy Says”, marked Reed’s first explicit character reference to the Warhol Factory scene that birthed his band, it ultimately underscored the Velvets’ increasing remove from its hazy decadence: A devastatingly intimate portrait of then-transitioning Factory regular Candy Darling, “Candy Says” is the sobering soundtrack for that inevitable moment when all tomorrow’s parties turn to morning-after, makeup-smeared, self-loathing introspection. (The album cover reinforces the reflective mood: though shot at the Factory, the Velvets look more like they’re hosting a small gathering friends in their living room, their ’67-era striped tees and fuck-you wraparound shades replaced by comfortable sweaters and sensible collared shirts.)

If The Velvet Undergrounddialled down the aggression and abrasion of its predecessors, it undercuts the mellow approach with some of the rawest songwriting of Reed’s career, and a plainspoken candor as startling as his past meditations on smack and S&M. His blunt language drives a spike into the album’s gentle jangle to unleash a maelstrom of emotions, where ecstatic moments of spiritual reawakening (“Beginning to See the Light”) are answered by cruel reality checks (“I’m set free/ To find a new illusion”), where the love of his life becomes someone else’s (“Pale Blue Eyes”), where a Jewish guy feels so fucked up, he starts praying to Jesus. Even the seemingly easy-going choogle of “What Goes On” is routinely upset by Reed’s admissions of anxiety (“One minute born/ One minute doomed”). By that token, the simultaneous-poetry experiment “The Murder Mystery” feels less like an anomalous WTF throwback to the Velvets’ avant-garde roots than the sound of the album’s slow-stewing inner turmoil coming to a boil.

Here’s the original record…

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For every rock band that makes it big there are a million others that disappear unnoticed. However, there is also a rock band of a third kind: A band that makes a deep, narrow mark in its time that influences musicians for decades to come. The Velvet underground is a great example of this kind of band. The MC5 is another one.

For the uninitiated, the MC5 were a Detroit, Michigan rock group that released three records between 1969 and 1972. Their debut album Kick out the Jams is the band’s best known release and its title song their greatest, most infamous “hit.” The band fused the soul of rhythm and blues with the frenzy of garage rock and a love of pure noise into what often sounded like a kind of Motown metal that was as groovy as it was incendiary. The band are now seen as punk rock pioneers whose prescience continues to galvanize their place in the history of rock.

MC5: A True Testimonial tells the story of the group and their music against a backdrop of the art, rock, drugs and radical politics that defined the underground scene in Detroit at the end of the 1960′s.

Watch MC5: A True Testimonial below.

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Bob Dylan brought poetry to pop music and Leonard Cohen brought pop music to poetry, but it was Lou Reed who brought the literary ambitions of the great American short story to the 3 minute single. An iconic New Yorker, Reed’s place among American rock’s most important singer/songwriters was secured through an inspired, intoxicated, cantankerous, contradictory five decade career which ended on Sunday (10/27/13) with the loss of the singer’s life. At this writing, the cause of death is thought to be complications from a recent liver transplant.

“Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart” (PBS’American Masters, 1998) traces Reed’s art from the early inspirations of doo-wop music and fifties rock ‘n’ roll to his classic records with The Velvet Underground, through his challenging, experimental solo works like Transformer, Berlin, Metal Machine Music, New York and Magic and Loss — Reed’s tribute to his friend and mentor, songwriter Doc Pomus.

Linger on, Lou.

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