The Velvet Underground

Nico and The Velvet Underground

Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground is a must view for anyone with a fleeting interest in rock and roll, Andy Warhol, the 1960s New York art scene or avant-garde cinema. Haynes brilliantly uses a multi-screen avant format, a mirror of Warhol's Chelsea Girls, to frame or rather fragment a band that was influential, revered and despised. Like Warhol, Haynes uses visual repetition and duplication to suggest the multiplicity of meaning found in these great artists. Haynes interlaces the Velvets' story with clips from avant-garde shorts in a way that comments on the cultural underpinnings of the band. So,we get shots from Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising helping to suggest the aura of homoeroticism and S & M around the band or a brief clip of the looking glass face of the cloaked figure in Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (a film that also dabbles in repetition) as Nico intones "I'll Be Your Mirror."

I enjoyed it all immensely and I laud Haynes for wading through all the footage that he did (I visited the Warhol museum in Pittsburg recently and it was obvious Warhol kept everything, especially the receipts), but I have my quibbles. As Greil Marcus has noted, Haynes seems to lose interest in the band after John Cale was forced out. Now I think the band's albums and live shows with Doug Yule are just as strong as the ones with Cale. Haynes seems to prefer the sturm and drang of "Heroin", "I Heard Her Call My Name", and "Sister Ray" to the sweet Lou sensitivity of "Pale Blue Eyes", "Jesus", and "New Age". As Paul Nelson noted over four decades ago, a sweet, sunny side coexisted with a dark one in the songs of Lou Reed. 🍌

I happen to think, as did Mr. Nelson and Robert Christgau, that the Velvets' best album is the one they did after Cale left; their eponymous third. Haynes seems to think Cale's talents were equal to that of Reed's. I do think that Cale's musical releases in the 1970s, especially his Island albums, are of equal value to  Mr. Reed's output then; something I wouldn't have admitted at the time, but, since the 70s, Mr. Cale has proved to be a better collaborator than songwriter or composer. The attention Haynes lavishes on Mr. Cale seems to be at the expense of Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker. Both are fascinating characters in themselves and I think Ms. Tucker was a minimalist pioneer in her grafting of Bo Diddley and African drumming, but I'm not sure this is a documentary about music.

Of course, Cale's replacement, Doug Yule is given the shortest shrift. Happily, the band The Paranoid Style offered up a paean to him (entitled "Doug Yule") that is an apt tribute just this past year. That the Velvets continued on with Yule as the front man after Reed left the band is unmentioned by Haynes, presumably out of kindness to those involved. The band's fifth album, Squeeze, is fairly woeful compared to the first four (and 1969 Velvet Underground Live and VU), but it exists. I may be a demented outlier about this, but I would have enjoyed hearing of the European tour they did without Lou and the subsequent tour of New England's finest, and crappiest, ski lodges.

🍌 Paul Nelson, 'All The Young Dudes", 

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1976.