There was nothing heat and fuzzy about The Velvet Underground. When the airwaves have been stuffed with paeans to peace, love, and San Francisco sunshine, this transgressive troop was lurking across the gritty streets of the Decrease East Facet and haunting Andy Warhol’s manufacturing facility in Hell’s Kitchen, digging the decadence. Their songs about S&M, heroin habit, and racial pressure made the band the poison apple at Snow White’s hippie occurring. So how did The Velvet Underground handle to create a few of the most lovely ballads of the 60s in between all of the unhealthy vibes and valentines to vice? Let’s dig in.
Sunday Morning
Exhibit A is the opening monitor on their 1967 debut album. However it was truly the very last thing recorded for the file. For all of producer Tom Wilson’s appreciable avant-garde cred, the business-minded facet of his mind instructed him the Velvets would want a radio music, so he pushed Lou Reed’s deceptively fairly ode to early-morning paranoia to the fore. It was initially written for Nico’s stern baritone, however Reed sang it as an alternative, lending it a extra laid-back really feel, whereas John Cale’s celeste, piano, and viola overdubs made it the closest factor to chamber pop the band would ever render.
Femme Fatale
With Andy Warhol as supervisor, the Velvets bought to know the wild forged of characters who made up the artwork entrepreneur’s offbeat retinue. A few of them inevitably impressed Lou Reed’s songwriting, most famously Sweet Darling and Joe Dallesandro in “Walk on the Wild Side.” Edie Sedgwick, nonetheless, was Warhol’s “It” Lady, who appeared in an extended string of his movies. Her magnificence went hand in hand with tragedy. Drug habit would take her life at age 28 in 1971. When Reed saluted her with “Femme Fatale,” Sedgwick was nonetheless using excessive. The lyrics attribute an nearly predatory high quality to Sedgwick, however they’re offset by the mild, bossa nova-like sway of the guitars and the intense concord of the call-and-response backing vocals. Nico brings simply the best contact of bittersweet to a tune that might simply as simply have been written about her.
I’ll Be Your Mirror
This one truly was impressed by Nico, who gave it one of the vital poignant vocal performances she ever recorded. She had allegedly uttered the title phrase to Reed in dialog and he took it from there. The prettiness of the opposite Velvet Underground ballads is contrasted by a soupcon of unhappiness, bitchiness, or some kind of pressure, however “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is Reed’s unsullied assertion of sweetness, all about one individual really understanding and accepting one other with all their faults. It goes by shortly, barely lasting greater than two minutes, nevertheless it’s sufficient to supply a peek at Reed’s seldom-seen tender underbelly.
Sweet Says
Earlier than Reed put Sweet Darling in “Walk on the Wild Side,” he devoted this heart-rending tune to Warhol’s transgender actress. Within the 60s, writing a compassionate portrait of somebody scuffling with gender identification was spectacular sufficient. Making it one of the vital transferring moments ever dedicated to tape is a complete different factor. In fact, the music has a wider enchantment, with a message that may resonate for anybody who’s ever felt at odds with themselves. Reed assigned lead vocal duties to the brand new man, bassist Doug Xmas, whose place in historical past is assured by these 4 fateful minutes. On March 6, 2013, simply months earlier than his dying, Reed sang “Candy Says” at his ultimate public efficiency, appropriately aided by one other transgender artist, Anohni. Coming from an ailing, fragile Reed, strains like “I’ve come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world” lent the music one other layer of which means.
Pale Blue Eyes
This attractive gut-punch of a tune is a major instance of Reed’s reward for subversion. Inside the framework of what’s ostensibly an easy love music, he drops a few of his most potent, metaphysical poetry and throws in a splash of adultery for good measure. Reed reportedly wrote the music about Shelley Albin, his girlfriend at Syracuse College, who was allegedly married on the time of its composition. To jot down a dragon-slaying couplet like “If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see/I’d put you in the mirror I put in front of me” is to know the brass ring of inventive achievement. To drop into a young love ballad and make it work, that’s simply genius territory. In his lyric e-book, Between Thought and Expression, Reed added the next footnote to the music: “I wrote this for someone I missed very much. Her eyes were hazel.”
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