My first encounter with the Velvet Underground was at a friend’s house – and I was put off.
Can’t remember why. I might have thought they were an invention of Andy Warhol, and maybe a put-on. Heroin was ‘too much for my mirror’ – to borrow Beefheart’s line. That Cale viola was seriously grating.
Most likely the exceptionally dark and New York Noire of it didn’t fit my dharma then – there were innumerable records to listen to in 1967. From: The Doors, The Fish, The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, the Who, the Kinks, Love, Procul Harum, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.
Other records I was listening to in that time frame: Canned Heat’s First, Jimi Hendrix Are you Experienced, Electric Flag.
Now we get to 1968. Eden was receding. The hippie had been buried. It was the second record, White Light White Heat – that really got me. I am in high school and always doomed to be out the door at 7:30 am. The clock radio with the flipping digits would go off at 6:30 am – at this point the all night DJ had maybe put something long on – like InnaGaddaDavida, and split. WTOS from Wauwatosa. The first blush of Alternative FM rock. *** Playing InnaGaddaDavida or Sister Ray.
I saw the VU light – and followed them thereafter, enough for my friends to call me obsessed.
Sister Ray or WhiteLight …or I Heard her Call My Name – what the Music Genome Project would call accelerating tempo, droning textures, and dynamic builds. And ……… I’d add ….minimalism.
Wild stuff that ghostlike would haunt what they might do thereafter…When the Third Record came out...that was a shock...the mildness of it was pretty unexpected. Number 4, Loaded, was something you could play for everyone you met, I stalwartly discovered.
There was a war going on – these were tough psychic times. I joined in with others as we looked for a warm post hippie kitchen feel. Cat Stevens, the Band, Neil Young. It made sense that the Velvet’s would eventually cool it down too. Fatigued. Shouted out. Bellyachin’.
The later Velvets sounded great with Doug Yule, who I think has been very unfairly overlooked in the histories. It is true, tho, that the Velvets were different after Cale left. I say all that …. In recollection of my recent encounter with a NYRB review of a biography on Eric Satie’s music.
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Velvet Times or From Too Much for My Mirror To Obsessive
Compulsive Fanboy
What I did during another snowstorm
The Velvet Underground had one or two canonical styles, and
were not wholly unique in that. But there were others at times doing guitar
drones and cathartic buildups during the Fillmore Era, and I’d count among them
Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead and the 13th Floor Elevator.
Certainly, with White Light White Heat they put it on record like a stake in
the heart of hippie mood music.
Among the stylistic attributes the Music Genome Project
might apply to the Velvets would be accelerating tempo, droning
textures, and dynamic builds. In the early going, and like a vestige
tree spirit thereafter, was a most determined minimalism.
The Velvet Underground stripped down edifice. I’d venture
that minimalism sprang from Lou Reed’s unison guitar tuning, Mo Tucker’s take
on Olatunji, and Sterling Morrison’s take on Jimmy Reed and Lightning Hopkins. But
let’s imagine for now that the vector that truly defined the Velvet
Underground’s singular sound can be laid specifically at the feet of John Cale.
All this comes to mind because 1) I read a review of a new
biography on Erik Satie and 2) Well, it’s snowed incredibly and no one is going
anywhere at the moment. Let’s tune into Jermemy Dank’s “Satie’s Spell” – which
covers “Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman” in the New York Review of
Books. [Not including link, as there is a pay wall.]
Cale doesn’t show up in the review. But he came to mind.
“Minimalism” was the open sesame. Cale’s got the Satie cred. With John Cage he
performed Vexations, Satie’s blockbuster minimal opus. Cale even played a
portion of that when he appeared in 1963 on I’ve Got A Secret [ see link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mqO-xsRyTM
Satie had great popularity in my college days in the 20th
Century. And I can only admit to slight familiarity with him or his music. He
was capable of lush trance like takes on what he thought might be the ancient
Greek way. He was a master of musical jokes - ones that had to be explained to
me. I discover in my reading that he was all about minimalistic strip-down of
edifice.
What I gathered from the review: Satie was critical of the
way classical music in France had come to evolve - they called the style French
Romantic, this being the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century. He
found it pretentious - serious for the sake of being serious.
Reviewer Denk explained the correct hipsters' question of
French Romantic music was: "How did Western civilization decide that this
twaddle is sacrosanct?"
Yes, there were others that rebelled - Stravinsky or
Schoenberg, for examples. But no one quite like Erik Satie.
Arbitrary Breakup in Narrative
Like an abstract expressionist, Satie would break up
narratives and deliberately or randomly scatter them so that the listener
couldn't indulge the time-honored practice of guessing the next note. Satie
would strip away the 'analogous story" that might underline a composition.
He'd use weird chords. Or notate normal chords weirdly. For
example: B-double-flat major, which the concert performer Denk tells us is just
A major in a Sunday clown suit.
Vexations aside, Satie was a “less is more” “just the facts”
minimalist guy. And I think Cale pondered his approach deeply. I’m Waiting for
My Man. European Son, I Heard Her Call My Name.
Much of the review centers on biographer Ian Penman’s style.
I’d say he has some of the flair of Lester Bangs, but I’ll stop there.
Penman comes of a bit high falutin’, and a include a
citation [courtesy of reviewer Denk] so you can judge…but you’d be better
digging into Penman’s writing yourself. He’s appeared extensively in the Times
of London and The Guardian.
I’d say he has some of the flair of Lester Bangs, but you’d
probably throw a pie at me next time we meet, given the turgid prose blast I’ve
just managed to create. JV
About the NYRB: It’s a cold winter and I am reading it to up
my pith metre, and it seems to be working. For more ... https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-saturday-night-review-of-new-york.html
Citation
Digital culture nullifies our capacity for blankness,
boredom, the ability to just happily accept the passage of time; just to let
something break off, drift straggle … Music may … grant us access to certain
threshold states: daydream, longing, reverie. A different form of purchase.
- Penman, Satie Bio
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1.
*** It was an era as well where alternative press would grow, as for example, Crawdaddy. And here’s an excerpt from a writeup on Susan Sontag. It refers to Wayne McGuire’s essay on the Velvets that was tremendously influential in my cranium. McGuire sang the praise of feedback in the VietNam era. Hendrix, McLuhan, Merton, others chimed in similarly…
2.
My take on the era was extracted from Boston writer Wayne McGuire in Crawdaddy [link as of July 5, 2025]:
“The real question is: How can we control and humanize an increasingly uncontrollable and proliferating technology, when the value foundation for that attempted humanization is rapidly disintegrating and when the attempt by humans to control such power (who would be the master programmer?) would most certainly be corrupting in the extreme).”
3.
Google Gemini was invoked in research for this article. It gave me some of the best critique I ever had...
Gemini to me:
Your sentence is intellectually dense, but the phrasing is a little "knotty" near the end. If you want it to flow more naturally for an essay or a review, you might try: etc
This report includes material from elsewhere on MoonTravellerHerald.
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2024/07/velvet-tones.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2015/09/la-monte-young-and-second-dream-of-high.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2006/05/hey-what-about-punk-music.html
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