The Velvet Underground

What Goes On

Sean Albiez, David Pattie, Sean Albiez, David Pattie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501393907
• eBook ISBN: 9781501338427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Though The Velvet Underground were critically and commercially unsuccessful in their time, in ensuing decades they have become a constant touchstone in art rock, punk, post-punk, indie, avant pop and alternative rock. In the 1970s and 80s Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico produced a number of works that traveled a path between art and pop. In 1993 the original band members of Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker briefly reunited for live appearances, and afterwards Reed, Cale and briefly Tucker, continued to produce music that travelled the idiosyncratic path begun in New York in the mid-1960s. The influence of the band and band members, mediated and promoted through famous fans such as David Bowie and Brian Eno, seems only to have expanded since the late 1960s. In 1996 the Velvet Underground were in inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, demonstrating how far the band had traveled in 30 years from an avant-garde cult to the mainstream recognition of their key contributions to popular music. In these collected essays, Pattie and Albiez present the first academic book-length collection on The Velvet Underground. The book covers a range of topics including the band's relationship to US literature, to youth and cultural movements of the 1960s and beyond and to European culture - and examines these contexts from the 1960s through to the present day.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction – The Velvet Underground: What went on
• 1 Saved by rock and roll: The Velvet Underground in and out of history
• 2 The Velvet Underground and the networks of sound, vision and words of the fertile transatlantic crescent 1965–7
• 3 Andy Warhol films the Velvet Underground and Nico
• 4 ‘The riskiest kind of writing available’: Lou Reed, Grove Press and the literary underground
• 5 The Velvet Underground and musical archetypes
• 6 Lou Reed’s Great American Novel
• 7 Nico, captain of her own ship: Cultural accreditation and mid-1960s experimental rock
• 8 European Son: ‘Europe’ in Nico, Cale and Reed’s long-1970s solo work
• 9 ‘I’ll be your mirror’: The Velvet Underground as the legacy of Ziggy Stardust
• What Caroline says: Berlin, 1973 and 2006
• 11 Unfrozen borderlines: Nico, John Cale and Brian Eno at the Berlin Nationalgalerie
• 12 Noise annoys: Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music
• 13 The Velvet Underground is a Jonathan Richman song
• 14 ‘It’s not that I don’t want to play your favourites’; Lou Reed, improvisation and performance
• 15 Portrait of the artist as Andy Warhol: Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella
• 16 The late musical voice: John Cale and Lou Reed in the twenty-first century
• Discography – The Velvet Underground and Solo Works
• Index
• Imprint