The always artful filmmaker Todd Haynes totally ignores the one clichéd anecdote about the iconoclastic rock group The Velvet Underground in his superb, eponymic doc “The Velvet Underground,” a film that should always be experienced at top volume. Attributed to the similarly groundbreaking musician/ producer Brian Eno, the oft-repeated phrase claims the debut VU record only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band. That Haynes ignores it is fine, but it’s good context here and nearly indisputably true. The Velvet Underground, outside of the Beatles or the Stones, is arguably the most influential rock group of all time and certainly paved the way for punk, post-punk, indie, alternative, and nearly all forms of rock with dark, disruptive edges. While David Bowie started in the same year, he, like many other seminal artists of this era–Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, et al. and those that stood on their shoulders–was deeply influenced by 1967’s groundbreaking The Velvet Underground & Nico album and the short-lived career that followed.
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Conflict and contradiction are arguably the basis of all great art. And this artistic strain was certainly The VU’s DNA, musically and beyond. Founding member John Cale describes it as the tension between the elegance and brutality of their sonic bedlam, but it’s a tension, stress, and theme that also unraveled the band after only five years and four albums.
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Featuring the famed and notoriously cantankerous singer/songwriter Lou Reed, the fabulously underrated multi-instrumentalist Cale (one of the great musicians and songwriters of our time who Reed has overshadowed), angular guitarist Sterling Morrison, and primordial drummer Moe Tucker, Haynes isn’t at all interested in setting up an early easy-to-digest summary of the group off the top, their impact, or anything familiar at all for that matter. Instead, he starts right at the beginning, diving surprisingly deep into all the formative details, slowly building to a hypnotically accumulative crescendo that expresses the far-echoing impression the band made on the culture and has the same effect as their transcendental music.
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More importantly, Haynes— who acutely understands the art scenes, avante garde proclivities, and counterculture considerations of this decade and obviously has made several music films (“Velvet Goldmine,” about Bowie and the glam age, “I’m Not There” about Bob Dylan’s many masks)— wisely keys into the Warhol-ian age of experimentation, cuts ups, Fluxus-influence, repetition and kaleidoscopic images for the striking visual language of his doc. ‘The VU’ doc transports him back to raw, art school tendencies, and it’s a little strange and jarring at first— split screens, disembodied voice-over over a single image of Lou Reed seemingly piercing into your soul for minutes on end, etc.—but it’s bold, gnarly, intoxicating and entirely the point. While Andy Warhol is not the story and had no input into their music, Haynes certainly captures the discordant aesthetic and unpredictable energy of this ecstatic, exciting art movement looping around him. The explosion of art in New York and Warhol’s Factory scene was the same beautiful, chaotic, radical spirit that the VU was also channeling, and so, that Factory apostles would soon bring the Reed and Co. to Warhol’s attention seems like destiny.
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Focusing on Reed and Cale mostly—the dueling chaos-and-order creative forces and egos of the group (though each inhabiting elements of both) — Haynes leaves no stone unturned, devoting copious amounts of time to their developmental histories; Reed influences like the poet Delmore Schwartz, Cale’s foundational drone teacher La Monte Young and his frequency-jamming Dream Syndicate, and some of the psychic traumas they both acquired in difficult childhoods and adolescence (the infamous stories of Reed’s shock therapy to dissuade him from his homosexual affinities). Obviously, only Cale and Tucker are alive to tell their side of the story, but Haynes excavates the perfect amount of Reed and Sterling recordings to make it feel more than ghosts haunting the edges of the doc’s broken-up frame.
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Warhol looms large in the story, too beyond borrowed aesthetics. It was he, a promoter, champion, and impresario at heart, who foisted the icy Germanic chanteuse Nico onto the band and toured them all together in his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia show that made for outrageously memorable concerts for LSD-aficionados, but maybe detracted from the actual music and made them feel like sideshow performers in the freaky all tomorrow’s party (“He produced our album to the extent that he was breathing in the room while it was recorded,” one band member quips about his producer credit on the inaugural album. Nico would leave after just one album).
That still-breathtaking, dissonant, profound, mesmerizing music itself—the feral next to the angelic, the poetic butting up against the drones of madness—with Reed’s transgressive, subversive lyrics on top—is presented in an outstanding plangent mix, a pummeling, spellbinding wall of sound that feels like the only VU concert you’ll ever get to attend and an authoritative reminder of just how impossibly magnetic this band was. While friends, family, and musician Jonathan Richman (an enthusiastic fan in his teen years), help shape the tale, ‘The VU’ feels like it’s told from the perspective of the band members and is always veering far away from talking-head doc standards.
Haynes makes the group further distinctive by appreciating their ethos and bleak nihilism, far removed from their 1960s contemporaries. They loathed the hippies, and while the Southern California scene was singing paisley songs about peace and love, the VU was dressed all in black, singing discordant and disarming songs about heroin addiction, early trans angst, junkies, whores, drag queens, and the existential struggle of sordid street life. This band took their spiritual cues from J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, and other subversive, outré poets and outsiders of that era.
Haynes also emphasizes the eponymous The Velvet Underground & Nico record more than anything else and essentially suggests the band was never the same without John Cale. While incontrovertibly true, and nice that Cale gets his due, the Welshman was the musical anchor towards the chaotic, the dissonant, and the experimental that made the VU feel so dangerous and volatile, it’s also unquestionable that the records that followed, The Velvet Underground (The Gray Album as one person in the doc refers it to), and Loaded are fantastic rock and pop records, though perhaps not as precarious and envelope-pushing as the first two records (musician Doug Yule took Cale’s place, and while not as daring, he certainly brought spiritual and musical harmony to the group before they imploded in 1970).
While a definitive portrait in its own idiosyncratic manner, “The Velvet Underground” won’t be for all audiences; it’s often as cacophonous and anarchic as the band and Warhol’s factory creativity (no clue what normies watching AppleTV+ are going to make of it), but it’s a fitting, perfect encapsulation of that thrilling era in cross-pollinating, boundary-breaking art, performance, and music. Rock manager Danny Fields contends such a dynamic, crucial, combustible group burned so brightly, their light was brief but blinding. That platitude is its own prosaism too, but given how furious the Velvet Underground blazed on stage, on their albums, and in the searing mark they left, one maxim about their fleeting incandescent glory feels more than ok. [A]
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