There’s a reason we’ve never seen that film. So surely they deserve to be captured and memorialized in a film that does them justice. They are, along with the Beatles and the Stones, one of the three seminal groups in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. In theaters and on Apple TV+.For years, I’ve been longing for someone to make a documentary about the Velvet Underground. “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray” - you do the math. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy. As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. “The Velvet Underground” will show you where that perpetual novelty came from, and connect the sonic dots with other, contemporaneous artistic eruptions.
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Testimony to their influence is provided by the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw them live 60 or 70 times when he was a teenager in Boston, and whose enthusiasm is undimmed more than half a century later.ĭrop a needle on any Velvet Underground record - or queue up a playlist, if that’s how you roll - and what you hear will sound new, frightening and full of possibility, even on the thousandth listen. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the Velvets on the West Coast, elaborates on their hostility to the California counterculture: “We hated hippies.” Never a political band, it nonetheless articulated a powerful protest - against sentimentality, stupidity, false consciousness and positive thinking - that would sow the seeds of punk rock and later rebellions. “We hated that peace and love crap,” Tucker says. Reed, who died in 2013, is a posthumously beloved figure, but not many of his contemporaries would describe him as a nice person.Īnd niceness was, in any case, antithetical to what the Velvet Underground was trying to do. An aspect of Warhol’s genius was a gift for using people, and often using them up. The film critic Amy Taubin, who appeared in a Warhol film about “the most beautiful women in the world,” bluntly recalls that the Factory, Warhol’s headquarters, was a bad place for women, who were valued for their looks rather than their talents. While those images sometimes document places, events and personalities - offering up Allen Ginsberg, Max’s Kansas City and a news clip about the downtown scene narrated by Barbara Walters - they serve more importantly to link the Velvets’ music to the experimental cinema of the time. Their faces, shot in gentle, nostalgic, indirect light, share the screen with a rapid flow - a kinetic collage - of images.
Cale and Maureen Tucker, the drummer, the two original Velvet Underground members who are still alive, share their memories, as do some of Reed’s old friends and surviving members of the Warhol circle. And also to see - to feel, to experience - the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan.Ī lot of eloquent people are on hand to talk about what it was like. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. In the aftermath life goes on, solo careers are pursued, and the survivors - fans as much as artists - look back with mellow affection on the wild and heady past, brought alive by excavated television footage.
Early struggle gives way to (relative) triumph, and then the whole thing blows up in a squall of battling egos, substance abuse and self-destructive behavior. The Velvet Underground story is hardly obscure, and in outline it might fit fairly neatly in the standard music-documentary template. Their creative partnership, encouraged by Andy Warhol and enhanced by the mercurial presence of the German model, actress and singer Nico, was the volatile bedrock of the Velvet Underground, a commercially marginal band that altered the course of popular music. Sometime in the 1960s, John Cale, a classically trained Welsh violist with avant-garde leanings, met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college graduate from Long Island who dreamed of being a rock star.
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