The Velvet Underground & Nico

Cover Art.

The Velvet Underground & Nico was the debut album of The Velvet Underground.  The style of music found inside this album is “dark-clouded” (Howard, 2004) compared to the “euphoric sunshine daydream”  (Howard, 2004) music scene in the West Coast at the end of the 60’s.  This band made experimental music for the time, which only captured a selected group of people in the beginning of their career.

The Velvet Underground had two main songwriters, Lou Reed and John Cale.   John Cale, a “gifted piano and violin player “ (Howard, 2004), studied Classical music at London’s Goldsmith’s College in 1960.  After getting his degree, Cale got a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study modern composition in Massachusetts, USA.  Cale then moved to New York “seeking for more open minds” (Howard. 2004), which leaded him to the “quietly intense songwriter” (Howard, 2004) Lou Reed.  Lou Reed was working as a songwriter at Pickwick Records in New Jersey.  

After playing together as the Primitives, Reed and Cale kept rehearsing together along with other musicians.  By the end of 1965 Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Mauren Tucker formed the Velvet Underground.  Reed was the main lyricists and composer, while Cale provided his “viola virtuosity, inventive basslines, and pulverizing piano assaults” (Howard, 2004) to help create a “sonic futurists” (Howard, 2004).

Andy Warhol was the person who supported, promoted, and produced The Velvet Underground & Nico.  Warhol was the “leading artist of the visual art movement called, pop art” (Economist, 2009).  Warhol did not know anything about music production, but he featured them in his artistic exhibitions (Promoter) and paid the recordings for the album (Executive Producer).

The Velvet Underground & Nico album was an album that did not have any success when it was first released in 1967.  Tracks like, “Venus In Furs” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” showed clearly the dark compositions compared to the upbeat tracks produced to the West Coast by this time.  The minimal style of music from the Velvet Underground & Nico was something that the society in the end of the 60’s were not used to listen.  This style of music required the use of instruments unseen in popular music before like guitars, acoustic bass, violins, and hand percussion. Despite its relative lack of success upon release, the Velvet Underground & Nico album became after time one of the most influential albums of all times (RollingStone, 2003).

In my opinion, The Velvet Underground & Nico album is hard to digest the first time.  Like, Joe Harvard said, “I wasn’t raised listening to The Velvet Underground. When I first heard them, I didn’t like them! I thought it was a piece of s***, but after time it came by coincidence to me and I loved it!” (Harvard, 2008). I first listened to that album when I was 15 years old and I did not like it.   After listening to the album recently made me appreciate what was really going on musically and socially in the end of the 60’s, how well produced this album is, and how their sound/style of recording reflected in bands and artists like Donovan, MGMT, etc. 



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