![]() ![]() ![]() Its members were sexy and mean-rail-thin and mop-topped, with dark sunglasses and tight, pegged pants-a rock-and-roll look as iconic as Elvis’s, but embodying extreme disdain for any kind of healthy impulse, no matter how sense-making. ![]() The Velvet Underground embodied all that was taboo: drugginess, dirtiness, sexual subversion, a scowling death wish. The emotions the band aroused in me, though, still felt originary. By the time I became a fan of the band, in the nineties, I was one such devotee: listening to the music on tape rather than on LP, wearing a banana-logo T-shirt likely printed by some subsidiary factory in Bangladesh, seemingly light-years away not just from Lou Reed buying smack in Harlem but also from the people who were first scandalized when they heard Lou Reed singing about buying smack in Harlem. The band’s afterlife has proved much longer-lasting than its relatively brief heyday: it influenced later movements such as punk, no wave, and new wave, and spawned an untold number of late adopters. Initially led by the musical partnership of Reed and Cale, it quickly released two poorly received albums-the first famously bearing a Warhol-designed image of a banana-and went on, after Cale’s departure, to record two more albums, before dissolving in the early seventies. The Velvet Underground was established in 1965, and became the house band for Warhol’s Factory and “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” his series of multimedia performances. A quick search on my phone, as I waited for a light on Canal Street to turn green, revealed that I had just passed “The Velvet Underground Experience,” an exhibition that was first installed at the Philharmonie de Paris two years ago, and that had now arrived in New York. A velvet rope was languishing, unpeopled, in front of the store-looking like a cross between the entrance to a club in the Meatpacking District and a teller line in a Bank of America branch. Though I’d never noticed it before, the outsized faces on it-printed in stark white-on-black, in the style of a Pop Art silkscreen-were immediately familiar: Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Moe Tucker, and Sterling Morrison, of the band the Velvet Underground, along with their impresario, Andy Warhol. On a recent night, I was driving down Broadway when, a few blocks below Fourteenth Street, I spotted a large, showy sign above one of the storefronts. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |