The story of The Velvet Underground

Pickwick, Ludlow Street and a paperback

The story begins with two very different young men born a week apart in March 1942. Lou Reed grew up on Long Island, a bullied, anxious kid who learned guitar from the radio and cut his first single with a doo wop trio called the Jades in 1958. At Syracuse University he studied under the poet Delmore Schwartz, the first great person he ever met, he said. John Cale came from Garnant, a coal mining village in Wales, where Welsh was his first language. A gifted viola player, he studied at Goldsmiths in London and crossed the Atlantic in 1963, arriving in New York to play long, droning pieces with the composer La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music.[1] [2] [3]

In 1964 Reed took a job as a staff songwriter at Pickwick Records, a budget label that churned out cheap soundalike albums. He called himself a poor man's Carole King. One of his novelty songs, a spoof dance number called The Ostrich, was played on a guitar with every string tuned to the same note. When Pickwick wanted a band to promote it, Reed was put together with Cale, the violinist Tony Conrad and the sculptor Walter De Maria, and they appeared as the Primitives. Cale was amazed. The ostrich tuning produced almost exactly the drone he played with La Monte Young, and Reed already had songs like Heroin in his notebook. A partnership was born.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reed and Cale moved into a cold flat on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. Reed ran into Sterling Morrison, an old friend from Syracuse, on the subway and brought him in on guitar, while Cale recruited his neighbour, the percussionist Angus MacLise. They tried out names like the Warlocks and the Falling Spikes. Then Tony Conrad showed them a lurid paperback about the secret sexual subculture of the day, written by Michael Leigh and called The Velvet Underground. MacLise suggested they take the title. It sounded like underground cinema, and it fitted Reed's song Venus in Furs, about masochism. In November 1965 the name stuck for good.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That summer Reed, Cale and Morrison taped rough demos in the loft. Cale took a copy to London and tried to get it to Marianne Faithfull, hoping she would pass it to Mick Jagger. Nothing came of it. Then the rock journalist Al Aronowitz found them their first paying gig, seventy five dollars to play Summit High School in New Jersey. Angus MacLise walked out rather than take money for art, or, as Reed later put it, because he hated being told when to start and when to stop. The band needed a drummer fast, and Morrison remembered that his school friend Jim Tucker had a younger sister who played.[1] [2] [3]

Maureen Tucker, known as Moe, was working as a keypunch operator for IBM. She had taught herself by playing along to the first Rolling Stones album and loved the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. She played standing up, with mallets as often as sticks, on a tiny kit with an upturned bass drum and almost no cymbals, which she hated. Cale at first objected to having a woman on drums, but her pounding, hypnotic beat became the heart of the band. They landed a residency at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village, a tourist trap where the owner could not stand them. When he threatened to fire them if they played The Black Angel's Death Song again, they opened the next set with it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Andy Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable

Being fired from the Café Bizarre turned out to be the luckiest break of their lives. In December 1965 the filmmaker Barbara Rubin brought Andy Warhol's circle down to see them, and Warhol and his collaborator Paul Morrissey were hooked. Warhol became their manager, let them rehearse at his studio, the Factory, and made them his house band. He had one condition. He wanted a glamorous singer out front, and he had just the person. Nico was a German model and actress, born Christa Päffgen, who had appeared in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Reed was not happy about it, but the band reluctantly agreed to let her sing some songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new line up made its debut in a very strange place. On the thirteenth of January 1966, Warhol was invited to speak at a banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry at the Delmonico Hotel. Instead of a talk, he brought the band. As hundreds of psychiatrists in evening dress sat down to dinner, the Velvets launched into their noise, Nico sang, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick danced, and film crews shone bright lights in the diners' faces while asking them rude questions. The New York Herald Tribune headline read Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists. Warhol was fascinated by how uncomfortable everyone was.[1] [2]

In April 1966 Warhol and Morrissey took over the Dom, a Polish dance hall on St. Mark's Place, painted it white and filled it with projectors, strobe lights and mirror balls. The show became the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Warhol's films played across the band while Malanga and Mary Woronov performed a whip dance, and the lights were so punishing that the band started wearing sunglasses on stage. The circus then toured America and Canada. In California it went down badly. The San Francisco Chronicle called it very Greenwich Village sick, and Bill Graham of the Fillmore said it sickened him. The Factory crowd, fuelled by amphetamine, found the acid soaked hippies just as ridiculous.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There were setbacks along the way. In the summer of 1966 Reed was laid up in hospital with hepatitis, and for a short run of shows in Chicago Angus MacLise came back on drums, Tucker switched to bass and Cale sang. MacLise wanted to rejoin for good, but Reed would not have it. That December the band appeared in an unusual format, a flexi disc called Loop tucked inside an arty boxed magazine named Aspen, packaged to look like a box of laundry detergent. It was credited to the Velvet Underground but was really Cale alone, a record of pulsing feedback ending in a locked groove. It was their first commercially available recording.[1] [2]

The Banana Album

Warhol decided it was time to make a record. A Columbia Records salesman and part time disc jockey named Norman Dolph offered to organise the sessions, asking for a painting instead of a fee. In mid April 1966, over about four days, the band recorded most of the album at Scepter Studios on West Fifty Fourth Street, a battered room Reed said sat somewhere between reconstruction and demolition, with holes in the floor and only a few working microphones. Dolph was paid with one of Warhol's silver Death and Disaster canvases. He sold it around 1975 for seventeen thousand dollars and joked that Lou Reed probably had not made that much from the album yet.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Columbia turned the tapes down, and so did Atlantic and Elektra. According to Morrison, Atlantic disliked the drug references and Elektra disliked Cale's viola. The man who finally said yes was Tom Wilson, the producer who had taken Bob Dylan electric and was now at MGM's Verve label. Wilson was also a rarity for his time, a Black producer in charge of major rock records. Cale recalled playing him Heroin in an office and Wilson loving the screaming viola. In May the band re recorded Heroin, Venus in Furs and I'm Waiting for the Man in Hollywood, and in November Wilson added one more song he thought could be a hit, Sunday Morning.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The songs were like nothing else in pop. I'm Waiting for the Man follows a buyer going uptown to Harlem to score heroin. Reed later said everything in it was true except the price. Heroin itself describes the drug's rush without judging it, speeding up and slowing down like a pulse, with no bass at all. Venus in Furs is almost a literal reading of a nineteenth century novel about masochism. Yet there was tenderness too. Warhol asked Reed to write about Edie Sedgwick, and the result was Femme Fatale, sung by Nico. I'll Be Your Mirror was inspired by Nico herself, and the closing European Son was dedicated to Delmore Schwartz.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The Velvet Underground and Nico finally came out in March 1967 in a white sleeve with a yellow banana sticker by Warhol and the words Peel slowly and see. Peel it back and you found a pink banana underneath. Warhol's name was on the cover, the band's was not. Some shops refused to stock the record, many radio stations would not play it, and magazines refused its adverts. Then came a legal blow. The back cover photo showed an image of the actor Eric Emerson projected behind the band, and Emerson threatened to sue. MGM pulled the album from the shops for weeks while his face was stickered over and then airbrushed out.[1] [2] [3]

By the time the record was back in the shops, the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper and the summer of love was in full bloom. The Velvets' songs about needles and whips could hardly have been further from the mood. The album crept onto the Billboard chart and peaked at number one hundred and seventy one in December 1967. Years later Brian Eno said it had sold only about thirty thousand copies early on, but that everyone who bought one started a band. Today it sits in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, and Pitchfork has ranked it the best album of the 1960s.[1] [2] [3] [4]

White Light White Heat and the firing of John Cale

After the album flopped, the band's ties to Warhol frayed. Reed later said Warhol sat him down and asked whether he wanted to keep playing museums and art festivals forever, and that after thinking it over, Reed fired him. Nico drifted away too, and would describe it as being fired. Their new manager was Steve Sesnick, who had run the Boston Tea Party club, where the Velvets had become local heroes. Tucker liked him so much she thought of him as a fifth member. Cale did not. He believed Sesnick was pushing Reed forward as the leader at the expense of the group, and both Cale and Reed would later call him a snake.[1] [2] [3]

In September 1967 the band went into Mayfair Sound Studios in Manhattan with Tom Wilson producing. Thanks to Warhol, they had a free endorsement deal with Vox, and they arrived with a pile of amplifiers, fuzz boxes and an organ. They played so loud that the engineer, Gary Kellgren, kept warning them that all the needles were in the red. They told him to just do his best. Cale called the result consciously anti beauty. The album includes The Gift, a dark comic short story Reed had written at college, read aloud by Cale in his flat Welsh voice, while Lady Godiva's Operation drew partly on Reed's teenage experience of electroshock treatment.[1] [2]

The centrepiece was Sister Ray, a seventeen minute improvisation about drag queens, sailors, heroin and a police raid. Reed said Warhol had insisted they keep what he called the song with the rude lyric. There was no bass, just two guitars, Cale's distorted organ and Tucker holding it all together. White Light White Heat was released on the thirtieth of January 1968. It spent two weeks on the Billboard chart and peaked at number one hundred and ninety nine, lower than the debut. The band blamed radio bans and a lack of promotion. Critics mostly ignored it at the time, but its wall of distortion became a blueprint for punk and noise rock.[1] [2]

On the third of June 1968, the writer Valerie Solanas walked into Warhol's Factory and shot him. She had appeared in one of his films and said he had too much control over her life. Warhol survived, but only just, and spent almost two months in hospital. By then the Velvets had moved on from his world, but his shadow never left them. Twenty years later Reed and Cale would write a song condemning Solanas on their tribute album to Warhol. The shooting also marked the end of the anything goes era of the Factory, which from then on became much more of a business.[1] [2]

Inside the band, the tension between Reed and Cale was reaching breaking point. Reed wanted accessible songs; Cale wanted more noise and drones. Their final sessions together that year show the split, with poppy songs like Stephanie Says beside Cale's viola epic Hey Mr. Rain. Then Reed called Morrison and Tucker to the Riviera Cafe in the West Village without telling Cale, and gave them an ultimatum. Either Cale goes or the band is finished. Neither liked it, but they sided with Reed. Cale played his last show at the Boston Tea Party in September 1968, and Morrison was the one sent to tell him he was out.[1] [2] [3]

Doug Yule and the quiet album

Cale's replacement was Doug Yule, a twenty one year old musician from the Boston group the Grass Menagerie. The Velvets had stayed at his apartment on River Street in Boston, which he rented from their road manager, and Morrison had heard him practising guitar and noticed how quickly he was improving. In October 1968 Sesnick invited him to Max's Kansas City in New York to meet the band, and he was asked to play bass and organ. He learned the set in a hurry for shows in Cleveland. Yule was a more conventional player than Cale, melodic and technically sure, which suited Reed's plan to take the band in a gentler direction.[1] [2] [3]

Within weeks they were recording their third album at TTG Studios in Hollywood, staying at the Chateau Marmont, writing in the afternoons and recording at night. Reed said they could not make another White Light White Heat. The result was so quiet that the writer Richie Unterberger joked it was as if, having made perhaps the loudest album ever, they had set out to make the quietest. Reed and Morrison played matching Fender twelve string guitars. Morrison claimed their Vox gear had been stolen at an airport, but Yule and Tucker said the new sound was simply a choice. Everyone remembered the sessions as happy and creative.[1] [2]

The album opens with Candy Says, sung by Yule, about the Warhol actress Candy Darling and her pain at living in a body that did not feel like hers. It was Yule's first time singing in a studio. Pale Blue Eyes, one of Reed's finest love songs, was inspired by his first love, Shelley Albin, who was by then married to someone else. The Murder Mystery has all four members reciting different words at once. And the album closes with After Hours, sung by Moe Tucker, because Reed thought her innocent voice made the song believable. She was so nervous that after eight takes she cleared the studio of everyone but Reed and the engineer.[1] [2] [3]

The Velvet Underground came out in March 1969 and failed to chart at all. Reed had made his own mix, known as the closet mix, which pushed his vocals forward and annoyed Morrison and Tucker, while MGM's engineer Val Valentin made the version most people later heard. The band spent 1969 on the road across America and Canada, playing tight, beautiful shows. In November they played small clubs in San Francisco like the Matrix, a former pizzeria, for a couple of dollars at the door. A young fan named Robert Quine taped many of these shows, and live albums from this year would appear decades later.[1] [2] [3]

That year they also recorded a whole set of new songs, including Foggy Notion, I Can't Stand It and Stephanie Says, meant for a fourth MGM album. It never came out. MGM had a new boss, Mike Curb, who dropped a batch of acts, partly over drug associations and partly because they did not sell, and the label kept the tapes. Reed later said the band simply wanted out. Those recordings sat in the vaults until 1985, when they were finally released as VU, followed by Another View in 1986. Reed reworked several of the songs on his solo records, including Ocean, Lisa Says and Andy's Chest.[1] [2]

Loaded, Max's Kansas City and Lou walks out

In 1970 the Velvets signed with Cotillion, part of Atlantic Records, for what would be their last album with Lou Reed. The label asked for a record loaded with hits, and that gave it its name. It was the band's most straightforward pop and rock album, and it contains two of Reed's best known songs, Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll. Reed said Rock and Roll was about himself. If he had not heard rock on the radio as a boy, he wrote, he would have had no idea there was life on this planet. Yule grew into a much bigger role, singing lead on four songs, including the opener, Who Loves the Sun.[1] [2] [3]

One founder was missing. Moe Tucker was pregnant with her first child, a daughter named Kerry, and barely played on the album, though she was credited as its drummer. Doug Yule played drums on several tracks, including Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll, along with bass, piano and some lead guitar, and the engineer Adrian Barber and others filled in. Morrison went back to college at the City College of New York to finish his degree, fitting sessions around classes. Tucker later said a reporter told her every man in the band admitted they should have waited for her. She said that made her very happy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

From the twenty fourth of June to the twenty eighth of August 1970, the Velvets played a nine week residency at Max's Kansas City, the Manhattan hangout where Warhol's crowd filled the back room. They played two long sets a night. On drums was Doug Yule's younger brother Billy, who was just sixteen and still in high school. It was their first real run of shows in New York in years. On the twenty third of August, a Warhol regular named Brigid Polk taped the show on a portable cassette recorder from her table. Nobody knew it then, but it was Reed's last night with the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reed was worn out by the lack of success and by pressure from Sesnick. During a break between sets, he took Tucker, who had come to watch, and sat with her on some stairs to tell her he was leaving. He did not tell Morrison or Yule. Yule said Sesnick waited until an hour before the next night's show to tell him Reed was not coming. He blamed Sesnick for driving Reed out. Reed moved back to his parents' house on Long Island and took a job as a typist at his father's accounting firm, earning forty dollars a week. He was twenty eight.[1] [2] [3]

Loaded was released in November 1970, three months after Reed quit. He said he was surprised to see it in the shops, and he complained that a verse had been cut from Sweet Jane and that New Age had been shortened. Yule countered that the album was essentially finished when Reed left and that he knew about most of the edits. In 1995 the box set Peel Slowly and See restored the songs the way Reed wanted. Loaded was not the smash Atlantic hoped for, but Sweet Jane became one of the most covered songs in rock, and Reed would play it for the rest of his life.[1] [2] [3]

The Velvets without Lou

With Reed gone and Loaded about to come out, Sesnick had bookings to fill, so the band kept going. Doug Yule took over as singer and switched to guitar, Walter Powers came in on bass, and Moe Tucker returned from maternity leave. They toured America to promote the album into the summer of 1971. Sterling Morrison had finished his degree by then and quietly applied to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. His last show with the band was at Liberty Hall in Houston in August 1971. What happened next became one of the band's favourite stories.[1] [2] [3]

When it was time to fly home to New York, Morrison packed his suitcase, rode to the Houston airport with the band and walked with them to the gate. Only then did he tell them he was staying in Texas. The suitcase was empty. Tucker later confirmed the story, saying he had simply found it hard to face the moment. He was the last of the founders to leave. The keyboard player Willie Alexander replaced him, and that autumn the line up toured England, Wales and the Netherlands, where Loaded had just been released. After that tour, Sesnick sent Alexander, Powers and Tucker home.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 1972 Atlantic released Brigid Polk's tape as Live at Max's Kansas City, and interest in Europe was growing. Sesnick secured a one album deal with Polydor in Britain. Doug Yule, the only member left, recorded Squeeze in London almost entirely on his own, with the Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice and a few session players. Yule wanted Tucker on drums, but Sesnick said she was too expensive. Then Sesnick failed to turn up in London with equipment and money for the tour, leaving the band to play a handful of dates just to afford flights home. Yule said his only pay was six copies of the album.[1] [2] [3]

Squeeze came out in February 1973, in Europe only, with little promotion, and critics dismissed it as a Velvet Underground album in name only. It has since won some admirers, and the British band Squeeze named themselves after it. In the spring of 1973 a tour manager booked a group with Doug Yule, his brother Billy and others as the Velvet Underground for a few shows in Boston and on Long Island, against the members' wishes. In late May they parted ways with the manager, and the name was finally laid to rest. The band that had inspired so many others ended without anyone really noticing.[1] [2] [3]

Scattered lives

Reed's solo career took off with his second album, Transformer, released in November 1972 and produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson. Bowie was a long time fan who had been playing I'm Waiting for the Man since before the Velvets' debut came out. The single Walk on the Wild Side sketched Warhol's crowd, including Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, over a jazzy bass line, and it reached number sixteen in America, his only Hot 100 hit. Then came the bleak Berlin, the live Rock n Roll Animal full of Velvets songs, and the feedback album Metal Machine Music. Through the 1970s Reed was a heavy user of methamphetamine and alcohol.[1] [2] [3]

There was darkness around him in those years. Candy Darling, who had inspired Candy Says, died of lymphoma in March 1974 at just twenty nine. Reed's first wife, Bettye Kronstad, whom he married in 1973, later said he was violent when drinking on tour, and a 2015 biography by Howard Sounes gathered further allegations of abuse against women, which Reed, who died in 2013, could no longer answer. He also clashed with old friends. In 1979 he hit David Bowie during a late night argument in London. Around the same time, Reed began to wean himself off drugs, and by the early 1980s he was sober.[1] [2] [3]

John Cale became one of rock's great producers. He produced the Stooges' debut, Nico's haunting solo albums, the Modern Lovers and Patti Smith, and later the band Squeeze, who were named after the Velvets album. His own solo records ran from the lush Paris 1919 to snarling late seventies punk shows, where he once wore a hockey mask on stage. In 1991 his piano version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah laid the template most later covers would follow. Nico, meanwhile, dyed her hair red, took up the harmonium and made dark, pioneering records. She struggled with heroin addiction for more than fifteen years.[1] [2] [3]

The other two left music far behind. Sterling Morrison earned his doctorate in medieval literature from the University of Texas with a dissertation on the Old English poet Cynewulf, then became a licensed master mariner and captained tugboats on the Houston ship channel through the 1980s. Moe Tucker moved to Phoenix to raise her family, later divorced, and settled in Douglas, Georgia, where she worked at a Walmart distribution centre until 1989, when she quit to tour Europe with the band Half Japanese. Doug Yule played with Reed in the mid 1970s, joined the country rock band American Flyer, and then became a cabinetmaker and violin maker.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the eighteenth of July 1988, Nico was on holiday in Ibiza with her son Ari. She fell from her bicycle and hit her head. A passing taxi driver found her unconscious, but she struggled to get admitted to a hospital, and she was misdiagnosed with heat exposure. She died that evening, aged forty nine. X rays later showed a severe brain haemorrhage. Her manager said she had given up heroin a year and a half earlier, and she had just played a Berlin concert of new songs. Her ashes were buried in her mother's plot in a forest cemetery in Berlin.[1] [2]

Meanwhile, the Velvets' legend kept growing, and it spread to unexpected places. The Czech playwright Václav Havel said the debut album, bought on a visit to America, helped inspire him, and he became a friend of Reed. When Havel became president after the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989, Reed visited him in Prague, and in September 1998 he performed at a White House state dinner in Havel's honour. Back home, a new generation found the band through punk and college radio. When the catalogue was reissued in the 1980s, battered original copies had already been fetching thirty or forty dollars in used record shops.[1] [2] [3]

Drella and the reunion

Andy Warhol died on the twenty second of February 1987, after gallbladder surgery in New York. At his memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral that April, Reed and Cale spoke to each other for the first time in years. The painter Julian Schnabel suggested they write a piece for their old mentor. The result was Songs for Drella, a song cycle about Warhol's life. Drella was a nickname his crowd had given him, a mix of Dracula and Cinderella, which he never liked. The album came out in April 1990, but by the end of the sessions Cale vowed never to work with Reed again.[1] [2]

Then, on the fifteenth of June 1990, at a Warhol exhibition by the Cartier Foundation in Jouy en Josas, France, Reed and Cale finished a short Drella set and were joined on stage by Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker. The four played Heroin together, their first performance as a band in more than two decades. The idea of a reunion took hold. In 1992 the classic line up agreed to reform. Morrison argued that Doug Yule should be included, but Reed and Cale vetoed it. Morrison and Tucker had each worked with Reed and Cale over the years, but this was different.[1] [2] [3]

The reunion tour began in Edinburgh on the first of June 1993. The Velvets played Glastonbury, headlined their own shows and opened for U2 on five dates of the Zoo TV tour. Cale sang most of the songs Nico had once sung. A live album and film, Live MCMXCIII, was recorded over three nights at L'Olympia in Paris, and there were plans for an American tour, an MTV Unplugged show and perhaps a new studio album. None of it happened. Before the tour was over, Reed and Cale had fallen out again, and the Velvet Underground broke up for the second time.[1] [2]

In late 1994 Sterling Morrison was diagnosed with non Hodgkin lymphoma. His last public performance was with Tucker and Cale at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh that November. Reed visited him near the end and said he never complained, describing his illness as leaves in the fall. Morrison died in his hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York, on the thirtieth of August 1995, one day after his fifty third birthday. Reed once said he could spot Sterling's guitar among a hundred others. Cale remembered him as the friend he would call with his craziest theories, knowing Sterling would come back with something smarter.[1] [2] [3]

In 1996 the Velvet Underground were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Patti Smith. The honour went to the classic line up, so Doug Yule was not included and did not attend. Reed, Cale and Tucker played together one more time, a new song called Last Night I Said Goodbye to My Friend, written for Morrison. It was the last time the Velvet Underground ever performed. Reed later said that the band had been savaged for songs like Heroin, and yet decades later he was reading those same lyrics in art museums.[1] [2] [3]

Losing Lou, and the long echo

The surviving Velvets still ran the band as a business partnership. In December 2009, for the band's forty fifth anniversary, Reed, Tucker and Doug Yule sat down together for a rare public interview at the New York Public Library, with Cale absent. Then in January 2012, the partnership sued the Andy Warhol Foundation, which had licensed the famous banana design for a line of iPhone and iPad cases. The band argued the banana had become their symbol. A judge threw out the copyright part of the case after the foundation promised not to sue them over the design, and the trademark claims were settled privately in 2013.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reed had lived with hepatitis and diabetes for years, and he developed liver cancer. In May 2013 he had a liver transplant at the Cleveland Clinic, and he wrote that he was a triumph of modern medicine. But on the twenty seventh of October 2013, he died of liver disease at his home on Long Island, aged seventy one. His wife, the artist Laurie Anderson, whom he married in 2008, said he died peacefully, calling him a prince and a fighter. Cale wrote that the world had lost a fine songwriter and poet, and that he had lost his school yard buddy.[1] [2]

Tributes poured in. David Bowie called him a master. That night Pearl Jam played I'm Waiting for the Man, the Killers played Pale Blue Eyes and the Arctic Monkeys covered Walk on the Wild Side. In 2015 Reed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a second time, as a solo artist, again by Patti Smith. In 2017 the Velvet Underground received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and that October Cale and Tucker reunited at the Grammy Salute to Music Legends concert to play I'm Waiting for the Man, Cale on keyboards and Tucker on a woodblock. Cale also staged the debut album in full in Paris, Liverpool and New York.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2021 the director Todd Haynes released a documentary simply called The Velvet Underground. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in July and arrived on Apple TV plus that October, with Cale and Tucker interviewed on camera and Doug Yule heard only in voiceover. Haynes said the band proved that the art lost in the shadows can outlast what shines brightest. Tucker, by then a grandmother in Georgia, told Rolling Stone she had retired from music without regrets, because she had had a lot of fun with her band. Some critics felt the film underplayed the third album and Yule's part in the story.[1] [2] [3]

As of 2026, John Cale, Moe Tucker and Doug Yule are still alive. Cale, now in his eighties, keeps making records, including Poptical Illusion in 2024, and he co wrote and sang on Charli XCX's song House and appears on the cover of her 2026 album. The Velvets' reach is hard to overstate. Rolling Stone ranks the debut among the greatest albums ever made, and bands from Joy Division and R.E.M. to Nirvana, the Strokes and Sonic Youth have named them as a root. They sold very few records while they existed. As Sterling Morrison once put it, they became the original alternative band because there was no alternative.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

The people around The Velvet Underground

Lou Reed and John Cale. They met through a novelty record and built the Velvets' sound together, Reed bringing the songs and Cale the drone. Reed forced Cale out in 1968 and they barely spoke for nearly twenty years. Warhol's death brought them back for Songs for Drella, then the 1993 reunion, and both times they fell out again. Still, when Reed died, Cale called him his school yard buddy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. Warhol managed the band, paid for their first record, designed the banana and paired them with Nico. Reed rarely gave an interview without calling him a mentor, yet he fired him in 1967 to move beyond the art world. After Warhol's death in 1987, Reed and Cale wrote a whole album about him, and at its heart is Reed's love for his late friend.[1] [2] [3]

Lou Reed and Nico. Warhol pushed Nico on a reluctant band, and Reed resisted at first. Yet he wrote songs for her voice, including Femme Fatale and I'll Be Your Mirror, which was inspired by her, and the two were briefly lovers. Nico's rituals before shows irritated him, and she left after the first album. They shared a stage once more with Cale in Paris in 1972.[1] [2] [3]

John Cale and Nico. After she left the Velvets, Cale became Nico's closest musical partner. He arranged and produced The Marble Index, Desertshore and The End, surrounding her harmonium with strange instruments, and later produced Camera Obscura. He said she truly carved herself a niche. After her death he staged tribute concerts for her, and he wrote a ballet score named after her.[1] [2] [3]

Lou Reed and Moe Tucker. Tucker described their bond as a brother and sister relationship built on total trust. Reed chose her as the one person to tell when he quit the band in 1970, sitting with her on the stairs at Max's. Years later, when she started making her own records, he was the first to call and offer to play, and he even took her band on tour.[1] [2]

Sterling Morrison and John Cale. Morrison was the one sent to tell Cale he was fired, and it haunted him. When they met again in Austin in 1979, Cale was so taken with Morrison's joke T shirt that Morrison literally gave him the shirt off his back. At Morrison's funeral, Cale said he had depended on him to answer his craziest theories with something better thought out.[1] [2]

Lou Reed and Steve Sesnick. Sesnick replaced Warhol as manager and steered the band toward pop. Cale believed he built up Reed at the group's expense, but Reed later accused Sesnick of driving a wedge between him and Doug Yule. Both Reed and Cale called him a snake. Sesnick left music for golf and business, and died on the twenty seventh of October 2022, nine years to the day after Reed.[1] [2]

Doug Yule and Steve Sesnick. Sesnick brought Yule into the band and favoured him as a possible leader after Reed. But Yule came to blame him for pushing Reed out, and for the final years. He said Sesnick abandoned his band in England with no money or gear, paid him in copies of Squeeze, and even signed him up with a royalty collection society in his name and took the advance.[1] [2] [3]

Lou Reed and Delmore Schwartz. The poet taught Reed at Syracuse and showed him how plain, short language could reach astonishing heights. He once warned Reed he would get him if he sold out. Reed dedicated European Son to him, and Schwartz died alone in a Manhattan hotel in July 1966, before the album came out. Reed paid tribute again with My House in 1982.[1] [2] [3]

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Reed and the performance artist Laurie Anderson were together from the early 1990s and married in April 2008. They worked on several recordings together. She was with him at the end in 2013, calling him a prince and a fighter, and she later oversaw his archive, including the release of his earliest demos in 2022.[1] [2] [3]

Lou Reed and David Bowie. Bowie was covering I'm Waiting for the Man on stage before the Velvets' debut was even released. In 1972 he co produced Reed's Transformer, which gave Reed his only American hit. The friendship was stormy. In 1979 they argued late at night in London and Reed hit Bowie. When Reed died, Bowie called his old friend a master.[1] [2] [3]

Sterling Morrison and Frank Zappa. Morrison was convinced that Zappa and his manager had delayed the Velvets' debut on their shared label so the Mothers of Invention could be first with a freak album. He never let it go, and for years he mocked Zappa's lyrics and musicianship in interviews. Austin friends even recognised Morrison in a bar by overhearing him talking about Zappa.[1] [2]

Rare facts about The Velvet Underground

• The Velvets were fired from the Café Bizarre for playing The Black Angel's Death Song, after deliberately opening their next set with it. The owner warned them that if they played the song one more time they were fired. They started the next set with it, lost the job, and soon after were taken up by Andy Warhol.[1]
• The engineer of the first Velvets sessions was paid with a Warhol painting instead of cash. Norman Dolph asked for art rather than a fee and got a silver Death and Disaster canvas. He sold it around 1975 for seventeen thousand dollars, joking that Lou Reed had probably not earned that much from the album yet.[1] [2] [3]
• Most of the banana album was recorded in the building that later housed the Studio 54 nightclub. Scepter Studios was at 254 West Fifty Fourth Street. Reed described the room as somewhere between reconstruction and demolition, and Cale said only four microphones worked.[1] [2]
• A test disc of the first Velvets sessions was found for seventy five cents, then sold for over twenty five thousand dollars. In 2002 a collector found the disc, dated from April 1966, while flipping through records in Chelsea. It held unheard early versions of the debut album songs.[1] [2]
• Warhol wanted every copy of the debut pressed with a deliberate crack so I'll Be Your Mirror would repeat forever. The idea was that the record would keep saying I'll be your mirror until the listener lifted the needle. It was never done.[1]
• One of the first Velvets covers was recorded by American soldiers in the Vietnam jungle. A group of servicemen calling themselves the Electrical Banana recorded There She Goes Again in a makeshift studio of pallets and a tent, with bamboo microphone stands and a gas generator.[1]
• Moe Tucker stops drumming in the middle of Heroin because she could no longer hear the band. When the song got loud and fast she lost track, stopped, and expected the others to stop too. Nobody did, so she came back in. The gap is on the album.[1] [2]
• Moe Tucker saw the Beatles' first Shea Stadium show because her mother bought a new stove and fridge. A Sears advert offered a free ticket with each appliance, so her mother bought both and got two tickets. Tucker also saw the Rolling Stones on an early tour.[1]
• Before the Velvets, Moe Tucker was a keypunch operator at IBM. She had dropped out of Ithaca College and taught herself drums by playing along to records. She was brought in only because Morrison remembered her as his school friend's sister.[1]
• The Velvets' first commercially available record came free inside an arty magazine packaged like a box of laundry detergent. The flexi disc Loop appeared in Aspen magazine in December 1966. It was credited to the band but was actually John Cale alone, recording pulsing feedback.[1]
• John Cale once appeared on the TV quiz show I've Got a Secret after an eighteen hour piano concert. In September 1963 he took part in the first full performance of Erik Satie's Vexations with John Cage. His secret was the concert. A fellow guest's secret was that he was the only audience member who stayed to the end.[1]
• Lou Reed mailed his earliest demos to himself in a sealed package to prove copyright, and it stayed sealed for nearly fifty years. The May 1965 tape, with Cale harmonising, was released in 2022 as Words and Music, May 1965. It shows songs like Heroin as folk tunes.[1] [2]
• In its earliest version, Heroin opened with the line I know just where I'm going. On the finished album Reed sang I don't know just where I'm going. He sometimes went back to the earlier lyric on stage.[1] [2]
• Pale Blue Eyes was written about someone whose eyes were actually hazel. Reed noted this himself. The song is said to have been inspired by Shelley Albin, his first love, who by then was married to another man.[1]
• Reed said everything in I'm Waiting for the Man was true except the price. In the song the narrator goes uptown to Harlem with twenty six dollars in his hand to buy heroin.[1]
• David Bowie played I'm Waiting for the Man on stage before the Velvets' debut album was released. His manager Ken Pitt brought back an acetate from New York in late 1966, and Bowie's band learned it within a week. He at first misunderstood what the man in the song was selling.[1] [2]
• The Velvets' only network television appearance in the 1960s was in a CBS News report about an underground film. In December 1965 CBS aired a segment on the making of Piero Heliczer's film Venus in Furs, in which the band appeared.[1]
• After her drums were stolen from one club, Moe Tucker played on dustbins brought in from the street. She usually played standing up, with mallets, on an upturned bass drum, and rarely used cymbals because she felt they drowned everything out.[1] [2]
• Warhol arranged a free equipment deal with Vox, and Morrison believed they were the first American band to get one. The Vox amplifiers, fuzz pedals and organ helped make White Light White Heat so loud that the engineer warned all the needles were in the red.[1] [2]
• The last show Lou Reed played with the Velvets was taped by a fan on a cassette recorder at her table. Brigid Polk, a Warhol regular, recorded the set at Max's Kansas City on the twenty third of August 1970. It came out in 1972 as Live at Max's Kansas City.[1] [2]
• The Velvets' drummer at Max's Kansas City in 1970 was a sixteen year old high school student. Billy Yule, Doug Yule's younger brother, sat in while Moe Tucker was on maternity leave and played on two songs on Loaded.[1]
• Sterling Morrison quit the Velvets at an airport gate, carrying an empty suitcase. In August 1971 he rode with the band to Houston airport, then told them he was staying in Texas for graduate school. Moe Tucker confirmed the story.[1] [2]
• Sterling Morrison became a tugboat captain in Houston and earned a PhD on an Old English poet. He worked tugboats on the Houston ship channel through the 1980s and completed his dissertation on the poet Cynewulf in 1986.[1] [2]
• In 1979 Sterling Morrison gave John Cale the shirt off his back, literally. Cale loved Morrison's joke T shirt in an Austin motel room and begged for it. Morrison swapped it for a clean one, grumbling that he would give him the shirt off his back.[1]
• Doug Yule said his only payment for the last Velvet Underground album was six copies of it. He said manager Steve Sesnick left the band stranded in England, and even signed Yule up with a royalty collection society under his name and kept the advance.[1] [2]
• The British band Squeeze named themselves after the Velvets' final album, and John Cale later produced their debut. Chris Difford confirmed the name came from the Velvet Underground record. Cale told the young band to throw away their old songs and write new ones.[1] [2]
• The Velvets' manager Steve Sesnick later claimed he invented golf's Skins Game. After leaving music he became a golf consultant. The marketing company involved could not confirm his account. He died on the twenty seventh of October 2022, nine years to the day after Lou Reed.[1]
• Morrison and Tucker sold their rights to the 1969 live recordings for fifteen hundred dollars each. Manager Steve Sesnick owned the tapes that became 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, released in 1974.[1]
• An early version of Sweet Jane from 1969 has completely different lyrics about Miss Jimmie and Miss Anne. It was played at the Matrix in San Francisco the day before Thanksgiving 1969. By the next night those characters had vanished from the song.[1]
• Lou Reed's first record was made in 1958 with a doo wop trio, and the saxophonist King Curtis played on it. Reed played guitar and sang backing vocals with the Jades on So Blue. It was played on the radio by a substitute disc jockey on Murray the K's show.[1]
• After quitting the Velvets, Lou Reed worked as a typist at his father's accounting firm for forty dollars a week. He moved back to his parents' home on Long Island in 1970 and wrote poetry before signing to RCA the following year.[1]
• An asteroid and a spider are both named after Lou Reed, and the spider has a velvet body and lives underground. Asteroid 270553 Loureed was named in 2015. The spider genus Loureedia was described in 2019 in Spain.[1]
• Sterling Morrison's last public performance was with Moe Tucker and John Cale at the Andy Warhol Museum in November 1994. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma that year and died in August 1995.[1]
• Tucker said every man in the band later admitted they should have waited for her to record Loaded. She was pregnant during the sessions. Hearing that, she said, made her very happy.[1]
• In the Warhol film Symphony of Sound, the police turn up about forty minutes in and shut the Velvets down. Warhol and Morrissey filmed the band rehearsing noisily at the Factory in early 1966, with Nico's small son running around.[1]
• Reed made his own closet mix of the third album, which annoyed Morrison and Tucker. It pushed his vocals forward and buried the backing. Reed also kept every guitar solo he recorded for What Goes On because he could not choose between them.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.