But the Velvet Underground were not producing laidback hippy whale music: as drummer Moe Tucker points out, they hated hippies and (capriciously) hated Frank Zappa on that basis. Haynes gives a very good sense of what I can only call the transcendental quality of the Velvet Underground’s music, inspired as it initially was by the aesthetic of drones, sustained chords and chord variations, a sense that continuous immersion in the music will (at some stage) facilitate an epiphany that cannot be coerced or guaranteed.
#THE VELVET UNDERGROUND VELVET UNDERGROUND RAR MOVIE#
Haynes presents his movie in a more or less continuous split screen, juxtaposing a collage of thematically relevant found-object images, archival material about the band, and talking-head interviews with surviving band members and admirers or sometimes Warhol’s daringly static portrait-movie images of people like Reed who had to just stare into the camera lens. what? Manager? Enabler? Producer? Patron? Album cover designer? Eminence grise? At any rate he was sufficiently integral for Reed to feel the need to fire him – as he was to fire the band’s immensely talented co-founder, the classically trained musician and viola player John Cale, who looked like a cross between Syd Barrett and Glenn Gould and speaks here with great gentleness and forbearance towards his late comrade. Or conceivably it was the sometime singer Nico, whose name was presented separately from the rest of the band on a “feat.” basis, without being pre-eminent, unlike Diana Ross and the Supremes or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.Īnd Andy Warhol, who virtually created, or recreated, the Velvet Underground as the Factory house band, was their. The band was fronted by guitarist and lyricist Lou Reed. pop music? Rock’n’roll? Proto-punk? Avant garde? An interviewee here in Todd Haynes’s documentary talks about the co-existence of R&B and Wagner.
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They were part of a complex social ecosystem of experimental artists in New York, named after a book about the sexual subculture by Michael Leigh. Not so much a rock band, more a way of life. M aybe no subject more fits the phrase “you had to be there” than the Velvet Underground, the band that emerged as part of a richly interdisciplinary artistic adventure in the American late-1960s.