Tag Archives: the velvet underground & nico

#1461: The Velvet Underground – Venus in Furs

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According to my Spotify data, I listened to The Velvet Underground & Nico, first time ever, on 20th October 2012. That was near the beginning of a period in time when I was really trying to check out what was considered to be history’s classic albums, using besteveralbums.com as a guide. Rate Your Music must have been around. I’m not sure Album of the Year was a thing. Best Ever Albums came to me in a Google search, and it’s been serving me well since then. TVU&N was pretty highly ranked in that best ever albums chart at the time, from what I can remember. And again from the data, it seemed I liked the album a lot, because I went through it once more in December 2012, listened to it in patches through 2013 and ’14 too. I gained my favourite tracks from the record through those listens. I’ve previously written about ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘There She Goes Again’, but ‘Femme Fatale’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ gets double thumbs from me too. Gained more of an appreciation for those two along the way. But to round off the TVU&N coverage and The Velvet Underground as a band on the blog is the album’s fourth track – today’s subject – ‘Venus in Furs’, which I’m sure I got into on the second listen at most.

Every song on TVU&N had a Wikipedia article back in those days. They still do now. And I like to do my research about any music I end up listening to. So I clicked on the link for ‘Venus in Furs’. The page mentioned how the lyrics contain themes concerning BDSM, and lo and behold, while going through the song, I found that to be very true. Lou Reed sings about the dark mistress figure dressed in “shiny, shiny leather” who tends to their subject’s sadistic pleasures with their whip and belt. And I’m thinking, in 1967, surely no one else had even dared to write a song like it. That was the year which saw the Summer of Love. But with TVU&N, The Velvet Underground showed the dark, seedy side of society that was still lurking in the shadows while everyone was caught up in peace and free love. ‘Venus in Furs’, to me, sounded like a bit of a statement in that regard. I’ve always had a scene in my mind of the sadist crawling through a desert towards the mistress described in the song, who just happens to be giant in size. A bit like the lady in the ‘Go with the Flow’ video by Queens of the Stone Age. It’s all in slow motion too. I don’t know. To me, this song has always sounded like dry heat. I see someone sweating, looking for water when I hear this song. And I guess here, the sadist is very thirsty in their own unique way.

“Boom, chk, boom boom, chk, boom boom, chk,” and so on and so forth. That was meant to be an onomatopoeic rendition of the song’s rhythm. I like it. Very simplistic and tribal-like, very appropriate for the song’s subject matter. Makes the scene described within sound like a ritual of some kind. With Lou Reed on guitar, other guitarist Sterling Morrison handles the bass and plays following Mo Tucker’s simple drum pattern. Puts an emphasis on those bass drum strikes. Reed’s guitar has strings that are all tuned to one note, a style of tuning known as ‘Ostrich tuning’. Reed came up with the name. It sounds cool, for sure. I think the instrument in the song that steals the show is the electric viola, played throughout, by John Cale. The loudest instrument in the mix, it drones during the verses, occasionally swooping upwards sharply – Is that a glissando? I don’t know my theory. Cale will play a little solo of some sorts in the small instrumental breaks that occur. The viola feels really effective though, when the song changes key when it gets to the choruses. The viola’s droning on that one note during the verses, which are slowgoing enough as it is, that when Cale shifts to another note for the first time a minute-and-a-half in, it feels like a massive shift has happened in the song’s proceedings. It’s awesome. There should be more Velvet Underground songs on this site. What are there, six? Too little. In another universe, it’s much different.

#1351: The Velvet Underground – There She Goes Again

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Funny how the title of today’s song is the following lyric to that of the previous post. At least I think it’s a little amusing. Both respectively from total opposite sides of a spectrum, though. ‘There She Goes Again’ is a track by The Velvet Underground, another one of theirs showing their face here, this time appearing on the band’s debut Velvet Underground & Nico album from 1967. Think I have a whole backstory on my first experience of that record when covering its opener ‘Sunday Morning’. But for anyone who wants a brief, brief recap: Was frequenting besteveralbums.com around 2012. Saw a “best ever albums” ranking. …Nico was very high on the list. Was an album definitely considered to be a “classic”. Listened through it on Spotify and and liked it enough to pirate onto the old computer. There it is. And I think ‘There She Goes…’ was one of my favourites on there from the beginning.

Now, ‘There She Goes…’ might sound, to some, like the most “normal” sounding song on the LP. I think its placement, following the seven-minute, two-chord opus of ‘Heroin’, was a very intentional choice. Sounds very normal compared to that. But then you go a little deeper, find out the song’s written about a frustrated prostitute, and it’s like “Oh, it’s not all that different.” Not so different in terms of themes of seedy, urban life that are a constant throughout the album, anyway. In terms of the performance, it’s definitely the most laidback out of the tracks that don’t feature vocalist Nico. It starts off with a musical quotation of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Hitch Hike’, which occurs again at various points as the song goes on, and the guitars all sort of chug along while Maureen Tucker thwacks away on the snare drum. I’ve never really thought about it before, but it also sounds like Lou Reed’s doing a bit of a Bob Dylan impersonation in the verses (“She down on here kneeees, my frieeend”). I can’t think of it as anything else now. But it all adds to the song’s character.

What I think is the real gem of the song comes in those “There she goes” harmonies that respond to Reed’s phrases during the verses. Those things are probably what got me hooked when I first heard it years ago. I believe they’re both done by fellow bandmember John Cale, and they make for great contrast of lightness to Reed’s gritter sing-talking. “There she goes agai– There she gooooes”. I can hear them in my head as I type it out to you. I don’t know, seems funny to have these innocent-sounding harmonies in a song about a working girl. But then again, that’s probably the whole point. Gotta dig how the track goes into double-time right at its end too. I’m a fan of it all. R.E.M. did a well-known cover. I prefer the original. Johnny Marr used the song’s opening as inspiration for the beginning of ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’. The song has its admirers. I’ve read comments calling it filler. I’m not a fan of those comments.

#1313: The Velvet Underground – Sunday Morning

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I guess the backstory of my experience with this tune is interesting enough. I was learning how to really appreciate albums in 2012 to 2013, to sit down and focus on every song on there rather than highlighting the singles I would have already known. And if I was to do so, I needed to find out what the classics were, the ones that were considered to be the best of all time. Luckily, I found a website called besteveralbums.com, a place I’ve definitely mentioned before on here a few times, which appropriately contained an a calculated overall ranking of what was to be the finest LPs through history. I made it a mission of mine to go through that list. I gave up after a while, but I’d got the gist. At the time I write this, The Velvet Underground & Nico is apparently the 10th best album ever. Around the time I discovered the site, it was the 13th. But I listened through, read its Wiki article, understood why it was meant to be so good. All the works.

And ‘Sunday Morning’ is the album’s opening track. If you were to listen through TVN&Nico, you might notice the sonic difference between the song and the 10 others that come after it. I want to say I did. ‘Sunday Morning’ seemed like this almost-primed-for-radio production while the others were much more rougher around the edges. The song was the last one to recorded for the album and the only one on there not to be produced by Andy Warhol, instead done so by Tom Wilson who requested its inclusion after feeling the album as it was a missing that one number. The whole thing would have started with ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, which wouldn’t have been bad at all. But it just feels right to have ‘Sunday Morning’ leads things off. Sort of lulls you into that false sense of security before ‘I’m Waiting…’ kicks in and the album’s momentum truly gets going. Some fine track listing work right there.

Lou Reed wrote it after having the suggestion to write a song about paranoia forwarded to him by Warhol. And you can sense that paranoia in the lyrics, “There’s always someone around you who will call” / “It’s just the wasted years so close behind”… for example. It’s also sort of about feeling like death during a hangover. But what brings you in, at least I know it did for me, is how the track has this lullaby-like feel, with Reed sing-sighing in your ears and bandmember John Cale providing the music-box like dynamic with his performance on the celesta. This truly is a song for those mornings when you don’t want to get out of bed. It’s like Reed’s telling you to stay put in an abstract kinda way. The Velvet Underground had performed the song live with singer Nico before the album, but when it came to recording Lou Reed took the lead vocal duty instead. Probably for the best. The thick German accent maybe would have worked against the subtly. You can hear Nico in the background during the song’s final moments, though. A small move that caps the track off as they both repeat the song’s title into the fade out and silence.