“If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen.  That’s our policy: Always leave them wanting less.”  Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is dead.  Lou Reed is still alive and still playing.

It seems counter-intuitive for me to be writing about The Velvet Underground right now.  I’m sure it seemed just as counter-intuitive to Jim DeRogatis every night when he sat down to his laptop and penned this latest piece on the band that amalgamated at such a bleak, nihilistic turn in the history of New York City.  But Mr. DeRogatis knew there was a paycheck on the other end of that gig, and, yes, despite ourselves, money trumps even our strongest convictions.  So, for the almighty dollar, we keep writing about things that are better left unwritten.  Jackals — all of us.

However, there’s a sweet solace in the fact that The Velvet Underground:  An Illustrated History of A Walk on the Wild Side (released last month by Voyageur Press) is just that: an illustrated history.  This is a story told through pictures, not words.

Not that Jim’s prose isn’t enlightening.  It most certainly is.  But there’s a certain risk taken when one goes prying deep into the persons and histories of an act as hallowed as The Velvet Underground.

Yes, Lester Bangs is dead too.

Ah…but we can’t take all this too seriously, can we?  To his credit, I think Jim DeRogatis keeps a healthy distance in his coverage of Lou Reed and Co. and never sways too far from good, straight-forward, “objective” journalism.  He chronicles the group’s ascent (or descent) from playing “Heroin” before a beleaguered audience in the gym at Summit High School to The Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Warhol antics to the soft-edges of “Sweet Jane” and the band’s inevitable demise with a clear conscience (a feat rarely achieved given the said topic).  The text reads on that same thin stretch of rope which most VH1’s Behind the Music episodes attempt to balance themselves.

If it’s testament to his genius, let it be, but DeRogatis leaves the truth that lurks menacingly underneath his “objectivism” to the bold and brazen words uttered by the very tongues of the beasts themselves – the people directly involved.  For every word penned by Jim, you have a supplemental quote from the likes of Reed, Cale, Morrison, Moe Tucker, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and any other degenerate that actually sucked in the air seeping up through the sewer drains in lower Manhattan sometime between 1965 and 1970.

In some ways, The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History offers a leveling narrative to the loose ends left behind in Leg’s McNeil’s classic Please Kill Me, the vile and anarchic oral history of the same place and time frame.   The former is a perfect introduction to the scene that helped put kerosene on the antithesis to the “flower power” of the hippie movement out west.  The latter…well, just read Please Kill Me after The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History and come up with your own conclusions.

The book also includes contributions from Bill Bentley (whose interview with Sterling Morrison, entitled, “Swallowed Up by Armadillos: Sterling Speaks,” is my personal highlight of the book), Garth Cartwright, Glenn Kenny, Greg Kot, Olivier Landemaine, Rob O’Connor, David Spraque, and, of course, Andy Warhol.  Yet, it’s the pictures that really tell the story (or paint the picture, if you will) of the scene that birthed and nurtured what some consider the most integral rock band of the last four decades.  The book is chock full of never-before-seen (at least by you) pictures of the band, concert flyers (which are amazing), press releases, and album covers, among other delicacies.  The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History is, more or less, Lou Reed’s scrapbook minus the cigarette burns, soiled contraceptives, poop and drool stains.  It still tells the story.  It’s just clean.

You’re probably asking me now (if you’re a true fan of The Velvet Underground), “Clean?  How can it be ‘clean’ and tell the story of The Velvet Underground?”)

My answer…

Jim DeRogatis (photo by Marty Perez)

I have no clue.  Honestly, I don’t know why the hell I’m even writing this piece.  The Velvet Underground and all things pertaining are best left to the fickle fancies of Fate and not advertisement.  The same way Reed found Leopold von Sacher Masoch’s Venus In Furs on that fortunate day in long lost New York – shoved down in the back shelf of some dank, nasty bookstore on some forsaken street corner in the wrong part of town.  There’s a beautiful, aesthetic appreciation at that moment of discovery – the euphoric rush of a forbidden revelation.  But, alas, such a discovery is a thing of the past.  The thrill of the hunt is disappearing from the human condition.  A kid nowadays is more likely to discover The Velvet Underground via downloading The Strokes on iLike or digging through his old man’s CD collection between Journey’s Greatest Hits and Only By The Night.

Ah…all this bitter nostalgia and harsh cultural criticism stirs up a few thoughts that I’ll close on.  The book opens with a quote from Lenny Kaye about the NYC from whose wretched womb The Velvet Underground was born.  The sad irony: that New York City doesn’t exist anymore.  The New York City of the 1960s and 1970s who used to trade war stories with prostitutes, dope dealers, and impoverished gypsy caravans is now married to a stockbroker, a signed member of the Episcopalian Church, keeps a steady, good-paying real estate gig, and spends her off hours carousing with movie stars and millionaires.

The chemicals and contaminants that create freaks like The Velvet Underground were flushed out of New York nearly two decades ago.  I’m starting to wonder if such artistic poisons still exist anywhere on this forlorn planet – maybe New Orleans.  But…I digress…

I’ve always argued that Lou Reed was just snorting the residue that fell to the floor behind Bob Dylan’s boot heels.  I find John Cale to be one of the most pretentious assholes in music history.  I wonder if Andy Warhol might have killed The Velvet Underground by taking the coolest thing Rock and Roll ever produced, canning it up in Campbell’s Soup, and selling it to us retail…bright, red and white, and mass-produced.

Perhaps this is all part of the appeal of The Velvet Underground.  The music stands.  But don’t take my word for it.  Don’t take Jim DeRogatis’s word for it.  Don’t even take Lester Bangs’s word for it.  Buy an album.  Buy the book.  Flip through the book if you have to…but please buy White Light/White Heat, close your eyes, turn off the lights if you have to, and just try to hear the poison the way it was meant to be heard.  Let it give birth to you, give you the freedom to move for the first time…”like Frankenstein’s monster discovering it could walk.” (John Cale)