Photo via Apple TV+
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground
Director Todd Haynes emerged as a promising young filmmaker with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987). The late Karen’s brother Richard sued, but that didn’t dissuade him from turning repeatedly to music. He directed a fictional feature on ‘70s glam rock, Velvet Goldmine (1998), and a “non-linear” biographical dramatization of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There (2007). With The Velvet Underground (2021), he documents a band that sold few records during their time together but became legendary and seminal after their demise in the early ‘70s.
The Velvet Underground is an ongoing montage with multiple screens busily providing additional information and context. The key relationship Haynes explores is the somewhat unlikely collaboration between songwriter, singer and guitarist Lou Reed with viola player John Cale. Reed was a Brooklyn baby transplanted to suburban Long Island and steeped in the era’s doowop and garage rock. At Syracuse University, he fell in with poet Delmore Schwartz, who aside from influencing Reed is remembered only as a minor Jewish writer from the Great Depression. Cale, a classically trained coal miner’s son from Wales, came to New York on a Leonard Bernstein fellowship. He fell in with the post-John Cage avant-garde.
New York, the subject of many Velvet Underground songs, provided the unique combustion chamber for the band Reed and Cale formed and becomes the subtext for Haynes’ documentary. Filmmaker Jonas Mekas, one of several talking heads in The Velvet Underground (others include Jackson Brown and Jonathan Richman), describes New York in the ‘60s as the place to which artists escaped. Rent was cheap, guerilla filmmakers were everywhere and Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop Art. In New York, Cale worked with La Monte Young, making music out of unsustained tones and hypnotic drones that arrested the listener’s sense of time. Likewise, pop artist Andy Warhol’s films moved slowly at 16 frames per second.
After Warhol’s Factory became the Velvets’ venue, the pop artist produced the band’s 1967 debut album. His role was to pocket the money advanced by the record label, design the famous yellow banana LP cover and let the band do as it pleased in the studio. Always obsessed with image and star power, Warhol also added a band member, Nico, the stunningly beautiful blond German actress from La Dolce Vita who intoned several songs in glacial Teutonic tones.
An early demo of “I’m Waiting for the Man” sounds more like early Bob Dylan than the Velvet Underground, complete with harmonica solo. Cale’s aesthetic brought dark sonic dimension to Reed’s endeavor of turning his experiences into literature—not on the page but on stage, powered by the electrical distortion of Cale and guitarist Sterling Morrison and riding the subway train rhythms of drummer Maureen Tucker.
The band proved as fluid as the psychedelic light shows that pulsated around their early performances. Warhol’s prominence angered Reed, who comes across as sullen, difficult, insecure, comforted only by the discomfort he caused around him. Reed fired Warhol (who’d fire Warhol?), Nico wandered away and after a second album—the noisy, metallic White Light/White Heat (1968)—Reed fired Cale. Their third album, The Velvet Underground (1969), was beautiful and quiet. With their final studio album, Loaded (1970), Reed finally arrived at his own sound, largely stripped of avant-garde tendencies but adhering to the idea of rock songs as short stories.
Haynes’ The Velvet Underground is visually spectacular and unfailingly engaging as it peels away slices of cultural, personal stories too large for a two-hour film. It’s also a reminder that “underground” culture in America was once truly underground, hard to access, often deliberately off-putting, in the years before “alternative” became a marketing tag.
The Velvet Underground is showing at the Downer Theater.
