91. The Velvet Underground — The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
Published in
3 min readAug 21, 2020
- Fuck yes. This album is where it’s at. Especially after all of the psychedelic and largely unremarkable albums this list has been throwing at me, this album feels like the kind of breath of fresh air it must have felt like in 1967 (when, uh, nobody listened to it). It’s grungy, it’s dirty, it’s raw, it’s authentic, it’s quintessentially Lou Reed. It’s just a fantastic, fantastic album.
- “Sunday Morning” into “I’m Waiting For The Man” has to be one of the greatest opening pairs of songs ever put to record; “Morning” serving as a gentle intro before the pounding guitars of “Man” introduce us to the seedy stories of the city Reed loved to tell. From there we run through a diverse and fascinating set of tunes unlike the vast majority of the rock being produced at the time, with Nico providing her weirdo german voice to songs like “Femme Fatale” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and John Cage’s viola sustaining a nervy tension as “Heroin” builds and builds.
- “Heroin” is a truly remarkable tune, a drug paean unlike any recorded to that point (and a big part of why the record was a total flop, as no radio station would play them because of it), but it’s stunning. I have less-than-zero interest in ever trying heroin, and I frankly don’t need to I’ve got this song, one of the most viscerally experiential songs ever recorded. What really stands out to me is the way the band could shift from a song like that to a gentle, loving tune like “I’ll Be Your Mirror” less than three minutes later. The Velvet Underground & Nico is a magic trick.
- The album was famously a flop upon its initial release, not truly discovered for years to come. (Brian Eno said that while the album initially only sold approximately 30,000 copies, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”) It calls to mind a handful of earlier rock albums that were before their time — Moby Grape (released the same year), The Sonics, The Monks. There’s an alternate universe where The Velvet Underground & Nico suffers the same fate as those groups. I’m still not entirely sure how it elevated itself out of total obscurity but I’m glad it did.
- It’s frankly incredible to me that it didn’t sell better on the sole basis of having a Warhol original for its album art; if Banksy did an album cover for a band today, I suspect that would drive a significant number of sales (albeit still a small number, since nobody buys albums anymore). The lucky few that bought it got the version where the banana is a sticker that peels off, revealing a flesh colored banana (natch). That version is worth a ton these days. Can’t wait to find a stickerless vinyl of my own.
One Essential Song:
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