Tune Musings: “Velvet Underground” — Jonathan Richman (1992)
Tune Musings is a regular series where a lifelong audiophile shares, dissects, and reviews lesser-known, beautiful music.
When I worked in a grocery store many years ago, I had a boss who loved discussing music with me during long shifts. Rick was older, a veteran of hundreds of 70s concerts, and a self-described prog rock snob. He would pontificate daily on the artistic merits of the entire catalog of his favorite band: Jethro Tull. Rick would always try to nudge me into tipping my toe into the pools of Tull, Yes, ELP, and Marilliion.
Being a huge indie geek (at the time*) I’d occasionally spar with Rick, denouncing such acts as overwrought, artificial, and compositionally sterile. “Those artists are so dull…and prog just comes off as way too clean,” I would immaturely argue. “Where’s the raw emotion or spontaneity in all those carefully constructed synth solos?”
Rick would scoff at my suggestion that rock music should be unrefined, chaotic…even difficult to listen to. The day I told him I was into the Velvet Underground was when he laughed so rigorously for so long that I was sure he had lost weight from all the tears.
“I remember them,” he finally said once the laughter stopped. “They were terrible. They couldn’t even play their own instruments.” Wiping the last remnant of chortling from his face, he stated: “You might be the only person left still listening to the Velvet Underground.”
*And by ‘at the time,’ I really mean “used to be, am now, and forever will be.”
Rick, of course, was wrong.
Case in point: Modern Lovers founder and singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman’s admiration for his primary musical inspiration is fully displayed on the song “Velvet Underground” (from the 1992 LP I, Jonathan). With his trademark wild-eyed whimsy, Richman gushes unabashed love for The Velvet Underground, framing in three-plus minutes a lifelong infatuation with their look, their sound — their very existence.
Like much of his recorded career, “Velvet Underground” is sparse and simple, consisting solely of Richman on vocals, guitar, bass, and hand claps. Chugging along with a lo-fi Eddie Cochran-esque flair, Richman regales the listener with infectious, literate descriptions of a Velvet Underground concert. He nails the famed NYC avant-garde scuzz rockers’ defiant anti-musicianship in the third verse when he sings:
Twangy sounds of the cheapest types
Sounds as stark as black and white stripes
Bold and brash, sharp and rude
Like the heat’s turned off and you’re low on food
Almost as much as their experimental sound, The Velvet Underground were equally infamous for their arty arrogance, both on and off the stage, which Richman reflects on in perfect summation:
A spooky tone on a Fender bass
Played less notes and left more space
Stayed kind of still, looked kind of shy
Kind of far away, kind of dignified
Richman gleefully pulls off his best Lou Reed drawl during the song’s interlude, which features a near-perfect thirty-five-second cover-within-an-original condensed version of the Velvet’s famous “Sister Ray.”
Say that certain rules about modern music wouldn’t apply tonight” (photo credit: author)
VU could be called early progenitors of “noise rock” — or what I call any type of modern music that is not afraid to accentuate their sound with dissonance, out-of-tune instrumentation, unorthodox time signatures, and a deliberate deviation from the standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-guitar solo-chorus song structure that has been the pop song blueprint for decades.
It’s a form of musical expression I first learned to love in the early 90s, thanks to copious exposure to college radio, where repeated listenings of The Fall, Spacemen 3, and early Sonic Youth taught me that noise — structured or chaotic — could be as beautiful as a flawlessly played symphony.
Most importantly, noise rock was fresh. And raw. If ears could gape open in astonished wonder, picture a seventeen-year-old me in just such a state the day I first heard the Velvets: “Who the hell is this, and how did they come up with that….sound?” One of my favorite lines in “Velvet Underground” comes in the chorus, where Richman epitomizes that initial euphoric feeling that comes from hearing something new and astonishing:
Well you can look at that band and wonder where
All that sound was coming from with just four people there
Indeed — Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker took a Warhol-colored chainsaw to mid to late rock music conventions, adding a nihilistic edge to the genre while simultaneously spilling heavy doses of avant-garde atonality and primal rhythms into the musical palette.
Richman sings to their originality towards the song’s conclusion:
Both guitars got the fuzz tone on
The drummer’s standing upright pounding along
A howl, a tone, a feedback whine
Biker boys meet the college kind
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground
Rock and roll, but not like the rest” (Photo credit: Verve Records)
While the core group were ignored by the mainstream and only released four proper albums, the Velvet Underground’s influence was profound and far-reaching, inspiring contemporaries like Iggy Pop and David Bowie and future alt-rock radio stalwarts REM, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and The Jesus & Mary Chain (among countless others). Their unique sound was instrumental to the development of punk rock, new wave, and several other genres.
Brian Eno is often credited with the famous quote characterizing VU’s legacy: “The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band.”
I emotionally reciprocate fully with Jonathan Richman’s tribute to the band. Unlike progressive rock gods, the Velvets may have missed some notes and tuned their guitars incorrectly. But they created a sound unique enough to be remembered and cherished by adventurous listeners long after their last feedback moan faded.
