The Velvet Underground (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Thomas Doherty

Produced by Todd Haynes, Christine Vachon, Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Carolyn Hepburn, and David Blackman; written and directed by Todd Haynes; edited by Afonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz; cinematography by Edward Lachman; music supervision by Randall Poster; featuring John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Jonathan Richman, Mary Woronov, and Merrill Reed-Weiner. B&W and color, 121 min. An Apple Original Films release.

VH1’s Behind the Music series and its trademarked tagline (well, according to The Simpsons), “But backstage, things were falling apart,” pretty much sums up the trajectory of the rock biodoc—hardscrabble struggle, platinum-plated success, and bitchy disintegration. The three-act rise and fall is sometimes capped with a coda featuring the surviving members at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or on a back taxes-mandated reunion tour, reflecting ruefully on their glory days—if only we had not been such egomaniacal, drug-addled assholes.  

The Velvet Underground skipped the second act—no meteoric success, arena playdates, or chart-topping singles. From 1967, when their first LP, The Velvet Underground and Nico (known to devotees as “the Banana album,” after the Andy Warhol cover art) was released, to 1970, a mere three records later, when founding member and front man Lou Reed bolted, the VU profile barely cracked cult status, much less the Billboard Top 40, or Top 100, for that matter. Recalling a royalty check for $2.79 from his first band in high school, Reed semi-jokes that the amount “is more than I made from the Velvet Underground.”

The stature of the band—now stratospheric—is almost entirely retrospective, a pantheon reputation accrued incrementally, sending out sound wave upon sound wave of inspiration and influence. The big spike came from acolyte David Bowie, who covered their songs and copped their riffs, and who in 1972, with sideman Mick Ronson, swooped in and produced Reed’s breakthrough solo album Transformer. Bowie and Ronson gave Reed want he always wanted—a jukebox hit, “Walk on the Wild Side,” rock and roll stardom, and, ultimately, even heavy rotation airplay on MTV.

Todd Haynes, the auteur of Cold War sexual repression and florid Sirkian angst, seems a congenial fit for a band drenched in both. He has visited the scene before in Velvet Goldmine (1998), a biopic of a fictional glam rocker, and, sort of, with I’m Not There (2007), which, whatever it is, is not a biopic of Bob Dylan. In The Velvet Underground, in what is clearly a labor of fanboy love, Haynes strives, maybe a bit too hard, both to exorcise the rock biodoc clichés and to give the Velvets the center spotlight that eluded them back in the day. (2021 has been a banner year for the VU on screen, also marking the release of a 4K restoration of Ed Lachman’s Songs for Drella [1990], a concert film of Cale and Reed’s tribute album to Andy Warhol, “Drella” the not-always-affectionate nickname for the artist his friends considered a hybrid of Dracula and Cinderella.) 

Taking his visual cues from two tributaries of the avant-garde film scene in New York in the early to mid-Sixties—the jackhammer minimalism of Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative (Mekas, who died in 2019, and to whom the film is dedicated, is an on-camera witness) and the stroboscopic multimedia overload of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the Warhol-masterminded happenings the Velvets fronted in 1966—Haynes bombards the viewer with a rapid-fire blizzard of sounds and images on a very busy canvas. He has ransacked the Warhol film archive for period wallpaper, making especially effective use of the long-take, static B&W close-ups of the band members and other Factory regulars, projected on screen right, while other pages from the family album flip by on screen left. (Gratitude and kudos to the poor soul tasked with getting permission rights from the scores of film, photo, and music sources.)

True to form and history, Haynes dotes on the gay-saturated wild-side-walking artistic revolution in early-Sixties NYC, a cauldron of 16mm cinema, beat poetry, experimental music, and campy dress-up that characterized an underground soon to be overground. “We aren’t part really of pop culture or counterculture,” crows Mekas. “We are the culture.” Cruising for sex and heroin, Reed was not a fellow traveler but a dedicated participant–observer. (For New Yorkers, the most shocking revelation will not be the heroin runs or leather-clad B&D but in the dirt-cheap apartment rentals.) The deep dive into the scene may leave non-VU fans craving more orientation—datelines and nameplates to tag the place and the players—but Haynes assumes that the Warhol Factory is too well chronicled in fiction, film, and memoir to require extensive footnoting. He is probably correct: anyone who signs up for the film will be able to identify Edie Sedgwick on sight.

The film opens with the jaw-dropping appearance of John Cale on a 1963 episode of CBS’s “I’ve Got a Secret,” where his secret is his performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” as per the instructions of his near homonym John Cage, a musical piece that took eighteen hours and forty minutes to perform (Cale is accompanied by the only member of the audience who sat through the whole thing). The video has an otherworldly, time portal quality—is this Forrest Gump-style seamless matching?—but it is the real thing.

Cale-centric VU historiographers will be pleased that Haynes has given Cale his due. Bred in a hellishly dreary Welsh mining village (“a little bit grim,” Cale understates), raised on radio, and conservatory trained, he was a musical polymath who seemed to be able to master any instrument he picked up. Ever on the hunt for the perfect riff—or drone—he looked and listened everywhere, to “R&B and Wagner,” as he says in the film, or the sixty-cycle hum of a refrigerator (“the drone of Western civilization”). Situated on the far-out fringes of the aural avant-garde, he is seen in an early film clip taking an axe to a piano with a fervor Pete Townshend would envy.

A suburban kid from Long Island, Lou Reed was no prodigy. Clinically depressed and drug dependent, he was difficult to cope with on a good day. His life—just barely—was saved by rock and roll. When his guitar teacher refused to teach him to play “Blue Suede Shoes,” he learned by playing along with the records. At some point, Reed was subjected to electroshock therapy “to shock the gayness out of him,” he later claimed. (Reed’s sister Merrill Reed-Weiner loyally defends her parents’ decision, reminding viewers of the “tenor of the times” and the dismal options for mental health treatments. Later, Merrill good-naturedly shows off her moves with “the Ostrich,” a dance from an early Reed–Cale incarnation, The Primitives.) 

Reed was just another beatnik with a drug problem, a Delmore Schwartz fixation, and a stalled musical career (while sort-of attending Syracuse University, Reed fronted a band that was so bad they had to continually change their name to get repeat gigs) until he and Cale discovered the advantages of symbiosis—in brief, how Cale could layer and pace the music to back up Reed’s lyrics. Initially, the two circled around each other like panthers. “Shit, I knew you had an edge on me,” Lou says at their first meeting after Cale shows off his virtuosity on classical viola. Guitarist Sterling Morrison (who died in 1995) and drummer Maureen Tucker (happily alive and well to offer her insights) fill out the original quartet.

Enter Andy Warhol, who can recognize—and feed off—talent like a vampire. He asks them to be a kind of house band for the Factory. In time, soon actually, the Velvets will resent the Warhol imprint (Reed complains that people thought Andy was the lead guitarist), but they also acknowledge that without Warhol as guardian–protector their first album would never have happened. “After you heard them, you knew it was they who enhanced Warhol’s image and not necessarily the other way around,” wrote Lillian Roxon in her Rock Encyclopedia, published in 1969. “They were ever so much more than their master’s voice.” Yes, but Warhol gets equal billing with the band on the cover art, which was emphatically not true of the Stones’s Sticky Fingers.

The third essential ingredient was an exotic flavor added at Warhol’s insistence, the model/actress Nico, a statuesque Teutonic goddess too icy for a Hitchcock film. “She couldn’t hold a pitch,” complains drummer Moe Tucker, as if she was cast for her octave range. Against the black background of the other four, her photogeneity was mesmerizing. “She couldn’t do this, she couldn’t do that, then all of sudden she could do it all very well,” recalls Cale, more generous.

Haynes has a lot of fun with the band’s 1966 tour with Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (“the show attempts, of course, to reproduce the psychedelic effect of LSD and peyote via external stimuli,” a game attendee for Variety helpfully explained). You could have experienced it all for $2.50 with a $1.50 drink minimum. The Velvets were galaxies away from the zeitgeist of incense and peppermints, so when the tour moves West to sun-bleached, Day-Glo California, the culture clash is pretty hilarious. They hang at the swimming pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel—clad head to toe in black. “We hated hippies—flower power and burning bras—what the fuck is wrong with you?” snarls former Warhol superstar Mary Woronov, unmellowed by age. The feeling was mutual. “I hope you fuckers bomb,” promoter Bill Graham hisses before the band goes onstage at the Fillmore.

The band was not yet falling apart but the roster was already unsteady. Nico left after the first album (“She was a wanderer,” says Cale. “She wandered into the situation, then she grandly wandered out”) and the headbutting of the two alpha males was inevitable. In 1968, Reed delivered an ultimatum to the rhythm section: Cale or me. Tucker and Morrison went with the surer bet. Guitarist Doug Yule (oddly, totally missing in action from on-screen commentary) steps in to fill an unmendable hole.

When Cale—an ingratiating, laconic, and insightful presence—leaves the action, the film sags—and this despite the instant uplift of the guitar-hero chords of “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll,” from the fourth and last album, doubtless the band’s best-known tunes. Reed died in 2013—his comments are necessarily archival, which means two vital voices are missing from the postmortem on the band’s last chapter.   

Throughout, the talking head eyewitnesses to VU history are eloquent and wry, grateful to have been there at the creation. A well-preserved Jackson Browne, of all people, recalls being at the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” shows in New York, where the slumming scene makers included Walter Cronkite, Rudolf Nureyev, and Jackie Kennedy. Amy Taubin, who went from Factory girl to film criticism, recalls the cruel hierarchy of beauty in Warholworld, where everyone strove to be this year’s girl, not excluding the boys. John Waters pops up to recall seeing the band in Provincetown. “The town didn’t get them,” shrugs Waters, who did.

One frustration—no fault of the director’s—is the dearth of high-quality synch-sound performance footage of the vintage Velvets. The archival material from nightclubs and the Factory is murky and muddled, good for ambiance but not listening. A band too dissonant for commercial AM radio (“And now, rocketing up the charts, the Velvet Underground with their sock-hop hit ‘Heroin’”!) was too obscure for the marquee concert events at Monterey and Woodstock and, of course, utterly radioactive for network television. Expect no lip-synched appearances on Hullabaloo or American Bandstand.

By way of substitute—one step removed but as close as most of us will get—is the smitten recollection of Boston rocker Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw the band sixty or seventy times, mostly at the Boston Tea Party, the legendary venue where Southie toughs and Harvard brats composed a diverse crowd who shared nothing but a far-ahead-of-the-curve taste in music.  

Richman contradicts the band’s rep for remote cool and scary vibes, telling how they befriended him as a starstruck kid and how Sterling Morrison taught him to play guitar. (John Cale would co-produce Richman’s first VU-indebted album, The Modern Lovers, recorded in 1972 but released in 1976.)

Richman waxes near mystical, evoking the strange “overtones that you couldn’t account for,” an ethereal “group sound with no source,” humming throughout the club. The improvisations went on forever. “Typical would be a long version of “Sister Ray” [the “short” album version clocks in at 17:27 minutes] and the five seconds afterward,” he recalls, savoring the memory. “The five seconds afterward tells you a lot about what it was like to see them.”

Enjoying his own story, Richman mimics a bit of the Reed vocal and the guitar parts to give a sense of the sonic gestalt. “And all of a sudden it would stop like that”—he ceases singing and strumming—“and the audience would be dead silent for”—and here he measures out the seconds, silently. Haynes mutes the soundtrack as Richman counts off—three, four—with his fingers. Then he breaks the silence and speaks aloud: “FIVE.”  

Only then would the crowd come out of its trance and applaud. “The Velvet Underground had hypnotized them one more time,” Richman marvels, still awed.

No need to wait five seconds to applaud Todd Haynes’s hypnotic riff on The Velvet Underground.—Thomas Doherty 

Thomas Doherty, professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, is author of numerous books, most recently Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century.

Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 1