Velvets vs. Beatles, 50 years later
Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune
on
Feb 27, 2017
Published in
Entertainment News
What a difference a half-century can make, especially when considering the
impact
of two landmark albums released only a few months apart 50 years ago. That they
are
even being considered in the same sentence today would've seemed preposterous in
1967. And the same is true now, except the albums have traded positions.
In the months leading up to the release of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band,"
the Beatles knew that every word and sound they were recording would be
scrutinized
and likely celebrated, and they set their sights on the center of a youth
culture
that hung not just on their every song, but the way they dressed and styled
their
hair, what they said and how they said it. The mainstream media would be primed
as
well -- established publications such as Time and The New York Times praised the
grown-up sophistication of "Sgt. Pepper" when it was released June 1, 1967. It
was
hailed as a "decisive moment in Western Civilization" and its artistic reach was
compared to that of George Gershwin and T.S. Eliot. Years later, critic Langdon
Winner
amplified the hype in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock 'n' Roll:
"The
closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in
1815
was the week the 'Sgt. Pepper' album was released."
The Velvet Underground, on the other hand, clearly knew that with its debut,
"The
Velvet Underground and Nico," released March 12, 1967, it was making an album
that
failed almost every test of pop culture currency. Band members were seen as vile
pornographers by those who superficially scanned and demeaned their risque
subject
matter: drugs, decadence, deviant sex. Their record was banned from some stores,
ignored by radio programmers and shunned by some publications who refused to run
ads announcing its arrival. The record sank off the charts the same week as
"Sgt.
Pepper" was ushering in the "Summer of Love." Years later, the Velvets' John
Cale
shrugged when asked if the band was disappointed by the response. "There was a
theory
of stubbornness at work within the band. We didn't care what anyone thought."
Now the "Summer of Love" feels like an artifact, and the Velvets' vision of a
landscape
in which primitive rock 'n' roll merged with literary and avant-garde aesthetics
feels fresher than ever. "Sgt. Pepper" was clearly a product of its era, a work
that
followed up superior Beatles albums such as "Rubber Soul" and, especially,
"Revolver."
The studio experimentation that so dazzled contemporaries in 1967 was already in
full bloom a year earlier on "Revolver," thanks to such visionary pieces of
music
as "Tomorrow Never Knows." And the songwriting on "Revolver" was extraordinary
--
the melancholy beauty of "Here There and Everywhere," the violent cool of
"Taxman,"
the jangling pop perfection of "And Your Bird Can Sing" -- a standard that its
more
celebrated follow-up could not match.
"Pepper" offered the groundbreaking "A Day in the Life" and the psychedelic
visions
of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," but much of the rest comes off as slight and
overly clever and self-conscious. Songs such as the dance hall homage "When I'm
64"
or the mash note to a meter maid, "Lovely Rita," sound of a piece with the
bubblegum
of British contemporaries such as Herman's Hermits or Gerry and the Pacemakers
rather
than of the group that released the double-sided single "Strawberry
Fields"/"Penny
Lane" only months earlier.
Expectations were ridiculously inflated for "Pepper." The album was crafted over
700 hours in the studio -- a huge extravagance by the era's standards (the
Beatles
spent less than 10 hours making their debut album four years earlier). And it
arrived
after the Beatles had proclaimed they would no longer tour to focus on
recording.
So suddenly the world's biggest band had gone from a breakneck pace of recording
three albums a year in between tours to a nine-month span of virtual silence in
1966-67.
By the time "Pepper" came out, the response was preordained: it could be nothing
less than a masterpiece. That time has demonstrated that it fell short can be
pinned
on outsized expectations more than any failing by the Beatles, who made a
pleasant
if lightweight album when measured against their own immense standards.
Perhaps its main achievement was its inclusiveness -- a warm, welcoming
collection
of show tunes that even your great aunt could love rather than a groundbreaking
rock
album for the counterculture. By making an album that would appeal to everyone,
the
Beatles disappeared inside the fanciful "Sgt. Pepper" costumes they wore on the
album
cover.
In contrast, "The Velvet Underground & Nico" was initially viewed as the work of
a dicey-looking cult band cooked up by pop-art icon Andy Warhol, ostensibly the
album's
"producer." Warhol's role in the band was minimal. He helped foster some of the
theatrical
elements in the quartet's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" shows, designed the
famed
banana album art and brought in model-turned-vocalist Nico. Primarily, he
provided
a kind of insulation from corporate record-label interference. He enabled Lou
Reed,
John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker to chase their singular vision,
a
true melding of high-art ambition and raw rock 'n' roll, flavored with avant
garde,
classical and world music elements -- only without the recording budget of the
Beatles.
The Velvets' songs provoked outrage. "Heroin" chronicled a junkie's habit in
novelistic
detail with an ebb-and-flow arrangement built on Tucker's tribal drumming,
Cale's
scraping viola and Reed's deadpan vocal. It offered no judgments or
pronouncements,
only a point of a view from a voice not often heard in popular music. Similarly,
there were investigations of the drug trade rendered almost as dark comedy
("Waiting
for the Man") over a primitive rock 'n' roll pulse that Bo Diddley might've
admired;
a mystical, droning plunge into the world of sadomasochism as depicted in the
work
of Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch ("Venus in Furs"); and the
screeching
subway car violence of "European Son," Reed's twisted tribute to his literary
mentor,
the late author Delmore Schwartz. And yet there was the icy tenderness of "I'll
be
Your Mirror" and "All Tomorrow's Parties," and the deceptive music box twinkle
of
"Sunday Morning" and its encroaching paranoia.
These were not particularly comforting songs, nor were they intended to be. The
Velvets
saw the '60s as a grand marketing scam, and they were an opposition party of
four,
wary of youth-culture movements and "flower power" sloganeering. Over time,
their
music -- abrasive yet beautiful, poetic yet punishing -- felt strangely
accessible
to kids picking up their guitars around the world. It would resonate decades
later
in the music of everyone from the Sex Pistols and the Talking Heads to R.E.M.
and
the Strokes. As producer Brian Eno once famously said, even though the Velvets'
debut
sold only 30,000 copies in its early years, "everyone who bought one of those
30,000
copies started a band." Indeed, each of its songs now sounds like a jumping off
point
for entire sub-genres of punk, post-punk, indie and alternative rock.
Yet the Velvets' mission was a solitary one in 1967, a time when almost every
other
band aspiring to break into the pop charts wanted to be the Beatles. The Velvets
believed in rock 'n' roll, yet wanted to push it forward on their own
uncompromising
and widely derided terms. Reed saw it as music that could be as sustaining and
artistically
ambitious as a great novel or movie. "The Velvet Underground and Nico" saw the
world
with a ruthless clarity that went beyond mere teen-dream escapism. Next to it,
"Sgt.
Pepper" -- despite its kaleidoscopic sound and studio achievements -- sounds
almost
quaint.
(c)2017 Chicago Tribune
