The Velvet Underground

Year 14, Day 184 - 7/3/22 - Movie #4,190 - VIEWED ON 1/31/22.    

BEFORE: Yeah, so I cheated, I did NOT watch this film as part of my documentary chain, I watched it back in January, on the day I reviewed "Dune", which I had watched earlier - I had a free day because of that, so I looked into the future and I realized that this particular documentary could be needed to make my linking possible, without it I didn't have a full chain that circled back on itself, allowing entry from any one of hundreds of links.  I then devised about a dozen ways to get from Father's Day to July 4, hoping against hope that I could schedule "WBCN and the American Revolution" for July 4 itself.  So even though it's February 1 for me, I'm planning to post this review on July 5 - this is essentially a message from the past to the future.  Did the pandemic end?  How are things in July 2022, are we back to normal yet?  Did Russia invade Ukraine?  Did conservatives and doomsday preppers invade Washington?  Are any celebrities still alive?  I have no idea. 

Here's the things about the Velvet Underground documentary - it's an Apple TV exclusive, meaning that if I want to watch it, I either need to attend a screening in a live-audience movie theater (still not medically recommended) or sign up for Apple+ TV - but I pulled that scam last year to watch "On the Rocks" with Bill Murray. I joined the service, watched that one movie, and quit the service before they could charge me for a full month - I doubt that Apple will let me pull that trick again.  BUT, right now, in February 2022, it's still Oscar nomination season, and the film is available on the Academy streaming platform, because it's bucking for a Best Documentary nomination.  And my boss signs on all the time to watch the animated films that are qualified for nominations, so I could sign on after midnight, watch this doc from home, and sign out, nobody would know.  I'm not saying that's what I did, just that it was possible - because it's a bit wrong for me to watch the film that way.  However, I can't afford another monthly subscription to another service, not Paramount+ or Apple+, we already subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, AmazonPrime and Disney+, and I've got to draw the line somewhere.  Somebody really needs to bundle all these services together and create the cable TV of the future, but I don't see that happening, everybody's getting too rich right now on their own, I assume - except Peacock, which lost a few billion last year, and I don't see how that's possible.

Anyway, from a long list of about 32 films, this seems to be the one that will be the most trouble to watch - but if I watch it in February when it's slightly available to me, I'm in the clear. I think.  Jeez, just two years ago both of my bosses would probably have gotten a DVD of this in the mail, and I could have borrowed it from either one and returned it the next day - no harm, no foul.  The Academy's all about their streaming site right now, with good reason, so I have to break their rules in order to see this - it's not my fault.  Don't hate the player, hate the game, or something like that.  

Mary Woronov carries over from "Eating Raoul".

THE PLOT: This documentary explores the multiple threads that converged to bring together one of the most influential bands in rock and roll.

AFTER: Oh, yeah, I forgot, I don't even LIKE the Velvet Underground.  I probably should have thought this through a little more before proceeding, or found another way to get where I wanted to go.  But this seemed like a good idea at the time - that's probably what the band members say when they talk about their experiences in the 1960's and 1970's, it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Nobody ever really thinks this through - "Hey, let's start a band!" is probably followed by, "Hey, how do you write a song?" and "Wait, we have to play HOW MANY gigs?" and "How do we get from Chicago to Detroit to Milwaukee in time?" and a thousand other problems, like "What happens if nobody shows up?" and "How do I get rid of these groupies?" and "Who's stealing my royalty checks?"

This documentary, to its credit, does NOT mention the famous quote about the Velvet Underground, which refers to their first album selling only 10,000 copies, but also the possibility that everyone who bought it then started a band.  Supposedly Brian Eno said this, but he was quoting Lou Reed, and sometimes they say 10,000 copies and sometimes they say 30,000, but either way, there's a point that got made. I can't tell you one early Velvet Underground song, which doesn't bode well - and now after watching this documentary, I understand why.  Early Velvet Underground music is, quite frankly, shitty music.  All of those 10,000 bands that their fans started were all probably shitty bands as well.  

Before watching this doc, I couldn't even tell you the difference between John Cage and John Cale - I think they were conflated in my brain somehow.  John CAGE was a composer born in 1912 who was a pioneer in avant-garde music and the non-standard use of instruments, he had one composition called 4'33", where a group of musicians played nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. John CALE was born in 1942, and was a founding member of the Velvet Underground, and was also noted for avant-garde music, especially the use of drone tones and other electronics.  Both men worked together on a performance of Erik Satie's "Vexations", an 18-hour performance where the same musical passage was played repeatedly, 840 times in all.  So you can see maybe where my brain started confusing these two men with similar names.

John Cale and Lou Reed were both part of the same scene, the downtown New York mixture of musicians, artists, filmmakers, stoners and other no-goodniks that all circulated around Andy Warhol and lived in terrible apartments in the Village and were interested in messing with the forms of art to create a counter-culture, which ultimately took over and became the culture, to some degree at least.  Cale seemed to fit right in with the sensibilities of Warhol, who made an 8-hour long film that was just footage of the Empire State Building, or other long static shots of people just staring at the camera without blinking.  On the topic of Warhol, I'm similarly torn when trying to decide if he was in fact a great artist or just a great scam artist. 

There are a few Velvet Underground compositions I do enjoy, but they're the later ones, like "Sweet Jane" and "Rock & Roll", that may make me a dilettante, but I really don't care.  Now I know that maybe the band's sound got a little better when they kicked John Cale out of the group, makes sense.  But even the radio-friendly "Rock & Roll" isn't that great of a song, in the first verse Lou Reed rhymes "Nothin' happening at all" with "She don't believe what she heard at all" - you can't rhyme a word with itself, that's cheating!  Or just lazy.  Then these both are rhymed with "Rock and roll", and "all" doesn't rhyme with "roll".  I call foul - this isn't how songs are supposed to work.  

I can't help but think that this documentary contains some rather glaring omissions - they mention that Lou Reed was heavily into the gay scene of New York City.  OK, but what does that mean, exactly?  I'm not saying that the film should be all tawdry and give us a laundry list of his sexual partners, but come on, we want to know, were he and Andy Warhol a couple?  Wikipedia says that Lou Reed wrote some songs for Nico because they were lovers for a while, so wait, was Lou Reed gay, bisexual or what?  Not to put a fine point on it, but isn't this kind of important?  How are we ever going to advance as a culture and be more accepting about LGBTQ rights if we can't even talk openly about what went down?  David Bowie referred to himself as a "closeted heterosexual" during the glam-rock period, and that sounds very fascinating!  I want to know more about that.  Lou Reed similarly sounds like a very interesting chap, only if we're all going to dance around the logistics of it, we're never going to know exactly how interesting.  Right?  Nah, forget it, let's just sweep it all under the rug and not explore it, better to let sleeping dogs lie, right?  

I remember back when I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a film crew took over an old post office on the corner of 16th Street and Prospect Park West for a film shoot, and turned it into a fake cigar shop, this was for the 1995 movie "Smoke", written by Paul Auster and directed by Ang Lee.  Every once in a while, rumors would go around the neighborhood that Madonna was over there doing a cameo, or Roseanne (they filmed another movie, "Blue in the Face" with most of the same cast, on the off-days) but only later, once the film was released, did I learn that Harvey Keitel and Lou Reed played the characters who worked in the cigar shop. Had I known that Lou Reed was hanging out a couple blocks from my condo, I might have strolled over once in a while, that's a missed opportunity.  Lou Reed is very good in the film, especially if his segments where he addressed the camera directly were improvised, check out "Smoke" if you get the chance.  

Later on, Lou Reed had some kind of personal relationship with Laurie Anderson, and again, I don't think a film should invade any celebrity's personal life to an in-depth degree, because what goes down between two people is intensely private, but they were married from 2008 to his death in 2013, and I find that very fascinating, some part of me just wants to know all the details. 

Anyway, back to the band, which hit some kind of stride when Warhol hooked them up with Nico, who was a singer who couldn't sing very well.  She was to singing what John Cale was to playing music, he was fascinated by droning notes and non-musical sounds, remember...  But with a little training apparently she could be taught to carry a tune, so people started to pay attention when their records started to sound a bit more like music, go figure. But then Nico quit the band, Lou Reed had a falling out with Andy Warhol, and then Reed asked John Cale to leave the band - this doesn't really sound like a recipe for success.  But Doug Yule joined the band to replace Cale, again driving the band's sound toward a more musical direction, and they had a couple productive years before the next round of departures, when Sterling Morrison decided to go back to school to find himself, and drummer Maureen "Moe" Tucker left shortly after that.  At what point is a band not a band?  I guess after everybody quits - this was in 1971, were they just following the Beatles' lead at this point?  That's when it was trendy to quit a band and go solo.

Before the last founding member quit the band, the Velvet Underground had a 9-week residency at Max's Kansas City in NYC, and unfortunately this documentary just kind of waves this off, it doesn't go into any detail about this set of concerts - there's no footage, no sound playback, they just sort of act like any fan of the band knows what went down there, probably because a live album of the concerts was released in 1972.  OK, but not everybody watching this film owns that album, so how about a little help here?  Were those concerts, you know, GOOD? Did the band members finally realize how much work it is to play for an audience, is that why they all quit shortly after that?  WTF?

Lou Reed went on to have a fascinating life, a busy career (off and on) and a drug habit of course (also off and on) but this film doesn't really cover that, because it's about the BAND and not any one member.  John Cale and Moe Tucker are still around, and they were both interviewed, but they're senior citizens now, that's about where any rock legend who's still around finds themself these days. All rock stars are now something of an endangered species, what with just two Beatles and two members of the Who still with us, Charlie Watts passed away and so did Meat Loaf, Ronnie Spector and Michael Lang, producer of the 1969 Woodstock concert, in the first month of 2022 alone. They're dropping like flies, but maybe it's always been that way, and we only pay attention when they come in clusters.  

Also starring John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Doug Yule, Jackson Browne (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Shelly Corwin, Danny Fields, Henry Flynt, Joseph Freeman, Allan Hyman, Richard Mishkin, Martha Morrison, Terry Philips, Jonathan Richman, Amy Taubin, John Waters (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Merrill Reed Weiner, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela

with archive footage of Laurie Anderson, Chuck Berry (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Mick Jagger (ditto), David Bowie (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Bo Diddley (ditto), John Cage, Tony Conrad, Walter Cronkite (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Denny Doherty (last seen in "Echo in the Canyon"), John Phillips (ditto), Michelle Phillips (ditto), Bob Dylan (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Anita Ekberg (last seen in "Way...Way Out"), Cass Elliot (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Bill Graham (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Allen Ginsberg (last seen in "Howl"), Brian Jones (last seen in "Zappa"), Angus MacLise, Gerard Malanga, Jonas Mekas (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Sterling Morrison, Billy Name, Nico, Peter Orlovsky, Lou Reed (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Barbara Rubin, Ed Sanders, Delmore Schwartz, Jack Smith, Barbara Walters (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Andy Warhol (last seen in Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Charlie Watts (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Frank Zappa (also last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice")

RATING: 6 out of 10 recording sessions at Max's Kansas City