11 Fascinating Facts About The Velvet Underground

To rock snobs, art-school students, and dads everywhere, the Velvet Underground are the cornerstone of rock and roll. They inspired bands like R.E.M. and Sonic Youth with their innovative style, which wedded avant-garde techniques to garage-band riffs and melodies. Younger listeners are as likely to know the Velvets from their needle drops in Wes Anderson movies (who could forget the use of “Stephanie Says” in The Royal Tenenbaums?) or their banana logo, which has had a second life as a trendy t-shirt. 

Whether you’re a longtime fan of the band or looking to find a way into their catalog, here are 11 fast facts on their background and influence. 

Lou Reed met John Cale while working for a bargain record label. 

Lou Reed had some minor musical success as a teenage musician on Long Island. Record producer Bob Shad scouted Reed’s band The Jades after their first performance at a junior high talent show. After Shad released the band’s first single, “So Blue,” The Jades got some airplay on the influential radio show The Swingin’ Soiree.

After college, Reed worked as a songwriter for the bargain record label Pickwick Records, where he wrote songs like the dance-craze parody “The Ostrich” for imaginary in-house bands. Producers for the TV show American Bandstand heard “The Ostrich” and invited the band that recorded the song, The Primitives, to play on the show. Since The Primitives didn’t actually exist, Pickwick representatives recruited violist John Cale and some of his colleagues from composer La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble to back Reed up on this TV appearance and on a short tour. 

Nico was a model and actress before joining The Velvet Underground.

While Reed and Cale began playing Velvet Underground classics like “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs” at Primitives gigs, Christa Päffgen had started to make a name for herself as a model and actress. In the 1950s, she was photographed by Herbert Tobias, who suggested she change her name to Nico (a name taken from one of his former lovers). She would appear in the pages of high-end fashion magazines and on the cover of the Bill Evans Trio’s album Moon Beams.

Nico’s nascent modeling career led to an interest in acting and singing. She had cameo roles in some European movies, most notably La Dolce Vita, and played gigs at the Blue Angel nightclub in New York. She met Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and recorded a single for Andrew Loog Oldham’s singles label Immediate Records in 1965. 

Their music incorporated some innovative techniques.

Reed tuned all of his guitar strings to D when writing “The Ostrich.” The technique would come to be known as the Ostrich Tuning, and Reed also employed it in “Venus in Furs.”

Cale’s extensive knowledge of avant-garde technique complemented Reed’s barebones pop songs. As a student of La Monte Young, Cale played compositions that incorporated the use of sustained notes and distortion. Songs like “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (which also incorporates Ostrich Tuning) draw on techniques—like the percolating treated piano that drives the song—that Cale would have learned in his time with the Theatre of Eternal Music.

While Reed and Cale had some formal musical background, drummer Moe Tucker was self-taught. When she was 19, Tucker got a secondhand drum set and began playing along with songs as she listened to albums or the radio. Her focus on keeping time instead of showing off made her an ideal drummer for the nascent Velvet Underground. “I just always felt like the drums shouldn’t take over the song,” she told Magnetic Fields percussionist Claudia Gonson in 1997. “They should always be under there, obvious, but not taking over the song so that suddenly you realize all you hear is drums.” Instead of using cymbals, Tucker would use a mallet to play fills on a bass drum that she’d turned on its side.  

They began calling themselves The Velvet Underground in 1965.

The band had been both The Warlocks and The Falling Spikes before nabbing The Velvet Underground from Michael Leigh’s 1963 book. Angus Maclise—who served as the band’s drummer before Moe Tucker—saw the book at their friend filmmaker Tony Conrad’s apartment; he had found it discarded in the street. The book’s synopsis promised that “sexual mavericks of every persuasion ... are documented in this legendary expose of the diseased underbelly of ’60s American society.”

“We said, ‘That’s nice,’ ” guitarist Sterling Morrison would later recall. “It’s abstract and the word underground meant something, and so we said sure, why not?”

They were tight with Andy Warhol.

The Velvet Underground were playing shows at the Cafe Bizarre (the forerunner to the legendary Café Wha) in Greenwich Village when countercultural filmmaker Barbara Rubin—a fan of the band—introduced them to Andy Warhol. The artist had a concept for a multimedia event that would come to be called “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” and Rubin thought the Velvets would be perfect for it. Warhol hired the Velvet Underground for the EPI shows, as well as for shows at the Silver Factory.

The artist also became their manager, paying for recording sessions and licensing his “peel slowly and see” banana silkscreen for the first Velvet Underground album. His gift for what Lou Reed described as “putting jarring elements together” brought another member of the band into the fold. “When he put Nico in, we said ‘Hmmm.’ Because Andy said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta have a chanteuse.’ I said, ‘Oh, Andy, give us a break.’ ” When Nico joined the band, “he said, ‘Oh, you should write a song, so-and-so is such a femme fatale. Write a song for her. Go write a song called “Femme Fatale.” ’” The song Reed wrote on his manager’s suggestion became one of the Velvets’ most enduring numbers.

They were huge in Boston.

Boston and New York had a notoriously adversarial relationship throughout the 20th century, but fans of cutting-edge rock music in both cities found a common interest in the Velvet Underground. According to Astral Weeks author Ryan Walsh, the band played more than 40 shows at the Boston Tea Party venue, to audiences that singer/songwriter Jonathan Richman described as “wall-to-wall hippies, bikers, Harvard students, Northeastern students, fashion models, professors, drug dealers, art teachers, groupies, MIT students ... photographers, local thugs, local disc jockeys, skinny-bohemian-artist girls, visiting dignitaries from the New York art scene, and the royalty of the Boston music set— the local singers and guitar-players in their mod suits strolling around with their beautiful girlfriends.” (Richman would hire John Cale to produce demos for his band, the Modern Lovers.)

While Lou Reed described the Tea Party as “our favorite place to play in the whole country,” the Velvets’ ties to Boston extended offstage as well. The band was briefly label mates with several psychedelic Boston bands, like Ultimate Spinach, Beacon Street Union, and Orpheus, for what MGM Records described as “The Bosstown Sound.” 

The Velvet Underground’s first album was a commercial flop—and a huge influence on other artists.

No one thought The Velvet Underground and Nico—with its songs about S&M and narcotics and its distortion-heavy production—would make the pop charts alongside more mainstream bands like the Monkees, the Turtles, and Engelbert Humperdinck. Verve Records ran into problems with the record sleeve—not only did their pressing plant have problems printing the peelable vinyl banana sheeting for the album cover, but actor Eric Emerson sued (or threatened to sue; sources differ) the band for the use of his image on the rear cover.

When the album was finally released in March of 1967, its problems extended from the sleeve art to the music inside. According to Joe Harvard’s 33-1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico, magazines refused to advertise it, and radio stations wouldn’t play it. Contemporary sales figures are impossible to find now, but lawyer Christopher Whent estimates the album sold 10,000 to 50,000 copies when it was originally released.

A funny thing happened on the way to the cutout bins, however. In a 1982 interview in Musician magazine, producer Brian Eno paraphrased Lou Reed as saying “the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years.” Eno added, “that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!” A wide swath of bands and solo artists, from Big Star and Joy Division to Tori Amos to LCD Soundsystem, have cited the Velvet Underground as an influence. Had The Velvet Underground and Nico never been released, half of your record collection might not exist. 

They had an epic falling out with Warhol.

Warhol’s (mostly) hands-off managerial style both helped and hurt the Velvet Underground. His name opened doors for them, as with their signing to Verve. By giving them rehearsal space and paying for the recording sessions for their album, he allowed them to refine their sound without worrying about financial or logistical problems. And, as Reed would later say, the artist “was like an umbrella. We would record something and Andy would say, ‘What do you think?’ We’d say, ‘It’s great!’ and then he would say, ‘Oh, it’s great!’ The record went out without anybody changing anything because Andy Warhol said it was okay. It’s hilarious. He made it so we could do anything we wanted.”

On the other hand, Warhol’s lack of experience in the music world hampered some of the band’s forward momentum. “Andy passes through things, but so do we,” Reed told Anthony DeCurtis in a 1989 Rolling Stone interview. “He sat down and had a talk with me. ‘You gotta decide what you want to do. Do you want to keep just playing museums from now on and the art festivals? Or do you want to start moving into other areas? Lou, don’t you think you should think about it?’ So I thought about it, and I fired him.” Warhol was, in Reed’s words, “furious. ... He was really mad. Called me a rat. That was the worst thing he could think of.”

Reed’s bandmates’ response to Reed’s firing of Warhol was one of shock. ”The way he handled it and the way he did it was really destructive,” Cale told Red Bull Music Academy in 2016. “He blew up the band and fired Andy without telling anybody, and it was like, ‘What?’ ”

Reed appointed Steve Sesnick—part-owner of the Boston Tea Party venue—as the new manager of the band. Sesnick helped the Velvets transition from an avant garde quintet to a more traditional rock band, but he also exploited the tension between Reed and Cale. The latter never liked Sesnick, and Reed’s relationship with him eventually soured. “He was a very bad person, trying to divide everyone, telling one person one thing, telling another person something else, and pitting people against each other, starting with John and me, and then working his way down through the band,” Reed told Creem magazine in 1987. “That way he could maintain power.”

Cale and Reed couldn’t agree on the musical direction that the Velvet Underground should take.

Nico left the band after the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico, and John Cale would remain in the fold for their follow-up album, White Light/White Heat. While the Velvet Underground’s later albums still featured their shocking lyrical imagery and distortion-heavy production, Reed’s ability to write more structured songs became a bigger part of the Velvets’ sound. Songs like “Here She Comes Now” balanced the band’s twin gifts for melody and avant-garde technique.

According to 1995’s Lou Reed: The Biography, Cale and Reed disagreed about the musical direction of the Velvet Underground: Cale wanted to keep the avant-garde bent, while Reed (and Sesnick) preferred a more mainstream direction. “We lost sight of the music,” Cale would later say. “I was into trying to develop these really grand orchestral bass parts. I was trying to get something big and grand and Lou was fighting against that, he wanted pretty songs. I said, ‘Let’s make them grand pretty songs then.’ All of that was just irritating, it was a source of a lot of friction. It was unresolved, it was a constant fight of who was gonna play what. They were creative conflicts. I think egos were getting bruised.”

In 1968, Sterling Morrison fired John Cale at Reed’s behest; after that, the band’s production became more standard. The layers of heavy distortion and guitar feedback had mostly subsided, and Reed’s skill for writing hooks came through on songs like “What Goes On.” 

Guitarist Sterling Morrison had a surprising career change. 

The Velvet Underground released their eponymous third album in 1969 and their fourth, Loaded, in 1970—by which point Reed was no longer in the band.

In August of that year, the band landed a residency at Max’s Kansas City nightclub in New York City. Guitarist Sterling Morrison took the opportunity to enroll in classes at City College of New York to finish his bachelor’s degree. Moe Tucker, meanwhile, was temporarily absent from the band because she became pregnant with her daughter, Kerry. (She told Flood Magazine in 2015 that she was disappointed to not be able to record Loaded: “I was happy to discover only lately that Doug [Yule, who joined after Cale was fired], Lou, and Sterl all said on separate occasions during various interviews that they should’ve waited for me. That made me happy.”) After mounting tensions with Sesnick, Reed left the band, playing his final show at Max’s Kansas City in August of 1970. Doug Yule, Tucker, and Morrison continued to tour for awhile, but Morrison ultimately left in August 1971. The band’s final studio album, Squeeze, came out in 1973.

Reed, Cale, Tucker, and Nico all remained in music in one form or another. Reed became a legendary singer/songwriter, releasing acclaimed albums like Transformer and New York. Cale divided his time between a similarly eclectic solo career and production work, engineering albums by Patti Smith, the Stooges, and Squeeze, among many others. Nico became a part of the CBGB scene, and her album The Marble Index is seen as one of the big influences on goth music. Tucker joined experimental bands like Paris 1942 and Half Japanese between the intermittent releases of solo albums in the 1980s and 1990s.

But Sterling Morrison, who played guitar throughout the Velvet Underground’s career, left music entirely after he quit the band. He relocated to Austin, Texas, where he began a Ph.D. program in medieval literature and worked as a tugboat captain to put himself through school. “There is no one who was more perfectly made for being a tugboat captain,” Reed told the Austin Chronicle in 2000. “There was nothing he couldn’t master.” The dream-pop trio Galaxie 500, whose sound was influenced by the Velvet Underground, paid tribute to Morrison’s second career on their song “Tugboat.” 

Warhol’s death brought The Velvet Underground back together ... briefly.

After John Cale was fired from the Velvet Underground in 1968, there was some understandable acrimony between him and Lou Reed. The pair crossed paths for the first time in almost 20 years at a memorial for Andy Warhol, who died in 1987. Artist Julian Schnabel, who organized the tribute, suggested that the pair write a tribute to their mentor. The Brooklyn Academy and the nonprofit Arts at St. Ann’s commissioned them to write a memorial, and thus Songs for Drella was born. “It was a great opportunity to pick up the threads of the Velvet Underground and draw our original ideas about arrangements and subject matter to a conclusion,” Cale told The New York Times in 1989. “Obviously, we’re bringing a lot of baggage to the project, but we are doing it with a lot of love. Andy was an incredibly generous spirit.”

Songs for Drella had its world premiere as a multimedia stage show at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn in 1989. Reed’s label, Sire Records, released the album in 1990. Though Reed and Cale appeared on Late Night with David Letterman (above) and Night Music to promote the album, their strained relationship prevented a tour to support it. But in 1990, their performance for the Andy Warhol Exposition in Jouy-en-Josas, France, concluded with Moe Tucker and Sterling Morrison joining Reed and Cale for an encore of “Heroin,” marking the first time the band shared the stage since their shows in 1970.

The Velvet Underground toured Europe in 1993, playing headlining shows and opening for U2 on their Zoo TV tour. By the time they’d gotten together to tour, Reed was coming off the release of his acclaimed albums New York and Magic and Loss, and had come to think of himself as a solo artist fronting his beloved first band and didn’t see the Velvets as a democracy. After the European tour, the Velvets had been approached to play on MTV Unplugged and to embark on an American tour, but Cale left the band after tensions escalated between him and Reed, and they vowed never to work together again.

In 1995, Sterling Morrison died of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. When The Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the following year, the remaining members of the band played their final original song, a tribute to Morrison called “Last Night I Said Goodbye to My Friend.”  Lou Reed passed in 2013, but through their influence on countless bands, musicians, and artists, The Velvet Underground’s music remains immortal. 

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