The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat (1968)
Oz [looking through Giles' records]: Wow. Either I'm moving in with you, or you're letting me borrow your albums.
Giles: I think saving the world from immanent danger is more important than any record.
Oz: Even this one? [holds up Loaded]
Giles: [long pause] Well, a case could be made, I guess...
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 4, ‘The Harsh Light Of Day’
These days, it seems the Velvets’ popularity has expanded to the stage where they can be casually referenced in cult TV shows. Everybody knows how, in 1967, the Velvet Underground released their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and, despite being faced initially with public indifference and pitiful sales, the band went on to become hugely influential on generations of rock musicians. Today, their striking debut is (quite rightly) regularly recognized as not just one of pop music’s most audacious and influential debuts but one of the all-time great albums. The Velvets’ mix of streetwise suss and cool experimentation within a recognizably pop context has influenced everyone from David Bowie to Stereolab to Jonathan Richmond to Wire. Their self-titled third LP pretty much invented Galaxie 500, and Loaded, Lou Reed’s attempt at commercial appeal, for better or for worse pretty much invented the indie rock sound, from Postcard and C86 to Belle And Sebastian and onwards. All four of VU’s original studio albums are undeniably excellent, each having spawned a legion of followers, yet still having aged arguably better then any other act from the 60s you care to mention, but my favourite Velvet’s album is their dark, druggy and sinister sophomore effort, White Light/White Heat. Often cast as a ’difficult’ album and overlooked in favour of its more subdued and approachable sister albums, in truth WL/WH represents the pinnacle of the Velvet Underground, in all their drugged-up, subversive glory. It is also a much more thrilling and listenable record then some would have you believe.
Following their first album’s lack of success, the Velvets sans Nico holed up in their New York basement, wired on paranoia and amphe-phe-phe-phe-phetamines, and made some of the most intense, messy and noisy music ever committed to wax. Their drug habits didn’t do Lou Reed and John Cale’s increasingly antagonistic working relationship any favours, and the nervous tension evident on The VU and Nico is here raised to fever pitch. The first album may have become belatedly famous for Lou Reed’s song and lyric writing craft, but the Velvets were taking their cue from the raw and nasty feedback-drenched epics such as ‘European Son’ and ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’. Having said that, White Light/White Heat hits the ground running with the title track which could almost have sat on the first LP alongside such VU classics as ‘I’m Waiting For My Man’. However, even from the start the tension is rife, from Reed’s wall-eyed vocals to the impossibly overdriven guitar and organ, swathing the song in harsh feedback 1,000 volts more intense then anything the Jesus and Mary Chain would ever achieve. You can feel that something is not quite right – the Velvets seemed to have surgically removed their tender side that came to the fore on the Nico-sung ballads of the first album. In its place is a weird and nasty ambience, totally in keeping with the chaos and tension in the music. The lyrics are typical Reed fare – a devil-may-care speedfreak anthem inciting you to murder your mother, before the song dissolves into a hail of harsh noise and feedback. And all in under 3 minutes. Perfect pop. Things get even weirder and nastier with ‘The Gift’. One speaker channel features what is essentially a wired jam on one chord, like ‘European Son’ slowed down to a grind, with shards and splinters of noise breaking out at odd intervals, whilst in the other speaker channel John Cale tells a shaggy dog story which is in equal parts hilarious and disturbing in his deadpan Welsh accent. What stops the piece from falling into sheer novelty is the band’s playing, which imbues the track with menace and threat, and the deadpan bizarreness of the story, performed to perfection by Cale. ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ is equally weird, disturbing and funny. It starts off almost like a folk ballad, albeit one drenched in guitar and viola feedback. as the lyrics get progressively odder and more unpleasant, so does the music, mutating into what sounds almost like Captain Beefheart drugged up to the eyeballs on heroin, with voices and whirring noises slipping in and out of the mix and from speaker to speaker as the gruesome operation goes more and more wrong. It almost sounds like the Velvets are performing open surgery on the listener with their scraping guitars and abrasive feedback. As Reed intones, somewhere between morbid fascination and drugged-out numbness, ‘The head won’t move’, the song falls apart, prognosis for the patient clearly not positive.
Then, amidst all this noise and nastiness, there is a moment of piece, as heartbreakingly delicate and beautiful as it is brief. It is often said amongst fans that the Velvets’ talents at writing love songs are sadly overlooked, and most site their third, self-titled album as evidence, housing as it does such moments of tender beauty as ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘Candy Says’. But ‘Here She Comes Now’ is perhaps the most overlooked of all their ballads. Sandwiched in between the sinister surrealism of ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ and the brutal ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’, ‘Here She Comes Now’ is all the more striking for being amidst such chaos. Opening with a melodic guitar figure that would later be echoed on Orange Juice’s gorgeous ‘Louise Louise’, if it weren’t for Lou Reed’s ambiguously sinister lyrics, the song would be a thing of pure limpid beauty. But after two verses in almost as many minutes, the song fades away, and the gentle silence left in its wake is shattered forever.
‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ is a juddering, nerve-shredding ride of a song, in which the deranged protagonist hears the voice of his dead girlfriend. But what makes the song is Lou Reed’s guitar playing. Trying to emulate Orlette Coleman’s free-jazz playing on his guitar, Reed unleashes chaotic runs of guitar lines laced with feedback that shoots out of the mix, barely playing in any recognizable key as each line melts into the next and stutters and sparks before exploding all over again. It’s all Sterling Morrison, John Cale and Moe Tucker can do to keep the steady thud-thud-thud two-chord Velvets riff going underneath him, and several times the sheer fuzzed-out intensity threatens to derail the song. Harsh, wild and deranged, this is what you wished James Williamson’s guitar lines on Raw Power sounded like instead of all that proto-shredding twaddle. The soloing is so rhythmically loose that it breaks completely free from the droning of the rhythm section, instead achieving something akin to The Magic Band’s more unhinged guitar moments, and anticipating the Fire Engines’ post-No Wave squall by some twenty years. ‘And then my mind split open’ indeed. It is one of the most exciting pieces of guitar playing in the history of pop music, and truly proves Lou Reed’s talent as a great guitarist who was able to make up in daring and inventiveness anything he lacked in conventional ability. It’s just a shame to think that in two years the man would be playing the pedestrian pentatonic My First Guitar Solo ™ on ‘Oh, Sweet Nothing’ from Loaded.
Then we come to the most famous track on the album, and the one perhaps most responsible for White Light/White Heat’s reputation as difficult. ‘Sister Ray’ always starts off faster then you think it will. And it’s always more intense, more messy, more noisy, more unspeakably thrilling then you think it will be as well. The Velvet’s legendary side long 17 and a half minute noisefest is still one of the most exciting pieces of music in pop history. The band start off playing three chords, but quickly grow bored with two of them. ‘Repetition in our music and we’re never gonna lose it’, sang Mark E. Smith twenty years later, and you can bet he learned it from the masters. Lou Reed delivers his legendary lyric about drugged up transsexual rape and murder at his sardonic best, his overdriven guitar feedback competing with John Cale’s equally overdriven organ for sheer noise and intensity. Cale and Reed sound like they are trying to drown each other out, stringing out the music tighter then a high tension line, whilst Sterling Morrison gives up on the other chords and Moe Tucker battles gamely to keep some semblance of control. Though it would be an influence on everyone from krautrock bands to early industrial groups, the sheer sonic intensity and gritty nastiness of this screaming bloody mess of a song would rarely if ever be equaled.
After this mess of misanthropy and white noise, John Cale left the band to be replaced by Doug Yule, making for a much less tense, much more relaxed Velvet Underground. If it’s easy to be disappointed by this mellowing out, it’s worth remembering that that kind of intensity is hard to sustain, and that afterwards being in the Velvet Underground must have been a more amenable proposition for the band members then before. White Light/White Heat still stands as a benchmark for the daringly experimental and for sheer bone-shaking noise, proof that something twisted, ugly and deranged can indeed be a thing of beauty, and as one of those records that truly stands above the crowd; music that really matters. Music critics and casual fans may always pay more attention to the Velvets’ more accessible albums, but it is perhaps fitting that White Light/White Heat remains in the shadows, sought out by the faithful alone and never to be given away free with this Sunday’s edition of the Observer. It is one of my favourite albums, and I love it dearly. This is, perhaps, enough.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 4, ‘The Harsh Light Of Day’
These days, it seems the Velvets’ popularity has expanded to the stage where they can be casually referenced in cult TV shows. Everybody knows how, in 1967, the Velvet Underground released their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and, despite being faced initially with public indifference and pitiful sales, the band went on to become hugely influential on generations of rock musicians. Today, their striking debut is (quite rightly) regularly recognized as not just one of pop music’s most audacious and influential debuts but one of the all-time great albums. The Velvets’ mix of streetwise suss and cool experimentation within a recognizably pop context has influenced everyone from David Bowie to Stereolab to Jonathan Richmond to Wire. Their self-titled third LP pretty much invented Galaxie 500, and Loaded, Lou Reed’s attempt at commercial appeal, for better or for worse pretty much invented the indie rock sound, from Postcard and C86 to Belle And Sebastian and onwards. All four of VU’s original studio albums are undeniably excellent, each having spawned a legion of followers, yet still having aged arguably better then any other act from the 60s you care to mention, but my favourite Velvet’s album is their dark, druggy and sinister sophomore effort, White Light/White Heat. Often cast as a ’difficult’ album and overlooked in favour of its more subdued and approachable sister albums, in truth WL/WH represents the pinnacle of the Velvet Underground, in all their drugged-up, subversive glory. It is also a much more thrilling and listenable record then some would have you believe.
Following their first album’s lack of success, the Velvets sans Nico holed up in their New York basement, wired on paranoia and amphe-phe-phe-phe-phetamines, and made some of the most intense, messy and noisy music ever committed to wax. Their drug habits didn’t do Lou Reed and John Cale’s increasingly antagonistic working relationship any favours, and the nervous tension evident on The VU and Nico is here raised to fever pitch. The first album may have become belatedly famous for Lou Reed’s song and lyric writing craft, but the Velvets were taking their cue from the raw and nasty feedback-drenched epics such as ‘European Son’ and ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’. Having said that, White Light/White Heat hits the ground running with the title track which could almost have sat on the first LP alongside such VU classics as ‘I’m Waiting For My Man’. However, even from the start the tension is rife, from Reed’s wall-eyed vocals to the impossibly overdriven guitar and organ, swathing the song in harsh feedback 1,000 volts more intense then anything the Jesus and Mary Chain would ever achieve. You can feel that something is not quite right – the Velvets seemed to have surgically removed their tender side that came to the fore on the Nico-sung ballads of the first album. In its place is a weird and nasty ambience, totally in keeping with the chaos and tension in the music. The lyrics are typical Reed fare – a devil-may-care speedfreak anthem inciting you to murder your mother, before the song dissolves into a hail of harsh noise and feedback. And all in under 3 minutes. Perfect pop. Things get even weirder and nastier with ‘The Gift’. One speaker channel features what is essentially a wired jam on one chord, like ‘European Son’ slowed down to a grind, with shards and splinters of noise breaking out at odd intervals, whilst in the other speaker channel John Cale tells a shaggy dog story which is in equal parts hilarious and disturbing in his deadpan Welsh accent. What stops the piece from falling into sheer novelty is the band’s playing, which imbues the track with menace and threat, and the deadpan bizarreness of the story, performed to perfection by Cale. ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ is equally weird, disturbing and funny. It starts off almost like a folk ballad, albeit one drenched in guitar and viola feedback. as the lyrics get progressively odder and more unpleasant, so does the music, mutating into what sounds almost like Captain Beefheart drugged up to the eyeballs on heroin, with voices and whirring noises slipping in and out of the mix and from speaker to speaker as the gruesome operation goes more and more wrong. It almost sounds like the Velvets are performing open surgery on the listener with their scraping guitars and abrasive feedback. As Reed intones, somewhere between morbid fascination and drugged-out numbness, ‘The head won’t move’, the song falls apart, prognosis for the patient clearly not positive.
Then, amidst all this noise and nastiness, there is a moment of piece, as heartbreakingly delicate and beautiful as it is brief. It is often said amongst fans that the Velvets’ talents at writing love songs are sadly overlooked, and most site their third, self-titled album as evidence, housing as it does such moments of tender beauty as ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘Candy Says’. But ‘Here She Comes Now’ is perhaps the most overlooked of all their ballads. Sandwiched in between the sinister surrealism of ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ and the brutal ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’, ‘Here She Comes Now’ is all the more striking for being amidst such chaos. Opening with a melodic guitar figure that would later be echoed on Orange Juice’s gorgeous ‘Louise Louise’, if it weren’t for Lou Reed’s ambiguously sinister lyrics, the song would be a thing of pure limpid beauty. But after two verses in almost as many minutes, the song fades away, and the gentle silence left in its wake is shattered forever.
‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ is a juddering, nerve-shredding ride of a song, in which the deranged protagonist hears the voice of his dead girlfriend. But what makes the song is Lou Reed’s guitar playing. Trying to emulate Orlette Coleman’s free-jazz playing on his guitar, Reed unleashes chaotic runs of guitar lines laced with feedback that shoots out of the mix, barely playing in any recognizable key as each line melts into the next and stutters and sparks before exploding all over again. It’s all Sterling Morrison, John Cale and Moe Tucker can do to keep the steady thud-thud-thud two-chord Velvets riff going underneath him, and several times the sheer fuzzed-out intensity threatens to derail the song. Harsh, wild and deranged, this is what you wished James Williamson’s guitar lines on Raw Power sounded like instead of all that proto-shredding twaddle. The soloing is so rhythmically loose that it breaks completely free from the droning of the rhythm section, instead achieving something akin to The Magic Band’s more unhinged guitar moments, and anticipating the Fire Engines’ post-No Wave squall by some twenty years. ‘And then my mind split open’ indeed. It is one of the most exciting pieces of guitar playing in the history of pop music, and truly proves Lou Reed’s talent as a great guitarist who was able to make up in daring and inventiveness anything he lacked in conventional ability. It’s just a shame to think that in two years the man would be playing the pedestrian pentatonic My First Guitar Solo ™ on ‘Oh, Sweet Nothing’ from Loaded.
Then we come to the most famous track on the album, and the one perhaps most responsible for White Light/White Heat’s reputation as difficult. ‘Sister Ray’ always starts off faster then you think it will. And it’s always more intense, more messy, more noisy, more unspeakably thrilling then you think it will be as well. The Velvet’s legendary side long 17 and a half minute noisefest is still one of the most exciting pieces of music in pop history. The band start off playing three chords, but quickly grow bored with two of them. ‘Repetition in our music and we’re never gonna lose it’, sang Mark E. Smith twenty years later, and you can bet he learned it from the masters. Lou Reed delivers his legendary lyric about drugged up transsexual rape and murder at his sardonic best, his overdriven guitar feedback competing with John Cale’s equally overdriven organ for sheer noise and intensity. Cale and Reed sound like they are trying to drown each other out, stringing out the music tighter then a high tension line, whilst Sterling Morrison gives up on the other chords and Moe Tucker battles gamely to keep some semblance of control. Though it would be an influence on everyone from krautrock bands to early industrial groups, the sheer sonic intensity and gritty nastiness of this screaming bloody mess of a song would rarely if ever be equaled.
After this mess of misanthropy and white noise, John Cale left the band to be replaced by Doug Yule, making for a much less tense, much more relaxed Velvet Underground. If it’s easy to be disappointed by this mellowing out, it’s worth remembering that that kind of intensity is hard to sustain, and that afterwards being in the Velvet Underground must have been a more amenable proposition for the band members then before. White Light/White Heat still stands as a benchmark for the daringly experimental and for sheer bone-shaking noise, proof that something twisted, ugly and deranged can indeed be a thing of beauty, and as one of those records that truly stands above the crowd; music that really matters. Music critics and casual fans may always pay more attention to the Velvets’ more accessible albums, but it is perhaps fitting that White Light/White Heat remains in the shadows, sought out by the faithful alone and never to be given away free with this Sunday’s edition of the Observer. It is one of my favourite albums, and I love it dearly. This is, perhaps, enough.
posted by Jonathan Thornton at 12:12 pm
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