The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Velvet Underground & Nico is the debut studio album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground and the German singer Nico, released by Verve Records in March 1967. The album was recorded in 1966 on Ludlow Street, New York while the band were featured on Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour. Warhol, who designed the album's record sleeve, served as co-producer alongside Tom Wilson.

The Velvet Underground & Nico features elements of avant-garde music incorporated into brash, minimal and groove-driven rock music. Lead singer and songwriter Lou Reed delivers explicit lyrics spanning themes of drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism and urban life. Due to its abrasive, unconventional sound and controversial lyrical content, the album underperformed commercially and polarized critics upon release. Various record stores banned the album, many radio stations refused to play it, and magazines refused to carry advertisements for it.

In the following decades, The Velvet Underground & Nico received widespread critical acclaim, being regarded as ahead of its time, and was included on numerous all-time best album lists. The Observer placed it at No. 1 in their list of the "50 Albums That Changed Music" and Pitchfork ranked it as the best album of the 1960s. It has been characterized as the original art-rock record, influencing many subgenres of rock and alternative music, including punk, garage rock, krautrock, post-punk, post-rock, noise rock, shoegaze, gothic rock, art punk, and indie rock.

The Velvet Underground & Nico continues to be lauded as one of the most important albums in rock and pop music. In 2006, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2008, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, honoring recordings of "lasting qualitative or historical significance". Despite its poor sales, the album is certified platinum in the United Kingdom for sales of over 300,000 copies. In 2023, Billboard ranked the album No. 1 on its list of "The 100 Best Album Covers of All Time."

Recording

thumb|left|200x200px|[[Nico (singer)|Nico sang lead vocals on three tracks, including the single "All Tomorrow's Parties".]]

The Velvet Underground & Nico was recorded in a rehearsal studio on Ludlow Street, New York. It was recorded with the first professional line-up of the Velvet Underground, consisting of guitarist and vocalist Lou Reed; violist, keyboardist, and bassist John Cale; guitarist and bassist Sterling Morrison; and drummer Maureen Tucker. At the instigation of their mentor and manager Andy Warhol and his collaborator Paul Morrissey, German singer Nico was also featured; she had occasionally performed lead vocals for the band. She sang lead on three of the album's tracks—"Femme Fatale", "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "I'll Be Your Mirror"—and back-up on "Sunday Morning". In 1966, as the album was being recorded, this was also the line-up for the band's live performances as a part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

The bulk of the songs that would become The Velvet Underground & Nico were recorded in four days in mid-April 1966 at Scepter Studios in Manhattan. This was financed by Warhol and Columbia Records sales executive Norman Dolph, who also co-engineered the sessions with John Licata. The cost of the project is unknown; estimates vary from $1,500 (equivalent to $ in ) to $3,000 (equivalent to $ in ).

Dolph sent an acetate disc of the recordings to Columbia Records in an attempt to interest them in distributing the album, but they declined, as did Atlantic Records and Elektra Records. According to Morrison, Atlantic objected to the songs' drug references, while Elektra disliked Cale's viola. Finally, the MGM Records-owned Verve Records accepted the recordings, with the help of Verve staff producer Tom Wilson, who had recently moved from a job at Columbia.

In May 1966, three songs ("I'm Waiting for the Man", "Venus in Furs", and "Heroin") were re-recorded in two days at TTG Studios in Hollywood. When the record's release date was postponed, Wilson brought the band to Mayfair Recording Studios in Manhattan in November 1966 to add a final song to the album: the single "Sunday Morning". Several others who worked on the album are often mentioned as the technical producer.

Recording engineers Norman Dolph and John Licata are sometimes cited as producing the Scepter Studios sessions, though neither is credited as such on the album. Dolph said that Cale was the group's creative producer, as he handled the majority of the arrangements. However, Cale recalled that Tom Wilson produced nearly all the tracks, and said that Warhol "didn't do anything".

However, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed both cited Warhol's approach as a legitimate method of production. Morrison described Warhol as the producer "in the sense of producing a film". Reed said:

Music and lyrics

Lyrics

The Velvet Underground & Nico was notable for its overt descriptions of topics such as drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism, and sexual deviancy. "I'm Waiting for the Man" describes a protagonist's efforts to obtain heroin, while "Venus in Furs" is a nearly literal interpretation of the novella of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which itself prominently features accounts of sadomasochistic practices. "Heroin" details an individual's use of the drug and the experience of feeling its effects.

Lou Reed, who wrote the majority of the album's lyrics, never intended to write about such topics for shock value. Reed, a fan of poets and authors such as Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Hubert Selby, Jr., saw no reason the content in their works could not translate well to rock music. An English major who studied at Syracuse University, Reed said in an interview that he thought joining gritty subject matter and music was "obvious": "That's the kind of stuff you might read. Why wouldn't you listen to it? You have the fun of reading that, and you get the fun of rock on top of it." is a tender and affectionate song, in stark contrast to a song like "Heroin". A common misperception is that "All Tomorrow's Parties" was written by Reed at Warhol's request (as stated in Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga's Velvet Underground biography Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story); while the song does seem to be another observation of the denizens of the Factory, Reed wrote the song before meeting Warhol, having recorded a demo in July 1965 at Ludlow Street. experimental rock, proto-punk, psychedelic rock, and avant-pop. Much of the album's sound was conceived by John Cale, who stressed the experimental qualities of the band. He was influenced greatly by his work with minimalist composer La Monte Young in the Theatre of Eternal Music, John Cage, and the Fluxus arts movement, and encouraged the use of alternative ways of producing sound. Cale thought his sensibilities meshed well with Reed's, who was already experimenting with alternate tunings. For instance, Reed had "invented" the ostrich guitar tuning for a song he wrote called "The Ostrich" for the short-lived band the Primitives. Ostrich guitar tuning consists of all strings being tuned to the same pitch class. This method was utilized on the songs "Venus in Furs" and "All Tomorrow's Parties". Reed and Morrison's guitars were often tuned down a whole step, which produced a lower, fuller sound that Cale considered "sexy".

Cale performed on the viola on several of the album's songs, notably "Venus in Furs" and "The Black Angel's Death Song". Cale strung his viola with guitar and mandolin strings, and when played loudly, Cale would liken its brash sound to that of an airplane engine. According to critic Robert Christgau, Cale's "narcotic drone" not only sustains the sadomasochism-themed "Venus in Furs", but also "identifies and unifies the [album] musically". Of the vocal performances, he believed "Nico's contained chantoozy sexuality" complemented "the dispassionate abandon of Reed's chant singing".

Tucker's style of drumming on the album involved her playing standing up rather than sitting down, playing bass drums and tambourines on their sides with a drumstick in her left hand and a mallet in her right hand, resulting in "a mix of African trance rhythms and Ringo-like arrangement genius" according to Adam Budofsky of Modern Drummer. Tucker's predecessor Angus MacLise had informed her style, influencing her into playing "pounding" rhythms that fit with, in her words, "the ominous mood" of several of the album's songs. A special machine was needed to manufacture these covers, one of the causes of the album's delayed release, but MGM paid for costs figuring that any ties to Warhol would boost sales of the album.

Sources have often cited the cover art as a phallic symbol. In the 2006 documentary The Velvet Underground: Under Review, one commentator remarks:Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik has compared the act of peeling the banana sticker to the peeling back of a foreskin, arguing that the jacket "aligned the Velvets with the hard-edged queer culture that the Factory was coming to represent." Copies that had already been printed were sold with a large black sticker covering the actor's image.

Alleging that the Foundation had earlier claimed it "may" own the design's copyright, the partnership asked the court for a declaratory judgment that the Foundation did not have such rights. In response, the Foundation gave the partnership a "Covenant Not to Sue"—a written and binding promise that, even if the partnership and certain other parties continued to use the design commercially, the Foundation would never invoke its professed copyright ownership against them in court.

On the Foundation's motion, Judge Alison J. Nathan severed and dismissed from the lawsuit the partnership's copyright claim. According to Judge Nathan, the Constitution allows federal courts to decide only "Cases" or "Controversies", which means ongoing or imminent disputes over legal rights, involving concrete facts and specific acts, that require court intervention in order to shield the plaintiff from harm or interference with its rights. The judge held that the partnership's complaint fell short of that standard because even if the Foundation continued to claim ownership of the design's copyright—and even if its claim was invalid—that claim would not legally harm the partnership or prevent it from making its own lawful uses of the design. The partnership did not claim that it owned the design's copyright, only that the Foundation did not. Since, according to the court, the Foundation promised not to sue the partnership for any "potentially copyright-infringing uses of the Banana Design", the partnership could continue using the design and there would be no legal action that the Foundation could take (under copyright law) to stop it. And if, the court concluded, the partnership could continue with business as usual (as far as copyright was concerned) regardless of whether the Foundation actually owned the design's copyright, a court decision would have no practical consequences for the partnership; it would be a purely academic (or "advisory") opinion, which federal courts may not issue. The court therefore "dismissed without prejudice" the partnership's request that it resolve whether the Foundation owned the design's copyright.

Reception and sales

Chart history and sales figures

Upon release, The Velvet Underground & Nico was a commercial failure. The album's controversial content led to its almost instantaneous ban from various record stores, many radio stations refused to play it, and magazines refused to carry advertisements for it. Its lack of success can also be attributed to Verve, who failed to promote or distribute the album with anything but modest attention.

The album first entered the Billboard album charts on May 13, 1967, at number 199 and left the charts on June 10, 1967, at number 195. When Verve recalled the album in June due to Eric Emerson's lawsuit, it disappeared from the charts for five months. It then re-entered the charts on November 18, 1967, at number 182, peaked at number 171 on December 16, 1967, and finally left the charts on January 6, 1968, at number 193. At times the figure has been distorted to 10,000 copies. Writers often erroneously use this quotation as a definitive figure for how many copies of The Velvet Underground & Nico were sold in the first several years. While it indeed sold less than Warhol and the band had hoped, according to a MGM royalty statement presented to Jeff Gold, a former Warner Bros. Records executive, 58,476 copies of the album were sold in February 1969. In 2021, Grant McPhee, a filmmaker and writer, conducted an investigation into Eno's claim, citing 23 pressings of the album in 1967 alone, as well as a 1970 Sterling Morrison interview where Morrison claimed the album had allegedly sold 200,000 copies.

Contemporary reception

A capsule review from Billboard published ahead of the album's release praised the "haunting" vocals of Nico and the "powerful" lyrics of the band, calling it a collection of "sophisticated folk-rock" and a "left-fielder which could click in a big way." Vibrations, a small rock music magazine, gave the album a mostly positive review in their second issue, describing the music as "a full-fledged attack on the ears and on the brain" while noting the dark lyrics. Wayne Harada of the Honolulu Advertiser and Dave Donelly of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin both praised the album's banana-sticker cover; the former terming it "the wildest" front cover of any album yet and the latter calling it a conversation piece. Harada wrote: "Inside, the eating's good, too: 'Sunday Morning' has a definite psychedelic hit sound. 'Run Run Run' still is another Underground gem gaining ground."

Meanwhile, Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice, published in Velvet Underground's hometown of New York City, was more reserved in his praise. Goldstein called "There She Goes Again" a "blatant" lift of the Rolling Stones rendition of "Hitch Hike" and called Reed's vocal performances on other songs "distressingly like early Dylan". However he ultimately wrote that "the Velvets are an important group and this album has some major work [within]", singling out "I'm Waiting for the Man", "Venus in Furs", "Femme Fatale", and "Heroin".

The Tampa Tribune writer Vance Johnston dismissed it as a collection of "several confusing sounds... most depressing and whatever the message I failed to get" but wrote that Warhol aficionados would declare it his best "at any rate". Don Lass of New Jersey's Asbury Park Evening Press was similarly dismissive, finding the music "as lifeless and inanimate as the discarded banana peel, touching every cliche in the rock 'n' roll spectrum while missing the genuine fun that good big-beat renderings can offer." A staff writer for the Pensacola News Journal defined the album overall as "one big savage sound", with its lyrics "equally frenzied": "The result sounds like the merger of Dracula and some of the long-haired wailers of today". John F. Szwed of Jazz & Pop called the band's performance on the record "tedious despite their ventures into electric viola et al", acknowledging the strength of their "loud whine" but ultimately writing that "something is lost in the translation" in the absence of the visual accompaniments of Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

Reappraisal

A decade after its release, The Velvet Underground & Nico began to attract wide praise from rock critics. Christgau wrote in his 1977 retrospective review for the Village Voice that the record had been difficult to understand in 1967, "which is probably why people are still learning from it. It sounds intermittently crude, thin, and pretentious at first, but it never stops getting better."

The Velvet Underground & Nico has been characterized as "the original art-rock record" In The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1998), Colin Larkin called it a "powerful collection" that "introduced Reed's decidedly urban infatuations, a fascination for street culture and amorality bordering on voyeurism." In April 2003, Spin led their "Top Fifteen Most Influential Albums of All Time" list with the album. On November 12, 2000, NPR included it in their "NPR 100" series of "the most important American musical works of the 20th century". In 2003, Rolling Stone placed it at number 13 on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list, calling it the "most prophetic rock album ever made". It re-ranked at number 23 in a 2020 reboot of the list. The album was selected as one of the 24 significant US albums of the 1960s in the book "The Perfect Collection" by Tom Hibbert (1982).

In 1997, The Velvet Underground & Nico was named the 22nd greatest album of all time in a "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted in the United Kingdom by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 2006, Q magazine readers voted it into 42nd place in the "2006 Q Magazine Readers' 100 Greatest Albums Ever" poll, while The Observer placed it at number 1 in a list of "50 Albums That Changed Music" in July of that year. Also in 2006, the album was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In 2017, Pitchfork placed the album at the top of its list of "The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s". Staff writer Philip Sherburne wrote: "Today, it's easy to see The Velvet Underground & Nico as a solipsistic record, given all the social and political problems of the era that it ignores; the Velvets weren't so much turning on and dropping out as digging in and shooting up. If the contemporary underground begins here then so too, perhaps, does its occasionally blinkered perspective. Art for art's sake can be a hell of a drug. But for all of their danger and debasement, there was also something cozy about the Velvet Underground. [...] Far from 'closing in on death', the Velvet Underground were zeroing in on the sound of the future." It was voted number 13 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). In 2025, Apple named it one of the 100 best albums.

In 2006, The Velvet Underground & Nico was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2008, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, honoring recordings of "lasting qualitative or historical significance".

Cover versions

In April 1967, one month after the album's release, a band called the Electrical Banana may have recorded the first cover version of "There She Goes Again". According to bandmember Dean Kohler, they recorded it in a tent in Vietnam in April 1967 and sent the master tape to a company in California to have 45 RPM records pressed.

Also in 1967 the Dutch band The Riats from The Hague released a single with "Run, Run, Run" as the A-side and "Sunday Morning" as B-side. The exact release date is unknown, so it remains open for debate whether Electric Banana or The Riats were the first to put a Velvet Underground cover on record.

In 1991, Melvins covered "Venus in Furs" on a split 7" single with Nirvana, who recorded "Here She Comes Now" from White Light/White Heat.

In 2009, the American musician Beck recorded a track-for-track cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico and released it online in video form on his website, as part of a project called Record Club. Musicians involved in the recording include Beck plus Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Brian LeBarton, Bram Inscore, Yo, Giovanni Ribisi, Chris Holmes, and Þórunn Magnúsdóttir.

Also in 2009, various artists from Argentina collaborated to produce a track-for-track cover of the record. They played a number of concerts in Buenos Aires to celebrate the release of the album, which was made available online for free.

In 2021, Verve Records released the tribute album I'll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico, a track-by-track cover of the album with performances by St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, Bobby Gillespie, and Iggy Pop among others.

Aftermath

Frustrated by the album's year-long delay and unsuccessful release, Reed's relationship with Warhol grew tense. Reed fired Warhol as manager in favor of Steve Sesnick, who convinced the group to move in a more commercial direction. Nico was forced out of the group, and began a career as a solo artist. Her debut solo album, Chelsea Girl, was released in October 1967, featuring some songs written by Cale, Morrison, and Reed.

Tom Wilson continued working with the Velvet Underground, producing their 1968 album White Light/White Heat and Nico's Chelsea Girl.

Track listing

Personnel

According to the album's liner notes:

Lou Reed lead guitar, ostrich guitar, vocals
John Cale electric viola, bass guitar, piano, celeste on "Sunday Morning"
Sterling Morrisonrhythm guitar, bass guitar, backing vocals on "Femme Fatale"
Maureen Tuckerpercussion
Nicochanteuse

;Production

Andy Warholproducer (all except "Sunday Morning")
Tom Wilsonproducer ("Sunday Morning")
Norman Dolphengineer
Omi Hadenengineer
John Licataengineer

Reissues and deluxe editions

Compact disc

The first CD edition of the album was released in 1986 and featured slight changes. The title of the album was featured on the cover, unlike the original LP release. In addition, the album contained an alternative mix of "All Tomorrow's Parties" which featured a single track of lead vocals as opposed to the double-tracked vocal version on the original LP. Apparently, the decision to use the double-tracked version on the original LP was made at the last minute. Bill Levenson, who was overseeing the initial CD issues of the VU's Verve/MGM catalog, wanted to keep the single-voice version a secret as a surprise to fans, but was dismayed to find out that the alternative version was revealed as such on the CD's back cover (and noted as "previously unreleased").

The subsequent 1996 remastered CD reissue removed these changes, keeping the original album art and double-tracked mix of "All Tomorrow's Parties" found on the LP.

Peel Slowly and See box set

The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in its entirety on the five-year spanning box set Peel Slowly and See, in 1995. The album was featured on the second disc of the set along with the single version of "All Tomorrow's Parties", two Nico tracks from Chelsea Girl and a ten-minute excerpt of the 30-minute "Melody Laughter" performance. Also included in the set (on the first disc) are the band's 1965 Ludlow Street loft demos. Among these demos are early versions of "Venus in Furs", "Heroin", "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "All Tomorrow's Parties".

Deluxe edition

In 2002, Universal released a two-disc "Deluxe Edition" set containing the stereo version of the album along with the five tracks from Nico's Chelsea Girl written by members of the band on disc one, and the mono version of the album along with the mono single mixes of "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "Sunday Morning" and their B-sides "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "Femme Fatale" on disc two. A studio demo of the unreleased track "Miss Joanie Lee" had been planned for inclusion on the set, but a dispute over royalties between the band and Universal canceled these plans. This contractual dispute apparently also led to the cancellation of further installments of the band's official Bootleg Series. However, this track was included in the subsequent re-release, 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition. In April 2010, Universal re-released the second disc of the "Deluxe Edition" as a single CD "Rarities Edition".

45th Anniversary Super Deluxe edition

On October 1, 2012, Universal released a 6-CD box set of the album. It features the previously available mono and stereo mixes as discs one and two respectively. Disc one contains as bonus tracks additional alternate versions of "All Tomorrow's Parties", "European Son", "Heroin", "All Tomorrow's Parties" (instrumental), and "I'll Be Your Mirror". Disc two contains the same bonus tracks as the prior deluxe version's second disc. Disc three is Nico's Chelsea Girl in its entirety and the Scepter Studios acetate (see below) in its entirety occupies disc 4. Discs 5 and 6 contain a previously unreleased live performance from 1966. According to the essay by music critic and historian Richie Unterberger contained within the set, the source for the show is the only audio tape of acceptable quality recording during singer Nico's tenure in the band. The essay also clarifies that the absence of any DVD materials in the box set is due to the fact that none of the band's shows were filmed, in spite of their heavy reliance on multimedia visuals.

Scepter Studios acetate version

Norman Dolph's original acetate recording of the Scepter Studios material contains several recordings that would make it onto the final album, though many are different mixes of those recordings and three are different takes entirely. The acetate was cut on April 25, 1966, shortly after the recording sessions. It resurfaced decades later when it was bought by collector Warren Hill of Montreal, Quebec, Canada in September 2002 at a flea market in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City for $0.75. Hill put the album up for auction on eBay in November. On December 8, 2006, a winning bid for $155,401 was placed, but not honored. The album was again placed for auction on eBay and was successfully sold on December 16, 2006, for $25,200.

Although ten songs were recorded during the Scepter sessions, only nine appear on the acetate cut. Dolph recalls "There She Goes Again" being the missing song (and, indeed, the version of "There She Goes Again" that appears on the final LP is attributed to the Scepter Studios session). In 2012, the acetate was officially released as disc 4 of the omnicomprehensive "45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition" box set of the album (see above). The disc also includes six previously unreleased bonus tracks, recorded during the band's rehearsals at The Factory on January 3, 1966. However, a ripped version of the acetate began circulating the internet in January 2007. Bootleg versions of the acetate tracks have also become available on vinyl and CD. The acetate was issued on vinyl in 2013 as a limited edition for Record Store Day. In 2014, it went back to auction.

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Certifications

According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks sales, The Velvet Underground & Nico sold 560,000 copies between 1991 and 2013.

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

800 Copies: Meet the World's Most Obsessive Fan of The Velvet Underground and Nico from NPR