Go Home. Shut Up. Grow Up.
by Steve Wynn
I remember vividly the first time I ever heard the Velvet Underground. I was in a garage in Davis, California, where I was attending college in the late '70's. I was actually at a rehearsal. In a literal garage band, both in terms of location and intention. We were more on the mark in the former than the latter at the time. Our bass player Steve Suchil was older, our mentor, the guy who had Been There. He was maybe 30 to our 19 years of age. He knew stuff. For example, he was baffled that we liked the Monkees. "This was the stuff that cool people all hated back in the '60's." Whatever. The Monkees were great. Still sound great.
Anyway, one night at rehearsal he said, "I've got something I think you might like" and pulled out the debut album by the Velvets. I already knew about Lou Reed—”Walk On the Wild Side" was inexplicable AM-radio fare when I was a kid. And I might have heard Transformer and Coney Island Baby by then. But the second the needle dropped and I heard the first 10 seconds of "Sunday Morning" I knew my life would never be the same. 19 is an age when a record can do that to you. I had the same experience when I first heard Big Star’s 3rd, the Nuggets collection, Country Life by Roxy Music, but this was different. This was in my wheelhouse, this was something I understood, this felt like a voice from a previous life even though the inhabitants of that previous life were all still alive and doing just fine, thank you.
It spoke to me. My songwriting up to that point had been mostly in the pop and folk style. I was smitten by 60's bands as well as punk and the new wave scene that was in full bloom at that point. But the thrill of matching willful noise and abrasion and hard, bruised lyrics against traditional songwriting was a revelation. And, well, I happen to sing the way I do and, yes, it wasn't all that far from what I was hearing. When you're young and playing music you are always searching for something new and unexpected but simultaneously attainable and self-affirming. I'd found it.
It was hard to find the records back then. That first album was barely in print but I was working in a record store so it was easy enough to track down. The others were, as I remember, a bitch—but I found them, too, and devoured them whole. Funny thing: with Dylan and Coltrane, my favorite of their catalog changed radically over the years, shifting from Highway 61 Revisited and Ascension to Blood on the Tracks and Live at Birdland, then settling into Time Out of Mind and Giant Steps. Same with the Velvets. As much as I loved all of their records immediately, my Velvets LUST magnetically pulled me to White Light/White Heat more than the others. I studied, practiced to, memorized and lost myself in "Sister Ray" (which I have covered twice, without a road map and which both times clocked in at almost the exact same time as the original).
A few years later it was the 3rd album.
And now? Now, I find when I put on a Velvets album it's usually Loaded, the one I liked the least by far when I was young. I mean, I still like all four albums. And the outtakes. And the live records. And I love the Nico and Cale contributions. They're essential. Give me a break. I f you don't like their contributions and don't love every song on those first two albums, you don't like the Velvets. Go home. Shut up. Put yourself in a corner with a dunce cap and then listen to “I Heard Her Call My Name” one hundred times in a row and call me in the morning. Grow up.
But grow up I did. And "New Age" and "Who Loves The Sun" spoke more and more to me with each year. So, I'm down with Loaded. You know what I love about that record most of all? The singing. The vocals on that record are just bonkers. Lou sings the way you sing when you've sung a song 1000 times and are completely bored with the original. It's a variation on something without a template. It's why I love covering "Rock and Roll.” If you start at the original you're already flying through the air without a net. There is no wrong. Only right is wrong. I love that.
My band, The Dream Syndicate, was loved from the very start. We made our first EP before we played our first gig. We were successful critically, commercially, and with our peers from the start. Strange for a $100 recording that was meant to be a demo to get gigs. Anyway, that was the good news. The bad news-—or so it seemed at the time—was that people wouldn't shut up about the Velvets. Everything from "second coming of the Velvets” to, as one influential LA booker once said, "a third rate Velvet Underground ripoff." Whatever. He came around, but it was a drag at the time to have your inspiration and soul and efforts reduced so simply. But, over time, I realized that the reason our band was so loved back then was that people were so hungry for anything that could give the same thrill that they had when, like me, they first heard the Velvet Underground. I guess we did a good job of replicating that thrill, not by copying the band exactly but by mixing beauty, vulnerability, traditional pop structures and, yes, the kind of lyrics an English major would write (I was, he was) with a fearless embrace of noise and chaos. Lou had John Cale, I had Karl Precoda.
By the way, we didn't get our name from the La Monte Young/John Cale pre-Velvets band but rather from the Tony Conrad/Faust album "Outside the Dream Syndicate," which our drummer Dennis Duck had and loved. Who knew? We did, eventually. Things happen for a reason, I guess.
I didn't cover Velvets songs often if ever until Lou died. Since then I've regularly played his songs and, lo and behold, am reminded once again how much his music meant to me.
Steve Wynn’s new album with the Dream Syndicate is The Universe Inside. He lives and works in New York city.
