acquired something i’ve lusted after for a short while during the week: the velvet underground – new york art, a beautifully presented monograph on probably my favourite band of all time.
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edited by johan kugelberg and published by rizzoli, its a fantastic collection of vu ephemera. it's got all the famous photos of the group playing, rehearsing, posing, and relaxing, plus a whole heap i’d never seen before. ditto flyers. and i think this is my new favourite picture of nico...
then there’s all the extras, lou’s early singles and pickwick lps, piero heliczer and angus maclise’s poetry journals, slide projections from the epi shows, original sheet music for the early songs, newspaper and magazine reviews from the time, articles by lester bangs, richard meltzer, sterling morrison, new and old interviews, and a lengthy timeline starting with delmore schwartz’s birth in 1935, and ending with the 2007 exhibition that spawned the book. it’s well split too, the cale years take up a fair chunk of it, but the post-cale years get a good look-in. jonathan richman’s photos of the band live in 1968 or so are great. stripped of the psychedelic lighting, they look like the kind of fan-photos of shows you see all the time on the net.
i dunno, i just think they’re amazingly sweet. not to mention the photos of them playing on the basketball court at the university of maryland.
“ladies and gentleman, the greatest band in the world... EVER!”
anyway, i could gush for a long time about this book. and i’ve probably overlooked a shitload out of sheer excitement. suffice to say if you’re a velvets fan, don’t hesitate.
i did find it interesting that there’s minimal input from john cale. apart from a promo interview transcript from 1967, there’s no ‘new’ words form jc (the book opens with a conversation between lou and maureen, in which lou is full of nothing but praise for mo). AND in all the interviews, lou’s responses jump out in bold text, while everyone elses words are left untouched. who the hell really edited this book??? hehe, it's all pretty funny, especially if you saw the dec ’09 issue of uncut, which promoted the book with a cover story interviewing john cale and maureen tucker. cale gives hilarious a love-hate (mostly hate) spiel on lou, highlighting all his bad points and making special note of how Lou “threw himself into” the gay scene at the factory. it's top shelf bitchiness, and well worth tracking down.
so to throw some light on john cale, here he is doing amazing things to a vox continental organ in 1967, off another all time favourite album. enjoy!
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