Velvet Underground receives its own exhibit

Mike Newmark Arts Editor

The Velvet Underground—a serious contender for the greatest band of all time—embodied so many features of the late-’60s zeitgeist (sex, drugs, psychedelia, a mixture of apathy and anxiety) while simultaneously shunning them and defying easy pigeonholing. That made them a curious lens for their cultural period, and for what the public seemingly wanted from its art. Inarguably, 1967’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (also known as “The Banana Album” for Andy Warhol’s now-iconic image of a banana on its cover) was rock ‘n’ roll’s exemplary mold-breaker, a restlessly creative and influence-free debut that inspired countless bands in its wake. Forty years later, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller celebrates The Velvet Underground’s seminal first album with an impressive exhibition—entitled C/O The Velvet Underground, New York, N.Y.—of ultra-rare Velvets material, including posters, silk-screens, photographs, album art, press articles, vinyls, and much more.

Co-curating the exhibit with Johan Kugelberg is John McWhinnie, the man responsible for bringing art to Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. “About a year-and-a-half ago, [Kugelberg] and I were tossing around ideas and we realized that we both had the same idea,” said McWhinnie. “There are only about five or six collectors of Velvet Underground material that we know about, and only a couple of Velvet Underground-related exhibits. The biggest one was an Andy Warhol show that had only a very small section on the Velvets. But neither of us had ever seen a show devoted exclusively to the band and that drew from the band’s rarest materials.”

The Velvets (consisting, during their critical years, of multi-instrumentalists Lou Reed and John Cale, guitarist/bassist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker) did not receive the kind of reverence that McWhinnie, Kugelberg and so many others have for them now. Universally derided upon its initial release, The Velvet Underground and Nico took beatings in both mainstream and underground press. The start of the exhibit contains a page ripped from an unknown publication; in it, the writer comments with smug authority on “the scene,” noting that, “The [Velvet Underground] album is generally as worthless as anything is that is connected with Andy Warhol…A few cuts, such as ‘Sunday Morning,’ and ‘Heroin,’ are good, but the rest is not very good. Basically the Velvet Underground are a dance band that play lots of drug and sex songs but have very little imagination.” A Los Angeles radio station’s weekly zine noted that the Velvets in concert were “very uninteresting” and that Nico had “fantastic beauty but no voice.”

To read these reviews (featured in the exhibit in their original print) is to view a body of highly opinionated people who had no understanding of what The Velvet Underground was trying to do. Admittedly, the Velvets did not make themselves easily understood. Photographs show the band playing at a stuffy psychiatrists’ convention and Lou Reed plugging in his guitar under a gym basketball hoop, presumably in front of middle-schoolers whose musical education did not extend beyond scales. The wealth of handbills, cover artwork proposals and tour posters are almost disturbing in their aberrance and audacity. And the group photos reveal a band that was as cocksure as it was self-aware, as though the members were fully cognizant of their status as outsiders. Clearly, their holistic image was as endemic to their art as their actual music.

That image was cultivated entirely by infamous pop artist Andy Warhol, and much of the exhibit is devoted to the memorabilia associated with the Warhol-Velvets partnership. The band became involved with Warhol when he recruited them to play at his warped multimedia extravaganza, Exploding Plastic Inevitable—a show so unprecedently twisted that it prompted Michael Williams of The Chicago Daily News to write the paroxysm, “The flowers of evil are in full bloom with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable!” It’s no accident that material related to Warhol’s show is in good supply: Warhol was a hype machine, bringing the Velvets exposure and avant-garde credibility but doing little else, and McWhinnie is quick to point this out. “I think [Warhol] was incredibly important to the band because without his alma mater, the first album would never have happened,” he said. “But they really were their own band with their own identity; they existed before [Warhol] came along and they existed after he left.”

Though McWhinnie notes that the chronicling of The Velvet Underground gets “spotty” after 1968, it’s still noticeable that nothing related to their fifth album, Squeeze, is anywhere to be found (excepting one Xeroxed band family tree). Squeeze was recorded in 1973 with an entirely new lineup, and is still regarded by those who have heard it as the band’s first and only god-awful recording—so awful, in fact, that efforts have been made to remove all traces of it from The Velvet Underground’s official catalogue and likely the entire world. Barring this minor gripe, the exhibit is packed with more Velvet Underground material than the fan, collector, indie rocker or cultural historian could ever dream of. The most curious items include a set of large, unpeeled banana stickers (meant to be stuck onto the album covers), a plastic banana signed by Warhol, and the notorious “Norman Dolph” acetate record, which contains an entirely reworked version of The Velvet Underground and Nico. What’s more, little of this material has been seen by anyone outside the band and a few close friends.

As the old indie rock aphorism goes, few people heard or cared about The Velvet Underground, but those who did started bands of their own. And those bands would go on to inspire still others, so that every feedback squall, every edgy excursion into emotionally fraught territory, every ephemeral Sunday morning song and every musical smack in the face can be traced back in a direct line to The Velvet Underground’s brave, bold vision.

Needless to say, the Velvets’ stature has grown by leaps and bounds since 1967. Lester Bangs, writing for Creem magazine in May 1971, said it best: “The Velvet Underground have been one of the most consistently advanced musical organizations of our time, paid the price, and endured the strength of their commitment.” This exhibit is—among so many other things—a testament to that commitment.

C/O The Velvet Underground will run until May 12 at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 50 1/2 East 64th Street, N.Y. Admission is free.