KALX DJ 45 RPM interviewed author Richie Unterberger on August 22 2026.
45 RPM: [00:00:00] It’s now 1:17, and you’re tuned into KALX 9.7 FM, University of California and listener-supported freeform community radio. I am 45 RPM, and to my left is Richie Unterberger. He’s here to plug his new book, Do What You Fear Most, a tome on the Velvet Underground. And welcome to back to KALX.
Richie Unterberger: Thanks. It’s been a quite a few years since I’ve been interviewed here, but I’m glad to be back.
45 RPM: It’s good to have you back. I guess the first question would be, what made you decide to write this book on The Velvet Underground?
Richie Unterberger: I had a previous book on the Velvet Underground 17 years ago, but it was a reference book, what they did on certain days in their career. And since that time, I’ve been able to do a lot more research on the group. For one thing, the Lou Reed Archive was not open then. Reed was still alive, and now it’s part of the New York Public Library in the Performing Arts division. It has some unreleased recordings and documents. But also at the Andy Warhol Archive, they’re always unearthing more stuff to do with Warhol.
He had literally a townhouse. several floors, ceiling to floor, filled with stuff, and things are still being unearthed, including some restoration of some of his films. But also over that time, some people contacted me, some interesting archival records came out. And also, it was important to me to write the story in a format that was a standard biographical narrative, not a reference book where it’s maybe more limited to hardcore fans, but telling the story of the group because I think the story of the group is as unusual and fascinating as the music that they did, which is very much the focus. And whatever one thinks of the quality of the book, it certainly is the most comprehensive one on the Velvet Underground. It’s 800 pages.
45 RPM: Yeah, no argument there.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah.
45 RPM: How did you do the research for this particular book? I mean, were there, um… Oh, you mentioned the Lou Reed Archive and the Andy Warhol, and were there other people? You have interviewed other people, too, correct?
Richie Unterberger: I interviewed some people that I had not been able to track down when I, in the early 2000s, did a lot of interviews. Some of those people, unfortunately, from my much earlier interviews are not around anymore. But other people emerged or became contactable.
As a couple of examples, Geoff Haslam, he’s not a name that’s really well known, even to record collectors, but he was one of the co-producers of the Loaded album, and I’d only seen a couple of quotes from him talking about his involvement in the record. He’s still around in England. He’s British, and he was glad to talk to me for a couple of hours to fill in some interesting material.
I interviewed Lou Reed’s first wife, who didn’t meet him until around the time the Velvets’ run with Reed was finishing, but she, of course, has a real inside perspective. And as far as recordings, one obvious one that’s easily available now, the demos he sort of mailed to himself in 1965, including some very early versions of songs he would do later, like “Pale Blue Eyes,” but some others which had not been heard before.
But the Lou Reed Archive, for instance, has a few, not a whole lot, but a few really interesting unreleased recordings that shed some light on not just Reed’s, but the Velvet Underground’s evolution. There were a couple at the Lou Reed … I’m sorry, the Andy Warhol archive too, but more and more things keep emerging, and they probably will for years after I do this book. But I do think I tracked down the great wealth of them.
45 RPM: Yeah. Actually, I have to admit, I didn’t even know there was a Lou Reed archive until I read your book. Can anyone just go in there and check out or do research over there or?
Richie Unterberger: Yeah. The New York Library for the Performing Arts, it’s part of Lincoln Center. It’s pretty easy to find in Manhattan. You have to go there, that’s the thing. It would be great if they set it up so you could log into a database no matter where you were, and maybe they and maybe many libraries are working toward that, but you have to go there. But you don’t even need to live in the New York area.
They issue you a temporary library card, and you can get headphones and access all these unreleased, not just recordings, but interviews. You can’t tape it, although somebody seems to have figured out a way to get one of those tracks on an unauthorized release. It wasn’t me. But there’s a lot of stuff to go through there, and it only opened a few years ago.
Laurie Anderson, his third wife, Reed’s third wife, sort of gave the New York Library the rights to make this stuff available and accessible. And I’m glad that it’s free and available to anybody, as long as you are on the premises. Yeah.
45 RPM: Right. Yeah, no, definitely something to check out next time we’re in, I’m in New York, New York.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah.
45 RPM: Yeah. And also too, was there anyone that you wanted to interview who’s still alive but you weren’t able to get a hold of or didn’t hear back from?
Richie Unterberger: The two obvious people I would have liked to have most interviewed, which I did not, were John Cale and Maureen Tucker. And I did put in requests to Cale and didn’t hear back from his representatives. And Maureen Tucker, I had tried 17 years ago, multiple times. I thought the interview was going to come through, and it did not. I did unearth a great deal of interviews, that not just Cale and Tucker, but Reed and Sterling Morrison, and Nico, gave over the years, not only when they were in The Velvet Underground, but since then, some of which are very, very hard to find.
And I think that at least the viewpoints of all of the Velvets members are represented in the book. I did interview Doug Yule and his younger brother Billy, who played drums when they were the resident band of Max’s Kansas City for the summer of 1970. But it is also very interesting to find associates who have rarely or never been interviewed, or if they have, they’ve never been asked as much in depth.
Paul Morrissey, who was the business manager of the group for the time they were managed by Andy Warhol, he talked about them a lot to me. His perspective is not one that everybody agrees with, but I think it’s important to represent him because he was handling them. He says he was basically their manager. Not everyone agrees with that, but he– A funny line he said to me is, “I was basically Andy Warhol’s manager, who was the manager of the group. Have you ever heard of a manager who needed a manager?”
45 RPM: Mm. Good point.
Richie Unterberger: That’s what he felt his role was.
45 RPM: Yeah, no, usually it doesn’t work out like that, though, but again, who knows, but yeah.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah.
45 RPM: And actually, how about if I play one of the rare songs from them? This is The Ostrich from I guess back when Lou Reed was in a band called The Primitives.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah, and it was really a fake band when the record came out at the end of 1964, although it’s Lou Reed singing, and although a bunch of writers are credited, it’s really Lou Reed who wrote it. This song, you can tell it’s Lou Reed on vocals. It’s not too much like the Velvet Underground, but it was key in getting the Velvet Underground to form. Do you want me to tell the story now, or wait until we hear The Ostrich?
45 RPM: Yeah, might as well hear The Ostrich first- Yeah … then proceed from there. So here we go with The Primitives and The Ostrich.
musical excerpt: The Ostrich by The Primitives
45 RPM: And you’re tuned into KALX 90.7 FM, where you just heard “The Ostrich,” from The Primitives, an early band involving Lou Reed. And our guest Richie Unterberger might be able to shed some more light on them.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah. When Lou Reed had recorded this and it came out on the Pickwick label where he was employed as a songwriter, Pickwick Records wanted this pretty off-the-wall recording to be promoted. It’s part of the tail end of the dance craze genre in rock and roll, and what more absurd dance can you concoct than The Ostrich, one of the most immobile creatures?
But they wanted a band, not the guys who had played on the record behind Reed, but someone who looked– people who looked more like a rock and roll band. And the guy who had hired Lou Reed for Pickwick Records, Terry Phillips, who I did interview, he saw these two guys at a party, and they had long hair.
Remember, this is late ’64, so… that’s a selling point when the Beatles have become really huge here. And he asked them if they were musicians, and they said yes, which was honest, but they weren’t rock and roll musicians. It was John Cale, who had a Welsh accent. That also maybe worked in his favor when the British Invasion was huge, and Tony Conrad.
Both of them had already played extensively with La Monte Young, minimalism. And just for a laugh, they checked out what is this all about, and they met Lou Reed and heard The Ostrich. And John Cale, he has said this in more than one interview, he was struck because the guitar on The Ostrich, all the strings are tuned to the same note. And he and Conrad had been doing that with La Monte Young’s group, sometimes called the Theater of Eternal Music.
And he and Lou Reed were realizing that the gap between the rock and roll that Reed was doing and starting to write more serious songs than The Ostrich, and the avant-garde music that Cale was doing, it wasn’t that huge.
It could be bridged. And after a few shows by the Primitives where Cale and Reed played together and the Primitives broke up, Cale and Reed decided a lot more seriously to pursue working together, concocting a sort of rock music that hadn’t been done before, combining the literary poetic lyrics of Lou Reed and his rock and roll energy with the minimalism and the avant-garde drones that John Cale, a classically trained musician from Wales, had been working on for almost a couple of years since moving to New York.
I can’t think of another major rock group, certainly from that time, where the three most colorful figures came from such different backgrounds. Lou Reed, a rock and roll fan and a literature, an aspiring writer from Long Island. John Cale, classically trained musician from Wales. And Nico from Germany, who was an internationally successful model and had appeared in a couple of films, but had hardly any professional singing experience. How do you combine those three into one?
And to give you a sense of how different Nico’s background was, you can play track number two, which is Nico’s first surviving recording.
45 RPM: Okay. I might as well do that right now. Do you want to give some background on the track?
Richie Unterberger: It is a recording that was not released at the time. It’s still not widely known because it’s only been on a box set, I’m giving away a trivia question here- of Serge Gainsbourg’s film music. Nico had appeared in La Dolce Vita, a notable supporting role, a very famous film by Federico Fellini. Her only lead role in a commercial film was two or three years later. It’s a film called Strip Tease, made in France, and there was consideration that she should sing a theme song, but she didn’t get to do that.
That went to Juliette Greco. But the recording survives, and the song, which was recorded around late 1962, was written by Serge Gainsbourg, who was already becoming a notable figure in France, more for his songs than for his own recordings. That would come later. So here we get to listen to Nico in 1962, and it doesn’t sound much like anything certainly she did with the Velvet Underground or in her long solo career.
45 RPM: So a little bit of the distance between this and, say, the Marble Index.
Richie Unterberger: It’s a long way from the Marble Index. It’s not rock and roll.
45 RPM: Yeah, well, let’s find out. So here we go. Serge Gainsbourg and Nico, and Strip Tease.
musical excerpt: Strip Tease by Nico.
45 RPM: That was Nico and Serge Gainsbourg and Strip Tease off the box set compilation Le Cinema Gainsbourg: Musiques des Films 1959 to 1990. You’re tuned into KALX, 90.7 FM, and to my left is Richie Unterberger. And we’d mentioned before the Andy Warhol connection.
Richie Unterberger: Andy Warhol got involved with the Velvet Underground at the very end of 1965. It’s not as random or fortuitous as one might think. He had seen performances by La Monte Young. He might have seen La Monte with John Cale at those performances, but they didn’t know each other. It was really some of the younger people involved with Andy Warhol’s Factory who brought Andy Warhol down to this small club where they were playing in Greenwich Village, the Cafe Bizarre.
Gerard Malanga, who would be a dancer as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia show constructed around the Velvet Underground, and also the underground filmmaker, Barbara Rubin. They seemed to be the two people who had found the Velvets sort of on their own, thought what they were doing is totally different.
Andy Warhol, he was looking to sort of sponsor a rock band at that time. According to Paul Morrissey, Warhol wanted to do that to make money, to just put his name on a series of performances over a club. Andy Warhol presents such and such, and with some of those receipts could fund the films that he was doing.
But I don’t think it was just a matter of, “Oh, and this is a band I can do that with.” I think he did instinctively realize, “This is a band that’s doing material as adventurous as what I have done with pop art and what I’m starting to do with film.” Especially with their lyrics, but also their sound, which was so unconventional in its combination of elements.
Warhol and Morrissey were crucial in getting Nico to join the group, because when they saw the Velvet Underground at the Cafe Bizarre, it was just four people. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, the guitarist who had joined around spring 1965. Maureen Tucker had only joined a few weeks before that because they needed a drummer when Angus MacLise, who had also played with LaMonte Young, dropped out.
But they felt, especially Paul Morrissey, that they needed more glamour. At that time, Morrissey said they were wearing black and playing with their backs to the audience, didn’t talk between numbers, spent a whole lot of time tuning up. They already knew Nico because she was such a successful model.
She’d already been to the Factory and had done at least one of the underground films of Warhol, and she had a single in Great Britain in 1965 produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager. They, and especially Lou Reed, were reluctant to get Nico into the group because Lou Reed wrote almost everything, and he wanted to sing everything.
The compromise was the billing can be The Velvet Underground and Nico, like Nico is just a guest vocalist. But what she sang on the first album, those three songs, they’re among her, or their, the whole band’s best material. All Tomorrow’s Parties, Femme Fatale, and I’ll Be Your Mirror. And All Tomorrow’s Parties, it’s a great example of how you combine these apparently uncombinable personalities.
Lou Reed, a really good unconventional song with poetic lyrics. John Cale contributing the drone and the repetition, especially with the piano that Cale plays on All Tomorrow’s Parties. And Nico, a different vocal style than what we just heard, a really gothic one that suits the song very well, which I was told was Andy Warhol’s favorite Velvet Underground song.
45 RPM Yeah. Do you think that Nico did some experimenting with her voice, do you think, to go from what we just heard to what we hear on All Tomorrow’s Parties?
Richie Unterberger: It’s definitely a change, and I don’t know how sudden or gradual it was. There are rehearsals that you can hear right after she joined the group. But I think a key in turning her attention to rock songs or popular music that wasn’t like the Serge Gainsbourg song that we heard, she had a brief fling with Bob Dylan when Dylan was in Europe in 1964, and really liked his songs and wanted to do his songs really badly. She only got to do one of them on her first solo album, but she was nagging The Velvet Underground to sing that one, I’ll Keep It With Mine, which Dylan had not released at that point, and they were resistant to that, and they wanted her to sing, if she was going to do any singing at all, what they had written, and that required a different approach for those sort of more subdued ballads, which still had a lot of menace and lyrical intrigue, I think. One of the interesting things that I dug up, if I could talk and give an example about some of the arcane interviews I found. Nico didn’t give many interviews in the 1960s about her music, but she gave one for a German magazine that was only published in German, and there were only two libraries in the United States that had one, but luckily one was able to unearth it for me, and I translated it.
There are several interpretations of I’ll Be Your Mirror from women that Reed was involved with. “They say it was about me,” sometimes. But Nico’s was unusual. She said it was to see both the beautiful and the ugly, if I or someone in a relationship can be your mirror, and I think that was a very apt comment.
45 RPM: Yeah. Actually, speaking of Nico and with songs Nico performed on, should I go in and play the single version of All Tomorrow’s Parties?
Richie Unterberger: It’s the whole Velvet Underground version, and it’s the single, so it lasts less than the album version. But as I said, that’s the ultimate example of, I think, of how Reed, Nico, and John Cale, and I don’t want to overlook the contributions also the two other members, both from Long Island like Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison on guitar, and Maureen Tucker adding a rock and roll element to the background, combining these forces that no music business handbook would have said these are gonna be the basis of a really pioneering rock band, how it combined into something that they couldn’t have done on their own.
45 RPM: Yeah. And also worth noting for Warhol, too, at least he, and arguably some of their later managers, at least he didn’t see them with just dollar signs in his eyes. He saw them more in terms of art and all that.
Richie Unterberger: In terms of artistic
45 RPM: I mean not to see them as just a moneymaker scheme, but sort of as an art project in and of themselves.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah. I think Warhol thought of them in both ways. He did wanna make money off of them, and he developed this multimedia show around them, but he also saw that what they were doing was something that he was very much in sympathy with, trying to break new ground in a different form. And Nico’s role, by the way, wasn’t just an occasional singer.
If you look at the media coverage the Velvet Underground got in the time Warhol was managing them, she gets more coverage than all four of the other members combined, including Lou Reed, who wrote almost everything and, and sang almost everything, and John Cale, who was such an important musical arranger.
That might have guaranteed her time in the band was limited, but she was really important to them for image, and I think that Warhol realized that.
45 RPM: Yeah. Well, actually, here is The Velvet Underground and Nico with single version of All Tomorrow’s Parties.
musical excerpt: All Tomorrow’s Parties by The Velvet Underground and Nico
45 RPM: The Velvet Underground and Nico, and the single version of All Tomorrow’s Parties. Again, you’re tuning to KALX 90.7 FM. I’m 45 RPM, and to my left is Richie Unterberger, and we’re talking about his new book, Do What You Fear Most. I’m just wondering too, what were some of the more surprising things you came across during your research for this book? Like things that may not be generally known, or may have gone against what were the accepted truths of the Velvet Underground story?
Richie Unterberger: I’m sometimes asked that at my events, and the most interesting thing to me, which is in some of Lou Reed’s obscure and very early interviews, is that he thought of each of the first three Velvet Underground albums as novels in and of themselves that told a story, and what’s more, he felt that those three albums in sequence told a larger story.
The first album, the banana album, the most famous one, it’s somebody who is trying to get into all kinds of different experiences. The second, White Light/White Heat, is someone taking those experiences to the most extreme limb that they possibly can. It’s one of the noisiest records of that era if not the noisiest. And the third one is that person retreating and becoming introspective, but at the end they find out, well, actually all these experiences we’ve been through, I’m back to where I was at the beginning. It’s subtle. It’s not like Tommy, which has a story, or Quadrophenia, or some other sort of rock operas.
But he even said, this is shortly after the Velvets broke up in a really good long interview that was never reprinted in a paper that’s been long gone, “If you take those three albums,” he said, “I wish MGM would issue those as a box set, because it’s the story of the 1960s.” That might be kind of far-fetched, but having heard him put it in context in those interviews, I can see what he’s thinking, that that’s one of the reasons that those records are so different, especially the third one.
When I got the third one, I’m 64, so I didn’t live through these albums when they came out, but when I was 17 and 18 I got these records, and I was prepared for the third album being really quiet and different from the first two, and very different from White Light/White Heat. But still, when I started the record, it was a needle in those days, that was your only option, and Candy Says came on, I was like, “it’s not just quiet, they’re trying to play as quietly as possible.”
It’s the as opposite as you can get from side two of White Light/White Heat with I Heard Her Call My Name and Sister Ray, which are so noisy and so sort of hysterical, so veering out of control.
45 RPM: Yeah, it’s almost like a total 180.
Richie Unterberger: Yes. But it’s obviously something that was very important to him. He was disappointed nobody picked up on it.
I can see why nobody picked up on it. If he had really wanted to- He needed, I think, to put a little short story on each record sleeve, like Pete Townshend did for Quadrophenia. And in a letter which was just unearthed as I was finishing the book by a memorabilia dealer, he made it clear that Loaded, the fourth album of the four on which he played with the Velvets in the studio, that was not part of that sequence, that novelistic sequence.
45 RPM: Yeah, ’cause I remember reading that book. I mean, I didn’t realize that until they were supposed to be a part of one… The first three albums were supposed to be part of one long, so to say, trilogy until I read the book. I guess speaking of Loaded, what do you think were some of the biggest what-ifs in the Velvet Underground story?
What if the Velvet’s first album hadn’t been delayed due to the issue with the back cover, or what if the band had waited until Moe had come back before recording Loaded instead of getting a replacement drummer, speaking of Loaded?
Richie Unterberger: The most important what-ifs to me are not could they have sold more records. I know that, of course, was very important to them, but it’s more musically. The biggest what-if, it’s an obvious one. John Cale was fired by the Velvet, by Lou Reed. He got Sterling Morrison to do the physical firing. Not long before they started recording their third album, like six weeks before they started recording it, what would a third album have sounded like with John Cale?
Could they have even done a third album given their growing differences? I do think that Doug Yule, who replaced John Cale, he, I think he did a great job with the group. For the third album certainly, but also the great 1969 live album. I think he was a very important contributor. There’s a lot about that era in the book.
I don’t dismiss it like some documentaries do. But it is an intriguing question. Would it have sounded a lot more far out if John Cale stayed there? Some people around the Velvets felt part of the reason Reed didn’t want to work with him anymore is that Cale’s ideas were getting too far out, too inaccessible, and Reed wanted to go in a more straight ahead rock and roll direction.
Not sell out, still do really creative, unusual songs, but more accessible ones. So that’s a what if. And you also pointed out, you’re doing my job for me in a sense, if Maureen Tucker had played on the fourth album, she didn’t because she was pregnant and couldn’t play the drums as she was accustomed to doing, not only would the album have sounded different, could the group have lasted longer?
Because an important thing that Doug Yule pointed out to me, he said, “It was a mistake. We should have waited for her to be able to play on the record before recording it. Not just because we needed her drumming, but also she made the whole group get along better as a dynamic. She was the only person who could really cool Lou Reed out of his really strange, mercurial moods, and the whole band got along better.” Maybe they wouldn’t have broken up in late August 1970 when Reed left the band as a surprise to most of them when they had a week at least to go at Max’s Kansas City.
45 RPM: Yeah. Actually, do you think Doug Yule would have been taken more seriously as part of the Velvet Underground if he hadn’t been persuaded to do the Squeeze album under the Velvet Underground name?
Richie Unterberger: The Squeeze album, I think it’s sort of a footnote. And Doug Yule himself doesn’t even think it’s a really good record. I know it might disappoint some fans of the record. There aren’t that many, I think, but there are a few. I don’t give much space to The Velvet Underground after Reed left, or to their reunion, because I don’t think the music is comparable, or very close even, to the quality of what was done when Reed was in the group.
But to fill in, maybe for some listeners who don’t know the history of the Squeeze album, in 1973, a Velvet Underground album came out, it was billed to The Velvet Underground, called Squeeze, but it’s really a Doug Yule solo record. There’s some drumming by a guy who was in Deep Purple, and some backup vocals by session musicians, but everything else was played and written by Doug Yule.
I think he was, as he explained to me, a great sort of supportive member of the group, supporting, using his talents to support great material written by somebody else, but not a great singer-songwriter. He felt like he was sort of cajoled into it by The Velvet Underground second, or the manager who took over from Andy Warhol, Steve Sesnick. If it had come out as a Doug Yule solo album, I think it would’ve been even more obscure than it is now.
45 RPM: Yeah. Do you think, did you find anyone who had a good word to say about Steve Sesnick, or?
Richie Unterberger: Yes, actually. Steve Sesnick took over from Andy Warhol in the middle of ’67, and some of The Velvet Underground had really harsh words for him, both Reed and Cale.
45 RPM: Oh okay.
Richie Unterberger: Cale called him a snake, somebody else called him a snake, because they felt that he, he was trying to divide and conquer, and shifting his alliances according to how he could help control the band. And maybe that’s a reason John Cale was fired by Lou Reed, but also how Doug Yule was pushed to the forefront for Loaded, getting some of the songwriting credits initially, leading to Reed’s decision to leave.
But Sterling Morrison’s wife said that they really liked, or Sterling at least, and certainly Maureen, really liked Steve Sesnick. He was really fun to be around. He was very involved with the group, paid them a lot of attention. It wasn’t like they were just one group in his stable. And also Steve Nelson, who promoted a lot of Velvet Underground shows in Boston and then in Massachusetts, said that he thinks Sesnick in some respects did a really good job.
He says Sesnick was very professional. They always showed up. I could always count on them when I wanted them to be on a bill, and you could definitely not do that with all managers and their clients in those days. And Victor Bockris, who has written books about members of the Velvets and about Andy Warhol and worked with Andy Warhol, said that one thing that Steve Sesnick did for them, he was sort of Brian Epstein with the Beatles.
He was really focused on them. He gave them a lot of attention. They felt like if they had something they needed to discuss, Sesnick was always there. They ultimately didn’t appreciate everything that was handled on their behalf, but he wasn’t the worst manager, which is sometimes the impression some of the Velvets and critics give of Sesnick.
45 RPM: Yeah, ’cause like I said, when you read an interview by, say, Lou Reed, usually there aren’t too many good words, fun words being said about it, Sesnick, so…
Richie Unterberger: No, and I think, I think part of it is they got into such heavy legal dispute, and the compromise was Reed got sole songwriting credits for some material that was initially credited to a bunch of people, but he had to give up the rights to the name the Velvet Underground.
And Sesnick kept using that name with Doug Yule as the leader of the group when really the standard of what they were recording and performing wasn’t close to what it had been when Lou Reed was the leader.
45 RPM: Yeah, and do you know how they, or how much Reed and the company managed to get finally the name back from him?
Richie Unterberger: I don’t know. I think it took quite a while. That’s all I know. But not only– They got their name back obviously because they could use it for their reunion tour in 1993. But I did have some discussions with the lawyer who has represented them for a long time, and he seems to have done a lot of work in straightening out their accounts and getting royalties for all the record sales that were dispersed all over the place. That wasn’t just due to Sesnick. I don’t think Andy Warhol kept really good records either.
Here’s something, it’s a little surprising. It might not be too surprising to Velvet Underground fans. The lawyer gave me sales figures for most of their albums. He doesn’t have them for Loaded, but according to what he’s calculated, their first album, their most popular one, has sold three million copies worldwide.
45 RPM: Yeah, that’s a surprise.
Richie Unterberger: And at the time, I did get a royalty statement for the first two years. It sold 60,000, which isn’t that bad, actually… for a late ’60s album. But it’s not the million dollar or gold record that they were hoping for, and it’s not in line with the huge influence and critical respect it’s had.
But over the years, there’s been sort of this mythology. Hardly anyone bought the record. Lou Reed contributed to that because he told Brian Eno it only sold 30,000 copies in the first five years, and that’s been quoted many, many times. But that’s not true. Even at the time, it sold more.
But over time, I know how frustrating it is to these musicians and cult musicians, it took decades to find its full audience. The Beatles, it took a week to sell a few million copies, even though they’re still selling copies today. The Rolling Stones and The Who, they had much more quick success, but it wasn’t that way with the Velvets.
But three million is a lot, and even their records which aren’t as famous, like White Light/White Heat has sold more than half a million, the third album more than half a million, the ’69 live album about a half million. And even though that’s not what you read on the Record Industry Association of America website, that they’ve sold that many, in part that’s because that only calculates domestic US sales, and the accounting is very different.
But I can believe that because they have such a multi-generational following. I don’t have kids, but I have a lot of friends who have kids who are now the age I was when I became a Velvet Underground fan. They’re not, they don’t think of it as, like, this antique thing. They think it’s just really cool and really great, and as major as when they discovered The Beatles and The Stones.
45 RPM: It’s one of those bands that keeps getting discovered by each new generation.
Richie Unterberger: I think that’s fair to say. Yeah, I know kids who are 14 who become big Velvet Underground fans. When I was 14, I know I’m sounding like an old fogey, but you couldn’t hear those records. Long before the internet, of course, but they weren’t played on commercial FM stations. I couldn’t get KALX. I wasn’t living in this area.
Maybe it was played on KALX, but I think I heard two Velvet Underground songs before I bought the first album without having heard the whole album when I was 17 in 1979, and that’s not an uncommon experience. I can tell from when I do events and just talk to big fans of the group.
45 RPM: In some cases, it’s almost like you almost have to stumble across it.
Richie Unterberger: It wasn’t so much stumbling. There was so much rock criticism I was reading that was raving about how great these records were, and it wasn’t just one or two instances. It was people like, sometimes people who knew them, like Lenny Kaye, Lisa Robinson, Ellen Willis, who was the first rock critic for The New Yorker, and I thought there must be something to this.
Even if I, it ends up it’s not one of my favorite groups, there must be a lot of substance to this record to get not just a rave review, but a really substantial in-depth one. And I’d heard a good amount of Lou Reed stuff, but The Velvet Underground’s material I think is of a different caliber actually.
45 RPM: Yeah. And actually speaking of Velvet Underground, how about we play a little something from them? This is the second version of Guess I’m Falling in Love, and do you have any background on this particular track?
Richie Unterberger: It’s a live recording from 1967 when they were playing for a few weeks at a venue called The Gymnasium in Manhattan, uptown. It was an actual gymnasium, but they took it over for these night performances. It’s different from the live version that’s on the White Light White Heat box set. I think it’s better. It’s slightly lo-fi but very listenable. Maybe that’s a reason that the other version won out, and it’s a great example.
Nico is not on the recording, but it’s a great example of their underrated assets as a really good, hard-charging, straight-ahead rock and roll group. Maybe the lyrics and the delivery and the combination is not that mainstream, but it’s, I think, just a great out and out rock and roll track, especially the way the guitar-
45 RPM: And we’re just about to hear that now.
45 RPM: Velvet Underground and Guess I’m Falling in Love, volume two, or version two on K-A-L-X Berkeley.
musical excerpt: Guess I’m Falling in Love by the Velvet Underground
45 RPM: That was the Velvet Underground and a live rendition of Guess I’m Falling in Love. And you’re tuned into KALX 90.7 FM. I’m 45 RPM, and to my left is Richie Unterberger. And in your book, you also had mentioned, touched on the solo careers of John Cale and Nico right after they had left the Velvet Underground.
And, I have to mention this was one thing I liked about the book too, is how you touch on these figures so they’re still part of the story after they left the band, instead of like, other folks who may just say, “Okay, they’re out of the band. We don’t have to deal with, deal with that thread anymore.”
Richie Unterberger: I wanted to write about Nico and Cale’s early solo career, and also Reed’s very early solo career, because I think they had very close ties to what they had done with the Velvet Underground. Nico’s first album, which I really like, Chelsea Girl, half of the songs were written by Reed, Cale. Morrison pitched in on one as well, and they’re very good, and all three of them play on some of the records.
So it’s almost half of a Velvet Underground record, especially the track It Was a Pleasure Then, which really is the Velvet Underground, although Maureen Tucker’s not with them In the book, I cover Nico and Cale, Cale’s solo career when the Velvets Underground- after they’ve left the Velvets, but the Velvet Underground are still going, because there’s some overlap.
For one thing, John Cale really helped out a lot on Nico’s early solo records, the first two when he was still with the Velvet Underground. Also, I really like those early solo records, especially Chelsea Girl, but there’s also Marble Index and Desertshore, which John Cale was very heavily involved with as an arranger and playing a lot of instruments.
Also, Lou Reed’s first two solo albums, even a little bit afterwards, certainly the first one, he was really relying on songs that were already written and performed when he was with the Velvet Underground to launch his solo career. His first album, eight of the 10 songs, there are Velvet Underground studio and/or live versions.
And on Transformer, the one which made him a star, that album, the second album, and Berlin, there are some remnants, and even on some of the later ’70s records. So what he had done with the Velvets was very important to how he made his mark as a solo artist. And also Reed, Cale, and Nico came back together for a very good sort of reunion show in January 1972 in Paris.
It’s available on CD in really good sound, and I think that captured the spirit of what they had done with the group much more so than the 1993 reunion, which like most reunions, to my ears, are unnecessary. It’s sort of a retread of what they had done, but not as interesting.
45 RPM: Yeah. Though at least it probably helped get Sterling some money before he sadly passed away.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah. He’s the only one who didn’t make a solo album, by the way, who was with them in the ’60s. Even Doug Yule did a folk album, like around 2000. Maureen Tucker did a lot of solo records. And to talk just a couple seconds about Sterling Morrison Luckily, he gave a lot of interviews. He died in 1995, and maybe his role in the group is overlooked because he was sort of a function as glue that kept everybody together, these very different, not just musicians, but personalities who could fly off in different directions.
He had that really solid, almost standard rock and roll way of playing guitar, but he could play far out as well. And if he hadn’t been there, sort of like John Entwistle with The Who, maybe it would’ve been too chaotic and disorganized musically, and also as a means of keeping the group together long enough to do those four albums.
45 RPM: Yeah, no, that’s true. Actually, do you… do you have any events you want to, coming up that you want to plug or?
Richie Unterberger: I would ask people to, if they are curious about events that I do, go to my website, which is richieenterberger.com. There is no other writer by that name. You should be able to find it. Go to the What’s New section. It lists upcoming events. I do events where I talk about rock history in general, specifically about The Velvets. I know I have a few coming up. I don’t have the dates set for all of them. September 29th, it’s a weekday, so I know a lot of people couldn’t get to it.
It’s a Tuesday, 3:00 PM, at the Fromm Residence Hall at University of San Francisco. I’m doing an event about the book where some local musicians are playing two or three Velvet Underground songs. That’s not the whole event. I also talk about the book and play some recordings. November 17th, if I remember correctly, at the Belvedere Tiburon Library, Marin County, I’m doing an event for the book.
You can also go to the library’s website. I’m sure they’ll post that. At some point November, December, or January, I will do an event for the book at the main library of San Francisco, near the Civic Center. We don’t have a date for that yet. Three of the events I’ve done in San Francisco and the East Bay, they’ve already passed. One I did at Down Home, if I can briefly plug something.
And they have expressed interest in my doing more events of other aspects of rock history. So October 18th, it’s a Sunday, at 2:00 at Down Home, I’ll be showing and discussing uncommon Beatles film clips. That’s not out of the mainstream like The Velvet Underground are, but that’s the month the Rubber Soul box set comes out.
45 RPM: Yeah, good timing there. And do you have any last words or last thoughts, um, anything else you want to say or?
Richie Unterberger: When I got a contract for the book, which was about four years ago, I insisted the book had to be this long. And some people… I haven’t gotten objections, which has pleased me, but certainly from the publishing side, I think there was nervousness. Is that too much? Will bookstores carry it? It takes up so much space.
I’m biased, but my opinion is that the Velvet Underground are really worth that long of a book. Most rock books are half the size or less, or most music biographies. To again state something I mentioned at the beginning, because the music is that important, it’s as important as, I mean, presidents and secretaries of states and dictators get books that are 800 pages or longer.
But also, the story is really interesting, and unlike the Beatles and the Stones, who I love, the story has not been told to this extent. I do think it’s fair for me to say that, whether, whatever one thinks of the book, which I hope you do, you meaning you out there, give a chance to.
45 RPM: Yeah. Actually, were there any stories or anything else you had to, I know the book is over 800 pages, and that’s, I think it’s pretty definitive, but, were there any stories or anything else you had to cut or weren’t able to fit in the book?
Richie Unterberger: I would only say that after Lou Reed left the Velvet Underground, and the Velvets continued or stumbled on for two and a half years, there are some funny stories, sort of on the gallows side, of how sort of ramshackle their gigs were, and how tenuous their links were becoming to the real deal when Lou Reed was with the group.
One thing that didn’t make the book, and I don’t think it’s that crucial, Sterling Morrison left the group after a year, and he was so nervous about breaking the news that they were playing in Texas, and they were going to the airport, and he hadn’t told them before they went to the airport, and he went with them to the airport, and he brought his suitcase.
But before he boarded the plane, he didn’t board the plane. He said, “I’m staying here.” He went to graduate school at the University of Texas.
45 RPM: Okay, and then he became an instructor, right? Or was …
Richie Unterberger: He became sort of an associate professor specializing in medieval literature, not something you would expect to grow out of the Velvet Underground, and then he became a tugboat captain in Texas.
45 RPM: Yeah, that was surprising.
Richie Unterberger: Yeah. Maybe it paid more money. But it’s too bad, he was only 53 when he died. Yeah. Because he had a lot of stories. Luckily, he told a lot of them, and I interviewed his wife, who was able to relate a lot of them, but I would have loved to have spoken with him firsthand, certainly.
45 RPM: Yeah. Well, anyway, thanks for coming in. Richie Unterberger and his new book, Do What You Fear Most, a book on the history of the Velvet Underground. Um, please go ahead and go out there and buy it. And thanks again for coming in, and how about we play one last song by Lou Reed, and this is the demo of Walk It and Talk It, and I think there was supposed to be a story behind this one.
Richie Unterberger: Lou Reed made some demos for his second album before he recorded those in London, and that was his breakthrough album, Transformer. And it’s just him and his guitar. I really like hearing the songs in that bare state. Very good fidelity Most of them came out on a Record Store Day release, but it was only on iTunes, and only for like a few hours it seems, where all of them came out.
There were only three of them which are not on the Record Store Day vinyl release, which even now might be hard to find. But this is one of the tracks that was only on iTunes very briefly. And like much of the material, as I said, he was doing in his early solo career The Velvet Underground recorded and performed it.
They recorded it during their Loaded sessions, then they performed it on stage, but it wasn’t available as a Velvet Underground recording for many years. And the song is Walk and Talk It.
45 RPM: Okay. By Lou Reed, right here on the KALX. And thanks again, Richie Unterberger.
Richie Unterberger: Thanks.
musical excerpt: Walk and Talk It by Lou Reed.
