A little nervous today, because for the next few days I'm going to be writing about The Velvet Underground, and I want to do them justice. I've decided that I'll write one post about each of the four albums, and so today it's The Velvet Underground and Nico.

OK, first off, if Andy Warhol was to only produce one rock album, it had be this one. It seems like everything that he did was, at the very least, thought-provoking and at times, like here, ground-breaking, iconoclastic, lasting. This album, completed in 1966, but due to all sorts of record company errors released in March of 1967, still sounds avant-garde today. Thousands of bands got their inspiration from it, but very few (if any) ever matched its depth and diversity.

It began with Lou Reed. I've always felt that if rock and roll were personified, it'd be him. A troubled teen who loved early rock and doo-wop, who wore nail polish (in the fifties!), who actually received shock treatment therapy with the OK of his distraught parents, who studied literature at Syracuse (where he met the poet Delmore Schwartz, from whom he got his anti-commercial, aboveboard bearings), became the first songwriter in rock to incorporate the goals of serious literature into rock music. Then there was John Cale, the Welsh-born multi-instrumentalist (bass, viola, celeste, etc.) with ties to the contemporary classical music world, who gave the album two of its most prominent characteristics: its use of drones (influenced by his work with La Monte Young) and his distinctive choices as a bassist. Sterling Morrison, on guitar, provided the group a potent lead player and a philosophically advanced thinker, while Maureen Tucker was a perfect drummer for a group that was both experimental and primitive - listen to her playing on "Heroin", for an example.

Then there is the group's extra-musical quality. I guess the best way that I can describe it is to call it a seriousness of purpose. It has the same earnest quality as the best jazz (Coltrane comes to mind), but their virtuosity is not primarily of a musical kind - it's conceptual and intellectual in nature. For example, the above-mentioned "Heroin" and "I'm Waiting for the Man" both deal with drug addiction from the point-of-view of the addict, which is a revolutionary concept, even for today. These songs encourage a listener to empathize and understand. And the album as a whole therefore, despite its dark subject matter, is ultimately (as another great poet put it) "an affirming flame".