lyrics rock and roll the velvet underground

Cale told Uncut “It was a big rave noise, fantastic for ending a show with.

The Black Angel’s Death Song is a Dylan-esque folk musing refracted through the Velvet Underground’s arty filters, with each instrument (including Reed’s vocal delivery) marching to its own independent rhythm.įinally, European Son, a freeform jam around a propulsive bassline, quickly collapses in on itself to hover around an event horizon of feedback and six-string depravity that points the way to the explorations of follow-up album White Light/White Heat. The album’s penultimate song is also its most musically sophisticated experiment. Every instrument reflects the subject matter: the rhythm-guitar interplay moves through a cycle of repeated rush and release towards its crescendo, Cale’s electric viola descends to hell and back and Moe Tucker’s heartbeat drum accompaniment temporarily stops and restarts.Įven There She Goes Again – the most conventional of the album’s tracks – finds the time to launch into a raunchy rock ’n’ roll lick at 1:54 that a lesser band would’ve happily used as the basis for a whole song, while the guitar interplay at the foundation of Femme Fatale is revamped for I’ll Be Your Mirror, embroidering Nico’s icy delivery with a regal, shimmering melody part shadowed by a restless bassline from Cale. Meanwhile, on album centrepiece Heroin, Reed and Morrison show just how much can be done with two chords. Warhol favourite All Tomorrow’s Parties finds Reed scratching out a sitar-like drone melody in his Ostrich D tuning on a Gretsch guitar with the frets removed, while John Cale hammers away at a ‘prepared’ piano with paperclips entwined in its strings to alter the tone – again, all in a day’s work. Image: Jean-Louis Atlan / Sygma via Getty Images At one point, he even detunes his high E string to B mid-solo, while still frantically picking it, which is surely a first. On Run Run Run – one of rock’s most gloriously out-of-tune songs – Reed introduces us to Margarita Passion, Beardless Harry et al over Morrison’s queasy blues rhythm tuned down to D, before unleashing a feral, freeform solo combining squeals of feedback, John Lee Hooker-esque boogie, buzzy tremolo picking, random string bends and god knows what else. This was a trick that Reed had picked up from guitarist Jerry Vance and subsequently “filed away” it also makes an appearance later on in the album, on All Tomorrow’s Parties. While the demonic whiplash of Cale’s electric viola dominates Venus In Furs, alongside it are two guitar parts from Reed, one spelling out the ‘chorus’ section in downstrokes, the other a psychedelic, Middle Eastern-inflected droning chord-melody line resulting from his ‘Ostrich’ tuning – a ‘trivial’ tuning where all of the guitar’s strings are tuned to the same note. By way of contrast, Femme Fatale’s intro creates the song’s unresolved feel by using contrasting guitar tones, Reed’s rolled off, claustrophobically bassy Cmaj 7 and F maj 9 chords looming behind Morrison’s trebly, static arpeggio. I’m Waiting For The Man sees Reed build tension with expressive snarls of open strings driving his train-like, distorted rhythm part behind Morrison’s hypnotic, bluesey cycling lead motif. On Sunday Morning, Reed’s country-folk guitar break has a luminous, comedown strangeness to it, thanks to its slackened strings (several of the album’s songs were in downtuned standard tuning, perhaps to help accommodate Cale’s viola). Guitar-wise, every one of the album’s 11 tracks has a burst of invention. Instead, they rapidly coalesced their sound into a rule-breaking blend of art-music experimentation, visceral rock ’n’ roll and streetwise literary lyricism that could be brutally atonal one minute and fragile and melodic the next: and at its heart was the axis of Reed and Morrison’s guitar pairing, with Cale alternating between viola, bass and other instruments, backed by the simpatico primitivism of Maureen Tucker’s drumming (there also were a few blues licks, but that’s by the by). “There were people who were really good at that. “We had a rule in the Velvet Underground: no blues licks,” Reed told Guitar World in 1998. With its pioneering tuning and lyrics (“You take a step forward, You step on your head”), the song was already sufficiently out of kilter with the prevailing wind in the mid-60s music industry and in the two years between the Velvet Underground’s formation and recording their debut album, Cale, Reed and second guitarist Morrison honed their experimental ambitions at a residency in New York’s Café Bizarre and as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable happenings. Pre-Velvets, Reed was a songwriter for Pickwick Records when he teamed up with rock-loving avant-garde viola player and multi-instrumentalist John Cale to promote Reed’s novelty-dance hit, The Ostrich.

Lyrics rock and roll the velvet underground