The Velvet Underground & Nico poll

"[Hendrix] was the most sexual man I ever saw on stage", Nico confessed, "even Mick Jagger said so. It was not all the vulgar things he did with his guitar, though I enjoyed when he burned his guitar at the festival. It was his presence. He was like a cat. He moved elegantly for a man. He was suave. Did you know he was half Indian? Cherokee. I think these mixtures are very good. I am a mixture, part Turkish, part Russian. We would have made wonderful children together, such a mixture".

she had a kid with Alain Delon, looks exactly like Alain Delon..

No one should be overly surprised that Nico could be prone to contradict herself. However, that story from the Guardian is indeed horrible. It was new to me.

Alain Delon, as pretty as he was, is hardly an item for her defense. He's a miserable shithead.

she was the Ty Cobb of chanteuses

soz I misspoke: nazi shithead who fancied jimi hendrix

i never knew that either. really gross. but that's what i gathered from the book i read too -- that she just turned into a really mean/selfish/ugly to the core sort of person.
it was like she ended up spiritually hollow, and that's lamentable when it happens to anyone.

Yeah, that's about the impression I got from watching Nico: Icon last night. A long descent, basically.

she had a kid with Alain Delon, looks exactly like Alain Delon..

extended junkiedom usually accompanied by (or requires?) a certain narcissism (see also: Chet Baker)

thanking u, morbs

Actually before the kid even came up thought about posting in comedy French accent defending his mother's honor.

she was the Ty Cobb of chanteuses

Sunday Morning is the one I listen to most often

I remember buying this on cassette for £3.99 around 91 in the Our Price in Victoria station.

Supposedly, when she broke up with Lou Reed, he asked her why, and she simply said, "Louuuuu, I just can't sleep with Jews anymore!"

There's different versions of that story. One says he dumped her, and she was quoted on that afterwards.

i first listened to VU and Nico when i was 17.

I'm Waiting sounded very strange to me. the melody was good, but i didn't know what to think about the minimalist monotonic drumming.
obviously, the ONE ONE ONE drumming is what makes the song special. otherwise, it would be a garage number like There She Goes.

i remember loving Venus In Furs because of the violin and the dramatic atmosphere. now it's overplayed.

but Heroin was and still is the best song i heard from this record.
the straightforwardness and sincerity of it sounded amazing. they still do. the noisy -ahead of it's time- guitar in the 2nd part and the intensive drumming sounded so special and matched the lyrics perfectly. they still do.

Lee's voice didn't change much since, which is a virtue.

lou's of course..

after these stories of Nico just randomly stabbing people in the eye and shit i'm kinda picturing her tenure with VU being like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x3rzeDeOuk

5. "Run Run Run" 4:22
10. "The Black Angel's Death Song" Reed, Cale 3:11
11. "European Son" Reed, Cale, Morrison, Tucker 7:46

i like these the best

I take it all the people going for 5, 10, 11 didn't rate the third album very highly, but loved the second.

Different days of the week, bro.

love them all
xpost

WL/WH is my favourite Velvets album but on the debut I prefer the more straightahead material...and VIF.

also , White Light sound different from 5,10, and 11

eh I've always felt like the last 10 minutes of this album start to get a bit grating tbh

Venus. 2 is rock n roll, but ViF is so alien, so strange, and that's before you even ponder the lyrics

'european son' is the only song here i don't love. sounds like they wanted to do 'sister ray' but hadn't figured out how to do it yet.

Oh, the "Waiting for the man" thing:

I'm sure you all know the 'bang bang bang' of the piano, the surprise is that the mono version has the piano mixed right back and the guitar being the loudest instrument. I guess Lou was in for the mono mixing session then..

this is as tough as a poll gets.

i had to go with "sunday morning" though. painfully gorgeous, it anchors the whole record, ushers it in, creates space and a sense of anticipation, between the opening celesta and the bass, for all the noise, midday hustle and nocturnal weirdness to come later. it's a cliche to say that vu&nico changes lives, but it's true, and that change starts right there, with those opening notes...so you can't forget that. i can't. there's nothing subtle about it at all.

I love wlwh, I love booker t so much and I heard her call my name is brilliantly crazy, as is lgo in a totally different way. I think the third album is overall too soft for me as a whole, although it had brilliant songs. Taking the best track tracks from both albums, you have an album that rivals the debut. I prefer tge noise songs on wlwh to 10, 11 on this, concur with jd

Today it's "All Tomorrow's Parties"

"waiting" for me, despite good arguments here and elsewhere for many other tracks, because it's the one song on here that, when I heard it for the first time, I said "my God, this is the greatest rock song ever written."

always gonna be "all tomorrow's parties" for me

How can this not have been polled before? Heroin.
I met a lady named Rosebud at a museum opening tonight who claimed to have introduced Lou and Andy. She was the filmmaker Harry Smith's "wife" in the OTO--that Crowley Thelema religion where Smith was a high priest--and she was going on about Ludlow Street and how she thought Maureen was the most beautiful boy the first week she knew her and all about the Cafe Bizarre residency, etc. She said she went to Andy and said, "you gotta hear them, they are the future!" I gotta admit, she was strangely convincing but there are probably 100 people walking around who claim the same thing

love all these songs, but the for me the definitive versions of lots of them are elsewhere. waiting would be my no. 1, but the cale solo performances are how i think of it. second is mirror, but there are more delicate versions elsewhere, including lou reed solo.

sunday morning, venus in furs, all tomorrow's parties, and heroin are the four tracks that feel like they belong on this album and nowhere else. and of those, venus is just too self-important and ridiculous to vote as the best. of those i gotta go with heroin because it works as a song as much as a performance, but where this particular recording is the one where everything works -- the weakness in the voice, the uneasy un-groove it un-settles into, the hesitant toms. still just fucking thrilling.

oh god and cale strangling his viola in early art-freakout mode without that being the only point of the song. it has that balance that he followed for the rest of his career.

"All tomorrow's Parties" has such a harsh yet glorious ringing sound.

It's gorgeous.

This is one of those albums that I really wish I could have heard with no preconceptions. I can't imagine picking it up at random and trying to make sense of the band from "Sunday Morning" onward.

When i was a teen/tween i loved all the twee VU tracks and was mystified by the noisier, more challenging stuff. When it all "clicked" after i reallly felt the last minute or so of "heroin" it was world-exploding. I think a lot of listeners are similar: they form a relationship with some songs, with nico, and then are more willing to be led into artier music for the first time.

oh god and cale strangling his viola in early art-freakout mode without that being the only point of the song. it has that balance that he followed for the rest of his career.

so otm

cale's so great because he he's this bizarre mix of compromise and uncompromise

Yeah I think Heroin is the best at offering everything that this record has to offer

Waiting over Heroin.

Q: how many people listened to Heroin and thought, I'll have some of that please VS those who thought, this is amazing and all but thanks for the warning, never going to do that.

"sunday morning, venus in furs, all tomorrow's parties, and heroin are the four tracks that feel like they belong on this album and nowhere else."

otm

"How can this not have been polled before? "

see also the 3rd VU record

the noisy -ahead of it's time- guitar in the 2nd part

I think that's viola you're hearing there but I'm not sure what you mean by the 2nd part tbh

I take it all the people going for 5, 10, 11 didn't rate the third album very highly, but loved the second.

there is perfectly fine stuff on everything after WLWH but i don't think of it as the VU

In my first term at university this is one of the handful of albums that my new clique of friends could agree on so I heard it dozens of times. At first my favourite was Venus in Furs because it was weird, then Heroin because it was terrifying, then Sunday Morning because it was beautiful, then I wasn't sure. When this poll came up I wasn't going to vote because what's great about this album is that every track is a distinct entity, almost from a different band, so choosing a favourite becomes an apples-and-oranges situation, but when I did my ballot for the big Lou Reed poll I surprised myself by choosing I'm Waiting for the Man as my #1. It's just so relentless and perfect and startling, coming after Sunday Morning, and it tells you everything about Lou. His literary ambitions really make sense here - these could be the first lines of a novel. He doesn't just write explicitly about drugs, he gives you an address and a price tag. He puts you right there on the corner.