Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

Mark G OTM

is there a good VU book?

I like Richie Unterberger's White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-by-Day

yeah, a great resource. the NY Art coffee table book is nice as well.

The Gerard Malanga one is a good intro, but we're well past that stage now, right?

yeah definitely good stuff in Up-Tight (and great photos in the original version) — skews a bit too heavily on the warhol years, but that's to be expected, I guess.

Yeah drag that later reprints of Uptight get rid of so many of the photos. Do the same ones appear in Unterberger, been a while since I looked in that.
THey kind of epitomised cool for a while there so good to have photos of them.

awesome, looks like i'm gonna be picking up unterberger's

bumping this cause I've been on a Velvets kick today and decided to try eq'ing the audio from the Warhol Boston Tea Party film to make it a little more coherent. It's far from 'good' but I think it's a little better than what it was. I cut out some of the more distracting tape cut sounds too, except in Sister Ray cause I wanted to preserve as much of it as possible.

Link if anyone's interested:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/umskd1u3ldk51bg/Velvets%20Boston%2067.rar?dl=0

hey thank you!

great idea!
that film is so frustrating, lol. so close, yet so far from an actual VU concert film.

getting a "corrupt file" message of some kind when I try to expand the .rar folder though ...

I got a "not a .rar file" message

that's weird, I just tried downloading it and it works for me, but oh well - try this instead:

https://www.4shared.com/folder/tQRfRnrY/Velvet_Underground_Boston_Tea_.html

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DgT0D7jU0AAlntM.jpg

is Sesnick holding a severed head?

LOL @ the idea of listening to WLWH at a cocktail party with that crew (would have loved to see the live performance, tho)

that is nuts, where did you find that?? Also makes me think - how many pictures are circulating of Sesnick from that era? He looms large over any bios but I don't really recall seeing any shots of him before.

it's from cashbox magazine. there are a couple more pics of sesnick, but there aren't many

"Sesnick in luxury" in the original edition of "Uptight"

yikes
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyvA4tZXcAA3lzQ.jpg:large

AND THEN

god that is fucking enraging

seems too dumb to be real, but hey this is 2019.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51aSkiBkT2L._SX332_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

is this image in public domain then. Or does that get bypassed by it being a cartoon of the image. Oh with certain famous artists added.

Turning chronologies upside down is so hip, innit.

Maybe it's a "Bob Marley with a picture of Jimi Hendrix T-shirt" kind of joke.

Who's the 'we'? is it a like totally solipsistic viewpoint, as in the venue owners. Like I bought this and then only discovered this a while later. So obviously nobody else could have known about them before.
You don't osmose the VU from being on NYC streets then?

What could be more trainspotty than a modern classical composer spending 26 minutes dissecting "The Murder Mystery"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw_fWpymCDg

Hey now, that “asinine banal piano phrase” is my favorite part.

Really liked this bit of overthinking. I didn’t know about the Warhol novel, Which does seem like it must have influenced it.

I've never heard anyone in the VU ever talk about why this track was recorded, given that they had lots of material they could have recorded, or how it was recorded or how it was written etc.

He's right that it's weirdly un-discussed for a band so thoroughly interviewed and written about. I'd like to know the story of how Reed got the text into the Paris Review in 1972.

Lou was sorta moving around in the New York poetry world in his post-velvets / pre-solo career days.
there's a radio interview from the late 60s where he talks pretty extensively about Murder Mystery.

some detail here: http://www.richieunterberger.com/vuexc11.html

I've always felt the chords were very bossa nova influenced.

ooh, case in point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44GRRnhZSGM

That's like the quietest Youtube video ever.

skip to 7:45 or so
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1061089/m1/?fbclid=IwAR0Dof08ymTgh_TMVC81JvkVd5zzu0oikt9vTmvJgl_-GPOTbBtQGlk37aw#track/1

Sweet! Same performance...

https://static.spin.com/files/1411225-velvet-underground.jpg

love how it goes "friends and vacation" then off to a rock show, the VU play and it instantly cuts to Brakhage style film painting and manipulation

ha, Moe is wearing a New York Jets sweatshirt

Getting that fleeting glimpse of the VU definitely made my week.

Some more trainspotting over here https://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/183242727312/the-velvet-underground-white-rock-lake-dallas

awesome clip!

and congrats on 10 years of doomin' and gloomin' tyler!

one day the lost macdougal street version of the first velvets album will be released

thank you stevie !!!

xp you don't mean the acetate do you? because that was on the 45th anniversary VUaN set.

no, i'm making a sort of joke about lou reed writing the songs for the first vu record as greenwich village folk songs

i'll be happy if somebody just puts out that rehearsal tape by one of the pickwick bands with reed and cale, that sounds like something i'd love, even if they don't wind up playing "do the ostrich" for twelve minutes or something ridiculous

isn’t that stuff on the first disc of the “peel slowly” box ?

or

fits the stated requirements

i could never really listen to that first disc because they stuck all the takes of each song together on one track, i appreciate the completionist instinct but come on was it not worth the bother of properly editing?