Writing by Sarah Mason, Image courtesy of Polygram Entertainment
My mother is a child of the 60s, and whenever I couldn’t sleep, she would sing “Sunday Morning” from the Velvet Underground’s first album, “The Velvet Underground and Nico.” The album, identified by Andy Warhol’s famous yellow banana on the cover is a favorite of my mom and me. “Sunday Morning” is still as hypnotic as a glass of warm milk and a kiss on the forehead. My mother would burn patchouli incense in the house and raised me on stories of emerging womanhood in the East Village, though she never told me about the drugs, the heroin the sex or about the artists who turned music and institutional art on its head. Not once did she detail the tension of her city which layered until it exploded in protest. Some stories, like the Velvet Underground’s, are best left for adulthood where they can be told with colorful honesty and gritty detail.
“The Velvet Underground,” directed by Todd Haynes, unravels the chaos of the band by first documenting the chaos of the 60s. In dreamlike sequences of interweaving reels of fluttering footage, the Avant-garde is personified as the image of famous rebels: Lou Reed, John Cale and of course, Andy Warhol who juxtaposed the camp of pop art in order to highlight the voice of the hidden other. Throughout, sustained tonal pitches evoke a temporary state of softness before it is interrupted by violent bursts of clashing instruments. In these sustained instances of tense uneasiness, the internal world of the outcast, the grit and often tragedy is viscerally felt. The Velvet Underground’s improvisational approach to music was meant to stimulate the senses of each other and their audience, which Haynes duplicates in this documentary with the use of constant movement followed by the striking stillness of an empty screen. Flashing images, animations, vivid color, peaceful and then shocking sound.
While the documentary emphasizes the darkness of the other, particularly in the remembrance of Lou Reed, the legacy of the band is not entirely cemented in evocative woe but is often spoken of with awe and hilarity. There is humor in the anecdotes like the quality of the band when they first began. Before they were the Velvet Underground, they were called The Primitives, which John Cale remembers as being the formative years of when they “got stoned and jammed.” They were novices with enough confidence to bomb, and consistently played such horrible shows that they would change their name to fool venues and re-book gigs.
In their first tour of the West Coast, a picture of the band in sunny, Californian weather, sitting poolside, dressed in all black demonstrates the geographical dissonance between East and West. A rivalry of style and identity. They were annoyed at the flower children of the West whose flowers wouldn’t change a thing, and their Warhol live performances eventually proved to be a similar distraction from intent. Once separated from Warhol, their lost, spunky identity returned. The band deemed “an almost magical mistake,” formed by those who were truly able to encapsulate the reality of being different, transformed the listening experience of music forever. Their legacy is preserved in “The Velvet Underground,” but not with bias or misdirection or with the seizing of emotion from irrelevant sources. Instead, through artful sequences of collected film, the band is left to speak for themselves.
