Oh I Do Believe

Sometime during 1991, I go on a pilgrimage. About 15 years before, I'd read John Rechy's City of Night in a kind of frenzy: what is this book telling me? What can it tell me? Written in the pace and rhythm of early rock'n roll, City of Night became central to my mental map of Los Angeles. Years later, I'd drive around MacArthur Park and Pershing Square looking for the ghosts of Chuck, Skipper, Miss Destiny.

Rechy lives in Los Feliz, at the foothills of his beloved Griffith Park. In 1955, Nicholas Ray shot the climactic scenes of Rebel Without a Cause at the park's Observatory: hidden in the film's love triangle - James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo - was an explicit homosexual subtext, which Mineo lived and died out. In 1966, Rechy made the park the star of Numbers, as Johnny Rio cruises its hidden glades to the sound of Wild Thing, Summer in the City, Dirty Water - punk nirvana.

Rechy has the physique of a body-builder and the carefully tended face of a middle-aged queen: deliberately artificial, as he is pleased to admit. He is cautious, but soon we begin to talk about how his work has fed back into popular culture - he cites the Doors' L.A. Woman with its 'city of night' refrain, I tell him about Soft Cell's gleeful Numbers. And we both realise: what was once taboo, hidden, right at the edge, is now at the heart of pop culture. What has happened?

When Rechy first wrote what would become City of Night, in the late 50s, homosexuality (let alone hustling, drag queens and drug taking), was just not talked about. Much of the 50s existed in order to edit out of history the freedoms of wartime: a renewed, McCarthyite puritanism drove homosexuality further underground with the inevitable psychic consequences. By the mid to late 60s, there were all sorts of exposé! books, but not then: just a few coded, discreet novels (like James Barr's Quatrefoil), which would usually end in suicide or death.

Before the full industrialisation of Media and of pop, there was an edge of the world, and Rechy was falling off it. Now that the leather queen is a pop video staple, now that trannies are high fashion, now that it may be possible - although still very rare - for the outcast to gain access to the mainstream and thus lose his outcast status, it's hard to imagine the sheer desperation of being cast out in the late 50s/early 60s, with no way in, no way never ever.

The question - What is Pop? - is an ideological battleground. If 'Pop is dead', who is pronouncing the death sentence? Not those of us who still have much to gain from it. The 80s insistence - post The Great Rock and Roll Swindle - on Pop as Industry, Pop as Process, Pop as Hyper-Capitalism is, of course, an important part of the picture, but not all of it, never ever. I'd rather talk about the idea of Pop as an enfranchising process - imperfect but powerful: in Dave Marsh's words, providing 'a voice and a face for the dispossessed'. Let us celebrate those who have contributed to this ongoing process, to these hardwon freedoms.

The Velvet Underground came in through the door marked exposé!: they are now in the museum. That's a long, nearly 30 year journey. Their reputation rests on a perfect quartet of albums: The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), White Light/White Heat (1968), The Velvet Underground (1969), and Loaded (1970}. All the other records released after the event, whether the dozens of bootlegs, or official releases like The Velvet Underground Live at Max's Kansas City (1972}, 1969 The Velvet Underground Live (1974), VU (1985), and Another View (1986), are after the event.

1965: the name comes from an exposé! paperback by Michael Leigh, ostensibly about S&M, but, like all exposé!'s, promising much more than it delivers. It is found on a New York street by Tony Conrad, an early associate. The members all live in New York, then on the cusp between its recent folksinging past and the electricity of Dylan-derived rock. Lou Reed teams up with Sterling Morrison to make hilarious exploitation Merseybeat records for a company called Pickwick. John Cale studies piano under John Cage and plays with Downtown minimalist LaMonte Young. Maureen Tucker lives on Long Island and plays garbage cans for drums.

Film maker Barbara Rubin takes the Warhol crowd to see them in the Café Bizarre and the Velvet Underground become the Factory house band. Paul Morrissey brings Nico in to sing with them; Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga do the dance of the whips - a variation on the 1965 Vinyl film - to the flicker of the same strobes that will trigger the suicide of their operator, Danny Williams. They take a residency at a Polish hall called the Dom, in St. Marks Place, attract a lot of interest, play in L.A., where people hate them, record the first of those four albums.

That quartet: The Velvet Underground and Nico mixes blank, sharp pop songs with journalistic exposé!s of various taboo states: S&M, drugs, nihilism. Reed works at detachment but the band - especially John Cale - start to take you in there. Recorded in the red, White Light/White Heat is nihilism, with a certain black humour. John Cale is fired and replaced by Doug Yule. Distortion is replaced by quiet. The Velvet Underground: blind faith as a way out of a dead end. Loaded: pop culture as the ultimate redemption. Doug Yule squeezes Reed out of his own group.

As Lou Reed said: 'If you play the albums chronologically they cover the growth of us as people from here to there, and in there is a tale for everybody in case they want to know what they can do to survive the scenes. If you line the songs up and play them, you should be able to relate and not feel alone - I think it's important that people don't feel alone.' The perfect trajectory: from cult to pop, from nihilism to affirmation, and then nothing - for a while.

During the 70s, there is a slow accretion of the legend. In 1971, Polydor UK re-release the first three Velvet Underground albums to critical acclaim and a few more sales. The next year, Lou Reed hits with Vicious and Walk on the Wild Side. David Bowie popularises Warhol, bisexuality and the Velvets, who were there first, weren't they? The Reed-less Velvets tour, and nobody notices. In mid-decade, Mercury release the 1969 live set, and Nigel Trevena publishes the first collection of facts about this almost unknown group.

For, despite their flirtation with exposé!, The Velvet Underground are distinctly ill-exposed. During their lifetime, there are a few record reviews and a few articles by hard-core fans, like Sandy Pearlman and Jonathan Richman, in tiny magazines. Explicitly opposed to the gigantism of the San Franciscan scene - which dominates American Pop as it turns into Rock during 1968/9 - The Velvet Underground are not featured in the dominant media of the time.

Out of the mid-70s, the story enters our time. Punk brings The Velvet Underground into their own: they are one of the three pre-1976 groups - DollsStoogesVelvets - that will be admitted to the Pantheon. The group become a rock journalist's touchstone: the subject of discographies, esoteric research, myth-making in articles by Giovanni Dadamo, Mary Harron. The trickle of Velvet Underground bootlegs becomes a flood: the Foggy Notion and Cycle Annie 45's, the Skydog LP, The Velvet Underground Etc.

This is only natural, as English Punk is a fantasy of the Warhol Factory, proletarianised and transposed to London ten years on. From 1980 onwards, the whole period becomes part of an established history thanks to books like: Andy Warhol and Jean Hackett's Popism: the Warhol 60's (1980), Jean Stein and George Plimpton's great Edie (1982), and finally Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga's Up-tight: The Velvet Underground Story (1983). Now, we have a positive industry: books from Ultraviolet, Nat Finklestein, biographies of Nico and Warhol, Velvet Underground discographies, passionate fan hymns like What Goes On magazine.

And the music is picked over until only the bare bones remain. The Punks went for the glamourous New York nihilism, with minimalist tendencies, while post-Punk groups like Orange Juice and Josef K went for the acoustic quiddities and guitar mantras of the third album. And then, no one had any new ideas for about ten years: as successive generations of indie boyrock groups diluted The Byrds and The Velvet Underground, it became hard to listen to either by the early 90s.

Everything in Pop is over-exposé!d now, isn't it? Each accretion brings a slow shutting down of The Velvet Underground's original strangeness, original promise. Once, they shocked: now, the 'shocking' is at the media industry's heart. Once, they sounded like nothing else: now, they sound like everything else. Fixed like flies in amber, whether they re-form and play is almost irrelevant, except in the individual transactions between musicians and audience. But should this be regretted? Isn't this inevitable? Isn't it better to know that The Velvet Underground were major liberators?

The first Velvet Underground album is such a concentrated package that it is not surprising that pop culture took 20 or so years to catch up. The Velvet Underground and Nico straddles Pop and the avant-garde with the decisive quality of a preemptive strike. Encoded within the record are reference to authors like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Delmore Schwartz, Lou Reed's teacher, whose In Dreams There are Possibilities is the definitive account of the immigrant experience in the first quarter of this century.

Best of all was the way the thing looked: a blurred picture of the group with five separate shots underneath, so lit that you could hardly tell which were the boys and which were the girls. This severe androgyny went further than English attempts at the same game, which had the innocence of childhood. Here the deadpan, blurred look is matched by lyrics about matters that were not hitherto the subject of pop songs. Underneath everything, is John Cale's viola, penetrating enough to bring down the walls of Jericho.

At one stroke, The Velvet Underground expanded pop's lyrical and musical vocabulary. This was deliberate and gleeful: contemporary interviews had Reed blithely discussing a Cale composition 'which involved taking everybody out into the woods and having them follow the wind'. Reed was in love with the Doo Wop that we'd never heard in Britain, the Spaniels and the Eldorados, intense, slow ballads with a lot of heart from the early/mid 50's. Sometimes, these songs would slow down to the point of entropy - an oasis of calm and a refusal of the harshness of ghetto life.

Reed's own sentimental strain would surface later, on Pale Blue Eyes, or on his own Doo Wop song, I Found a Reason, but as he well knew, by then, both he and Pop had the curse of self-knowledge: 'And I've walked down life's lonely highways, hand in hand with myself'. For The Black Angel's Death Song on the first album, however, he wrote lyrics so phonetic that it would take their appearance in print some 25 years later, to decipher them.

('The idea was to string words together for the sheer fun of their sound, not any particular meaning,' he writes in 1992's Between Thought and Expression.)

In 1963, LaMonte Young recorded Sunday Morning Blues with a group called the Theatre of Eternal Music, which comprised Young on soprano sax, Marian Zazeela (voice), John Cale (violin), Tony Conrad (viola) and Angus MacLise (drums). MacLise played beatnik style, while Young improvised over the drones provided by the other three musicians. The result stands at a critical juncture between Near and Far Eastern music, contemporary Bohemianism, Minimalism and the whole panoply of art rock that the VU would set in motion.

So many great stories here. Angus MacLise became the first drummer for the Velvet Underground in 1965, leaving when he realised that the group would get paid for its first performance. He re-joined briefly when Reed was hospitalised with hepatitis in June 1966, playing in Chicago at Poor Richard's (rough tapes from the show have wonderful Cale vocals on Venus in Furs and Heroin). MacLise decamped for the East, and died in Tibet, reportedly of malnutrition, in 1978. His son is in line to become Dalai Lama.

Conrad produced an album of drones and minimalist percussion in 1972, called Beyond the Dream Syndicate - the last three words being the embryo Velvets' first name. Reed made his own drone move with 1974's Metal Machine Music, so forbidding that it was rumoured to be a contract-breaker with his record company. Legend apart, there is no reason to believe it was not sincere. In concert, the first VU would routinely play a piece called Melody Laughter: 25 minutes of minimal Moe Tucker percussion, guitar/viola drones, and Nico wails. In the mid 80s, some enterprising soul put a 1966 performance on LP, and it's fabulous.

When Cale left the VU in 1968, he took these drones to his production of Nico's tour-de-force, The Marble Index; the first Stooges album; and his collaboration with Young's contemporary Terry Riley, The Church of Anthrax. LaMonte Young himself has remained an elusive, hermetic figure, only partly by choice: currently performing in New York with a rock group, he finds record company backing elusive. He has just released The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, drones for eight trumpets and mutes. (For a good introduction to his work, find his five hour The Well Tuned Piano set with accompanying booklet.)

Hearing this wealth of esoteric material is one way to recapture the first, taboo thrill of hearing The Velvet Underground and Nico, and is one way of disentangling the group's music from its legend. The simple fact is, to hear the record in 1968 was to be let into a secret world, once you'd got past the first frisson of pure evil. (Like the sleeve notes say, 'the flowers of evil are in full bloom with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable'). Like every other great pop record, it changed your life.

Hooked, you then followed the Velvet's epigrammatic, spiritual path, through the sheer, physical rendering of nihilism (I Hear Her Call My Name), through the solipsism of faith ('There are problems in these times/Oooh but none of them are mine') to the transcendence of pure pop ('Despite all the computations/You could just dance to a rock'n'roll station/And it was alright'). This simple affirmation was all the more powerful for being hard-won.

So what did the Velvets do? They helped to enfranchise women as instrumentalists in pop groups, as opposed to featured singers (although they had one of those as well, and what a strange tale that is); introduced a whole strain of contemporary American classic music to a wider market; wrote some wonderful, enduring songs; laid down a marker which no art-pop group has since been able to ignore. Without The Velvet Underground I would never have: visited New York; read Delmore Schwartz; heard LaMonte Young and Terry Riley; perhaps even become a writer.

The Velvet Underground stand at the point where the archaic, immediately postwar culture of repression and exposé! meet the full implications of the 60s: sexual freedom, social mobility, pop as the motor of the culture industries. If tragedy stalks their story, it's because they, and many others at the same time, were exploring uncharted waters. Now that we think we know everything about pop, it is easy to tie up their story into a neat, Late Show, style package: this omits any account of the group's courage, which is the reckless courage of all those who, both then and now, refuse to be content with the world as it seems.