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Social democracy in peril.
The new fascism.
Coming Together at the Seams
The view from Porto Alegre ...
... and direct action in New York.
Not Just Black and White
LOCAL MOTION: Oak Park, Illinois
A Scandal Bigger than Enron.
An Open Letter to George W. Bush
Kenny Boy? Never heard of him.
Backtalk
McCarthyism redux.
Appall-o-Meter
The military busts the 2003 budget.
Word Games
Bush stealth-attacks reproductive rights.
Hard-liners
Bush hands AIDS policy to the Christian right.
Chechnya remains mired in misery.
Ann Pettifor: Discrediting the Creditors.
Party Animals
BOOKS: Micah Sifry follows the third way.
BOOKS: Randall Kennedy's Nigger.
MUSIC: Something is in the water.
FILM: Let's play Rollerball.
|
February 19, 2002
Welsh for Zen
The band never played Peoria, but it did occasionally find its way outside
the bounds of New York. The previously released 1969 Velvet Underground Live
set gives a glimpse of the band at its musical peak, touring through Texas and
San Francisco. The performances capture several otherwise unreleased songs and
definitive arrangements of album tracks (like the slow “Sweet Jane”).
In a sense, the Velvets were ambassadors venturing out into a great wild world,
where the rivalry between squares and the counterculture didn’t leave much
room for oddballs like them. More recordings of New York’s finest, out of their element, can be found
in the essential Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes, a recently
released three-disc set. Recorded mostly in 1969 on the band’s West Coast
leg of the tour, where their shockingly fresh minimalist sound must have unsettled
the less confrontational and more psychedelic counterculture there, these discs
offer further testament to the skill of the Velvets as a live act. Rather than
flaunt abrasive edges and avant-garde pedigree, The Quine Tapes find
the band in complete control of its twin tendencies toward noise and quiet.
The tracks on The Quine Tapes feature Cale’s replacement Doug Yule,
whose workman-like playing makes for a fine Cale proxy, and perhaps provided
some additional stability. (Cale’s own copious drug use rivaled only Reed’s.)
Whether speeding through “Foggy Notion” or taking their time with
a nearly 12-minute “Waiting for the Man,” the Velvets sound in a weird
way like the classic pop act the perverse Reed always wished for. At least,
they do until you hit any of the three versions of “Sister Ray” included
herein, ranging from 24 to 38 minutes in length. The lascivious goof-off of
a song may represent Cale’s most apparent contribution, and even though
by this point he’s long gone, the band revels in sheets of distorted and
droning sound. Cale first arrived in New York to study classical piano and viola, which he
had begun to master back in Wales. But once in New York, Cale quickly fell in
with Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, players in the nascent minimalism school,
whose compositions were sometimes little more than hours and hours of multi-layered
drones; the qualities lay more in nuance than in melody. Cale’s pre-Velvet
years were documented in New York in the 1960s, a collection of lo-fi
recordings made with the likes of Conrad, Young and Angus Maclise. Here one
gets the wall-of-noise blueprint for songs such as “Sister Ray” and
“Venus in Furs,” both boasting Cale’s tearing, distorted viola
playing. After his departure from the Velvet Underground, Cale continued to explore
the world of edgy rock, but he eventually returned to his classical and Welsh
roots. In Wales, Cale found his calming center, a quiet corollary to New York’s
volume and certainly the antithesis of the reckless spirit he brought to the
Velvets. Reading his candid autobiography What’s Welsh for Zen,
it becomes clear that Cale’s upbringing played a big part in fostering
the dual extremes of his personality and his music. Wales instilled in him the
contradictory spirit that would bring a quiet schoolboy who practiced organ
at the local church all the way to New York to hang out with the wild things
and make a bigger racket.
More mellow is the latest from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, How I Long To
Feel that Summer in My Heart, a gentle album that has more in common with
the Velvet Underground’s softer, post-Cale music. The group is the yin
to the Super Furry Animals’ yang, though in its younger years Gorky’s
mined a similarly unpredictable rock sound. How I Long continues in the
acoustic vein of their preceding EP, The Blue Trees; “Honeymoon
with You,” “Stood on Gold” and “Let Those Blue Skies”
are pure bliss and heartache. The band does get slightly wilder and weirder
with “Her Hair Hangs Long” and “Hodgeston’s Hallelujah,”
respectively, but Gorky’s never go as far out as the Super Furry Animals.
Yet both bands have found a way to incorporate their national heritage into
their music; both have recorded in Welsh, and often return to the language as
a badge of pride as well as willful display of stubborn eccentricity and obscurantism.
In a sense, the music they make is as much a part of their particular location
as the Velvet Underground were to their own. The isolation of Wales mirrors
the isolation of New York’s outsider scene of the late ’60s, enabling
artists to gleefully make music free from the constraints of expectation. Whether
in his writing or in his music (like the Dylan Thomas tribute Words for the
Dying), Cale regularly returns to Wales as a source of energy and inspiration.
There must be, as the saying goes, something in the water. One assumes that the Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci find
their homeland as magical as Cale does. Paired together, the two groups represent
the same extreme dualities that Cale brought to the Velvet Underground, teamed
to create something fresh and exciting. Both bands wield the element of surprise
like an instrument, and while it’s doubtful we’ll be listening to
archival live sets from either outfit in 30 years, there’s no question
that they make for an invigorating now. Joshua Klein is a freelance critic in Chicago. |
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In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
as there ever been a band as immediately identified with a specific place
as the Velvet Underground? The New York group, among the most influential musical
acts of the past 30 years, perfectly epitomized the local squalid sex-and-drugs
scene, setting the stage for the rise of punk and setting the standard for grungy
verisimilitude in song. But so much has been made of the Velvet Underground’s
role as Andy Warhol’s house band that one wonders what the rest of the
country might have thought about the obscure quartet. 
art of the Velvets’ power stemmed from founding member John Cale, easily
their most versatile player and no stranger to balancing light and dark. Lou
Reed still gets the lion’s share of credit, but the band’s early output
underscores Cale’s invaluable contribution. Reed may have provided New
York swagger, but it was Welshman Cale who brought to the band its “out”
cred and, possibly, its gentler inclinations as well. 
n recent years, Wales has again become something of a center for new and adventurous
rock bands. Cale himself appears on the new album by the Super Furry Animals,
whose manic and unpredictable structures owe as much to classic psychedelia
as they do to the Velvets’ more disturbing take on drug music. Rings
around the World is also more dramatic and conventionally melodic, but the
disc does display a certain familiar dedication to chaos and compositional anarchy.
Veering radically from sweet soul (“Juxtapozed with U”) to noisy pop
(“[Drawing] Rings around the World”) to electronica (“[A] Touch
Sensitive”), the album refuses to settle down at some compromised sonic
center. The disc is pure id unleashed, as if the Beatles developed with the
same ear for abrasive mischief as the Velvets. The disc does bear at least a
sideways semblance to a good deal of Cale’s solo work in the mid-’70s,
a period when he teamed up with Brian Eno for a trio of ambitious and weird
rock albums.