THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO
Verve 1967
Über das vielleicht wichtigste Debütalbum der Rock’nRoll Geschichte ist schon so viel geschrieben worden, dass eigentlich jedes Wort überflüssig ist. Deswegen werde ich keine Worte verlieren und lass andere zu Wort kommen. Um meine Eindrücke von diesem epochalen Werk zu schildern, zitiere ich mich einfach mal selbst und gehe zurück in die 60er Jahre, als ich für ein deutsches Fan-Magazin zusammen mit meinen Kumpels Victor und David die einzigarte Möglichkeit hatte, nach New York zu reisen, um die vier originären Velvets zu interviewen. Here we go:
niko: Hey Velvets, es ist mir eine Ehre, dass ihr mich willkommen heißt. Als ich euer Debütalbum zum ersten Mal gehört habe, war ich – wie wohl tausende andere auch – ziemlich geschockt. Wie kam es zu dem Sound und diesen Texten.
John: What Lou was singing was not what RocknRoll was usually about.
Sterlin: Well, I never sit down and listen to lyrics, because rock ’n‘ roll is not sit-down-and-listen-to-lyrics music! If you wanna listen to lyrics, then read the New York Times
Lou: Yeah. Anybody should be able to play these songs, that’s what I like about them.
John: There are beautiful sounds in RocknRoll, very lazy, dreamlike noises. Just take the noise and you’ve got our Sound. (leise) you can forget about the lyrics in most songs (Lou guckt böse). We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible.
niko: Wie kam es, dass Nico zu euch gestoßen ist?
Sterling: Andy said, „Oh, here we have Nico. Would you like her to sing with you?“ We said, „Well, we couldn’t dis-like it.“
John: We had been through so many changes as a band, we were just settling down and suddenly Andy throws us a herring. But it worked.
niko: Definitiv. Lou hat ihr mit All tommorroros parties oder I’ll be you mirror großartige Hymnen geschrieben.
Sterling: The problem was not with what Nico sang, when she did sing. The problem was what to have Nico do when she wasn’t singing.
John: Sometimes she would love to be on stage in her white outfit, banging away on her tambourine (beugt sich zu mir rüber und flüster): ok, we’ve got a statue in the band. But when Lou wrote Femme Fatale and I’ll be your mirror for her, that was pretty amazing.
Sterling: Nico has two voices. One was full-register, Germanic, gotterdammerung voice that I never cared for and the other was her wispy voice which I like.
Lou: Nico’s the kind of person that you meet and your’e not quite the same afterwards. She always understood immediately what I was after with a song.
niko: Ich war damals bei einer E.P.I. Show von Andy dabei, es war überwältigend. All diese Lichter, Töne, Bilder, Tänze. Und irgendwo auf der Bühne sah man Silhouetten von euch, ganz in schwarz, sonnenbebrillt, unnahbar.
Sterling: It was at this time, that the Velvet started wearing dark glasses on stage, not through trying to be cool but because the light-show could be blinding at times
Maureen: I’m stunned when I have to face the fact going on around us then, we never just put a camera here and taped a complete show.
niko: Was ist mit Songs wie Velvet In Furs, Heroin oder The Black Angel’s Death Song? Johns knarzende, dröhnende Viola, die Tempiwechsel, atonaler Krach. Wie kam es dazu?
Reed: (über Venus In Furs)The prosaic truth is that I’d just read a book with this title by Leopold Sacher-Macher and I thought it would make a great song title so I had to write a song to go with.
Sterling: Venus In Furs is just a different kind of lovesong. Everybody was saying, this is the vision of all-time evil and I always said, ‘Well we’re not going to lie. It’s pretty. Heroin? It’s beautiful song too, possibly Reed’s greatest. The real damage, particularly in New York has been done through the cult of personality. Rock fans have taken heroin thinking Lou took heroin, forgetting that the character in the song wasn’t necessarily Lou Reed. We had one protest song in the Velvet Underground and that was „Heroin“. And Black Angel? (lacht), a good friend of ours who saw many shows ran up to me after the release of the album and explained…”the black angel’s death song…it’s got chords”. “Of course it’s got chords!” I replied, “it’s a song, isn’t it”?
—–
Bis heute elektrifzieren mich die Songs bei jedem neuen Hören, kein anderes Album spiegelt mich für den Geist des RocknRoll so wider das Bananenalbum, bricht Grenzen, infiziert, beunruhigt, provoziert. Immer wieder. Wer verstehen will, muss hören.
[P.S. obiges sind natürlich alles wortgetreue Originalzitate, was sonst]
--
and now we rise and we are everywhere