LOU REED: “Rock & roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don’t understand. The music gave you back your beat so you could dream. A whole generation running with a Fender bass… The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? Die for it. Isn’t it pretty? Wouldn’t you die for something pretty? Perhaps I should die. After all, all the great blues singers did die. But life is getting better now. I don’t want to die. Do I?”
PATTI SMITH: “The Velvets opened wounds worth opening, with a brutal innocence, without apology, cutting across the grain, gritty, urbanic. And in their search for the kingdom, for laughter, for salvation, they explored the darkest areas of the psyche.”
LOU REED: “If it wasn’t me, I would have idolized myself in the Velvets. I loved what we did and I’m proud of it. We stood for everything that kids loved and adults hated. We were loud, you couldn’t understand the lyrics, we were vulgar, we sang about dope, sex, violence – you name it. But it wasn’t the ‘nocturnal side’ of rock’n’roll – it was the daylight side. No one else had noticed it, that’s all. It didn’t take nerve to write those songs… we couldn’t understand the reaction, we didn’t know why everyone else was reeling in shock. If you line the songs up chronologically, you should be able to relate and not feel alone. I think it’s important that people don’t feel alone.”
IGGY POP: “This first time I heard the Velvet Underground and Nico record was at a party on the University of Michigan campus. I just hated the sound. You know, ‘HOW COULD ANYBODY MAKE A RECORD THAT SOUNDS LIKE SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT? THIS IS DISGUSTING! ALL THESE PEOPLE MAKE ME FUCKING SICK! FUCKING DISGUSTING HIPPIE VERMIN! FUCKING BEATNIKS, I WANNA KILL THEM ALL! THIS JUST SOUNDS LIKE TRASH!’ Then about six months later it hit me. ‘Oh my god! WOW! This is just a fucking great record!’”
LESTER BANGS: “Aw, Lou, it’s the best music ever made, the instrumental intro to ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ is like watching dawn break over a bank of buildings through the windows of these elegantly hermetic cages, which feels too well spoken, which I suspect is the other knife that cuts through your guts, the continents that divide literature and music and don’t care about either.”
LILLIAN ROXON: “The important thing about the Velvet Underground was that in 1966 and 1967 they were as far away as a group could possibly be from the world of incense and peppermints and lollipops and even earnest teenage protest. Theirs was the dim underworld of drugs and sexual perversion, of heroin addiction and the desperate loss of hope that goes with it. Their concern was with death and violence. They were singing about a world that exists and that they know… ‘Heroin’ didn’t have to use code words to get its meaning across… Oozing evil and lubricity, they made every other group look like kid stuff, and they made a lot of people nervous. Their records were never played on commercial stations. There is no word for their sound but sometimes it seems as if a presence has taken over, perhaps even His Satanic Majesty himself. You can easily imagine someone performing black masses with the Velvet Underground’s albums. Not for the kiddies.”
ARIEL PINK: “Lou Reed’s the best songwriter ever and the most misunderstood artist. His art isn’t viewed through the proper lens and he’s a total wrench in the machine of serious music. He was never more straight-forward in his songwriting than with the Velvets and the rest is a long-running joke – a mind-control experiment and art prank.”
JOHN CALE: “Lou’s affair with Nico lasted through January and halfway through February. By then she was finished with him. Nico just swatted him like a fly. When it fell apart, we really learned how Nico could be the mistress of the destructive one-liner. One morning we had gathered at the Factory for a rehearsal. Nico came in late, as usual. Lou said ‘Hello’ to her in a rather cold way, but just ‘Hello.’ She simply stood there. You could see she was waiting to reply in her own time. Ages later, out of the blue, came her first words: ‘I cannot make love to Jews anymore.’ It took a lot to calm Lou down after that. I think he went to the doctor at noon and got a full bottle of Placidyl, a full bottle of codeine, and by nine o’clock that night was completely paralytic. He couldn’t move. Everybody saw this and somebody took it upon themselves to relieve him of the bottles, but it was for his own good.”
NICO: “Lou Reed was very soft and lovely. Not aggressive at all. You could just cuddle him like a sweet person when I first met him. I used to make pancakes for him. Lou was absolutely magnificent, but he made me very sad then… He wouldn’t let me sing some of his songs because we’d split. He tried to make it up to me later with that Berlin album… I’m from Berlin originally and he wrote me letters saying that Berlin was me.”
NICO: “Lou is a genius, so he can afford to do all the
oddities he wants. I’ve an ambiguous
relationship with him. We were together,
at first, then we broke up because he wanted to cancel my artistic standpoint,
he wanted me to sing only his stuff for a lifetime.”
TIM MITCHELL: “In October and November a conflict developed between Reed and Cale when the latter very briefly moved in with Nico at her Upper West Side apartment. Her presence in the band had always been a bone of contention, but for Cale now to be living with her after she had rejected Reed helped to undermine the relationship between the two men. As is was, the arrangement only lasted a couple of days, Cale describing his stay as ‘harrowing.’”
