#54 – The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat
I do apologize for missing a couple days but duty calls sometimes
The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat
If you grew up in suburban Chicago in a town called Wheaton (if properly pronounced you should be both emphasizing and holding the “Wh” just a smidgen longer) then the topics discussed on this album could be a bit foreign. Parts of the album will rip your skin off, other parts might be there just to shock the fuck out of you.
Lester Bangs said that “his litmus test for telling a true punk rocker from a poser was to pull White Light/ White Heat from their record collection and note if the grooves on the record showed signs of having been played.”
White Light/White Heat is that maximum moment of gore, sex and drugs for anyone to handle. Even though this album did come out in early 1968, those were still different times and Rock and Roll was still fairly young.
There was a period of time that I seemed to have ‘Sister Ray’ on repeat. Not abrupt in the least, song builds up into a crescendo that is paramont of the psychaedelic era. The Velvet Underground were always able to take the absurd in life and expand upon this in a manner that often times revealed a completely different culture from within it’s music. The song was recorded in 1 take which is surprising at any time but for a 17 minute song that is even more of a shock and would make an argument that it is one of the most important rock tracks ever recorded. It’s combination of rock and avant gard jazz along with a storyline that is NC-17 (containing plenty of transvestites having an orgy with drugs involved)
“The Quine Tapes” which were released in 2001 had contained a couple of shows recorded by Robert Quine of the Velvet Underground and on those recordings, it shows recording times of 3 Sister Ray performances to be 24, 28 and 38 minutes respectfully. That these recordings where over a span of 2 months shows a bit of the background of the band as they improvised onstage.
The album as a whole displays a level frustration and angst throughout. The Velvet Underground’s first album did not sell as well as planned and they dumped both Andy Warhol and Nico and pushed forward.
The more beautiful moments of their debut album such as “Sunday Morning” are replaced with tracks such as “Lady Godiva’s Operation” which attempts two different storylines within the lyrics which at first come off fairly sexual and turns into a botched operation. It takes this moment of beauty and turns it into a moment of gore. The story of “The Gift” as recited by John Cale should be made into a short movie if it had not been done so already tells a story of hope and love and ends with tragedy.
In a way it feels like Grimm’s outlandish fairytales before Walt Disney got his hands on them. However, I cannot think of an album that has truly been able to match it moment for moment.