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The Velvet Underground & Nico

(33⅓ #11)

Joe Harvard

3.72 · Rating details · 874 ratings · 76 reviews

The Velvet Underground and Nico has influenced the sound of more bands than any other album. And remarkably, it still sounds as fresh and challenging today as it did upon its release in 1967. In this book, Joe Harvard covers everything from Lou Reed's lyrical genius to John Cale's groundbreaking instrumentation, and from the creative input of Andy Warhol to the fine detail ...more

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Paperback, 168 pages

Published March 31st 2004 by Bloomsbury Academic

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Oct 04, 2007 Paul Bryant rated it really liked it

Shelves: popular-and-unpopular-music

Joe Harvard:

The miniscule tattoo I got in 1979 caused a family furor, with dark rumblings about bikers and convicts; when my niece recently acquired skin art that would impress most Yakuza and bring a smile to the lips of a Maori headhunter, nary a peep was uttered. American culture moves so fast it's more a verb than a noun.

Well, that's good stuff and this cute li'l book makes a pretty good job of accounting for one of the great albums of our time, released in the year of the summer of love and ...more

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Sep 18, 2020 Matthew rated it liked it

3.5 stars.

The first band – of many; so, so many – I became truly obsessed with was The Doors. I was at that impressionable age of 13, when my interest in music my father (or, in this particular case, my friends’ fathers) listened to growing up had begun to outweigh the pop songs saturating the radio waves. It was also when puberty had taken its hold over me, when girls went from “gross” to “hubba hubba” seemingly overnight, when I learned that obsession was more than just a cologne.

It started o ...more

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Apr 07, 2008 Paul Austin rated it liked it

Author Joe Harvard is a musician himself; he’s also perfected his studio tan by spending the better part of three decades producing and engineering at various recording studios, including Boston’s storied Fort Apache, which he founded. Prominent on Harvard’s website is a photo of him at some bar gig or other, buck naked except for a Flying V guitar. Is this really the kind of person you want penning a Velvet Underground book, given the Velvets erudition — a band influenced more by John Cage and Author Joe Harvard is a musician himself; he’s also perfected his studio tan by spending the better part of three decades producing and engineering at various recording studios, including Boston’s storied Fort Apache, which he founded. Prominent on Harvard’s website is a photo of him at some bar gig or other, buck naked except for a Flying V guitar. Is this really the kind of person you want penning a Velvet Underground book, given the Velvets erudition — a band influenced more by John Cage and the Fluxus gang, and poets such as Lou Reed’s own mentor Delmore Schwartz, than the rock music of their day?

Well… yeah. It’s exactly who you want writing it. The band has been chronicled endlessly, and if there’s going to be yet another VU book — in this case, on their first album specifically — I’d rather read a take on it by a rock and roller who had his musical boundaries shaken up by hearing this album than a take by some scholar who finds the Velvets intriguing despite being a rock band. Harvard talks about how his own band began playing Velvet Underground covers and soon realized how uncomfortably they sat with the Who and Stones jams filling out the remainder of the setlist.

The Velvet Underground is a band that’s constantly in the “influenced by” list when bands describe themselves, and this first album — the only one featuring the original Reed, Cale, Morrison, Tucker and Nico lineup — is usually the sound those bands are referring to. It was the Velvets before they started reading their own press, and duly ramped up the dark underbelly quotient to theatrical excess, ensuring they’d continued to “shock.” It was also the album that included not only sinister drones and scrapes (”The Black Angel’s Death Song,” “Venus In Furs”) but also some startlingly fragile quiet songs (”I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Sunday Morning” — although the latter was recorded only when the label sent the band back to the studio to record a song they felt could be a single.)

As an album, The Velvet Underground and Nico is chemistry personified. Recorded in four days, one day, or twelve hours, depending on who’s account you’re reading, it was Lou Reed’s vision of taking the literary sensibilities of Hubert Selby and Delmore Schwartz and nailing them to a rock beat. But it’s hard to imagine the end result would be anywhere near as sonically compelling without the classically trained (but “rules”-averse) John Cale aboard with his viola and arrangement ideas. The same could be said of Moe Tucker, who played a bass drum on its side with mallets so simply it became a hypnotic pulse the others could wrap themselves around. And the icy Nico — I’ve heard lots of folks do a comic impression of her singing “Femme Fatale,” but regardless of how you hear it, it’s something you don’t forget. And we’re not even getting into the influence of album “producer” Andy Warhol, who urged the group not to sacrifice the rawness and squall of their live shows in favor of cleaning it up for the studio. (His famous quote of the time, so very Warhol: “Don’t take the dirty words out!”)

For the “I was there” content, Harvard leans on the recollections of two folks in particular: album engineer Norman Dolph and Harvard’s longtime friend Jonathan Richman (who’s own Modern Lovers album would make a great 33 1/3 book as well, by the way). By the time the album became as celebrated and influential as it is, the VU members all carried pretty significant baggage as to where credit was due, resulting in some obvious agendas; this makes it all the more terrific that Harvard located Dolph. Norman Dolph doesn’t have any axes to grind, deflects credit to others at every turn, and basically provides recollection as to what the actual process was. It’s a fascinating read; the album is so much a part of lore now that when a fan at a record fair recently stumbled upon one of Dolph’s first acetates, it made news that the original leadoff track was meant to be the eight minute grinder “European Son” rather than a more listener friendly track. It also made news that this acetate — bought for 75 cents — sold on eBay for twenty five grand.

It’s a fair bet to say many of today’s bands that claim to be influenced by the Velvets don’t really listen to the Velvets; they listen to other contemporary bands who do. I’ve run across one band who say their sound is “Velvets-inspired”, but when asked, the CD they actually talk about is by The Black Angels. Hey, fair enough — it only goes to show how powerful the legacy of the VU is, and how saying “Velvets-like” has become a part of our pop-culture vocabulary. When you invoke the Velvets, people know exactly what vibe you’re trying to conjure up: the darkness, the drones and the danger, the minimalist psychedelia.

Joe Harvard writes as a fan and doesn’t claim to be an expert. Freed from having to critically redefine the album (it’s been done ad nauseam), he can write with unbridled enthusiasm, pose a few theories, and generally enjoy himself as he digs into the past and present of The Velvet Underground and Nico. His enthusiasm is contagious. ...more

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May 24, 2008 Drew rated it really liked it

So hey, this book was really good. It has thus far been my opinion that the books in this series that stay away from straightforward writing about the album they're dealing with are more memorable and enjoyable, but this book turns that opinion on its head. And by the way, that's not to say that I haven't enjoyed the more straightforward installments that I've read--in fact, I thought Andrew Hultkrans's take on Love's "Forever Changes" was damned good. But Harvard's "Velvet Underground And Nico" So hey, this book was really good. It has thus far been my opinion that the books in this series that stay away from straightforward writing about the album they're dealing with are more memorable and enjoyable, but this book turns that opinion on its head. And by the way, that's not to say that I haven't enjoyed the more straightforward installments that I've read--in fact, I thought Andrew Hultkrans's take on Love's "Forever Changes" was damned good. But Harvard's "Velvet Underground And Nico" is the first time I've read one of these books and felt like I've really learned something. Maybe it's because a lot of the writing about The Velvet Underground is more focused on mythology than actual history, or maybe it's because Joe Harvard focused on Lou Reed's literary influences (Raymond Chandler! Hubert Selby Jr!), which no other Velvet Underground-focused account that I've read ever has, but I felt like there was a lot of new information here. It really enriched my enjoyment of this album, and it probably helps that I agree with Mr. Harvard that this is the VU's true masterpiece and the only place where they fully got it right. I have friends who feel like Nico drags the whole thing down, and other friends who don't get the drone-noise chaos of "European Son" or "Black Angel's Death Song", and I don't know if said friends would turn up their nose at this book, since it doesn't fit with their own analysis of this album. But since it fits with mine, I didn't have any trouble with that part of the book. And since Harvard did a great job of collecting a lot of stray bits of information from dozens of accounts and personally conducted interviews into an account that probably contained a good bit more factual information than has been present in any previous Velvet Underground discussion, I feel that his book is an important addition to the canon of VU-centric discussion, regardless of whether you're someone who agrees with the author and myself that "Velvet Underground and Nico" is their best album.

And by the way, if you don't, you need to listen to it again. And again and again and again. Maybe you should do that anyway--you know, just in case. ...more

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Mar 22, 2007 Richard added it

This could have been better, but it was still interesting. i feel I could have written a more nuanced analysis of the album than this dude did, but there were a lot of little factoids that I'm glad to know. Like you know in "Femme Fatale" when the guys sing "She's a femme fataaaale" and they pronounce the "a" really flat and nasally? Apparently that infuriated Nico, and she wanted them to pronounce it in the correct French way, but Lou Reed insisted that they pronounce it that way. And she didn' ...more

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Nov 10, 2020 Jeremy Liang rated it liked it

Eh, not to much meat on the bone. But, reading this did get me to listen to The Velvets’ music more attentively, so maybe it was all a means to an end.

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May 08, 2010 Jon rated it really liked it

Shelves: criticism, 2010-summer-reads, music-stuff

I do like The Velvet Underground. But this is the first book I've read about them and I thought it a nice place to start. I'm fairly familiar with the band's history and thought this book did a good job talking about the historical context of the album and all those popular stories surrounding the band and this album, while also giving some good thoughts, insights, and analysis that made the band and the album seem that much more interesting.

This was an easy, quick read that I breezed through in ...more

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Sep 28, 2011 Patrick McCoy rated it liked it

Shelves: music

The Velvet Underground and Nico edition of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of books on record albums by Joe Harvard has some good information about the album, it seems pieced together from several other sources and doesn’t have the authority of some of the other selections I have read. It has been suggested that booklet that came with the Peel Slowly 5 disc VU Box set has as much information and while that is not true, it is not as comprehensive as Frank Bruno’s impressive book on Elvis Costello’s Arm ...more

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Mar 01, 2014 Dragan Nanic rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 33-1-3

This book manages to capture the best thing about 33 1/3 series - inspiring reader to listen the album again exposing other interesting music and facts along the way. It also brought back memories of my high school and the very first time I heard the Velvet Underground and Nico.
I liked the style - it has that raw edge that corresponds well with the actual music. However, the form (settings around the record first and description of the songs later) dulls it a bit. It would be much more effectiv ...more

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Dec 18, 2012 Elliot Chalom rated it really liked it

Shelves: music-non-fiction

The back cover states "In this book, Joe Harvard covers everything from Lou Reed's lyrical genius to John Cale's groundbreaking instrumentation, and from the creative input of Andy Warhol to the fine details of the recording process." That's a perfectly apt description of what this solid if unspectacular entry in the 33-1/3 canon does. Harvard gives a detailed and comprehensive "making of" the album in a short but rich 145 pages. However, despite the fact that he admittedly finds it to be one of ...more

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Oct 25, 2007 Tosh rated it liked it

A so-so book on one of the great albums. I am proud to say that I discovered this particular album not by myself or via a friend at school or even through the rock media of the time. It was through my Dad who had a copy of the album in his collection. In fact it took me awhile to get to even listen to this album. Maybe a year??? Nevertheless it is one of those great recordings where sounds equals great songwriting equals great performance. It's magic. It really is. This book on the other hand is ...more

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May 16, 2011 Andrew Kubasek rated it really liked it

Shelves: completed

A really fun book! Granted, it contains a lot of references to demos and alternate takes that, without access to them, make it hard to fully comprehend. But the background material - especially regarding Andy Warhol's relationship to the band as "producer" and how Nico came to join the group - is especially engrossing. I also liked the mini-essays about each song from the final cut of the record.

I highly recommend that anyone reading this book be very familiar with the album before even trying t ...more

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Oct 18, 2007 Don rated it liked it

Just discovered the "33 1/3" series of books, where each volume takes one noteworthy & influential album and delves into it in excruciating detail - the band members, their history, the making of the album, thoughts & explanations on all of the songs, etc. It's not perfect - at times, the author's prose gets a little too full of its own cleverness - but for music geeks like myself, this is a fantastic discovery. (And I can't help but note they have a volume on Aqualung...!) ...more

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Sep 12, 2014 Bill rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: music

Certainly one of the best books in this series and highly recommended, whether or not you are a fan of the Velvet Underground.

Written as an appreciation and highly successful in that regard. The author concentrates on the album and the making of it (primarily) and avoids the pointless trivia that surrounds that band in particular and these books in general.

Certainly has given me cause to go back to some music I haven't heard in some time. ...more

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Feb 11, 2015 Bayneeta rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

When we married my ex-husband and I merged our record collections, and agreed to pass duplicates on to siblings. Turns out the only duplicates were a few Beatles albums and maybe a Dylan or two. Our musical tastes were wildly divergent. But over the years I grew to appreciate many of the albums in his collection. This was one of them. This book has more detail about tunings than I'm able to appreciate, but a chance to revisit a favorite album was much appreciated. ...more

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Jan 08, 2009 Chris rated it liked it

My first 33 1/3. It was good and had a lot of stuff I didn't know, which is always great. It also had (I thought) a pretty good approach to the often dodgy rock non-fiction genre. Making sense of (often verbal) legends and rumors isn't easy and Joe Harvard did a good job of putting things in perspective. ...more

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Sep 12, 2011 Patrick Fisackerly rated it really liked it

A really interesting little book that tells you pretty much everything you'd want to know about THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO, one of the greatest rock albums ever made. It's as much about Lou Reed as it is about Andy Warhol and the whole Factory subculture of the '60s, and that's fine with me. A good read. ...more

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Jan 29, 2014 Tanya Taylor rated it it was amazing

Joe Harvard does an incredible job of piecing together years of information about this album and the people who created it ~ his notes on the individual tracks will make old fans want to revisit the album in order to better appreciate the subtle details in each song. Can't believe I waited so long to read this gem. ...more

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Jan 29, 2014 Patrick Gibbs rated it really liked it

Nice conversational piece on the VU's first album, the making of, and context for the environment in which it landed. Not exactly a behind the scenes look, but more of a pulling together of the many tales relating to the making of the album. Bonus points for going to Jonathan Richman as a source. ...more

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Aug 08, 2008 Nathan rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Lou Reed

Shelves: 33-1-3-series

I really enjoyed this read. It got away from the typical Andy Warhol shtick that you get when you read about the band. This one actually could have gone a bit farther than it did, but I like me some Joe Harvard.

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Jul 02, 2008 Alex rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Velvet Underground fans

Genius. I love the 33&1/3 series, but this one is probably my favorite, mainly because it documents the genesis of an album so dear to me. A must for any Velvet Underground fan.

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Jan 04, 2009 David rated it liked it

"If I hadn't heard rock 'n' roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet."

"All great art looks like it was made this morning." - Norman Dolph ...more

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Sep 27, 2009 Lydia Gurevich rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorite

Amazing, informative book about the greatest band of all time.

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Nov 05, 2011 fourtriplezed rated it liked it

Shelves: music

I thoroughly enjoyed this bio of the great album. Short sharp and to the point.

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Dec 23, 2019 Nat rated it it was ok

Shelves: 33-1-3, music

One of the greatest albums, not one of the greatest 33 1/3s.

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Jan 29, 2016 Andrew Guthrie rated it it was amazing

The Velvet Underground And Nico
By Joe Harvard

“I’m not a critic. I’m a musician and this is not an attempt to “explain” the Velvet Underground . . .”
from the introduction to “The Velvet Underground and Nico” by Joe Harvard.

If the first Velvet Underground album came out in 1966, then I was 11 years old. I was already steeped in the mid-1960s “rock revolution”, being the youngest of four kids, listening to my older siblings’ records and the AM radio. I clearly remember my sister playing the album i ...more

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May 20, 2017 Frank Jude rated it really liked it

Shelves: art, cultural-history, music, history

The 331/3 series of books about influential albums offers a kind of "biography" of the albums reviewed, often including the "how it came to happen" as well as a song by song breakdown of the album. I've read several of these little paperbacks (Marquee Moon and Trout Mask Replica among my faves, and this one, by Joe Harvard meets the high standards set by those two.

As Harvard points out, when we're talking about rock as it is now played, there is no argument that The Velvet Underground -- regardl The 331/3 series of books about influential albums offers a kind of "biography" of the albums reviewed, often including the "how it came to happen" as well as a song by song breakdown of the album. I've read several of these little paperbacks (Marquee Moon and Trout Mask Replica among my faves, and this one, by Joe Harvard meets the high standards set by those two.

As Harvard points out, when we're talking about rock as it is now played, there is no argument that The Velvet Underground -- regardless of one's own feelings and thoughts about the band -- is one of the top two or three bands to have had the greatest influence. And their first album, with songs they had written and been playing live since 1965, recorded in 1966 and released as The Velvet Underground and Nico is among the top five albums to have exerted the greatest influence; this despite the fact that while active as a band, they barely charted! As Harvard writes:

"It's a contradiction so glaring it approaches paradox: a band that left its mark on rock music and musicians in a profound way, but whose music was purposefully snubbed by the major outlets. Industry inertia was nearly comprehensive: record stores, radio stations, the music press, promoters, the marketing personnel, and bean counters of the record labels who controlled the crucial distribution networks. Put simply, these people could not deal with this music in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love."

It was The Velvet Underground which sparked what would become a rock avant-garde, influenced as much by the Fluxus Movement, John Cage, Lamonte Young and Ornette Coleman as Booker T and the MGs, and Bo Diddly and bringing a profoundly literary sensibility -- albeit one more in line with folks like Hubert Selby, Raymond Chandler, Delmore Schwartz and a kind of journalistic objective distance -- in songs about heroin, orgies, methamphetamine, bondage and discipline, physical and emotional submission, violence, queer culture and the denizens of New York City's "mean streets."

At times, Harvard can be funny and bitingly sarcastic. But he shines when he goes deep in his analysis, such as in this passage:

"There's an intriguing circularity to the way the Velvets' sound was influenced by African music and American blues, yet their songs seem empty of these styles, and their music remained overwhelmingly white, like that of a band they themselves would influence: the Stooges. In contrast to so many other bands of the 1960s, there were no dominant Afro or Afro-Cuban rhythms. Yet in a fundamental way the Velvet Underground were among the most successful integrators of the essence of African music into their sound: repetitive, interdependent parts built around a central, constant rhythm. Most importantly, there was an almost totally successful effort to avoid overtly incorporating the dominant influences of the time -- a refreshing absence of hoary 'blooz' riffs prevails. While everyone else was lionizing and cannibalizing the blues to build a foundation for their sound, the Velvets were imposing fines at their rehearsals for anyone caught using a blues lick."

This is a book for those who love or otherwise were influenced by the Velvet Underground. For me, though it's a bit of a cliche to say, they -- and this album -- truly set the course of my life. I could appreciate what the Beatles did on Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but much of it seemed quaint after listening to "Venus In Furs," "Heroin" and "European Son."

...more

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Dec 24, 2020 Rob rated it really liked it

Shelves: usa, music-film, non-fiction, counterculture, 2020

A hugely influential album "produced" by a well-known artist who knew nothing about music production, recorded in several different places over a disputed number of days, that served to drive rock music out into a hinterland that had been unimaginable only a few short years earlier… There is still plenty to pick over on this album, which has been written about many times, and this little book takes the picking-over route, dishing on the way it was recorded, the occasional (sometimes understandab ...more

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Sep 27, 2018 Ross Bonaime rated it really liked it

For some reason, I have never listened to "The Velvet Underground & Nico," so in order to gain some context for the album, I decided to read Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 installment on the album. Harvard's breakdown of the album is more or less what I wanted this book to be, explaining the making of the album and the importance of the songs. The finest part of the book - as is with most of these 33 1/3 books - is the breakdown of songs that showcases what each song means for the album as a whole. By the ...more

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Apr 17, 2020 Norma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, non-fiction, audio, bio-and-autobio, 2020, music

( Format : Audiobook )
"Chords, tones and textures" or "noise and garbage?"
Since the latter half of the 1960s I've been a an enormous can of the Velvet Underground, was even privileged to have seen them play one time, and always marvelled that in an age when Rock was almost exclusively the domain of the male, the most exciting, driving, avant garde and rockiest of all the groups had a woman, not as token singer, but right there in the beating heart of the rhythm: the great Moe Tucker as the drum ...more

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