Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground

by Dylan Jones

When Sedgwick introduced Warhol to her father, their meeting was not a success. While Andy thought Francis Sedgwick was the most handsome man he had ever seen, the Massachusetts blueblood

said afterward, “Why, the guy’s a screaming fag.”

Legs McNeil:

John came up with the idea for the magazine, but I thought it was stupid, to tell you the truth. I thought, why would we want to do a magazine? It just seemed like more homework. But then he said that if we do a magazine people will want to hang out with us, and people will buy us drinks, and that made sense to me.

I said he should call it Punk. He never mentioned the word himself, it was me. I came up with it. He wanted to do a magazine that was rock and roll and comics, so Punk seemed appropriate.

The Ramones were pissed off when we called them a punk band—but then the Ramones were always pissed off.

influence of the Velvet Underground, they only need pointing in the direction of the first issue of Punk, in January 1976, which featured a cartoon of Lou Reed looking like Frankenstein’s monster in a leather jacket. Reed became the punk template, and while Richard Hell’s haircut was more influential, Reed’s general demeanor was the British and American punk benchmark.

Echo and the Bunnymen.

Ian McCulloch was very Sterling Morrison.

In 2010, when Moe Tucker was filmed expressing her fury over the Obama administration at a Tea Party rally in Tifton, Georgia, she robustly defended her right to politically do anything she damned well liked. “Anyone who thinks I’m crazy about Sarah Palin, Bush, etc., has made quite the presumption,” Tucker told the Riverfront Times music blog. “I have voted Democrat all my life, until I started listening to what Obama was promising and started wondering how the hell will this utopian dreamland be paid for? For those who actually believe that their taxes won’t go up in order to pay for all this insanity: good luck!” When she was pressed on her involvement with the Tea Party, she said, “I’m not ‘involved’ with the local movement. I went to the first Tea Party in June or July of 2009 because it was within

“I’m stunned that so many people who call themselves liberal yet are completely intolerant. I thought liberals loved everyone: the poor, the immigrant, the gays, the handicapped, the minorities, dogs, cats, all eye colors, all hair colors! Peace, love, bull! You disagree and you’re immediately called a fool, a Nazi, a racist. That’s pretty fucked up! I would never judge someone based on their political views. Their honesty, integrity, kindness to others, generosity? Yes. Politics? No!”