By 1968 the environment of the Velvet Underground was chaos. A year of focusing on the production of their debut had produced little rewards, they would be spending much more time touring and moving from location to location – in clubs which would sometimes not want the kind of music that the band played – and on top of all that they were no longer under the supervision of Andy Warhol. He did leave a parting gift though, which would be the suggest of the band’s next entirely black album cover. On that blackness, in what has to be a knowing, they would write the word white twice.
White Light/White Heat is the sound of a band that embraced the madness and the darkness. However gorgeous the Nico tracks might have been they were still a compromise for the band, and this record was them completely letting loose in a way that the first really only gave hints at. Armed with a deal for new state-of-the-art Vox Amps and a new producer in the way of sixties god Tony Wilson, who between Dylan and Zappa had his way with the experimental ego-maniac drug takers of the world, the band would produce a guitar aesthetic that no one was really prepared for (including the record engineer, who apparently walked out during a “Sister Ray” recording). There were already jazz fusion acts, but White Light/White Heat uses influences that ranged from the free jazz of Ornette Coleman to the power chord pop of the Kinks to create something noisier and more anarchic than anything people were prepared for (except maybe the cooler “hipper” communities for which this music was made. Listening to live recordings of their music reminds you that the band did make music for a certain crowd and setting).
Of course, with that in mind it is not as though the album is an alien creation. Songs are primarily defined by three chords, even using the same chord structures for multiple songs. And even in the midst of such electronic turmoil the band leaves time for a beautifully simple like “Here She Comes Now”. It’s hard to get lost with the kind of musical structure. But that simplicity, combined with such noise and a style born of long playing sessions in a live environment, is what makes this album so influential. Great realms of noise rock are indebted to this record, and its DIY, jammed out, recorded-in-five-days-fuck-it attitude makes it a key template of proto-punk, the style of music that would in a decade inspire a musical revolution (certainly one can imagine one Mark E. Smith listening to this album on repeat). One could even argue that this is as much a precursor to the darker realms of heavy metal as anything Black Sabbath was putting out at the time (at least if people can argue the same for “Helter Skelter”, I can make a case for this).
And the carnage around Lou Reed both in his lifestyle and music would certainly effect the content of his mind. Sex, drugs, death, sometimes all at the same time, permeate every song on this album, even when it has nothing to do with said topic. They are all part of a greater, transcendental sense of release that this record wants to get across amidst all the furore of sound. One could read a reductive “so trip man, s’all about drugs” message onto this record, put the non descriptive white light, along with illusions to Lady Godiva and character elevated by archetype and iconic names (Waldo Jeffers, Mad Mary Willams, Sister Ray), makes White Light/White Heat something akin to a great American myth. Perverted Elysian Fields, the final days of Rome embraced with a blissful inevitability, and the kind of destruction that can only be met with a calming sigh at its end. I only assume everyone does that final act at the end of this record, like myself.
The opening title track of White Light/White Heat, though, stands among the album’s most tradition. The modal, music hall like piano playing has the feel of traditional rock and roll, along with the smooth vocals from the backing vocals that chant out the elements of the title in sharp bursts. The only thing that denotes it as particularly noisy and punk rock-ish is Cale’s fuzz bass, its repetitive two note pattern pushed into the most prominent section of the song’s mix. But as the piano fades out and the bass rises, we get the first all encompassing clamour of the record, with the guitars struggling to even make an impression against the aggressive wails. Reed’s wails follow a similar pattern of the descent into madness, the elation of the verse followed quickly by insanity, repetitions of death and eventually images of killing mothers (very much a reverse Oedipal thing going on here). Reed’s vocals perfectly encapsulate that increasing agitation, starting off with a sense of rhythm before the plosive, beat-poetry like spits of those final words.
Lou Reed’s verse moves into prose for what even now is among the strangest songs in rock history, “The Gift”. Essentially a spoken word piece accompanied with with fuzzy guitar backing, it tells the short story of Waldo Jeffers, a man worried about his partner’s possible infidelities at college/university who mails himself to her to avoid the cost of travel, before being met with a morbid end as the package is opened with a large knife to his head. It’s black comedy is almost as aggressive as the music in the background, rumbling and gaining momentum throughout the eight minutes of this tale, but as with all of Reed’s narratives its the details he gives that lend it nuisance. For one thing Waldo isn’t completely relatable, having the kind of ownership, “nice-guy” complex that can only be greeted with the sarcastic and funny “awwws” from the band. Despite this, all his worries turn out to be completely accurate (“just because you’re paranoid…”, hey?). Marsha is not portrayed as an awful human being despite being unfaithful though, instead the conversation with her and Sheila is populated with mundane details of exercise and vitamin pills. All the while John Cale’s dulcet, welsh tones are telling this story, which leads the listener into a false calming security, like Waldo, before the push of that knife.
(One strange detail of the production though is the stereo sound, with one side giving the story and the other playing the music. With the eight minutes of the track, I like to swap my focus like its a choose your own adventure novel).
As this would be the last Velvet Underground record that John Cale was a part of, it is befitting then that his presence on White Light/White Heat is so prominent. With the amount of diversity present in his later work, and the smoother songs on later Velvet Underground records, I only presume that he pushed the album towards a more avant-garde direction (though this would be odd considering that of the two most prominent member, Lou Reed would make the most “out there” release with Metal Machine Music). Cale is the lead singer again on “Lady Godiva’s Operation”, and with that also continues this record’s very dark humour. The first half is again Cale’s soothing vocals against noisy clashing guitars of Morrison and Reed, painting a portrait similar to the myth of Lady Godiva. But then we move to a scene of a medical operation, and like the botched treatment of the surgery itself, the song also acts with self sabotage as Lou Reed blunt vocals come from the opposite channel to completely change the tone of the song. All the while Tucker percussion, no frills and constant up until this point, is played like the beating heart of the patient who will unfortunate not get the results they required.
As though as to leave us with some kind of release before side one of White Light/White Heat ends, we are left with the shortest and most delicate song on the whole record in “Here She Comes Now”. Even without having looked, I could sense that this track was originally written for Nico to sing (which she did do in some settings), not just because of the ethereal dreamlike guitar playing, but because its another female led song from an all knowing third person, which Reed loved to give Nico on the first record. Obviously the repetition of “come” makes the seven year old in me giggle, and its more sexual connotations another element of having a man singing, but its so obvious that it sexual that it becomes its own kind of funny and ridiculous even amidst such loveliness.
But although the art rock that closes the first side of the record leaves us with at least sense of stability and calming, its on the second side that we are left with the most anarchic that White Light/White Heat offers us. The take of “I Heard Her Call My Name” used on this album was so brash and abrasive it made Sterling Morrison quit the band for a short period for having “ruined” one their best songs in the studio (is it fine to say that Sterling Morrison was a bit of a whiner?). If we read the “come” of the previous song as the more innocent verb, than this song can be read as the response to that song’s calls, contrasted with being screeching and hectic where that was smooth and calming. Apparently the guitar work on this song was inspired by the free jazz of Ornate Coleman, and when the duelling guitars of Reed and Morrison arrive at Reed’s schizophrenic and punishing guitar line I can certainly see the influence. It’s as mad as Mary Williams, reflecting the “mind split open” of the lyrics and increasing in controlled chaos as Tucker’s metronome like beats gradually get faster until it can only end in an almost orgasmic release.
But even that is nothing compared to the final song – the one that would come to define this album the most, and after more than 40 years is as bizarre, impenetrable and an overall pummelling frenzy – the seventeen minute, three chord opus of “Sister Ray”. Allegedly the song is a tribute to and named for the lead singer of the Kinks, and I suppose if you turn your eyes and squint your ears enough you can hear its base in the repeating power chords and the poppiness of that beginning organ. That though is where the comparisons, to anything really, end. This follows the Velvet Underground mission statement as we collectively know it more than any other, with verses of a large, I presume pansexual orgy, characters popping in and out of said orgy, before murders occur in the middle of the party and the events continue. It’s oppressive and haunting, but with the use of the word “ding dong”, it also can’t be help but be utterly ridiculous, moving from black humour to a kind of sociopathic insanity. The first word that comes to mind for the song is “bang”: the bang of the gun, the bang of the drums, and of course the gangbang. The musical display is as commendable as it is almost nonsensical. How Maureen Tucker manages to play such consistent rhythms for so long is commendable, before it descends into off kilter congos, toms, snares and cymbals that still manage to contain everything going on in the centre. The duelling guitars of Morrison and Reed are of course on full display, fighting each other almost to the point of death. But the thing that moves this song to straight up transcendence for me is John Cales organ, breaking down in a way that would have made Ray Manzarek call a bit excessive, and moving from blown out and clashing to approaching some kind of strange alien melody. By the time the song ends, you’ll certainly feel like you need time to adjust back into this world.
White Light/White Heat is my personal favourite Velvet Underground record, though I completely understand that in an already strange discography this is the group’s least accessible work. It’s a work that you both defend yourself against and lose yourself to, and you feel the whole band’s performance doing the exact same thing. It would be the last hurrah for the Velvet Underground’s whole original lineup, with John Cale leaving the group after (shocker) this record also didn’t find an audience, and the band would completely change tact in the wake of his absence. On this record’s cover the whites and the black were separated. The next record, and the next lineup, would combine the two together, and the results would be much more inviting…
What do you think, though?
The Velvet Underground Album Rankings
- White Light/White Heat
- The Velvet Underground and Nico