The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat | 21 April 2009



















Richie Unterberger's monumental study of The Velvet Underground will be in stores very soon, as a taster we're pleased to run the following extract concerning a rare 1966 acetate that recently sold on Ebay for around $25,000.



Excerpt from White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day

April 18-23, 1966

RECORDING

Scepter Records Studios, New York




The Velvet Underground finally enter a recording studio for the first time, laying down the bulk of their classic debut album within the space of a few days. Exactly which (and how many) days the Velvets spend at Scepter is unclear: because they aren't yet signed to a recording contract, the group are not working within the usual system of preparing material for release -- which tends usually to ensure some sort of documentation as to when the tapes are recorded and mixed. But whenever they take place, these sessions don't just generate the heart of a classic album: they also produce one of rock's rarest and most expensive relics in the form of an acetate disc (the mere existence of which will not be discovered for nearly 40 years).

The idea behind the sessions is to produce material that can then be shopped around for a record deal. The costs are shared roughly equally between Andy Warhol and Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records sales executive and art collector who met Warhol in the course of his side job of supplying music for art gallery shows and openings with his mobile disco. (He asks to be paid in art rather than cash.) Dolph's main job is in Columbia's Custom Labels Division, which provides services for smaller labels without their own pressing plants. It's through this work that he notices that one of his accounts, Scepter Records, has its own recording studios, which is how these sessions come to take place at Scepter's midtown Manhattan facility on West 54th Street -- later home to the famous Studio 54 discotheque.

On the first or second night of the Velvets' stint at the Dom, Dolph recalls being told, by Warhol, of his plan to "do an album" with the group. "I said, 'I can help you with that.' He said, 'Oh really? Okay, good. Do it.' I think he did that with a lot of people; if he found somebody that could do what he wanted, he'd just say, 'Do it.' And they would, whether it was appear in this movie or go out for pizza. He never gave a lot of orders that I ever saw. He just made suggestions and people took him up on it. He had plenty of people around to do anything he wanted. He didn't ask me any questions about 'do you know this studio or that engineer or this producer' or any of that. It was: 'We’d like to make a record,' and I said, 'I’ll take care of it.' "

Warhol, Dolph says, "had his little tape recorder, which he carried all the time. I seem to remember him there probably for about two hours in the aggregate over maybe three occasions. But he was totally fascinated by what was going on, and I don't think he made any aesthetic judgment whatsoever. 'Gee, that sounds good' might have been it. He was a spectator."

However, both Cale and Reed will later emphasize how Warhol's contributions aren't merely decorative, with Cale praising Warhol's insistence that the band stay true to their live sound, and Reed appreciative of his refusal to bow to commercial considerations. "What he did do is he made it all possible," Reed recalls in the Transformer documentary. "One by his backing. And two, before we went in the studio he said, 'You’ve got to make sure -- use all the dirty words. And don’t let them clean things. And so, when he was there, they -- you know -- they didn’t dare try to say, 'Hey, why don’t you don’t do that over,' or, gee, any one of all the other things they would normally have done never happened."

Even by the standards of an April 1966 rock recording, the production on these dates is rudimentary, due in large part to the lack of funds available for buying more studio time and expertise. And yet, as Dolph stresses, the Velvets "were quite clear what they wanted to do. I don’t know that anybody really told Lou Reed what to do or what they thought, but you had the feeling that musical decisions were being made largely by John Cale, sort of in conference with Sterling. Moe was very quiet in the whole thing. I don’t think I heard her speak ten words.

"Anything to do with a vocal performance where Lou Reed is singing, nobody influenced that at all," Dolph continues. "If it was a thing where he was the focus of what was going on, he was it. But to the extent that it involved an ensemble, I would think that the credit fell to John Cale. You had the impression that John was a studied, learned musician in the sense that he could read scores and all that sort of thing. Lou Reed was essentially a performer. I don’t mean that derogatorily, but that he was the Mick Jagger of the deal, whereas John Cale was the Keith Richards of the deal."

Although stories will later circulate of a troubled relationship between Nico and the rest of the Velvets, Norman Dolph notes that they "treated her with great respect" during the Scepter sessions. "Imagine [jazzman] Les Brown and his band of renown, and Doris Day as their singer," he adds. "It's as though when Doris Day came on, she was a special focus of what that orchestra did." Similarly, as Dolph recalls, the Velvets saw Nico as "a jewel in a setting. It was in no way slapdash or quick or 'let's get this broad out of here.' It was, 'Now we're gonna shift into a quieter gear, and we're gonna do Nico.' Things went into sort of a quiet mode when she was there. I don't believe she was in the studio much longer than when she was performing in the studio."

Walker Brother in Scottish music paper from 1967 | 20 April 2009

Here's something else in relation to a forthcoming Jawbone title. Whilst researching 1960s Scottish music press we stumbled across this great John Walker front cover from a September 1967 edition of Showbeat Monthly. The below rarely seen scan will be of great interest to those of you awaiting Anthony Reynold's forthcoming The Impossible Dream: Scott Walker & The Walker Brothers .

Many thanks to Brian Hogg for allowing us to scan the picture from his collection... Only one word is missing from the end of the piece, these Scottish 1960s music papers were huge. Enjoy.


Bruford review, The Guardian by David Sinclair | 14 April 2009

Buy Bill Bruford: The Autobiography at the Guardian bookshop
Bruford began at the top, playing drums on million-selling albums and the world's biggest stages with Yes, King Crimson and Genesis during the 1970s. Then he moved into jazz, where he enjoyed success with his own group, Earthworks, but on a necessarily reduced scale. Having turned his back on a lucrative position at the heart of the rock machine, he has since found himself, like nearly all jazz musicians, operating as a cottage industry on the sidelines of the marketplace. This move, from major to minor if you will, introduces a layer of unresolved tension to Bruford's life story which makes the narrative arc quite unlike that of the standard celebrity biography. He has found it a slog, to put it mildly, and at the age of 59 has now announced his retirement, with an almost audible sigh of relief.

As well as allowing him to tell his side of the story, his book serves as an extended resignation letter to the industry that has fed, fascinated and frustrated him for more than 40 years.The most surprising feature of these memoirs is the lack of self-belief to which Bruford candidly admits. Although revered as a master percussionist, who is a regular attraction at drum clinics (specialist forums where the most acclaimed drummers are paid handsomely to show off their skills), he confesses to a lack of technical confidence that has become little short of disabling. "As a youngster I couldn't stop playing," he writes. "Now it seems I cannot start. Then, every note was perfect, polished, wreathed, garlanded and bedecked with self-confidence; now every note is riddled with the maggots of self-doubt ... I don't doubt that others accept my efforts as valuable: it's just that I don't."

How has it come to this? In his search for an answer, Bruford muses in engrossing detail on the myriad compromises and pacts that the working musician must make: with his family, with other musicians, with the record industry, the media, promoters, managers, producers, equipment manufacturers. He considers the vexed relationship between creativity and commerce, drawing on a range of outside reading material -- sometimes a little self-consciously -- to add theoretical weight to his anecdotal experience.

Considering the fate of his friend and neighbour Phil Collins, another supremely talented drummer who steered his career in precisely the opposite direction, Bruford believes that the responsibility for managing vast riches "weighs heavy" on Collins's shoulders, although he stops short of saying that he would reject such a responsibility himself were it to have been thrust upon him.

Like all musicians, Bruford has a distinctly ambivalent view of the audience on whose continued goodwill his livelihood depends, but who never fully succeed in "getting" what he is doing. Coming to the end of a four-night residency amid the "tawdry glamour" of the Hollywood entertainment district in 2001, he notes that "tonight is the last night I shall have to sign autographs for the earnest, pleasant, balding, upright middle-aged men who have flown from Kansas City or El Paso because I once played on [the Yes album] Fragile. Their comprehension of the newer Earthworks material is minimal, but it sure doesn't matter to them ... "

Born in 1949 in south-east England and brought up in a stable, well-to-do family, Bruford is the quintessential Englishman -- which seems to be part of the problem. His outward stoicism, inbred courtesy and disciplined work ethic were not conspicuous advantages when coming into a music world steeped in the drugs and debauchery of the 1960s and early 1970s. "It shouldn't really be me doing this at all," he ponders later in life. "It's for someone in a black skin, from another country, another caste, or someone miserable, or someone on drugs, or with an American accent ... surely not good ol' Sevenoaks and Tonbridge me."

His account of life on the road and in the studio as part of the chaotic, malfunctioning organisation of Yes leaves you wondering not why he left them at the height of their success, but how he managed to stay in the group for as long as he did. His relationship with the eccentric guitarist and bandleader Robert Fripp over several stints in King Crimson was even more bizarre. "I wasn't given a set-list when I joined the band, more a reading list. Ouspensky, JG Bennett, Gurdjieff and Castaneda ... This was going to be more than three chords and a pint of Guinness."

Published by Jawbone, an energetic new imprint specialising in books about music, Bruford's autobiography not only provides a humorous insight into the daily detail of a successful musician's life but also grapples with the big existential issues of what it takes to be an artist of any sort in the modern world. The account is loosely organised around a string of questions that Bruford has found himself parrying for most of his life: why did you leave Yes? Is it difficult, with a family? Do you like doing interviews? (The latter receives a resounding "No!" conveyed in one of the most entertaining passages in the book.) But the perennial question that irks him most is: yes, but what do you really do? Now we know.


David Sinclair's Wannabe: The Spice Girls Revisited is published by Omnibus.
Win *signed copies* of five Bill Bruford CDs | 01 April 2009

Thanks to our good friends at Voiceprint we have five career spanning Bill Bruford CDs to give away as a prize for one lucky person. (Please continue reading this post at the bottom of the page for information on the titles and that all important question, set by Bill Bruford himself.)


For the answer to the below question you will need to have read Bill Bruford: The Autobiography. If you don't already own it click on the hyperlink and follow the directions to Amazon and order today...

Bill asks: In the book, who is quoted as saying: "I have to change. It's like a curse."?

The competition closes on May 25th.

All of the below CDs are signed by Bill and will be despatched to one lucky winner who will be drawn at random.