LOADED

A warts-and-all oral history of the iconic proto-punk band.

“Rock and roll is so great; people should start dying for it.” So proclaimed Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed, and it wasn’t much of a stretch. The people around the band and around Andy Warhol’s Factory dropped like flies during the Underground’s early days, and it’s sobering to note how many of the voices are now silent. Reed is broadly remembered as “one of the coldest, most humorless, arrogant and—worse—boring characters rock and roll has ever seen,” in veteran music journalist Jones’ words—or as journalist Barney Hoskyns puts it, “dry and sneering, even when he was being tender.” Reed was seldom without that sneer and an accompanying snarl. One of the sharp points that Jones draws out is how profoundly, for instance, Reed hated the Beatles (“throughout his career he went out of his way to diminish them”), prefiguring the punk hatred for hippies that would emerge a few years later. The author rightfully devotes much attention to Welsh musician and composer John Cale, who gave the band so much of its distinctive sound. Dylan offers less on Maureen Tucker, the drummer who turned toward right-wing politics in her later years; and the late Sterling Morrison, who, in a sideways but heartfelt compliment, the similarly late Reed recalls as “perfectly made for being a tugboat captain.” While the band members cordially hated one another and parted acrimoniously, they also hated the world, making an art form out of misanthropy. Even so, glimpses of humanity break through: Reed’s anthemic song “Sweet Jane,” by the author’s account, was “a cautionary tale of forgiveness,” and Cale elevated Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” to “a modern masterpiece.”

Essential for Velvet diehards, but also of interest to those longing for the pre-Disneyfied New York City.