The Velvet Underground - White Light White Heat

The blood and guts of the Summer of Love.

Lou Reed: vocals, guitar, piano...cantaloupe

Sterling Morrison: guitar, bass, vocals, sound effects

John Cale: viola, bass, organ, lead vocals on “The Gift” and co-lead with Lou on “Lady Godiva’s Operation”

Maureen Tucker: drums

Produced by Tom Wilson

Author’s Note: This post corresponds to the White Light/White Heat episode of Vinyl Monday, originally posted 12/2/2024. Save for audio/editing jokes that cannot be included in a text format, this is a faithful adaptation of the review chapter. To watch the full episode, scroll to the bottom of this post or visit my YouTube channel here.

“I don’t think a lot of people realized at the time what they were playing with. That flower-power thing eventually crumbled as a result of drug casualties and the fact that it was a nice idea but not a very realistic one. What we, the Velvets, were talking about, though it seemed like a down, was just a realistic portrayal of certain kinds of things.”

quoted from: David Fricke, “Q&A: Lou Reed” (Rolling Stone Magazine, 11/5/87)

Few records that reflect the upheaval 1968 brought like The Velvet Underground’s 2nd LP, White Light White Heat. Even fewer were recorded in 1967.

The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club that summer; punting psychedelia to the straight folk. England is the epicenter of pop music and psych is king. Its hottest exports are the Experience and Cream. Here in the States, the San Fransisco scene is exploding. Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish are enjoying the fruits of their major-label deals. As for future giants The Grateful Dead, they’re currently terrorizing Warner Bros. A little-known Janis Joplin has just landed a spot fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company. The Laurel Canyon scene is running hot too. Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas both had radio hits. Meanwhile, godfathers of folk rock The Byrds are finding their footing after Gene Clark’s departure. They land arguably the first psychedelic pop hit with Coltrane-influenced “Eight Miles High.” Had Donovan released “Sunshine Superman” on time, he would’ve beat them to it by a month.

Political assassinations, racial tensions, mass upheaval, and Richard Nixon were on the horizon. The flower child bubble was about to pop. Tucked away in grimy New York City, you have the Velvet Underground, standing there with the needle.

Though it elevated its guest singer’s star, their debut album didn’t sell a shit. Insert Brian Eno quote here.

In the immediate aftermath of their debut, there were big shake-ups in the VUniverse (not just in regards to the Eric Emerson lawsuit.) It began with Lou Reed breaking up with Nico for good, then throwing her out of the band after saying one too many disparaging things about Jewish people to known Jewish person Lou Reed. (I have a whole podcast episode about the life of Nico – she had a different perception of reality than the rest of us.)

The Velvets also consciously uncoupled with the reason Nico was in the band in the first place. If the Velvets wanted to sell any records, ever, they had to make a choice: either keep playing the galleries and artsy-fartsy events organized by Andy Warhol, or try something else. They went with the latter. Clearly the breakup mustn’t have been too bad; Warhol didn't stop Lou from going through Billy Name's collection of negatives for an album cover.

But for the first time in their history, the Velvets were set adrift. As Sterling Morrison described,

“Our lives were chaos. Things were insane, day in and day out: the people we knew, the excesses of all sorts. For a long time, we were living in various places, afraid of the police. At the height of my musical career, I had no permanent address.”

(David Fricke, “Overloaded: The Story of White Light White Heat” Mojo, 11/20/2013)

White Light White Heat’s sound reflects this unrest. The ugliness was due in part to the deal the Velvets somehow landed with Vox back in ’66. Those precious Beatle amps were used to the fullest extent on this record. It was completely intentional; meant to mimic their live shows. Did they encounter that famous blue smoke? If John Cale is to be believed, then yes. “We never quite realized that there were technical problems in turning everything past nine.” (John Cale with Victor Bockris, What’s Welsh For Zen, 1999)

The ugliness may have also come from animosity brewing between Lou and John. It’s hard to picture in our context: Paris 1919 vs. Metal Machine Music. (God, I want to review Metal Machine Music.) But once upon a time, Lou was the poppier, more accessible songwriter and John was the one all about the weird shit. That’s not to say Lou shunned all avant-garde approaches: “There were two sides of the coin for me. R&B, doo-wop, rockabilly. And then Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, stuff like that...I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.”

Differences between the two - over the music and John's new wife Betsey Johnson (yes, THAT Betsey Johnson!) - caused plenty of friction. John was reportedly so incensed over the remixed I Heard Her Call My Name, with Lou’s almost-free-jazz guitar up front, that he left the band for a time. John described White Light White Heat's material as, “reflect(ing) the internal tensions as we ascended at each other's throats. Our shared intelligence could not offset the antagonism of differing musical notions." And yet, in that strange, tenuous Velvets way, the turbulence, confusion, and stagnation struggle glued them together. As Sterling said, “We were all pulling in the same direction. We may have been dragging each other off a cliff, but we were all definitely going in the same direction.”

The third contributor to the ugly was producer Tom Wilson. If the chair-dragging, glass-smashing goodness of the banana album and the very existence of Freak Out! are any indication, Tom had a...laissez-faire...attitude towards producing. How loose? According to Lou, Tom was either too drugged out or too busy sleeping around to oversee sessions! That task was left to engineer Gary Kellgren. And he had his work cut out for him. The Velvets’ infamous epic Sister Ray was so long, loud, and bizarre that he cried uncle! Walked out of the session! Said something to the affect of, “You can’t pay me enough to listen to this. I’m going to get coffee. Call me when you’re done. Fuck this shit, I’m out!”

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Dan Epstein for Rolling Stone described White Light White Heat as “a needle-pinning assault.” It’s true. This is the least accessible Velvets album by a country mile. Douglas Wolk for Pitchfork corroborates that, describing, “a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time: six songs with lyrics designed to horrify the bourgeoisie (not that they’d have listened to the Velvet Underground in the first place)...” (Douglas Wolk, “White Light/White Heat” Pitchfork, 1/16/2014) All of that is in quite a compact package. Just six songs and – hold on, 41 minutes? This feels way shorter. White Light White Heat flies by at breakneck speed, careening through fractured scenes of drugs, sex, death, and violence. The seedy underbelly the New York artists’ community was born and bred in, and the chaos the Velvets called home. Man, did these guys luck out by having Tom Wilson on board again. His famously...hands-off...approach lead to some of the most challenging, boundary-breaking, door-busting music to come out of the mid-’60s.

It also lead to that awful electric version of “The Sounds of Silence,” but that’s neither here nor there.

I wrote most of this video and did most of the listening in the middle of the night, in pitch black. Correct choice.

Don’t adjust your dials, folks: White Light White Heat really is that crunchy! In a lot of ways, it’s the perfect Velvet Underground song. It shares its DNA with another Bowie favorite, “I’m Waiting For The Man.” It’s in the percussive piano slamming itself out, and the odd pop sensibility. Pop sensibility that is, of course, ruined by lyrics about doing hard drugs. Such is the Velvet Underground. It’s a Little Richard song gone to hell.

The title track is so distressed, you can hardly tell what’s what. The drums are reduced to battering radio static; the bass indiscernible from the guitars indiscernible from the piano. You can tell there’s a great big groaning bass in there somewhere. But you can’t tell where. It drives the song in an insidious way.

It’s like the original album art, by Factory member Billy Name. (I've got the "little green army man" UK reissue cover by Hamish Grimes.) There’s Joe Spencer’s arm, there’s a skull and sword tattoo, but they’re only visible at certain angles.

The only things that stick out of the fuzz are Lou’s nasally talk-sing-sneer delivery and the, again, oddly 1950s rock-and-roll backing vocals. “White light. White heat. White light.” Over the title track’s all-too-short two minutes and change, there are slips in the pop veneer. An out-of-place chord here. Lou drops off there. It builds tension which the last 30 seconds won’t release. Sustained, dissonant chords; bashing, primitive drums; fizzling out into feedback. The end is suspended, cranked-up confusion. Foreshadowing to the foreshadowing; a taste of the abrasion to come.

Like pockets of the banana album, The Gift started as a short story Lou wrote in his college days. It's the classic tale of, “boy meets girl, girl goes back home, boy gets paranoid and mails himself to girl, girl’s roommate takes sheet metal cutter to package for girl and fucking kills boy.”

...am I wrong in being reminded of the bit where the girl mailed herself to Davy Jones?

Considering absurdly hyper-specific lines, like “The idea came to him on the Thursday before the Mummers Parade was scheduled to appear/He had just finished mowing and edging the Edelson’s lawn for a dollar fifty,” and “‘I’m supposed to be taking these salt pills, but’ – she wrinkled her nose – ‘they make me feel like throwing up,” “The Gift” reads as a parody of those early-mid ’60s teen tragedy songs. Like the Shangri-La’s, “don’t run off with your boyfriend or your mom will DIE of a broken heart!” It’s funny Lou Reed and Frank Zappa were frenemies. They both took the piss out of teen culture the exact same way, and both so effectively. It’s because they both knew it so well: Lou wrote pop songs pre-Velvets, while Zappa worked in advertising.

“The Gift” is a great laugh for those with a morbid sense of humor. There’s this really cool groove behind John’s Welsh accent, topped off with a steeply underrated guitar solo behind it. The screeching with reckless abandon doesn’t compete with him. Behind the smog, it holds its balance. This was one of the few mixing decisions made on the record that didn’t employ the FAFO method!

Wait...are we sure Waldo and Marsha even dated in the first place? To me, this sounds an awful lot like desperate "Nice Guy" antics. I keep my PO Box on lockdown in part because there are crazies out there who would absolutely try to mail themselves to their favorite YouTuber. For fuck’s sake, don’t do it. Not only is it parasocial and weird, you’ll almost certainly die in transit before even getting to Waldo’s untimely end. (Zappa suggested it be represented by Lou either stabbing a melon or clobbering it with a mallet, it depends on who you ask.) Anyway, the only evidence of any relationship in the lyrics are 3 dog-eared letters – implying they’re very old – and two very expensive long-distance phone calls. Otherwise, Marsha just seems annoyed by Waldo, calling him “that schmuck.”

Being LGBT+ comes up a lot in both the Velvets and Lou’s solo work. The Factory was a haven for queercreatives in New York in the ’60s; Warhol had a number of trans superstars, including Candy Darling. Lady Godiva’s Operation is a decidedly darker, unromantic take on gender dysphoria compared to "Candy Says." Our Lady Godiva’s titular operation is either a botched lobotomy or gender reassignment surgery; represented by sci-fi whirring in ambience and a thick heartbeat. (Both are simply credited as “medical noises” in the liner notes.) Lou Reed himself had a very complicated relationship with his sexuality. At some point in his teens he endured electroshock therapy, which may or may not have been to “cure” his bisexuality. Much to think about.

On to the music. John’s viola is so supercharged, you can hardly tell it’s a viola. The riff is “Cinnamon Girl” Neil Young-meets-Jimi Hendrix. It’s one of the only distinctly 1968 things on the whole record. It’s also of the few times Mo Tucker ventures out of her comfort zone. She’s still quiet and understated, but dare I hear a flourish in there? Since I started paying attention to her uber-minimalistic style I hear it all the way down “alt rock"'s family tree.

Lou’s out-of-time, gloriously flat, accidentally bass-boosted entrance on “SWEETLY” is one of the great unintentionally funny moments on any rock record ever. (Honorable mention to Lou’s “BEBLEHBLUBLEH”on “I Heard Her Call My Name,” that made me spit out my tea!) “Lady Godiva’”s bizarre vocal mixing hasthe same energy as the goofy backing vocals on “Femme Fatale.” But this one was just Lou existing; clingingonto the melody for dear life. My buddy my guy, the guitar is literally playing what you’re supposed to be singing! Perhaps in spite of the heartbeats and “medical noises,” that melody Lou can’t seem to find gets stuck in my head.

Here She Comes Now is the only true moment of solace on White Light White Heat, and what a sweet moment it is. It was originally written for Nico to sing, and you can tell; Lou sings in a more hushed affect in front of banana album-esque tambourine taps. The Velvets had this tragically romantic side to them. See “Candy Says,” “New Age,” “I Found A Reason,” “Ocean,” and this. But don’t think I missed “she’s made out of wood.” The drums and jangly guitar are all Byrds - there's that pop root poking through the pavement again.

Of course, this sweet moment doesn’t last long. You flip the record and drop the needle on “Here She Comes Now’”s chaotic part 2, “I Heard Her Call My Name.” Sterling and Lou really fling this one out; both slashing at their strings. I’m reminded of the Stooges in the way they get into this song as soon as possible, wail all over the place, and Lou’s utterly hilarious delivery. “BEBLEHBLUHBLEHBLEH,” “whEEEE!”

Critics used to say the Stooges couldn’t play their instruments. Hell, even Dennis Thompson said the Stooges couldn’t play their instruments. (Dennis’s one-sided beef with the Stooges will never not be funny to me.) Stripping rock music down to its bones doesn’t make it bad. A number like “I Heard Her Call My Name” and White Light White Heat’s closer are testaments to these groups being able to play. It takes serious effort to wield noise without it sounding like crap, and attitude to boot to carry off when it does sound like crap. Once again, the song bursts apart in a frenzied feedback screech. It’s one last warning sign before we reach the point of no return. Or maybe it’s the distress flare so we don’t wreck our ship into…

Sister Ray. Sister Ray. Sister Goddamn Ray.

Would you believe me if I told you this was only the seed of the hellspawn “Sister Ray” became? The album version alone is 17 minutes long, quelled only by the 20-minutes-and-change limit on a side of a record. But it could go way longer and way weirder live. Of course I love “Sister Ray.” Are you kidding? It’s one take, two chords, and 17 minutes of white-knuckled madness. The closest the Velvets ever got to the fabled psychedelic freakout, Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” on hard drugs.

This song is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the poser. Lester Bangs had this to say about Velvet Underground “fans:”

“None of these name-dropping assholes actually sit around listening to ‘Sister Ray’ for fucking pleasure, ever.”

(Lester Bangs, “The Roots of Punk” New Wave, 8/1977)

Well, Les...you’re right about “Sister Ray” being the ultimate endurance test for even the most devoted Velvet Underground fans. But I don’t think anyone sits around listening to “Sister Ray” for fucking pleasure, ever. We listen for the experience.

The experience of the Velvets molding this solid riff and distressed organ into something completely unrecognizable. It’s hard to imagine how they could even build this thing up from the beginning. They’re already going full throttle out of the gate. Like seriously, how did they get a dinky little organ that loud? I’m not entirely unconvinced that John didn’t straight-up break the organ from mashing on it so hard. By the halfway mark, it’s not even playing notes. It’s reduced to a sheet metal distress signal: HELP. NOW. HELP. NOW.

I always get worried when long-haul songs start with as much energy as “Sister Ray” does. It’s bound to fizzle out by the end, leaving deranged enjoyers like myself dissatisfied. What makes “Sister Ray” work? TheVelvets transmute this energy perfectly. They ride every twist and turn on rusty wheel and every time change like a seasoned jam band. It’s the shapes they cut into this fuzzed-out slab; like knives slashing through a velvet curtain. Though Mo isn’t known for being groundbreaking, she holds her own amongst this madness. She had to have been beating the shit out of her kit. Lou barks out the lyrics. You can practically hear the sweat and spit on the mic, he’s choking the life out of, “co-co-co-couldn’t hit it sideways” as the riff chugs and loses its shape.

And all of this as Lou Reed sings some variation of “sucking on my ding-dong.” At least eight times. White Light White Heat’s extinction burst comes as this song plunges itself straight into the ground. Sister Ray is the blood and guts of the summer of love.

David Fricke described the Velvets’ multiple personalities as the “musical seesaw.” Pop or art rock. They never got to be in between. The Velvets are special because both ends of the seesaw laid the groundwork for new subgenres. Loaded is my favorite Velvets album, “Stephanie Says” my favorite Velvets song (at the moment.) The Velvet Underground is ancestor to the indie pop movement of the late 2000s/early 2010s; VU too. That’s all the pop side. Then, the other side. The Velvet Underground & Nico (christ, this band has too many self-titled records) might be proto-punk. But it aligns better with the birth of alt rock.

And then there’s White Light White Heat. The black sheep of the Velvets discography. I’d argue it’s the best Velvet Underground album because it’s the most important of the bunch. It’s a birth of punk, the first birth of noise rock, father to no wave, and grandfather to THE most influential band after the Velvets, Sonic Youth. If I’d covered White Light White Heat instead of Loaded this time last year, I don’t think I would’ve been ready for it. It honestly took me getting into Sonic Youth late last year for me to warm up to the noisy stuff.

Which is odd, seeing as all my favorite albums seem to descend into fiery balls of godfuck at some point.

Thinking back to the Lou quote that opened this review, I’m reminded of something Kim Gordon said in her memoir, Girl In A Band: “...when people would ask Thurston or me why Sonic Youth’s music was so dissonant, the answer was always the same: our music was realistic, and dynamic, because life was that way, filled with extremes.” The Velvet Underground were always willing to hold their lighters to the flammable extreme of life. They were a band of extremes. Lou’s trademark lazy delivery aside, I believe these guys were incapable of half-assing anything. They were either on one end of the spectrum or the other. They weren’t polarizing, they were the polar. It was life or death. That’s just what being a working musician in the drug-addled New York underground in the late ’60s was. You couldn’t help but soak up a White Light White Heat from all this eccentric chaotic exiled brilliance.

The result was this static, kinetic thing. The only pop it is is the static electricity when you touch the hot television screen. It exists at both ends of the spectrum; pitch-black. White hot. You can’t always judge a book by its cover. With White Light White Heat – and I mean this in the best way – you totally can.

Personal favorites: Fuck it. The whole thing.

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!