Velvet Underbruises and Venus Fringes

I'm going to watch the Todd Haynes doc, so let's have a thread on this love not taken lightly.

I desperately need to see this.

And I will be saying similar things when the Beatles doc shows up.

Some preliminaries...







Nico. Venus. Mirror.


Speedball. Mainline. Dingdong.


Candy. Jesus. Murder.


Sun. Sweet. Head.

Only the banana isn't up to snuff?

There's a lot of peripheral engagements in the early exploding plastic inevitable that don't always translate musically. The "light shows", before the Dead or Floyd caught on. The "B12" shots available to privileged audiences. The banana has a slight hangover for all of that, but it has its place in the moment.

I think if I would have a less than perfect VU album, it's White Light/White Heat.


The title track has always left me cold. And Sister Ray, while I always feel it should be the perfect manifestation of everything that matters in rock and roll when it is allowed to unfurl and be miserable and unpleasant and unrelenting, never sends me off enough that I don't start fading out half way through. It's just....too much? Which, I know, is probably half of the point.



FWIW, the Sister Ray deficit is one of the things I've been trying to course correct during the pandemic. Not there yet, but still plugging away. And now that I have good headphones, maybe that will put me in the middle of the maelstrom. But White Light I'm pretty certain will just never hit my pleasure centres.


I adore the other three records. Even though there is some not so super top notch stuff on Loaded, it doesn't bother me so much.

Funny you should mention it. The doc is pretty fabulous at depicting exactly the kind of visual-dependent aesthetic that we're talking about here, that defines the early Velvets so well. It may be the strongest suit it has to offer.


Or maybe I'm just one of those heathens who feels no animosity or disinterest in the Doug Yule years. After all, the third LP is my favorite, and, push come to shove, Loaded, is second, so to have this latter era condensed to, say, 20 minutes or so of the final run time is a bit disheartening. Maybe I wanted a 4 hour doc. Who wouldn't?

All in all though, this is pretty much the platinum standard for rock music docs, up there with Beatles Anthology, Dylan's No Direction Home, the Stones' Crossfire Hurricane.