The Velvet Underground

The Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes

(live recordings from the West Coast – 1969)

2001 Release

The Quine Tapes is an eye-opener – much like the one Alex gets in A Clockwork Orange.

A manager of a popular San Francisco rock group once told us that an overzealous fan almost made it impossible for his band to get gigs at some of the clubs in San Francisco. This fan secretly took tapes of the band’s sloppy rehearsals to clubs and passed them out generously. In the band’s initial contact with club booking agents - a quick phone call to let them know the band would be sending out a tape - the bookers told him they had already heard a tape and weren’t interested. It took awhile to figure out what happened. The fan was gently admonished. The band recovered. This is our way of saying it’s lucky for the Velvet Underground that Richard Quine didn’t get these recordings out sooner.

For unlike most live albums from the era, The Quine Tapes rewrites and realigns rock and roll history. Now it may be said that too much of the Velvet Underground’s allure has been their aura of mystery. There was Nico’s other-worldly pose and John Cale’s affiliation with the academy. Mo – a girl - played drums. Throw in Lou Reed’s urban street sense and bad attitude, and the band’s general cacophony: they seemed so different from everybody else. Only a chosen few ever knew what actually went down in that New York City, celebrity-ridden, inner-city dance scene. Most of us weren’t invited. With The Quine Tapes, the Velvet Underground has become more surely defined; mystique has diminished, become something less, something suspicious.

Revelation number one: the Velvet Underground was a horrible jam band. John Cale isn’t in the mix, and that loss may have been deathly. What the record shows is ineptitude closer to Grand Funk or Blue Cheer than it is to the sound that launched Sonic Youth and a bunch of good punk bands. The three discs (almost four hours of music) are live performances recorded by Robert Quine on a cassette and later transferred to a 7-inch reel-to-reel. The venues were San Francisco’s The Matrix and The Family Dog. The time was November/December, 1969, with a version of "Sister Ray" included from a show in Washington earlier in the year. Surprisingly, the sound isn’t bad – the bass buzzes a bit, instruments jump out and fade away, Reed’s voice is a little raw-sounding, somebody is toying with effects in Washington – but considering the source – it’s more than serviceable. Because the band is playing multi-sets a night, the songs are stretched. There’s an odd, slow, cheerful version of "I’m Waiting For the Man" riddled with Greenwich Village folk/blues guitar arpeggios. There are three versions of "Sister Ray" clocking in at 24, 38 and 28 minutes – the most abysmal being the first, the least abysmal the last. There is a 17-minute version of "Follow the Leader," though the song was never good at 4 minutes. There are ugly, long versions of "I Can’t Stand It," and "What Goes On." Early versions of "Rock and Roll," "New Age," and "Into the Sun" may be insufferably extended rehearsals (the liner notes aren’t quite clear). On the shorter side, Mo’s "I’m Sticking With You," and "After Hours," are queasily sung; "Over You" is instantly forgettable; "Femme Fatal" and "Sunday Morning" do not shoulder their singer-songwriter strengths with much conviction.

As improvisational musicians the band was rudderless. They sound like amateurs. The things that make a rock jam great are missing here: individual style, rhythm, mood, musical form and conception, ensemble interaction, the recasting & blending of traditional elements with new elements. Melody is missing: the most melodic passage is Doug Yule’s bass solo on "New Age" which is very nice and then tedious after a few minutes. On first listening to the discs, we thought it necessary to distinguish Lou Reed’s guitar from Sterling Morrison’s guitar – but that endeavor quickly became pointless. They both play with a lack of hooks and inspiration that is tunelessly fluid and colorlessly busy. They don’t have a funky bone in their body, counterpoint and staccato punctuation of any sort seem beyond them, and Mo Tucker’s straight beat stamina highlights the lack of imagination sprawling out around her. The Velvet’s mystique used to suggest things beyond the West Coast’s happy-smile superficialities; but the joke is reversed here – I don’t recall a classic San Francisco jam band ever playing this badly. There’s nothing much about these Velvet tapes that suggest they had ever heard the music of their musical peers or their musical ancestors unless it was maybe the Doors and Dylan. Reed's mouthy disrespect seems idiotic in retrospect. As witnessed by these recordings, The Velvet Underground came up with nothing that can be called accomplished or provocative. If there is an ultra-aesthetic meaning to this kind of willful obnoxiousness somebody is going to have to write an essay.

The only songs that work fairly well are "Black Angel’s Death Song," "Heroin," "Venus in Furs," and a nicely extended version of "White Light, White Heat." By showing a certain fidelity to these four songs, the band recreates classics based on musical principals they don’t seem to understand anywhere else. This lack of understanding and banal mindset may be the only mystery left regarding the Velvet Underground. There is no reason to call it the Velvet mystique, "the John Cale" mystique will suffice. (Reed himself, with exception of the shuck and jive Metal Machine Music, would never much dabble with noise and deconstruction until Robert Quine reminded him of it in the late seventies. Reed's noise has never been as interesting as it was when he was playing with Cale.)

Revelation number two: so many of the things mid-seventies punk and new wave bands would praise about the Velvet Underground may have been largely figments of their own imagination. These tapes prove the band was as boring as the worst boogie bands. The Quine Tapes are more persuasive in showing the worst of what can happen when amateurs are encouraged, or falsely inspired, rather than revealing the striking things amateurs can create without a bit of common sense. The Velvet Underground may not have been trying to make music just like the hippies, but it would have helped if they were at least as good in a few other ways. You begin to wonder if the noisy glory that is missing is noise that came from the academy – not from the streets – noise made rather easy by Cale’s knowledge of how certain chords/notes would sound when played against each other. Reed’s story-telling capacities still hold a certain punky attitude here, but he is also unbearably self-righteous and conceited, almost nerdish. His few rejoinders to the audience find him praising the sound of his guitar ("sounds like a hundred guitars"), and explaining his songs like the worst jokesters often feel compelled to do. The Velvet Underground come off as mere novices, in love with the sound of their own voice.

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