Lisa Gets Arty.

Lisa Chamoff, AKA @lchamoff or IndieUntangled in her professional life, is a music aficionado like Seth and myself, but in a different vein. Lisa asked us if she could write about the Velvet Underground, and here it is.

It was 1996 and I was a Beatles- and Britpop-obsessed teenager when some random guy started Instant Messaging me to talk about music and literature. In this ancient, pre-MySpace and Facebook era, you crammed the Interests section of your AOL profile with all the bands you listened to in an effort to look cool and find like-minded souls to chat with.

While I’m assuming Jeff the University of Maryland graduate and English major was looking for more than a friendly conversation with someone who he eventually learned was a 16-year-old girl, he had more of an impact on me than he’ll probably ever know.  At one point, Jeff asked if I’d ever listened to The Velvet Underground, who he flatly deemed “much cooler” than Fab Four. I admitted that I hadn’t, and on one of my subsequent trips to Sam Goody I picked up “The Best of the Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed.” The 15-track disc opens with Reed half talking, half singing about scoring $26 worth of smack in a Harlem brownstone. It was like Trainspotting set in 1960s New York turned into music, and it was perfect.

In 1987, Reed told Rolling Stone that his goal as a songwriter was to create the Great American Novel in album form. He may not have gone that far, but the protégé of poet Delmore Schwartz definitely wrote the Great New York Novel. The band mixed John Cale’s classical background with Reed’s rock one.  VU’s Andy Warhol-produced debut with the iconic banana pop art was a snapshot of a certain New York cool in the 1960s. It opens with the sweet, simple “Sunday Morning,” continues with the aforementioned “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and then the deep-voiced Nico sings an homage to Warhol Factory Girl Edie Sedgwick with “Femme Fatale.” Side two has Lou’s drug love song, and if Nico sounds a little different in the hauntingly beautiful “I’ll Be Your Mirror” it’s because Cale and Reed made her cry before the tapes rolled to cut off her lower register.

Later songs were pure rock, from the classic ‘60s harmonies of “Who Loves the Sun” to the signature “Sweet Jane” with its jangly guitar intro on 1970’s “Loaded,” the band’s last album with Reed. (There’s also a slower version, which Cowboy Junkies hewed closely to in their cover, but in my opinion the versions from “Loaded” and “Fully Loaded” reign supreme.)

VU was active for about a decade, though really only five years before Reed left to embark on his solo career, and it was never a huge commercial success at that time. However, as the oft-quoted Brian Eno line goes, while the first VU album may have sold only 30,000 copies after its release, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Based on influence alone, they are untouchable.