Words & Music May 1965

Sound DNA

• Rock
• Rock & Roll

• lo-fi
• witty
• storytelling

About

In May 1965, Lou Reed was a 23-year-old staff songwriter and session musician for Pickwick Records in New York, churning out doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll “soundalike” singles to be sold in drugstores. There he was introduced to his future Velvet Underground bandmate, the Welsh-born John Cale, when the label put the two of them together for a house band called The Primitives. (They would go on to make the jokey novelty song “The Ostrich.”) Reed could write teen pop hits at a rapid clip, but his real creative focus essentially starts with this foundational document, <i>Words & Music, May 1965</i>, which he made with Cale and which includes the first known recordings of some of the Velvets’ most well-known songs. There’s almost nothing thematically linking his former dime-store hits-for-hire and these strands of The Velvet Underground’s underbelly-surveying DNA. But the collection (the first in a series of archival releases) does highlight the songwriting discipline and rigor that would see Reed through countless stylistic changes and a 50-plus-year career as one of America’s most important artists. After he made these recordings, Reed mailed the original reel-to-reel tapes to himself, and they remained unopened until four years after his death in 2013, when his wife, artist Laurie Anderson, gave them to the New York Public Library as part of an archival exhibition. They reveal a lot. Even just their existence suggests that Reed was protective of his intellectual property and took his day job as a songwriter seriously: The package's seals and postmarks served as an ad hoc copyright (should anyone have questioned the songs' provenance), and he introduces each song here by its title and the boilerplate verbiage “words and music, Lou Reed.” Much more importantly, though, the recordings not only unearth the root structure of one of American music’s most quietly influential bands, but they lay bare some unexpected inspirations along the way, while offering all kinds of surprises in terms of how the songs were originally conceived. The demo of “I’m Waiting for the Man” isn’t the propulsive, distorted, seedy, swaggering ode to scoring that you know it as. Instead, it’s almost jaunty; like porch-light folk and doo-wop more suited to Gerde’s than CBGB’s. “Heroin” is similarly rootsy—not a dark, droning, screeching dirge but a fingerpicked Woody Guthrie-esque ballad with different lyrics (most notably the opening line, “I <i>know</i> just where I’m going,” before the Velvets introduced a little uncertainty years later). Of the other classics here, Cale’s harmonizing, along with a doleful harmonica, gives the demo of “Pale Blue Eyes” a distinctly country-folk feel. And while it would later appear on Nico’s <i>Chelsea Girl</i>, “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” sung here by Cale, takes on a minimalist, musique-concrète-like form. (It’s by far the most experimental of the lot.) There are, of course, plenty of song sketches that never became fully fledged Velvets or Reed releases: “Buttercup Song” is a particularly goofy folk ditty (Velvets fans have long referred to this unheard song by its lyric “Never Get Emotionally Involved With a Man, a Woman, a Beast or a Child”), and “Stockpile” and “Buzz Buzz Buzz” are rambling 12-bar blues-rock numbers—revelatory for a band that would outright ban blues licks in their music. What’s underscored mostly by these recordings is, not surprisingly, Reed’s strength and range as a songsmith. Todd Haynes’ 2021 documentary <i>The Velvet Underground</i> attempted to position Reed as a pop songwriter—thorny and polarizing as he might’ve been—and foil to violist Cale, a devout student of the avant garde. And <i>Words & Music, May 1965</i> does, to some degree, support that thesis. The songs do establish a lot of the central themes of the Velvets and Reed's solo work to follow: the casual pursuit of drugs, the ecstatic effects of their consumption, the equally ecstatic effects of falling in love, the New York character sketches, the existential questing, the occasionally corny throwaways. But in their folksy original form—and without Cale's more left-field influence on arrangement and production, which would shape the band’s official recordings a couple years later—they also imagine a very different Velvet Underground.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits