The Velvet Underground and Nico: 1967
1967 · music
In March 1967 a record appeared with a banana on the cover and almost nothing else, no title on the front and an instruction to peel the sticker slowly. The Velvet Underground and Nico had been recorded the previous year in New York for very little money. It sold poorly, was ignored by radio and was buried within months by the summer of flower power and by an album from Liverpool that took all the attention. It is now regularly named among the most influential records ever made.
The band was Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, with the German singer and model Nico on three songs at the suggestion of the artist Andy Warhol, who managed the group, produced the album in name and designed its cover. Reed wrote about addiction, need and the parts of city life that popular music of the time did not describe. Cale, a classically trained musician from Wales, brought a viola drone and an appetite for noise. Tucker played standing up, without cymbals, in a plain and unswinging pulse.
Nothing about it fitted the year it came out. Where the fashion was for warmth and orchestration, these songs were flat, close and unsentimental, and several of them were genuinely difficult to listen to on first hearing.
Its influence arrived slowly and then everywhere. Punk, art rock and much of what has been called alternative music since the 1970s traces its manner back to this record, and a much repeated remark attributed to Brian Eno holds that although hardly anyone bought it at the time, almost everyone who did went on to form a band. The album is now in national registries of recorded heritage, which is a strange fate for a record that no station would play.