The albums are there for all time, but as a historical presence the Velvets can seem a bit like a group of ghosts.īut now, the great director Todd Haynes has, at long last, made a documentary about the Velvet Underground. (It’s quite an irony considering that Warhol, the band’s mentor, was the first person to be notorious for filming everything around him, but there you go.) The Velvet Underground, whose music was a mesmerizing midnight trance-out, had no radio niche, no publicity, no “media,” no backstage verité Pennebaker or Maysles. Every time I’ve raised the subject with those in the know, the explanation comes down to: “There’s no footage.” What they mean is: There are random bits of footage, and plenty of photographs, but if you want to see the Velvets in their prime performing “What Goes On” or “White Light/White Heat” in a steamy rock club, or get a taste of what it was like to see the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (the hypnotic chug-a-chug of the band, the psychedelic blobs and Warhol films) at the Dom in New York City in 1966, or to see any full-scale concert clip that would allow you to experience the Velvets in a you-are-there, that’s-what-they-were-like way, you’re out of luck, because those clips basically don’t exist. There’s a reason we’ve never seen that film. So surely they deserve to be captured and memorialized in a film that does them justice. They are, along with the Beatles and the Stones, one of the three seminal groups in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. “This teenage aspiring artist… was hanging out and talking to Andy Warhol! At one point he said: ‘Mr Warhol, I just have to tell you – I don’t understand your art.’ And Andy turns to Jonathan and says: ‘Yes, you do.’ He was so gentle, so kind and so right on because we all understand Andy Warhol’s art, even when we think we don’t.For years, I’ve been longing for someone to make a documentary about the Velvet Underground. “Jonathan managed to get backstage!” says Haynes. Nico and Warhol were both in attendance, despite Nico not performing, and John Cale was still in the band. He didn’t have a ticket to the show in Cambridge, Massachusetts – and had to forge a fake student journalist pass so he could get in. ![]() One story Haynes excitedly tells NME involves Richman’s first ever Velvets gig in 1967. “I knew he was there – and later I found out he’d been to 70 of the band’s shows! “When I decided to, I knew I had to get Jonathan Richman ,” says Haynes. He was very shy, very weird and very passive, but there wasn’t a person I interviewed for this film who was there at the factory and knew Andy, who didn’t say the most loving things about him.” Jonathan Richman snuck backstage to meet Andy Warhol I think it was conceived incorrectly in the script as some queer, tongue-licking, gross, lurid guy. “ The Doors movie really bugs me because of how lasciviously he’s played and how luridly he’s played. “It is really hard to play Andy Warhol,” says Haynes, continuing his dissection of the artist on screen. A boyfriend I had, Jim Lyons, who was an editor and dear friend who passed away – he had a project in mind, a portrait film about Andy Warhol and Gus agreed to star in it but sadly Jim didn’t last.” He hated Crispin Glover in ‘The Doors’ “He doesn’t even have to do impressions, he’s too vacant to do that. Gus has this funny vacancy in the way he talks ,” says Haynes. “The person who’s closest to Andy Warhol I know is Gus Van Sant. It made even more sense that Lou’s relatives be there to watch it. ![]() The Velvet Underground were NYC through and through, so it made perfect sense to show Haynes’ film at the New York Film Festival. His Velvet Underground doc made Lou Reed’s family cry… He digs deep into the group that kickstarted his musical obsessions. For the latest in NME’s In Conversation series, we caught up with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Todd Haynes, who was hand-picked by acclaimed artist and Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson to helm The Velvet Underground, a new documentary about the band. Well, fast-forward half a century and there aren’t many ’60s bands bigger (perhaps The Beatles and The Rolling Stones). In fact, the band were so lowly regarded by their contemporaries that Cher famously said at the time: “The Velvet Underground will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.” From their inception in 1964 to an acrimonious split nine years later, the avant-garde rockers made little money and never had a hit record (not counting pre-Velvets dance tune ‘The Ostrich’, which co-founders John Cale and Lou Reed recorded as The Primitives). The Velvet Underground were arguably the world’s first sleeper band.
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