The press quotes on the inside of my friend's vinyl copy of 'The Velvet Underground and Nico' are hilarious and awesome, and makes me wish I was at the Plastic Exploding Inevitable shows, because the critics sound bewildered, in love, frustrated and sort of scared at the same time. All of them together paint quite a picture of the critical reaction that the band had.
"A Three-ring psychosis that assaults the senses with the sights and sounds of the total environment syndrome ... Discordant music, throbbing cadences, pulsating tempo."
--Variety
"Not since the Titanic ran into that iceberg has there been such a collision as when Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable burst upon the audiences at The Trip Tuesday. For once a Happening really happened, and it took Warhol to come out from New York to show how it's done. "
--Los Angeles Times
This is the best one:
"Warhol's brutal assemblage --non-stop horror show. He has indeed put together a total environment, but it is an assemblage that actually vibrates with menace, cynicism, and perversion. To experience it is to be brutalized, helpless. --you're in any kind of horror you want to imagine, from police state to mad house. Eventually the reverberations in your ears stop. But what do you do with what you still hear in your brain ? The flowers of evil are in full bloom with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable."
--Michaela Williams, Chicago Daily News
"Shatteringly contemporary --the electronic music, loud enough to make the room and the mind vibrate in unison --Nico, the beautiful flaxen-haired girl, the noise, the lights, the film and the dances build to a screeching crescendo."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"The Velvet Underground, a group whose howling, throbbing beat is amplified and extended by electronic dial-twiddling, has a sound hard to describe, even harder to duplicate, but haunting in its uniqueness. And with the Velvets come the blonde, bland, beautiful Nico, another cooler Dietrich for another cooler generation. Art has come to the discotheque and it will never be the same again."
--John Wil****, East Village Other
"The sound is a savage series of atonal thrusts and electronic feedback. The lyrics combine Sado-Masochistic frenzy with free-association imagery. The whole sound seems to be the product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and The Marquis de Sade."
--Richard Goldstein, New York World Journal-Tribune
This is a good one too:
"The rock 'n roll music gets louder, the dancers get more frantic, and the lights start going on and off like crazy. And there are spotlights blinking in our eyes, and car horns beeping, and Gerard Malanga and the dancers are shaking like mad, and you don't think the noise can get any louder, and then it does, until there is one rhythmic tidal wave of sound, pressing down around you, just impure enough so you can still get the beat; the audience, all of it fused together into one magnificent moment of hysteria."
--George English, Fire Island News
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The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
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