'The Velvet Underground and Nico' by The Velvet Underground (1967)
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"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."
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--Michaela Williams, Chicago Daily News
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"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."
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--George English, Fire Island News
I was sitting in my friend's dorm room. The music is very loud. What is particularly interesting about his room is the fact that everybody draws on the wall. It's a constantly changing work of art. What's also cool is the kid across the hall from my friend is a man of immaculate taste and a regular in Ralph's room(my friend is Ralph.) You see, the room I'm in is a popular room, and a constant cast of characters goes in and out of the place. The man across the hall is named Ryan, and he has a monster of a record collection. His record player and all his vinyls are in Ralph's room, because Ralph's room has the speakers, and Ralph's room has all the dangerous and illicit things inside.
A shiver went through my spine when the cocaine hit my brain. For the next forty-five minutes I was on the verge of acting violently towards the entire world around me. Urges so strong it was hell trying to tame them and stay civil.
I am an animal. I want to break that chair. Knock down that wall. Punch my friend in the face. It hit me right as the viola was wailing. Venus in Furs. I was speeding through a tunnel and my mind was racing and so was everybody else's. A fevered wail from someone across the room. It's a girl we know. She got excited by something and had a bottle of oxycodone in her hand. She gasps dumbly. The top wasn't on all the way and flew off when she shook her arms. Now the opiates are all over the floor. I laugh at her. The way the pills dropped, it looked like they fell out of her like a damn slot machine.
'Hey, Kelsey's paying off!'
I blame her craziness on The Velvet Undergound. It's the perfect soundtrack for a drug-haze. It gets you in a mood where bad things can potentially happen. It's that insanity and fear, lurking beneath the surface that makes this album so appealing. It goes without saying that it was quite revolutionary in 1967. Not even Dylan reached the depths that the Velvet Underground did.
We were all high and all crazy. There's woods behind the dorm. About ten of us went out there and chased each other around, throwing snow and horsing around. It was an intense inter-personal experience. That's what college has been like for me. I've been hanging out with the underground the seedy underbelly, the shady characters. It's an amazing way to live but is only possible in the briefest time frame. I've seen people go from promising young scholars to drug addicts within a couple of months. It's a hell of a ride while it lasts, though.
Every time I play the 'The Velvet Underground and Nico' vinyl, there's usually someone in the room who hasn't heard it before. And usually, that someone is a stoner or a duggie, and they always like the Velvets. I'm convinced that this is the drug album. The album is swimming with desperation and dirt. It just,
sounds dirty at certain points. It gets the fear going.
On my first acid trip, I listened to it. During 'Sunday Morning' I wept... for myself and the stupid decisions I made. I was trying to grasp in my head the overwhelming entirety of everything. I know now that the acid trip was my spiritual awakening. The sound had surrounded me and burrowed deep into my mind like a goddamned gopher. It's an angry, aggressive beast this album, teeming with polar opposites, love and hate, aggressive passion and comatose hypnotism. It's a soundtrack for dirty, druggy insanity.