The producer who walked out on The Velvet Underground: “I don’t have to listen to this”
There’s no rule that says a producer has to like every song they are working on. For every great artist that comes into the studio, there are others that you have to sit through their feeble attempts at writing hits before you start to drift off behind the control board. The Velvet Underground already weren’t everybody’s cup of tea in the late 1960s, but when they made their sophomore album, White Light/White Heat, one of the engineers didn’t even bother sticking around to hear the songs.
Then again, if you were in his position in the 1960s, you would have probably thought that the alternative icons had lost their minds. While The Velvet Underground and Nico was far from a production masterpiece with its caustic approach to production, Lou Reed wanted to make an album that was designed to sound screwed up.
Across almost every track on the album, every instrument is pushed well beyond what’s acceptable for normal volume, to the point where it’s just a huge barrage of noise half the time. The title track could have just been a fun romp if they wanted to make that, but putting loads of distortion on every single guitar made it sound like a pop song had gone to Hell.
The Velvets were art rockers before anything else, though, and ‘Sister Ray’ was their one opportunity to experiment. ‘Heroin’ already primed the pumps for a song like this, but no one really knew what they were listening to at the time, featuring 17 minutes of the group jamming on a handful of riffs and making white noise on their instruments.
Keep in mind, this isn’t like a progressive rock song that was starting to rear its head at the time. This was just a pure emotional exorcism set to music, where any sense of key or time signature is practically irrelevant halfway through. That’s fun if you’re the one playing it, but not so much for the producers.
According to Reed, producer Gary Kellgren couldn’t be asked to stay in the studio while they were working, telling PBS, “The engineer said, ‘I don’t have to listen to this. I’ll put it in record, and then I’m leaving. When you’re done, come get me.’” Any producer would have tried to preserve their ears, but the raucousness of the recording was far more ahead of its time than anyone realised.
Compared to the other art rock acts that came before, this felt like the natural starting point of noise rock, with bands like Swans taking that elongated soundscape idea to the next level whenever they performed. The rest of the album also got its just due shortly after, with David Bowie eventually covering the title track on his Ziggy Stardust tour.
At the same time, there’s probably no one who could cover ‘Sister Ray’ properly and make it sound as good as The Velvets did. Outside of Reed and Sterling Morrison trading licks, there’s no getting around the power of Moe Tucker, who turns into an absolute monster by the end of the track. The rest of the world was still droning on about Flower Power, but with one song, The Velvet Underground created the foundation for both heavy metal and alternative rock bombast without even trying.