Bauhaus - "Telegram Sam" (1980)

Here's a blistering T-Rex cover by Bauhaus- one of the best tracks they ever recorded.

The Velvets- Fragments of a History, Chapter 2: Peel Slowly & See

Simply put, The Velvet Underground's debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, was a game-changer that, over the course of the four+ decades since its release, has served as a precursor to everything from glam-rock to punk to industrial and beyond, a deceptively unassuming album whose particular effect was best summed up in Brian Eno's famous pronouncement: "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." As the album cover suggests, the back-story of The Velvets' debut is very much about their brief stint as members of Andy Warhol's Factory, for it was through Warhol's mentoring and patronage that they were able to record (a now legendary) album that they themselves never thought would materialize. However, from the beginning of their association with Warhol, there was conflict. Paul Morrissey, an avant-garde filmmaker and factory regular, convinced Warhol that The Velvets needed a more appealing lead singer, as Lou Reed was prone to appearing withdrawn and abrasive on stage. German fashion model and fledgling singer Nico, whom Warhol had used in a few of his films, most notably Chelsea Girls, was Morrissey's recommendation to Warhol, who in turn set about convincing Reed and John Cale to accept Nico as the band's "chanteuse." Despite their initial resistance to the idea, Reed and Cale were eventually persuaded to not only accept Nico into the band, but to write a few songs specifically for her; being the intelligent opportunists that they were, they likely realized that being given new instruments, free rehearsal space, food, drugs, sex (of all kinds), and Warhol's pop-art cache were perks that few, if any, bands could ever dream of enjoying.

Despite much evidence to the contrary, Sterling Morrison has suggested that the band was actually quite open to Nico's participation: "She was around because of Andy, but he couldn't talk us really into anything. We thought it would be a good idea. I mean that's how the whole thing was worked on the first album: The Velvet Underground and Nico. In other words, we were a unit with or without her. And she could do some things we really like, so we said do some songs. It was a complicated working arrangement because she said if I don't sing, I don't do anything. So it was always a question of how many songs Nico would do, should she do all of them, which we didn't want, and that was the only cumbersome aspect of it." Whether or not the band was initially receptive to Nico, her lack of musical experience had a divisive effect. At their first rehearsal with their new vocalist, the band reportedly drowned her voice in guitar noise every time she tried to sing. As Sterling Morrison has also revealed, after joining, Nico was often a detrimental force within the band: "There were problems from the very beginning because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for Nico, and she wanted to sing them all [....] And she would try and do little sexual politics things in the band. Whoever seemed to be having undue influence on the course of events, you'd find Nico close by. So she went from Lou to Cale, but neither of those affairs lasted very long."

Warhol's first major project involving The Velvets was a multimedia exhibition called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which involved the band playing in front of a silent 70 minute black & white film entitled The Velvet Underground & Nico: A Symphony of Sound. Performing in the EPI allowed The Velvet Underground to regularly explore and indulge their interest in musical improvisation, a trait that would be put to use soon thereafter while recording their debut album. In 1966, the first step a band would typically take before recording an album was securing a recording contract. In the case of The Velvets, Warhol decided instead to finance the album himself with the help of Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records Sales Executive who hoped Columbia would ultimately agree to sign the band and distribute the record. In mid-April 1966, after much rehearsing and endlessly working on new arrangements intended to accurately reflect the innovative approach they had honed earlier that spring playing in the EPI, The Velvets entered Scepter Studios, an old, decrepit recording studio in New York City, with Warhol as ostensible producer to record an acetate that would be peddled to various record companies. Lou Reed has clarified Warhol's role during the recording sessions: "Andy was the producer and Andy was in fact sitting behind the board gazing with rapt fascination at all the blinking lights. He just made it possible for us to be ourselves and go right ahead with it because he was Andy Warhol. In a sense he really produced it because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren't large enough to be attacked. As a consequence of him being the producer, we'd just walk in and set up and did what we always did [....] Of course, he didn't know anything about record production, he just sat there and said, 'Oooh that's fantastic,' and the engineer would say, 'Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic isn't it?'"

Despite the austere recording conditions, The Velvets made the most of the opportunity. Norman Dolph: "Most of the actual tracks, there was only one good unbroken take, maybe two of some of them. I'll say this: at no time did anybody on either side of the glass say, well, we'll fix it in the mix. That was never said. They performed it, and they'd come in, and we'd play it back end-to-end. If there was not a simultaneous agreement, they'd go back and do it over. But usually, anything that sounded like rough or iffy or from an engineering point of view didn't please John, he or I would break it down. We'd never even finish the take. Then they'd start a new one over, and then they'd come in and say, yeah, that's it, next case. And there was never any 'I'll play it back tomorrow, see if I like it tomorrow, and if I don't, then I'll redo it.' None of that. It was all just like they'd just sung it live, and they couldn't go back and redo it, because it was live. Because we were paying for the tape at probably $125 a roll, usually the broken takes were backed up and recorded over. Otherwise there would be some interesting scraps lying around [....]  It seems to me that "Heroin" was either done last, or the very first of the second day. 'Cause I remember that that was the one where Lou Reed needed to kind of get his head in the right place for that. And I remember in that one, in the control room, nobody moved a muscle when he was singing that song. And you didn't want anything to go wrong with that take at all, because if it had, he would have torn a wall down. Every bit of the energy in the song, you experienced in his persona at that point." The result, known as the Norman Dolph Acetate, ended up being roundly rejected by Columbia who didn't feel the band had any talent (ditto Atlantic and Elektra); however Morrissey managed to sell it to Verve/MGM, who promptly decided to sit on it until the following year because they had just released another "weird" album, Freak Out  by The Mothers of Invention and weren't quite sure how to market The Velvets. The delay gave the band a chance to re-record a few songs under better conditions in Los Angeles while on tour as part of the EPI and to record some new material (including "Sunday Morning") with Verve staff producer Tom Wilson in New York.

The Velvet Underground - "Heroin" (1967)

An absolute fucking masterpiece, that one is. Part two of The Velvets series coming very soon...

The House of Love - "In a Room" (1990)

"There are lessons for the lonely,

When I'm drunk in a room,

that's when I think of you."

The 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators (1966) / Easter Everywhere (1967) / Live (1968) / Bull of the Woods (1968)

The mid-1960s saw the rise of countless local garage-rock scenes throughout the U.S. that, in many ways, laid the groundwork for the psychedelic movement later in the decade and also the punk movement that first cropped up in NYC in the mid-1970s. While most of the bands comprising these local scenes were short-lived and destined for permanent obscurity, The 13th Floor Elevators, from Austin, TX. and fronted by one of the most tragic figures of the rock-era, Roky Erickson, arguably rock 'n' roll's first real counter-culture "wildman" figure and electric jug player and self-styled spiritual leader Tommy Hall, who claimed to have participated in LSD experiments at UT Austin in 1964, transcended their provincial origins by being one of the first bands to openly advocate the use of psychotropic drugs as a form of mind expansion as well as allowing the effects of this practice to overtly influence their music. Hall: "Everything I wrote was inspired through my taking LSD. I invented the electric jug totally out of my desire to find a place onstage with this new group, so I could be a part of it, and so I could communicate my new ideas through the lyrics I wanted to write." What set The 13th Floor Elevators apart from their garage-band contemporaries was their musical sophistication, which manifested itself not only in their playing, but also in their tendency to draw from multiple genres to create their distinctive brand of melancholic psych-rock. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland was the driving force in achieving the band's unique sound. Hall: Stacy was a consummate guitarist, far ahead of his time. He had deep fears about his dying young under violent circumstances. This manifested itself as a deep, mysterious, soulful feeling in his music and gave the Elevators a profound base to our overall sound. His sense of impending doom was indeed prophetic."

The 13th Floor Elevators led a dangerously precarious (in a legal sense) bohemian existence in amidst the ultra-conservative culture of their home state, something that eventually necessitated an extended stay in San Francisco in 1966-1967, where they helped foment the quickly developing Bay Area psychedelic scene and reconnected with fellow Austin native Janis Joplin (Joplin is rumored to have been influenced by Erickson's distinctive vocal style). Just before their visit to the Bay Area, the band had released their classic debut album, The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, which was something of a clarion call for an impending revolution in rock music. Aided by a breakthrough single, "You're Gonna Miss Me," which landed Erickson, Hall & co. on, of all things, American Bandstand, The 13th Floor Elevators' debut album was a minor commercial success despite their humble garage-band origins; however, what truly set the album apart was its palpable sense of its own pioneering status. In 1966, there were a number of bands toying with adding psychedelic elements to their songs, but in the case of The 13th Floor Elevators, they were pretty much inventing psych-rock from scratch by investing their songs with a manic sense of emotional urgency and broadening their musical palette to include sonic textures falling far outside the purview of conventional pop music (not the least of which were Hall's simply bizarre contributions on the electric jug).

Stacy Sutherland

After returning to Austin in early 1967, the band began recording what would become their masterpiece, Easter Everywhere, an unparallelled piece of late-sixties psychedelia that features a more polished and confident sound than its precursor matched with a cohesive set of consistently fine songs. From the acid-drenched slow-burner "Slip Inside This House," to the beautifully mournful folk ballad "I Had to Tell You," Roky Erickson's vocals are simply stunning in their ability to convey everything from unhinged passion to wistful melancholia, and Stacy Sutherland's lead guitar work is an exercise in understated melodic brilliance. Sadly, a year after the release of Easter Everywhere, Erickson was arrested for the possession of a single marijuana joint, which, in Texas at the time, was prosecuted in outlandishly harsh ways. In order to avoid a 10 year prison term, Erickson pleaded insanity; consequently, he was institutionalized and repeatedly subjected to electroshock therapy until his release in 1972.  As a result of Erickson's fate, The 13th Floor Elevators slowly fell apart, finally disbanding in 1969 after releasing Bull of the Woods; however, few if any bands were as instrumental in the rise of psychedelia and the unprecedented revolution that rock music underwent during the late 1960s. Tommy Hall: "Most people got caught up with illusions, failing to see truth provided by the psychedelic experiences. You must look past the pyramid, into its shadow, to find the truth."

The 13th Floor Elevators - "You're Gonna Miss Me" (1966)

This mid-sixties Austin garage band, led by the legendary Roky Erickson and featuring the electrified jug playing of Tommy Hall, is pretty much ground zero for the psychedelic rock movement. But who came up with the idea of having them play a teeny-bopper pool party?

Love and Rockets - "No New Tale to Tell" (1987)

"When you're down, it's a long way up.

When you're up, it's a long way down.

It's all the same thing.

No new tale to tell."

Notes from the Paisley Underground: The Salvation Army - Happen Happened (1982/1992)

Michael Quercio was one of the pivotal figures of the paisley underground, not only because he gave the scene its moniker (which most, including himself, eventually came to hate because of its emphasis on image over musical substance), but also as the leader of The Salvation Army, a punky garage-pysch band who would later become the more overtly psychedelic and equally important Three O'Clock. If you're only familiar with the latter, then Happen Happened will come as something of a surprise because The Salvation Army had a much darker, grittier sound than the later, renamed version of the band, and the album itself happens to be one of the most vivid documents of the early days of the paisley scene in L.A., and some, including Rain Parade guitarist Matt Piucci, consider it the finest slice of neo-psych to emanate from the paisley underground. The origin of The Salvation Army begins with Quercio, then using the pseudonym Ricky Start, sending some home demos of his fledgling band in to Rodney Bingenheimer, the legendary Los Angeles-area disc jockey and unofficial curator of the growing alternative music scene that was soon to explode in the U.S. Inspired by Bingenheimer's enthusiasm for the band's sound, Quercio and band-mates Troy Howell and Johnny Blazing recorded a few professional-quality demos at a local studio, which ended up netting them their first big break. Quercio: "Our original 45 was released in the fall of 1981. We were all still in high school or just graduated. It was on the Minutemen’s label which was called New Alliance. There was a place where a lot of bands played called Alpine Village in Torrance that’s kind of like a German biergarten. Anyways, D. Boon from the Minutemen saw us there and after our show he came up and asked if we had anything and we had just made this little demo tape that we made with money we saved up from our parents and stuff. He liked two of the songs and said he wanted to put them out and he put them out on his label as a 45."

Michael Quercio

Soon after the release of The Salvation Army's debut single, Blazing was kicked out of the band (for flubbing up the photo session for the picture sleeve of the 45) and was replaced with Gregg Louis Gutierrez, a guitarist whom Quercio knew from his college days. With the new lineup in place, the band recorded a follow-up EP; however, it never saw the light of day because fate came knocking before it could be officially released. Quercio had sent Rodney Bingenheimer an advanced copy of the EP, which the disc jockey began promoting on KROQ. Lisa Fancher had just started her own record label, the seminal L.A. underground mecca Frontier, when she heard one of Salvation Army's songs on Bingenheimer's show Rodney on the Roq. She signed the band immediately and put them in a studio to work on a full album. It was during these sessions that Danny Benair, former drummer for The Quick and Choir Invisible, would join the band, replacing Troy Howell, whose limitations behind the drum kit were becoming more and more apparent. The compilation Befour Three O'Clock collects the first single, unreleased EP, and the result of the sessions for Frontier, Happen Happened, The Salvation Army's final recording before changing their name to The Three O'Clock. It begins with one of Quercio's earliest recording sessions, which yielded the excellent 1981 "Happen Happens / Mind Gardens" single. This early version of "Mind Gardens" is built around a simple Punk-inspired chord progression and Quercio's snarling vocals, and represents quite a contrast to the album version recorded the following year, which loses much of its directness beneath all the reverb and jangle. Despite this, The Salvation Army's sole original album is full of great Nuggets-inspired tracks such as the blues-psych cover of The Great Society's "Going Home," a song featuring a swaggering guitar-based hook and one of Quercio's better early vocal performances. Happen Happened is one of the most essential releases related to the paisley underground, as it both a great album and a rare snapshot of the scene's early roots in the L.A. hardcore/punk movement.

The Three O'Clock- "With a Cantaloupe Girlfriend" (1982)

It's strange how something as seemingly innocuous as a video show can potentially change your life. My parent's had just been divorced, and now, living with my mom in a small apartment, completely isolated and without friends, I began to disintegrate into dust. One day, after school, flipping through channels on the TV, I discovered a video show called MV3. What was unusual about this show was that it focused mainly on alternative and independent artists, as it was hosted by, among others, local KROQ DJ Richard Blade. The American Bandstand-style dance sequences were often painful to watch, but over the course of the coming weeks and months, my ears and eyes were opened to the only music that had ever really spoken to me, music that told me I was not really alone and that being different was a sign of sanity, even in those moments when I felt like I was falling down the rabbit hole. This was the first time I discovered that music would always be there to save me. Another great aspect of the show was the live performances by local L.A. bands, many of whom comprised the paisley underground scene that was just hitting its stride at the time. Among these was an appearance by The Three O'Clock, which really made an impression on me at the time. However, I admit, the hosts are pretty lame, although I think I had a crush on the devotchka speaking at the end of the clip- what can I say? I was a kid, ha. Seriously though, I always wanted a cantaloupe girlfriend, but it took oh so long to find her......

p.s. this clip might have been the beginning of my love affair with red Rickenbacker guitars as well

Various Artists - CD86: 48 Tracks from the Birth of Indie Pop (2006)

"We [tried] to invent an alternative scene – our own version of punk you could say – by forcing a coterie of new bands onto a cassette called C86. It’s not entirely convincing and you should get out more if you remember The Shop Assistants – but it nails our colours to the mast. We, it said, for better or worse, are indie." -NME

One of the biggest misnomers about the UK music scene of the mid-to late 1980s is that nothing of interest was happening. Post-punk had gone pop, bands such as Echo & The Bunnymen and The Smiths were beginning to disintegrate due, at least in part, to the realities of major-label patronage, and the baggy beats of the Madchester scene were still a few years away. Reverberations of the punk revolution ten years earlier, though still audible, had been reduced to a murmur as D.I.Y. ideals had been replaced by glossy imitation. This was deep into the Thatcher era, meaning the deregulation of markets under the euphemistic title "economic liberalization", massive unemployment and social unrest. In the midst of all this, NME (New Musical Express), something like the UK equivalent to Rolling Stone, perhaps to stem its own slow descent into cultural obsolescence, made a fateful decision. NME journalist Roger Carr: "During the mid 80s, a few of us at the paper were starting to hear and see a load of bands coming through with a different sound to that which had dominated the independent scene for much of the earlier part of the decade. You got the feeling that something was happening, like the ground was shifting slightly." In an era long before the conspicuous consumption of digital music files, NME's issuing of a mail-order only mix-tape served as both an efficient way to expose new indie music to a larger audience and to resuscitate the publication's flagging indie credibility. Roger Carr: "We thought we'd do one of these for what was happening in indie music at the time. I'd done it for the paper before in 1981- the imaginatively titled C81- and that had been quite popular. So a few of us got together and started picking the bands we wanted to go on the tape." What this unassuming cassette tape would end up doing is become the catalyst for the rise of a new indie-pop scene whose influence would be as controversial as it was far-reaching.

The bands that Carr and his cohorts had begun to notice emanating from places such as Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow exemplified a disorienting conflation of classic sixties guitar-pop with the D.I.Y. ethos of the punk revolution in its purest form. In terms of sound, the obvious touchstones for many of these bands were The Byrds, Love, Phil Spector, Ramones, Buzzcocks, Orange Juice, Undertones, Television Personalities and Jonathan Richman. As many of the bands took the "shambling" label that had been affixed to some of their post-punk forefathers to a new level, musicianship was not at a premium; however, what was at a premium in bands such as Primal Scream, The Soup Dragons, The Pastels, Shop Assistants and The Close Lobsters was a complete rejection of punk's tendency to embrace and celebrate male-centered aggression. Phil Wilson of London indie band The June Brides: ""If you like popular music there's pop and there's rock [....] And if you're a little bit sensitive then a lot of rock music feels a little bit ridiculous- all that feet up on the monitors stuff. I approve of not being macho." As such, this burgeoning indie-pop scene was open to the participation of women on an unprecedented level. Amelia Fletcher of Oxford's Talulah Gosh: "The political aspect has been neglected [....] It was very, very open to women. Although it wasn't overtly political, women felt involved because musicianship wasn't at a premium: you could make the music you wanted to the extent you were able." Martin Whitehead of The Flatmates: "Before C86, women could only be eye-candy in a band, I think C86 changed that- there were women promoting gigs, writing fanzines and running labels." In addition, the look adopted by fans and bands alike reinforced a sense of cultivated uncoolness: bowl-cuts and bobs were de rigueur, as were stripey t-shirts and anoraks. All of which prompted the following commentary on an indie mag called i-D: “Childlike innocence and assumed naivety permeate the Cutie scene – their clothes are asexual, their haircuts are fringes, their colours are pastel. Cuties like Penguin modern classics, sweets, ginger beer, vegetables and anoraks. Heroes include Christopher Robin, Buzzcocks and The Undertones.”