Download or read book The Velvet Underground s The Velvet Underground and Nico written by Joe Harvard and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-03-31 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Velvet Underground and Nico has influenced the sound of more bands than any other album. And remarkably, it still sounds as fresh and challenging today as it did upon its release in 1967. In this book, Joe Harvard covers everything from Lou Reed's lyrical genius to John Cale's groundbreaking instrumentation, and from the creative input of Andy Warhol to the fine details of the recording process. With input from co-producer Norman Dolph and Velvets fan Jonathan Richman, Harvard documents the creation of a record which - in the eyes of many - has never been matched. EXCERPT In 1966, some studios, like Abbey Road, had technicians in white lab coats, and even the less formal studios usually had actual engineering graduates behind the consoles. Studios were still more about science than art. Clients who dared make technical suggestions were treated with bemusement, derision, or hostility. The Velvets were a young band under constant critical attack, and the pressure to conform in order to gain acceptance must have been tremendous. Most bands of that era compromised with their record companies, through wholesale revamping of their image from wardrobe to musical style, changing or omitting lyrics, creating drastically edited versions for radio airplay, or eliminating songs entirely from their sets and records. With Andy Warhol in the band's corner, such threats were minimized.
Download or read book The Velvet Underground Experience written by Carole Mirabello and published by . This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled from archival ephemera, unpublished photographs, films, album covers, posters, fanzines, letters, testimonies, and poems, this monograph gathers anew the Velvet Underground Experience exhibition that opened in Paris in 2016 for a US audience, recreating the sound, visual, and emotional experiences of the underground scenes in New York, where extravagances were always allowed.
Download or read book White Light White Heat written by Richie Unterberger and published by Jawbone Press. This book was released on 2009-06 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the influential cult band draws on dozens of new interviews and previously undiscovered archive sources, tracing their initial lack of success before they inspired and were championed by such artists as David Bowie. Original.
Download or read book The Velvet Underground written by Michael Leigh and published by . This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swingers and swappers, strippers and streetwalkers, sadists, masochists, and sexual mavericks of every persuasion; all are documented in this legendary expose of the diseased underbelly of '60s American society. The legendary sexology book that lent its name to the seminal New York rock'n'roll group THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, led by Lou Reed, whose songs were to mirror its themes of depravity and social malaise. Subjects range from mail-order pornography and prostitution to bondage and SM parties, orgies, and clandestine sex clubs. In 1966 the book was picked up on by Lou Reed, a young New York musician who had just formed a band, The Falling Spikes. Reed immediately changed the band's name to The Velvet Underground, became Andy Warhol's house band, wrote a raft of songs based on sleaze and the demi-monde, and the rest is history...
Download or read book Love s Forever Changes written by Andrew Hultkrans and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2003-09-17 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Forever Changes' may be thirty-six years old at the time of this writing, but its hermetic fusion of the personal and the political feels more relevant than ever. It speaks to the present in ways that, say, a Jefferson Airplane record never could, whatever the parallels between the late U60s and our contemporary morass.
Download or read book You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone written by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new, definitive biography of the iconic and mysterious singer, Warhol superstar, Velvet Underground collaborator: influential solo artist Nico. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE ALONE is a new biography of Nico, the mysterious singer best known for her work with the Velvet Underground and her solo album Chelsea Girl. Her life is tangled in myth--much of it of her own invention. Rock and roll cultural historian Jennifer Bickerdike delivers a definitive book that unravels the story while making a convincing case for Nico's enduring importance. Over the course of her career, Nico was an ever-evolving myth: art film house actress, highly coveted fashion model, Dietrich of Punk, Femme Fatale, Chelsea Girl, Garbo of Goth, The Last Bohemian, Heroin Junkie. Lester Bangs described her as 'a true enigma.' At age 27, Nico became Andy Warhol's newest Superstar, featuring in his one commercial break out hit film Chelsea Girls and garnering the position of chanteuse for the Velvet Underground. It wasn't Nico's musical chops which got her the gig; it was her striking beauty. Her seeming otherworldly and unattainable presence was further amplified by her reputation for dating rock stars (Brian Jones, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, among others). She became famous for being Nico. Yet Nico's talent and her contribution to rock culture are often overlooked. She spent most of her career as a solo artist on the road, determined to make music, seemingly against all the odds, enduring empty concert halls, abusive fans, and the often perilous reality of being an ageing artist and drug addict. She created mesmerizing and unique projects that inspired a generation of artists, including Henry Rollins, Morrissey, Siousxie Sioux and the Banshees and Iggy Pop. Drawing on the archives at the Andy Warhol Museum and at Nico's record labels, various private collections, and rarely seen footage, and featuring exclusive new interviews from those who knew her best, including Iggy Pop and Danny Fields, and those inspired by her legacy, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE ALONE reveals the complicated, often compromised, self-destructive and always head strong woman behind the one-dimensional myths.
Download or read book Seeing the Light written by Rob Jovanovic and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the rock group Velvet Underground, tracing the band's history from its formation by John Cale and Lou Reed in the mid-1960s to its notoriety after being adopted by Andy Warhol to its ignominious end.
Download or read book The Velvet Underground written by Sean Albiez and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An academic collection that explores and examines The Velvet Underground in the 1960s and the solo activities of band members up to the present"--
Download or read book I ll Be Your Mirror written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Question-and-Answer interview was one of Andy Warhol's favorite communication vehicles, so much so that he named his own magazine after the form. Yet, never before has anyone published a collection of interviews that Warhol himself gave. I'll Be Your Mirror contains more then thirty conversations revealing this unique and important artist. Each piece presents a different facet of the Sphinx-like Warhol's ever-evolving personality. Writer Kenneth Goldsmith provides context and provenance for each selection. Beginning in 1962 with a notorious interview in which Warhol literally begs the interviewer to put words into his mouth, the book covers Warhol's most important artistic period during the '60s. As Warhol shifts to filmmaking in the '70s, this collection explores his emergence as socialite, scene-maker, and trendsetter; his influential Interview magazine; and the Studio 54 scene. In the 80s, his support of young artists like Jean-Michel Basquait, his perspective on art history and the growing relationship to technology in his work are shown. Finally, his return to religious imagery and spirituality are available in an interview conducted just months before his death. Including photographs and previous unpublished interviews, this collage of Warhol showcases the artist's ability to manipulate, captivate, and enrich American culture.
Download or read book Lou Reed written by Anthony DeCurtis and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential biography of one of music's most influential icons: Lou Reed. As lead singer and songwriter for the Velvet Underground and a renowned solo artist, Lou Reed invented alternative rock. His music, at once a source of transcendent beauty and coruscating noise, violated all definitions of genre while speaking to millions of fans and inspiring generations of musicians. But while his iconic status may be fixed, the man himself was anything but. Lou Reed's life was a transformer's odyssey. Eternally restless and endlessly hungry for new experiences, Reed reinvented his persona, his sound, even his sexuality time and again. A man of contradictions and extremes, he was fiercely independent yet afraid of being alone, artistically fearless yet deeply paranoid, eager for commercial success yet disdainful of his own triumphs. Channeling his jagged energy and literary sensibility into classic songs - like "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Sweet Jane" - and radically experimental albums alike, Reed remained desperately true to his artistic vision, wherever it led him. Now, just a few years after Reed's death, Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis, who knew Reed and interviewed him extensively, tells the provocative story of his complex and chameleonic life. With unparalleled access to dozens of Reed's friends, family, and collaborators, DeCurtis tracks Reed's five-decade career through the accounts of those who knew him and through Reed's most revealing testimony, his music. We travel deep into his defiantly subterranean world, enter the studio as the Velvet Underground record their groundbreaking work, and revel in Reed's relationships with such legendary figures as Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Laurie Anderson. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Lou Reed is an illuminating tribute to one of the most incendiary artists of our time.
Download or read book The Life of Lou Reed written by Howard Sounes and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating biography of Lou Reed, featuring interviews with over 140 people who knew him intimately, plus previously unpublished photographs. As band leader of the Velvet Underground and later a successful solo artist, Reed was much more than what the general public came to know as the grumpy New Yorker in black who sang “Walk on the Wild Side.” To his dedicated admirers, he was one of the most innovative and intelligent songwriters of modern times—a natural outsider who lived a tumultuous and tortured life. In the course of his deep research into Reed’s life, from a humble upbringing on Long Island to death from liver disease in 2013, Howard Sounes interviewed more than 140 people who knew the artist intimately—some of whom have not spoken publicly about him before. With new revelations from former wives and lovers, family members, fellow band members and celebrities, and music industry figures, this book offers an updated, unfettered look at Reed’s creative process, his mental health problems, his bisexuality, his three marriages, and his addictions to drugs and alcohol. Featuring previously unpublished photographs of some of Reed’s most private moments, this is the definitive account of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most complicated and brilliant prophets. “Compelling . . . Sounes takes pride in carefully debunking the myths that have crept in from Reed’s own fictionalizations.” —The Sunday Telegraph “Controversial . . . Sounes’ book pushes the standard Reed narrative.” —New York Times “A measured chronicle of the life and music of Lou Reed . . . Sounes proves to be an amiable narrator who successfully reveals Reed as an innovative, influential musician.” —Publishers Weekly “A walk on the dark side.” —Independent “A must read . . . Sounes chronicles Reed’s turbulent, and often brutal, relationships with men and women . . . and the wayward talent that produced such classics as ‘Walk On The Wild Side.’” —Daily Mail
Download or read book The Velvet Underground written by Jim DeRogatis and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hardly anyone bought The Velvet Underground's albums when they were released, but most everyone who did formed a band. This was the kind of influence the Velvets axerted, and it persists to this day in the sounds of groungs as diverse as Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Sex Pistols, R.E.M., My Bloody Valentine, and Sonic Youth - all of whom claim the Velvets as their most important influence. This book offers behind-the-scenes look at how 'The Velvet Underground' did it.
Download or read book Nico written by James Young and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 1994-05-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nico’s keyboardist recounts her ill-advised eighties tour in this “funny memoir . . . A well-written black comedy” of life on the fringes of rock & roll (The New York Times). This is the story of the last “scene” of the art rock diva Nico, whose fifteen minutes of fame included her tenure with Andy Warhol’s Factory, the films Chelsea Girls and La Dolce Vita, and a momentous stint with The Velvet Underground, singing on their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. In 1982, Nico was living in Manchester, England, far from her “fifteen minutes” and interested only in feeding her heroin habit. Local promoter Dr. Demetrius saw an opportunity, hired musicians to back her, and set off on a disastrous tour of Italy. In a daze of chaotic live shows and countless heroin scores, Nico toured the world with assorted thrown-together bands, encountering a wild crew of personalities, including John Cale, Allen Ginsberg, John Cooper Clarke, and Gregory Corso. This story of Nico and the characters who orbited around her is “a funny and engaging chronicle that puts you right on the tour bus, amid the clutter of drums and drugs and unwashed bodies” (Kirkus Reviews).
Download or read book The Velvet Underground written by Johan Kugelberg and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2009 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music.
Download or read book All Yesterdays Parties written by Clinton Heylin and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Velvet Underground, among the most influential bands of all time, are credited with creating a streetwise, pre-punk sensibility that has become inseparable from the popular image of downtown New York. "Discovered" by Andy Warhol in 1966, the VU - with their original line-up of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker - would soon become the house band of the avantgarde, composing songs simultaneously furious in their abrasiveness and beautiful in their pathos, standing in striking contrast to the prevailing flower power of the era. All Yesterdays' Parties gathers for the first time almost all of the published writings contemporary with the band's existence-from sources as mainstream as the New York Times to vanished voices of the counterculture like Oz, Fusion, and Crawdaddy! The book is a revealing snapshot of an era by trailblazing rock writers such as Lester Bangs, Robert Greenfield, and Paul Williams. With photographs, posters, and other visual evocations of the period throughout, All Yesterdays' Parties is an invaluable resource, a trove of lore for anyone interested in the VU, their roots, and legacy.
Download or read book Beyond the Velvet Underground written by Dave Thompson and published by Omnibus Press& Schirmer Trade Books. This book was released on 1989 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beyond the Velvet Underground follows the careers of the VU stars in the years that followed the band's demise ..."--Cover.
Download or read book Nico Life And Lies Of An Icon written by Richard Witts and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nico was revered as ‘the most beautiful creature who ever lived’. She was Andy Warhol’s femme fatale and the High Preistess of Weird, yet few knew her real name or her wretched origins. When she called herself ‘a Nazi anarchist junkie’, they thought she was joking. Bob Dylan wrote a song about her, Jim Morrison a poem, Jean Baudrillard an essay, Andy Warhol a film, Ernest Hemingway a story – yet she fought against the idolatry of men to assert her independence as a composer of dissident songs. Nico’s contribution as an artist (17 films and 7 LPs) was smothered by gossip of her alleged affairs with men and women, whether Jimi Hendrix or Jeanne Moreau, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones or Coco Chanel. She drifted through society like a phantom. Each era celebrated a different Nico – the top covergirl of the Fifties, the Siren of the Sixties (as The Times acclaimed her), the Moon Goddess of the Seventies, and the High Priestess of Punk when rock stars like Siouxsie Sioux and Pattie Smith acknowledged her pre-eminence. Ironically, they did so at the lowest point in her life. For behind the Garbo-esque veneer lived a lonely woman trying to stand autonomous in a fast-changing world, seeking to survive her heroin addiction and to cope with her tormented mother and her troubled son, his existence denied by his film-star father. In this pioneer biography, which Nico asked the author to write shortly before her outlandish death in 1988, Richard Witts uncovers the reasons for her subterfuge, and examines the facts surrounding her encounters with terrorist Andreas Baader, the Black Panthers, and the Society for Cutting Up Men. Exclusive contributions from artists such as Jackson Browne, Iggy Pop, Viva, John Cale, David Bailey, Siouxsie Sioux – and many others including her relatives, friends and enemies – make this the definitive biography of an icon who was not only a testament to an era but hitherto unrecognised influence on popular music and style.
