The Velvet Forum

Ten strange and bizarre facts you didn't know about Teh Velvet Underground that make it all the more remarkable how successful they were.

1. No band before the The Velvet Underground has ever put a fruit on there cover, let alone a banana.

2. Their first gig featured a naked whip dancer called Gerald who used a live pet mouse in his gyrating performances.

3. They once got sacked for playing a nursery rhyme as an encore at a party for NY advertising executives.

4. The band's first manager was a fashion shoe illustrator who knew nothing about art, music or big business.

5. In late 1967, John Cale the band's lead viola player, over a period of four months, made an underwater concert sound system out of concrete breezeblocks. The rest of the band were so upset they sacked him for seven days, allegedly for spending all their drug money on the failed project.

6. Lou Reed once spent a month in a New Jersey lunatic asylum so that he could improve his ideas for lyric writing. Whilst in there he had his head shaved, wore a straight-jacket and had electrodes applied to his genitals.

7. The band originally planned to record their third album in the cubicles of a disused public toilet in the South Bronx

8. The band's drummer originally wanted to be a tax accountant and had only learnt the drums as method of communication with African tree spirits.

9. The band's female singer was an ex-German housewife from Cologne who as a child had originally been raised in a Bavarian forest. She didn't speak a word in any known human language until she was phonetically taught to sing her first single I'm Not Saying by British prog-rock guitarist Jimmy Page.

10. The band named themselves after a range of lingerie they had seen in a Seers and Robuck's catalogue, whilst crowded into Lou Reed's mother's small dark closet at his parent's house.

Richie Unterberger

iaredatsun wrote: But, hey ? that list in the booklet looks suspiciously like this list from the VU biographer and rock critic, Richie Unterberger's own website!

Are the other "facts" crap as well?

iaredatsun wrote:It's hot!

Cancelled the box as, if I wait, I can a free copy at the end of the month. But I really couldn't wait so got a cheap copy of the stereo/acetate double CD. Haven't got to the acetate yet as I'm still reeling from the experience of the stereo remaster. The difference is not subtle. What third rate n-generation tape copies have we been listening to all these years? You can suddenly hear the instruments, the sound, everything. It's like someone just washed the net curtains after twenty years smoking Senior Service.