Tag Archives: the-velvet-underground

As hard as it is to believe, Sonic Youth played their final show 14 years ago this fall, instigated by the breakup of co-founders Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. In the years since, they’ve each continued working on many fronts: Gordon was nominated for a Grammy this year for her …

As hard as it is to believe, Sonic Youth played their final show 14 years ago this fall, instigated by the breakup of co-founders Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. In the years since, they’ve each continued working on many fronts: Gordon was nominated for a Grammy this year for her …

Thom Yorke has quietly been on a bit of a tear the past year or so. In 2024, his side project the Smile — with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and jazz drummer Tom Skinner — put out two dazzling albums of crinkly art-rock, Wall of Eyes and Cutouts. He also …

Paul Morrissey, the filmmaker who was a business partner and collaborator of Andy Warhol‘s, died Monday, Oct. 29. He was 86. The Andy Warhol Museum confirmed Morrissey’s death in a statement shared on social media. Per The New York Times, Morrissey’s archivist, Michael Chaiken, said the filmmaker died in a …

There’s a moment on Pour a Little Sugar on It: The Chewy Chewy Sounds of American Bubblegum 1966-1971, a new box set, that pretty much captures everything wonderfully inane about one of pop’s most derided genres. Start with the beyond-silly name of the band, the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus, which …

F or six decades and counting, John Cale has lived on the edge of the avant-garde. A classically trained violist, he spent the mid-Sixties playing hours of drones with minimalist composer La Monte Young before co-founding the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed. The band transformed rock & roll into an …

Keith Richards takes on the Velvet Underground’s classic “I’m Waiting for the Man” for an upcoming tribute album dedicated to the music of Lou Reed. Arriving a day before what would have been Reed’s 82nd birthday, Richards also shared a new video of studio footage from the recording of his …

In late-1964-early-1965, Lou Reed wrote to the poet Delmore Schwartz, his creative-writing professor at Syracuse University, and described his life in New York City since graduating the previous spring. Reed noted his unsubmitted Harvard application and ambivalence about grad school; he obliquely referenced the “sick but strange and fascinating” experiences …

Lou Reed can’t help but laugh after announcing the title of a new song, “Heroin,” on a demo recording from May 1965. He then gives a surprisingly folky, almost Dylan-esque performance of the tune, which would become a noisy, droning blast of euphoria on The Velvet Undergound and Nico a …

To hear the first few seconds of the video above may catch you by surprise: It’s Lou Reed announcing the title of a song while declaring he wrote the words and music. Only it’s a song we know very well — “I’m Waiting for the Man” — and it’s from …