![]() No rock critics offering potted histories. No Eno quote about how the few people bought the first album all started bands. ![]() But this is a 200 level Velvets seminar at the least, assuming all your prerequisites have been met. Too many music documentaries (too many documentaries in general) waste their runtime making an excuse for their existence, with familiar faces testifying to their subject’s significance. Who can say if Haynes would have told the story differently had Reed not died in 2013, and really, who cares? To his credit, Haynes would rather be provocative than definitive. And there was rock 'n' roll, another soup can on the shelf waiting for cultural transformation. This was a world shaped by filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, who filmed the band’s first performance, impresarios like the Velvets’ rabbi, Andy Warhol, and musical boundary-pushers like drone pioneer La Monte Young. ![]() The film imagines the Velvet Underground as a moment in time, an outgrowth of the New York experimental arts scene of the ’60s. The band doesn’t even enter the studio to record its 1967 debut until halfway through Haynes’s two-hour documentary, and as the filmmaker tells it, it’s kinda all downhill from there. The Velvet Underground is less the story of how the collision of Cale’s high-art drone and Reed’s stark rock poetry abetted that cultural change and more about about the art world that made that collision possible, if not inevitable. Square America could then comfortably guffaw at such egghead bunk, but once its affectations were smuggled into pop the olds would secretly fret that their kids knew something they didn’t. He’s the first figure we see, pre-Velvets, a conservatory longhair straight from central casting, performing Erik Satie’s “Vexations” on piano for the game show I’ve Got a Secret as host and panel react so snidely they could make you want to sell military secrets to the Soviets. Many voices, alive and dead, including Reed’s curt Long Island snarl on occasion, contribute their perspectives and remembrances and gripes to Todd Haynes’s richly archival, ingeniously edited two-hour documentary, but Cale’s assured Welsh purr is the predominant baseline thrum throughout. The Velvet Underground is John Cale’s reward for making the inspired career choice of outliving Lou Reed.
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