Never

Advertisement

Supported by

Send any friend a story

As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

By Joe Coscarelli

A half a century ago this month, the Velvet Underground released its debut LP, "The Velvet Underground & Nico." That enduringly transgressive album would go on to earn the music-industry axiom, first voiced by Brian Eno, that although relatively few people bought it initially, everyone who did started a band.

Before innovation crystallizes as influence, however, it is bemusing at best, if not altogether maddening.

Take, for instance, the confused-looking crowd in suits in these never-before-seen photographs, by Larry Morris, of the group performing at the Dom in downtown Manhattan on April 7, 1966. Not even two weeks later, the Velvet Underground — featuring Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, with additional vocals from the German singer Nico — would enter Scepter Studios in New York to record its first professional demos of songs like "I’ll Be Your Mirror" and "Heroin."

10 Photos

View Slide Show ›

But on this night at the club — described in The New York Times then as "the temporary cinema-discotheque that Andy Warhol, the apostle of Pop Culture, has installed at 23 St. Marks Place" — it was all so new. Attendees, Marylin Bender wrote, could "grope their way to the dance floor in blackness that is broken only by hallucinatory flashes of multicolored lights in order to wriggle, writhe and tremble to the music of the Velvet Undergrounds, a four-piece band whose chanteuse is a fashion model answering only to the name of Nico." The group was merely a detail in the story and getting its name right was not yet a priority.

"Modeling is such a dull job," Nico told The Times, while, the writer added, "tossing her flaxen mane."

The concert was part of Warhol's traveling multimedia shows, known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which mixed projected films, live music and dance. (The entry fee for the night: $2.) Gerard Malanga, a Warhol associate and Factory collaborator, can be seen shimmying onstage with the fresh-faced Velvets. "It was an ephemeral but everlasting experience," he recalled in an interview this week.

While the images show a split between the squares seated, straight-faced, at clothed tables, and those letting loose on the dance floor, Mr. Malanga remembered the atmosphere as "one of participation and excitement."

"The crowd looks like they were all grown-ups — everybody looks so well-behaved," he said. "I do remember it being younger and more lively."

In celebration of the 50-year anniversary of "The Velvet Underground & Nico" — plus the news that Mr. Reed's personal archive has been acquired by the New York Public Library — check out more photographs by Mr. Morris from this early Velvet Underground performance in the slide show above.

Advertisement