1. White Light/White Heat
2. The Gift*
3. Lady Godiva's Operation*
4. Here She Comes*
5. I Heard Her Call My Name
6. Sister Ray
A
Few albums are as well-represented by their cover art and title. This album is a long, strange blast of proto-industrial skronk, only really leavened by the pretty psychedelia of "Here She Comes". It's easily the VU's most "out there" album, and sort of a last hurrah for the John Cale era before Lou Reed turned the band more towards gentler (though still warped) pop music.
The opener is a garage stomp about speed, and probably the most conventional song what with its steady beat and call-and-response vocals. Everything is distorted and in the red, though, and Mo Tucker's drumming is so simple and heavy that it's brilliant. Things really get weird with the next two songs. "The Gift" features the band playing a sludgy groove in one channel while John Cale reads a story Reed wrote in the other, a funny little tale with a macabre ending about a young man who posts himself to his girlfriend. "Lady Godiva's Operation", featuring quite a pretty melody, tells the story of a sexually rapacious transsexual who is either subjected to a lobotomy or a botched sex-change operation (the lyrics are rather vague), and features the odd trick of Cale's gentle vocals being intercut with Lou Reed's nasal speak-singing. It's a strange song, but one of my favourites. "Here She Comes" is a delicate piece of psychedelia featuring a neat bit of slide guitar, and another gem.
Side two is, in my opinion, less successful but more obviously influential. "I Heard Her Call My Name" again mines "Waiting for the Man"'s primal garage stomp, but races along at breakneck speed and features astonishing guitar solos from Reed. No, these aren't Eddie Hazel-style flights of virtuoso playing, but they are atonal and wild and jazzy and have had an obvious impact on generations of guitarists from punk all the way through to someone like Ira Kaplan. Apparently Reed was influenced by Ornette Coleman, and it kind of shows.
The big attention getter on this album, of course, is the seventeen minute long closer. "Sister Ray" is, on one level, and incredibly stupid song. It's basically just a dirty two chord riff that serves as a base for Cale's wild organ work, Reed's experiments in feedback, and some appropriately confrontational lyrics about a bunch of drag queens partaking in a drug-fueled orgy. Pretty much every droney song with a farfisa in it owes a debt to "Sister Ray". At the same time, though, I find that it quickly wears out its welcome. I mean, it's fun to have on in the background, but actually sitting down and listening to the whole thing is kind of a chore. Bearing in mind that I've done so both drunk and sober (sorry, I'm not taking drugs again just so I can appropriately experience some stupid song).
So this album went down like a lead balloon, and it's not hard to see why. It's wild and dangerous, vulgar and in-your-face, and sounds like it was recorded by a mental patient through a cardboard box. Even members of the band were unhappy with how it turned out. But it's that unhinged, try-anything approach that's so endeared it to subsequent generations. The glorification of drugs and debauchery is on the one hand unfortunate, but on the other it helped expand the vocabulary of popular music to include parts of life which real people inhabit, and gave a voice to the voiceless. Unfortunately the Velvet Underground also led a lot of people into making some pretty stupid choices, but I guess those mistakes had to be made so that we could all learn from them (sorry for being a narc, but I'm not going to glorify an album that encourages shooting-up speed).
Anyway, this is a pretty great album. It sounded like nothing else at the time and still retains the power to shock and awe with its harsh tone and deep commitment to weirdness. And without it, half my favourite bands probably wouldn't exist.
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