Album Challenge - 1967 pt. 1 - Peel Slowly

It's time to take the recent Album Challenge of records that influenced my taste in music to 1967 so peel slowly and see. That of course means The Velvet Underground and Nico. This album really was about All Tomorrow's Parties. The year 1967 was important to me and my growing obsession with collecting albums and over the years many albums have come and gone at the top of my list of favorite albums in my collection released that year. However, considering the perspective of records that influenced my taste in music this Velvet Underground album rises to the top and especially looking at the influences so many years later.

I got this album at a head shop shortly after the 1967 Summer of Love and this record certainly wasn't about that kind of love. That summer was between my sophomore and junior years in high school. I was hanging out in record stores and going to concerts and shows but not near as often as I would a year later in 1968. I had heard about this album from some of my older friends in the Uptown String Band, a Philadelphia Mummers String Band, that I was a sax playing member throughout my teenage years. Those guys were a big influence on my taste in music at the time.

The Velvet Underground and Nico album had an intense feel like nothing I had heard before but I often played the record when no one was around. Well, at least in those early teenage years. I wrote about my dropping some Frank Zappa songs into the mix of Motown singles at our sixties rec room parties but I never did that with the Velvet Underground. Well, until the mid 70's house parties on Seymour Street. It was at one of those parties in 1974 that a stoned friend tried to peel the banana off the cover of the album. Pissed me off. I later learned that only the first pressings of the original LP had the actual peel me banana cover like this one.

There are too many great songs on this album both sung by Lou Reed and Nico to get into the details at this point. There's the John Cale influence too. I would see The Velvet Underground play The Trauma in Philadelphia in early 1968. That was an amazing show and a real eye opener although I was very disappointed that Nico was not on stage with the Velvets at that time. She apparently left the band at the end of the 1967 tour when the band stopped working with Andy Warhol. I only went to the Trauma a few times back in the day. It was located a block or so down Arch Street from The Electric Factory which was my main venue to see bands in the late 1960's along with the 2nd Fret at 19th and Samson and The Main Point in Bryn Mawr. I would see The Velvet Underground again in later 1968 at the Electric Factory along with Nazz. It was cool seeing Lou Reed and Todd Rundgren on stage that night. One other time I saw the Velvet Underground perform in a park "be-in" in 1968 a few months after I had bought this record. I had made my way to the stage but was very disappointed again when there was no Nico performing. The sound was terrible and I wandered off not realizing what a rare event I had been witnessing. They were also playing mostly songs from what I would later realize was their new album White Light White Heat and in retrospect I should have stayed as close to the stage as possible. A few years later I saw Lou Reed at the Main Point in Philly when I was home for Christmas leave right after Transformer was released in 1972 and then again the following May in Norfolk with that great touring band from Rock 'n' Roll Animal. We had just arrived in port from a few months overseas and some of my shipmates saw that Alice Cooper was playing in town. They asked me if I wanted to join them. I hesitated then asked who was the opening act. They said it was someone named Lou Reed... I said I'm in. Of course a few months later everyone would know who Lou Reed was when Walk On The Wild Side curiously became a monster AM radio hit. RIP Lou Reed.