That Time The Velvet Underground Played A New Jersey High School and Sang About ‘Heroin & Dope Addicts’ (Book Excerpt)

From ‘Lou Reed: The King Of New York’

By Will Hermes

The Velvet Underground were a swirling enigma of a sensational art rock band. In the 1960s, with the help of Andy Warhol and his factory, the band formed a template of sorts from which so many art-influenced-and-damaged independent bands would arise. In the just-released “Lou Reed: The King of New York” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a phenomenal new book on the group’s late, great singer/songwriter, lauded music scribe Will Hermes delves into Reed’s fascinating career which was crazily dynamic and wide-ranging with peregrinations from doo-wop to art happenings, punk to Tai Chi master and far beyond.

In this excerpt from “The King of New York,” Hermes, who’s written for Rolling Stone, NPR, New York Times and Spin along with penning the incredible 2011 book “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever,” (which charts NYC’s incredible music scene between 1973-1977 and is also a must-read), chronicles one of the Velvet Underground’s earliest and weirdest gigs: a 1965 show at a local high school in the suburban wasteland of Summit, New Jersey.

This was before art star Andy Warhol became their manager. Picture the Velvet Underground, in their outré noise-leaning NYC hipster coolness, playing after a teen high school band and opening for a local garage act who were working with Carole King and Gerry Goffin. The disconnect between it all is amazing and certainly left secondary schoolers and locals scratching their heads. Ultimately, though, that’s what made the Velvets so great.

Excerpt from “Lou Reed: The King of New York”

Al Aronowitz’s (The Velvet Underground’s first manager) first booking for the Velvets was inauspicious—at Summit High School, near his home in suburban New Jersey, on December 11, 1965. They were second on the bill. Opening was a quartet of fourteen-year-olds from nearby Springfield who called themselves, accurately, the Forty Fingers.

Headlining were Aronowitz’s first management clients, the Myddle Class, a local garage band splitting the difference between Herman’s Hermits and the Rolling Stones. They were older—all eighteen—with a strong local following. They’d just released their debut single, “Free as the Wind,” a co-write with King and Goffin. King didn’t like Aronowitz—she thought he was too old to be hanging out all night with young musicians “like a groupie.” But Goffin was wowed by his connections, and the three had gone into business together, launching the short-lived Tomorrow Records in part to release the Myddle Class’s debut LP.

Rock ’n’ roll concerts were beyond rare in the upscale Jersey suburbs. Accordingly, many kids dressed up: after all, when the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan show in September, they were still wearing suits and ties. Mia Wolff, fifteen, came from nearby Berkeley Heights; she recalled wearing a cranberry-colored corduroy jacket, matching skirt,
and a lacy white shirt. Other girls came in brightly patterned blouses, dress slacks,
go-go boots or stylish loafers. Kids swigged liquor in the parking lot; bolder ones maybe took a few puffs on a joint.

Rob Norris was sixteen, and hadn’t smoked weed yet. But he was a longhair, in fact had been kicked out of New Providence High School for violating the dress code. (When his parents had a lawyer threaten to sue the school, the dress code was modified and Norris was back in.) He also had a pipeline for rock ’n’ roll gossip: a friend’s sister was Al Aronowitz’s babysitter. The afternoon of the concert, Norris got a call from the Summit High School pay phone about this strange band who had just arrived, every one of them dressed in black.

Roughly a thousand kids packed into the Summit High School auditorium that night, with hired security guards to keep order. King, Goffin, and Aronowitz mingled alongside Ken Jacobs—a young filmmaker in Jonas Mekas’s circle—and his wife, Flo; Barbara Rubin roamed with her camera. “There was such an energy,” recalls Stephen Philp. He was twelve, and his brother Rick played guitar in the Myddle Class; he’d even caught a ride that night in King’s white Cadillac. The crowd was mainly there for the Myddle Class, and they were restless. The Forty Fingers played two songs and bailed. Then came the Velvet Underground.

“Two of them were wearing sunglasses,” Norris recalled. “One of the guys with the shades had very long hair and was wearing silver jewelry. He was holding a large violin. The drummer had a Beatle haircut and was standing at a small, oddly arranged drum
kit. Was it a boy or a girl?” Norris couldn’t tell.

“Before we could take it all in, everyone was hit by a screeching surge of sound,” he remembered, “with a pounding beat louder than anything we had ever heard.”

The Velvets played three songs. Tucker recalled opening with “I’m Waiting for the Man,” though other accounts have the first song as “There She Goes Again”— a chiming folk-rock melody attached to chord changes apparently lifted from Marvin Gaye’s 1963 hit “Hitch Hike.”

If you don’t listen too closely, it might sound like a generic teenage relationship plaint.
But the description of a woman “down on her knees” and the reprise “you’d better hit her!” suggest something darker, conjuring violence in a way James Brown’s “Hit me!” exhortations never did. It had more in common with the threateningly sexualized innuendo of Big Joe Turner’s “Honey Hush,” whose narrator threatens a woman with the “baseball bat” in his hands, or “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” the startling 1962 song about domestic abuse written by King and Goffin and recorded by the Crystals, something a pop song student like Reed would have noted, maybe hearing the sort of nonjudgmental emotional documentation he was pursuing in his own writing. Years later Reed noted how his song in part reflected“just how violent America is,” and stressed that “for me it’s just a song, an attitude. It’s got nothing to do with me. Look, I write songs I don’t agree with . . . It has to do with a movie I saw, or a character who was a certain way. Or somebody I read about in the paper, or met at a party. I put him in a song and act him out.”

Next, the Velvets played “Venus in Furs.” Mia Wolff was with a group of fellow students. “I was mesmerized by the sound,” she recalls. “The droning quality of it, the deep beat, the downstroke of the chords.

We were probably high. I have a visceral memory of sitting there and just being erased by the music.” Rob Norris recalled that the song “swelled and accelerated like a giant tidal wave which was threatening to engulf us all.”

Sterling Morrison remembered “the murmur of surprise that greeted our appearance . . . increased to a roar of disbelief once we started to play ‘Venus in Furs,’ and swelled to a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment by the end of ‘Heroin.’” As Cale saw it from his spot on the stage, “we were so loud and horrifying to the high school audience that the majority of them, teachers, students and parents, fled screaming.”

Moe Tucker recalled the night’s cultural revolution in more pedestrian terms. “I was a nervous wreck when we played that show,” she said, adding that Reed probably was, too. “Our set was only about 15 minutes at the most and in each song something of mine broke. All my stuff was falling apart! The foot pedal broke in one song; the leg of the floor tom started going loose. I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to ruin this!’ ”

When the Velvets came offstage, it was clear to Cale that the headliners “were really pissed off . . . I tried to apologize to the lead singer, but secretly I was exhilarated.” After a break, the Myddle Class took the stage, their fans cheered, and relative order was restored.

For his part, Al Aronowitz had been recording the show on his new Wollensack reel-to-reel tape machine, but in the hustle of the postshow load-out, the $300 unit went missing. Aronowitz was convinced the Velvets stole it; the mystery was never solved. A shame, because the machine probably contained a recording of the Velvet Underground’s first show with Moe Tucker, and the first time they shared their worldview outside of the bohemian snowglobe of downtown Manhattan.

In the aftermath, a flame war erupted in the local paper that marked the start of the Velvets cult-hero standing. After the local paper’s teen columnist, “Suzie Surfer,” praised the Myddle Class and disparaged the Velvets, a group identified as “Some ‘Velvet Underground’ fans” wrote, “Why don’t you stick to your surfboard, Suzie. You’re no music critic!” To which she responded: “Stickin’ to my surfboard is more fun than hearing about heroin and dope addicts.”