"Shiny, shiny....boots of leather"
The Velvet Underground....The Book...The Band..

The most powerfully innovative, eduringly influential and organigally self-destructive musical group of its day was named one day in 1965, when Angus MacLise (original drummer) picked up a porno paperpack called "The Velvet Underground" written by Michael Leigh, which promised the lowdown on the "sexual corruption of our age".

Swingers and swappers, strippers and streetwalkers, sadists, masochists, and sexual mavericks of every persuasion; are all documented in this legendary (albeit somewhat snoozey) expose of the diseased underbelly of '60s American society.

The band, then playing the sado-masochistic masterpiece, "Venus in Furs" to aroused amazement in lower Manhattan, found the link too good to pass up. Here was a band conceived in total freedom , whose songs were to mirror its themes of depravity and social malaise.

The VU's first paying gig was as on opening act for "The Myddle Class" at a high school dance in Summit, NJ. Raw sex in jeans, studs and black leather, they played "There She Goes Again", "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin". Two girls fainted. There were no encores.

Their next paid performance was at the Cafe Bizarre, a tourist trap with a hawker, on MacDougal Street in NYC. Lou Reed played rythum & ostrich guitar (a rewiring that enabled his instrument to project multiple tones for every string plucked), Sterling Morrison played lead, John Cale alternated on bass and viola (constantly refining they mysteries of distortion) and Moe Tucker pounded out a heay, hypnotic beat.

The looked marvelous, like passionate pirates on a summer outing, but their music was a menace baffling the suburbanites who only wanted to play bohemians for the night. But, by chance, Gerard Malanga, poet and filmmaker whose fancy it was to sit at the right hand of Andy Warhol had wandered in. (More)