When last we encountered “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” the Velvets were using it to get out of their residency at Café Bizarre, which had led to their meeting Andy Warhol but eventually became a burden and a bore. If you’ll recall, Sterling Morrison said:

After a set, the lady who owned the café came up and said that if we played “The Black Angel’s Death Song” one more time we were fired. So we led off the next set with it.

So its placement as the second track on the acetate, where it seems likely to weed out any intended listener who might have survived the nine-minute assault that is “European Son,” is… curious.

So far this is exactly the opposite order of the one on The Velvet Underground & Nico, where “Black Angel” is the penultimate song and “Son” the closer. On the album one has a chance to get acclimated to the VU’s sonic universe before dealing with the two most difficult tracks — which are, yes, brilliant in their own way but not for the faint of heart.

I thought long and hard before buying Richie Unterberger’s Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground. I already have a surfeit of source material for this project, including Unterberger’s own massive reference White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day, 1500+ pages in its Kindle version.

But in the end I couldn’t help myself, so this 800-page tome landed on my doorstep yesterday:

I must confess that upon unpacking it, my first reaction was despair. This blog has become my personal Winchester Mystery House, the Thing That Will Never Be Finished. I had to remind myself that a) this is entirely self-imposed, and b) I love the VU and mostly do enjoy learning and writing about them.

As far as I can tell, there is very little audio documentation of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The biggest chunk I could find is in this half-hour-plus film made by Jonas Mekas, who (says Wikipedia) “was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called ‘the godfather of American avant-garde cinema.’”

I watched this whole thing so you don’t have to, and it is indeed an odd piece of work — sort of a compilation of home movies involving Warhol in one way or another, filmed between the mid-1960s and early 1980s and finally released in 1990. Much of the footage is willfully amateurish — blurry, shaky, underlit, overexposed — and most of it is silent, which is why Mekas chose to accompany it with recordings of the EPI-era VU that he somehow had access to.

“The great thing about the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was that it left nothing to the imagination. We were on stage with bullwhips, giant flashlights, hypodermic needles, barbells, big wooden crosses…. You were shocked because sometimes your imagination wasn’t strong enough to imagine people shooting up, being crucified, and licking boots.” —Ronnie Curtone, dancer

Our journey through the history of the Velvet Underground has now arrived at April 1966, which will be a momentous month for them. Toward the end of it they will be at Scepter Studios recording their debut album. We will get to that soon enough — hopefully before this blog turns five years old. (At this rate I will get to Lulu sometime in the 24th century. Well, I’m in pretty good health, who knows?)

But meanwhile, throughout the month, the Velvets performed almost every day at the Dom in New York City as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It was the Beatles’ Hamburg period crammed into a month1I wonder, as a purely academic question: Who did more speed, the VU or the Beatles? We know the Fabs took pep pills to keep up with their punishing schedule, so they’re probably the smart bet; the Velvets, given their drug-drenched milieu, had the entire cornucopia of pharmaceuticals at their disposal and may have relied less on amphetamines. But I wouldn’t put money on it,— long sets played over and over for audiences that hadn’t necessarily come there to see a band.

In February 1966 the Velvet Underground was part of a happening called “Andy Warhol: Up-Tight,” which Richie Unterberger describes this way:

The shows open with Lupe, the last Warhol film to star Edie Sedgwick, which is projected onto a split screen from two separate reels and is based on the last night of the Mexican film star Lupe Velez. The Velvets then take the stage to perform in front of more films and slides by Warhol and Paul Morrissey. Gerard Malanga and Sedgwick writhe around in front of the band while Danny Williams, a film editor noted for his work on What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, projects lights and colored slides over the musicians.

And John Cale describes it this way:

It was this really tiny theater. The show really scared the shit out of a lot of people. Gerard Malanga started dancing with whips, and there were lights flashing, and six movies going simultaneously, and we were playing as loud as we could. It was really an assault on the senses. For the time. Now it would be nothing.

Soon after participating in these shows, Edie Sedgwick had a falling-out with the Warhol camp, apparently feeling eclipsed by Nico — who would end up singing lead on the song Lou Reed wrote about Edie, “Femme Fatale.” (The sad tale of Edie Sedgwick, who still had a few years to live at this point, is a topic for another time.)

It was around this time that Lou Reed and Nico had their brief and tempestuous affair, which supposedly ended with Nico declaring in public, “I can no longer make love to Jews.” According to one version of history, it was Nico who said to Lou “I’ll be your mirror,” inspiring one of his greatest songs. However, longtime paramour Shelley Albin claims that the song dates back to Lou’s college years, and another old girlfriend claimed it was really about “the sign Pisces, and its liquidity and duality.”