Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed once said “if you’re going to talk about greats, there is no one greater than Raymond Chandler. I mean, after reading Raymond Chandler and going on to someone else, it’s like eating caviar and then turning to some real inferior dish.” Lou had a simple plan: to “take the sensibility of Raymond Chandler or Hubert Shelby (sic) or Delmore Schwartz or Poe and put it to rock music.” And when he formed the Velvet Underground that was exactly what he did. Taking a cure from film noir and pulp fiction, Reed and company would pull back the curtain that separated pop music from the world beyond “moon and June” love songs, creating in the process a new music verité—a rock noir, if you will.
It’s a contradiction so glaring it approaches paradox: a band that left its mark on rock music and musicians in a profound way, but who music was purposefully snubbed by the major outlets. Industry inertia was nearly comprehensive: record stores, radio stations, the music press, promoters, the marketing personnel and bean counters of the record labels who controlled the crucial distribution networks. Put simply, these people could not deal with this music in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. Coupled with critical indifference and public hostility, it all spelled an absence of commercial reward for the struggling Velvets. Pick your cliché: They Couldn’t Catch a Break; They Couldn’t Get Arrested; If It Wasn’t for Bad Luck, They Wouldn’t Have No Luck at All.
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