Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

By Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga
Cooper Square Press, $17


Told through delightfully bitchy quotes and contemporary diary entries, Up-Tight tracks the Velvet Underground’s progress from their beginnings in the midst of New York’s mid-’60s avant-garde music scene to their eventual demise in the face of widespread public disinterest in 1970.

It reveals that when not changing the face of rock forever, the Velvets enjoyed taking amphetamines and upsetting virtually every music-industry figure they came into contact with: Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham called them “disgusting germs,” while Cher claimed that their music would “replace nothing, except maybe suicide.”

They also loved provoking one another: When Lou Reed announces that his sister will be attending one of the band’s gigs, John Cale and Sterling Morrison bet $100 on who will seduce her first, “with the amount doubled if she turned out to be ugly…Lou managed a few phrases of profound loathing as John and I laughed and laughed.”

However, there were fewer chuckles during their 1993 reunion, which Reed seems to have deliberately sabotaged in order to safeguard his reputation as rock’s biggest bastard. Authors Victor Bockris and onetime Velvet Underground dancer Gerard Malanga cover the reunion tour’s bitter collapse with their customary dry wit and detail — then lose a point for apparently not noticing that poor old Sterling Morrison died in 1995.
—James Slaughter