Opposites Attract

mark greif considers the congruences of the velvet underground & the grateful dead.

Both bands originally imagined themselves as the ‘Warlocks’ essentially because each had a vision of enchantment, underlaid with darkness. – Mark Greif, “The Right Kind of Pain”

Mark Greif throws out a number of provocative ideas in his review of The Velvet Underground by Mark Witts. Most strikingly, he fruitfully compares the Velvet Underground to the Grateful Dead in order to think through the stale (but not entirely unaccurate) binary of California hippie rock and New York City proto-punk.

…When you look at the state of both bands at their contemporaneous founding moments in 1965-66, you find that the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead started out, in an odd way, as basically the same band. In fact, both bands started with the same name in 1965: the Warlocks. And both were quickly taken up by other cultural movements and artists from other genres to furnish ‘house bands’ for collective projects.

…The most striking fact is that, like the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground started out as a platform for extremely long, wandering, repetitive, live improvisations, appropriate to multimedia events.

…The logical consequence is that the Velvet Underground were not necessarily anti-psychedelic as such (though that was what they said), but instead insisted on a different, less sunny affect-world than was associated with West Coast psychedelia: ‘We thought that the solution lay in providing hard drugs for everyone,’ Cale told Witts in a BBC interview, but ‘there is already a very strong psychedelic element in sustained sound, which is what we had . . . so we thought that putting viola [drones] behind guitars and echo was one way of creating this enormous space . . . which was itself a psychedelic experience.’

This would be the meaning of the odd simultaneity of approach between the Velvets and the Dead when they started out: 1966 was a moment in the history of popular music when the phenomenology of popular song was changing, partly under outside ‘art-cultural’ influences (the Merry Pranksters, Warhol’s Factory), and partly, one presumes, because of increases in amplification, the widespread ‘electrification’ of folk music (Dylan, Reed’s hero, went electric in 1965), and evidence from Liverpool to Los Angeles of a wish to record or augment the effects of drugs vocally and musically (the Beatles, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors etc).

Once he explores the striking similarities, Greif moves to the important differences:

While both groups initially aimed to hypnotize with their music, lyrically they were worlds apart. Lyrics are fate in pop. Bands become committed in funny ways to the lyrical content and thematics of their work, perhaps through the loop of the expectations of their audiences, perhaps because they’re singing them every night themselves. Grateful Dead lyrics, from the beginning, however carelessly put together, were about roads and rivers. They drew from blues and bluegrass a promise of continual rambling – with the occasional respite of dew-bejewelled meadows, barefoot dancing, and rolling in the rushes down by the riverside. It’s no accident that their first single was ‘The Golden Road’, that their signature song (apart from the tripped-out ‘Dark Star’) was ‘Truckin”, and that the band matured, from 1970 onwards, by turning the endless-trip LSD premise into an endless-travelling touring premise, summed up in the ultimate Dead-lyric cliché: ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been.’ Velvet Underground lyrics, by contrast, are about not going outdoors, and the wish for pleasurable self-destruction (‘I thank God that I’m good as dead’). …The Dead were fated by their lyrics to travel, which they did, creating a unique phenomenon of mass social affiliation across thirty years of steady touring (with just a one-year hiatus in 1975), and playing, much of the time, to an even mix of loving aficionados and grotesque burn-outs. …The Velvet Underground were fated by their lyrics never to attain a live audience, but to be passed on, from hand to hand, on record.

What gets interesting is that after focusing on the lyrics as the crucial difference between the Velvets and the Dead, Greif moves back from the lyrics to the music.

He puts forth a theory of music succeeding through “congruence.” It’s an odd word to use when listening to the Velvet Underground, since one thinks more often of their intense sonic dissonance. But by congruence, Greif means that the lyrics and the sound of the Velvets compliment each other to produce a powerful emotional experience: that of the “closet drama” of vicarious transgression in which listeners, who came to the band as a secret “passed on, from hand to hand, on record,” could experience danger, rebellion, and abjectness at a distance.

In fact, for Greif, the lyrics in fact feed back into the sound. He argues that the semi-incoherent, naughty lyrics of the infamous Velvet Underground classic “Sister Ray” are in fact a kind of nonsensical signage pointing the listener toward the screeching, grinding sounds, rather than vice-versa. Lyrics are background; sound becomes front and center.

Sitting on the same sixties stoop? Velvet Underground and Grateful Dead.

By returning back to the sound as the key component, Greif somewhat undermines his Velvets-Dead comparison. Wait, wasn’t it the sound they had in common, but the lyrics that distinguished the two groups from each other?

Yet, crucially, with a small adjustment to Greif’s theory of congruence, his comparison can be understood as quite convincing.

Perhaps it is not through harmony of lyric and sound, but rather through a broader patten of incongruence — through playing with the possibilies of incongruence as aesthetic experience — that these bands both converged and diverged. Across the continent from each other, they grappled with the same new possibilities of electronic amplification, collective social experimentation, and the strange Warlockian alchemy of avant-gardism and mass culture. Through their shared (though difference) tendencies toward inconsistencies, contradictions, and disorienting fragments incompletely brought together, both bands constructed parallel audiences, superficial kinds of communities in which individuals could experience surprisingly powerful awakenings and discoveries of self and group.

Incongruity marked both bands. Darkness always haunted the supposedly happy hippie world of the Dead, beginning with the addictions of their central figure, Jerry Garcia; and there was often a kind of heartfelt secret handshake among Velvet listeners that provided a humanistic bond among the fantasies of bondage.

Thinking of both groups as caught up in and playing with impossible contradictions, incomplete puzzles, and odd tensions allows us to see the deeper commonalities between tie-dyed hippies and safety-pinned punks while also keeping in mind the important stylistic and social differences.