Can you start by telling us how this project came about?
In 2003, the London branch of Backbeat Books (which distribute several books I did for their US branch) expressed interest in working with me on future projects. The one we discussed that everyone had the most mutual enthusiasm for was a detailed chronological survey of the Velvet Underground's career. Backbeat has done books in the UK with a similar format for a few other artists, including the Beach Boys, Kinks, and Byrds.
At that time, however, the London branch needed approval from the bigger US office of Backbeat Books in San Francisco, who turned the idea down. The US branch of Backbeat was sold in late ’06, and as the UK branch was not part of the sale, they were then free to green-light book ideas without needing a go-ahead from overseas. They asked me whether I was still interested in doing the Velvets book. I was, we came to a deal shortly afterward, and I started researching and writing the book in spring ’07.
This was an incredible undertaking. You list over 100 texts in your bibliography, and it seems there may have been more not mentioned (I find it hard to believe that you overlooked Clinton Heylin’s From The Velvets To The Voidoids, for example). Can you give us an idea of the process you went through to convert all the existing info into a retroactive diary?
There's no shortcut to this – it was a matter of finding everything published about the Velvet Underground I could, making notes as to especially valuable information, and combining it into what I hoped was the most readable and easiest-to-follow text. At the risk of sounding immodest, could I say that even though more than 100 books are listed in the bibliography, there was a lot more information I collected besides what was contained in those books. There were many newspaper and magazine articles I found, quite a few of which have never been reprinted and are only available at libraries, on microfilm, or from private collectors. Also I did about 100 first-hand interviews specifically for the book, as well as combing through memorabilia in private collections, finding unreleased recordings and rare films, helping locate rare photos/posters/graphics used in the book, etc.
Your book has certainly taken its place as the definitive bible for any serious Velvets fan. But for the casual fan perusing through the many VU books on the market, why should yours be the one to pick up?
I'm not an objective judge of this, but first of all, I don't think there are "many" VU books on the market, or at least not many when compared to some other famous bands of the same era like the Beatles, Beach Boys, Who, etc. There are a little more than half a dozen books about the VU on the market, though some more about the VU has been written in books about Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico.
I think my book has by far the most information about the band – more than 300,000 words – and the most accurate. A lot of the information hasn't been published before. But more than the quantity, I strived to make it a quality work where you can follow the trajectory of their career in great detail; get many behind-the-scenes stories about how the songs were written, how the records were recorded, and the strange and colorful concerts they did; and also get a strong sense of how the Velvet Underground were perceived by audiences and the media at the time, not just several decades after they broke up. Many reference books have good information of this sort, but are pretty dry reads, just presenting the bare/essential facts. I've tried to make it a book that not only has such information, but is fun to read and gives you insight into the creative process through which these very different people made such classic music, which is really the most important thing about the Velvet Underground when you come down to it.
You mention you unearthed previously unveiled info – can you give us some highlights of information that hasn’t been published before?
One interesting highlight for me was hearing May 11, 1965 Lou Reed demos of ‘Heroin’ at Pickwick Records that have never circulated, not even on bootleg. These are really the earliest known recordings on which he sounds like the legendary singer-songwriter with whom we're familiar, and I was surprised by how close the words and music were to the studio version he recorded for “the banana album” about a year later, though these two May ’65 versions have more of a Dylanish talking blues feel.
I interviewed Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol's business manager and essentially the co-manager of the Velvets with Warhol from around the beginning of ’66 through mid-67. According to him, when the VU broke from Warhol, Reed disbanded the Velvets as "he wanted to end the management contract before any hoped-for record royalties came in...[He] told us they weren't going to play any more, and he asked for a release from their contract...Once they were released he re-formed the group without Nico." I'd never heard that story before.
There's long been a great amount of mystery about their so-called "missing fourth album," which would have been based around tracks recorded for MGM in ’69, none of which were issued while the group were active. Some of the mystery has been whether these were intended for an album at all, or just demos or works-in-progress meant to stall MGM as they looked to get out of their deal with the label. In a Philadelphia underground paper, I found the only comments from the band about the situation during the time itself, made in late August ’69. Reed told the reporter the fourth album had been recorded, but wouldn't be released for some time yet, as "it would be totally senseless. In a few years it will be ahead of its time, but now it just won't sell and will go unknown. We've had enough of that." Doug Yule was amused by this story when I told him, and thought it might be an example of their post-Warhol manager Steve Sesnick talking through Reed.
As for photos, I was glad to find and be able to include a previously unpublished picture of the Primitives, the band in which Lou Reed, John Cale, Tony Conrad, and Walter De Maria played in late ’64 and early ’65 before Reed and Cale formed the Velvet Underground. This is only the second picture of the Primitives to be published, and Lou Reed almost looks like a wholesome teen idol at this point.
As there are numerous other examples and I don't want to take up a huge amount of space here, I'll add that plenty of others are described on my website, at www.richieunterberger.com/vu.html.
I’m sure it was as frustrating to you as it is for the readers to pore through so many conflicting accounts of such key events as when John and Lou first met, when the band first met Andy Warhol, when Maureen replaced Angus MacLise, when they “fired” Andy, what led to Cale’s firing, when did Cale leave the band; how did they come to choose Doug Yule; what led to Nico’s firing and when did she leave the band, et. al. What was your ultimate process for selecting the approximate dates and best guestimates of when all these and other such events occurred?
There's no precise method or criteria I use for these things; they vary from case to case. Generally, I go through all the sources I can, weigh how credible they are and how many people seem to remember things which way, and try to make an informed judgment as to when and how events took place. When there are different accounts, as there often are, I try to present the different sides of the case, sometimes noting if an account seems especially likely or unlikely. When you have a document such as a poster or contract or newspaper report, obviously that helps in establishing probable dates and circumstances, usually more so than foggy memories do several decades later. When some account is obviously flagrantly wrong – like the guy who told me he saw the VU at Max's Kansas City after the Ramones and Blondie had started to make names for themselves in New York, for example – you just don't refer to it.
Why do you think there are so many conflicting versions of these key events. Could it truly be chalked up to memory failure, or do you think there might have been a little bit of having the interviewers on – toying with them by making up random answers to what seem like important and legitimate questions, simply out of boredom of having been asked the same things over and over?
Having done many interviews – not just for this book, but also for my other books and other projects over the years, probably somewhere between 500 and 1000 in all – I do actually believe that the great majority of these conflicting versions and inaccuracies are due to fading memories, not deliberate attempts to mislead interviewers or readers. I know that Lou Reed sometimes has the reputation of being surly or mischievous with interviewers, as to some degree John Cale and Nico have. But it's not just the Velvet Underground and their associates that have conflicting memories of when, how, and in what sequence things happened. Almost all public figures (and probably people) do, all the way up to the Beatles, whose John Lennon couldn't properly remember the sequence of some of their releases even when interviewed at length by Rolling Stone right after the group broke up. Even when there's no particular reason to fudge details, and/or even when the musicians involved aren't famous, this often happens. It's rare when a musician keeps a diary or other records that can help pin down these things far more precisely, as Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones did, for instance. Possibly some events were clouded or collapsed in the mind of the musicians so that they remembered them in certain ways they wished to (as when Sterling Morrison incorrectly recalled Jefferson Airplane sharing the bill with them at the VU's May ’66 Fillmore shows in San Francisco, for example), but such instances didn't seem overly egregious.
Did you speak with Lou, John, or Moe, to clarify any of these discrepancies – or just to get their assistance with the project in general?
No, Reed and Cale's representatives did not respond to or successfully act upon my interview requests. Although Moe twice indicated she'd answer my questions by email, she did not reply to them after they were sent.
You tease a lot of VU fanatics with your detailed analyses of numerous “unofficial” releases. How important to your project was it to include these live and rehearsal recordings and tapes in the book, even if only the most fanatical Velvet fans have heard them?
It was pretty important, because one of the goals of the book was to have information and stories that haven't appeared elsewhere, especially if they shed light on the music and how it was created. Without either condoning or criticizing the practice of circulating unreleased music, it's also a fact that it's easier than it's ever been to find and hear such material, so it's not as obscure or hard to obtain as it once was.
I enjoyed the way you used these “archival” recordings to analyze the band’s development and transition – so much more can be discovered outside the band’s official studio releases. But you are always careful to point out the poor quality of some of these recordings. As you listened to the bootlegs and compared them to contemporary reviews of the performances, did you feel that the contemporary writers’ assessments were accurate? I mean, they were actually at the gigs, whereas your opinions are based on extremely rough audience recordings.
The writers of the time obviously had an advantage in being able to be present at these concerts and hear them, presumably in considerably better sound quality than listeners to an audience recording of the same show can. Sometimes the reviewers' accounts based upon live experiences are understandably more enthusiastic than mine can be when listening to a rough-sounding tape – though sometimes they were far harsher, especially if they didn't like or comprehend the Velvets' music. But as imperfect as they are, these recordings are the only documents that someone like me, who wasn't at these concerts (and was too young to have gone even if I'd been in all the cities where they'd taken place), can use to get a more concrete idea of what they played and how they played. On occasion, too, the concert tapes are of good enough quality that they provide a pretty good representation of how the band sounded like, as is the case with one of their October ’69 shows in Dallas; their November ’69 recordings at the Matrix club in San Francisco; and spring ’67 performance at the Gymnasium in New York.
You offer us a tantalizing tidbit in what may be one of the holy grails for Velvet completists – the reported pristine quality tapes of several late-68/early-69 gigs at the Boston Tea Party. Do you know if we are any closer to hearing these officially?
I'm not an insider among the people who make these decisions, but I haven't heard any indications that these are being considered for release in the near future. I think it's possible the sound quality isn't as pristine as some people might have indicated. Some of this material has been bootlegged, and in case these are the recordings they're talking about, the sound quality isn't exceptional.
Do you think the contemporary press that viciously tore into the band had a hidden agenda and, more often than not, tended to review more than just the music? I mean, there are many instances of reviewers complaining about Nico’s singing ability or the band’s aloof stage presence and, perhaps, missing the qualities of the music itself?
I don't think there was so much a hidden agenda as an inability to grasp or appreciate the VU's music, both because it was in some respects so avant-garde and ahead of its time, and because in the VU's earlier years (especially the Nico lineup years), a lot of writers reviewing the shows weren't even particularly rock fans. Sometimes the writers assigned to do the articles were just regular beat reporters or general entertainment reporters on the paper's staff. This changed, for the VU and many other bands, by the late ’60s, when even the daily papers often had younger writers who were actually knowledgeable rock fans, and the more alternative/underground ones definitely had such writers. The VU reviews from the late ’60s are actually pretty good on the whole, and sometimes ecstatic.
I do think that during the Warhol era (approximately January ’66-mid-67), some reviewers took aim at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable [EPI] shows because they thought Warhol's pop art and whole attitude was something of a put-on or cheap money-making gimmick that should be cut down to size. I comment on this more in my answer to the next question.
Do you feel they were unfairly seen as Warhol’s pet project and got caught up in the media circus, and critics, therefore, expected more out of them than had they just been another rock band from NYC?
In reviews during the Exploding Plastic Inevitable/Warhol era, the Velvet Underground often seemed viewed as just a part of a Warhol multimedia event, and their actual music was often ignored or dismissed. I don't know the exact figures, but it seems like Warhol gets ten times as much ink as the Velvet Underground in these accounts. Warhol's management of the band was kind of a double-edged sword. It got them a lot more instant attention than they could have without him, but his presence and involvement overshadowed the group in the media's minds, and the VU were sometimes discussed almost as if they were a mere prop in the EPI show, rather than a self-contained band of substantial merit. I don't think it's quite that the media expected more out of the band than the average rock group; I think it's more that they were viewing the concerts more as a Warhol event than a musical event, and thus not paying as much attention to the music as they could or should have.
I was surprised to read how much Warhol practically hated the whole idea of managing them and how they were bleeding him dry. I wasn’t sure if this was common knowledge, or something that is just coming to light recently? Or, since so much of this information was related by Andy’s manager, Paul Morrissey, do you feel he had an agenda to build up his own importance?
A lot of this sentiment, at least in my book, is from Paul Morrissey (who gave me a lengthy interview), rather than from other people involved in the VU story. I gave Morrissey's views substantial space because he was an insider who was there, being Warhol's business manager and essentially the co-manager of the band with Warhol, though he's not often credited as such. He did seem to do considerably more of the nuts and bolts work we usually associate with managers – getting them gigs, helping to organize the concerts, and such – than Warhol did. He might feel like his role's been relatively neglected by historians.
But though I wanted to represent his opinion on this in the book, it's not the only or definitive one. My own view is that Warhol might have disliked some of the more conventional aspects of artist management, but also did enjoy their music, being around them, and participating in the EPI events to some extent. It also seems like it's just hard to determine whether Warhol enjoyed or disliked anything, so unemotional was he in the face he presented to the public. I think he enjoyed his association with the VU more than not, but probably not so much so that he was set on continuing to work hard on their management when it was getting tiring and some personal/business hassles were becoming larger issues.
I was a little disappointed in the minimal information about the early days of Moe Tucker’s involvement and I thought, perhaps, there was a little too much Angus MacLise, who, despite being the original drummer, still seems like a marginal character in their overall history. Do you think that MacLise’s contribution was more critical to the band than Tuckers, or was this lack of early Moe info due to the overall limited amount of extant material on her involvement in the early days?
This wasn't intended as a slight on Tucker, who was undoubtedly far more important to the Velvet Underground than MacLise was. It's much more due to, as you mention, the limited amount of information on her pre-VU activities. Musically/artistically speaking, there simply weren't many such activities. She barely played music in public before joining the Velvets, and the specifics of even those appearances aren't well documented.
By contrast, MacLise engaged in quite a few such activities and those are much better documented, especially since a good number of his ’60s musical performances have now been made been available on CD. I don't see it as a matter of emphasizing MacLise over Tucker, just a function of what's available to write about their pre-66 artistic work. In any case, I didn't mind giving MacLise some space as his life, music, and relationship to the VU have usually been rather sketchily covered, and it's part of my book's general mission to make such information available.
I wouldn't call him a "marginal" character in the VU's development myself. He was their original drummer for the best part of ’65, and he did have some influence on how their music took shape, even if Reed and Cale had much more. Also, he moved in much the same musical circles as Cale did in ’63-’65, when they sometimes played together, and were both part of La Monte Young's groups.
There is quite a bit of information about John Cale’s pre-VU avant garde period with Tony Conrad, LaMonte Young, et. al. How important do you think this was to the overall VU development?
It was very important, and has even sometimes been a bit overemphasized by those who view the most avant-garde aspects of the VU as their most important ones. But there's no doubt that the drones, nerve-shredding instrument amplification, and minimalistic patterns Cale explored with Young and Conrad cast a big shadow over much of the VU's work while John was with the band. That's particularly evident in Cale's electric viola work, of course, but also in some of his keyboards. I also think that in general, Cale was the VU member most instrumental in getting them to think of combining rock music with avant-garde musical elements, whether or not he had the specific ideas along those lines in every time it showed up in their music. I also believe that his avant-garde flourishes were far more striking when injected into Reed's rock songs than they were, or could have been, in the far less accessible, wordless arrangements of the music Young's groups made.
Ultimately, it seems that it was Cale’s avant garde streaks that conflicted with Reed’s desire to be more accessible that led to Cale’s firing. Do you think the band would have been as important or influential if their personalities weren’t as rigid and there was more compromise between the two of them?
That's hard to say. As with many bands, I think some of the friction between them, both artistic and personal, helped raise the music to levels neither could have achieved on his own, or working with other musical partners. On the other hand, it was a shame that they couldn't have produced at least a little more music together, especially in the studio.
Maureen Tucker later expressed regret that the VU weren't able to do at least one more album with Cale, and Cale himself expressed regret that he wasn't able to participate in studio recordings of some songs they'd already started to arrange and work out in performance. Yet I do think that Doug Yule was a more suitable musician for the more straightforward rock-oriented material Reed wrote for their third and fourth albums (and their "missing" fourth album from ’69 sessions). In an ideal world, we would have not only the album the VU did with Yule in late ’68 (The Velvet Underground, colloquially known as "the third album"), but also that same material recorded around the same time with Cale in the lineup. In our early-twentieth-century era, such a thing is more possible than it was, with expanded CDs and download-only versions and such being available for those artists who want to present different interpretations of the same material within the same time frame (i.e. with artists who present electric and acoustic versions of the same album). But it wasn't so possible in the late-60s, and it's another of those what-if scenarios that can't be redone.
It seems that the post-Cale period didn’t produce as essential documents as those first two albums, and perhaps this is the result of Reed having too much of a chokehold over the rest of the band? I think it was that conflict that forced each of them to be better writers and performers and ultimately a much stronger band than the latter period where everyone went along to get along (with Reed). That lack of combativeness seems to have diluted their material, and consequently their influence and importance?
I know a good number of fans and critics feel the way you outlined in the above question, but personally I think the Reed-Yule lineup period was about as good as the Cale one. As Tucker once put it, the music was still about as good; it was just different. I think The Velvet Underground (aka "the third album") is great, and their second-best LP behind The Velvet Underground and Nico (aka "the banana album"); another big fan of the third album in particular is Brian Eno, as just one example of how the post-Cale period had a substantial influence. I also think 1969 Velvet Underground Live, recorded in fall ’69 with the Reed-Yule lineup, is the greatest live rock album, and not without its highly adventurous/experimental moments, though generally the post-Cale era was more song-oriented and less experimental. Doing interviews for the book, I was surprised when a couple people who interviewed me expressed a very strong preference for the Reed-Yule era over the Reed-Cale one.
That's not to say that I think the Cale and post-Cale eras are equal in all respects. Generally, I think the Cale era was the group's most creative. But I don't think it's true the band went downhill after John left, though Loaded is my least favorite of their records (and even there some VU fans vociferously disagree).
Getting more to the specifics of your question, though generally Reed dominated the music more post-Cale than during the Cale era, there wasn't a lack of creative spark and collaboration among the band members. There weren't non-Reed musical personalities in the band as strong and idiosyncratically original as Cale (or Nico), but Doug Yule has said that he did actually have quite a bit of input into the arrangements, live and in the studio. The guitar interplay between Reed and Morrison reached all-time heights of creativity and intensity, as often documented on 1969 Velvet Underground Live, especially now that Sterling was free to concentrate solely on guitar (having often had to play bass when Cale was in the lineup and playing viola and keyboards). Ultimately I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the premise of your question: I think the band interaction that led to the VU's greatest innovations did diminish after Cale left, but not that much, and not as much due to Reed's domination as is sometimes portrayed.
Your book certainly comes closer than any other single source to relating the Velvets’ story, but do you think the definitive tale will ever be told – considering all the factual discrepancies, the deaths of Nico and Sterling, and simply failed memories?
No book can ever include all the details of an artist's lives with complete accuracy, even the most famous ones, up to the Beatles and Elvis. Even if the surviving Velvets wrote autobiographies, these could well be colored or distorted by personal biases or unintentionally contain inaccuracies (as Cale's autobiography did), simply because of the imperfections of memory and the lack of comprehensive documentation kept at the time. All that noted, it's too bad that Sterling Morrison didn't complete his autobiography as he intended to do. He didn't get far before he died, though.
It seems strange that you refute so much of what Cale relates in his autobiography. That almost seems to suggest that any of the members’ quotes should be suspect. Did you uncover a lot of such discrepancies between what was reported in various contemporary accounts and what the members may have said in later interviews?
Yes, but I'll reiterate that this really isn't uncommon in researching the careers of rock bands, from the Beatles on down. The Velvet Underground aren't particularly unusual in this respect, or in how often such discrepancies came up.
What was the most frustrating or annoying aspect of this project?
I was disappointed I couldn't do interviews with everyone I would have liked to have spoken with – not just Reed, Cale, and Tucker, but some of their associates. This is something that's happened with every book I've done; not everyone is accessible or interested in talking about the past. I was also disappointed that Universal Records, which administers the pre-70 Velvet Underground recordings, did not make any of their documentation about VU sessions accessible. Some collectors/interview subjects who had indicated they had rare and unusual material I could survey as part of my research flaked out and didn't come through – again, an annoyance that's been part of every book project I've done.
Would you suggest that anyone interested in the book first go out and pick up the music – or go back and dig it out of their collections and relisten to it? Personally, I think the impact of your work might be lost on anyone not familiar with the records.
I think this could be said of any book where you're not too familiar with the artist – if I was reading about an early-twentieth century country musician or early-twenty-first century alt-folk musician I hadn't heard much or at all, the book would be lost on me too. I think you have to assume some interest and knowledge on the part of a reader who's likely to pick up a book on an artist, rather than figuring you have to write a text so compelling that it's going to captivate someone who's heard them barely or at all, which really isn't going to be possible. That might mean a Velvet Underground book will by definition have a much more limited audience than one on Green Day or someone like that, but that's okay with me, I wanted to write a Velvet Underground book.
The way everyone reads books is different, but personally, I don't think it's a requirement that you go out and listen to all the VU you can before reading this, whether it's in your collection or not. When I'm reading about someone I like, I can usually understand most or all of the points of reference from my memories of the records. If they're describing music I haven't heard, that's still of value if they're describing it well, and might incite me to try and hear it if it's available.
There have been a few diary-type books on major artists in the past, from Christopher Hjort’s Byrds book (So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star: The Byrds Day-By-Day 1965-1973) to Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Chronicle, etc. Did you review any of these or similar books for inspiration or formatting directions, or did you come up with that diary concept on your own?
I have a bunch of these books (including the two you mention), but I didn't review any of these specifically before writing my book. The diary concept, and the specific format used in the book, was determined by what had previously been used in Jawbone's series of "Day By Day" books, all of which have the same general format. Christopher Hjort's Byrds book is part of that series, which is why the format of the VU book and that one (as well as others in the series) have a lot of similarities.
You researched hundreds of books, articles, liner notes, etc. to get your source information – how long did it then take you to reorganise all that information chronologically – it seems like an enormous undertaking. I imagine the book was, perhaps, years in the preparation? For example, you thank Greg Shaw for his contributions, but he died five years before it was eventually published.
I started the book in the spring of 2007, and finished at the end of September ’08, though there was a lot of additional work over the next six months in production, research, and the addition of some odds and ends. I'd been a Velvet Underground fan for 30 years, though, so I did have a good deal of the material before I started writing, though it wasn't until I started the writing that I organized and drew from it in a systematic manner. I hope I'm not harping on this, but again I want to point out that the research wasn't just a matter of organizing information from previously published sources. I did a lot of first-hand interviews too, which also took a good deal of time to organize, conduct, transcribe, and distill.
Incidentally, the Greg Shaw mentioned in the acknowledgments is not the Greg Shaw of Bomp fame who died a few years ago. It's an entirely different writer also named Greg Shaw, who's the author of the book The Doors on the Road, and is still very much alive.
What were some of the more unusual or shocking discoveries that you made while researching and writing the book? Things that, perhaps, you were unaware of before you started writing it?
I covered some of these in my answer to the previous question about previously unveiled info, and rather than repeat myself, note again that plenty are described on my website, at www.richieunterberger.com/vu.html. One other worth noting, however, because it had been referred to before but only in very obscure sources, was that the song ‘White Light/White Heat’ itself was not wholly inspired by drug experiences (specifically amphetamine use), as is usually believed. Another probable inspiration was Alice Bailey's occult book A Treatise on White Magic, which advises control of the astral body by a "direct method of relaxation, concentration, stillness and flushing the entire personality with pure White Light, with instructions on how to 'call down a stream of pure White Light.'" It's known for certain that Reed was familiar with the volume, as he calls it "an incredible book" in a November 1969 radio interview in Portland, Oregon. That increases my respect for him as a songwriter, knowing that the song was more about transcending to different levels of experience than about drug use specifically.
Another interesting discovery, as it happens, is the one you ask about in the very next question.
I was surprised to discover Reed’s numerous references to the songs all being specifically sequenced on the albums to tell a story – almost as if the first three LPs were meant as a box set, with each subsequent LP being a sequel to the previous one (which explains his extreme dissatisfaction with the resequencing of the Loaded tracks). Had you picked up on that on your own when you first heard these albums or was this a revelation to you as well?
I hadn't picked up on this, though I'd read references to his having structured the third album in particular along these lines. To be honest, I think there's a bit of poetic license in Reed's depiction of these albums as telling a story – it's not a story even in the nominal senses that, say, Tommy and S.F. Sorrow tell a story. But I think overall Reed's point is a valid one – that the albums were sequenced in a very specific way to create a certain mood (if not a conventional plot-driven story), and that furthermore, each album was constructed to set a much different mood than the others, with the moods of the first, second, and third albums adding up to an experience that had the most impact when they were heard in that order.
Of all the great books you’ve written, would you say this was the most difficult to research and assemble and complete?
First, thanks for your praise for my books, I appreciate it. All of my books have been difficult to research/assemble/complete in different ways, so it's hard to compare them and say which was the hardest. I will say that I think the Velvet Underground book has the most in-depth research of any of my books in terms of digging up previously unknown or obscure information. But my Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll book was difficult in regards to the numbers of interviews I had to arrange for a 60-chapter book; my two-volume work on ’60s folk-rock (Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High) was difficult not only in assembling all the interviews and research, but also organizing it into a lengthy narrative, not just a chronologically-sequenced description of events; and The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film was a challenge in just finding all of the material to write about. Once the research and interviews are done, however, the writing itself is not the most difficult part; in fact, it goes relatively quickly and is the most enjoyable part, aside from conducting the interviews.
Are there other artists that you’d be interested in giving the day-by-day diary approach or was this just too exhausting a task?
There are other artists I'd be interested in giving this approach, but none as much as the Velvet Underground. Part of what attracted me to the project was the combination of the Velvets being a great, fascinating band, and their career not having been nearly as heavily researched as those of the era's superstars, which gave me the opportunity to uncover a lot of previously unknown information and stories. I can't think of another major artist where that combination would be present in such an interesting fashion. There are other artists I'd be interested in doing such a book for, like Janis Joplin, Van Morrison (just the first ten years of his career), Joni Mitchell (just the first ten years of her career), and others. I don't know if I'll have the opportunity to do such books on those or other artists, however.
Your book’s last entry was about two years ago – have there been any significant findings or activity on the VU front since then?
No, in part because there don't seem to be any plans to issue unreleased Velvet Underground material, even in the form of expanded editions of their second and third albums (the first and fourth albums have already gotten expanded CD treatment). It's been interesting for me, though, that even in the five months since the book's come out, I've been contacted by about 15 readers who have some sort of information to impart that I didn't find in my original research – accounts of concerts, precise dates when things happened, leads to additional rare audiovisual material, that sort of thing. If there's ever an opportunity to do a second edition of the book, I should definitely have some material to add.
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