Phoney artist, phoney band: Sterling Morrison on guitar (on film)

It was certainly an investment of my precious time, but your humble correspondent is nothing if not diligent - yes, I've just watched all three parts of Cam Forrester's lengthy YouTube documentary on the Velvet Underground's Sterling Morrison. Yeah, man, nearly four hours of chat and more chat about how this lanky, moustachio-d guitarist (and bassist) held down the VU sound while Lou Reed and John Cale fought for dominance, Andy Warhol um'd and ah'd his way through various art experiments with the group, their later manager Steve Sesnick apparently earnt the band's enmity with his tricky behaviour, and Moe Tucker bashed away at her drums, apparently just content to be in a band. Well no, this is a very crude (un-serious) summary and Sterling: The Velvet Warrior is - in my admittedly not-very-expert opinion - a thorough, fair-minded assessment of the guitar player in a key band in ... er, well, a key band in the entire history of rock and roll music. Yeah, roll over Beatles-hoven ... Anyway, anyone with the slightest interest in punk/post-punk and any variants of "art-rock" and experimental music will, of course, already be fairly conversant with the Velvet Underground's music and know something about their basic story. This three-part doc is, I guess, for people a bit like me - fairweather VU fans who'd like a deeper hit. Yeah, when the VU smack begins to flow ... So, as a non-specialist here's what I found interesting in Sterling: The Velvet Warrior:

*Morrison appears to have been more "grounded" than Reed and Cale and acted as a sort of arbiter of their various artistic disputes. Forrester calls him the "sensible" one. It also seems that Morrison's viewpoint and input were taken seriously by Reed and Cale. 

*Morrison met Reed at Syracuse University in New York State with, apparently, Reed hearing Morrison and his mates playing records in the dorm room below his own and going downstairs to see about borrowing some records because he was running out of stuff ("blues records") to play on his campus radio show.

*Morrison was inspired by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Reed, Lightnin' Hopkins and doo wop songs.

*Morrison says the band admired "well-chosen notes" (eg the guitar riff in the Rolling Stones' Last Time) and he reckons their early "sensibility" (c.1965-66) was closer to obscure "English bands" than US pop outfits of the time. Cale evidently used to travel back to the UK during this period, bringing back records. Which ones exactly is not mentioned. 

*With the first album, Warhol's "producer" role was apparently pretty much him saying things like "oh yeah, it's great" to everything they suggested or did, while Tom Wilson did the actual production work. 

*The White Light/White Heat album was "doomed", says Morrison, because of the way the band chose to record it in the studio - essentially playing fiercely loud and all together. "The louder we played, the quieter they had to do the mastering", he says. He also says they decided they'd only do one take of Sister Ray and use it come what may to avoid band disputes over which version to use. 

*Morrison comments on how the Exploding Plastic Inevitable-era shows saw the VU sandwiched between a backdrop of Warhol films (sometimes as many as four playing simultaneously) and a foreground of the dancers, especially Gerard Malanga writhing about with his whip. He seems to make this comment entirely neutrally (ie not complaining). 

*Morrison also - when speaking many years later anyway - has a pretty keen awareness of how the band were viewed in their early (Factory) days: "Andy was the phoney artist and we were the phoney band". 

*Again, possibly with the benefit of hindsight, Morrison contrasts his own attitude to Lou Reed's. Reed, according to Morrison, always wanted to be a big pop success, while he (SM) was happy for the band simply to be a means of having "a good time". This also largely seems to have been Mo Tucker's attitude. 

*In a similar vein, Morrison also says (near the beginning of the first doc), that "if you're not intent on succeeding at all costs, you can't possibly sell out". True, I guess, though the various grumbles we hear from the band about their record companies (Verve, MGM, Atlantic) not promoting their records also seems to slightly cut against this claim. 

*And yet more on this anti-commercial ethos: "we were all really contemptuous of hype", says Morrison. Fair enough, though I did notice how this non-hype band were being hyped for shows at places like the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1966 on the basis of Warhol's name. He was the famous one, the band were virtually unknown. 

*It was also a slight shock to me to hear Doug Yule (Cale's replacement) saying that VU's natural habitat (at least when he joined the band in 1968) was the 1,500-capacity "ballrooms" such as the Boston Tea Party and the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Yule reckons that by 1969 these were closing down and the band were caught between smaller places that they'd outgrown and huge arena venues which weren't right for them. And there I was thinking the VU were a prototypical small-venue indie band. 

*And again, I was pretty stunned to hear that the band made $16,000 for just one week playing at the Dom in St Marks Place in New York. Really, $16,000? 

*And speaking of the Dom, Morrison evinces real anger at the memory of Dylan's slippery manager Albert Grossman gaining control of the Dom in late summer 1966. Grossman was a "criminal", says Morrison.

Bright boy: Sterling Morrison 

Oh dear, now we're into the weeds of money making and artistic ethics. (Actually, a very Warholian intersection). Anyway, I found this full-immersion three-part documentary on a key musician from the mighty Velvet Underground thoroughly engrossing. For one thing, I think it's well executed. In a way it's essentially a standard cut-and-paste doc of archive footage (live performance footage, old interviews, a few fragments from Warhol's excellent Screen Tests), photos, snippets of quotes we see on screen and little blasts of their music. But, rather nicely, Forrester has also cut in various clips of himself playing Morrison's guitar and bass parts, filmed with the focus on the guitars and the playing (his upper body is not shown in the shots). It's slightly repetitive but it works - save, I didn't overly like to see a promo ad for a guitar shop in these passages (financing, eh?). Overall Sterling: The Velvet Warrior is a rich mix. Narration from Forrester (with noticeably very crisp diction), Morrison's quotes voiced very effectively by a voice actor called Wyatt Markus, a steady stream of image, text and music. One quibble is that some of the subtitling appears extremely early as if it "anticipates" what's going to be said - a glitch? But no, it's well paced and very informative. Among other things, Forrester's film demonstrates the value of making documentaries done chiefly for consumption by fans on places like YouTube: they can be almost as long and as "self-indulgent" (which this wasn't) as you like. A typical TV version of this documentary - fearful of tiring its intended audience - would have been butchered and compressed into an almost unwatchable 60 minutes.  

A final word on Sterling Morrison. He comes out of this film (I suppose unsurprisingly) as a dignified, ethical man who deserves a lot more credit for the Velvet Underground's amazing work. One key point the documentary fixes on is Lou Reed's pretty ruthless ejection of John Cale from the band. In retrospect Morrison regrets not opposing this more forcefully than he did at the time. He just wanted the band to go on, he says. This uneasy feeling seems to have lingered with him for years. Later, when he'd left the disintegrating band ("withdrew") and become a teaching assistant and PhD student (medieval literature) at the University of Texas in Austin, he himself gets kicked out of a "bar band" called the Bizarros that he'd semi-casually got hooked up with. Apparently Morrison didn't speak to the band member (Bill Bentley) who informed him of this sacking for years - a sort of psychic pay-back for the whole Reed/Cale incident. Hmm, who says rock and roll isn't deep?