Hot on the heels of exhuming the Motions in New York in 1969, I stumbled upon this clip of the mighty Loaded-era Velvet Underground playing at a camp ground at White Rock Lake, Texas that very same year. Forgive me if this is old news to you, but I thought it was pretty damn remarkable.
While I was fully aware of who Lou Reed was, at the time, I didn’t discover the Velvet Underground until I got to college in 1985. This came via my friendship with a fellow scowly music geek named Jay (`twas Jay that also turned me onto the glory of The Stooges). With a single airing of “Waiting for The Man,” Jay had me entirely captivated by the Velvet Underground, opening up a whole new, crucial chapter of music discovery for me that led to further revelations like The Modern Lovers, The MC5, Berlin-era Bowie, King Crimson and beyond. Were it not for Jay, I’d probably still be subsiding on a strict sonic diet of Alien Sex Fiend, Venom and the Cro-Mags today.
In any case, one seemed pretty hard-pressed to find any evidence that the Velvets existed in anything other than a strictly gritty, black & white world, perpetually behind impenetrable black sunglasses and summarily decked out in stylishly funereal attire. Though well ahead of their time in most respects, they seemed to inescapably inhabit an era prior to the technicolor and Kodachrome.
Not entirely so, as it turns out.
Here’s the official description:
The film footage was first revealed to the world about a year ago courtesy of the G. WILLIAMS JONES FILM AND VIDEO ARCHIVE AT SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY (SMU). It is a recording of elements of ‘Dallas Peace Day’ which was part of a nationwide day of protest called the ‘Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam’ on 15 October 1969 at White Rock Lake, Dallas TX.
The video footage (perhaps the only high-quality colour footage that exists of the band pre the 1993 reunion) is obviously of stunningly good quality, but unfortunately, the audio track was virtually non-existent although faint snippets of ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Beginning To See The Light’ can be discerned. So in the spirit of that, I crudely overlaid the audio of the latter song that was recorded originally as part of a bootleg of the famous ‘Matrix’ shows in San Francisco, 26-27 November, 1969 that I liberated from Disc 5 of the 45th Anniversary/Super-Deluxe edition of the 1969 self-titled/grey album. I selected it based on sonic quality, although it is virtually indistinguishable from the version that appeared on the ‘1969: Velvet Underground Live /Volume 1’ album that indeed had been recorded in Dallas within a few days of this peace-day. So, I am confident that what I present here is authentically close to what would have been seen and heard that day and have I have kept virtually every frame of footage that included either the band or the audience during their set.
The band quite evidently had shed some of the noir appearance of the Andy Warhol/John Cale period and this Mark II/rebooted version has a lot more sunshine about them in every sense and along with Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker is newly recruited Doug Yule, who seems to get most of the camera’s attention.
Intriguingly, I’ve since been told that the footage was recorded for/by Stoney Burns (seen alongside Sterling wearing sheriff’s hat) who was a well-known counter-culture journalist running a publication called ‘Dallas Notes’ at the time, that was in effect shut down the following year after a heavy-handed Police raid where virtually everything was seized (typewriters, credit-cards, telephones etc etc) including camera equipment and rolls of film which may explain it’s the disappearance and remarkable standard of preservation ...apparently there had been an unsuccessful challenge to get all this material returned that had reached as high as the US Supreme Court!
NB: By the way ...Should one be tempted to share with the world, one's opinion that the Velvets were "just a garage band" (a common enough motif in comments on the original 'up' to become irritating); first-of-all, dig out your static-cloth to wipe the baby batter from your prog-rock LPs and then perhaps explain why you clicked on this in the first place …just saying!
Without further ado,…enjoy….
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