Image: Jean-Louis Atlan / Sygma via Getty Images
At one point, he even detunes his high E string to B mid-solo, while still frantically picking it, which is surely a first. On Run Run Run – one of rock’s most gloriously out-of-tune songs – Reed introduces us to Margarita Passion, Beardless Harry et al over Morrison’s queasy blues rhythm tuned down to D, before unleashing a feral, freeform solo combining squeals of feedback, John Lee Hooker-esque boogie, buzzy tremolo picking, random string bends and god knows what else. This was a trick that Reed had picked up from guitarist Jerry Vance and subsequently “filed away” it also makes an appearance later on in the album, on All Tomorrow’s Parties.
While the demonic whiplash of Cale’s electric viola dominates Venus In Furs, alongside it are two guitar parts from Reed, one spelling out the ‘chorus’ section in downstrokes, the other a psychedelic, Middle Eastern-inflected droning chord-melody line resulting from his ‘Ostrich’ tuning – a ‘trivial’ tuning where all of the guitar’s strings are tuned to the same note. By way of contrast, Femme Fatale’s intro creates the song’s unresolved feel by using contrasting guitar tones, Reed’s rolled off, claustrophobically bassy Cmaj 7 and F maj 9 chords looming behind Morrison’s trebly, static arpeggio. I’m Waiting For The Man sees Reed build tension with expressive snarls of open strings driving his train-like, distorted rhythm part behind Morrison’s hypnotic, bluesey cycling lead motif. On Sunday Morning, Reed’s country-folk guitar break has a luminous, comedown strangeness to it, thanks to its slackened strings (several of the album’s songs were in downtuned standard tuning, perhaps to help accommodate Cale’s viola). Guitar-wise, every one of the album’s 11 tracks has a burst of invention. Instead, they rapidly coalesced their sound into a rule-breaking blend of art-music experimentation, visceral rock ’n’ roll and streetwise literary lyricism that could be brutally atonal one minute and fragile and melodic the next: and at its heart was the axis of Reed and Morrison’s guitar pairing, with Cale alternating between viola, bass and other instruments, backed by the simpatico primitivism of Maureen Tucker’s drumming (there also were a few blues licks, but that’s by the by). “There were people who were really good at that. “We had a rule in the Velvet Underground: no blues licks,” Reed told Guitar World in 1998. With its pioneering tuning and lyrics (“You take a step forward, You step on your head”), the song was already sufficiently out of kilter with the prevailing wind in the mid-60s music industry and in the two years between the Velvet Underground’s formation and recording their debut album, Cale, Reed and second guitarist Morrison honed their experimental ambitions at a residency in New York’s Café Bizarre and as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable happenings. Pre-Velvets, Reed was a songwriter for Pickwick Records when he teamed up with rock-loving avant-garde viola player and multi-instrumentalist John Cale to promote Reed’s novelty-dance hit, The Ostrich.
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