Reed grew up on Long Island where his rebellious impulses led him to rock 'n' roll, as well as sexual and drug experimentation. By the early-'60s he was also attracted to the wildness of avant-garde jazz and the intellectual and emotional stimulation of poetry. Reed was also strongly influenced by troubled poet/educator Delmore Schwartz while studying at Syracuse University. After graduating, Reed lurched in another direction, writing and producing hack pop and rock tunes for Pickwick Records in NYC.

After Reed and Cale met, they performed briefly as the Primitives - even recording a dance spoof single called "The Ostrich" - then mutated into the Velvet Underground, named after a particularly virulent S&M novel. They sought not just to entertain, but to challenge: to prove that rock 'n' roll could be dangerous again. They gravitated toward Andy Warhol - who brought Austrian actress/model/chanteuse Nico into the fold - and became fixtures in Warhol's multimedia organization, the Factory, and in the Village bohemian art scene.

Live, the Velvets were a bizarre amalgam of vigorous R&B, pretty pop songs, extended experimental noise jams (often grounded in Cale's drones), and the performance art of Warhol's touring Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The original band lasted just two albums, The Velvet Underground and Nico, and White Light, White Heat (both '67).

In an interview, Cale told me, "It seemed to work even when we were playing in the exact opposite corners of the musical spectrum on the same piece. We were capable of anything. The dichotomy was given as great a value as the ability to unify on something. That was something that Andy believed in as well. It just angers me that there wasn't more work done because we were so good at it."

In an interesting juxtaposition, pioneering producer Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Animals, John Coltrane, Sun Ra) was supervising the first albums of both the Velvets and Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention at the same time. Both "art" bands, they shared a surface freakiness that masked the underlying gulf between them. The Velvets reveled in the sensory-based hedonism that the puritanical Zappa railed against. The fact that both bands performed in Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Trip club in Los Angeles is a great Warholian irony.

The Velvet Underground and Nico, with Warhol's infamous banana record-jacket art, was originally recorded in '66 at the Cameo-Parkway Studios on Broadway with money from a shoe salesman under the vague guidance of Andy Warhol who seemed as interested in the blinking lights on the mixing board as in the music. The floors were ripped up and the walls were gone and only four mikes worked, but somehow the record was made. Then when Verve signed the Velvets, the band was given ten hours at an L.A. studio to re-record four songs with Wilson.

"Waiting For the Man," with a breezy rock groove, follows a Reed character into the black section of town where he deferentially explains to one and all that he isn't there for the women, but for his "man," his drug dealer. Reed is almost giddy with self-contempt as his need for drugs drags his social status below that of ghetto dwellers. That defiant self-contempt defines the Velvet's status as the first post-modern band and the progenitor of the entire punk/new wave movement.