THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO VERVE MONO RARE DJ PROMO

$

1,500

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO ~VERVE MONO RARE DJ PROMO     Click picture to enlarge

• The V.U. Meter

  The Legacy of the Velvet Underground

  by Charles Olver

  Theirs was the dim world of drugs and sexual perversion, of heroin addiction and the desperate loss of hope that goes with it. Their concern was with death and violence... Oozing evil and lubricity, they made every other group look like kid stuff, and they made a lot of people nervous... There is no word for their sound but sometimes it seems as if a presence has taken it over, perhaps even His Satanic Majesty himself. You can easily imagine someone performing black masses with the Velvet Underground?s albums. Not for the kiddies.

--excerpted from The Velvet Underground?s entry in Lillian Roxon?s Rock Encyclopedia (Grosset & Dunlap, 1969)

1. Sunday Morning
2. I'm Waiting for the Man
3. Femme Fatale
4. Venus in Furs
5. Run Run Run
6. All Tomorrow's Parties
7. Heroin
8. There She Goes Again
9. I'll Be Your Mirror
10. The Black Angel's Death Song
11. European Son

If The Velvet Underground and Nico had been released when it was completed, in 1966 when the media buzz on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was at its peak, it would surely have benifitted commercially and promotionally even from the divesive public response to the band. Any vibe is better than no vibe. In a droll nod to their effect on audiences, the Velvets actually chose an all-negative selection of press blurbs to run on the album's inside gatefold spread. (A skittish Verve mixed in a few good quotes - without telling the group.)

But The Velvet Underground and Nico sat on Verve's shelf for nearly a year, scuttled by the company's inability to cope with the music, in-house competition from Verve's other major freak-rock signing the Mothers of Invention and manufacturing problems with the peelable banana. The label did issue two singles in 1966 - an edit of "All Tomorrow's Parties" (in a boosted radio-potent mix) backed with "I'll Be Your Mirror," and Sunday Morning" with "Femme Fatale" and the flip. The Velvets' only appearance on long playing vinyl that year was on the iconoclastic ESP-Dick label. A teaser just called "Noise," less than two minutes of exactly that, was buried on a protest-collage LP, The East Village Other Electric Newspaper. Then, just as the "Banana" album was finally released in March, 1967, came "the crowning moment of doom," as Morrison puts it.

The back cover of the album showed the Velvets at an E.P.I. show playing against a backdrop still of Warhol's film Chelsea Girls featuring Eric Emerson. According to Morrison, Emerson got busted for possession of acid and, in need of money for his legal defence, told MGM that the picture had been used without his permission. He demanded payment; MGM respondeed by cutting further distribution of the record until he could be airbrushed out and new covers printed. The "Banana" LP, which had reached 171 on the Billboard album chart in mid-May (in Cashbox, it peaked at 102), suddenly disappeared from stores. By the time it reappeared, the sales momentum was gone - the album never recharted - and the rock audience was too wrapped up in the frenzy over the Beatles' new record, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Undone by circumstance, reviled by the love-and-peaceniks, exiled from the mainstream, the Velvets were now genuinely alone in their work. They had no peers, no rivals and no one to answer to. In the face of almost total rejection, the Velvet Underground had just released the most incisive, uncompromising debut record in rock history.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO YELLOW LABEL DISC JOCKEY

I HAVE TRIED TO TAKE AS CLOSE-UP AND CLEAN SHOTS OF THE COVER/ DISC AND LABELS AS POSSIBLE. IF YOU HAVE LOOKED FOR THIS TITLE IN MONO ORIGINAL FORMAT, YOU KNOW THAT DECENT UNBEATEN COPIES WITH BANANA PEELS STILL INTACT ARE BECOMING RARE, OR AT THE VERY LEAST SUPER HARD TO FIND. THE STEREO COPIES OUTNUMBER MONO PRESSINGS BY AT LEAST 20:1.  YELLOW LABEL DISC JOCKEY MONO COPIES LIKE THIS ONE IN HIGH GRADE CONDITION ARE A RARE FIND. PRESSED IN VERY LIMITED NUMBERS TO BE DISTRIBUTED TO LARGER RADIO STATIONS, MOST OF THESE NOW BELONG TO THE NOW DEFUNCT RADIO STATION OWNERS, OR THE DISC JOCKIES WHO PLAYED THEM. MOST HAVE RADIO STATION SPAMPS ON THE LABEL, OR WRITING ON THE COVERS, AND OFTEN THE LABELS THEMSELVES. UNFORTUNATELY, MOST ARE JUST BEAT.

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