William Dart looks at a new tribute to The Velvet Underground's debut album titled I'll Be Your Mirror, featuring St Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, Matt Berninger, Michael Stipe, Andrew Bird, Courtney Barnett and others.
Photo: Polygram/Verve
Pairing up Nico, the model and onetime star of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, with this edgy New York rock quartet was the doing of Andy Warhol, who ended up playing producer on one of the indisputably iconic albums of all time.
It was a release that first caught my eye through an advertisement in the June 1967 issue of Evergreen Review. There it was, alongside promotions for Aubrey Beardsley posters, jazz poetry LPs from Broadside Records, and the paperback of Barbara Garson’s MacBird, a radical theatrepiece presenting LBJ as the Shakespearian villain of the Kennedy assassination and beyond.
The new Velvets album – their debut – was headlined in the ad as “So far underground you get the bends” and illustrated with Warhol himself peeping over its celebrated banana-bedecked cover. “What happens when the daddy of Pop Art goes Pop music?” it asked, promising a “hip new trip to the current subterranean scene.”
When Polydor released its then definitive boxed set of the four staple Velvet Underground albums in 1995, it came with a major essay by Rolling Stone’s David Fricke. Not surprisingly, Fricke holds the Velvet Underground and Nico set in the highest esteem, hailing it as a “marvel of ferocious eloquence, crude expansive majesty and subversive accomplishment”.
Yet, just a few sentences before those lofty words, he quotes Lou Reed’s disarmingly casual assessment of the album, describing it as a collection of songs that “Anyone should be able to play ... and that’s what I like about them.”
Now, Reed’s challenge has been seriously taken up in an album titled I’ll Be Your Mirror, which turns out to be the final, posthumous project of Hal Willner, whom I tributed on this programme last year, just after his untimely death.
I’ll Be Your Mirror sees a classic album being recreated track by track, just as the NME did 33 years ago, gathering together a bunch of artists from Sonic Youth to Billy Bragg to work through The Beatles' Sgt Pepper.
My personal bias of a half-century ago is showing up in my choice of songs. Listening to I’ll Be Your Mirror, I find myself less drawn to Iggy Pop and Matt Sweeney ripping into 'European Son' or the raunchy blitz of Kurt Vile’s 'Run, Run, Run'. It’s in gentler pastures that I find myself wanting to graze, as in the very first track of the album, as Michael Stipe welcomes us with a 'Sunday Morning' greeting.
Matt Berninger of The National is positively breezy in 'I'm Waiting for the Man' alongside Lou Reed's much starker original.
Courtney Barnett is refreshingly direct and straight-from-the-guitar in a demystifying take on the title song, 'I'll Be Your Mirror'.
For me, one of the most powerful and poignant of Reed's songs, 'All Tomorrow's Parties', transports us into the fragile world of the Warhol set, with a roving song camera that the songwriter would bring out on more than one occasion, most famously when he walked on the wild side.
In 2021, St Vincent and Thomas Bartlett view the same scenario, with a new sense of remove that comes from the passage of half-a-century.
The almost cinematic intertwine of dispassionate spoken commentary with a background of various keyboards and samplings takes us back to the start of it all: Andy Warhol and his Factory, his films and the great happening that launched these musicians, the splendidly titled Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
This may be a muted evocation of it but the connection made is palpable and potent, a connection that’s yet another legacy of the late and much missed Hal Willner.
Music Details
ARTIST: The Velvet Underground
TITLE: All Tomorrow's Parties (Demo)
ALBUM: Peel Slowly and See
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Polydor
ARTIST: The Velvet Underground
TITLE: All Tomorrow's Parties
ALBUM: Peel Slowly and See
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Polydor
ARTIST: The Velvet Underground
TITLE: Venus in Furs
ALBUM: Peel Slowly and See
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Polydor
ARTIST: The Velvet Underground
TITLE: There She Goes Again
ALBUM: Peel Slowly and See
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Polydor
ARTIST: The Velvet Underground
TITLE: The Black Angel's Death Song
ALBUM: Peel Slowly and See
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Polydor
ARTIST: Andrew Ball and Lucius
TITLE: Venus in Furs
ALBUM: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Verve
ARTIST: Matt Berninger
TITLE: I'm Waiting for the Man
ALBUM: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Verve
ARTIST: The Velvet Underground
TITLE: I'm Waiting for the Man
ALBUM: Peel Slowly and See
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Polydor
ARTIST: Michael Stipe
TITLE: Sunday Morning
ALBUM: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Verve
ARTIST: Susan Marshall
TITLE: Femme Fatale
ALBUM: Little Red
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Madjack
ARTIST: Sharon Van Etten
TITLE: Femme Fatale
ALBUM: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Verve
ARTIST: Courtney Barnett
TITLE: I'll Be Your Mirror
ALBUM: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Verve
ARTIST: St Vincent and Thomas Bartlett
TITLE: All Tomorrow's Parties
ALBUM: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico
COMPOSER: Reed
LABEL: Verve
