Check out this super cool Velvet Underground website.
There’s some really great live stuff on this site. Check out especially “Foggy Notion” here.
Damn. Makes you wish you were there.
Mo Tucker’s drumming is so solid. What a drummer. Steady as a rock. Her drumming reminds me of this line from Clark Ashton Smith’s “Soliloquy in an Ebon Tower”:
In my room
The quick, malign, relentless clock ticks on,
Firm as a demon’s undecaying pulse,
Or creak of Charon’s oar locks as he plies
Between the shadow-crowded shores.
The true fanatics probably already know all about this site, but I just found it, and I pass it along for the rest of you.
Velvet Underground? Excellent choice.
Every so often I pull out their albums and listen. It’s amazing how well they hold up. Only a couple other avant garde groups have held up nearly as well — perhaps Talking Heads, and garage-punk Violent Femmes. (Jerry Harrison’s follow-on project, Casual Gods, has aged okay).
Some of the post-punk stuff has aged well too — the Dead Kennedys, for example, are always listen-able… though as a conservative, it might be the concept behind the name, more than the music that does it for me.