The Velvet Underground & Nico (commonly referred to as The Banana Album) is the debut studio album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground and the German singer Nico, released by Verve Records in March 1967. The album was recorded in 1966 on Ludlow Street, New York while the band were featured on Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour. Warhol, who designed the album's record sleeve, served as co-producer alongside Tom Wilson.
The Velvet Underground & Nico features elements of avant-garde music incorporated into brash, minimal and groove-driven rock music. Lead singer and songwriter Lou Reed delivers explicit lyrics spanning themes of drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism and urban life. Due to its abrasive, unconventional sound and controversial lyrical content, the album underperformed commercially and polarized critics upon release. Various record stores banned the album, many radio stations refused to play it, and magazines refused to carry advertisements for it.
In the following decades, The Velvet Underground & Nico received widespread critical acclaim, being regarded as ahead of its time, and was included on numerous all-time best album lists. The Observer placed it at No. 1 in their list of the "50 Albums That Changed Music" and Pitchfork ranked it as the best album of the 1960s. It has been characterized as the original art-rock record, influencing many subgenres of rock and alternative music, including punk, garage rock, krautrock, post-punk, post-rock, noise rock, shoegaze, gothic rock, art punk, and indie rock. "On that first album alone, the Velvets invented—or at the very least inspired—art rock, punk, garage, grunge, shoegaze, goth, indie and any other alternative music you care to mention."
The Velvet Underground & Nico continues to be lauded as one of the most important albums in rock and pop music. In 2006, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2008, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, honoring recordings of "lasting qualitative or historical significance". Despite its poor sales, the album is certified platinum in the United Kingdom for sales of over 300,000 copies. In 2023, Billboard ranked the album No. 1 on its list of "The 100 Best Album Covers of All Time."
Recording
The Velvet Underground & Nico was recorded in a rehearsal studio on Ludlow Street, New York. It was recorded with the first professional line-up of the Velvet Underground, consisting of guitarist and vocalist Lou Reed; violist, keyboardist, and bassist John Cale; guitarist and bassist Sterling Morrison; and drummer Maureen Tucker. At the instigation of their mentor and manager Andy Warhol and his collaborator Paul Morrissey, German singer Nico was also featured; she had occasionally performed lead vocals for the band. She sang lead on three of the album's tracks—"Femme Fatale", "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "I'll Be Your Mirror"—and back-up on "Sunday Morning". In 1966, as the album was being recorded, this was also the line-up for the band's live performances as a part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
The bulk of the songs that would become The Velvet Underground & Nico were recorded in four days in mid-April 1966 at Scepter Studios in Manhattan. This was financed by Warhol and Columbia Records sales executive Norman Dolph, who also co-engineered the sessions with John Licata. Rather than a cash fee, Dolph asked for one of Warhol's paintings and was given a silver "Death and Disaster Series" canvas; he sold it around 1975 for $17,000, remarking, "I bet Lou Reed hasn't made $17,000 from this album yet." The cost of the project is unknown; estimates vary from $1,500 (equivalent to $ in ) to $3,000 (equivalent to $ in ).
Dolph sent an acetate disc of the recordings to Columbia Records in an attempt to interest them in distributing the album, but they declined, as did Atlantic Records and Elektra Records. According to Morrison, Atlantic objected to the songs' drug references, while Elektra disliked Cale's viola. Finally, the MGM Records-owned Verve Records accepted the recordings, with the help of Verve staff producer Tom Wilson, who had recently moved from a job at Columbia.
In May 1966, three songs ("I'm Waiting for the Man", "Venus in Furs", and "Heroin") were re-recorded in two days at TTG Studios in Hollywood. When the record's release date was postponed, Wilson brought the band to Mayfair Recording Studios in Manhattan in November 1966 to add a final song to the album: the single "Sunday Morning".
Production
Although Andy Warhol is the only formally credited producer on the album, he had little influence beyond paying for the recording sessions. Several others who worked on the album are often mentioned as the technical producer.
Recording engineers Norman Dolph and John Licata are sometimes cited as producing the Scepter Studios sessions, though neither is credited as such on the album. Dolph said that Cale was the group's creative producer, as he handled the majority of the arrangements. However, Cale recalled that Tom Wilson produced nearly all the tracks, and said that Warhol "didn't do anything". Reed also said the "real producer" of the album was Wilson. Reed claimed it was MGM who decided to bring in Wilson, and credited him for producing songs such as "Sunday Morning": "Andy absorbed all the flak. Then MGM said they wanted to bring in a real producer, Tom Wilson. So that's how you got 'Sunday Morning', with all those overdubs—the viola in the back, Nico chanting. But he couldn't undo what had already been done."
However, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed both cited Warhol's approach as a legitimate method of production. Morrison described Warhol as the producer "in the sense of producing a film"."An Interview with Sterling Morrison", Fusion, March 6, 1970. Reproduced in Reed said:
Music and lyrics
Lyrics The Velvet Underground & Nico was notable for its overt descriptions of topics such as drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism, and sexual deviancy. "I'm Waiting for the Man" describes a protagonist's efforts to obtain heroin, while "Venus in Furs" is a nearly literal interpretation of the novella of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which itself prominently features accounts of sadomasochistic practices. "Heroin" details an individual's use of the drug and the experience of feeling its effects.
Lou Reed, who wrote the majority of the album's lyrics, never intended to write about such topics for shock value. Reed, a fan of poets and authors such as Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Hubert Selby, Jr., saw no reason the content in their works could not translate well to rock music. An English major who studied at Syracuse University, Reed said in an interview that he thought joining gritty subject matter and music was "obvious": "That's the kind of stuff you might read. Why wouldn't you listen to it? You have the fun of reading that, and you get the fun of rock on top of it."
Though the album's dark subject matter is today considered revolutionary, several of the album's songs are centered on themes more typical of popular music. Certain songs were written by Reed as observations of Andy Warhol's "superstars". "Femme Fatale" in particular was written about Edie Sedgwick at Warhol's request. "I'll Be Your Mirror", inspired by Nico, is a tender and affectionate song, in stark contrast to a song like "Heroin". A common misperception is that "All Tomorrow's Parties" was written by Reed at Warhol's request (as stated in Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga's Velvet Underground biography Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story); while the song does seem to be another observation of the denizens of the Factory, Reed wrote the song before meeting Warhol, having recorded a demo in July 1965 at Ludlow Street.
Instrumentation and performance
The Velvet Underground & Nico has generally been described by writers as art rock, experimental rock, proto-punk, psychedelic rock, and avant-pop. Much of the album's sound was conceived by John Cale, who stressed the experimental qualities of the band. He was influenced greatly by his work with minimalist composer La Monte Young in the Theatre of Eternal Music, John Cage, and the Fluxus arts movement, and encouraged the use of alternative ways of producing sound. Cale thought his sensibilities meshed well with Reed's, who was already experimenting with alternate tunings. For instance, Reed had "invented" the ostrich guitar tuning for a song he wrote called "The Ostrich" for the short-lived band the Primitives. Ostrich guitar tuning consists of all strings being tuned to the same pitch class. This method was utilized on the songs "Venus in Furs" and "All Tomorrow's Parties". Reed and Morrison's guitars were often tuned down a whole step, which produced a lower, fuller sound that Cale considered "sexy".
Cale performed on the viola on several of the album's songs, notably "Venus in Furs" and "The Black Angel's Death Song". Cale strung his viola with guitar and mandolin strings, and when played loudly, Cale would liken its brash sound to that of an airplane engine. Cale's technique usually involved minimalist drones, detuning for an eerie, surreal effect, and distortion to highlight harmonics and transform the instrument's sound. According to critic Robert Christgau, Cale's "narcotic drone" not only sustains the sadomasochism-themed "Venus in Furs", but also "identifies and unifies the [album] musically". Of the vocal performances, he believed "Nico's contained chantoozy sexuality" complemented "the dispassionate abandon of Reed's chant singing". In 1966, Richard Goldstein described Nico's vocal as "something like a cello getting up in the morning".Ulf Lindberg et al. Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-headed Cruisers. Peter Lang, 2005. p. 115.
Tucker's style of drumming on the album involved her playing standing up rather than sitting down, playing bass drums and tambourines on their sides with a drumstick in her left hand and a mallet in her right hand, resulting in "a mix of African trance rhythms and Ringo-like arrangement genius" according to Adam Budofsky of Modern Drummer. Tucker's predecessor Angus MacLise had informed her style, influencing her into playing "pounding" rhythms that fit with, in her words, "the ominous mood" of several of the album's songs.
Artwork The album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico is widely recognized for its Andy Warhol–designed banana image, which incorporated an interactive element: early pressings featured a peelable sticker bearing the instruction "Peel slowly and see," revealing a flesh-colored banana beneath. A special machine was needed to manufacture these covers, one of the causes of the album's delayed release, but MGM paid for costs figuring that any ties to Warhol would boost sales of the album. Most reissued vinyl editions of the album do not feature the peel-off sticker; original copies of the album with the peel-sticker feature are now considered rare collector's items. A Japanese re-issue LP in the early 1980s was the only re-issue version to include the banana sticker for many years. On the 1996 CD reissue, the banana image is on the front cover while the image of the peeled banana is on the inside of the jewel case, beneath the CD itself. The album was re-pressed onto heavyweight vinyl in 2008, featuring a banana sticker seen on original versions.