The Velvet Underground & Nico is widely considered to be one of the most influential albums of all time. But how did an album that famously sold only 30,000 copies(Mckenna) become so widely heralded? How did that same album make it into the Library of Congress’ archives(LOC)? And how did it make it into Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time(Rolling
Stone)? The story begins with a band called the primitives, a band that was never really supposed to exist.
The Primitives were the fictitious band that Pickwick Records had attached to the single
“The Ostrich” which was nominally a send up of the dance crazes that had been sweeping the nation at the time.(Cross 34) The single had been penned by Lou Reed who at the time was working for Pickwick Records as
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Lou Reed claims that Sterling Morrison was asked to join the band when they ran into one another on the subway one day when Morrison wasn’t wearing any shoes and was invited to come with him. Morrison claims that though this account is funny he would never go shoeless on
“...the dogshit streets of New York.”(Bockris, 36) But both agree that the chance meeting did happen on a subway after the two hadn’t seen one another in years. Morrison and Reed had briefly attended Syracuse at the same time, and had found that there musical tastes were similar.
Joe Harvard would say that “He believed rock music should make people want to tear shit up.”(23) Sterling Morrison would eventually be one of the most important members of the band; not only because of his musical ability, at various points playing lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and bass, but because a family connection brought in the fourth and final member of the Velvets
Maureen Tucker.
Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker’s arrival in the band was perhaps the least likely of all. An entire string of coincidences all conspired to bring her into the band. First she had to have been