Venus, Part Two

I can't say I have a clear memory of the album's first few tracks. Sunday Morning felt sweet and innocuous; I doubt I was paying attention to the lyrics particularly, but I was on the fence regarding everything except how the goddamn celesta's tinkling – any of its (intended) ethereal beauty lost on the sound's voyage up the rusty needle, through the labyrinthine wires and out a set of speakers long past their prime. I'm Waiting for the Man was rockin', any favor I had toward it anticipating my future love of garage rock, the rawer the better. Nico's crooning on “Femme Fatale” suffered the same fate as the celesta; the instrumentation yielding to the unintentionally over-overdriven crackles and crunches of the high notes. I awaited Venus in Furs.

I don't think I can accurately describe what happened at that moment. Viola and tambourine, guitar and distortion tumbled out in an mildly Arabic dirge. Discounting the occasional brief and unsatisfying foray into early 90s punk rock, this was my first encounter with genuine dissonance, with instrumentation that looked you in the eye and sternly stated “I am not here to be your friend.”. The drums beat out a somber death march for the guitar. The tambourine struck and the viola shrieked in instantaneous response. The highs screeched, the lows distorted themselves out of melody. Lou Reed started singing. No, that's wrong entirely -- this wasn't singing. The music was a black mass, and Lou, plaintive and beat, intoned the incantation.

”Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you. Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart.”

There was no mistake about it, the song wanted me sick. The noise rose and crashed, rose and crashed like against the surf within me. The repetitions were hypnotic, and yet the distortion, the grating, kept me awake, on that bleeding liminal edge. The images effortlessly flashed before my mind's eye. I could see the almond color of the furs, adorned, imperiously. In my gut, I could feel Severin's lust-sickness, his insatiable hunger for the blow.

”A thousand dreams, that would awake me. Different colors, made of tears.”

Until that day my only encounter with psychedelia was the occasional replay of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit on the classic rock station, and a brief infatuation with the unabashedly silly Strawberry Alarm Clock. Venus in Furs was no Incense and Peppermints. Grace Slick made Alice a little stranger; Lou Reed destroyed a man named Severin before my ears. This wasn't a good-natured freak-out. I felt alien in my own crawling skin, embraced by a desire not wholly my own.

Certainly, I'd encountered these images before, courtesy of my unfettered and tortuously slow Internet connection. This wasn't the usual teenage kick, however, wherein the illicitness of the viewing itself was half (or more, depending on the [frequently piss-poor] quality of the material) the fun. I grew up a bit, that night, laying in the dark, enthralled to the rhythm. One bleary eye cracked just enough to let the light of self-realization make itself known; I couldn't see, but I knew I would, eventually. After doing some research, I went down to the Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of the book to which the song was ode. It was, for the content, absolutely dreary. An item good for getting lambasted for carting around filth by an octogenarian substitute teacher, and that little else. It didn't matter, though. I'd seen the gate to the thousand dreams, that was enough.

The next time this album was in heavy rotation was six years later. I had now been working on St. Mark's, the slowly dying punk rock mecca of New York City, the very street on which I bought the record over a half-decade prior. I was living the dream, managing a boutique (read: t-shirt shop) I frequented as a kid. I closed Saturday nights and opened Sunday mornings, hungover more often than not. Those Sundays, I knew I could look forward to at least three things: peace and quiet (the owner, nursing her own hangover, left us alone on Sundays,) a grease-drenched Philly cheese steak from the falafel place a few doors down, and The Velvet Underground and Nico. My shoulder-length hair had been long since chopped off, given way to an overgrown mohawk dyed green long past its expiration date. The ultra-wide jeans and extra-large band shirts replaced by skin-tight everything. The ubiquitous flannel shirt replaced by a vintage blazer (“Made in Czechoslovakia.”) Eventually, Venus in Furs would come on the store's miswired (guess by whom,) stereo system and I would lean against the gumball machine, light a cigarette, and be more glad I wasn't a teenager than ever.

Related posts:

1. Venus, Part One