Here he is speaking over a neatly typed lyric sheet for his song “Heroin,” which appeared as the first song on the second side of The Velvet Underground and Nico. The second pole is Lou Reed, who has been heard early in the documentary on the music that most inspired him as a boy growing up on Long Island-rockabilly and especially doo-wop, or street-corner group harmony (“The sounds of another life,” he said in 1989, inducting the Bronx singer Dion into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “the sounds of freedom”)-and on making his first record, a doo-wop ballad, at fourteen, having it played on the radio (he received a royalty check for $2.79, more, he says, than he ever made from the Velvet Underground).
Because to us, the sixty-cycle hum was the drone of Western civilization.” On Haynes’s split screen: Cale himself, a view of New York pedestrians as seen from above crossing the street in a diagonal pattern, cars, apartment buildings, telephone poles, tall buildings. He speaks now about composing with the sound artist and critic Tony Conrad in an apartment on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side that Conrad (“I didn’t want to be part of the economy”) rented for $22.44 a month: “The most stable thing we could tune to was the sixty-cycle hum of the refrigerator. His secret was that he was one of eleven musicians to take part in an eighteen-hour, eight-hundred-and-forty-part performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (with him on the show was Karl Schenzer, whose secret was that he sat through it). One pole is John Cale, first shown in footage of a 1963 episode of the CBS quiz show I’ve Got a Secret. Two poles of Todd Haynes’s documentary film on the Velvet Underground, a band-Lou Reed, principal singer and guitar John Cale, viola and other instruments Sterling Morrison, guitar Maureen “Moe” Tucker, drums-that formed in New York City in 1965, came under the sway of Andy Warhol and the denizens of his Factory, released its first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, in huge letters “PRODUCED BY ANDY WARHOL,” in 1967, its fourth and last, Loaded, in 1970, and disbanded that year, after Cale had already been excluded from the group in 1968:
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