The 33 1/3 Series

You’ve probably seen these ever-so-cute little volumes in record stores and bookstores, or maybe in friends’ houses; each one is by a single author about a single album, and there are now, I believe, a few dozen of them out.

I’ve read three of them: The Abba: Gold one by Elizabeth Vincentelli, the Love: Forever Changes one by Andrew Hultkrans, and the Velvet Underground and Nico one by Joe Harvard. I came upon them completely arbitrarily. Well, actually, a combination of chance and fate: I read these three because I am what my grandfather would have called a schnorer, aka a cheapskate (approximately), and I encountered each of these in remainder sections of New York bookstores I frequent. I love all the records, though.

My conclusion, based on this schnorer’s sample: these books are wildly inconsistent in quality.

The Abba book starts strong, discussing the oddness of selecting a Greatest Hits’ compilation for this series, which is supposedly devoted to the great masterworks of the LP format—albums like Sgt. Pepper, Blue, Thriller, and any number of ELO records. The riches of some bands simply can’t be appreciated in that format, Vincentelli (who writes for multiple publications, like the Village Voice) points out; there are simply certain bands that most people encounter through the greatest hits’ format, and in such cases the usually maligned “Best Of” format takes on a life of its own. But after making this point early on, V slides into, basically, reportorial description of each song and its accompanying promotional video.

Unfortunately, Andrew Hultkrans, author of the Love: Forever Changes book, starts with a paean to one of his undergraduate teachers, Sacvan Bercovitch, a big muckity-muck in American Studies at Harvard. In numerous books, Bercovitch writes compellingly about how American political and cultural discourse quashes radicalism by favoring prophetic forms like the jeremiad, with its endless fixation on renewal and rebirth, over critiques that address current, historically conditioned social and political conflicts. That’s admittedly a very thumbnail, perhaps pinky-nail, account of his argument. It’s still better than Hultkrans’s misunderstanding, though, which is that Bercovitch’s point is that Americans “have a responsibility to think in prophetic terms.” Ouch! Then he goes on to celebrate how Arthur Lee, the brilliant leader of this intensely original and weird San Francisco band from the late sixties, fits into this vaunted American tradition. Ooof!

(Interjection: If you’ve never heard the album Forever Changes go out and purchase or steal it now!)

This objection may seem like my nitpicky defensiveness about my field of scholarly interest. But this misreading by Hultkrans, described as "former editor of Bookforum," underwrites and undermines the book as a whole. It sets the stage for a long series of esoteric platitudes about Lee’s lyrics: in other words, to do exactly the sort of thing acvan Bercovitch critiques. I’m not just making a kind of loose, reflexive Marxist point here; in so much journalistic and academic writing about rock, jazz, and hip hop, romanticizing the band as part of a prophetic tradition so often works to allow the critic to avoid the challenge of writing about the material of music, which is sound.

The pleasant surprise (as my father once diplomatically described learning of my mother’s pregnancy with me) here is Joe Harvard. As the most famous underground rock band of all time, the Velvets have a tendency to generate the same kind of romantic generalizations that dominate the Love book. Yet Harvard, who is not a professional writer (he owns Fort Apache studio in Cambridge), and who does not tell us whether or not he attended Harvard, is lucid, and funny, and clearly aware of the problem of writing about rock insightfully. He’s read his stuff, and issues correctives to a lot of misinformation in other books about the Velvets.

There’s a lot of attention to the studio, as you’d expect, and it’s pleasantly surprising that Harvard is able to do so much with an album recorded in a couple of days. I think the edge he has on many other writers is that he simply understands what it’s like to work as a member of a band. I think it’s a consequence of this, too, that he upends the notion that Lou Reed and John Cale were the only important forces in the band. “The Velvets were a band in the truest sense,” he writes, extending this sense out to Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, Nico, and others, including Andy Warhol. (I agree that a “band”’s borders often extend outward beyond the musicians who play onstage or in recording sessions).

I was especially impressed by his sustained attention to Warhol. Most rock writing on the Velvets tends to write him off as, basically, a financial sponsor. More generous critics say he had the insight to give the band space to do what it wanted. One sometimes gets the feeling that there’s simply too much weirdness, queerness, and effeteness surrounding Warhol and the Factory for these writers to deal with. But Harvard talks about Warhol’s careful role in surrounding the band with technical people who would maintain the grunginess and perversity that he loved in their sound, and that fit so well with his own work, especially in the mid-sixties when the Factory was in full swing and he had gone headlong into avant-garde film. As Harvard puts it:

"It was Warhol's comment that the band should just rehearse onstage [much in the same way he viewed filmmaking] that helped push them toward their flights of improvised daring. He suggested that Reed write or make changes to "Femme Fatale," "I'll Be Your Mirror," "All Tomorrow's Parties," and "Sunday Morning". . . Were it not for Warhol, of course, Nico would never have joined the band, and that in itself gives him a colossal role in the sound on the first album. "(51)

Or, more generally:

"Warhol did precisely what a great producer should: he achieved an effective translation of the sound the band heard in their heads on to tape, and then he got it out into the world in tact."

The point is that even though he didn't know the first thing about twiddling the buttons on the console, Warhol skillfully produced the conditions that gave rise to the album--and its sound.