Velvet Underground & Nico at 59: How Lou Reed and Andy Warhol Made the Most Ignored Album of 1967 — and the Most Influential Album of the Next 50 Years

Velvet Underground & Nico at 59: How Lou Reed and Andy Warhol Made the Most Ignored Album of 1967 — and the Most Influential Album of the Next 50 Years

When The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in March 1967, it sold fewer than 30,000 copies in its first five years. Radio stations refused to play it. Reviewers dismissed it. The label nearly shelved it. And yet, by the time rock music had finished evolving through punk, post-punk, alternative, and indie, almost every significant artist of those movements had a dog-eared copy somewhere in their collection. Brian Eno famously said that while the album only sold 30,000 copies, everyone who bought one formed a band. He wasn't wrong.

The Factory Floor: How Andy Warhol Became a Record Producer

In 1965, Lou Reed and John Cale — a classically trained Welsh musician who had studied with avant-garde composer La Monte Young — were playing grimy New York clubs under the name The Velvet Underground, named after a paperback exposé of underground sexual practices. They were radical, abrasive, and completely broke. Enter Andy Warhol.

Warhol had just begun his multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows — chaotic events combining live music, film projections, strobe lights, and dancers — and he needed a house band. He signed on as the Velvet Underground's manager and producer, channeling the project through his art collective, The Factory. His first act was to insist the band incorporate German model and singer Nico, born Christa Päffgen, as a vocalist. Reed resented the intrusion but complied. It would prove to be a defining creative tension.

Inside the Recording: The Viola That Changed Everything

The album was recorded in 1966 across two sessions — primarily at Scepter Studios in New York, with additional work at TTG Studios in Hollywood — and released on Verve Records on March 12, 1967. The budget was almost laughably small. The total recording cost came to roughly $1,500.

The concrete detail that defines the album's sound is John Cale's electric viola. Trained in classical drone technique under La Monte Young, Cale treated the viola not as a melodic instrument but as a texture machine — bowing long, dissonant notes beneath Reed's street-level narratives to create an atmosphere of menace and unease. On Venus in Furs, a song explicitly about sadomasochism, Cale's droning viola loops beneath a Middle Eastern-tinged guitar figure to produce something that sounds less like rock music than like a fever dream. No one had done anything like it in a pop recording before.

Then there was Heroin — a seven-minute first-person account of a drug injection that accelerated and decelerated in tempo to mirror the physical rush and retreat of the drug itself. Engineer Gary Kellgren initially refused to record it. Warhol's quiet insistence — he rarely shouted, but his authority was absolute — got it onto the tape. The song remains one of the most audacious and morally complex recordings in rock history.

The Conflict That Nearly Killed the Album

The tension between Reed and Warhol over Nico's role came to a head in the studio. Reed wanted her on as few tracks as possible; Warhol pushed back. The compromise was three lead vocal tracks for Nico — Femme Fatale, All Tomorrow's Parties, and I'll Be Your Mirror — each written specifically to suit her flat, emotionless delivery. That flatness, counterintuitively, became one of the album's most haunting qualities. Where conventional pop vocals reached for warmth, Nico's voice reached for nothing — and found something ancient and unsettling instead.

Warhol's visual contribution was equally confrontational. The album's original cover featured a simple peel-off banana sticker with the instruction "Peel slowly and see." Underneath was a flesh-colored banana. It was deliberately, cheerfully provocative — and Warhol's insistence on it over the label's objections delayed the album's release by months while copyright logistics were sorted.

Ignored in 1967, Essential Forever

Upon release, the album was banned from distribution in some markets due to its lyrical content. MGM/Verve, nervous about its commercial prospects, gave it almost no promotional support. It peaked at No. 171 on the Billboard 200 — a near-miss with oblivion.

But the album refused to die. By the mid-1970s, it had become the foundational text of punk. The artists it directly shaped include:

• The Stooges and the New York Dolls, who absorbed its raw noise and confrontational lyricism
• Television and the Ramones, who built their entire aesthetic on its New York street-level energy
• David Bowie, who called it one of the most important records ever made and produced Lou Reed's solo comeback Transformer in 1972
• R.E.M., Sonic Youth, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Yo La Tengo, and LCD Soundsystem, all of whom wear its fingerprints openly
• Joy Division, whose entire catalogue is arguably a long meditation on John Cale's viola drone

The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1996 and ranked No. 13 on Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2006, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. It remains, 59 years later, the clearest proof that commercial failure and cultural immortality are not just compatible — they are sometimes the same thing.

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