“And I just didn’t want a movie that told you all those things, I wanted you to maybe be able to find that yourself. Haynes carefully delineates the priming of this musical IED without recourse to a parade of stars assessing its impact: “There are countless people who are so interesting and so talented… could tell us what The Velvet Underground meant, why they were great and how they influenced them,” he says. The addition of Sterling Morrison on guitar and Mo Tucker on drums completed the classic Velvets line-up (and this John Doran piece in The Quietus is brilliant on the importance of Tucker to their sound). Soon they were sharing the same apartment, and Cale was driving them towards an uncompromising sound to match Reed’s uncompromising lyrics – one very different from the acoustic singer-songwriter format in which they arrived. Open hostility would come later but it could wait. “I was certainly disappointed… I was probably more closely tracking Bowie’s renunciations of his bisexual self by the Eighties than I was Lou Reed’s at that time, and they were disappointing, and I think a lot of us took that somewhat personally. Was it disappointing to him then that Reed, rather like Bowie, seemed to backtrack on an expression of his queerness later? He’s referring to the glam rock era, when artists such as Bowie “and even Gary Glitter… necessarily queer looking, many of them straight male artists mincing up and down the stages of rock’n’roll arenas”. And it was being manifest by this next close generation of music makers… And he jumped right on it.” He realised that he had inaugurated something. “But as early as 1972, when he joined David Bowie for his second solo endeavour, Transformer… it was a complete and total embrace of the gay liberation vernacular: ‘We’re coming out/ Out of our closets/ Out on the streets’,” he sings the lyrics. Yet his early career, especially his breakthrough film, Poison (1991) – a defining work of that decade’s New Queer Cinema movement – “owed so much,” he says, “to a kind of ferocity and defiance that The Velvet Underground opened up.” And, at 60, with his first documentary, Haynes has made a film, The Velvet Underground, out today on Apple+ and in selected cinemas, that captures something truly beautiful about the band and the time and place in which they came into being: a beauty that has facets of degradation, brutality, nihilism, narcissism and danger.ĭoes Haynes think Reed was the first “out” rock star? “The word ‘out’ doesn’t belong to this time in The Velvet Underground, in the Sixties,” he says. Haynes would not “discover” The Velvet Underground until he was at college years later. As a precocious seven-year-old visiting San Francisco for the first time in 1968, the future director of Far from Heaven and Carol took home a poster of Franco Zeffirelli’s wildly romantic Romeo and Juliet and put it up above his bed at home in suburban Los Angeles.
#SONIC SOURCE FILMMAKER CODE#
He was six when The Velvet Underground & Nico was released – that slow-detonating explosion that caused a mutation in the genetic code of rock’n’roll. Todd Haynes was still a toddler when John Cale met Lou Reed in New York in 1964.
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