The Velvet Underground

Home team in the future known as The Velvet Undergound, refers to 1964. At the time Lou Reed was playing in small groups, garage, and also worked as songwriter for the label Pickwick Records. At the end of the year, he met with John Keil - Welsh who moved to America to teach classical music. While Keil is already starting to work with avant-garde composers like John Cage and La Monte Young, whose influence is music in the early records of The Velvet Underground. Keil was pleasantly surprised that his experimental ideas coincide with the ideas of Reid, who, for example, tried to use the traditional setup of guitars to achieve a more sombre sound. In the end, Reed and Keil began to play and serve together.

The first of their joint group became The Primitives, fragile team, assembled to record songs written by Reed «The Ostrich». In the future, Keil, and Reid called for a Sterling Morrison, a friend from Reed College, as a guitarist and Agnes MakLiz as perkussionistki. The first group was called The Warlocks, later they changed it to The Falling Spikes. Name «The Velvet Underground» was a book about the author Michael Leith, it has been left in New York City apartment, which moved Reid, the previous resident, Tony Conrad. The Group enjoyed this title, plus it has also become a link to the video avangradistskim that time (that was including Conrad), and that at this time Reid wrote the song «Venus in Furs». As a result, a group decided to make a «The Velvet Underground» his name.

The Velvet Underground started rehearsing in New York. Their music at that time was much softer than the further work: Keil temporarily retreated from the avant-garde ideas and passion for bit-generation game MakLiz drums was very soft and calm. In July 1965, Reid, Keil and Morrison recorded a demo in his room at Lodlow Street. When Keil briefly left in Britain, he gave a demo Marianne Feytful, hoping that she would give him Miku Jagger, but no reaction to the demo was not followed. In 1995 it became a retrospective box set Peel Slowly and See.

When the group earned about $ 75 for a concert at the school in Summit, New Jersey, MakLiz left the group (she explained this to the fact that the group «sold» - according to Morrison, she played only for the sake of art). Replacement became MakLiz Maureen Tucker, the younger sister of a friend of Jim Morrison Tucker. Simple drum style Tucker was a group of something entirely new: it has played mainly on the volume-and bass-drum, using hammers as a shock sticks and little or no drawing plates. When the remaining members asked Tucker about something unusual, it is slightly moved the bass drum and began to play standing up, and when installing it was forgotten in one of the clubs, Maureen made the new ones found in the scrap-heap of barrels and boxes. Original Rhythms Tucker became an integral part of the overall group sound. The Velvets were playing in clubs, and gradually achieved a certain fame in the narrow circles.