This article could also be titled “The end of an obsession”. Because there is something of that in this new album (Velvet Serenade) that somehow culminates a work of half a century dedicated to a musical group. The obsessed person is none other than Ignacio Julià (Barcelona, 1956), one of the oldest and most reliable music-cultural-journalists in this country. The obsession is The Velvet Underground, the New York group that at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s marked new paths for the then not-so-old rockers. Lou Reed and John Cale's group. By Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison. From Nico. The group sponsored by Andy Warhol.
But what did that band have to dedicate so much effort to it for so long? “What separates The Velvet Underground from other influential rock icons of the sixties -explains Julià-, be they Beatles or Dylan, is that they were born as a transatlantic alliance between North American and European musicians. They are also much more than a rock group and their difference will profoundly transform the course of this music. They are part of Andy Warhol's universe, they are presented in the first multimedia show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with projections, strobe lights, spontaneous dancers, sprawling pop-art. This leap into the audiovisual is prophetic, as is John Cale's willingness to experiment and Lou Reed's writing, a literary ability that prophesies the future. What he wrote in the sixties has come true: populism, the normalization of queerness, nihilism, the relativity of all things, are already in the songs of that first album with banana on the cover ”.
So in the eighties Julià already dedicated a book to them (Feed-back: The Velvet Underground legend), which he expanded and rewrote –in English– in the first two thousand (Feed-Back/The Velvet Underground: Legend, Truth ), and which fifteen years later has ended up taking shape in what, now, seems to be its definitive version: Linger On –also, for the moment, in English–, published by the musician Thurston Moore –of the group Sonic Youth, another of the Julià's obsessions– in his editorial Ecstatic Peace Library.
The book has had presentations in New York (in the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker brought the Vicious Circle together and The New Yorker was founded) and in London, but Julià wanted to do a special preview in Banyoles –where he now resides– with a concert to which he invited the pianist Pascal Comelade and the guitarist Lee Ranaldo –also from Sonic Youth–. “It occurred to me to organize a book presentation with the same formula as the Velvet: an unusual European pianist like John Cale, and a New York poet and guitarist like Lou Reed. I achieved my purpose, with Comelade and Ranaldo”.
Involving Sonic Youth musicians like Moore and Ranaldo in this whole project is something that, artistically, makes sense. Julià explains it: “The parallels are obvious: both are New York bands that emerge in a context of visual art and so on. Half of the members of Sonic Youth come from art schools, and continue to practice as visual artists. And they are also much more than a group, since they use the band as an antenna to project what interests them: artistic vanguards of all kinds, a progressive political consciousness, a new vision of feminism... not to mention the use of new tunings of guitar that opens the doors to a whole alternative rock scene. Sonic Youth's influence since the late '80s is almost as incalculable as Velvet's since the '60s.
Similarly, the presence of Pascal Comelade also makes sense, although the French musician's background may seem less obvious to some. “With Pascal we were united by the passion for the most authentic rock'n'roll, because despite the fact that his music is something else, his world feeds on the sounds and iconographies of the rock canon of the fifties and even the seventies . His contribution to the Velvet Suite / Velvet Serenade concert was essential. Ranaldo limited himself to adding things to what Comelade brought and played; contributing a variety of sounds and singing some passages. I can never thank them enough for their friendship and their willingness to face my outlandish idea”, explains Julià.
With Comelade and Ranaldo, and with the collaboration of Ramon Prat on drums, the Banyoles concert, more than a celebration of Velvet covering their songs, was an exercise in experimentation and improvisation seeking to rescue –revive– the spirit of Lou Reed's band and John Cale. A celebration that was completed with the projection of fragments of Nomad, a Super8 film made by Julià in 1977 and which shows that his underground obsession comes from afar and is diverse.
The concert was one of those unique events that precisely because it was unique did not deserve to go down in history without further ado. That is why a documentary film came out of that, Velvet Siute (visible on Filmin), made by Manuel Huerga, who already in the eighties had dedicated a chapter of his celebrated program Arsenal to The Velvet Underground; and that in the nineties he had John Cale for the soundtrack of his film Antarctica.
And, finally, the concert has also been recorded on an album, Velvet Serenade, which is now released and also includes what happened a little over a year ago in Banyoles (already available digitally, and on vinyl and CD on June 23 ). In this way, a work is completed in whose spirit it could not be limited to a single format. Books, concerts, films and records thus show that obsessions can also be productive and, as in this case, project the spirit of what prompted them into the future. “I have lived everything as a final point to a project that was born in 1975, when I attended Lou Reed's first concert in Barcelona at the age of nineteen. There is no more, everything lived and accumulated since then is in Linger On. I will have to find new study subjects.” Julia's word.
