THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
“A CREATIVE PLAYGROUND”
Dylan’s cinematic biographer TODD HAYNES takes us behind the scenes of his upcoming Velvets documentary. “One hopes for masses of unreleased tapes…”
TODD HAYNES
MYfirst encounter with The Velvet Underground was probably in myfirst year of college, around 1980. It was a profound discovery for me. I was already into Bowie and a lot of the artists who were so influenced by The Velvet Underground –it’s hard to think of artists who were not influenced by The Velvet Underground! – so I was in a prime spot for their music to really matter. I think there’s something about that first record that describes a kind of sensibility –it’s in the content of the music, it’s in the sound of the music, it’s in the dirtiness of the music – that I associate with creative possibility. This music immediately makes you think about the frailty of identity and the fact that life is challenging, as a way of opening up creative expression.
Around 2016, Laurie Anderson started collecting Lou Reed’s papers and moving towards handing them over to the New York Public Library. David Blackman, who runs the TV and film division of Universal Music Group, which owns the Velvet Underground masters, talked to Laurie about the possibility of a documentary – what were the names of some directors that she would feel comfortable with? So it came to me through David, but I heard that Laurie had given me her blessing, and that meant a great deal to me. The archive, as it turns out, didn’t have a lot of materials that could provide a basis for a documentary. One hopes for masses of unreleased tapes and rehearsal recordings, but there wasn’t a great deal of that kind of thing. It was more about having the rights and the title.