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Velvet Underground – Heroin (live in Paris)
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The Velvet Underground – Heroin (Lyrics!)
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Johnny Cash had a long struggle with drugs and his story was told in an earlier post.
In his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Francis Schaeffer noted:
The man who followed on from that point was English–Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). He proposed drugs as a solution. We should, he said, give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads. All that was left for Aldous Huxley and those who followed him was truth inside a person’s own head. With Huxley’s idea, what began with the existential philosophers – man’s individual subjectivity attempting to give order as well as meaning, in contrast to order being shaped by what is objective or external to oneself – came to its logical conclusion. Truth is in one’s own head. The ideal of objective truth was gone.
This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups–for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965-1958. The Beatles’Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassible by other means of communication.
Here is a good review of the episode 016 HSWTL The Age of Non-Reason of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?, December 23, 2007:
Together with the advent of the “drug Age” was the increased interest in the West in the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. Schaeffer tells us that: “This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today.” Drugs and Eastern religions came like a flood into the Western world. They became the way that people chose to find meaning and values in life. By themselves or together, drugs and Eastern religion became the way that people searched inside themselves for ultimate truth.
Along with drugs and Eastern religions there has been a remarkable increase “of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope.” As modern man searches for answers it “many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine.” For many people having the “occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having meaning” is better than leaving the upper story of nonreason empty. For them horror or the macabre are more acceptable than the idea that they are just a machine.
Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:
The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there.
The Velvet Underground – Heroin (Lyrics!)
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Velvet Underground – Heroin (live in Paris)
Heroin (The Velvet Underground song)
“Heroin” is a song by the Velvet Underground, released on their 1967 debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico. Written by Lou Reed in 1964, the song, which overtly depicts heroin use and abuse, is one of the band’s most celebrated compositions. Critic Mark Deming of Allmusic writes, “While ‘Heroin’ hardly endorses drug use, it doesn’t clearly condemn it, either, which made it all the more troubling in the eyes of many listeners.”[2] In 2004, it was ranked at number 448 on Rolling Stone‘s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,[3] and was re-ranked at number 455 in 2010.[4]
Writing and recordingEdit
In an interview with WLIR in 1972, Reed said he wrote the lyrics while working for a record company.
I was working for a record company as a songwriter, where they’d lock me in a room and they’d say write ten surfing songs, ya know, and I wrote “Heroin” and I said “Hey I got something for ya.” They said, “Never gonna happen, never gonna happen.”[5]
“Heroin” was among a three-song set to be re-recorded, in May 1966 at TTG Studios in Hollywood, before being included on the final release of The Velvet Underground & Nico (along with “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Venus in Furs“). This recording of the song is the album’s second longest track on the album at 7 minutes and 12 seconds; “European Son” is 30 seconds longer.
“Heroin” begins slowly with Reed’s quiet, melodic guitar, Sterling Morrison‘s rhythm guitar and drumpatterns by Maureen Tucker, soon joined by John Cale‘s droning electric viola. The tempo increases gradually, until a crescendo, punctuated by Cale’s viola and the more punctuated guitar strumming of Reed and Morrison. Tucker’s drumming becomes faster and louder. The song then slows to the original tempo, and repeats the same pattern before ending.
The song is based on D♭ and G♭ major chords. Like “Sister Ray“, it features no bass guitar; Reed and Morrison use chords and arpeggios to create the song’s trademark sound. Rolling Stone said “It doesn’t take much to make a great song,” alluding to the song’s use of merely two chords.
Tucker stopped drumming for several seconds at the 5:17 mark, before picking up the beat again. She explains:
As soon as it got loud and fast, I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t hear anybody, so I stopped, assuming, well, they’ll stop too and say “what’s the matter, Moe?” [laughs] But nobody stopped. And then, you know, so I came back in.[6]
PersonnelEdit
- Lou Reed – lead vocals, lead guitar
- John Cale – electric viola
- Sterling Morrison – rhythm guitar
- Maureen Tucker – percussion
Alternative versions
The Velvet Underground and drugsEdit
“Heroin” (along with songs like “I’m Waiting for the Man” which dealt with similar subject matter) tied the Velvet Underground with drug use in the media. Some critics declared the band were glorifying the use of drugs such as heroin.[9] However, members of the band (Reed, in particular) frequently denied any claims that the song was advocating use of the drug. Reed’s lyrics, such as they are on the majority of The Velvet Underground & Nico, were more meant to focus on providing an objective description of the topic without taking a moral stance.[2][10]Critics were not the only ones who misunderstood the song’s neutral tone; fans would sometimes approach the band members after a live performance and tell them they “shot up to ‘Heroin'”,[11] a phenomenon that deeply disturbed Reed. As a result, Reed was somewhat hesitant to play the song with the band through much of the band’s later career.[9]
Billy Idol version
Other cover versions
References in popular culture
References
External links
| “Heroin” | |
|---|---|
| Song by the Velvet Underground | |
| from the album The Velvet Underground & Nico | |
| Released | March 12, 1967 |
| Recorded | May 1966 |
| Studio | TTG Studios, Hollywood, California |
| Genre | Experimental rock[1] |
| Length | 7:12 |
| Label | Verve |
| Songwriter(s) | Lou Reed |
| Producer(s) | Andy Warhol |
| Audio sample | |
| 0:30“Heroin”filehelp | |
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The Daily Hatch 