The Velvet Underground Documentary - Call to Fans

[Haight Trashbury]

Dear Mr. Trashbury,

Your insistence on making categorical statements, for instance:

It’s official, then.

Mystery solved.

... absolutely no doubt ...

on matters subject to the vagaries and distortions of 50 years' time makes it hard to take your otherwise valuable information as seriously as you seem to want it to be. How, in fact, is one to regard you as a credible source when you repeatedly call Olivier Landemaine "Oliver"? In our corner of the world that's a grievous error, even if Olivier himself is too mature to be bothered by it.

I don't mean to discourage you from contributing here, but your comments would be much more welcome if you would temper your enthusiasm with appropriate amounts of uncertainty. Otherwise, you're doomed to come off as a goofy sophomore, who knows everything including the unknowable.

--Phil Milstein

Looking back, I rather agree with your statement. The only thing that can be said difinitively here is that:

a. The masters for the VU on Upbeat were never copied (that I know of) and were wiped. David Spero said he knew for a fact that they’re gone.
b. Tony Conrad taped a show, and it’s the only known surviving copy (I say “known” because there may be others that were forgotten, although it’s unlikely).

I shouldn’t have made any assumptions on the dates of those recordings or the songs they contained, and I’m very sorry for that. I should’ve simply provided a hypothesis showing what was most likely.

[simonm]

That’s a very common misconception...

Actually it's not, it's just an idea someone on this board floated, that we talked about for a short while. Nobody claimed they'd solved the mystery. I used it as an example, as it seemed like as good a theory any to account for the existence of the tape, if we accept the chance that 22 yrs on JC mis-remembered its origin. None of the memories fit together neatly, nothing is certain.

[lurid]

it may well have been me who originally floated the idea and if it was, it was pure speculation on my part...

That’s a very common misconception...

Actually it's not, it's just an idea someone on this board floated, that we talked about for a short while. Nobody claimed they'd solved the mystery. I used it as an example, as it seemed like as good a theory any to account for the existence of the tape, if we accept the chance that 22 yrs on JC mis-remembered its origin. None of the memories fit together neatly, nothing is certain.

[Elvis Plebsley]

Me, I think and it was definitely speculation, based on Conrad stating that he had taped the Velvet Underground on Upbeat in the Angus Maclise, Brain Damage in Oklahoma booklet. The date is given as May 11 1968.

it may well have been me who originally floated the idea and if it was, it was pure speculation on my part...

Actually it's not, it's just an idea someone on this board floated, that we talked about for a short while. Nobody claimed they'd solved the mystery. I used it as an example, as it seemed like as good a theory any to account for the existence of the tape, if we accept the chance that 22 yrs on JC mis-remembered its origin. None of the memories fit together neatly, nothing is certain.

[Haight Trashbury]

That’s a very common misconception...

Actually it's not, it's just an idea someone on this board floated, that we talked about for a short while. Nobody claimed they'd solved the mystery. I used it as an example, as it seemed like as good a theory any to account for the existence of the tape, if we accept the chance that 22 yrs on JC mis-remembered its origin. None of the memories fit together neatly, nothing is certain.

LOL. It sounded like the poster was mistaking that theory for genuine fact. Silly me.

[peppergomez]

there's a simple solution for all this conjecture:

we invent a time machine and travel back to '67 and '68

[hkmartin]

This interview is mostly about Dark Waters, by the same director, but a little bit on the coming VU Doc https://collider.com/todd-haynes-dark-w ... terview-2/

...So, currently, I’m engaged in a pretty exciting, very different kind of project, which is my first documentary, and it’s about the band, The Velvet Underground. We filmed all of the interviews in 2018, before I even made it to Cincinnati for [Dark Waters], and we’ve been collecting an incredible database of archive material to flesh this story out. So, we’ve had an editor to working on it, who’s a partner of my main editor on this movie, Affonso Gonçalves, and was a co-editor on Jim Jarmusch’s documentary about The Stooges. I just watched a cut of where that’s at, and it’s so exciting, so juicy and so rich. I’m very excited to get my head and heart back into that.

Were you, personally, a big fan of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground? Is that what made you want to do the film?

HAYNES: Oh, my god, yes! Of course! They’re life changing. They altered the way you see and hear things and, of course, affected music and generations of artists, ever since they first appeared. You can’t overstate their influence. But my goal is really to focus on the time and place, in New York in the avant garde era and the really rich, thriving period where music and art and performance and happenings were all co-mingling and mutually informing each other. There was a great sense of discovery and experimentation going on. So, my goal was really to interview people and focus on the people who were there and present, as real direct witnesses to it. That was where we started with the people we interviewed for it.