New Sterling Morrison article

[msatlof]

Cool looking story on Sterling and his history in Texas. Six part series!

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projec ... -morrison/

[Doctor Bob]

Does anyone have access to it?

They didn't let me subscribe without a US-based credit card

[DavidH]

You can click on each part of the article except for the last part from here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250206211 ... -morrison/

Maybe there will be a later save on Archive with the last part too?

[DavidH]

I checked the main website again, and it looks like it's all available freely. I don't know if that will be forever, so best to check in soon if you want to read this.

[la219]

We should create a sub-forum just for re-posting articles. Each thread will be an article.

Rare Photos Released of the Velvet Underground & In Depth Look at Andy Warhol’s Combination of the Arts. Dylan Henricksen. May 27 2021. Revolver Gallery

The Promise of Immortality: Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and the Exploding Inevitable. Miss Rosen. Jan 09 2020. Jacques Marie Mage

[Doctor Bob]

I checked the main website again, and it looks like it's all available freely. I don't know if that will be forever, so best to check in soon if you want to read this.

Thanks! I found the first 5 parts with your wayback link. The 6th is still unavailable, and the main site tells me to subscribe. Pls let me know if you have a workaround (and thanks again!)

[DavidH]

I checked the main website again, and it looks like it's all available freely. I don't know if that will be forever, so best to check in soon if you want to read this.

Thanks! I found the first 5 parts with your wayback link. The 6th is still unavailable, and the main site tells me to subscribe. Pls let me know if you have a workaround (and thanks again!)

It's letting me read it for some reason. Here is the text of it if you still can't get onto it.

The Velvet Underground’s 1993 reunion is only a YouTube search away.

The clips are from the live album and concert film released at the time. The title reads like a tombstone: “Live MCMXCIII.”

I looked up “Pale Blue Eyes,” the stunning showcase of Sterling Morrison’s style. But in the reunion version I watched on my laptop screen at my desk, I could barely hear Morrison’s slinky guitar playing.

Lou Reed’s guitar is pushed up in the mix. And that bright solo Morrison recorded in 1968? It was outsourced to John Cale on viola, the camera turning back and forth between Cale and Reed until the final notes decay.

The crowd applauds and the four members take a bow before the credits roll. It’s the only Morrison sighting in his signature song.

Who’s to say whether Morrison felt browbeaten to the sidelines by the bigger personalities in the band? Maybe he just felt more comfortable in the shadows at stage left?

I know this: The tour is why Morrison left Texas. I imagine him at a Houston airport once more, one arm shorter with a stuffed suitcase.

This reunion played out much like the original lifespan for him and the band. It was short, contentious and largely ignored in the United States.

Still, that tour represents the crescendo of the steady beat of renewed interest and influence in the band, which rang out while Morrison hunched over poetry books in Austin or gripped the wheel of a tugboat in Houston.

The Velvets’ canonization formalized around 1986 when a collection of unreleased songs was issued, along with a repackaged set of their studio recordings. That year, Ignacio Julía, a Spanish music critic, authored an early history.

A year later, artist and former Velvets manager Andy Warhol died, spurring Reed and Cale’s attempts to fix their fissure. Their efforts led to the European tour in the summer of 1993.

The shows were well received, but the band dynamic immediately reverted to dysfunctional settings. Any hopes the reunion would extend to the U.S. fizzled. They abandoned plans for an “MTV Unplugged.”

Morrison, however, returned to the studio soon after the reunion. He added his guitar to a solo album by bandmate Maureen Tucker. In 1993, he played on two songs by the band Luna, “Friendly Advice” and “Great Jones Street.”

The latter displays Morrison’s distinctive tone and the empathetic way he situates himself in an ensemble. Morrison first plays a few notes that peek out between the acoustic guitar, adding depth to the opening verse. As the song progresses, Morrison’s guitar drifts toward the front. His playing possesses a rich resonance, each note as clean and clear as a ripple on the surface of water. “Friendly Advice” has a particular staccato sound that keeps pace with the Velvets’ uptempo work.

I wanted to filter the sound he brought to those songs from what Luna guitarist Dean Wareham played.
Artist Ken Ellis imagines the phases of Sterling Morrison’s life we’ve uncovered in this previously untold account of his time in Texas. Here, he starts his public life as the guitarist for the coolest band in rock.

I fished out an old email address for Wareham from a 25-year mess of notes, phone numbers, scraps of interview transcripts I never printed, an audio clip of John Cleese laughing at one of my jokes. You never know what you might need one day.

That day, I needed Wareham, a Velvets enthusiast from New Zealand who founded both Luna and Galaxie 500. The Velvets’ fingerprints are all over his music; Galaxie 500 even recorded the band’s “Here She Comes Now.”

I found my way to Galaxie 500 through Luna, who I first saw in Austin in the early 1990s. When I bought Galaxie 500’s first album, “Today,” released in 1988, the closing song grabbed me.

It’s called “Tugboat.” And it’s about — you guessed it — Morrison.

“I found it mysterious and heroic that he’d go from playing in this band to becoming a tugboat captain,” Wareham says. “I guess the song is a form of transference of my ego onto his. For the purposes of this song, it’s just a way of saying, ‘Let’s run away together.’”

When they worked together a few years later, Wareham describes the guitarist as “imposing.”

PART 3: Why Sterling Morrison quit the Velvet Underground for a new life in Austin, Texas

One song they worked on started to run a little long. “That’s veering into Grateful Dead territory,” Morrison told Wareham. Twenty years in Texas hadn’t changed him that much. He was back at that bar in Austin, ranting about Frank Zappa and those West Coast hippies as Bill Bentley slipped into the seat beside him.

Wareham describes Morrison as being fairly quiet during the recording sessions. He occupied the space instead with his “instantly recognizable” playing.

“That’s the sound of that band. … There’s a sound he gets,” Wareham said. “It has nothing to do with an effects pedal. It’s just his style. And it’s not just in his fingers. The highest compliment you can pay a musician is to say they sound like themselves.”

These are Morrison’s final released recordings.

Morrison died on Aug. 30, 1995. He was 53.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma decided his final days, ones he spent at his home in Poughkeepsie.

Fran Regan said his sudden departure, first from Houston and then so closely followed by his one from this world, hit the Ship Channel colleagues hard.

He did get to ask him why he didn’t say goodbye.

“He said something like, ‘I’m not the person I was before.’”

“The dude was dying and he was a proud guy,” Regan said. “I don’t think he wanted any of us to see him that way.”

PART 4: How a poet from a thousand years ago brought the Velvet Underground's Sterling Morrison to UT

Bentley, whose friendship with Morrison guided so much of my research, did reconnect with him before the end. They reconciled in Paris after he played the reunion shows I streamed on YouTube.

“He was cold but he had a soul,” Bentley says. “It’s hard to describe any inner self because he didn’t show it much. I never saw him sad. But he could hold a grudge, and he could push people away.”

Less than five months after Morrison died, the Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Reed, at least momentarily during the acceptance speech, shortened his own shadow and spotlighted Morrison as “the warrior heart of the Velvet Underground.”

I found Morrison on a mild summer day among the rolling hills of the Hudson River Valley.

He’s buried in Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery near a stone etched with “Morrison.” It looks big enough to anchor a small boat.

This all started as an attempt to document Morrison’s Texas years, to understand how and why he disappeared to this place, compounded by the simple curiosity of if he ever played again in Houston. I never thought I would read a dissertation or spend hours discussing how someone pulled a cargo ship through the Ship Channel.

But it led me to where I stood that morning, next to his grave, joined only by soft birdsong and the sun.

It was there that I realized what I had discovered.

Morrison, it turned out, was hiding in plain sight. I wasn’t chasing someone — I was tracking an elusive truth about what we leave behind.

Much like his dissertation decoding Cynewulf, much like he piloted his path on the Ship Channel, Morrison told his own story through meticulous documentation and particular movements he controlled.

The map I followed for the last year? Morrison drew it. I don’t think it was so he could be found. Maybe it was so he could be remembered.

Even if you toss the inconsequential ending of the Velvet Underground, he surely realized the band and Warhol radiated with cultural significance. He archived the history he helped author. He kept all the posters, handbills, receipts.

PART 5: Sterling Morrison quit the Velvet Underground. One of his next stops? The Houston Ship Channel

So much of what I found can be traced back to a website called Record Mecca, where fans can purchase these items. His wife, Martha, has authenticated them. (She declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Some items are museum-quality pieces, like an orange sweater Morrison wore in several photos in the book “The Velvet Underground: New York Art.” Currently for sale: a velvet suit created by Betsey Johnson, the famed clothing designer who was briefly married to Cale. The asking price is $12,000.

Other items fans have bought include Morrison’s track-and-field certificates from high school. Something I’d wad up and throw out today, a $10 bar tab, sold. Admittedly, it’s for the storied and long-gone New York Club, Max’s Kansas City.

In addition to all the Velvets material, Record Mecca sold all manner of Morrison ID cards. They cover all his eras at the University of Texas, both as a teacher and student. His captain’s licenses and union cards have also sold.

Martha sold a scrapbook Morrison kept of the 1993 Velvets reunion tour. It’s the sort of item a proud parent would assemble: A notebook with newspaper clippings glued to the inside. Bentley says Morrison might’ve started a memoir. He told Bentley he would call it “The Velvet Underground Diet.”

Why?

“Because diet books always sell.”

A representative for Martha said she’s working on her account of her husband’s life.

I hope she publishes it. He stamped a strong impression on those who knew him best in Texas, and each of the recollections they shared with me added gestural shading to his portrait.

Yet, many lines of his image remain blurry for me. Segments of his likeness remain out of reach.
Using a cell phone photograph from reporter Andrew Dansby, artist Ken Ellis recreates the moment Dansby experienced at Sterling Morrison’s graveside in New York.

His headstone remembers all the names he answered to in Texas; there’s room for the Holmes who darkened the corners of the library and the Sterling who captained the ships.

Just feet from his headstone, there’s one more rudimentary command left behind under Morrison’s birth and death years: “Rock on.”

I stood before the words carved into stone for more than a moment.

Suddenly, Morrison’s final message held this mystery up to the light, illuminating the true mission of my efforts for the last year. Actually, the real meaning of all the stories I’ve pursued about music for the past 25 years appeared to me in that cemetery.

“Rock on” cuts through time, as forever as a horizon line at dawn, sharp enough to gut the manmade limits of beginnings and ends.

That might be what all art is, whether it’s medieval poetry or a rock song about the color of someone’s eyes. Because it’s all expressions of what we all feel or have felt or desire to feel, these creations live forever, even after their creators are gone and, in some cases, forgotten.

Culture can play out like nature. Sometimes, the artifacts disappear under sediment or soil. But we still dig for them when we need them most, each an answer to life’s biggest questions. We know art can stand in for us when we can’t conjure the words we need to explain ourselves.

They may be dormant, buried deep, but they are just in a state of waiting. We revive them over and over and over again.

The heart restarts when we check out a poetry book, as we press play on a Velvet Underground song and find ourselves staring back from somewhere between the notes in a guitar’s melody.

[Doctor Bob]

It's letting me read it for some reason. Here is the text of it if you still can't get onto it.

Thanks so much. Yes it still doesn't work for me, presumably due to regional access differences? So thanks for copying and pasting for me, that was very kind of you.