Anyone who thinks there's nothing left to be said about the much-written-about Velvet Underground hasn't been listening to the right people. English journalist Dylan Jones (David Bowie) rounds them up for Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground, an oral biography by turns illuminating, amusing, unsparing, and, in the spirit of the band's notorious fractiousness, contradictory.
Loaded begins, inevitably, in New York City with Andy Warhol, the world's most mild-mannered Svengali; before discovering the Velvets, he had been thinking that, as Jones puts it, "he needed some kind of rock band as part of his extended family" of artists. The book covers the band's five-year existence, from 1965 to 1970; touches on members' post-Velvets lives and rancorous reunion in the early 1990s; and evaluates the band's place, time, prescience, and influence.
Jones has corralled insights from the Velvets and more than a hundred Velvets enthusiasts, either interviewing them for his book or incorporating their observations from previously published sources. Chiming in are the likes of Bono, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and David Bowie ("The Velvet Underground actually created modern music"). The non-household names tend to bring the wit, as when writer David Cavanagh notes that Velvets front man Lou Reed, who projected urban malaise, was actually "[r]aised on whatever the exact opposite of the mean streets are." Despite the connective tissue that Jones sometimes supplies between contributor comments, Loaded has a few jarring transitions, but this isn't heresy in a book about a band that preferred rough edges. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer