No. 027 - The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” changed my life
No. 027 - The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” changed my life
An 18+ comedy show, Music Central 96, and the years Matthew Schratz spent imagining a song he'd never heard
This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.
• 5 min read •
The song that changed my life started doing so years before I ever heard it.
In my middle and early high school days, before I knew about Pitchfork or had enough money to buy SPIN, I mostly learned about music from a CD-ROM called Music Central 96, a kind of Encarta Encyclopedia for music.
It was hyperlinked so you could hop around, but closed (i.e. not online). So some acts got long biographies, some albums got long reviews (many drawn, I’ve learned now, from Colin Larkin’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music), and some songs even included a little snippet you could listen to.
I remember listening to forty seconds of “Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie a lot. It was fun to hear bits and bobs, and also fun to think about the many, many bands that I could read about other people loving… without hearing the songs.
Everybody loved the Velvet Underground, as far as I could tell from Music Central 96. They showed up the most. They were from New York, they were cool, they were scary. They were somehow both secret (in terms of public awareness) and ubiquitous (among writers for Music Central 96).
Clicking through to the page that’s just about the Velvets, I may well have read — based on my current check-in with Larkin’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music — that the band’s “finely honed understanding of R&B enhanced a graphic lyricism whereby songs about drugs (‘I’m Waiting for the Main,’ ‘Heroin’), sado-masochism (‘Venus in Furs’) or sublimation (‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’) were not only memorable for their subjects, but also as vibrant pop compositions.”
The young me didn’t quite know what to make of this. It’s language from about three different registers that I would have had no idea how to process. But I knew enough to be especially intrigued by the transgressive “Venus in Furs” — a song I could not even imagine, and thus thought of ceaselessly.
My mom spent years volunteering at a local theater when I was growing up, eventually becoming the executive director. That meant my siblings and I were often “paid” (or bartered with) to pitch in too — cleaning, making popcorn, and so on.
I finally got to listen to the Velvets when I manned the ticket booth for a comedy show put on by a morning show host on Buffalo’s classic rock radio station.
I did not get to listen to them in a straightforward way. He didn’t walk out to “Sweet Jane” or anything. Rather, because this comedian was maybe going to say “fuck” or “shit,” my mom decided to pay me for working the event by buying me a CD of my choice and making me promise that I would listen to music and NOT the 18+ comedy show.
So instead of hearing Rob Lederman say, “Traffic on the 290 is fucking annoying!” or whatever he was saying, I listened to Lou Reed sing about what it is like to buy and use heroin.
I was with the program as soon as the CD started: from its scuzzy kickoff “I’m Waiting for the Man,” through the odyssey of “Heroin” and my immediate favorite, “Stephanie Says.” What the album *didn’t* have was “Venus in Furs,” so I could do nothing but keep thinking about it.
I can’t actually remember when I finally heard “Venus in Furs,” but there were more near misses between the comedy show and whenever that was.
One time, we went on a special trip to Boston for my brother’s birthday, and my mom almost bought me the banana album at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square. Then she saw an unrelated book with a banana cover called The Penis Book and got suspicious.
On another occasion, my friend’s sister Lara, driving her brother and me to school, deigned to let us listen to The Velvet Underground & Nico (at my pleading), but skipped “Venus in Furs” because her brother and I “weren’t ready for it.”
Eventually I did hear it — and I assume that I loved it: Moe’s lumbering drums, John’s demented viola, Lou’s incantatory words. The shiny boots of leather, the weariness that filled some things in but remained elusive and evocative. Plus Sterling’s bass.
It’s odd, though, that I don’t remember exactly when I listened to it. Maybe all my imagining of the song had changed my life already.
Now that I live in the streaming glut era, I’ve not only listened to all of the songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico hundreds of times, but also the rest of the Velvets Extended Universe.
I’ve listened to Squeeze, the album that doesn’t have anybody left from the first album (but lots of Doug Yule). I listen to “Hedda Gabler,” a John Cale non-album cut that’s not on Apple Music or Spotify, while I grade papers, and to “Endlessly Jealous,” a track from Lou Reed’s New Sensations — a 1984 album in large part about how video games are fun — while I go running.
These are not things that were available to me in the era of Music Central 96.
When it comes to the classics, I even have favorite versions. I like the Cale version of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” which sounds (twenty years ahead of its time) like LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” It also features a mid-song rant about coffee beans and Augusto Pinochet. And I love the 1993 reunion version of “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” where John and Lou sing to each other at the end.
But my favorite version of one of their songs, the one that changed my life, doesn’t exist.
It’s the version of “Venus in Furs” that, while reading Music Central 96, middle school me could only dream of. ◆
About Matthew
Matthew Schratz lives near Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, stepson and cat. He spends his time teaching, doing the crossword puzzle, and teaching people how to do the crossword puzzle.
Instagram @mattschratz
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