Genesis of punk

The 45th anniversary reissue of White Light/White Heat, the second release from the controversial 1960s avant-garde band The Velvet Underground, confirms its status as one of the most seminal albums in rock history, writes John Robinson

Left to right, Velvet Underground members Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale and Moe Tucker in 1969. Michael Ochs Archives /Getty Images

The commemorative box set has a civilising power – it can serve to gentrify those who surely never imagined they would become gentrified. It must be with a degree of irony that groups such as the Sex Pistols or The Clash discover that recorded work that was headline-grabbing sedition in 1977 has, 35 years on, become a luxuriously packaged gift item – a lifestyle accessory for people completely unlike their younger, disenfranchised selves.

This issue of the second album by The Velvet Underground falls squarely into that category. Reflecting on the band's influence in relation to its commercial success, the musician Brian Eno once joked that, while only a few people bought their first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), everyone who did subsequently formed a band. White Light/White Heat, from 1968, is a record no less influential, but considerably more aggressive. If the first album presented a challenging proposition, this was something else entirely.

"No one listened to it," said Lou Reed, the band's songwriter, announcing this 45th anniversary reissue two months before his October 2013 death. "But there it is, forever – the quintessence of articulate punk." Even to the band's already select and broad-minded audience, this was perceived as a difficult work. Reed wasn't completely correct, however: people were listening, just not all at once. David Bowie covered the title song, while the album's riffs are written in the DNA of every left-field guitar band from Can to The Stooges and The Jesus and Mary Chain and beyond. True enough, this isn't a record being commemorated for its huge sales. It's no Rumours or Dark Side of the Moon. It's not something that will catch the ear of the casual listener. You probably won't want to play it in the car; it will be a challenging gift.

In that respect, the set occupies a position not unlike that of The Velvet Underground at the end of the 1960s. They were rowdy and controversial, but moving in moneyed circles; uncompromising but commodified. Formed around the core of Lou Reed (a one-time literature student and commercial writer of novelty pop songs) and John Cale (a Welsh graduate student on a minimalist adventure in avant-garde New York), The Velvet Underground had by 1966 been co-opted completely into the pop art roadshow that their manager/record producer/patron Andy Warhol called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Disorientating filmshows were projected. Warhol “Superstar” Gerard Malanga danced, with a whip. In the middle of the chaos, the band played.

The second disc captures something of what that might have been like. At a live show recorded on April 30, 1967, at the Gymnasium, an Upper East Side venue that was formerly a Czech health club, the band are caught notionally promoting their debut album, released the previous month. If the setting was amusing (guitarist Sterling Morrison remembered audience members jumping from the balcony onto trampolines still in place from the gym), the band's story is moving on from the Warholian spectacle. There is no performance from Nico, the German actress and model presented to the group by Warhol as vocalist, and the band play only I'm Waiting for the Man and Run Run Run, the two noisiest compositions from the debut. Instead, they present a different sound – a tough and disrespectful take on rhythm 'n' blues. The first part of the set begins with an instrumental, Booker T, continues through the enjoyable I'm Not a Young Man Anymore and peaks with Guess I'm Falling In Love, in which Lou Reed's guitar accesses the primal roots of rock 'n' roll, a gutsy set of riffs, from which we are released by a set of delightfully conventional guitar solos.

As with other infrequently circulated material here (say, the uplifting, hilarious Temptation Inside Your Heart, a demo among the extras on disc one), the set serves to remind that for all their reputation as nihilist death rockers, this was a group of subtlety and contradiction. As much as wanting to create scarifying noise, The Velvet Underground also grew out of an admiration for the succinct, formally perfect compositions by Chuck Berry and emanating from New York's Brill Building.

These would be explored again after the departure of John Cale, on their self-titled third album, and their fourth, 1970's Loaded. Back at the Gymnasium in 1967, however, the people are jumping from the balcony to a far more extreme Velvet Underground sound. As the set develops, it runs to two epic and exploratory pieces, both of which will form an integral part of their forthcoming album.

Most monumental of these is Sister Ray. An improvisation apparently created one evening when Reed was unable to perform live, he has subsequently taken ownership of it: directing its narrative, and its savage dynamic. As with The Gift, which follows, the song is a masterclass in repetition, its chugging riff piloting a cinematic Reed tale of the city at night.

Even in the (very slightly) ambiguous language that he uses, we are clearly in at the deep end here: an unholy trinity of murder, sex and intravenous drug use. What’s most remarkable is Reed’s deadpan tone. When Cecil shoots the sailor/hustler from Alabama, the narrator remarks: “Don’t you know you’ll stain the carpet?” The sound mix of the live version here favours Reed’s shape-shifting guitar feedback, the thing kept on course by the beat of drummer Maureen Tucker. Here, the song lasts 20 minutes. It could sometimes take an hour.

The White Light/White Heat album itself is presented here in two versions, mono (disc 3) and stereo (disc 1) and it finds the group condensing itself to its purest and most aggressive essence.

John Cale came to think the record representative of only one strand of the band – its noise – and the current release, with its inclusion of mild-mannered contemporary demos like Stephanie Says and Hey Mr Rain helps rectify that. Sadly, other demos of the period (particularly the amusing Sheltered Life) are not included.

The album achieves a magnificent fusion: of form and content, noise and lyricism, Cale and Reed. White Light/White Heat opens the album, being a two-minute rush of apparently traditional piano rock 'n' roll. On one level, it reveals itself as a subversive song about drugs. On another, however, the song is a pure-hearted celebration of what might be achieved with the medium of rock 'n' roll itself: here both music and lyrics stretch to breaking point the notion of this as a vehicle for radio-friendly sentiment. The sound levels veer wildly into the red of frazzled distortion, while the lyrics teem with the sensory overload of the amphetamine experience.

By the time of its recording for the album, The Gift had become a backing track for Cale's reading of a Reed short story: about Waldo Jeffers, who decides to post himself to his distant college sweetheart, Marsha Bronson. The sound mix enacts their separation: listeners were intended to be able to choose how much they wanted of each element – the narration, or the music. Here you will also find them on separate extra tracks: each mirroring the other's inexorable grind towards an unpleasant conclusion. On the subsequent Lady Godiva's Operation, Reed's narrative anatomises the lobotomy of a drag queen while Cale simulates the wheezing of a respirator.

The group's command of their noise, while confrontational, is also supremely theatrical. On I Heard Her Call My Name, the group grant to a revelatory love/drug experience all the explosive drama it demands. The singer hears the call, "And then my mind split open." This cleaving is then enacted in a howling feedback guitar solo, the effect on the sound continuity as ungovernable as the narrator's feelings. There is also an alternate version included here, clearly rejected for failing to achieve the same ferocity. Interestingly, The Velvet Underground were commercially sponsored by Vox, who supplied them with amplifiers and effects. One hopes this was what they had in mind.

Legend abounds about the recording of the closing Sister Ray, notably that its escalating musical battle between Reed's guitar and Cale's electric organ enacts their mounting personal estrangement – rather than endorsing their collaboration in noise. The product of a one-take improvisation, the song is said to have prompted producer Tom Wilson to walk out during recording.

This was not, after all, something for everybody. Nor has White Light/White Heat lost any of its bite. Instead, it remains a leather strap, against which the cutting edge continues to sharpen itself.