The Velvet Underground takes Boston

A generous number of column inches in the Winter 2025 issue of Maggot Brain is dedicated to the Velvet Underground. The features include an archival interview with member Doug Yule, who talks with writer Pat Thomas about the band’s history with Boston during the late 1960s and more:

Pat: What about this thing, starting from around the time you joined, that the Velvets would not play New York City—they were punishing New York City?

Doug: I think it's more that we couldn't get a gig! I know when I was with them, we never played New York City. I think it had to do with a couple of things. It was uncomfortable for Lou to play in front of his past. He had made a lot of compromises with a lot of very interesting people in New York. I know when we later played at Max's [...Kansas City], which was the first gig that the Velvets played in a long time in New York, a lot of that came back to him.

Pat: A lot of the Andy Warhol gang started showing up?

Doug: People started showing up that [Lou] didn't want to talk to. It really bugged him. When he left the band, when he quit, which was basically he just didn't show up one Tuesday night or whenever it was, for the beginning of that week's shows—that was one of the things that was cited to me. That his past was driving him crazy.

The rest of the ‘90s-era discussion, which makes its print debut here and has only otherwise lived in somewhat obscure corners of the Internet, is pretty fascinating. It dispels a few myths about the mighty New York City avant-garde rock act, touches on the commonalities between the late-era Velvets and the Dead, and more, and is worth checking out, particularly as Yule declined to participate in Todd Haynes’ provocative documentary and doesn’t often speak to journalists about his time in the band.

The Velvet Underground formed in 1964 in Manhattan and added the multi-instrumentalist Yule as a member in Boston in 1968, when they were regularly performing there. Boston eventually became a de facto home for the band—between 1967 and 1970, they played in the Massachusetts capital more than 40 times, at a nightclub called the Boston Tea Party. Beantown crowds welcomed the Velvet Underground with open arms, and the band flourished onstage, working through some of the most exciting and adventurous art-rock ever made.

In 1966, the band’s first Boston show took place at an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s art staged at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Newbury Street. Along with filmmaker and Factory publicist Paul Morrissey, Warhol was managing the band, and while it’s well-known that he designed the iconic, interactive “banana” album cover art for The Velvet Underground & Nico, the band’s 1967 debut, it may surprise some to know that the photograph on the back was shot far away from New York City, at the Chrysler Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, during one of the traveling Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) performances arranged by the Pittsburgh-born Pop artist.

“Boston was the whole thing as far as we were concerned,” said founding member Lou Reed to Victor Bockris for Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story. He drew a comparison between what would become the fruitful Tea Party gigs and their role in the EPI/as Warhol’s house band at his studio, the Factory:

“(Boston) was the first time we played in public and didn’t have all those things thrown at us: the leather freaks, the druggies, the ‘this’ or the ‘that.’ It was the first time somebody just listened to the music, which blew our minds collectively.”

Because The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its songs about drug use and sex, was banned for its content by radio stations in New York and magazines wouldn’t run ads for it, guitarist Sterling Morrison told journalist Legs McNeil that he was “proud of the enemies they made” and seized the occasion to venture north, far from the band’s hometown DJs who refused to play their record. Owing to power struggles, financial mismanagement, and other difficulties better covered elsewhere, it wasn’t long after the debut’s release that the Velvet Underground and Warhol parted ways, and the act found themselves gigging in Boston on a recurring basis.

In May of 1967, the Velvets scored two shows at the Boston Tea Party, a former Unitarian Meeting House in the city’s South End neighborhood that was opened as a rock club just months prior by David Hahn and Ray Riepen.

Hahn, a hippie who operated a bus line in Central America, studied neurophysiology at MIT for a spell before dropping out. He became known for orchestrating the Tea Party’s compelling psychedelic light shows and later established his own light show project supported by MIT students called “The Great Eastern Lights.”

Ray Riepen was enrolled in the graduate program at Harvard. A business-minded young lawyer hailing from Kansas City, he also bought what would become the Boston Phoenix and transformed WBCN, turning a ten-year-old classical station into an influential hub of radical free-form programming. Both the paper and the radio station would serve as promotional arms for the Tea Party shows, which were booked by venue staffer Steve Nelson and, later, by Don Law, who had been managing a local garage act called the Remains.

The Velvet Underground’s Tea Party sets in the spring of ‘67 included the driving, frenetic “Sister Ray,” which is about as far from the celesta-and-strings pairing on the debut’s tranquil “Sunday Morning” that you can possibly get, as well as other songs that would soon appear on 1968’s White Light/White Heat LP. There are conflicting reports around the exact date of Reed’s firing of Warhol, but sources point to these May 1967 Boston gigs as having marked the start of a post-Warhol, post-Morrissey, post-Factory, post-EPI universe for the band.

In Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, a meticulously reported history of ‘60s-era Boston and the Van Morrison album for which it is named, author Ryan H. Walsh writes that only three Velvet Underground shows took place in New York between 1967 and 1970, and that the Tea Party was “where they found a second life as a band.” This renewal wasn’t without hardships—while singer/actress Nico’s name appears on the handbill pictured here, relationships were shifting, and she did not perform at these shows. The band’s cofounder, a classical composer named John Cale, also found himself packing his Welsh bags before the end of 1968.

“Reed seemed hell-bent on cleaning house,” writes Walsh of the period.

(Painter Thomas Hart Benton’s daughter Jessie Benton and a cult called the Fort Hill Community have lots to do with the Boston Tea Party, but you’ll have to read Walsh’s book for those details.)

Whereas their Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows and Factory parties were home to a specific sort of crowd, the Tea Party shows were sold out, over and over again, and the attendees included “local blue-collar kids, students from Harvard and BU and an occasional professor,” according to Tea Party manager Steve Nelson, who’d previously seen the Velvets blow the doors off the Village Gate on the band’s home turf during a party for The Paris Review. I can almost hear the monocles crashing to the floor. Nelson bought their first record at the Harvard Coop.

In 1968, Bostonians beamed when they flipped over the cover of the Velvet Underground’s second LP, the newly released White Light/White Heat. On the back of the sleeve, fans were presented with a photograph of their beloved Velvets taken in front of the Tea Party. And aside from some gripes in the local press, Massachusetts in general was very welcoming of this band—the Velvet Underground played a run of much anticipated gigs in September of 1967 at Boston’s Savoy Theater. They were accompanied by David Hahn’s “The Great Eastern Lights,” which involved at least 12 movie projectors, according to MIT’s Tech newspaper. Later, in 1969, northwest of Boston in South Deerfield, Steve Nelson opened the Woodrose Ballroom, and the band performed there ten times that year.

“It is irrelevant that the Velvet Underground first received significant exposure in their home city [of] New York with Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” wrote Crawdaddy’s Wayne McGuire in August of 1968. He continued:

“It was in Boston, through record sales and Boston Tea Party performances, that they began to find some acceptance and meaningful response (like getting their equipment stolen).”

The first studio appearance for Yule, whose tenure with the Velvet Underground was initiated in September of 1968, is on the band’s often radiant self-titled third album—a largely subdued and melodic outing compared to White Light that sees him singing and playing bass as well as organ.

When he was recruited by the Velvets, Yule was in a band called Grass Menagerie and lived for a period in a spacious apartment in Cambridge owned by his band’s manager, who was a friend of Steve Sesnick, the Velvet Underground’s manager since the summer prior. The New Jersey-born Sesnick had long been hanging around the Factory and is a controversial figure in the band’s history. Lou Reed called him a “snake” in an ‘80s-era Creem interview, and his colorful, widely disputed claims over time include taking credit for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which was conceived by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey.

Sesnick was popping up in Boston regularly, vying for the Velvets’ management job. The turning point may have taken place during a long car ride from Connecticut. On the road after a benefit gig the Velvet Underground played at Philip Johnson's Glass House, Factory photographer William “Billy Name” Linich made a reportedly convincing argument to the band members that in the wake of the Warhol and Morrissey fallout, Sesnick should handle its publicity and business affairs.

The Cambridge apartment, which was outfitted with a studio, was sometimes used by the Velvet Underground when they came through town, and after the Velvets’ Sterling Morrison heard Yule playing guitar there, he brought Yule to Lou Reed’s attention. Sesnick got in touch with Yule on behalf of VU after they fired Cale, who contributed electric viola, bass and other instruments to the act’s consistently innovative sound. Crawdaddy’s McGuire called Cale “the heaviest bass player in the country” in 1968.

“Lou and I eventually found the group too small for the both of us, and so I left,” Cale said of the development.

Post-Cale, Yule was tasked with bass duties and learned dozens of Velvet Underground songs during an overnight crash course with Reed for their next gig, which saw them heading west. Yule’s first performance with VU took place in October of 1968 at La Cave in Ohio, but it’s the Boston tapes that pack the heat.

A substantial guide to Velvet Underground live tapes that have circulated over the years also appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Maggot Brain. It’s the work of longtime music critic and regular Aquarium Drunkard contributor Tyler Wilcox, who knows his Velvets. He provides detailed context on much-heralded tapes but covers many that may be new to VU heads near and far.

“The Velvets were big in Cleveland, but they were huge in Boston,” writes Wilcox, adding that the performances at the Boston Tea Party “are some of the very best recordings of the Yule era that we’ve got.”

Handbill for the May 1967 Velvet Underground shows credited to the late David Hahn. The second flyer here, advertising Tea Party gigs in August of 1967, was created by Lightship Productions. Image © 2025 Maggot Brain / Third Man Records; photograph of the Velvet Underground ca. 1966 by Steve Schapiro/Corbis via Getty Images.