On the shelf
Jim DeRogatis’s “The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side” is available now from Voyageur Press.
You don’t become a prominent rock critic by being shy. But even in this profession, wherein a cocksure certitude of the rightness of one’s opinion is almost a prerequisite, Jim DeRogatis’ candor is uncommon. The veteran Chicago Sun-Times music scribe seems to relish his rep as a cranky contrarian. On “Sound Opinions,” the weekly public radio show and podcast he co-founded, DeRogatis happily plays the caustic finger-pointer to co-host Greg Kot’s calmer, more measured persona.
Ask DeRogatis about his brief stint at Rolling Stone in the mid-1990s, and you’ll get an earful.
“Working as a janitor in my high school, scraping gum off the desks one summer, was a better job than Rolling Stone,” DeRogatis rants, speaking from his home on Chicago’s North Side. “I could have sent the best writer of my generation to Iceland to live with Bjork for two weeks along with [photographer] Annie Leibovitz. But instead we were doing a hatchet job on Don Henley because [Rolling Stone publisher] Jan Wenner wasn’t invited to his fourth wedding.”
The New Jersey born-and-bred DeRogatis has written or contributed to more than half a dozen books since that unhappy episode, including an authoritative survey of psychedelic rock and a biography of experimental pranksters the Flaming Lips. This fall, he published “The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side.”
The Velvet Underground’s creative life spanned only the latter half of 1960s, but they’ve long been accepted as one of the most adventurous and original rock bands ever.
“They had as much of an artistic evolution as the Beatles did, in half the time,” DeRogatis says. “And I think they’ve been proven to have been every bit as influential.”
But because the Velvets’ commercial effect was negligible, it’s only now getting its own graphics-heavy coffee-table tome, a standard encomium for boomer rock bands.
“Frankly, the art director and the editor should be on the cover, along with if not instead of me,” DeRogatis says. “I have a dozen books about [Velvets graduates] Lou Reed and John Cale and the Velvets on my shelf, and a lot of this art, I’ve never seen.”
Though he freely concedes that the book’s raison d’etre is the collection of candid photos, gig posters, handwritten lyrics and other artifacts of the group’s brief-but-brilliant tenure, DeRogatis says he was honored by the commission to write the volume’s “connective tissue historical overview essay.” Writing with his usual straight-talking efficiency, he cuts through the four decades of myth that have accumulated around the band as generations of its acolytes — from U2 to Nirvana to the Strokes — have become superstars. DeRogatis also rounded up the dozen-plus other scribes who contribute essays.
One thing he didn’t do was seek comment from the Velvets, all of whom are still alive. DeRogatis has interviewed Reed, the group’s famously dyspeptic chief singer/songwriter, on a half-dozen occasions over the last two decades, but these conversations did little to demystify Reed’s creative labors.
“The only way he wants to talk is on a purely techno-geek level,” DeRogatis said. “If you ask him what setting he uses on his guitar pedals, he’ll talk to you for an hour. But ask him, ‘To what extent were you projecting yourself onto the heroine of [Reed’s 1973 concept album] Berlin?’, and you won’t get anything out of him.”
