A Quote by Dean Wareham
It's hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band.
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It's hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band. They have a lot of noise, they have a viola, they have a drummer that's standing up, certainly they have influenced my guitar playing, but hopefully after 12 records you start to sound like yourself.
Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
We've played with Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, The Ramones. You name any punk band and we've probably played or toured with them all the way up to and including Soundgarden, who we've toured with three times now. We also toured with Metallica for a year. But yeah, Megadeth was the only one we were a little sketchy about because um, it was a little sketchy.
The whole punk scene is, of course, responsible for the Go-Go's ever getting created. Because before punk rock happened, you couldn't start a band if you didn't know how to play an instrument. But when punk happened it was like, 'Oh, it doesn't matter if you can play or not. Go ahead, make a band.' And that's exactly what the Go-Go's did.
My favorite model of success is when people say, 'Nobody bought that first Velvet Underground album, but everyone who did started a band.'
So, I play in a band. It's a really underground band. Super underground. Very underground. Like, we don't even actually play.
Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.
I finally came to the decision that I couldn't do it like that anymore. So I surrendered to that. I did (the Sabbath reunion tour) without anything - cigarettes, tobacco, dope, anything. And I had so much more fun without it.
I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk.
From the beginning, there was so much pressure in the early San Francisco punk scene for everyone to be different than everyone else, to flaunt your intelligence and insights instead of every band sounding alike, like what plagues punk music in particular today.
I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.
Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.
At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.
When we came along in 1982, music was getting boring - like 1976 when punk hadn't happened. We wanted to be rock 'n' roll. We grew up with The Velvet Underground, the Stones and Mars bars and Marianne Faithfull and we knew we didn't want to be boring - and we weren't!
I certainly didn't want to be in a punk rock band, because I had already been in a punk rock band. I wanted to be in a band that could do anything - like Led Zeppelin.
I am very grateful to punk because I was a girl, and I felt like if I got in a band, I'd be kind of a novelty act, but punk was all about non-discrimination. No one cared because it was punk, so, you know, anyone could do anything they wanted.
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