Did your parents have a Velvet Underground album?

My dad had a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico on vinyl, which I now own.

lol um, no

I don't think either of my parents would have any idea who the VU were.

No. I'm not sure my parents would have heard of the Velvet Underground either.

No, and they've probably never even heard of the VU.

My parents probably never heard of the Velvet Underground, let alone have anything by them. They know Walk On the Wild Side by that's not exactly the same thing, is it?

no but every parent who have their album blahblahblah

My parents didn't have any albums full stop.

I don't think either of my parents would have any idea who the VU were.

― ENBB, Monday, 30 January 2012 15:39 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I presume that most people will fall into that category.

my Dad is WAY cooler than ILM's parents!

but they didn't have any beatles albums

"My parents had a Velvet Underground album, thus introducing me, etc."

my mom was cool

I don't think my parents owned a Velvet Underground album. But my Dad owned a copy of Rock'n'Roll Animal and was very much a fan of the guitar playing on it. As I recall he even searched for records featuring the guitar playing of Steve Hunter because he liked the record so much. So he was familiar with the VU, but he was probably missing the point.

No. The Beatles were the only acceptable rock band in our house.

That's awesome! xp

My Parents stopped buying 'pop' music when Sgt Pepper came out. They liked it a lot, but after that they thought it all 'not worth buying' and stopped.

So, why did my dad own a copy of "London Conversations" John Martyn? Apparently, he'd popped in with some friends to a recording studio to see how a friend of a friend was getting on with their first album session.

No.

No but my dad had a velvet cumberbun

*not true

My mother played classical music (violin). She wasn't much interested in pop music as far as I know. My dad was (and still is) a really big fan of northern soul. I doubt he has heard of VU.

My parents did not have a Velvet Underground album but my dad went to see them in Cleveland and said it was the "worst concert [he] he ever seen" and he walked out and then complained about it for the next 45 years. He hasn't mentioned it recently, but I'm sure I could get him going on how terrible it was just by mentioning Lou Reed.

suggesting to my dad that VU were the american Beatles went over just about as well as when i tried to get him to listen to john lennon/plastic ono

haha that's awesome lechera

xpost OMG that is so awesome. I admire your dad even more for walking out. lol

lol um, no

I don't think either of my parents would have any idea who the VU were.

ditto.

amazing. wonder which line-up it was? xps

I don't recall my dad ever listening to music, at least of his own choosing; my mother liked mostly classical. I'd be amazed if either of them have heard of the Velvet Underground even now.

at the times my parents just about knew who the rolling stones where, they never had any clue about the existence of vu.

when he heard me listening to them as a kid, my dad claimed he had seen the VU too, but after a little questioning he was like: "oh wait, no I was thinking of Iron Butterfly."

aww, awesome

Hahah, you all have such cool parents.

my parents have definitely not heard of the velvet underground

my dad liked mostly soul/r&b and classical. and beatles, but not stones. he's not that cool, he just thought vu were way boring.

^lol (so many xposts)

No, they didn't have a VU album. My mom was quite an avid follower of the charts though, and did own Berlin (man do I remember hearing that album for the first time) so I'm pretty sure she at least knew the name. btw, I myself was introduced to the VU when they topped an all-time album chart in a dutch music magazine in 1987.

no but they had albums that UK-based young ppl who had a Velvet Underground album might also have owned maybe?

Great thread idea. My mom actually GAVE me a Velvet Underground CD once, which was a very unusual gift b/c she never displayed any strong music opinions or tastes (my dad was the one with the record collection). It was literally her only contribution to my musical education, but man, what a big one.

Yeah, I can't remember where I first heard of them.

xxp

the VU are probably my favorite band, but I'm not sure if I woulda thought they were awesome if I walked into a 1967 concert w/o knowing anything about them. they were pretty raw sounding compared to a lot of bands then.

No way, my parents had Mitch Miller and Eddy Arnold albums, with one Brahms concerto thrown in for show.

i'm actually fairly confident that no one in my family owns a velvet underground album, including me, and including the extended family as well.

No way, my parents had Mitch Miller

Yeah, I'm in this camp. Parents had no rock albums of any sort.

I think the most obscure piece of vinyl my parents owned was Beatles '65.

My dad did go through a Gap Band phase though.

I can sort of remember:

Lou Reed had "Walk on the Wild Side" knocking around for a while as a single, then eventually it became a UK hit, not least because of the "NY Street Slang" that'd have got the track banned if the powers-that-be hadn't decided that no-one listening would have understood it anyway.

As background, the story went around that Lou was in the Velvet Underground, and a 7" e.p. came out with "Waiting for the man" as lead track. For some reason I thought "Satellite of love" was also a VU track, but I was mistaken (then, anyway - it came out as an extra track on Loaded eventually)..

Some years later, I had decided that Sade and the Smooth jazz scene was definitely one limb too far off the Style Council branch, and found a copy in Harrods bookstore of the "VU - Uptight" book during a shopping expedition in London with my mother (possibly the last one I did with her). Liked the pics, style, stories etc.

I went into reading "Pop Records" second hand shop to see if they had any and they had the 2LP "coke bottle" 'best of', and decided this was definitely what was lacking.

Then "Upside Down" got played on Peel, and felt ahead of the curve again... and so on.

Oh, also: at the time of Lou's hit and backstory, our local recshop had a copy of "Squeeze" by "The Velvet Underground", but I decided this was a different band with the same name. Wasn't far off wrong...

Was this a VU album?

http://img.snowrecords.com/lp/4/39097.jpg

no and if they knew anythingabout the velvet underground I wouldn't have had any VU albums either

My folks didn't, but dad was friends with Jonathan Richman and played in the same circles years before I was born. Mom gave me her promotional copy of Can's "Ege Bamyasi", which more than makes up for a lack of VU.

whoa! that is the winner for cool parents right there.
my older brother and i got into the VU when we were teenagers and somehow the band came up with a family friend and she ended up giving us all of her Lou Reed vinyl, pretty much all of his 70s records iirc. She said: "I don't even want to *think* about these records ever again."

that's funny, i sort of plagiarized The Gift for a high school literary mag. are you ... are you my child? omg.

i changed it a bit -- my story was set in a high school and a guy locked himself in a girls' locker. it was terrible.

my dad swore he had the first VU album, but, like many hip things of the 60s that i "discovered" in the early 90s, it was "stolen" when he was moving house one time.

and yet his manhattan transfer albums survived the move, hmmm.

I'm sure my father knew who they were but it wasn't in the stacks of vinyl I went through as a kid. My father was more of a 70s Bowie fan and my mother a 80s Bowie fan.

My dad had a bunch of stuff stolen in a burglary just before I was born. It included his reel-to-reel recorder and a bunch of reel-to-reel tape dubs of various rock groups. He is a meticulous record keeper and actually kept lists of his old collection. I found it one day when I was a teenager and the only thing that jumped out at me was a Doors album, of which we didn't have any around when I was growing up. I'd kinda like to try and find that list again and see if there's anything else he had that I missed out on.

Also stolen was a canoe, which I'm more bummed out about than the tapes.

Did he ever get another canoe?

That's the sad part. : (

That sucks. Canoeing is awesome. I wish I could do it again.

My mum had a cassette tape of Elvis Christmas songs that was played on one day a year, for twenty years. She also had one of those awful panflute cover albums of I believe Neil Diamond songs, which I imagine she bought at a shopping centre stall in a fit of white guilt.

This was the entirety of her music collection.

Hearing Blue Christmas still triggers really complicated feelings.

My parents will have probably never even heard of VU, and certainly don't own a record by them. Sabbath and Iron Butterfly, both mentioned upthread, they do own, but it seems like a one-off from their usual repertoire.

I still remember the very day I bought VU+Nico though, and coinciding with this thread, I was 15 years old and it was on the Friday afternoon of the day we as a family all left for an island to celebrate my grandparents' 40 year wedding aniversary for a weekend. I got drunk and listened to this through headphones while in bed. Remember it vividly. Good times.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

So soon, and all that...

fuck no

My dad had a Five Man Electrical Band album; my mum, Gene Pitney. But I do recall sharing a car ride back in the '80s with my dad and being mildly surprised that he knew "Walk On The Wild Side" when it came on the radio.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only 11 ilxors' parents had a Velvet Underground album but all of them posted itt

No, 14 ilxors' parents had a VU album tbh

oh yeah

ilm has had 175 distinct visitors over the past 2 days

http://www.mostphotos.com/preview/320561/woman-with-a-suspicious-look.jpg

guess i mean "registered users who gave a shit"

MVB: please start the Five Man Electrical Band version of this thread, it'll be just like SCTV's Goin' Down the Road parody when they were on NBC.

http://crunchyurbanite.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/confused-person3.jpg?w=161&h=112

Damn, that's more votes than Steely Dan vs. Fleetwood Mac!

Only 161 parents didn't have a Velvet Underground album, but all 161 started their own family.

dude, you must've prepared that before the result came out

That's a lot of votes!

Someone should poll all the versions of Eno's "all that did" quote...

Yeah, yeah... "My parents didn't have a Velvet Underground album, so they couldn't but form their own fkng band":P

"The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but every parent who bought it formed a child"

dude, you must've prepared that before the result came out

C'mon, I pay my writers good money for lines like that. Anyway, after I posted, I realized Volvo Twilight beat me to the joke.

Yes, my dad had - i think - WLWH, 3rd Album, Loaded, VU, Squeeze(!), Live @ Maxs. Not +Nico though. I remember playing him Sonic Youth and him saying they were a pointless and obvious velvets ripoff.

My dad plagiarized "The Gift" as a book report, and the teacher loved it so much she read it over the PA to the entire school.
For a high school English class, a friend of mine was assigned to come up with a clever original quote. He submitted, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," and the child-of-the-sixties teacher didn't recognize it.

That VU plagiarism story is amazing! What year was this?

WHOA @ the amount of votes! I dont even remember if I voted or not...!

Not everybody voted .....

Apparently that drummer joined Two Lights cos he heard their dad's Loaded.

A+

By now we've probably got a few extra generations in there, so somebody's parents may be gotten into them in the 80's or something, as opposed to when they were still active.

It just occurred to me that one of my grandparents owned the book the band name comes from.

i just remembered, my wife's dad's cousin was the equipment manager for the VU. Dave Faison, mentioned here: http://books.google.com/books?id=C-Ne8rSuNRoC&pg=PT52&lpg=PT52&dq=dave+faison+velvet+underground&source=bl&ots=pjYFSeQDf9&sig=yktuuePchrQlo1w6zi70F0BrOIc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xdYqT8u5KsuctwegveniDw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
exciting!
my wife's parents did not have a VU album though.

My only degree of connection is that like Mo Tucker, I've also worked inside a Wal-Mart.

aargh, tylerw, I lost my copy of that book through stupidity, so thanks for posting it. It has that great Lou quote about how everybody was talking about old blues singers but forgetting doo-wop groups like the Spaniels.

Pplains, I, too, have been inside the belly of the beast.

Big pretzels and Sam's Cola were my lunch for three months.

I totally missed this poll. My dad had Loaded & the Nico album on cassette.

That VU plagiarism story is amazing! What year was this?

― Kevin John Bozelka, Thursday, February 2, 2012 2:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He was a senior in high school, and he was born in '51, so it had to be at most within a year or two of the album's release.

Connections to the VU? Well, I've met two of them, but.

Doug Yule and Willie Alexander?

Nope.

I chatted to Moe on Facebook once.

One.