Wednesday, December 13, 2006

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - THE LIVE EVENT

Seeing authentic footage from the, "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" tour is about as likely as seeing a flying saucer. Yet, for the purists here it is. This is some footage, minus sound, that encaptures the brain frenized event.

Lou Reed and Warhol went on this cross country trip. Judging from the posters that I found online they had some sort of budget to play with. This tour made a stop at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, MI. It was billed as, "An Evening With Andy Warhol" and if you ask any aging hipster who remained on college campus after all these years they will tell you they were there or knew someone who was there. But I lived on that campus and we had a ton of cool things come in to play for an audience of maybe 20 - 40 tops.... sometimes an audience of 6. So filling up the entire Hill, which seats about 10,000+ is highly unlikely.

This was a very obscure tour. I only found out about it in the history books. This "famous" tour never makes any VH1 countdown of MUST SEE SHOWS. You will most likely find out about it through reading about Warhol or Lou Reed. Occassionally it will pop up in a art magazine.

Why write about a video from YouTube that has only 6 views? WELL FIRST OF ALL IT IS RARE to find any footage at all. It is very interesting too to see this thing unfold. It was a night of Velvet Underground music, dancing, psychedlic lights and film super imposed over the entire stage. For 1965. THIS WAS IT. This was about as high tech as it gets. The effect is still pretty encouraging and exciting.

The video picks up at the end with more flashing lights. This was the in place to be. It is a recreation of the year 1965. That was the year that Warhol realy broke big to the public.

Its worth a glance.

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