Released 1968
White Light/White Heat
The Gift
Lady Godiva's Operation
Here She Comes Now
I Heard Her Call My Name
Sister Ray
And so at the height of the "Summer Of Love" we stayed in NYC and recorded "White Light/White Heat", an orgasm of our own. (Sterling Morrison)
The Velvets, as Clinton Heylin has pointed out, could do many things very well. One of them was to unleash a full-scale sonic assault of rock`n'roll noise. If the first album mapped the territory, their second delved deeper into one aspect of their complex musical persona. The loud one.
When I first heard WL/WH, I was not prepared. I was not prepared for the hazy, feverish miasma of the sound, for the sheer propulsion and groove of it. Like all their albums, WL/WH's secret weapon is that it is great rock`n'roll. It has a good beat, and you can dance to it. The later remixes have helped bring some of that groove towards the front, but nothing will ever erase that haze.
Oceans of ink and electrons have been spent rehashing the album's debauched themes: hard drugs, obsession, lust, botched operations/sex changes/mutilations, non-orgasmic girls, dead ex-lovers calling your name, and Burroughs-ian orgy ending the whole thing in a 17-minute barrage of pure adrenalin. a hundred, a thousand, a million punk bands are said to have taken their inspiration from it. But if so, they never understood what made it tick. After all these years, they never unlocked its secrets, which go way beyond ding-dong sucking and two-chord assaults. After all these years, it has lost none of its relentless, hypnotic power, its overwhelming rush. Like a roller-coaster ride, you climb on with trepidation, knowing what's coming, afraid, not wanting it to end. As you get off, you're glad you did it. Glad it's over.
