Free Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Page B

Louie.” In 1965 Scepter had parlayed their label success into new offices, warehouse space and their own studio, at 254 W. 54th Street—a building that would one day house Studio 54. As Scepter was one of his accounts, Norman Dolph made frequent visits there, describing it to me as “everything you’d expect an indie studio to be in 1966: song pluggers and musicians and DJs popping in and out … an unsophisticated place, with basic equipment, up around the tenth floor, with a fair-sized studio and the small control room typical of that time.”
    The room’s history of turning out great old rock and roll records must have appealed to Reed in particular, whose collection of rare and obscure doo-wop and rock and roll 45s was one of his most prized possessions.The room had seen better days, unfortunately, and when the group arrived they found it “somewhere between reconstruction and demolition … the walls were falling over, there were gaping holes in the floor, and carpentry equipment littered the place.” 76 These first New York sessions produced an acetate that Dolph sent to Columbia, but he got it back with a rejection letter from their A&R Department. The record was then shopped around, until the band made an agreement with Columbia’s Tom Wilson: once he left the label and went to MGM, he would sign the Velvets onto the subsidiary label MGM/Verve. (Whether this Columbia connection had anything to do with Dolph’s overture is uncertain.)
    The second sessions for
The Velvet Underground and Nico
were done in LA, supposedly during a lull in the band’s disastrous May ‘66 visit. The problem I have with this scenario is the timeline.
    In the fall of 2003, Norman Dolph was contacted about a record that had been purchased at a Lower East Side flea market. Using the margin etchings Dolph identified it as one—perhaps the only—copy of the Scepter mixes, a mono acetate that he’d had cut to send to Columbia. The acetate is dated April 25th, a Monday.Dolph reckons that this puts the Scepter sessions in the week of April 18th-23rd, as he would have cut the acetate directly after the tracks were mixed. He is also confident that Columbia’s A&R wheels would not grind faster than a business week before a reply was sent, along with the returned acetate (he still has the rejection letter somewhere in his basement). Dolph thinks he gave the acetate to Andy or a band member—maybe it was stolen along with Lou Reed’s record collection in the burglary of Lou’s apartment around that time 77 , then bounced around for 35 years unnoticed until it reappeared beneath the nose of a remarkably lucky Canadian record buff visiting New York in 2003.
    However the recently surfaced acetate survived, it provides the date above. How could there be time to get the acetate to Columbia, await their refusal, shop the record to other labels, find Tom Wilson and get signed to MGM/Verve—all in less than a week, between April 25th and the beginning of May, when the Velvets left for California? Wilson was with Columbia just prior to Verve, though Richie Unterberger writes that he left in late ‘65. Perhaps he somehow got an insider tip that they were passing on the band; or, if Unterberger has his dates wrong, maybe Wilson—knowing he was headed toVerve soon—scooped the group immediately. Perhaps. But I think the accepted version of the Wilson sessions being done during the band’s first LA excursion smells funny, and I wonder if perhaps there was a second LA trip later that has been confused with the first. At the time of this publication, Dolph was trying to reconstruct the “chain of custody” of the tapes and acetates cut in ‘66; with luck, he might clear up the confusion once and for all … and possibly find out if the original 4-track masters exist in the process.
    Once signed to MGM, according to David Fricke, Tom Wilson booked the band into TTG Studios for two days, to re-do three songs: “Venus in Furs,” “Heroin” and