Edition №12
The album nobody bought, and the receipt that says otherwise
In 1982 Brian Eno told the Los Angeles Times that the first Velvet Underground album sold 30,000 copies in its first five years, and that everyone who bought one started a band. He said Lou Reed told him. MGM’s own royalty statement for the band puts the American figure at 58,476, counted through February 14, 1969.
I came to it through a side door. What I heard first was Echo & the Bunnymen covering “Run, Run, Run” on The Rock and Roll Alternative, George Gimarc’s show on KDGE, The Edge, a station that had just gone on the air. I loved it immediately, so I called in to ask what it was. (Ah, remember those days?) George told me it was a Velvet Underground cover, a B-side, on a 12” remix of “Bedbugs & Ballyhoo.”
My path ran backwards. A brand-new alternative station sent me to a record from 1967. Post-punk and new wave is where I’ve always felt most at home, and this is the record that created it.
The only copy I own is the ’96 Japanese mono CD. I have never held a 1967 pressing. Past that, deep respect for Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and the groundwork they laid.
That’s what the number is for. Given only 58,476 sold, most people standing where I am never have held one either. A small group bought this record and an entire world of music grew out of it, so almost everyone who owes it something owns nothing of it. The buying question starts there.
The statement is a MGM form with the band’s name typed into the “Pay To” box, and it itemizes the figure in two. It states 13,336 copies of the mono and 45,140 of the stereo, so roughly three of every four buyers took the stereo version home. The mono original is the scarcer object by more than three to one. That’s a count of what sold, not an opinion about what matters.
The same form runs its arithmetic to the bottom line and ends at $5,482.81 in the red against paid advances. That’s where one account stood on February 14, 1969, and nothing past it.
The numbers are the countable part of this record’s paperwork. The sleeve is the rest of it, and the sleeve credits Andy Warhol as producer. He did not produce it. He paid for the sessions, he kept a label at arm’s length from a band it would have rebuilt, and he made the sleeve. That’s certainly helpful but it’s not producing.
Tom Wilson did the production work. He was a staff producer at the label, he cut “Sunday Morning” months after the rest of it, and he shepherded the album out the door. The engineer who ran the session behind six of the eleven released songs isn’t printed on the sleeve at all. The one engineer credit that is printed is spelled wrong, and two of the reference works you’d check to correct it have been repeating the misspelling ever since.
None of that changes what the record is or what it started. It changes what you have to do to buy the right one.
A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.