RIP Bill Walton

Bill Walton was mostly before my time in the worlds of college and pro basketball, but he was so much bigger than life that it was impossible not to feel his presence long after his playing days.

Memories of Walton for me were mostly when I was obsessed with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s and his playing days were winding down and he was starting anew as an NBA color commentator. He would always do hilariously weird things in his tie-die shirts like rubbing dirt all over his body, making casual references to how much he liked doing drugs, being part of the Grateful Dead culture, eating birthday cakes and cupcakes with the candles still lit, and bringing fun-hearted spiritual-hippie presents to his colleagues.

Walton, who passed away this week from cancer at age 71, was a winner. He won 49 straight games and two high-school championships in California. He won 88 straight games at UCLA and national championships in 1972 and 1973. He was picked first in 1974 by the Portland Trail Blazers. He was league MVP in 1978 and won championships with the Blazers in 1977 and Boston Celtics in 1986.

Also passing away this week was Amy Winslow, who was once the manager of my second-favorite band Guided by Voices. She also worked with Yoko Ono, Surfer Blood, Kiwi Jr., and helped launch the Rachel Maddow Show. The cause was breast cancer at age 59.

And Tony Scott, who played for six years through the end of the 1970s into the 1980s for the St. Louis Cardinals, passed away at age 72. He stole 87 bases during that period as the Cards' centerfielder. 

AI will inevitably help us become more human than we used to be

Writer Kevin Kelly concludes that “the computer age didn’t really start until computers merged with the telephone” in the early 1980s. The Internet has of course grown since then to be central to the way our society operates and it will continue to grow. That is the baseline that begins his 2016 book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. A pretty intriguing title, and I wanted in on the secrets.

Things we can’t stop include massive copying, massive tracking and total surveillance, decentralized ownership, virtual reality that is actually real, and improved artificial intelligence and robots that will both take our jobs and create new businesses. Kelly writes that we need to embrace these changes. We don’t want to fight any one invention because the scientific process has made it so that we’ll take “solid things - an automobile, a shoe - and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service … rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear.”

Kelly has organized his book into 12 categories that are verbs like "accessing, tracking, and sharing" and posits that we look at technology this way instead of "iPhone, Uber, or shoe." Which products or companies will succeed or fail is unpredictable because those are determined by fads, fashion, and commerce. 

“Becoming” is the first area of focus. In the 1980s and 90s, young boys in chatrooms and Wall Street traders used the internet but leaders at ABC TV, WIRED, and many others scoffed at the thought of the internet going big. Many thought there would be 500 or so channels on TV that would be where the content would be created. “Instead, billions of users created the content for all the other users. There were 500 million channels.” The internet stuff the execs couldn’t imagine was that passive consumers would become active creators. We still fail to truly grasp how awesome the web has become, with its 60 trillion web pages (about 10,000 for every person alive). 

The corporations eventually realized the online world could be their distribution network, but they did not foresee that they wouldn’t be the ones making the content. YouTube, blogs, and social media were not created by big-media’s staff but by their users. We no longer even typically get customer service anymore from corporations because we can ask the global community congregating at places like Reddit subgroups. 

By now, the internet feels completely bloated, with “more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years.” But Kelly claims, in reality, “nothing has happened yet! The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning.” For instance, by 2050, just about everything with have a little AI added to it. “The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things.” We are just now “becoming” and the coolest inventions are yet to happen. 

“Cognifying” is the second inevitable and it’s all about AI. Granted, this book was released seven years ago so quite a bit has already happened, but perhaps not as much has happened as one would think. “At the rate AI is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.” AI will not look like HAL 9000 - “a discreet machine animated by a humanlike consciousness” - but rather like Amazon Web Services, “a cheap, reliable industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything and almost invisible except when it blinks off.” 

One example of being cognitive is photography. Years ago, it would have taken $100,000 and hefty bags of equipment to do everything cameras and iPhones do today to make photos treated, modified, and beautiful. Other examples could include music created in real-time as needed for soundtracks or video games, smart clothes that tell laundry machines how to wash them, advertising optimized for how many people follow and watch and what their level of influence is, matching buyers and sellers of real estate, real-time adjustments of medical care and treatments, dolls that will probably be the first really popular robots, and stats on every breath and movement of athletes to create highly advanced fantasy sports.

Google has been working on AI for decades and has always seen its search engine as a way to refine its AI rather than AI as a way to improve its search engine. Google has indeed been buying up lots of AI companies and, by its own predictions, AI should be its main product by 2026. This would be pure hyperbole, except three recent breakthroughs have made the ancient promise of AI possible: “parallel computation” has become so cheap that companies are able to use it in ways that Facebook can identify friends easily in photos and Netflix can make reliable recommendations, it’s taken a long time to get enough big data fed into the system for computers to get this smart, and the growing amount of users is helping to make it all even smarter. 

By 2100, Kelly predicts that 70 percent of the jobs people do will be replaced by automation. Assembly-line and factory workers will be the first to go. Pharmacists will be replaced by pill-dispensing machines. Office and school cleaners, truckers, and information-intensive white-collar jobs are in the AI path. But these aren’t things to worry about. No Victorian boy ever dreamed of one day becoming a professional video-game developer. Those who once farmed began working in factories and then later moved to other jobs. 

“Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.” AI’s greatest benefit is that it “will help us define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.” It’s not a race against the machines. It’s a race with the machines. “Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters” and helps us become “more human than we were.”

European colonization of the Americas greatly set back human progress

I’m often not great at staying focused while listening to audiobooks and was bored silly with the first hour of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. But I really wanted to know more about his challenge to the long-held notion that the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness before Christopher Columbus landed ashore. 

Luckily the Hoopla library app has a 20-page Cliff notes-type summary. Here are my Cliff notes to the Cliff notes. Caution: it's interesting stuff:

• As the last Ice Age receded, the New England region turned into an ecologically diverse landscape. Many people were hunter-nomads, but there were also settled villages with established agricultural practices.
• As early as 1616, hepatitis began attacking the indigenous population in the region. It had been brought by European settlers and killed off most of the region’s native Americans. The same thing was happening in Peru. The sophisticated engineering and military capabilities of the Inca society were no match for the smallpox brought by Europeans. Hernando de Soto’s exploration left almost no population in its wake in the Mississippi Valley, thanks mainly to the diseases his pigs carried.
• Europeans understood how diseases operated and spread, but there were not any attempts to halt or slow colonization. Transmission was often viewed simply as God’s will. Scholars have put the death totals in the millions, suggesting there had been a significant population in the Americas. 
• The human die off truly set humanity back, as there was a ton of knowledge and advancement lost in the entire colonization process.
• Peru’s mountainous landscape was shaped by continental drift that became an attractive locale for diverse groups of Indians around 10,000 B.C., with complex societies, governments, and urban centers common by 3200 B.C.
• The cultivation of maze throughout Mesoamerica was truly one of humanity's greatest feats of genetic engineering. Native American ecological influence could have helped greatly advance society's progress, but Europeans wiped out the native people and, with them, almost all their knowledge of landscape architecture and the urban settlement of places like Cahokia, Illinois, near modern-day St. Louis. 
• I grew up very close to Cahokia, where several mounds/hills still exist. It’s amazing to think back to how advanced this society was in 1250 B.C. before it collapsed around 1350 due to environmental mismanagement, social unrest, and a devastating earthquake. Likewise, the Mayan population collapsed between 800 and 830 B.C. because of overpopulation, resource overuse, and severe drought. 

Mann’s conclusion is that the Americas were not an untouched wilderness but rather a complex environment that worked because of the interplay between humans and natural forces. This suggests that people now and in the future should focus on building sustainable habitats rather than trying to simply reproduce what has been done in the past in terms of restoring ecosystems. 

Challengers challenges

I watched quite a bit of Day 1 of the French Open. Then I went and hit around on the courts for a while.

I should have stopped with the tennis at that point.

Instead I went to see Challengers tonight, and struggled mightily to stay interested in the new hit film featuring Zendaya.

The acting is fine. But there's not enough of it. 

Zendaya and crew look impressive on the tennis courts, even if there's a chance their strokes are all CGI.

The bonkers soundtrack (and not in a good way) never fails to come ripping in and slow down the action, making the movie a good 20 minutes longer than it needs to be. 

The movie itself is a soft-porn vehicle to feature Zendaya basically in a 2-hour-plus music video.

It makes sense that the music - supplied by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails - is there to add suspense to who will win the challenge to gain Zendaya's love. But the story itself is as threadbare and vacant as Reznor's way-over-dramatic (and way in the foreground) music. And the three main characters are so unlikeable that it takes away the chance for investment in caring much about any of them.

It would make sense if I liked Challengers. Director Luca Guadagnino cites Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho as among his favorite directors and films, and I can see some of those attempts to emulate the master here. His work on 2017's Call Me By Your Name was much better than Challengers, which is closer in style to his remake of Suspiria (pro tip: see the original version, not Guadagnino's).

In the end (and especially with that lame ending), the whole thing somehow makes me a little embarassed that I love the sport of tennis so much. I need to schedule my next match to wipe the taste of Challengers out of my mouth.

1.5 out of 5 stars

RIP Morgan Spurlock (but not fast food)

Maybe it’s just a matter of getting older and wiser, but it seems like the movie Super Size Me was the point in my life when I went from regularly devouring Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with Cheese and Fish Filets to only very rarely (usually on long road trips) having a meal at McDonald’s. 

The small documentary (a $65,000 production) turned into a massive hit ($22 million at the box office) and seemed to be a bad sign for the restaurant chain and possibly all fast food. It was released in May 2004, but a month of eating McDonald’s (the plot), in the end, didn’t kill director and star Morgan Spurlock. Who’s to say it didn’t shorten his life, but he did live until passing away from cancer this week at the age of 53, exactly 20 years after the movie’s release.

I think my decision to cut back on fast food was even more influenced by reading the excellent Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. The book was a slightly more intellectual indictment of fast food than the movie, but they did work powerfully in tandem. 

What seemed like the progress of the human species back then to taking steps for health improvement now only looks like a small blip on the radar, as parents allowing their children to regularly eat fast food continues to climb back to near universal numbers. 

The fast-food scare did, however, mostly end marketing directly to children, but now most of the publicity is done by celebrity spokespeople who draw kids into eating what used to be considered the adult food (only 2 percent of McDonald’s marketing budget is focused on Happy Meals).

During the month-long experiment that was Super Size Me, Spurlock gained a whopping 25 pounds as well as a slew of maladies including depression, fatigue, headaches, and liver and heart damage. He went on to have an impressive body of work in documentary filmmaking, including a follow up to Super Size Me about McDonald’s since-incorporated healthier food options, the pop band One Direction, male masculinity (in partnership with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett), and the only other one I’ve actually seen, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? (which many critics said made too much light of a serious story).

It's no wonder "white trash" is so prominent in America. That's who founded it

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election because, like so many politicians before him, such as Bill Clinton, he refused to be the usual scripted politician and embraced “the common man, the working stiff, the forgotten rural American,” according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

Turns out, sound deliberation and calm problem solving have never been the reality of the U.S. political landscape, which jibes with my master’s thesis, which concluded that personal foibles tend to help presidential candidates win office. 

The scumbag family that accuses a Black man of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird, disgraced chef Paula Deen, and the Duke boys of Dukes of Hazzard are all popular examples of white trash - “marginalized Americans stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children.” These examples of “human waste” were known as “waste people” as early as colonial times in the 1500s.

British colonizers saw the New World as the perfect place to ship its most unproductive and idle people. One reason we don’t see it this way any long, Isenberg writes, is that our elementary-school history lessons tend to become pretty much the extent of what we still know years later as adults, which, essentially equates to a series of vague myths about American exceptionalism, our uniqueness, and that there is an absence of class in our country. “Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are.”

We celebrate the Pilgrims only because Thanksgiving was invented to boost the struggling poultry (turkey) industry during the Civil War. And earlier, just because the country had won its independence from England, it doesn’t mean the British class system suddenly went away. “Long-entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor … [meant that some humans have] remained disposable well into modern times.” 

In the time of Shakespeare, French and English intellectuals became fascinated with the idea of sending Sir Walter Raleigh and other like-minded “men of action endowed with larger-than-life egos, heroism, and ill-tempered public behavior” overseas to the “almost inconceivable” wilderness of America, which they imagined to be filled with cannibals that could be tamed and subordinated and helpful in gathering natural resources for "the greater good."

But it wasn’t just the wealthy and educated who thought the artisans, the poor, and the homeless should be the ones put to better use in America. "This view of poverty was widely shared." Most of the settlers of the early 1600s to Jamestown died off quickly and a good portion of the rest “dreamt of finding gold, which did little to inspire hard work.” Gold didn’t pan out but some success started to happen with the “filthy weed” tobacco. The land was still barren by the late 1600s but the process for distributing land ownership and the creation of a white slave class ensured an already deeply entrenched division of classes. 

The 700 or so who landed on the Mayflower and other ships in Massachusetts were considered slightly less scum-of-the-Earth. They were, like the Jamestown arrivals, big on land ownership, but unlike those in Jamestown they were religion crazy. When two Quaker women tried to escape the church community, they were charged with contempt and hung. Pretty standard stuff. Class rank was becoming even more embedded in Puritan America, with “age, reputation, marriage, estate, number of sons all properly calculated before a church seat was assigned.”

Bacon’s Rebellion is an example of a defining event of the era. Sir Francis Bacon originated from wealth but decided to fight for the lower class. Part of what he was rebelling against was the “the most promising land was never equally available for all.” The game was rigged against many people, something that should sound similar to all of us today - no matter whether we’re on the rich or poor side of the divide.

RIP Alice Munro, whose stories perhaps got better as she got older

Western Ontario may not have been the best place to grow up for a kid, but for Alice Munro, it provided a fertile ground of small-town characters to spread throughout her lifetime of writing. She is renowned as a master of the short story, compared often to William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Somehow I had never read any of her work, but when she passed away on May 13, it spurred me to delve into some of the stories regarded as her finest.

“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” from the collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968): The young girl narrator describes a walk with her father through her small town anmed Tuppertown on Lake Huron. Then later, the mother isn’t feeling so well so the dad, daughter narrator, and younger brother go for a car ride and, oddly, stop at a woman’s house where there is whiskey and dancing - two things that definitely don’t happen at their own family’s home.

There really is not much that happens in this story, although Munro artfully describes what typical life must have been like for people in Depression Era-ravaged households where better times were still a memory and current times were very rough going. 3 out of 5 stars

“Age of Faith,” from the collection Lives of Girls and Women (1971): A 12-year-old girl with the family name of Jordan attends various churches in her rural community in order to get an understanding of whether God is real. She gets no help trying to understand from her younger brother, who has absolutely no need for religion. She gets no help from her mother, who yells at her that man created God, not the other way around. By the end, after their dad is looking for their dog because it has killed a sheep and the dad is now going to kill the dog, the previously ambivalent younger brother is attempting to pray to keep him from doing it. Meanwhile the protagonist girl still has lots of questions about God’s existence and how difficult it is to watch her brother show this display of faith.

Munro’s writing is all over the place, and despite an excellent concept or idea for a short story, I think she only half pulls it off. The story is profound, but it’s also not that interesting. 2.5 out of 5 stars

“How I Met My Husband,” from the collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974): A plane lands in the field across from the wealthy Peebles property, where the not-wealthy 15-year-old protagonist named Edie works, having dropped out of school because of bad grades and disinterest. She imagines that it must be harder for the rich people to picture what the poor people’s houses and lives were like than the other way around. The pilot has been camping out in the field and comes over for water then catches her wearing one of Ms. Peebles’ dresses, but the two spark a bit of a friendship or at least curiosity of each other. Then Alice, the fiancée of the pilot Chris arrives. But she leaves with Ms. Pebbles for a picnic and Edie takes a cake to Chris. They get intimate in his tent and he says he’s leaving and will write her a letter. Alice finds out and is furious but Edie is allowed to stay on working for Ms. Peebles. She waits for the letter for a long time, but it never comes. In the meantime, she builds up a relationship with the postman and they eventually get married. 

Now this is more like it. A great and entertaining story and a deep dive into the loneliness and sexual awakening many - all? - women face. 5 out of 5 stars

“Dimensions,” from the collection Too Much Happiness (2009): Doree is 23 and riding a bus to visit her husband in a home for the criminally insane. Then shifting back to when she was 16, her mother dies in the hospital from a botched operation and Doree moves in with a hospital orderly she has started a relationship with named Lloyd. They move across the country, get married, and have three kids named Sasha, Barbara Ann, and Dimitri. Doree and Lloyd homeschool the kids but increasingly he gets mad at her. One night she buys a dented can of pasta and he accuses her of wanting to poison him and the kids. She leaves and spends the night at the house of an another homeschooling mom. She comes back the next morning and he has murdered all three children because “how could they suffer the shame of knowing their mom had walked out on them?” She works at a job cleaning a motel and sometimes goes to visit Lloyd, who assures her the kids are happy and doing well. She continues to not find meaning in her life.

I found this one to be the most page-turning of these four Munro stories, but the ending is strange and a little unfulfilling. Doree was on her way to see Lloyd again when she witnesses a young man fly out of his pickup truck. Doree breathes life back into the man but it’s unclear if this is a sign to give up on Lloyd or continue to include him in her life. Perhaps Lloyd provides the only happy memory she can imagine about her kids. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Are we humans really humans or are we monkeys?

I've written about all the Planet of the Apes movies and I even named the 1968 original number 6 on my list of all-time favorite films. What is it that draws me to these films? 

For one, they have virtually all been really well done, with the Mark Wahlberg/Tim Burton 2001 edition being the only non-essential addition. CGI dehumanizes most movies that use it, but the Apes never lose their heart and their ability to overwhelm our senses.

The other thing is that apes and monkeys are just awesome. They obviously aren't humans but their similarities to humans is always present. Just about any story that places monkeys on or around the same level as humans has a good shot at gripping me. The premise - which some think is goofy -remains quite probably my favorite one in all of movie and pop-culture history.

But it's not just the premise. The big-budget, action-adventure parts wouldn't work nearly so well if there weren't exceptional characters and big sociological issues being dealt with. All the latest in the remarkably long-running series are prequels to the 1968 original, so we know somehow that humans will find a way to survive, if only in small pockets where they can escape the potential wrath of the apes. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) set the scene: humans developed an Alzheimer's cure that leaked from the lab and made most humans dumber but somehow made apes smarter.

As for the new Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, I loved it and the suspense and questions it asks at the end are a monumental setup for the inevitable collision course with the original's Charleton Heston-led storyline. 

Taking place several generations after War, a Coastal-dwelling and fierce clan of apes have twisted the meanings of the former great leader Caesar, who had dictated peace among the apes ("ape not kill ape") and also between the apes and humans. Nearly all apes have forgotten or never known about Caesar by this point. So the evil and power-hungry apes are exploiting that lack of historical knowledge and are now on a rampage to enslave any apes and humans who don't bow to their commands. 

However, there is one bird-loving, talented-climbing community of chimpanzees that, along the way, discover the true teachings of Caesar, and provide a formidable foe to the bad guys. Humans don't even appear in the film's first half, and when they do, we see they are witless packs who roam to survive and run from the occasional ape encounter. Monkeys have no reason to believe any of them can think let alone talk. But then along comes Nova (different from the Nova of the 1968 film, but apes have taken to calling many or all humans by that name), played by Freya Allan, who teams with the peaceful, bird-loving monkeys to not only outwit the evil apes but (hopefully?) revive humanity. Raka, an orangutan, is also key in relocating this bridge between humans and Caesar's apes.

In many ways, the chronology of the Apes movies doesn't much matter. It feels like humans (and apes) will keep repeating the failures and mistakes of our past, into time immemorial. We will keep fighting other tribes. We will keep believing unfactual things. We will keep getting diseases that some make it difficult to remedy. I think humanity's own current foibles is why the Planet of the Apes continues to be so awe-inspiring.

5 out of 5 stars

Fondly recalling “the trade” from my early-career journalism days, with Calvin Trillin

Even though I was a daily newspaper journalist for several years way back at the start of my career, I still love it when journalists open up about their day-to-day life and what the trade means to them. Therefore, esteemed writer Calvin Trillin's new compiliation, The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, is set up to be a page-turner for me. 

The book includes “disparate pieces from various places in various styles” and amounts “to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years.” It’s true: Trillin has written stories for many outlets, including The New Yorker, The Nation, and one of my old favorites Brill’s Content. Broken into sections on the trade, reporters and reporting, big shots, R.I.P., controversies, niches, and closings. 

His first topic in the book is “the lede,” a term I still use often in my strategic-communications work and often feel apologetic for using, having to explain that "no, I haven’t misspelled something." Trillin calls himself a “collector of ledes.” Like many old-time journalists, he appreciates a story told grippingly from the start. It can be a one-word crime article that begins (and ends) with the word “Dead” or it can an obituary in The New York Times that packs an entire life into a first sentence.

When I started my first newspaper writing job out of college, I was paid $17,000 a year and worked incredibly hard and very long hours. I was a known entity in the community yet the people I was covering - coaches, judges, lawyers, politicians - were all making way more money. I never really thought much about this. I loved to write. I loved to report. If that's what it paid, I would have to be happy with that, even if Trillin points out that news people are odd members of society. Is it a job befitting a college graduate? About all you might be truly guaranteed is a “decent obituary.” 

I also always wanted to work at a magazine and never truly did (I freelanced for National Geographic and other magazine-like publications), but Trillin’s essay on the downfall of magazines is interesting. Time Magazine invented the genre in 1923, with Newsweek coming along 10 years later. It was originally designed like The Week (which is my favorite magazine these days, essentially an upgrade from Time and Newsweek), presenting “the week’s news succinctly to ‘busy men’ who were too involved in their important endeavors to spend time wading through a lot of newspapers.” Time started as “a rewrite operation” before moving into enterprising original reporting. The magazine’s founders invented a fact-checking system that pitted the all-male reporting staff against the all-female research staff with the thought that it “would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process.” This was in the era of “group journalism,” before bylines were introduced at Newsweek then Time. Columnists followed. 

Trillin himself left Time so he could work for The New Yorker and then, realizing that “the civil-rights struggle had been covered mostly in terms of organizations and court cases and disruptions,” he wanted to write a book all by himself telling the stories of people who had been involved. He has continued to write for The New Yorker and the rest of this book promises interesting stories about it, even if, as Trillin jokes, there hasn't been a person who has worked at The New Yorker who hasn't written a book about working at The New Yorker.

The pieces come into place for the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed to become massively influential

I'm finally committing to a full-length Lou Reed biography. Alongside The Beatles, Reed is second on my list of musical performers I wish I could have seen perform live. So he's a big deal to me. I started PCLB's coverage of Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes, with an article about what Lou Reed was like before he was The King of New York. 

Here's part 2.

A history of mental-health issues and hepatitis likely saved Lou Reed from getting drafted into the Vietnam War. It probably helped that he allegedly told the draft board to give him a gun and he “would shoot anyone or anything in front of me.” This fortunate turn allowed him to focus on music and he got a job as a songwriter for Pickwick Records.

John Cale, the Velvet Underground's other guitarist, was born in Wales one week after Reed and had his own early mental-health issues. Reed and John Cale’s first iteration of a music group was to busk on the streets of Manhattan, but soon they put together a band that included Sterling Morrison. They called themselves The Falling Spikes until they changed their name to the Warlocks, which was at the same time the name of a band that would soon change its own moniker to the Grateful Dead. Moe Tucker joined as the band’s drummer right after they were wisely renamed the Velvet Underground. Their first gig was at a Jersey high school with about 1,000 people in attendance. While some were mesmerized, many others ran out screaming from the drone noise.

Next, enter Andy Warhol, who grew up as Andy Warhola in Pittsburgh. Like Reed, he had also suffered mental breakdowns as a child. But that was also a time when he developed his strategy to mostly stay quiet rather than telling people what to do. It became his style and power. He offered to be VU’s manager as long as he got a 25 percent cut. 

Nico allegedly first witnessed the Velvets in action on the same night Warhol first saw them. She had been kicking around as a singer and had even previously hung out with Bob Dylan for a week or so. She called that night seeing VU “the most beautiful moment in my life.” Reed came around pretty quick to her joining the band, although he was still pretty insecure as the lead, saying “I was just this poor little rock and roller and here was this goddess.” 

As they worked on the many brilliant songs from the debut album, Reed and Nico entered a relationship. Years later, she called him “very soft and lovely. He always stayed that way. I used to make pancakes for him.” She also always kind of thought Lou held a grudge against her for what her German people did to his Jewish people. During the same short period that Reed and Nico dated, Cale and It Girl Edie Sedgwick also had a brief fling.

Things didn’t stay great with Nico and the band all that long. She wanted to play Dylan covers and the band mostly refused, knowing he was one of their top rock’n’roll poet competitors. She also asked to sing “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” to which Reed refused. 

But much more influential on Reed than Nico was Warhol. They were best friends and a lot alike. “But Reed’s biggest takeaway was Warhol’s work ethic, which would stick with him for life.” Reed also watched closely as Warhol transformed himself from an “uptown commercial artist” into a flamboyant and open gay man - “in the tentative pre-Stonewall era” - knowing that it was possible to remake himself anyway he liked. 

Billy Name was a kid from the New York suburbs and he became a right-hand man at Warhol’s Factory art spaces. While Warhol and Reed were “strictly comrades,” Name and Reed clicked and not only hung out but would sometimes hook up together afterwards. 

The band finally hit the road - with Nico driving scarily in the English style of occasionally drifting into the wrong lane while Warhol “couldn’t care less” - going to Rutgers and the University of Michigan. It’s safe to say people in the hinterlands didn’t really get it, but the Velvets were about to begin a residency throughout April 1966 in the East Village at a run-down, smelly place called the Dom that was going to truly start to put them on the map, much like The Beatles at the Cavern Club a few years earlier.