This is not a post about poetry (for once), but pop music. I’ve been a devotee of the Velvet Underground since I first discovered them in college, and they have been more or less my favorite band my entire adult life. The first poem in my second collection Still Life with City is about a VU concert (“Live in Dallas”), and imagines the interplay between the band and the audience during performance. It was inspired by the Live 1969 album and Lou Reed’s semi-comical stage patter during the sets. So, I’ve been listening deeply to the Velvets for over thirty years and I think I may have made a discovery about “Sister Ray”.

I’m not an expert on pop music, and I haven’t read everything there is to read on the subject of the Velvet Underground or Lou Reed or the Sixties or anything of that sort. I just know what I know, y’know? “Sister Ray”, for those who don’t know, is a 17-minute song on side two of White Light/White Heat (1968), the Velvets’ second studio album and the last to feature John Cale. “Sister Ray” is notorious for taking the VU’s obsession with the wild side (“Heroin”, “Venus in Furs”) to its logical extreme, and recounts an ambiguous tale of a drugs-and-sex fueled orgy culminating in homicide reminiscent of the long scene in Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). I picked up a copy of Selby’s novel while working at Strand (1995) precisely because I’d read that it had influenced “Sister Ray”, and it didn’t disappoint. (I immediately attempted my own versions of Selby-esque stories based on my own dissolute social life in mid-’90s New York, but they were predictably adolescent failures.) As well, the lyric “Who’s knocking on my chamber door?” is easily traced back to Poe’s “The Raven”. (Reed later released an entire album of Poe-inspired songs called The Raven in 2003.) I’ve always thought that when the police show up to bust the sordid soirée it may have been a reference to Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” (“and when the po-lice knocked/both doors flew back” – Reed’s intonation of po-lice perhaps mimicks Berry’s), but that was a pretty commonplace trope in early rock-and-roll songs I think.

What has all this to do with Aretha Franklin, you ask? I’ve listened to many versions of “Sister Ray” on numerous bootlegs, some of them reaching the 40-minute mark (a “Sixty-Minute Man“, indeed), but the album version is the one ingrained on my consciousness. It’s extremely raucus with John Cale’s organ duelling with Reed and Morrison’s guitars for sonic prominence, and Reed’s vocals are often buried beneath the onslaught of noise. They can be indistinct or just plain unintelligible at times, leaping out like flames from a yule log before receding into the background, not unlike the way certain images come and go in your consciousness, perhaps pinging back and forth between the hemispheres. But I digress. Suffice to say the album version was the one I’ve always ‘known’. Yesterday I discovered another live version of the song from a 1967 show in NYC, as part of the WL/WH Super-Deluxe reissue (2013). As a completist, I’m late to the game. One can assume this is an early version of the song, recorded before or around the time of WL/WH, and it appears along with “Booker T“, ostensibly part of the same set. I’m just riffing here, mind you. But on this version the lyrics are clear and distinct, and Lou sings repeatedly “Just like Sister Ray says, ‘Sock it to me!'” and “Whip it on me!” When I heard that I, of course, thought of Aretha’s “Respect”, which popularized the phrase “Sock it to me!” in 1967, or thereabouts. Andrew Hickey goes into this on his his 500 Songs podcast in the episode on “Respect“. I listened to “Respect” after “Sister Ray”, then toggled back and forth for a while, and indeed Aretha even sings “Whip it to me!” which I’d never consciously heard before and which is repeated rapid-fire deep in the album cut of “Sister Ray” (“Whip it on me, Jim” it sounds like). On the live ’67 version, Lou repeats “Sock it to me” over and over, and when I compared it to the album version I noticed the phrase no longer appears in the most familiar recording of the song.

One further clue is that the name “Sister Ray” – who doesn’t appear as a character in the song, but is a kind of lurking presence of ambiguous sexual identity, a subject Lou dealt with regularly – could be “Sister Re” – that is, Aretha. Hickey explains that the line “Re, Re, Re, Re” in “Respect” was Franklin’s nickname (A-re-tha), and of course “sister” was a popular way to refer to Black women in the late ’60s (“Brothers and sisters!” is shouted in the intro to the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams“, for example, showing how white rock musicians often borrowed terminology from Black culture to give themselves clout). Given that the Velvets were always very open about the influence of Black music on their own (Tucker loved Bo Diddley, Morrison T-Bone Walker and Mickey Baker, Reed doo-wop music, as sourced from Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story) is it hard to imagine they were listening closely to Aretha Franklin in 1967?* Not at all. Again, remember that the song “Booker T” – as in “Green Onions” – was recorded at the same show, or in the same period, confirming their habit of paying homage to the music they admired, their internalization of influence. Like all great rock-and-roll bands, they wore their influences on their sleeve.

So what is Aretha Franklin doing in “Sister Ray”? Maybe John Cale or Moe Tucker can answer this question with some accuracy, as they are still with us. My guess is that either it was a somewhat unconscious interpolation, the way the zeitgeist can impose itself on us in ways we don’t necessarily control, or perhaps Reed – who had studied writing with Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse and was a gifted storyteller (“The Gift“, also from WL/WH, is proof) was using techniques he’d learned from Selby and Joyce, a kind of stream-of-consciousness in which narration, dialogue and background detail are all squeezed together in a non-linear, surreal, textured way reminiscent of a cubist painting.

I like the idea that “Respect” is playing on the radio or the record player during the orgy scene, and in the drug-induced haze and confusion “Sister Re” gets superimposed onto “Sister Ray”, and the two eventually merge into one, much like the vocals and instrumentation create an organic, indivisible whole. The song feels more like an psychodrama than a pop song to my mind, which may be the most truly innovative quality of the Velvets’ music.

In any case, I’ll never hear either song quite the same way again.

* A few days after writing this I came across this article listing “Lou Reed’s 46 favorite songs of the 1960s”, which Reed apparently detailed before his death in 2013. Number 40 on that list is Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man”, which is of course the title track of the album that features “Respect”. So he was definitely paying attention to Aretha Franklin while writing “Sister Ray”.