Every now and then, rock bands arrive at the wrong time. Some outfits are just too revolutionary for the masses to truly appreciate the extraordinary music that is being presented to them.
There’s a sweet spot when it comes to capturing the zeitgeist, and everything must align to make a group become the most relevant on the planet. With Led Zeppelin, they couldn’t have asked for a better time to rise to the forefront of the scene, and they grasped the opportunity with both hands to become a rock powerhouse.
At the time of their emergence, there was a giant hole in the British music scene after The Beatles retired from touring, and their split began to look inevitable. Led Zeppelin’s inventive brand of heavy rock also offered up a new variant of music that fans didn’t know they desired, and once it arrived, they couldn’t get enough.
Over in the States, The Velvet Underground were busy cooking up something entirely new, pretty much laying the groundwork for what we now call indie. Trouble was, hardly anyone was listening. Their racket went mostly ignored at the time. It wasn’t until Lou Reed broke out on his own and started getting a bit of shine that people went back and clocked just how ahead of the curve the Velvets had really been.
While The Velvet Underground and Nico is not only one of the most recognisable album covers of all time, the record is also one of music’s most influential. However, in 1967, it didn’t manage to break through the noise, and rather than playing to tens of thousands of people in huge rooms, half-empty New York bars is where they would frequent.
One person fortunate to catch them live on multiple occasions throughout their golden age was Jimmy Page. The first time he saw them perform was at the historic Manhattan nightclub The Scene, which he said was “decorated by Andy Warhol, and it was decorated with Bacofoil on the walls, because he said that was the colour of speed”.
He continued to Classic Rock in 2020: “And suddenly you hear this band doing this drone stuff, and Lou Reed’s writing was just out of this world. They were just phenomenal, and they sounded just like that first album.”
The Led Zeppelin guitarist saw them while he was in New York with The Yardbirds in the late 1960s. He added, “Everyone talks about The Velvet Underground, but at the time people did not go to see them, and I found that odd. I loved The Velvet Underground, and it was such a thrill to have done that single with Nico.”
The Nico link-up Page talked about was a cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s I’m Not Sayin’, which they laid down back in 1965. Page was already earning his crust as a sought-after session player, while Nico was still on the way up. Neither of them knew it then, but it’d be a fair few years before the pair got their proper dues.
Page’s main takeaway from seeing The Velvet Underground was bemusement at their lack of fans, however. He told Interview in 2019: “The other thing about Steve Paul’s and The Velvet Underground was that it didn’t really have too many people coming to hear it, which I found extraordinary.”
The guitarist claimed “hardly any people” were at the shows, estimating it was about “nine, a dozen people” despite them being “so radical” and “such a radical band”. Page also highlighted the key ingredient that made them great, saying they had “this wonderful glue, this synergy between them that was dark. It was very dark.”
The wider world was a bit slow on the uptake, but eventually folks cottoned on to just how great The Velvet Underground really were. They finally got the nod they’d always deserved, their name at last spoken with the kind of respect it should’ve carried way back in ’67.