The Velvet Underground & Nico: How the Banana Album Was Recorded
Updated: Jul 6
The Velvet Underground & Nico, the banana album, was recorded in 1966 in three studios. Most of it was cut in about four days in mid-April at Scepter Studios in Manhattan, three songs were re-recorded at TTG Studios in Hollywood in May, and "Sunday Morning" was added at Mayfair Recording Studios in New York in November. Andy Warhol is the credited producer, Tom Wilson produced the later sessions, and Verve Records released the album in March 1967.
The Velvet Underground & Nico at a glance
Recorded: April, May and November 1966.
Studios: Scepter Studios, Manhattan; TTG Studios, Hollywood; Mayfair Recording Studios, Manhattan.
Credited producer: Andy Warhol, except on "Sunday Morning" (Tom Wilson).
Engineers: John Licata at Scepter, with Norman Dolph running the sessions; Ami Hadani (credited as Omi Haden) at TTG.
Line-up: Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, with Nico singing lead on three songs.
Cost: never documented. Estimates run from $1,500 to $3,000.
Release: Verve Records, March 1967.
Chart peak: No. 171 on the Billboard album chart.
Before the studio: Ludlow Street, the Factory and the Dom
The songs were already old. Reed, Cale and Morrison taped early versions of several of them, "Venus in Furs" among them, in their Ludlow Street loft in July 1965. In December 1965 Warhol saw the band at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village, took them into the Factory and, with Paul Morrissey, pushed them to add the German singer Nico. By April 1966 they were playing Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Dom, where Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records sales executive, played records between sets. When Warhol said he wanted a record, Dolph offered to make it.
Scepter Studios, April 1966: four days in a wrecked room
Dolph knew that Scepter Records, the label of the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, had its own studio at 254 West 54th Street, the building that later housed Studio 54. Dolph and Warhol split the cost, and Dolph took a silver Warhol painting as his fee.
The room was in bad shape. Cale remembered torn-up floorboards and missing walls, with only four microphones that worked. Dolph described a small live room, a control room the size of about three cubicles, a 24-input console and a four-track Ampex half-inch tape machine. Our notes on making a difficult room work start from the same problem.
The band played live and loud, with almost no isolation. Dolph told Sound On Sound that Tucker stood in the middle with her back to the far wall and no baffles, Reed sang near the control room glass with his back to her, Morrison stood in a corner and Cale faced Reed from the left. Engineer John Licata had the sound the band wanted on the first pass of each song. We describe that kind of day in Recording a Band Live in a Room.
Nobody punched in. Most songs took one take, at most two half-takes joined together, and broken takes were recorded over because tape cost well over $100 a reel. The job took four days, two of them recording, and Richie Unterberger estimates about ten hours of recording. Cale told Uncut in 2009 that the band had rehearsed the songs for a year and a half and wanted to sound the way they did live, just as loud. Ten songs were recorded.
TTG Studios, Hollywood, May 1966: three songs again
In May 1966, while the band was in California with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Tom Wilson and engineer Ami Hadani spent two days with them at TTG Studios. They re-recorded "I'm Waiting for the Man", "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin", all slower than the Scepter takes. About six minutes and twenty seconds into the new "Heroin", Tucker's drums stop. She could not hear the others once it got loud and fast, so she stopped, expecting them to stop too. Nobody did, she came back in, and that take is on the album. More on letting a band set its own tempo in Why Bands Should Record Without a Click Track.
TTG, founded in 1965 by Tom Hidley and Ami Hadani, had a hall big enough for about 100 musicians, and Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Jimi Hendrix also worked there. Wilson had five of the Scepter recordings remixed too.
Mayfair Recording Studios, November 1966: "Sunday Morning"
With the release delayed, Wilson wanted a single with Nico on lead. In November 1966 he took the band to Mayfair Recording Studios in Manhattan for "Sunday Morning", which Reed and Cale had written with her voice in mind. Reed ended up singing lead, with Nico on backing vocals. Cale found a celesta in the studio and used it, and Morrison played bass. It is the most polished song on the album, a December 1966 single that opens side one. How far to polish a rough band is the question in The Art of the Raw Edge.
The sounds: Cale's viola, Reed's tunings, Tucker's drums, Nico's songs
John Cale's electric viola
Cale strung his viola with guitar and mandolin strings and played long drones, a habit from La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and he compared the amplified sound to an aeroplane engine. You hear it under "Venus in Furs" and in the wailing that rises with "Heroin". A straight line runs from that sound to the guitars in our shoegaze mixing guide.
Lou Reed's ostrich tuning
Reed tuned every guitar string to the same note, a trick from "The Ostrich", a 1964 dance song he recorded as one of the Primitives. The guitar drones beside the viola on "Venus in Furs" and "All Tomorrow's Parties". On "All Tomorrow's Parties" Cale also played piano with a chain of paper clips threaded through the strings.
Maureen Tucker's drums
Tucker played standing up, on a small kit with a bass drum turned on its side, often with mallets and rarely with cymbals, which she felt drowned out the band. Keeping a kit that simple alive in a mix is the subject of Mixing Indie Rock Drums.
Nico's three songs
Nico sings lead on "Femme Fatale", which Reed wrote about Edie Sedgwick at Warhol's request, on "All Tomorrow's Parties", Warhol's favourite, and on "I'll Be Your Mirror", inspired by Nico herself. Dolph says Reed and Cale accepted her only because Warhol insisted, though nobody showed it in the studio. The closing "European Son" breaks into six minutes of feedback after Cale hits a stack of plates with a metal chair.
Who really produced The Velvet Underground & Nico?
Warhol is credited on every track except "Sunday Morning". Dolph says Warhol dropped into the control room on two of the four Scepter days, said it sounded great and gave no instructions. Dolph paid and kept the sessions moving, while Cale and Reed made the musical calls. Cale later said Wilson produced nearly everything and Warhol did nothing. Reed also called Wilson the real producer but defended Warhol: with his name on the sessions nobody dared change anything, and he told the band to keep all the dirty words.
The fair answer is that Warhol paid for the band and shielded it, while the studio work belonged to Dolph and Licata at Scepter and to Wilson after that. A producer who mostly protects the band is doing a real job; compare Rick Rubin and Minimalism in Recording.
The acetate: rejected in a day, found for 75 cents
On April 25, 1966, Dolph had Columbia cut an acetate of nine Scepter songs, paid for with an $84 check from Warhol. Columbia turned it down within a day, and Atlantic and Elektra passed as well. Morrison said Atlantic objected to the drug songs and Elektra disliked the viola. Verve took the album through Tom Wilson, who had just moved there from Columbia.
Another acetate reached David Bowie's manager, Kenneth Pitt, in December 1966, and Bowie's band the Buzz was playing "I'm Waiting for the Man" on stage within a week. Dolph's acetate disappeared until 2002, when the collector Warren Hill bought it at a flea market in Chelsea, Manhattan, for 75 cents. It sold on eBay in December 2006 for about $25,000 and came out officially in 2012 on the 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition, with the faster Scepter takes of the three songs later redone at TTG.
The banana cover
Warhol designed the sleeve: a banana with his signature and no band name. Early copies had a peel-off sticker marked "Peel slowly and see" over a flesh-colored banana. The covers needed a special machine, one reason the release slipped, and MGM paid because it expected Warhol's name to sell records. The back cover then caused a recall. The actor Eric Emerson, whose image was projected behind the band in a live photo, threatened to sue, and MGM pulled the album until he was airbrushed out. In 2023 Billboard ranked the banana No. 1 among the 100 best album covers.
How the banana album was received
Verve released the album in March 1967; the exact day is disputed. Some stores banned it, and many radio stations would not touch it. It peaked at No. 171 in December 1967, after the Emerson recall had taken it off the chart for five months. Reviews were mixed, from a hopeful Billboard capsule to local critics who dismissed it.
Brian Eno said in 1982 that it sold only about 30,000 copies in five years, but "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band". The number is too low. An MGM royalty statement counted 58,476 copies by February 1969, and Nielsen SoundScan counted 560,000 sold between 1991 and 2013.
Critics came round within a decade. Rolling Stone ranked it No. 13 of the 500 greatest albums in 2003 and 2012 and No. 23 in 2020. Pitchfork put it first on its list of the 200 best albums of the 1960s in 2017, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2006. Its influence runs through post-punk, noise rock, shoegaze and indie rock; for the mixing side, see How to Mix Post-Punk.
After the banana: the other Velvet Underground studios
White Light/White Heat (1968): Mayfair Sound Studios, Manhattan, September 1967, produced by Tom Wilson and engineered by Gary Kellgren.
The Velvet Underground (1969): TTG Studios, Hollywood, November and December 1968, produced by the band, with Doug Yule in Cale's place.
Loaded (1970): Atlantic Studios, New York, April to August 1970. Home of "Sweet Jane".
Todd Haynes's documentary The Velvet Underground came out on Apple TV+ in October 2021. Its official trailer:
What we take from it
Our opinion, and plenty of engineers would argue with it: The Velvet Underground & Nico shows that performance and commitment matter more than gear. The core of the record took about ten hours of recording in a room with holes in the floor, on a four-track machine with a handful of working mics. It has outlasted a great many better-equipped records because the band knew the songs after a year and a half of playing them, and recorded them together at stage volume. Even the TTG remakes were cut in two days with the band playing together, and Tucker's dropout in "Heroin" stayed on the record.
For mixing, the lesson is to keep the room and the bleed, because on a record like this that is where the performance lives. We make the longer case in Live to Tape and The U47 Won't Save You, and on bleed in Room Mics as Evidence of the Performance.
What an earlier version got wrong
Dates. We said April 1966 to January 1967 and left out Mayfair. The sessions were in April, May and November 1966.
Warhol's role. We said Warhol helped with the arrangements. Dolph says he gave no instructions.
"Venus in Furs" effects. We described a distorted tambourine and a viola scraped with a metal file. No source, so they are gone.
Tom Wilson's complaints. We quoted Wilson on a late, quarrelling band. No source, and Dolph never heard an argument at Scepter.
The Café Bizarre. We called it a legend that Warhol found the band there. It is the standard account (December 1965).
The other studios. A merged post put the first "Venus in Furs" at the Factory, White Light/White Heat at Atlantic with Tom Dowd and Loaded at Wally Heider. All three are wrong; the corrections are above.
The trailer. That post embedded a stock video in place of the documentary trailer. The official trailer is above.
The Velvet Underground & Nico FAQ
Where was The Velvet Underground & Nico recorded?
Mostly at Scepter Studios in Manhattan, over about four days in April 1966. Three songs were re-recorded at TTG Studios in Hollywood in May 1966, and "Sunday Morning" was cut at Mayfair Recording Studios in Manhattan in November 1966.
Who produced The Velvet Underground & Nico?
Andy Warhol is credited on every track except "Sunday Morning" (Tom Wilson). In practice Norman Dolph and engineer John Licata ran the Scepter sessions, and Wilson produced the later work.
When was The Velvet Underground & Nico released?
Verve Records released it in March 1967. Many sources give March 12, but the historian Richie Unterberger thinks it was out by March 4.
Why is The Velvet Underground & Nico called the banana album?
Andy Warhol's cover is a single banana with his signature and no band name. Early copies had a peel-off sticker over a flesh-colored banana.
How many copies did The Velvet Underground & Nico sell?
It peaked at No. 171 on the Billboard chart. Brian Eno's figure of 30,000 copies in five years is too low: MGM counted 58,476 by February 1969, and Nielsen SoundScan counted 560,000 between 1991 and 2013.
Keep reading
Room and Ambient Mics for Recording. How the room ends up on the record.
No Wave Albums Recording in Studios. New York noise a decade later.
Recording Honky Dory at Trident Studios. Bowie, who played the Velvets live before their album was out.
Nevermind at Sound City Studios. Another fast album by a band that knew its songs.
Send us the rough mix
If you make post-punk, noise or indie rock that owes something to the Velvets, send us the rough mix and a few lines on what it should feel like. You can read how we work on online mixing, with more on post-punk mixing and indie rock mixing.
