The Velvet Underground & Nico & Jim & Marx & Engels & The Boy That Died
Jim was sixteen when he first heard The Velvet Underground & Nico, in a back bedroom of a house with tall ceilings, which his parents had bought a year or so before. The family had moved there from a semi-detached house nearby, attracted by the remaining period features.
He had first read about the Velvet Underground in the February 1998 issue of Q magazine, in an English lesson when he should have been working. There was a list of the one hundred best albums of all time; The Velvet Underground & Nico was number seventy-one, three places behind the first Supergrass album. Radiohead had two in the top six.
He didn’t like the CD at first. He didn’t know anyone who was addicted to heroin or, as far as he knew, any sadomasochists. He didn’t know anyone who had been to New York, although a school friend had been to Florida, and his grandparents had once visited the Grand Canyon. He was only dimly aware of Andy Warhol. He had read some Orwell, but no beats or moderns, and had never been in love. Nevertheless, within a week, he was saying it was his favourite album ever. It soon meant more to him than any other.
Although Jim read that everyone who had first bought The Velvet Underground & Nico had formed a band, he never did, nor did he ever really rebel. He had been growing his hair for some time, leaving it unstyled. He shaved occasionally, with his father’s razor. Despite most of his classmates wearing their backpacks over one shoulder, he wore his over both.
At the weekends, he played hockey for the same team as his father and brother, and remained devoted to his maternal grandparents. In the summer after his GCSEs, he traced his family history in the local library, and he pored over the family bible that his great-grandmother had passed down. He bought a Penguin Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto. He continued to grow his hair, and stopped going to church.
Gradually, the posters on his bedroom walls began to change, as his tastes became more esoteric, consciously so. By the time Be Here Now was released, the Oasis poster came down, and the Oasis t-shirt he had bought for a non-uniform day stayed in his bottom drawer. The Radiohead poster lasted a little longer, and he put up an advert for Portishead, even though he didn’t like Portishead. Ostentatiously, he blue-tacked a picture of William Beveridge above his pine bed, the man who had written the report that led to the founding of the NHS. He threw away the small picture that he’d cut out from a magazine, of the woman in the bra and pants.
On the bus, Jim read The Communist Manifesto, underlining pertinent passages in a red felt tip pen that he had stolen from the desk where his mother kept her things for work. He made one annotation in the margin: “peas”, meaning “peasants”. He highlighted his favourite phrases: “abolition of all right of inheritance”; “free education for all children”; “becomes an appendage of the machine.” More than the main text itself, he underlined the introduction, written by A.J.P. Taylor: “it assumed that men would behave as the social forces determined they should”; “the capitalists are choked by the surplus value which they cannot help accumulating”; “most men do not want responsibility. They want a comfortable life for themselves and their families”. He noted Taylor’s observations about Engels, a “reasonably wealthy man” who “hunted two days a week with the Cheshire.”
It took another year or so before Jim summoned the courage to buy things from charity shops; clothes first, then records. On a school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, with half an hour until the meet time, he watched a boy he knew go into an Oxfam or British Heart Foundation. Jim wanted to dress like him, confidently dismissive in his second hand clothes, and he soon refused to wear jeans. His grandmother began to tease him about the grey Farrars he owned, with a waist significantly larger than his own. His favourite t-shirt was electric blue, from East Germany via a vintage shop, with the logo of “FC Karl-Marx-Stadt” in white across the chest. At sixth form college, he ran for president of the Student Council, and an opponent put up posters in the corridors suggesting that Jim was a communist. Jim won, and became a diligent student representative on the governing corporation.
Initially, the albums Jim bought from the charity shops were those he already knew, then those he didn’t: easy listening, novelty songs, accepted classics, near unlistenable 78s, folk music, always self-conscious, semi-public, striving for solace in things that his friends didn’t like. His uncle gave him his old turntable, and he took his parents’ records from the plastic boxes in the cupboard under the stairs. He bought the NME, and listened to the cover mount CDs, disappointed that there was a world of things that would always belong to someone else, even if he bought them. His record collection grew quickly, half bought, half inherited. With no plan, he carefully assembled a world around him from things that people no longer wanted, or what had been left when they died.
In the January of Jim’s first year at university, his copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico was stolen. His things – records, books, videos taped from BBC 2 – had been loaded into the back of his father’s car, on the way back to college. The thief took a bag of clothes, with the Karl-Marx-Stadt t-shirt inside, and a bag of empty coat hangers, and the stereo with the Velvet Underground CD still in the player. A little troubled, Jim bought another copy the same day. His father found the CD later that week, discarded down an alleyway near where he had parked, thrown aside. Jim kept it, two copies in the same jewel case.
Just a few years later, the boy that Jim had seen in the charity shop in Stratford died. There was talk about a drug overdose. Jim heard too late, and didn’t go to the funeral. The boys had chatted back in sixth form, about the trainers that their friends wore. They had both liked literature and, after an exam, the boy told him about a theory he’d developed about the handkerchief in Othello. He once showed Jim a small bomb he was trying to make. When they were both fifteen, Jim had told the boy that he would either end up running the world or dead in a ditch. Seeing each other again in their late teens, drunkenly, the boy told Jim how that had stuck with him.
For years, Jim kept The Communist Manifesto with his other books. It is still there, close to the Velvet Underground CD, on different shelves, in a different county, in a semi-detached house in a desirable area, where he now lives with his wife and children. He has a happy life, and a comfortable teaching job that brings only moderate stress; he approached his thirty-fifth birthday with only moderate apprehension. He recently read that A.J.P. Taylor was born across the road from the house with tall ceilings where he had grown up, where he had first heard The Velvet Underground.
Occasionally, when the children are in bed, he sits and skims his records, on a chair he inherited from friends of his grandparents, beneath shelves of non-fiction and the novels his wife first read when she was young. He was quietly sad when Lou Reed died.
