From Ludlow Street to the Dom — walk the avant-garde downtown that launched rock's most influential band.
Untapped New York called me a "world-renowned Velvet Underground enthusiast." I'll take it. I've been deep in this subject for decades — the band, the scene, the people, the buildings, the intersecting worlds of avant-garde music, film, poetry, and art that made their story possible. This tour is the product of all of it.
In the early 1960s, the streets of the Lower East Side and East Village were buzzing with a downtown avant-garde scene unlike anything that had existed before. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Angus Maclise — and later Maureen "Moe" Tucker and Nico "chanteuse" — were drifting into New York, crossing paths in the fervent underground scene, serendipitously finding each other.
This tour follows that story from the beginning: how they met, where they rehearsed and first performed, and the moment they walked into Andy Warhol's orbit and recorded their debut album. It ends right where the legend begins.
We start at 56 Ludlow Street — the pivotal Lower East Side address where the band first took the name "The Velvet Underground" in the fall of 1965. From there we move through the streets where they rehearsed, performed, and collided with the world of Andy Warhol. We end at The Dom on St. Mark's Place, where the Velvet Underground & Nico performed as part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable in April 1966 — one of the most extraordinary convergences of art and rock and roll in American history.
Along the way you'll hear about the avant-garde figures who shaped the band's sound — La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Terry Riley — and the Factory figures who brought them to Warhol: Billy Name, Barbara Rubin. It's a tour about a band, but it's also a tour about a moment in New York City that will never come again.
