The Right Kind of Pain: The Velvet Underground
Mark Greif, 22 March 2007
I remember my own first exposure to the Velvet Underground. As a music-avid pre-teenager in the mid-1980s, I was listening to a Boston commercial radio station which still had the last of the city’s famous independent DJs, a man named Charles Laquidara, who played what he liked from vinyl LPs and was always looking to impress the mass audience. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘After the break, I’m going to play a song by the Velvet Underground. But here’s the thing. It’s seven minutes long. And – it’s called “Heroin”.’
