"Sunday Morning" on a Sunday Morning

Somehow, in the course of my rather extensive and self-propelled modern music education, I totally missed The Velvet Underground.

Sure, I wasn't completely oblivious. I knew of the band, and had certainly heard "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Sweet Jane" more than just a few times. I was a little more familiar with Lou Reed's solo work, as one of the teenage boys who'd worked in my family's store when I was growing up was a Lou fan and had several 8-tracks in his car, in which I was a frequent passenger as a child.

But the Velvets, as they were - somehow I just missed the boat on that until the fall of 1987.

The boyfriend at the time had moved up to East Tennessee and was living in an upstairs room of a friend and the friend's family's home. I was still living a few hours away, closer to Nashville, at the time, and made the trek eastward often to spend the weekend with him.

After what was a usual evening of debauchery the night before, the boyfriend, the friend, and I were hanging around the kitchen table one Sunday morning, all hung over but having managed to scarf down breakfast, making idle chatter while listening to music among the occasional miserable groan from having had a little too much fun the night before.

The friend got up to change the record on the stereo and put on The Velvet Underground & Nico, and for the first time, I heard the tinkly music box sound of the opening strains of "Sunday Morning". It was perfect background music for a Sunday morning in a sleepy little college town, there in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains, the sun shining way too brightly through the window for our painfully and shamefully hung over selves.

After I returned home from that weekend, I discovered that one of my friends had the VU and The Velvet Underground cassettes in her collection, so of course I immediately taped them, going on to fall in love with the likes of "What Goes On", "Beginning to See the Light", "I Can't Stand It", "Stephanie Says", "Lisa Says", and so many more. Probably as it should be, though, The Velvet Underground & Nico was my first taste, with "Sunday Morning" on a Sunday morning, though it still surprises me that it took me as long as it did to get around to that particular band.