The Velvet Underground & Nico

Almost nobody bought this album when it came out. It was a commercial failure, radio refused to touch it, and the mainstream music press largely dismissed it. Brian Eno famously observed decades later that while the debut album only sold 30,000 copies, everyone who bought one went out and started a band. That observation has become a cliche because it is completely accurate.

Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker recorded most of it in four days at a decrepit studio in New York City called Scepter Studios, for less than $3,000. The sessions were financed by Andy Warhol, who was listed as the album's producer, though as John Cale bluntly told an interviewer, "Andy Warhol didn't do anything." What Warhol actually provided, as Reed himself later explained, was protection. He was the umbrella that absorbed every attack aimed at a band singing openly about heroin, sadomasochism, street life, and the darker textures of New York City at a time when pop music was still largely about holding hands. Nobody was going to tell Andy Warhol his band couldn't make the record they wanted to make.

"Venus in Furs," "Heroin," "I'm Waiting for the Man," and "Sunday Morning" sounded like nothing else on earth in 1967, and they planted seeds that grew into punk, post-punk, noise rock, and indie music. This is the record that made it acceptable for rock bands to be strange, literary, and uncompromising. Everything that followed owes it a debt.