The song is built around the tension between an accelerating beat and the guitar’s chords that toll to a real-time description of an opium-induced state. Reed is supported by a stellar supporting cast consisting of John Cale’s shrieking viola and Mo Tucker mimicking heartbeats on drums. The experience of listening to Heroin is so compelling and excruciating that you want to be part of it as much as you want to help him. Heroin is the Velvet Underground’s masterpiece – seven minutes of pseudo-spiritualism, in which a poet intones on the divinity of his addiction. Its legacy, then, was creating a world in which any topic was now permissible in music – and that illicit trip to score drugs made for a joyride. Reed’s real triumph, though, is that with I’m Waiting for the Man he created cinéma vérité in rock. But it’s all good: his man’s got the goods, and – to make up for his lack of punctuality – he gives him a taste. “First thing you learn is that you always got to wait,” Reed laments. Witness the rhythm section’s mimicry of a train heading to the intersection of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, East Harlem. It represents an aesthetic high point for the Velvet Underground, sonically and lyrically. The ability to shock with taboo subjects such as buying drugs has waned today, but until 1967’s I’m Waiting for the Man, music was devoid of an overtly decadent tale such as this. Only the Velvets could make a song both pretty and distressing. Beneath the veneer of this beautiful song is the feeling of anxiety and unrest: Andy Warhol challenged Reed to write a song about paranoia and Reed responded with the line “Watch out / The world’s behind you”. In the studio, Cale discovered the celesta that would give Sunday Morning its eeriness. Reed took the lead, relegating Nico to background vocals. Written by Reed and Cale at 6am on a Sunday morning after an all-nighter in Manhattan, the song certainly delivered on Wilson’s order.
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