![]() The State House on top of Beacon Hill is adorned with statues of generals, senators, and apostates (Anne Hutchinson, banished Mary Dyer, hanged). ![]() Troublemaking cults go way back in Puritan Boston. But in Boston, they were a band, with a band’s kind of problems and a band’s kind of fans. The Velvet Underground may have been art-world superstars in New York. And while Doug Yule had an echt–Long Island accent and hairdo (according to Walsh, even David Bowie once mistook him for Lou Reed), he was a Boston University grad living in Cambridge when they drafted him to take Cale’s place. “There,” writes Walsh, “the band transformed from an Andy Warhol Factory novelty into a musical force.” All their personnel changes happened in the city, including Nico’s and John Cale’s final shows. But during that same period at the Boston Tea Party-a psychedelic club housed in a former Unitarian church in Boston’s South End-they played forty-three times. Walsh points out in his excellent new book about Boston in the ’60s, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, the Velvet Underground played only three proper shows in New York between 19. What I didn’t know then was that our liturgical attitude toward the Velvets was rooted firmly in a local tradition.
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