The strange moment Sterling Morrison ditched The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground were very much a hindsight band. They began with no intentions of achieving financial freedom or fame on the level of some of their more popular contemporaries of the 1960s. Instead, Lou Reed and John Cale wanted to bring true ingenuity to rock music. With Reed’s gritty poetry and Cale’s avant-garde curiosity, they formed an underground act in the gloomy streets of mid-60s New York City.
After recruiting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker, The Velvet Underground were a complete package. Following a short spell on the grassroots gig circuit, they caught the eye of Andy Warhol. The eccentric pop artist saw something special in the band that most others wouldn’t fully appreciate until a decade or so later. Having swept the band into his multi-media art troupe, “The Factory”, and becoming their manager, Warhol helped the Velvets create their first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico.
With a sound so ahead of its time, The Velvet Underground found very little in the way of fame and fortune with their first two albums. By the time they were working on their eponymous third record, Reed had dismissed the experimental Cale from the band, allegedly hoping to sculpt more commercially accessible material.
The 1969 album, The Velvet Underground, was by no means poor, but it lacked the exploratory edge that Cale had brought to the previous releases. Heading into 1970, the band took yet another step towards commercial exposure with Loaded, an album that severed most ties with the gritty sound by which the band once identified due to Tucker’s pregnancy-related absence.
Gradually, the band fell apart, with Reed, the creative leader, leaving just before the release of Loaded. Defiantly, the remaining members continued to tour into 1971, but under a growing sense of misdirection.
On August 21st, 1971, the band were on their way back to New York after playing a gig in Houston’s Liberty Hall. Morrison arrived at the airport in Houston with a ticket for New York and had seemingly packed his suitcase. Little did his bandmates know, his clothes were still hanging in a cupboard at the hotel; his suitcase was merely a prop filled with Yellow Pages phone directories. Morrison felt that this way, nobody could protest, or at least, they couldn’t protest for long with flight departing shortly. With his clothing left behind, nobody could change his mind, not even himself.
When the beans were finally spilt for Tucker and Doug Yule, they were filled with fury and disbelief. “But you have to know Sterling. He was a unique individual in many ways,” Yule later commented on the situation. “He was kind of an oddball, so it wasn’t surprising when he did things you wouldn’t expect other people to do”.
As it turned out, Morrison had decided to quit the band and stay in Texas to attend university. Just days before Morrison left his bandmates at the airport, Joe Kruppa, an English professor at the University of Texas, was flicking through a stack of applications when he came across a familiar name, Holmes S. Morrison. His suspicions were confirmed when his eyes drifted down to the ‘Past Experience’ section.
“For the past six years, I’ve been involved with a professional musical organisation touring and recording for Verve Records,” it read. “Jesus Christ,” Kruppa remembered thinking. “That’s Sterling. He’s applying!”
Kruppa, a big fan of the band, had met Morrison in 1969 when he and Reed dropped by at the university to discuss The Velvet Underground and their collaboration with Andy Warhol for his mixed media class. Naturally, he jumped at the opportunity to welcome the guitarist to the university. When he called Morrison to tell him the good news, he was already in the state.
After leaving his bandmates at the airport in Houston, Morrison travelled to Austin, ready to begin his new life. “Things weren’t fun for him anymore, he told me that,” says Martha Morrison, Sterling’s then-girlfriend. “He didn’t hesitate, but it was very wrenching for him. And it isn’t that he planned to leave them like that — they just called him while he was in the state”.
While in Texas, Morrison found an unlikely vocation as a deckhand on tugboats. He eventually concluded his educational pursuits with a PhD in 1986 but remained in his beloved full-time job as a tugboat captain until his illness and subsequent death in 1995. These latter years of Morrison’s life inspired Galaxie 500’s classic 1988 track, ‘Tugboat’.