The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Velvet Underground & Nico is the debut album by American rock band the Velvet Underground, released in March 1967 by Verve Records. Accompanied by vocalist Nico, the album was recorded in 1966 while the group were featured on Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, which gained attention for its experimental performance sensibilities and controversial lyrical topics, including drug abuse, prostitution, sadism and masochism and sexual deviancy. Though the record was a commercial failure upon release and was almost entirely ignored by contemporary critics, The Velvet Underground & Nico is now widely recognized as one of the greatest and most influential albums in the history of popular music. It ranked 13th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and was added to the 2006 National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. In 1982, musician Brian Eno famously stated that while the album initially only sold 30,000 copies, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." Genres that were significantly informed by the album include art rock, punk, garage, grunge, shoegaze, gothic, indie, and most other forms of alternative music. 2Recording The Velvet Underground & Nico was recorded with the first professional line-up of the Velvet Underground: Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker. German singer Nico was also featured, having occasionally performed lead vocals for the band at the instigation of their mentor and manager, Andy Warhol. Nico sang lead on three of the album's tracks—"Femme Fatale", "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "I'll Be Your Mirror"—and back-up on "Sunday Morning". In 1966, as the album was being recorded, this was also the line-up for their live performances as a part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The bulk of the songs that would become The Velvet Underground & Nico were recorded in mid-April 1966, during a four-day stint at Scepter Studios, a decrepit recording studio in Manhatta