(Genuine Jawbone)

 www.jawbonepress.com

BY MARK JENKINS

It's not true that, as Brian Eno once said, everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album went on to start a band. Some of them went on to write about the vastly influential, if hopelessly uncommercial, New York group. Richie Unterberger's White Light/White Heat is but the first of three VU books due this year, and follows more than a dozen previous ones.

Although they haven't attracted as many pop scholars as the Beatles or Bob Dylan, the Velvets are well-documented. So there are no big surprises in Unterberger's dense book, whose 368 small-type pages are most notable for exhaustive detail. The author has done impressive research, turning up material that expands the history entertainingly, if not substantively. The new stuff includes rare images, including photos, posters and ads.

Unterberger didn't talk to all the band's surviving members, but then John Cale and especially Lou Reed are not known for being reliable sources. He seems to have learned more from the Andy Warhol Museum and the Library of Congress, among other institutions, than from original interviews. But he does pursue every angle, which is no small undertaking with the Velvets.

Most fans know that the group spent time in Andy Warhol's orbit, but White Light/White Heat also annotates the roles of such diverse figures as Delmore Schwartz, Bob Dylan, Aaron Copland, La Monte Young, David Bowie, Alain Delon, Federico Fellini, Betsey Johnson, Serge Gainsbourg, Vaclav Havel, Brian Epstein and -- well, you get the idea.

The book has two major drawbacks. One is insufficient copy editing, which allows many typos, redundancies and dropped words. Most of the errors are merely distracting, but some lead to confusion. Guess the missing word, for example, in the author's comment on an early Velvets demo: "This landmark tape has still been heard by the public." (I think it's "not.")

The second quandary is the "day by day" format itself, which encourages dubious digressions, mind-numbing trivia and inaccurate asides. The book claims that Strip-Tease, a movie starring future Velvets vocalist Nico, was released in the U.S. in 1965 with an "R" rating. But the MPAA rating system wasn't introduced until 1968, a glitch that could have been avoided with a more succinct account of this not especially significant event.

The daily template also yields innumerable discussions about whether such and such a thing really happened or not, and if it did, if it occurred on a particular day. I can help with two of these. Unterberger is dubious that the Velvets actually performed in D.C. on April 26, 1966, but guitarist Sterling Morrison, who was the band's institutional memory, assured me in 1993 that he remembered playing the show. (The other three Velvets did not.) I can also add a small note about tensions on the '93 reunion tour: The book gives June 28 as the first time Reed traveled separately from the others, but Cale was going solo on June 7, the day I interviewed the group in London.

The day-by-day format will probably be less troublesome to readers who don't read the thing from cover to cover. The book functions best as either a reference work or a grab-bag from which snatch anecdotes at random - impress your friends with, say, the identity of the young man who got busted for pot with original Velvets drummer Angus MacLise in Oklahoma on March 24, 1968. White Light/White Heat is not the definitive history, but it's loaded with episodes that are fascinating, revealing or simply fun.