Ty Matejowsky examines the allusions to America’s pigskin pastime that add yet another wrinkle of contradiction to one of rock’s most complex artists.
Cult rock fandom’s gatekeeping tendencies prove no real match to the far-reaching influence of multimillion dollar ad campaigns, especially those reaching tens of millions of viewers each gameday. The catchy hooks and inherent genius of semi-obscure songs like ‘Sunday Morning’ can quickly capture the public imagination when well-placed needle-drops find new audiences. In the case of the Velvet Underground, this is not necessarily a bad thing given the band’s limited impact during their active years.
Last year as the 2024 National Football League (NFL) season got under way, some fans may have been shocked that a song by an act notorious for trafficking in transgressive topics like drugs, paranoia, sadomasochism, prostitution, and gender-bending has found its way into American living rooms, infiltrating this most sacred space of weekend viewing through ads for NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV. Featuring all 32 team mascots helping a groggy pyjama-clad dad prepare for game day à la Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the commercials quietly showcased the celesta strains of ‘Sunday Morning’ – the gentle opening track of the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut The Velvet Underground & Nico. Music snobs reflexively repelled by this egregious convergence of seminal alt-rock sublimity, smashmouth American masculinity, and consumer capitalism may do well to re-examine some lesser-known aspects of the band’s storied past.
Surprisingly, for a group widely touted as an exemplar of 1960s avant-garde experimentation and bohemian disaffection, the Velvet Underground – particularly lead singer and cofounder Lou Reed – has never shied away from indulging a genuine appreciation of gridiron play, referencing football in both song and performance. During the band’s post-John Cale-years and throughout Reed’s subsequent solo career, direct and tangential allusions to America’s pigskin pastime readily emerge. To wit, impromptu stage banter from an October 1969 show at the End of Cole Ave. nightclub in Dallas, later immortalized on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live (1974), includes Reed telling audience members, “we saw your Cowboys today and they never let Philadelphia even have the ball for a minute. It was ridiculous. You should give other people just a little chance… in football anyway.” Grainy 8mm footage shot around this same time at an outdoor Texas music fest – a standout segment of Todd Haynes’s 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground – features drummer Moe Tucker pounding the skins, looking resplendent in a white New York Jets sweatshirt.
After Reed’s unceremonious exit some months later in August 1970, the band – at this point comprised of original members Tucker and guitarist Sterling Morrison alongside the multi-instrumentalist Cale-replacement Doug Yule – soldiered on amid critical indifference and a shrinking fanbase, ultimately disintegrating ahead of 1973’s Squeeze, effectively a Yule solo album marketed under the Velvet Underground moniker. Emerging from a year-long exile at his parent’s Long Island home, Reed soon reinvented himself as a fey ambisexual figure with major assists from David Bowie and Mick Ronson on the glam rock touchstone Transformer (1972) before delving into much darker territory with the suitably bleak yet achingly redemptive Berlin (1973).
As jaded narrator of this sordid tale of degradation and dissolution, Reed is neither afraid of turning his unsympathetic gaze inward nor deploying unexpected football jargon. On ‘The Kids’ – a track about a young mother’s breakdown that Lester Bangs apocryphally dubbed the most depressing song that he ever heard – Reed embraces the role of what is surely any athletic program’s lowest and least respected member, painfully declaring, “I am the water boy.” He returns to football in a major way on the eponymous track of 1975’s Coney Island Baby. Here, the erstwhile Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal goes all in on adolescent vulnerabilities, admitting being “a little too lightweight to play line-backer” but nevertheless still wanting “to play football for the coach,” a mysterious fatherlike figure he calls “the straightest dude I ever knew.”
What makes these admissions so remarkable is that at the time no one appeared more diametrically opposed to football’s rah-rah mid-America wholesomeness than Lou Reed. Of all the labels credibly applied to his complicated and sometimes frightening 1970s persona – decadent, streetwise, genius, druggie, tormented, nocturnal, dark-hearted, bisexual, aloof, self-sabotaging – few would ever consider aspiring football player. Written and recorded during his alternatively tumultuous and tender relationship with Rachel Humphreys, a transgender woman who appeared on several of Reed’s album sleeves, ‘Coney Island Baby’ stands as a heartfelt testament to unabashed teenage yearning. Such sentiments are made clear at the song’s end where Reed wistfully declares, “I’d like to send this one out to Lou and Rachel and all the kids at P.S. 192.”
A forensic listen of Reed’s post-Velvets discography reveals other passing nods to this enduring American sports time pursuit. On ‘The Day John Kennedy Died’ from 1982’s The Blue Mask, he takes some poetic license with the timing of events on November 23, 1963, singing “I remember where I was that day, I was in an upstate bar / The team from the university was playing football on TV.”
Similarly, ‘New Sensations’ from the 1984 album of the same name finds a newly sober Reed departing a Pennsylvania diner to get back on his GPZ motorcycle as hunters and country folk continue “arguing about football.” Considered altogether, these gridiron references comprise a subtle throughline that extends all the way back to his Velvet Underground days, adding yet another wrinkle of contradiction to one of rock’s already most complex artists.
If advertisers using ‘Sunday Morning’ for the NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV spots registers less as sonic wallpaper to some clever CGI-laden promotion and more as artistic sacrilege, then it is certainly not without precedent. Twenty-five years ago, cratediggers worldwide grew indignant when Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’ gained widespread exposure through a Volkswagen Cabriolet commercial, introducing this revered albeit troubled singer-songwriter to the masses. For long-time Velvet Underground and Lou Reed fans, this NFL licensing agreement must surely be taken in stride given the previous appearances of songs like ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘I’m Sticking With You’, ‘Perfect Day’, ‘Venus In Furs’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ in commercials for brands such as Honda, Hyundai, Dunlop, AT&T, Sony PlayStation and Expedia.
Cult rock fandom’s gatekeeping tendencies prove no real match to the far-reaching influence of multimillion dollar ad campaigns, especially those reaching tens of millions of viewers each gameday. The catchy hooks and inherent genius of semi-obscure songs like ‘Sunday Morning’ can quickly capture the public imagination when well-placed needle-drops find new audiences. In the case of the Velvet Underground, this is not necessarily a bad thing given the band’s limited impact during their active years.
Lester Bangs writes that “modern music begins with The Velvets, and the implications and influence of what they did seem to go on forever… The only thing that… would be a mistake in thanking them for this precious gift is romanticizing them too much.” The mythologizing that he warns against leaves little room for inconvenient details that do not fit the established narrative of an iconoclastic New York City group primarily interested in documenting the deviant inhabitants of society’s fringes. An abiding appreciation for football by Reed and his Velvet Underground bandmates serves as part of an important rock and roll countermyth that this new NFL association helps bring to the fore.
❉ Read more on Lou Reed from We Are Cult:
• Lou Reed’s ‘Sally Can’t Dance’ revisited
• Noise alloys: The gory story of Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’
• ‘Lou Reed – Take No Prisoners’ (1978).
❉ Ty Matejowsky is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He has published various pieces with We Are The Mutants, The Middling Spaces, and Sports Literate. His book Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary (University of Alabama Press) came out in 2022. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ty-matejowsky-86026a92/
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