Remembering Sterling Morrison

Every successful band has "that guy" (or girl, let's not be sexist) who is neither the lead singer nor the front-man but who is the backbone, the conciliator, the person who keeps the band grounded and makes it good. In this case, this person isn't the third wheel but the third leg of a musical stool.

In the Rolling Stones, lead singer Mick Jagger and frontman Keith Richards were held together by their great drummer, the late Charlie Watts.

In the Beatles, lead singer John Lennon and frontman Paul McCartney were the flashy stars but guitarist George Harrison gave it an extra quiet cool.

And in the Velvet Underground, my personal favorite band, it was Sterling Morrison.

So who was he? 

In the new Apple TV documentary made by Todd Haynes, you get some idead but not much. The stars of that band were the irascible but brilliant and literary Lou Reed and the equally brilliant but stubborn muscial experimenter John Cale. Together, they crafted stunning, musically groundbreaking songs that influenced singers like David Bowie and bands like U2. But during the Velvet Underground's short but memorable run, with Reed and Cale making music history but also at each other's throats, Sterling Morrison's base guitart (and regular guitar) kept the beat going on.

Like Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison was a native of Long Island who met Velvet drummer Maureen Tucker during childhood and Reed up at Syracuse University in the early 1960s. Later, back in NYC, as Reed and Cale were putting the Velvet Underground together, they invited him to join. At the time, they were just a bunch of kids in their early 20s looking to make music and get noticed. They made music but success passed them by -- instead, they made musical history.

Morrison stayed with the band throughout its tenure, dealing with Reed and Cale's fallout, plugging away on the guitar as the band toured the country. But in 1971, very dramatically, he quit the band when they were due to return to NYC from Texas -- at the airport, he told his bandmates he was staying in Texas and moving on. Morrison then worked on tugboats, eventually becoming a captain, and also completed his PHD in Medieval History at UT-Austin, eventually teaching there as well. He would play around Austin, occasionally with his old Velvet friends, until he rejoined the band during its reunion tour in 1993. In 1994, he was diagnosed with cancer and sadly died in late August 1995, at the age of 53. 

In 1996, when the Velvet Underground were inducted into the Rock'N'Roll Hall of Fame, Reed, Cale, and Tucker performed a special song in Morrison's memory, a beautiful tribute to a great friend and talent.

Sterling Morrison was never the star, the frontman, the one everyone paid attention to and talked about. Instead, with him, it was all about the music, the work, helping to craft Reed and Cale's ideas into reality, making a great band even greater. And that's why, even more than a quarter century after his death, we remember him still.