Boston Rock Storybook - Joe Harvard "The Velvet Underground and Nico"

Austin City Limits Festival.com Recommended reading for Day Two of the Festival.
Amazon.com: "What this book does beautifully is with great scrupulousness, nail the facts down and reassess what all the different participants contributed (or maybe didn't in some cases!) to the final end result. Compared with all the many prior books on the VU I have read ... this is easily the most honest and thorough on the subject ... For my money the best all round and 'new' critical evaluation essay to date in this series of excellent titles" (Siriam, London UK] Amazon.com: "Fascinating tome by Joe Harvard (of Fort Apache/Pixies fame) about the making behind not only the Velvet's, but also their first LP. Lovingly researched ... Harvard's prose shows the love he has for his subject, and makes learning about this seminal album a treat.	Amazon.com:A few pages into The Velvet Underground and Nico you already sense that Joe Harvard clearly enjoys the heck out of his work. Conversational at times, more formal where fact-gathering is concerned, Harvard's tone moves seemlessly from hilarious indie-rock-vibe riffing to an almost poetic admiration when describing the songs themselves. The result amply justifies Continuum's choice of musician/fans - instead of career critics - to write the 33-1/3 series. At times reading this book was like watching a band on stage, and you can't ask much more than that from a book on rock. Best of New Orleans: "Joe Harvard plays detective in Velvet Underground and Nico, investigating the Velvet Underground's legend, debunking myths and presenting a clearer picture of the record as a musical object."
Boston Globe: "In a previous life, Joe Harvard was an archeologist. In a sense, he still is; it's just that he's digging through the bones of the Velvet Underground, having written a smart little book about the band"	Boston Herald: "If you want to get a well-told story out of Joe Harvard, it doesn't take much more than saying hello to him. The former Boston musician and producer who co-founded Fort Apache Studios in 1986 has a million of 'em: the Eastie boyhood, misadventures on a Harvard scholarship, journeys in rock and rehab, redemption ... he has the material as well as the gift of gab."
Buy.com: "Over the course of some lengthy discussions on the differing styles of the band's players, their songwriting, and general musical motivation, [Harvard] excavates and illuminates not only the album but also the period in which it was made. This type of musical archeology might strike some as obsessive, but Harvard's obvious enthusiasm for his task is so infectious that he coerces the reader into becoming a willing accomplice to his geekiness.	Chicago Tribune : " Continuum's 33 1/3 book series is among the best music-themed literature going. Personal, obsessive and clever... distinguished by individual bents and fresh ideas ... Harvard brings a musician's perspective to evaluating song structures, album sonics and band chemistry, while balanced views on Nico and Andy Warhol's roles reinforce the record's cultural impact.
From Major to Minor [N.Y.C.]: "The pleasant surprise here is Joe Harvard ... lucid, and funny, and clearly aware of the problem of writing about rock insightfully. He’s read his stuff, and issues correctives to a lot of misinformation in other books about the Velvets.There’s a lot of attention to the studio, as you’d expect, and it’s pleasantly surprising that Harvard is able to do so much with an album recorded in a couple of days. I think the edge he has on many other writers is that he simply understands what it’s like to work as a member of a band ... I was especially impressed by his sustained attention to Warhol."	Gazette, Western Ontario: "Dozens of books have been written about the Velvet Underground, but Joe Harvard’s look at the band’s debut album is especially solid ... a detailed and illuminating song-by-song discussion ... Harvard is willing to look at each song objectively, which is refreshing. The Velvet Underground and Nico is both an entertaining and informative read and a worthy companion to the album. It works especially well as an introduction to the Velvet Underground for anyone who’s heard the praise but not the music."
LA Citybeat - LA Valleybeat: "Brilliantly researched and written ... compact enough to carry in a pocket (or a guitar case) while you wait for friends or troll for tickets outside the Troubadour, the Wiltern, Spaceland, the Echo, the Anarchy Library, or any other music venue."	Modern American Literature and Popular Music "Required Reading ... Greil Marcus and Joe Harvard attempt to enrich our understanding of American popular music" American Studies/English 301, Professor Shawn Gillen, Beloit University.
Neon Magazine [N.Y.C.]: "One of the more entertaining books in the series ... Harvard has unearthed a virtual mother lode of interesting facts and anecdotes in the telling of how it all came together ... you can almost feel the heat of the Lower East Side streets wafting up."	[N.J.] Upstage Magazine: " ... a compelling look at a record that has stood the test of time. Like the others in this series, it strives to straddle the line between pop culture and art criticism. At 147 pages (and a smaller than usual book size) it's a very interesting, quick read and well worth your time."
Providence Phoenix: " ... attest to how great critical writing can be when it’s not just intellectual and emotional but experiential ... the lifeblood of Joe Harvard’s approach to The Velvet Underground and Nico ... the Fort Apache Studio founder’s book is amusingly Boston-centric — from off-subject anecdotes (Alpo from the Real Kids caught crabs after stealing New York Dolls drummer Arthur "Killer" Kane’s pants!) to excerpts from Harvard’s interviews with Jonathan Richman (confirmed: there would be no Modern Lovers if there had been no Velvet Underground) to Harvard’s remembrances of listening to Lou Reed singles on the juke at Jean’s Coffee Shoppe, "our local hamburger-cum-bookie joint" in Eastie... but he also offers unusual vignettes, as when he depicts John Cale ("One Badass Classical Dude") arriving at NYC’s Pickwick Studios to meet Lou Reed and discovering that Reed’s teen-trash anthem "The Ostrich" used an open-tuned drone similar to what Cale had been working on with Iannis Xenakis and LaMonte Young — "a shock akin to finding a monkey tuning his viola." The book also sparkles when Harvard lets his imagination explode on the page. He likens "Heroin" to the mystical poetry of Jalal ad-Din Rumi. In "European Son," he hears "someone flushing glass down a metal toilet" and "rockabilly rhythms from the foothills of Mars" and "a football chant for warrior droids of the future."	Playback:"The books' strengths come from authorship. Many of the writers are people who live the lives of musicians and aspire to be the subject of one of these books. To them, a perfect album is a rarity that blossoms from many labors, both on the part of the musician and the listener. These are authors who can appreciate their subjects from both ends of the musical spectrum. Joe Harvard's piece on The Velvet Underground and Nico offers insight into one of the most important albums of the ’60s and does it deftly with input from all the major players, allowing the reader to understand the brilliance of the production and the dance that took place to give the album its unique sound. The VU piece can be termed an obsessive, knob-turning story in that is does concentrate on production techniques, as do several of the other stories. OKT stories can be mildly exciting, but the VU tale offers some psychology lessons and a deep understanding of how interpersonal relationships add up to good vinyl. On the whole, 33 1/3 Greatest Hits is an awesome romp. Think of it as a party filled with your smartest and most literate music friends."
World Cafe Summer Reading series, 08/05/2004: "Our series continues as we talk with Joe Harvard. Harvard, a Boston based producer and musician, has written about the seminal album The Velvet Underground & Nico for Continuum's 33 1/3 book series.	Yahoo: "Joe Harvard's entry in the 33 1/3 series of book-length record meditations is part review, part band biography, and part detective story. Harvard unearths interviews with some key players in the recording of the Velvet Underground's first album, including Andy Warhol and band members Sterling Morrison, John Cale, and Lou Reed, as well as tracking down and gleaning valuable information from one of its engineers, Norman Dolph. With painstaking research, Harvard reconstructs the entire making of the album--the songs' conception, their recording, the finished product's release, and the band's disappointment at the lack of subsequent record company support."