City Lights,The Make Out Room, and The Rock n’ Roll Book Club of SF present
Richie Unterberger in conversation with Peter Maravelis (City Lights)
Music by DJ Michael Gabriel
at The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Admission $10.00 (Advance Tickets through The Make Out Room, TBA)
City Lights celebrates the publication of
Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground
By Richie Unterberger (Introduction by Dean Wareham)
Published by Omnibus Press
This is the definitive history of the Velvet Underground, complete and more fully researched than any before
Do What You Fear Most is the authoritative tome on the band that changed music, fashion and culture forever.
Blending new archival insights and first-hand accounts, Richie Unterberger illuminates the band’s radical global impact on New York’s progenitors of punk, who bridged pure rock’n’roll, avant-garde experimentation and literary songwriting to take rock music into previously uncharted territory. Beginning with each member’s path to the band, it details their influences, successes and (many) failures, the whirlwind with Warhol, the triumph of the Banana album, the fractured and strained relationships and egos, and beyond to the end of the Velvets and the beginnings of various solo careers.
Rigorously researched and packed with previously undocumented insights, this book features first-hand interviews with the group’s associates, as well as a substantial amount of material newly unearthed from the Lou Reed Archive and the Andy Warhol Archive, as well as never-before-seen images and ephemera.
An entertaining and exhilarating narrative, Do What You Fear Most vividly captures the grit and uninhibited creativity of the 1960s New York cultural scene and is an essential portrait of one of the 20th century’s most visionary and influential bands.
Richie Unterberger is the author of around a dozen rock history books, including Unknown Legends of Rock’n’Roll, Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia and Turn! Turn! Turn!. His book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film won a 2007 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research. He has contributed to numerous publications, including Record Collector and MOJO. He’s written liner notes for several hundred album reissues, including the extensive notes for the super deluxe edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico and Why Don’t You Smile Now: Lou Reed at Pickwick Records 1964-65. He gives regular presentations on rock and soul history throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches courses at several universities in the US.
Peter Maravelis is the event director at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. He edited the San Francisco Noir anthology for Akashic Books.
Michael Gabriel is a Bay Area-based DJ and artist known for his eclectic sets and community-focused events. He is a huge fan of the Velvet Underground.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation