YEAR
1996
INDUCTED BY
Patti Smith
CATEGORY
Performers
Not everyone bought their album, but everyone who did started a band.
The Velvet Underground was literary but down to earth, schooled in both highbrow culture and the streets. They wrote about life as they saw it—drugs and all—but they saw the beauty in bleakness.
John Cale
Lou Reed
Moe Tucker
Sterling Morrison
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By David Fricke
The induction of the Velvet Underground into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the culmination of the band’s slow, strange, inexorable rise to its rightful place in posterity.
The Velvets’ extraordinary transformation from openly reviled pop antichrists and chart exiles to universally hailed- and widely loved- pioneers of catalytic guitar violence, art-house idealism and fearless lyric candor has taken three decades.
