Avant-garde drone music transferred directly into a pop novelty band through one-note tuning

Evidence

Cale and Conrad warmed to the gig even more after Reed explained that they need only tune their instruments to one note, which was basically what they had been doing with Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. For several months in early 1965, Cale, Conrad, De Maria, and Reed spent their weekends playing high school dances west of Philadelphia, home of the crucial afterschool TV rock variety show American Bandstand, which is where Pickwick vainly hoped to the break the record. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 647

Categorization

• SHARE: The fact that the Velvet Underground’s origin was a manufactured novelty band on the Pickwick label who only had to match one drone note would delight anyone into Velvet Underground or drone music history.
• XREF: Connects to the low-barrier/ignorable art-form condition: the junk culture (novelty dances, trash paperback titles) fed the avant-garde, not the other way around.