Verve delayed the Velvets’ album nearly a year after the Mothers’ debut

Evidence

The Mothers were a bitter pill. Frank Zappa’s band had openly mocked the Velvets in the spring when they played together at The Trip in Los Angeles and the Fillmore in San Francisco. Moreover, although the two bands cut their debut LPs around the same time, made for Verve with same producer, Tom Wilson, the Mothers’ Freak Out! had been in record stores for months, nearly a year before The Velvet Underground and Nico was released. Adding insult to injury, the Mothers’ show—advertised with a handbill emblazoned with HELP LEGALIZE THERAPEUTIC ABORTION—was a critical success. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 937

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete evidence of how record-industry timing and curation shaped which bands broke — install into the reader’s structural-conditions argument about cultural production.