West Coast hippie audiences rejected the Velvet Underground as too dark

Evidence

After a month on St. Mark’s Place, the Velvets toured the West Coast. LA audiences found the band too dark. Their third night at The Trip, the Sunset Strip club was shut down for disturbing the peace with a “pornographic exhibition.” The San Francisco hippies hated them, and the feeling was mutual. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 871

Categorization

• XREF: The East-West avant-garde clash prefigures the counterculture turf wars later in this chapter; Velvets’ darkness as the test case.