Last month marked 50 years since the the highly influential record, but how much do you actually know about what happened behind the music?
- If you flip the album art upside down you will see a banana.
- Andy Warhol originally wanted to paint a watermelon for the album art, but Lou Reed said that he felt a banana would be better since he a had strong connection to bananas due to much of his childhood being spent on a banana farm.
- Then Warhol took a picture of Reed holding a banana to his face like it was a phone and wanted to use it for the album art, but the photo was lost and never to be found again.
- When The Velvet Underground toured they had to stop playing the album’s songs because of how fans would throw bananas on stage when they heard the record’s material.
- The band had problems with a drug trend called “banana slipping,” where one would slip on a banana and immediately eat the banana they slipped on after they hit the ground, when recording the album.
- During this era of the band, they had sort of a “fifth Beatle” named Raymond who was the band’s official banana peeler.
- German singer Nico was brought into the studio to sing vocals for a few tracks on the album during a week where Reed was so upset at the fact that the atomic symbol for potassium is K that he refused to come in to record, so the band brought in Nico to finish the job.
- When talking about bananas, the band always used the term “’nanners.”
- “Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana Stand” in the popular sitcom Arrested Development was based on a banana stand that the band frequented on their lunch breaks.
- A man dressed up as everyone’s favorite purple dinosaur Barney would occasionally join the band on stage at their shows to collaborate on a cover of the famous “Apples and Bananas” song from Barney and Friends.
- The album was originally packaged with signed and numbered banana peels from the band with a huge disclaimer from their label warning its proprietors to not throw the peels onto race tracks.
