The Velvet Underground is the ultimate visual biography of the greatest rock band in history. The new hardcover tome was lovingly and exhaustingly compiled by Johannes Kugelberg who managed to unearth a staggering amount of never-before-scene images. VMAN had a chat with Kugelberg about our shared favorite group.

Click here to see more images from the book.

I am such a Velvet Underground freak and completist and there was so much in the book I had never seen before.
I wanted to make sure that even like hardcore fanatics hadn’t seen like 80% of the stuff that was in there. The choices in the book was obviously trying to get the most amazing photography you ever could, and try to find as much stuff that hadn’t been seen by, anybody really, and we lucked out several times finding these amazing caches of unseen images.

Would you describe yourself as a hardcore fan?
There’s a shockingly absurd photograph that my mom has at her house of me at the age of five holding the Velvets and Nico album. My nanny’s son was a rock and roll fanatic in the 60s, and it was a slippery slope from there. I have listened to the Velvet Underground every week, I can easily say since I was 12 years old. There’s never been a week when I haven’t spent some time with some sort of Velvet’s recording. And, to me the velvets are one of the greatest art statements of the 20th century.

From all of the lost images you discovered, what is one of your standout favorites?
Tracking down Adam Ritchie with the help of my dear friend John Savage was an absolutely amazing visual epiphany. Adam is a superb photographer who lives in London and who basically spent six months in New York from around August of ‘65 to like February, March of ‘66 and basically hung out with the underground film makers and the Velvets and the Warhol scenesters and photographed everybody; and these photographs haven’t been seen by anybody for 42 years. So of all the photographs in the book, I would say the shots that Adam Richie took of the Velvets playing at the Psychiatrist’s Convention on the 11th of January with the shadows up on the wall is the one that just kicks my ass every time I look at it.

The Velvet Underground: New York Art is out now on Rizzoli.

Get a copy now from amazon.com (The deluxe edition comes with a free 7″ with two unreleased songs!)
Read more from the interview in the new issue of VMAN, out next week.

KEYWORDS: books, Music, velvet underground