I'm Waiting for the Man - The Velvet Underground Live 1969 (4K)
Audio taken from October 19, 1969, End of Cole Ave. club, Dallas.
Picture taken from October 15, 1969, Dallas Peace Moratorium.
For such a groundbreaking band, the Velvet Underground has little footage of them performing live. That was why in 2019 is was extremely exciting to see Texas film archives uncover three films of the Velvet Underground performing at the Dallas Peace Moratorium on October 15th, 1969. These films where: a short 16mm documentary of the event with some audio and picture of the Velvets performing (and Sterling Morrison being interviewed), a silent 16mm B-roll of outtakes from this doc, and a silent 8mm home movie shot from the audience.
I was curious, would it be possible to take all of this footage and try to sync it to a live recording for an approximation of what it would've been like to see the Velvet Underground perform live?
Luckily only a few days after the event on October 19th, a fan would make one of the best live recordings of the Velvet Underground at the End of Cole Ave. club in Dallas.
So now the hard part was, which song has the most footage them playing? From the doc there were sync sound snippets of "I'm Waiting for the Man", "Beginning to See the Light", and "I'm Set Free". To figure out the silent footage, I had to do a lot of lip reading. And as luck would have it, most of the other silent footage was also of "Waiting for the Man".
With another stroke of luck, it appears like they performed "Waiting for the Man" almost identically across the two shows. So with a little bit of fudging, I tried to get "Beginning to See the Light", "I'm Set Free", and all the other footage synced up to the best of my ability. It's not perfect, but I'm very happy with the results.
A big thanks to the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, and the G. William Jones Film & Video Collection at SMU for posting such incredible footage!
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