Picture this: Walter fucking Cronkite, the most trusted voice in American living rooms, on New Year‘s Eve 1965, serving up Piero Heliczer’s Venus in Furs with the Velvet Underground grinding through Heroin while Heliczer honks away on saxophone like some deranged angel. On CBS. On network television. Before the ball drops.
This wasn’t some slick counterculture packaging job. This was the real deal, the raw nerve ending of American art exposed on the same channel that brought you The Beverly Hillbillies. Mekas, Brakhage, Warhol with his blank stare and Edie with her silver everything, the whole beautiful freak parade momentarily granted access to Middle America’s consciousness between the pot roast and the champagne.
What CBS accidentally broadcast that night was the sound of everything about to change, the exact moment when the underground was still actually underground, before it became a marketing category. Lou Reed’s deadpan liturgy of junk and transcendence, uncut, uncompromising, absolutely not giving a damn whether Des Moines was ready for it or not.
And that’s the thing, it happened because someone, somewhere in that network decided that truth and weirdness and genuine artistic risk mattered more than comfort. Just for a minute. Just once. Before the bean counters and the moral guardians and the whole calcified apparatus of mainstream culture figured out what they’d done and slammed the door shut again.
That broadcast was a document of the last moment American media accidentally told the truth about what was actually happening in the culture.