Warlocks v. Warlocks

"It’s not clear to me that, following Witts’s own clues and leads, it doesn’t make more sense to freshen our perception of the Velvets by putting them back into their own time, but to ignore geography and direct influence and place them precisely where they aren’t supposed to belong–in, say, California. Suppose one connects them, following chronologies rather than personal histories, to a part of the California scene they are held to oppose, but with which they share an uncannily similar history.
"I’m thinking of the Grateful Dead."

Mark Greif reviews Richard Witts's The Velvet Underground in the London Review of Books.