The psychiatrists at the Convention were appalled. "That was revenge - Lou's revenge," Cale says, "and I was all for it." As a teenager, Reed had been given electric shock treatment to "cure" him of homosexuality. "Lou and I were going to put out a record with his psychiatrist's letter on one side and my arrest record* on the other,".
"The Velvet Underground" by Michael Leigh was a contemporary mass market paperback about the secret sexual subculture of the early 1960s. The band, at that moment called The Falling Spikes, immediately and unanimously adopted the Velvet Underground as its new name in November 1965.