ENO: VOYAGES IN TIME & PERCEPTION from Musician Magazine, Oct 1982, by Kristine McKenna

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/musn...

I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!

“That's a quote that (in various different wordings) has been attributed to Brian Eno countless times, though even the author of the most comprehensive Eno biography couldn't track down the original source. Of more importance, The Velvet Underground & Nico [the debut album], though not exactly a hit the first time around, sold a lot more than just a few thousand copies — and more, even, than the "30,000 copies in the first five years" that Lou Reed himself told Eno the LP sold. An MGM royalty statement shows sales of 58,476 copies through February 14, 1969 (about two years after its initial release)—not at all bad for a late-'60s LP, if far less than Andy Warhol and the Velvets hoped for.”

Not true. My mom (otherwise heavily into classical music and, through the influence of her older brothers, somewhat interested in singer songwriters like Bob Dylan and - gasp - Donovan) bought a copy - and went to a concert. She didn't start a band - but did instill a love of very noisy, very nasty rock'n'roll in her children.

This is so true and this quote would always remind me of the programming language Scheme. Scheme never quite made it big commercially but almost everyone who tried it implemented a programming language just to see it for real.

Myth or Eno legend? Who knows? Here's an interesting backgrounder, though: http://www.richieunterberger.com/vumyth.html