In describing a track called “Heroin” on the Velvets’ first album, the 1967 Velvet Underground & Nico, music historian Alex Ross writes, “Three months before the release of Sgt. Pepper’s, the Velvet Underground had closed the gap between rock and the avant-garde.”

 

But two years before that, in December 1965, the Velvets played their first gig together, in a suburban New Jersey high school auditorium, warming up for a popular local band. No gap was bridged that night. The Velvets performed three songs, ending with “Heroin,” and the audience responded with, as one of the band recalled in 1983, a “murmur of surprise that greeted our appearance” that “increased to a roar of disbelief as we started to play” and “swelled to a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment....”  Most of the audience walked out.

 

This documentary is about that night. It's about the collision of these two worlds and the effect it had on the fifteen year-old students of Summit High School.