I knew nothing of any of this (beyond happening to own a copy of VU w/Nico) until my first visit to England in 2006. I went to see the initial run of Tom Stoppard's play "Rock n' Roll" at the Royal Court which deals almost entirely with that period.
What a great play with great musical bits between scenes. And to the extent Stoppard faithfully interpreted the Velvet Revolution it was somewhat of a history lesson for me.
I haven't seen the play but it sounds interesting. I was in briefly in Prague and a few other Eastern European Cities in the Spring of 1988 when things were starting to loosen up, and I was very surprised that so many of the people I met were really into the Velvet Underground. Bootlegs from the west were everywhere at the time, but there were also all these local bands who had made poor quality homemade cassette recordings of their music. It seemed like every cassette would have two or three Velvet Underground covers, with some guy who barely spoke english screaming out lyrics to assorted Velvet songs. Awful but wonderful.
Here is a link to Plastic People of the Universe (the band from the play) covering Sweet Jane:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYLKwvGkRy0___________________________________________
As far as Nico goes, I think she had a very interesting voice and I like her vocals on those songs. But whoever happened to be singing, those were Velvet Underground songs through and through, and it doesn't make much sense to me to say that that album was only great because Nico sang
three songs. All three are really good songs, but they would be good songs even with Reed croaking them out. Listen to his vocals on Sunday Morning for example. Nico was reportedly supposed to sing Sunday Morning, and I am sure it would have been very pretty if sung by Nico, but Reed's rough yet velvet version is fantastic.
John, I agree that Reed was more of a matter of fact, spoken word kind of singer, and I think that worked very well with his lyrics, which more poetic than lyrical.