PITTSBURGH — Just as Andy Warhol was a major influence on pop art, the band most associated with Warhol shaped generations of indie and alternative music.

To paraphrase an often-repeated quote (usually attributed to producer Brian Eno), the first Velvet Underground album didn’t sell many copies, but everyone who bought one started a band.

A new exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum explores the creation of 1967’s “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” commonly referred to as the “Banana” album for its Warhol-designed cover featuring a peel-able banana.

The exhibit “The Velvet Underground & Nico: Scepter Studio Sessions” focuses on the 16-month period from December 1965, when Warhol first met the band — Lou Reed, guitar and vocals; John Cale, viola, piano and bass; Sterling Morrison, rhythm guitar and bass; and Maureen Tucker, percussion — until the release of “VU & Nico” in March 1967.

The key component is the band’s first recordings at New York’s Scepter Studio in 1966, a four-day session that Warhol paid for in part by trading a piece of his art to Columbia Records’ sales executive and DJ Norman Dolph, who also served as co-engineer.

Six of the nine songs recorded at Scepter appear on the album in slightly different mixes. The other three were re-recorded later that year in Los Angeles with producer Tom Wilson along with two additional songs, “Sunday Morning” and “There She Goes Again” (Some reporting includes “There She Goes Again” among the songs recorded at Scepter, but it is not included on the tapes in the museum’s possession).

Ben Harrison, senior director of performing arts and programming at the museum, said, “The primary inspiration for me to come to the museum and start the Sound Series was the Velvet Underground and the band’s relationship to Warhol. To be able to do a full-scale second floor exhibition around the band and their relationship to Warhol and really tie it directly to our archives collection has really been a great opportunity.”

The museum’s collection includes the original quarter-inch mono masters from the Scepter Studio sessions, a surprising discovery that was included in one of the donations the museum received from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Warhol was a collector, some might say a hoarder. He kept everything, even if it wasn’t neatly organized and filed. The Velvet Underground didn’t end up signing with Columbia Records, it signed with Verve Records. The mono tapes were sent back to Warhol by Columbia in 1969 when it was cleaning out its vaults (the letter that accompanied the tapes also is on display).

The tapes were found by former Warhol Museum archivist Matt Wrbican in a box of film-related material donated by the foundation.

“We are just so fortunate to have these in our collection,” said Harrison, who curated the exhibition in collaboration with Matt Gray, director of archives, and Greg Pierce, director of film and video.

Warhol is credited as a producer on the sessions, He didn’t fill a traditional role, but his presence in the studio gave the band the kind of creative control it might not have had otherwise, especially as experimental and unconventional as the Velvet Underground was in the mid-’60s.

“It gave the band permission to do what they wanted to do,” Harrison said. “He could tell the engineers at Scepter Studio, ‘This is the way we want it to sound, this is how the band sounds. We want it to be raw.’

“He not only understood what they were about, their sensibilities, but he advocated for them. Just because of who he was at the time, it gave them more creative freedom. I don’t know if we can say these recordings would have turned out the same way without Warhol there.”

Those original tapes are on display as part of the exhibition. The museum digitized that quarter-inch tape, and the nine songs will play on a continuous loop in the gallery during the exhibition, which runs through Sept. 25.

The album wasn’t a success initially. It peaked at 171 on Billboard’s top albums chart. Neither single, “Sunday Morning” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” charted at all, and the record largely was ignored critically.

Its importance has magnified in the 56 years since its release.

“The influence of it, at least from the late ’70s onward, has been attributed to so many genres — glam to punk rock to post-punk to noise to decades of indie rock and grunge,” Harrison said. “It’s often attributed as one of the first art rock albums. It’s not just the affiliation with Warhol. So much has been said about that dynamic, that friction between Lou Reed and John Cale and their backgrounds as two of the principals in the band. Lou being the principal songwriter and coming from his rock ‘n’ roll background and these dark, poetic lyrics. Then there’s John Cale and his minimalist, drone, classical background. They were very different and the fusion of that energy (made the band unique).

“Also, to me, what made the album so classic is the variety on the record. It goes from ‘European Son’ to ‘Femme Fatale,’ this lovely, melodic ballad. Sonically, there’s such a range. It was difficult to pigeonhole and categorize it then, and it’s difficult still.”

This isn’t the first time the recordings have been heard. Verve Records released a 45th anniversary box set of the album in 2012 that included the Scepter Sessions. Those recordings came from a vinyl acetate, which would have been made from those quarter-inch tapes.

Harrison didn’t want to debate which is better or worse — “that’s totally subjective,” he said — but the recordings playing as part of the exhibition are one step closer to the original than what has been previously available.

“I was shocked at the clarity,” Harrison said, describing the first time he heard them. “Outside of technical differences in recording, they (sound as if they) could have been recorded yesterday, just the pristine quality.”

One of the challenges of the exhibition was creating a space that could present the music the way it could be heard. Carpeting on the floor and acoustic panels on the ceiling and walls were installed, and listening areas were created throughout the space, so visitors can either take a quick walk through the exhibition or settle in and enjoy all 42 minutes of music from the Scepter Sessions. Even the lighting has been adapted to have a softer, incandescent feel as opposed to the bright white LED lighting of today, Harrison said.

Accompanying the music are photographs of the Velvet Underground taken by Steve Schapiro in 1966 and 1967 and rare film footage, including Warhol “Screen Tests” featuring members of the band. One wall is dominated by 100 copies of the 1967 album on loan from collector Mark Satlof.

“He has almost a thousand (copies),” Harrison said. “He’s a devoted collector of this record. Almost any time he saw one in any capacity, he would buy it. We came up with the idea of a grid of 100 and asked Mark to give us a range of peeled-ness of the banana to get a sense of how lived in and lived with these albums are.

“Visually, we’re trying to tap into this idea of Warhol’s sense of obsessive collecting, seriality and repetition, so we’re thrilled to have Mark loan us part of his collection.”

Another rarity that is prominently displayed under a protective case in the center of the exhibition space is an ashtray featuring the banana art that is widely believed to have inspired Warhol’s cover design.

“We just love the idea that this well-used ashtray was picked up in kind of a flea market capacity by a collector, Howie Pyro, in New York. We wanted to treat it like it was a rare gem at the natural history museum and juxtapose it with the album.”

If you go …

WHAT: “The Velvet Underground & Nico: Scepter Studio Sessions”

WHEN: Through Sept. 25. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday and 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday

WHERE: Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky St., Pittsburgh

HOW MUCH: $25 for adults, $13 for senior citizens, students and children and free for children 2 and younger. For more information, go to warhol.org or call 412-237-8300.