The Summit High School gig has become the stuff of legend, the unlikely place where the classic lineup of the Velvet Underground made its public debut. That the Velvet Underground—or the Myddle Class, for that matter—were playing a gig at a high school was another example of the nonexistent infrastructure of the day for rock music. High schools held dances and had at least modest budgets; some hired bands to perform. Back then it was as simple as that. A hustler like Al Aronowitz would be quick to take advantage of whatever possibilities lay nearby, and this was one of them. Admission was two dollars and fifty cents, and another band, the Forty Fingers, played along with the Velvets and the Myddle Class. By most accounts the Velvets’ three-song set—“There She Goes Again,” “Venus in Furs,” and “Heroin”—caused half the crowd in the school’s auditorium that night to exit. It’s unlikely that anyone who went to that performance to see the Myddle Class was at all prepared for anything like the Velvet Underground. Aronowitz was intrigued, wryly telling Sterling Morrison afterward that he was struck by the band’s “polarizing” effect on its audience. Cale recalled apologizing to the Myddle Class for driving people out of the room, but “secretly I was exhilarated.” And already, the Velvets began to exert the influence that is so much a part of their legacy. Clint Conley, who would later play in Mission of Burma, and Rob Norris, who would play bass in the Bongos, were both in attendance that night. “I think it was one of the most important nights of my life,” Norris said. “I felt like someone turned a blender on inside my head.”
Aronowitz’s next effort on the Velvets’ behalf was to arrange a residency for the group at the Café Bizarre on West Third Street in Greenwich Village. When it opened in the late fifties, the Bizarre was one of a number of significant Village clubs in the folk music revival. By the time the Velvets began playing there in December 1965, however, the place had become a tourist trap with a corny horror theme, something like a haunted house. Its very name suggests the degree to which the club attempted to trade on the exoticism of Greenwich Village to attract outsiders looking for a cheap thrill. Inside, the club wasn’t especially large and did not even have a raised stage. Maureen Tucker did not have enough room for her drum kit, so she played tambourine. Tables were set up for audience members, whatever few there were. The Velvets played multiple sets six nights a week for meals and virtually no money—grueling terms even by the standards of the day. They interspersed their own material with covers of rock and R & B tunes. The audience, at least at first, hardly consisted of potential Velvets acolytes. They barely paid enough attention to be offended by what they were hearing, let alone won over by it. However, the steady gig did provide the band with something like a showcase venue where friends, fans, and supporters could come see them and invite other guests. Barbara Rubin brought Ed Sanders, a poet and member of the Fugs, and, eventually, another notable friend: Andy Warhol.
The midsixties were a time when mainstream culture seemed open to new ideas, and artists who worked in rarefied fields saw the possibility of reaching larger audiences. As a pop artist, Warhol was a renegade. If the press had fun with the abstract expressionists—is that a painting or a drop cloth?—Warhol’s insistence that soup cans and Brillo boxes could be art made him a darling of the tabloids. A keen student of the media and a firm believer that all publicity was good publicity, Warhol encouraged the coverage, as condescending and sarcastic as it could occasionally be. He also saw the possibility of diversifying his fame portfolio beyond the world of visual art. He had already begun making films, and musicians like Bob Dylan and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones had visited the Factory, the work space he occupied at 231 East Forty-Seventh Street, exciting his interest in rock and roll. Dylan and the Beatles had transformed rock music into something that adults could care about. Warhol was fascinated by celebrities of all kinds, and he could see that rock “artists”—a notion that was just beginning to be taken seriously—were becoming something like a new aristocracy. He began to be curious about how he might enter that realm of the popular arts as well.
Filmmaker Paul Morrissey served as something like Warhol’s alter ego at the Factory. If Warhol was shy, silent, and passive, Morrissey, a scrappy Irish Catholic graduate of Fordham University and a military veteran, was aggressive, confrontational, and outspoken. Warhol had been approached about becoming involved with a discotheque in Queens, a ludicrous idea until Morrissey suggested that Warhol sponsor a band that could play there, simultaneously drawing attention to the club and presumably making money for the Factory. Barbara Rubin approached the poet, photographer, and Factory stalwart Gerard Malanga to take pictures of the Velvet Underground at the Café Bizarre, and Malanga asked Morrissey to come along with him to help him get the lighting right. Thinking that the Velvets might possibly be the band he was looking for, Morrissey consented to go. He liked the look and sound of the band and recognized how distinctive it was. He talked to the Velvets about Warhol managing them—the band apparently did not even mention Al Aronowitz—and the next night Morrissey and Malanga returned, bringing Warhol and Edie Sedgwick with them. According to Morrissey, Warhol was reluctant to get involved with a band, but the filmmaker persuaded him, and the Velvet Underground entered a decisive new phase in its development.
Whatever his initial reluctance, Warhol soon embraced the Velvets, and they entered the life of the Factory, an environment to which Reed, in particular, adapted with ease and enthusiasm. Most important, he quickly saw how an affiliation with Warhol would increase the band’s profile, while adding to the allure of its hipness. The environment of the Factory, where gender lines blurred and methedrine was the drug of choice, could not have suited him better. “At first, before they got to know him, everybody at the Factory adored Lou,” Cale later wrote. “In many ways it was the best home he ever had, the first institution where he was understood, welcomed, encouraged, and rewarded for being a twisted, scary monster. Lou, for his part, gave them what they wanted, parading his whole catalog of queeny, limp-wristed poses and ambitions. Lou took to the Factory water like the proverbial duck. I was a little less enthusiastic about the heavy gay scene that dominated the Factory, and the hierarchy by which the inhabitants appeared to live or die.”
Warhol was something like the vacant center around which everything at the Factory revolved. He was the force that attracted glamorous figures, exclusive party invitations, and media attention, but his passivity allowed anyone around him with a more assertive personality to shape the environment in his own image. As Warhol’s right-hand man, Paul Morrissey made the most of that dynamic. He directed Warhol’s films and filled in the conceptual spaces between Warhol’s cryptic utterings, turning Warhol’s idle thoughts into creative action. But for all his talent and energy, Morrissey was no less dependent on Warhol than were any of the other Factory scenesters. A new Warhol movie was an event. A Paul Morrissey movie? Not so much. Because Morrissey and Reed both harbored ambitions beyond being Warhol acolytes—not to mention the abrasiveness of each of their personalities—the two never got along. Morrissey admired Reed’s talent but ultimately had little interest in rock and roll. He also quickly spotted Reed’s hustle and controlling tendencies. Running things at the Factory was Morrissey’s job, and he had no interest in the lead singer of a no-name band making it more difficult. Everyone at the Factory was a rival with everyone else there for Warhol’s attention and approval, so tensions always bristled beneath the veneer of merry speed-freak hijinks.
Reed found the environment of the Factory heady. His time as part of Delmore Schwartz’s circle at Syracuse had introduced him to the idea of being around someone whose influence extended far beyond the classroom, the bar, or the campus. But Warhol was operating on an entirely different level. Schwartz’s best days were behind him, whereas Warhol was rising in terms of his visibility, impact, and success. Schwartz was the past, Warhol the future. Reed had enormous respect for Schwartz’s literary triumphs, but that was part of a far more rarefied world than the one he was moving in no
w. Warhol was not simply attuned to the media world that was taking shape in the sixties; he was helping to create and define it. If Schwartz disapproved of rock and roll, Warhol was fine with it, as he was with almost anything as long as it was “fun.” The Factory wasn’t exactly packed with readers, though someone like Danny Fields, who had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and briefly attended Harvard Law School, was smart and informed, and Gerard Malanga was a poet. But the mixture of pop art, movies, photography, and music seemed up-to-the-minute and exciting. Not yet forty, Warhol was fifteen years younger than Delmore Schwartz, but still old enough to occupy the fatherly role that Reed required of his mentors. Warhol would surround himself with admirers as Schwartz did, but his quietness and passivity were more to Reed’s liking. Reed had more room to exert his own power while still learning from a master. He studied Warhol carefully and, even in his moments of greatest excess, he observed everything that was going on around him. Indeed, it was at the Factory that Reed truly refined his voyeuristic writer’s eye.
Warhol was taken with Reed from the start. “I think Andy was afraid of him because he was so cute,” Danny Fields said. “Andy was a big old queen and Lou was adorable.” And Reed found much to observe in the characters who wandered in and out of the Factory. “I was sitting there one afternoon, and Judy Garland was sitting next to me,” Fields said. “Rudolf Nureyev is getting off the elevator. Tennessee Williams would be there. We were awestruck.” The band would rehearse there. Warhol would do his printmaking, and Morrissey would be shooting. Everyone would be socializing, though with an edge. Reed and Cale got a charge from the scene, but not everyone in the Velvets camp took to it so easily. “Moe and I were pretty young and from Levittown,” said Martha Morrison, who was Sterling’s girlfriend at the time (she would become his wife) and Maureen Tucker’s best friend. “The stuff that people did for shock value or just because they were creeps—that part of the Factory was hard for me. A lot of drugs, of course—not that I noticed anybody doing it, but they certainly looked like they had. The women, the girls, were really trying their best to be shocking and get some attention, maybe be in a movie. We were constantly shocked. Moe and I did a lot of hiding in the bathroom. Unfortunately, the bathroom was worse than whatever was going on outside, because there were all these drawings in there—essentially pornography.”
Richard Mishkin, who had played with Reed in earlier bands, had also moved to New York after college, and the two reconnected. Reed was staying at the Ludlow Street apartment with Cale some of the time, and of that situation Mishkin said, “I couldn’t believe what he was living in. It was so out of character for Lou, a Jewish boy from Freeport, living in a walk-up.” Reed invited him to hang at the Factory and play occasionally, just the two of them or with the Velvets, for whom Mishkin would sometimes play bass. “We had worked on songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’—the music, not the words—at Syracuse, so we picked up on that,” Mishkin said. He and Reed would occasionally play together on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone that Mishkin’s father and grandfather, who were sponsoring a housing project in the area, were using as a real estate office. “The building was standing alone in the middle of nowhere, because the rest of the buildings around it had been demolished,” Mishkin said. “It was not that inconvenient; it was right across the Brooklyn Bridge.… We could play anytime, as loud as we wanted, because nobody was around. And Lou rehearsed. He was never one of those people who would pretend you could just get up onstage with other people and make a cohesive sound. He understood that you had to practice.”
Along with the material Reed had worked up with the Velvets, they also played some of the covers they had done as L.A. and the Eldorados. But Reed, in collaboration with Cale, had already set his sights beyond whatever they had done before. “There was this whole genre that was just noise that I really didn’t like,” Mishkin said. “I was never into heavy metal, and this almost felt like a precursor to that. In college we never played loud, because we didn’t have the amplification, but now the music started to get really loud. Also, I always liked repetition in improvisation, but constant repetition was just not comfortable for me. I felt that Lou wanted to do something that would antagonize the audience, in the way that only Lou could do. John Cale and I had some kind of understanding as musicians. I’m classically trained, and he’s classically trained. But I was not into John Cage. I liked modern music, but Stravinsky and stuff like that. Atonal was not what I loved. It was almost like they were combining what I would have considered ‘insult music’ with rock and roll. If you couldn’t appreciate it, that was too bad. You had to intellectualize to become sensitive to it. That’s where Lou was heading. I don’t know that he was doing it to be offensive. He was doing it to find wherever it was he was going.”
Where he was going, in Mishkin’s view, was toward a role that had just begun to exert genuine cultural influence. “Lou thought of himself as a rock star,” Mishkin said. “As much as he wanted to be a poet, he wanted to be a rock star. Whereas Dylan was a songwriter, that wasn’t what Lou was striving for. Lou was striving to become a rock star, which happened to include writing music. But it also included something different that would set him apart. He was trying to develop the personality and the aloofness that, in his mind, he thought a rock star should have. I think he wanted to do that from the time he first started singing and playing in front of people. Lou knew in his heart that he was unique, and he was taking this noise and trying to translate it into something that would make him stand apart. That’s where we parted ways musically.”
Mishkin had the opportunity to observe Reed at the Factory. “Andy was like a master puppeteer,” he said. “He was privy to things because of who he was. One day, he pulled everybody together and said, ‘I just got this, and this is going to be the next big thing,’ and he pulled out a film of the Who. Nobody had heard of them, but they were breaking guitars and Keith Moon was wild.
“If Andy was the general, Lou was one of the lieutenants. People looked up to him because Andy respected him. It was like he was a project of Andy’s, a work of art. All the hangers-on there were in awe of people like Lou and Paul Morrissey. I don’t know how it changed when Lou started to gain fame on his own, but Lou was really in awe of Andy, and he should have been. Andy was mentoring Lou.”
Mishkin had his own run-in with Warhol, during the shooting of one of Warhol’s films in an empty apartment in a dilapidated building on the Lower East Side, not far from the Velvets’ Ludlow Street apartment. Mishkin had moved back into his parents’ apartment after dropping out of St. John’s University Law School, and on this particular day, his mother needed to locate him. “My mother was a little Jewish lady, and she was going crazy trying to find me,” Mishkin said. “So she walks into this abandoned apartment in the middle of Warhol making one of his films and says, ‘Where is my son Richard?’ It was so funny. Lou couldn’t stop laughing.”
In the evenings, Warhol, who, like Reed, hated to be alone, took advantage of the dozens of invitations he received to parties and openings, and he would bring along a crew from the Factory, including the Velvets and their friends. Class distinctions are not supposed to exist in America, so they remain hidden. Of course, they were always in place, but the sixties marked a time of class realignment. When Warhol would attend a Park Avenue soiree with a group of his followers, hierarchies shifted. The Warhol crowd may not have been wealthy or well-bred, though in some instances—Edie Sedgwick being one example—they were. But they were young, good-looking, creative, sexually daring, and brash, and they carried Warhol’s imprimatur, which had its own social weight. “We were definitely observed and watched, and we were aware of that,” Martha Morrison said. “Even just walking down the street or walking into a place like Elaine’s or Ondine, you did feel like you were ultracool and being looked at.”
“You just felt like you were at the center of things, and Lou had to feel that, too,” said Danny Fields. “Nobody was saying y
ou must or you can’t. It was like, ‘What is this world we’re in?’ We’d open the paper and read about ourselves: ‘Oh, my God, that’s us!’ Was it weird and drug-ridden and depraved? I don’t know. It was just us. And Lou was going through exactly the same thing. From their dump of an apartment to anyone in the world you wanted to meet. No one knew how to cope with that. We were at the center of some cyclone. And Andy was just getting bigger and bigger.”
VERY SHORTLY AFTER WARHOL took the Velvet Underground under his wing, he and Paul Morrissey decided that the band needed a touch of glamour and mystique. To provide those virtues, they insisted that Nico, a German actress and model who had drifted into the Factory scene, be added to the group as its “chanteuse,” or lead singer. Born Christa Paffgen in Cologne in 1938, Nico—a name given to her by a fashion photographer in Berlin—began modeling as a teenager. She was five foot ten, strikingly blonde, and strikingly beautiful, with porcelain skin and perfectly sculpted cheekbones. By the midsixties, she had spent a decade or so on the verge of a major breakthrough that never quite seemed to arrive. She had a bit part in Federico Fellini’s classic 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, and a lusciously erotic portrait of her appeared on the cover of Bill Evans’s 1962 album, Moon Beams. While her modeling career was successful, she never rose to the level of the kicky, childlike women who were beginning to define the feminine look of the sixties. Part of the reason was that, unlike the models who embodied the period’s carefree flirtatiousness, Nico exuded an icy distance. In that, she was an apt fit for the Velvets, whose brooding, droning songs defied the optimism of so much pop culture at that time. Also, despite her great beauty, there were elements of androgyny to Nico: her low-pitched voice, her thick German accent, her haughty remove. Without doing much of anything, she communicated drama. It was hard not to look at her, and Warhol and Morrissey understood the appeal of that—they were visual artists, after all, not musical ones. And Nico’s visual qualities, far more than anything to do with music, were the reason they installed her as the Velvets’ lead singer.
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