Nonetheless, Nico had already attracted notable attention on the music scene. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones had introduced her to Andrew Loog Oldham, the band’s manager and producer, who wanted to sign and record her for the label he had recently launched. Bob Dylan met her and offered her the song “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” and his manager, Albert Grossman, persuaded her to move to New York with promises to help with her music career. That Nico wasn’t much of a singer was beside the point. She had a look and an aura, and that was quite enough.
Of course, the notion of Warhol and Morrissey unilaterally deciding that Nico would be the Velvets’ lead singer was an outrageous affront, and Reed felt it. “Can you imagine doing that to a band?” Danny Fields asked. “This is a legitimate, fabulous, unique, magnificent band, and because their management thinks they’re boring, they put a German model in front of them? ‘Oh, there’s nothing to look at. People need something to look at.’ And here’s this beautiful woman who drifted into their orbit, so let’s make her the lead singer.” Reed certainly made his feelings known, but he was savvy enough not to rock the lifeboat he had just climbed into. Working with Warhol still had plenty of advantages that were yet to be realized. Reed’s strategy was to minimize Nico’s role: despite her desire to, she would not be singing every one of the band’s songs—just a handful that Reed deemed appropriate for her. He also undertook an affair with her, an effort he would employ many times later in his life: sex as a means of control. Outside the context of the band’s music, however, Nico would find her own form of rebellion, her way of getting under Reed’s skin. She took to publicly attributing his hostility toward her to resentment about what Germany had done to the Jews, or what, as she put it, her “people” had done to “his people.” At a band rehearsal at the Factory, Nico idly responded to a cool hello from Reed after she’d arrived late by saying, “I cannot make love to Jews anymore.” Given Nico’s imperious air and Reed’s self-consciousness about his stature at the Factory—and about being a suburban Jew—her brush-off seared him. Nico’s ongoing fascination with Bob Dylan, meanwhile, may well have been the reason for Reed’s many caustic—and sometimes anti-Semitic—remarks about him over the years. Reed would insist that the group be referred to as the Velvet Underground and Nico, giving her second billing and making it clear that she was not officially a member of the band.
While all this was going on, Reed maintained contact with Shelley Albin. As he would with many people, particularly women, throughout his life, Reed would call her when he felt frightened and alone. “I remember him saying to me when he was first in New York, ‘You don’t understand how lonely it is,’” she said. “I would say, ‘You’re getting somewhere, you’re doing this and that,’ but he would say, ‘No, it’s so lonely.’ It didn’t matter who he was with. He was always looking for nurturing. He was really desperately lonely. He kept trying to get me to come back to him.”
ANDY WARHOL IMMEDIATELY PROVED his value to the Velvet Underground beyond buying the band equipment and providing rent money and a rehearsal space. He arranged for them to perform at a psychiatrists’ convention at Delmonico’s Hotel, a classic New York locale. The scene was a prototypical midsixties clash of cultures, the arbiters of normalcy meeting the emerging hordes who were in the process of redefining—if not shattering—the very concept of normality. Psychoanalysis was still the rage, the province of creative types interested in exploring every aspect of their psyche to discover new, subversive sources of vision. But in many ways psychiatry remained a conservative field—for one thing, homosexuality was still regarded as a form of mental illness. It would not have been lost on Reed for one second that his audience on the night of January 13, 1966, consisted of practitioners of the profession that had recommended his devastating electroshock treatments. The event was the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, and the organization had invited Warhol to speak under the billing “The Chic Mystique of Andy Warhol.”
Warhol no doubt accepted the invitation for the sake of a paycheck and a laugh, but, being cripplingly shy, there was no way he would deliver a typical dinner speech to the tables of “black-tied psychiatrists and their formally gowned wives.” Instead, he showed films, and then the Velvets performed “Heroin” at deafening volume. Gerard Malanga brought along a bullwhip, Edie Sedgwick danced seductively, and Barbara Rubin and underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas ran through the crowd with cameras as Rubin peppered the psychiatrists with lurid sexual questions. Most important of all, the event was widely covered, with the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune both running sizable stories, and mentions turning up in Newsweek and other publications. It was the sort of publicity that an essentially unknown band could never have gotten on its own, as Reed certainly realized. Nonetheless, it could not have sat well with Reed that the Times described Cale as the “leader” of the Velvets and that Warhol talked about Nico as “a famous fashion model and now a singer.” Reed himself went unmentioned. He would have noted the slight, but he kept his eyes on the prize. The Warhol gambit was clearly working.
Things moved quickly from that point. In January of 1966, Warhol filmed the Velvets rehearsing at the Factory for an hour and called the movie The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound. In the film, the band does not play any songs, and while it’s extraordinary to see the group at work at this stage of its career, the formless playing is not especially inspired. As one might expect, the last thing Warhol would have wanted to film was a conventional performance by a rock band, so the camera arbitrarily goes in and out of focus and almost completely ignores the standard strategy of concentrating on whoever might be playing the most important part at any particular moment. The camera does occasionally lavish attention on Nico, yet another indication of her significance in Warhol and Morrissey’s estimation.
In early February, the Velvets played a week of shows at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which had been founded by Jonas Mekas and was located, at the time, at 125 West Forty-First Street. As usual, these were not typical concert performances. The band played as part of a multimedia event billed as Andy Warhol Up-Tight. At the time, the term “uptight” had a double meaning: there was its contemporary sense of nervous and restricted, as well as a sense of cool and exactly in its place, as in the raucous Stevie Wonder single of the period “Uptight (Everything’s Alright).” At the Up-Tight event, Warhol screened some of his films (Vinyl, Empire, Eat, A Symphony of Sound) while the Velvets played. A light show, photographs, dancing by Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga, and filming by Barbara Rubin were also aspects of the happening. Such events were part of the zeitgeist as well as part of Warhol’s improvisatory search for new directions: put everything out there and see what people respond to. The band did two performances a night, along with, hilariously, matinees on Saturday and Sunday. At these performances, the band, finally worn out by Nico’s relentless insistence, performed Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” on which she sang lead. No one else liked the song and the band eventually dropped it, an early sign of Reed’s frustration with Nico’s presence. On the handbills for the Up-Tight event, Nico was billed entirely separately from the band.
Warhol then sought to take Up-Tight on the road, which, given the limitations of the time, meant a tour of colleges. Because Warhol’s presence was the primary attraction, the events were mostly attended by art students and faculty, along with fun-seekers who took their cultural cues from that crowd. The troupe ventured out to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to appear at Rutgers University on March 9 (a gig for which Nico was paid a hundred dollars, the amount the rest of the band had to share), and then piled into a van to appear at the University of Michigan Film Festival in Ann Arbor on March 12. If New Jersey was a stretch, the Midwest was really pushing it for the Warhol crowd. But as such events tend to do, the Michigan performance attracted an audience of people who would continue to support the band in various ways—as fans, club bookers, and writers. As always, the Velvets proved to be divi
sive. Students who could feel the cultural changes taking place in the midsixties were energized by the rawness of their sound and the fever-dream swirl of the films and light shows. For more casual thrill-seekers, the deafening volume and the sheer strangeness of this crowd of New York freaks proved off-putting, to say the least.
BACK IN NEW YORK, by mid-March the time had finally arrived for the Velvet Underground to begin the residency at the Queens discotheque that had sparked Warhol and Morrissey’s interest in the band in the first place. The deal fell apart when the venue’s owner decided just four days before the Velvets’ start date to book the Young Rascals instead, probably a better move than staging a Warhol-style Up-Tight happening in an outer borough. It was extremely unlikely that Warhol’s fans would have ventured to Queens from Manhattan, where the vast majority of them lived. Meanwhile, the Rascals (led, as it happens, by keyboardist Felix Cavaliere, who had attended Syracuse University with Reed) had a number one hit with “Good Lovin’,” and would have a much stronger draw. As it turned out, the club was closed down on its opening night for liquor law violations and later burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances.
So, what to do with the Velvet Underground, whom Warhol was continuing to support? Entirely by coincidence, Morrissey learned that a Polish meeting hall on St. Marks Place had become available to rent. St. Marks was the main drag of what would soon be dubbed the East Village because of its proximity to Greenwich Village. The area had historically been dominated by Eastern European Jewish immigrants and, farther east, by Puerto Ricans who had moved to New York in the fifties and early sixties. The Jewish population was in the process of dying off, moving to the suburbs with their children, and being driven away by crime and clashes with the younger Puerto Rican newcomers. The West Village was relatively settled terrain, so counterculture types headed for the cheaper rents a few blocks east. Second Avenue, which intersected St. Marks, had been a hotbed of Yiddish theater, and those abandoned venues began to be used for rock shows. (One of them, just two blocks south of St. Marks, would eventually become the Fillmore East.) The shrinking Polish community had limited need for its meeting hall, so Morrissey snapped it up for a month, dubbed it the Dom (an abbreviated version of its Polish name), and quickly readied it for the Velvets’ residency.
It was a perfect example of a virtue made of necessity. St. Marks was an ideal setting for Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Putting aside the lovely coincidence that Warhol (whose family name was Warhola) was himself the child of Polish immigrants, St. Marks was hip, on the verge, and conveniently located for all the Factory crowd’s friends in the city’s various underground scenes. Renting the place for a month allowed for media coverage and word of mouth to build, and also enabled Warhol and the band to get the event’s various elements in order—though, given Warhol’s raw aesthetic, the performances were far from buttoned-down. Strobe lights, a glittering silver mirror ball off which lights were projected (soon to be known as a disco ball), spotlights, flashlights, Gerard Malanga’s whip dancing with Factory scenester Mary Woronov, Barbara Rubin’s guerrilla filmmaking, a psychedelic light show that made use of colored gels, screenings of Warhol’s movies—all accompanied performances by the Velvets. Nico wore white, and the rest of the band wore black—because, Reed said, it made it easier to see the films and light shows being projected onto them. Like Reed’s high school bands, the Velvets wore sunglasses—in this case, he said, to protect their eyes from all the lighting effects. It was groundbreaking stuff—a full-on sensual assault, intensified by the band’s characteristic earsplitting volume. Morrissey decided to call the event the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. He claimed to have taken those three words from the liner notes on a Dylan album, but more likely they were inspired by Dylan’s Beat-oriented, hallucinogenic wordplay.
In the course of the month of shows, the Velvets gained a significant reputation. The shows at the Dom were widely covered and became hip to attend for both the city’s art crowd and celebrities who aspired to chicness. “I don’t think we would have been anything without the fascination Warhol created,” Cale said. “Walter Cronkite and Jackie Kennedy would come down and dance in front of us on the floor. TV would cover it. This was a huge party for everybody, and everybody made money and everybody was satisfied.” As a performing band, the Velvets began to experience the true explosive force of the music they had created. It was one thing to demo a few songs, however visionary, in Cale’s apartment. Staging performances that galvanized audiences was quite another. “Lou and I had an almost religious fervor about what we were doing—and it worked,” Cale said. “Coming offstage after a set, I felt exhilarated because I knew that nobody knew what the hell was going on, and I felt in control.”
Reed’s friend Richard Mishkin occasionally played bass for the Velvets during their stint at the Dom, and he recalled, “I had never been in an environment like that, a claustrophobic space with a lot of people and strobe lights that after a while were just blinding. I don’t know that many places like that existed at the time. I sat on the bass amplifier, so the noise was overbearing for me. It was not acoustically a good room, and our equipment was terrible. During breaks I would walk around just to get a feeling for what was going on, and there were plenty of people who you just didn’t know what they were, but they were definitely stoned. It wasn’t really an audience. I don’t think there was a straight person—meaning somebody who wasn’t high—in the entire place. People were constantly moving around, dancing, like this fluid, hallucinatory mass of people. It was brand-new, leading edge. It was way out there. It was like a Fellini movie—but squared.”
Painter and musician Bob Neuwirth, who was one of Edie Sedgwick’s lovers, saw the Velvets at the Dom. “It wasn’t really rock; it was drug music,” he said. “The lyrics were interesting. The most impressive thing about Lou as an artist was that he was so authentic. He never sang about suffering that he didn’t have experience with. All those great, decadent songs that he wrote at that time were all about personal experience. I always found that admirable.”
4
THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT
AS THE VELVET UNDERGROUND began to gain a reputation, the next phase in Warhol and Morrissey’s business plan came into focus: finding the group a record deal. In their manner of doing things as made sense to them rather than researching the process or consulting with others, the two men arranged for the Velvets to go into a recording studio with Norman Dolph, an executive in the sales department at Columbia Records who was also an art collector. Warhol had casually mentioned to Dolph that he wanted to make an album with the Velvet Underground. Dolph suggested that he could make it happen, and Warhol essentially turned the project over to him. The two men split the cost—estimated to be roughly $1,500—of what turned out to be something like four days in the studio in the middle of April of 1966.
Dolph arranged for the band to work at Scepter Records, the studio of a label primarily known for such pop R & B artists as Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles. On their limited budget, the Velvets had to work not only quickly but at odd hours. They were likely to get bumped if Scepter needed the studio for one of the label’s more commercial acts. Warhol ultimately would be credited as the producer of these sessions, though he was, at most, an intermittent presence and, of course, had no experience whatsoever in producing records. Neither, for that matter, did Norman Dolph, who did attend the sessions. But in both music and film, where Warhol was far more experienced, the title of “producer” can mean many different things. Sterling Morrison said that Warhol gave the band “confidence,” and Reed always insisted that Warhol encouraged them to record their songs exactly as they wanted to, not to yield to any notions, their own or anyone else’s, about what might be commercial or inoffensive. The sound should be raw, and Reed’s “dirty words” and taboo subjects needed to remain unchanged. That was excellent advice and a crucial contribution, even if it simply strengthened the band members’ resolve to do what they might have done anyway. Many pr
oducers have received far more lucrative credits for doing far less.
The Velvets were not entirely lacking in studio experience. Reed had his boot camp at Pickwick Records, Nico had done some recording in England, and Cale had recorded with La Monte Young and others on the avant-garde scene. If they didn’t have technical expertise, they had something far more important: a vision. Still, someone needed to make sure the songs got recorded. John Licata, Scepter’s in-house engineer, helped out in that regard. Dolph, whom Cale would dismiss as a “shoe salesman,” kept things moving because in the studio time is money and he was paying the bill. Reed and Cale knew what they wanted the band to achieve: primarily, the excitement and immediacy of what the group could do onstage.
As always, Nico became an issue. At first there was an impasse. She wanted to sing all the songs, and Reed did not want her to sing any. Finally, in line with the concept of replicating the live show, she got to sing the three songs she sang onstage: “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” and “Femme Fatale.” The sessions were serious, focused, and, by the Velvets’ standards, professional. For example, despite the tension between Nico and Reed, when it came time for her to do her vocals, the band made sure that she was as comfortable as possible. Still, as Reed desired, she was scarce around the studio other than when she had to sing her parts. “We were really excited,” Cale said. “We had this opportunity to do something revolutionary—to combine the avant-garde and rock and roll, to do something symphonic. No matter how borderline destructive everything was, there was real excitement there for all of us. We just started playing and held it to the wall.” For his part, Reed was as intent as could be. “‘Heroin’ was an incredible thing when he did it,” Dolph said. “It was not dizzy or out of control or as you might expect it to be if sung by an addict. It was delivered as an actor, familiar with the role, might portray it. It was a very emotional delivery.”
Lou Reed Page 9
