Excerpt from: The Diary of Joey Ramone.
I just saw The Who movie The Kids Are Alright. It’s fucking fantastic. It doesn’t come off as just another documentary, it’s loaded with charm and character, excitement and the genius of The Who (if you love The Who as much as me). But for me it was more of a movie that reflects the current sad state of rock and roll. After seeing The Kids Are Alright, I felt really enraged.
The Who are the perfect example of what Rock & Roll stands for and was always meant to be. Whether it be 60’s, 70’s, 80’s or 90’s the definition of rock and roll is: Daring. Exciting. Going out on a limb. Very visual catchy and melodic tunes. Not ½ hour boring guitar solos or mindless songs about sex: She Left Me. Who the fuck cares!!! The kids of now are being deprived, cheated and brain washed bad. It’s not their fault, most of them just don’t know better. Rock and Roll is dying ’cos the media is trying to kill it as it’s always been trying since the days of Elvis and Gene Vincent (50s). They’re spreading propaganda about how youth listening to this music have their minds poisoned and turn into habitual sex crazed hard core tri-sexual, mindless pill popping pot smoking drop out mass murderers, which we all know is bullshit, but it’s always worked successfully to promote the clean-up-the-image campaign. Remember Pat Boone and Doris Day – the soft decor public image that parents will approve of. Rock and roll is for rebels and outcasts. Rock music was not meant for your parents pleasure.”
As well as being a great painter, film maker, publisher, journalist, photographer, trendsetter and icon, Warhol was a great writer. His novel, a, which will be re-published in 1998, will give us all a chance to read what I mean. Grab a copy. It tells you more about Warhol’s Factory in the Sixties than any other book. It is a bonechilling read.
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Andy Warhol The Writer
I was first introduced to Andy Warhol through his voice in 1973. I was working with a writer named Andrew Wylie in New York City. Wylie had interviewed Warhol and was trying to convince me that Andy was not only the most important artist of the twentieth century but also the greatest person in the United States. I was not convinced of this and argued with him about it. Wylie then played for me, on a cheap tape recorder, a cassette of the interview he had done with Warhol a couple of weeks prior. I listened to that voice for approximately one minute and was immediately convinced of both of these assertions.
In his writing, Warhol was most interested in depicting what I call ‘voice portraits’. I discovered this when I went to work for Warhol at Interview magazine in 1976. He told me that the best way to do an interview was to visit the subject, ideally in their own home, with no questions and no preconceptions – with as empty a mind as possible. This way, the interviewer will get the most accurate and revealing image of the subject via the topics he or she chooses to discuss, as well as the grammar, syntax and vocabulary used. If a tape is transcribed very accurately, with each ‘uhm’, ‘err’ and ‘but’ included, what is redacted is a voice portrait. Warhol demonstrated this in the distinct interviews he did for Interview magazine between 1974 and 1982.
The first book Andy wrote, and probably the most obscure in his catalogue of fourteen books, is called a (a novel). One day, in August of 1965, through the kind of serendipity that decorated Warhol’s career, Andy received a package in the mail from Philips Recording Company containing the first cassette tape recorder. Warhol was told that he could keep the machine on the condition he do something to publicise it. Andy instantly decided that he would write a book with it. Everyone at the Factory laughed and thought how stupid he was, because that’s not writing, that’s tape recording – or as Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”. Apparently, ‘language’ is not writing, words have to be written in some kind of preconditioned manner to be considered true writing. Andy didn’t agree and approached his favourite superstar, Ondine. Ondine was not only Warhol’s court jester but he was also the most articulate, funniest, fastest-talking person at the Factory. Warhol proposed that he would record ’24 Hours in the Life of Ondine’ (the reference to Ulysses is inescapable, and Andy knew the implications of writing a novel which would cover twenty-four hours in the life of a man), and he told Ondine that the book would make him famous. Ondine, who was a great person and wanted to be as famous as he was fabulous and loved Andy, was happy to do it so they agreed to meet a few days later on a Saturday morning. When they met, both ingested some Disoxyin pills – Ondine took ten (a superstar-strong dose), Andy took two – and off they went, living in what in those days was a normal day in the life of Andy and Ondine. They went to the Factory, they went to visit people in their apartments, to restaurants, they rode in the back of cabs to clubs … and Andy recorded it all on his brand new toy. After twelve hours, however, Andy tired and went home. The book was not completed until two years later during a second marathon session in August of 1967. a is, by the way, undoubtedly the most accurate written portrait of the silver factory. It is typical of the blindness of the publishing industry that while facile books on Warhol tumble into print yearly this echt document remains almost entirely neglected although available (through Grove/Atlantic who own the rights). What makes it so puzzling that the book is out of print in the celebrity-soaked USA is that it contains an all-star cast. Ondine dominates the text but Edie Sedgwick makes some fascinating appearances twittering a series of the trippiest titters in the book like “gone down from divinity to star to somehow the mockery walks get in.”1 And Lou Reed makes a guest appearance. Since a book about Edie was a bestseller and there are several books in print about Reed, it is inexplicable that a book by Warhol about these people remains out of print (and don’t give me that ‘it’s hard to read’ routine; it’s easier to read than The Naked Lunch). It looks like another part of the denial of Warhol’s genius. Although he was, in my humble opinion, as creative with words in 1965–7 as William Burroughs, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon or Susan Sontag, to name but a few of the stars of the day, nobody takes him seriously as a writer. And he was an industrious one.
Once the recording had been finished, Andy had to get the 24-hour tape transcribed. And it was in this step that the book was transformed from a good idea into literature. Rather than asking one person to transcribe, Warhol chose a bevy of (mostly) women to do the vital work. He gave the tapes to various people including Maureen Tucker, the drummer for The Velvet Underground who happened to be a super typist, and Gerard Malanga’s secretary, Susan Pile. Warhol also hired a couple of high school girls to come to the Factory each afternoon after school to type.
A number of inconsistencies occurred in the process of transcribing the tapes. Maureen Tucker refused to type up any swear words, so every time there was a swear word Maureen left that blank (there were a lot of blanks). One of the little high school girls had a tape confiscated and thrown into the trash when her mother overheard the language used – so one entire section of the book was lost. Susan Pile and Paul Katz, who were privy to the inner workings of the Factory and knew everyone there, felt strongly about some of the nasty things that were said about certain people on the tape, so they changed them to nice things. They also felt strongly about some of the nice things said and changed those to nasty things. Throughout the transcription words are misspelt, including ‘and’ and ‘but’, and grammar is confused; sometimes there are sixteen colons in a row or paragraphs with six brackets that open but never close. In this sense it is the ‘worst’ book ever written, just as Warhol’s films are the ‘worst’ films ever made. However, the films have, albeit grudgingly, at least been recognised for changing the form and content of American cinema, and The Velvet Underground’s first record produced by Warhol has been recognised as among the greatest rock records ever recorded. a is just as important a book as The Chelsea Girls is a film or The Velvet Underground and Nico is a record and should be recognised as among the most accurate, creative, influential novels of the Sixties. It is a useful, revealing, funny, educative book. To ignore i
t is a cultural crime, is to rewrite history incorrectly. It should be included on college reading lists in anthropology courses and history courses as well as English 101.
In August of 1967, Andy was handed the six hundred page manuscript to read in preparation for publishing the book. He was astounded by what he received, but contrary to what was expected, rather than take the pages to someone and have them properly re-typed, Warhol embraced the transcription exactly as it was. This is fantastic, he said, this is great. He read it six times from beginning to end.
In preserving the manuscript’s shattered state Warhol was actually presenting the precise aura of the conversations. Because as we know, people don’t actually speak in sentences, and there aren’t always periods of complete silence when one person speaks and others are supposed to be listening. Instead, there is always some sort of babble going on during a conversation. Language is broken, people literally don’t ‘spell’ words right when they speak them, words are spoken incorrectly. In a Andy created an accurate picture of a day in the life of the Factory in the Sixties.
Although the book was completed in 1967, it was not published until after Warhol was shot, in the fall of 1968 by Grove Press, which also published Warhol’s Blue Movie (the script illustrated by stills of its stars Viva and Louis Waldron making love in the shower and in bed). Thus, although a was the first book Warhol wrote which was published, another book written in 1966, Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), was published first by Random House in December 1967.
Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), which is an expensive rarity today, was another portrait of the mysterious silver factory as a schizoid funhouse. It consists primarily of photographs, blank pages, joke pages and a pop-up cut-out of a medieval castle inhabited by Warhol’s superstars above the logo ‘We are constantly under attack’. The text is a rambling, seemingly random, classically monosyllabic interview with Warhol. Although it stands today as an essential report on the Warhol factory, the Index book operates on a different level entirely than a inasmuch as it does not rely primarily on language.
In fact, 1967–8 saw the first stream of Warhol books: apart from Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) and a, there was Screen Tests: A Diary (in collaboration with Gerard Malanga); Intransit: The Andy Warhol-Gerard Malanga Monster Issue, as well as the famous catalogue of the Svenska Moderna Museet in Stockholm with the flower paintings on the cover, popularly known as the telephone book because of its thickness, that contained some three hundred photographs by Billy Name and Stephen Shore as well as ten pages of Warhol’s most famous aphorisms: ‘I don’t believe in love.’ ‘I want to be a machine.’ ‘I don’t like to think.’ All these books had a single purpose – to popularise Warhol just as the Bible popularises God. Only a, however, succeeded as a work of art on a par with his films, music and painting. As I see it, a is part of a trilogy that is married to, and is very similiar to, the film The Chelsea Girls and the record The Velvet Underground and Nico. It was made at the same time and based on the same people. The stars of The Chelsea Girls and the stars of The Velvet Underground are in a; and a follows the same themes and subjects as do The Chelsea Girls and The Velvet Underground and Nico.
a stands, I suggest, among the ten greatest books of the Sixties, along with The Naked Lunch and A Clockwork Orange. As is all great literature, a is a record of contemporary human speech. (Go back and read The Goncourt Journals2 or The Diaries of Samuel Pepys3 – the authors are reporting patterns and kinds of human speech.) a is a complete insight into the workings of the Factory and of the Warhol world and, as such, is tremendously successful. When published in the aftermath of Warhol’s shooting, it was well reviewed in (the highly intellectual) The New York Review of Books – at length and seriously for exactly what it was. But inevitably, a was treated as were The Chelsea Girls and The Velvet Underground and Nico – recognised as an underground masterpiece it was largely ignored, and was probably read by as few people as have seen Sleep.
Andy believed the tape recorder could change writing as much as the camera had changed painting. In the mid-Seventies, Warhol turned the machine on himself in another attempt to create literature. Hence, we get his second string of books: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again,4 POPism: The Warhol ’60s5 and Andy Warhol’s Exposures6 (of which I wrote the first draft).
In the Eighties Warhol wrote three more books – I like to think he saw his books in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as trilogies mirroring each decade, but that is perhaps overwar-holising Warhol – America, The Party Book and the posthumously published Andy Warhol Diaries,7 which was his only bestseller (what he had hoped a would be). The diaries were edited by one of the most talented, least known ‘lifers’ at the Factory, Pat Hackett, who had revealed a flash of brilliance in writing the scripts for Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974) and Bad (1977), with George Abagnolo, which is one of the reasons they captured Warhol’s voice so well artistically and commercially. America and The Party Book were primarily photo books with a text dictated by Warhol on tape mixed with interviews with a number of the photo subjects. Compared to their peers in the Sixties and Seventies they indicated a dire falling off of Andy’s interest in publishing books. Books were too much work for too little money. In fact, in 1985 when Andrew Wylie, by now a powerful literary agent who owed a good deal of his success to what he had learned from Warhol, approached Andy with a proposal to get him a one million dollar advance for five books that were for the most part already written – The Diaries, his play Pork (1971), the text of The Chelsea Girls and other factory documents – Warhol refused, somewhat bitterly, on those grounds. One could not help getting the impression, however, that the real reason behind Warhol’s rejection of Wylie’s super offer was the treatment Andy had received over thirty years from the publishing industry – from the editors to the reviewers – which had been, in a word, ‘stupid’.
a, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and The Andy Warhol Diaries are in my opinion the three great books that Andy Warhol wrote. (The Diaries successfully take you back to the Eighties, as The Philosophy takes you to the Seventies, and a takes you to the Sixties.) They are ‘the essential Warhol’. And we hope that in time some enterprising publisher like Penguin or Vintage will put out a portable Andy Warhol, doing what they have done for so many dead writers: by presenting a well-edited selection of his work with an instructive, informative, entertaining introduction, to make available to the reading public around the world a book that could place Warhol in an appropriate, well-earned context as among the most influential reporters of his times. Such a book would of course include extracts from a number of his ‘voice portraits’ in Interview magazine as well as from interviews he gave throughout his life. For more than any other writer of the period, Warhol made out of human prose a poetry as vital as Allen Ginsberg’s, as tough as William Burroughs’ and as delicate and passionate as the writings of Malcolm X. When I read the histories of the Sixties and note with astonishment that the attempted assassination of 1968 (coming right between Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations) is ignored and his influence on film is ignored and his influence on journalism and literature is never mentioned (despite the fact that back in 1974 Newsweek noted that Interview magazine had given birth to People, among others, and Warhol has inspired at least one hundred books in the last thirty years), I begin to grasp what it means to say that Andy Warhol died of neglect.
Notes
1 Andy Warhol, a (a novel) (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
2 Edmond de Goncourt, The Goncourt Journals, 1851–1870 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).
3 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (New York: Crosup & Sterling, 1892). This citation describes the first publication fully transcribed from the shorthand manuscript in the Pepysian library. However, numerous other volumes of Pepys’s diaries have been published at later dates.
4 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
5 Andy
Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
6 Andy Warhol’s Exposures, ed. Bob Colacello (New York: Andy Warhol Books/Grosset & Dunlap, 1979).
7 The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989).
When Martin Amis first came to New York in 1977 I was assigned to interview him for Warhol’s magazine, Interview. Andy thought he was “really great”. He turned out to be right again.
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An Interview With Martin Amis
“You write your first book, actually, to say to the world: ‘Here I am, I’m nice and interesting and have me round, I’ll go to bed with you’,” says English novelist Martin Amis on his first visit to New York (“It seems to me an easy place to live”) since he was ten, to celebrate the publication of his second book Dead Babies. A first, The Rachel Papers, written when he was 21, had served as an effective introduction. “I think that writers write about what it’s like to be a certain age, maybe only tiny bits of being a certain age.” Dead Babies was written when he was 22–23. It is about an English country house weekend (“The most civilized thing you could possibly do, but telling a seventy year old woman my book’s called Dead Babies, I do feel a bit of a pervert”). “People in America will think it’s a shitty, vicious book,” he says, “but in England I’m known as a writer with civilized attitudes and not just a sick scribbler.” His favorite American author is Joseph Heller whom he recently interviewed in London. Interview interviewed him in extremely civilised surroundings – the Upper East Side flat of Jon Bradshaw, the Michael York look-a-like English author of Fast Company, a book about gambling in the US. Martin has borrowed the flat for three days while Bradshaw is out of town.
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