Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  GERARD MALANGA: “She asked me to bring my whip and suggested I dance while the group performed, as Barbara knew how much I enjoyed it, having already seen me dance to Martha and The Vandellas in Andy’s film Vinyl. On the following day, Barbara and I entered Cafe Bizarre to the glaring sounds of what appeared to be a rock’n’roll group, but there all resemblance ended. The stage was level with the rest of the floor, so the group was right up against the tables and chairs. I waited for about 20 minutes before getting up to dance. I was tentative at first because no one else was on the dance floor at the time and I thought my participating would be an intrusion since the musicians were in such close proximity to the audience. I did, finally, make my way to the front of the audience – a few scattered customers – and was joined minutes later by a young girl who quickly retreated back to her seat. During the intermission Barbara introduced me to Lou Reed and John Cale. Lou said how much he enjoyed my getting up to dance to the music. I told him I felt a little self-conscious because I was intruding, but he assured me I wasn’t, and both he and John said I should come back and dance again. They really wanted people to dance to the music and not just to sit and listen to it. The music was very intimidating.”

  MORRISSEY: “The next day you told me The Velvets were interesting, you and Barbara wanted to film some footage of them, and you asked me to come along to help with the lighting. I thought they were fascinating. The first thing that registered to me, and I think to Andy later, was the drummer Maureen, because you could not tell whether she was a boy or a girl. This was a first within rock’n’roll because The Beatles all looked like little girls but you knew they were boys. You had no idea what Maureen’s gender was. The second thing was John Cale’s electric viola. And the third thing was they sang a song called ‘Heroin’. For some reason when I’m looking for something the first thing I see always works out for me. When I take an apartment it’s always the first one. And usually casting actors in movies I always cast the first one that comes in front of my mind and I say that’s right. I never fool around and change a person. I never saw any other rock’n’roll groups. They were a unique group and they were called The Underground. That’s another reason I went down because you told me the name of the group. And this was the term always connected with Andy, too. I didn’t say anything at the time, but the next day I said, ‘Andy, I found the group to play at Michael Myerberg’s UP.’ So Andy came down the very next night.”

  The Cafe Bizarre was a long narrow room with sawdust on the floor and a number of tables with fish-net lamps ranged along the walls. The Warhol party, including Sedgwick, Morrissey, Malanga and Rubin, sat at a couple of tables against the wall in front of and to the left of the band. It was a Thursday night. Nobody paid any attention to their arrival. The art and rock worlds were still quite separate and the ten or fifteen people scattered among the tables didn’t recognize the new arrivals. The silver-haired man in dark glasses and a black leather jacket with his chin resting on an elegantly slim hand listened to the animated conversation of his companions, occasionally interrupting with a short, playful comment but remained for the most part silent. As soon as The Velvet Underground started to play however, Andy became quite animated, because he immediately recognized he could work with this band. The music was so loud it was impossible to talk while they were playing, but in a break between songs he asked Edie what she thought about having the band play in front of the movies during her upcoming retrospective. She was understandably unenthusiastic about a suggestion that would clearly have drawn a good deal of attention away from her starring role and got uptight. But when Gerard got up and danced in black leather pants with his whip, eerily mirroring The Velvets’ style with his sinuous, mesmeric movements, which resembled a cross between the Frug and an Egyptian belly dance, Andy saw Gerard become a part of The Velvets and had even more reason to feel that here was a rock band with whom he could really connect. The Velvet Underground was little known outside their small circle but active on the same level of the underground movie scene that Andy was championing. Working more in tune with his own artistic approach than any other rock group he’d seen, they refused to accept any form of pre-conditioned order or restraint.

  LOU REED: “That was a very funny period with a very funny group of people. Everybody in a certain section was doing almost exactly the same thing without anyone knowing anybody else.”

  After the set Barbara brought The Velvets over to Andy’s table. They were all in their early twenties and dressed from head to foot in black. John Cale’s sonorous accent and dreamy deportment bespoke his Welsh background and classical music training. Curly haired Lou Reed’s shy gum-chewing smile identified him most closely with Andy, with whom he shared a similar temperament. They sat next to each other and immediately hit it off. Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker were quiet at this first meeting, but the vibes were good. They were all aware of who Andy was and gratified by his interest and compliments.

  MORRISSEY: “On the night Andy came to the Bizarre Gerard had invited Nico, who had just come to town, and that’s when I met her. I think Gerard had already brought the record ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ up to the Factory. I felt that the one thing The Velvets didn’t have was a solo singer, because I just didn’t think that Lou had the personality to standin front of the group and sing. The group needed something beautiful to counteract the kind of screeching ugliness they were trying to sell, and the combination of a really beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed. That very night, right away I said, ‘Nico, you’re a singer. You need somebody to play in back of you. You can maybe sing with this group, if they want to work with us and go in this club and be managed.’”

  ANDY WARHOL: “The Pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all. Nobody wanted to stay in one category, we all wanted to branch out into every creative thing we could. That’s why when we met The Velvet Underground at the end of ’65, we were all for getting into the music scene, too.”

  Before leaving Andy invited The Velvets and Nico to come up to the Factory whenever they felt like it. He left before the second set, but at dinner afterwards kept saying to his friends, “We have to think of something to do with The Velvets. What can we do? What could it be? WE HAVE TO THINK OF SOMETHING!” He had always been interested in rock music. The great ‘Sally Goes Round The Roses’ by The Jaynettes was his favourite song, he played it non-stop. He was excited about the possibilities of combining The Velvets’ musical with his visual sensibility.

  WHAT WAS THE MUSICAL SENSIBILITY OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND?

  JOHN CALE: “I had a classical education in classical music playing the viola in youth orchestras. I heard rock’n’roll on the radio in the Alan Freed days, and it was exciting, but I never thought of playing.”

  John Cale was born on December 5, 1940 in Crynant, South Wales where he went to school until he was seventeen. According to Nico, Cale’s “father is totally deaf and his mother is totally mute”.

  John studied at London University Goldsmiths’ College from 1960–1963. “When I was studying composition I was completely oblivious to the fact that The Rolling Stones were playing in some nearby club.” At Goldsmiths he spent his time ostensibly working on a musicological dissertation, but was not oblivious to the latest trends in avant-garde classical music and performance art. He got involved with electronic music and performances with the British composer Humphrey Searle. One of his teachers, Cornelius Cardew, was an important booster of John Cage, LaMonte Young and other avant-garde American composers. John Cage was the first major influence on John Cale.

  CALE: “Most classical musicians are really insecure about self-expression. The conductor always tells you how to play a piece. Then Cage comes along and gives you a sheet with dots and diagrams, and gives you the freedom to play what you’d like and most people goof off.

  “Cage’s music can sound like anything – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach – anyone. It can
sound like what any one individual wants it to sound like. You can find your own riff and do exactly what you want. Classical musicians however are not given this freedom in the system they play.”

  LaMonte Young, the second major influence on Cale, is an important American composer whose work has been infrequently heard by his own choice. His 1958 ‘Trio For Strings’, which inspired composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich has, for example, never been recorded.

  In 1963, under the aegis of Aaron Copland, Cale was awarded a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study Modern Composition with the Franco-Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis in the Eastman Conservatory at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts. According to Copland they originally met in England where he saw Cale perform and subsequently made possible his arrival in the States for that summer of study at Tanglewood. However, Copland later decided Cale couldn’t play his work at Tanglewood because it was too destructive. “He didn’t want his pianos destroyed.” So John went to New York City and found LaMonte Young, who was writing pieces in which the musician talked to the piano or, in one memorable incident, screamed at a plant until it died.

  CALE: “LaMonte was perhaps the best part of my education and my introduction to musical discipline.

  “We formed The Dream Syndicate, which consisted of two amplified voices, an amplified violin and my amplified viola. The concept of the group was to sustain notes for two hours at a time. LaMonte would hold the lowest notes, I would hold the next three on my viola, his wife Marion would hold the next note and this fellow Tony Conrad would hold the top note. That was my first group experience and what an experience it was!

  “It was so different. I mean the tapes are art objects. Some people who came to our concerts know what it was like, but it is the only example of that kind of music in the world. The Indians use the drone also, but they use a totally different tuning system and though they attempt a scientific approach, they don’t really have it buttoned down like we did.”

  The members of The Dream Syndicate, motivated by a scientific and mystical fascination with sound, spent long hours in rehearsals learning to provide sustained meditative drones and chants. Their rigorous style served to discipline John and developed his knowledge of the just intonation system. He also learned to use his viola in a new amplified way which would lead to the powerful droning effect that is so strong in the first two Velvet Underground records.

  CALE: “When we formed The Dream Syndicate I needed to have a strong sound. I decided to try using guitar strings on my viola, and I got a drone that sounded like a jet-engine! Playing the viola in the just intonation system was so exciting. The thing that really amazed me about it was that we played similarly to the way The Everly Brothers used to sing. There was this one song which they sang, in which they started with two voices holding one chord. They sang it so perfectly in tune that you could actually hear each voice. They probably didn’t know they were singing just intonation, but they sang the right intervals. And when those intervals are in tune, as they were in The Everly Brothers and our group, it is extremely forceful.”

  While he worked with LaMonte Young, John Cale shared a flat with fellow Dream Syndicate member Tony Conrad on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

  TONY CONRAD: “In the Fall of 1964, John Cale and I were sharing an apartment at 56 Ludlow Street, which is now sealed up. We had been working with LaMonte for some time doing very austere regimented things which were pretty intense. We had been talking about serious things like intervals, and Indian music and theory and avant-garde music, but when John moved into my place on Ludlow Street it turned out that when I went home I sat around listening to Hank Williams records and was blasting a huge 45 collection. John started getting interested in rock’n’roll, although there was a great ambiguity in his mind about how somebody could be interested in both rock and classical music. But there was something very liberating about the whole rock thing, and in a sense 56 Ludlow Street came to stand for a lot in terms of some kind of liberating musical influence.

  “There was a guy next door called David Gelber, who was playwright Jack Gelber’s brother (he wrote The Connection), and he had a lot of friends who were weird, dumpy, pasty, party chicks from Queens. He went to their parties, and one day he told us that we should come and meet these people because they owned a record company and they were looking for some people with long hair to form a rock band. We had hair that would now look suitable for business dress, but they thought we were the weirdest things in the world. The upshot of it was that we went to this chick’s party and there were these creepos who we were introduced to. They asked us if we played guitar and were we interested in rock. These guys looked so alien to us we couldn’t believe it. I mean this was the other side of the Queens Life Central. This guy Terry Phillips, who had slicked-back hair, a pencil-thin moustache, a real flaccid manner and weird distance from life, was interviewing us about whether we’re interested in rock’n’roll and we naturally felt like rock’n’roll stars already. He was connected to this record company Pickwick, which is a big record company that would do re-issue albums like Bobby Darin and Jack Borgheimer where there’d be one Bobby Darin song and ten Jack Borgheimer songs. They said did we have guitars and we said no. Did we know a drummer, and we said yeah, so we got Walter De Maria, who’s done some great, great drum work, on this thing and we went out to this weird cinderblock warehouse which was the headquarters of Pickwick Records, in Coney Island. The place was packed floor to ceiling with records and in the back these sleaze-balls and weirdos wearing polyester suits had a little hole-in-the-wall room with a couple of Ampex tape recorders in it. What had happened was they’d got back there with one of their staff writers, gone crazy one night and recorded a couple of his songs. They’d decided they wanted to release them, but needed a band to cover, because the executives and creepos had made the record so there wasn’t any band – it was a studio shot. The first thing they wanted to do was sign us up to seven-year creative contracts.

  “We realized after a narrow reading of the contracts that they would make all our artistic work actually owned by Lee Herridon Productions, which was the parent company that owned Pickwick, so we all refused to sign. But we went over and listened to the record. It was called ‘The Ostrich’. They’d gotten together with this guy and spent the night taking, in their own words, ‘everything’, gotten really wiggy and done this weird mix-down. We refused to sign the contracts, but we agreed to their proposal that we play some gigs to promote the record. Next weekend they came around and picked us up in a station wagon and John Cale, Walter De Maria and I began going out on these gigs trying to break this record in the Lehigh Valley area. There were actually four people in the group because there was also the guy who’d actually written and recorded the song – that was Lou Reed. He was 22.”

  By the time Lou entered high school he’d already formed his first band and was playing professionally on weekends. At age fourteen, he released his first record ‘So Blue’ (1957) in a high school group called The Shades on the Time label. The flip side was called ‘Leave Her For Me’.

  REED: “Our big moment came when Murray The K played it, but he was sick and someone else stood in. He played it once. I got royalties of 780. We were still in school. We’d open supermarkets, shopping centers, things like that. We had glitter jackets. It was what was called style – later on people would call it punk but at that time what we meant by punk was a pusher, y’know, ‘He’s just a fucking punk!’”

  ‘So Blue’ sunk into oblivion but has since been re-released on a bootleg collection of early Velvets material. Lou Reed always wanted to be a rock’n’roll singer, a rock’n’roll star. He was born March 2, 1942 in Freeport, Long Island, the elder of two children (a sister, Elizabeth) to a middle-income family. His father was an accountant. Ironically his first practical contact with music came from his parents who paid for him to have five years of training as a classical pianist. “They wanted me to do a scholarship and all that but no … not hank you … this
is not my idea of what’s exciting.” He began to amass a vast collection of rock’n’roll 45s. Lou was a natural born rock’n’roll animal. Although it should be noted that his tastes in music have always been very Catholic: “When I started out I was inspired by people like Ornette Coleman. He has always been a great influence.”

  He seemed quite normal to his high school acquaintances, who remember him as a good basket ball player and occasionally accompanied him on double dates or went along with him to one of his week end shows. His parents, however, seem to have taken a very dim view of the direction in which their unfathomable son was developing. “I went out and did the most horrifying thing possible in those days. I joined a rock band. And, of course, I represented something very alien to my parents.” So alien that at the age of eighteen they took him to a hospital where he was administered a series of electro-shock treatments. “I didn’t have the bad ones where they don’t put you to sleep first. I had the fun ones where they put you to sleep first. You count backwards, then you’re out. It was shocking, but that’s when I was getting interested in electricity anyway.”

  In 1960 Reed left home to attend Syracuse University in upstate New York. His career at Syracuse does not seem to have changed the course he was bent on, although he picked up some influences, the major one undoubtedly being the legendary American poet Delmore Schwartz who became his mentor and drinking partner: “I was friends with Delmore. He wrote great poetry and was an incredible man. Once when he was on a drunken binge with me, he had his arm around me and he said, ‘You know, I’m going to die one of these days.’ He was one of the unhappiest people I ever knew. ‘You can write and if you sell out and there’s a heaven from which you can be haunted, I’ll haunt you.’” In fact Delmore Schwartz did return to haunt Lou on a Reed solo album called ‘The Blue Mask’ released twenty years later, but in an affirmative, encouraging vein.