Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  Sterling Morrison first met Lou when they were students at Syracuse living in the same dormitory. “The first sound I ever heard from Lou was when the ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) were marching in the field behind the dorm in their uniforms.

  First I heard ear-splitting bagpipe music from his hi-fi, and then he cranked up his electric guitar and gave a few blasts on that. So I knew there was a guitar player living upstairs.” Lou had been thrown out of the ROTC Program when he’d put a gun to the head of his commanding officer. He had his own show on the campus radio station where he would play old rock’n’roll and R&B records, but Lou was thrown out of that position too, when he made fun of a commercial on muscular dystrophy.

  Holmes Sterling Morrison Jr was born on August 29, 1942 at East Meadow, Long Island to a middle-class, two-car, small-town at first but later suburban family of Scots ancestry. He had two younger brothers, Robert and William, and three younger sisters Dorothy, Kathleen and Marjorie.

  STERLING MORRISON: “I began studying trumpet at seven, and continued until I was 12, when my teacher was drafted. Unable to find another good one, and in spite of my promise on the instrument, I switched to guitar, inspired by Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. I liked the rockabilly form that was around(rockabilly was rock’n’roll in the beginning) but was more interested in the guitar work of black musicians. Listened to Alan Freed and Jocko all the time; kept my honky ears open. Doo-wah music impressed me mightily. Later on liked Mickey Baker and T-Bone Walker; Jimmy Reed. Eventually caught up with acoustical blues aces like Lightn in’ Hopkins, but always preferred electric guitar music and special effects. I got a flyer in the mail from Sam Ash Music in Hempstead inviting me to hear a demonstration of newly invented ‘fuzz-tone’. I didn’t have to go because my amp already was doing that on its own. I graduated H.S. with very high numbers and matching low esteem for just about everything but music. I was accepted at Syracuse along with Maureen’s brother Jim, a friend since eighth grade. Regents Scholarships for us both. He went, but I headed west to U. of Illinois (major: Physics). Left there at request of Dean of Men after two semesters, mostly for not attending class and for having been drummed out of ROTC, which was compulsory. Good grades, bad attitude, 3.2 beer. Transferred to City College of New York but left after two weeks due to no place to live. Headed for Syracuse with intent to attend in January. Stayed the Fall term with Jim Tucker at Sadler Hall beneath Lou.”

  Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison were both great admirers of Delmore Schwartz, who’d had a tremendous early success marred by deep depressions, pills, booze and subsequent failure. “Delmore was a brilliant poet,” says Morrison, “but he hada clinical case of paranoia. He thought he was being investigated at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller, and eventually he decided that Lou and I and everyone around him were Rockefeller’s spies.”

  There was a good music scene at Syracuse with Felix Cavalieri (of The Young Rascals), Mike Esposito (of The Blues Magoos) and Garland Jeffreys among other fellow students. Morrison and Reed played early Ike and Tina Turner numbers together in bands with names like Moses and his Brothers, Pasha and The Prophets, L.A. and The El Doradoes. L.A. stands for Lou Allen, the name Lou played under at the time.

  MORRISON: “I had gone home to the Island after meeting Lou at Syracuse to raise some money, and went back to City College in the Fall (major: English Lit). Visited Syracuse frequently and played with Lou when I could; spring break; summers. I was always about to enrol but never did. Lou and I had some of the shittiest bands that ever were. They were shitty because we were playing authentic rock’n’roll. I was a very sensitive young person and played very unsensitive, uncaring music which is Wam Bang Pow! Let’s rock out! What I expected my audience to do was tear the house down, beat me up, whatever. In the Sixties I had King Hatreds. I was a biker type and I hung around with nasty black people and nasty white people and I played nasty white and black rock & roll music.”

  After he graduated Lou moved back in with his parents in Freeport from where he began to commute to a job as a factory songwriter at Pickwick records, a company specializing in quickie albums, cashing in on popular trends such as hot rod, surf and Mersey Beat music.

  REED: “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs. They would say, ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’ then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. One day I was stoned and (after reading in Eugenia Sheppard’s column that ostrich feathers were big that season) just for laughs – I decided to make up a dance. So I said, ‘You put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it!’ It was years ahead of its time. And another thing called ‘Sneaky Pete’. And when they heard it they thought it could be a single, so we needed people who could be a group to go out and promote it.”

  CONRAD: “See, by the time they approached us, they had pressed the record already. ‘The Ostrich’ was the A-side and ‘Sneaky Pete’ was the B-side. We had nothing to do with making the record, we were just stringers hired to promote it. The impression I got was that Lou hada close relationship with these people at Pickwick because they recognized that he was a very gifted person. There was something really authentic about their understanding of his talent. He impressed everybody as having some particularly assertive personal quality, and it’s certainly to their credit that they hung out and popped pills and goofed in the studio with him. Anyway, they made up this name for us The Primitives, and they thought ‘The Ostrich’ would be a new dance craze, ‘Do the Ostrich!’ They said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s easy to play because all the strings are tuned to the same note,’ which blew our minds because that was what we were doing with LaMonte in The Dream Syndicate. It was pretty amazing, we couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘All you do is go Dun de Dun Dun/Dun de Dun Dun,’ and then we learned the breaks. The first couple of times we did this we hadn’t even rehearsed, we just stepped out on stage. It was bizarre because they would say, ‘And now, from New York City – The Primitives!’ The kids would start screaming YAAAAAAAAAA and run up and we’d go Dun de Dun Dun.

  “I remember we did a radio interview in Redding, Pennsylvania, played a high school gig in New Jersey, a super market and taped a TV show with Shirley Ellis who did ‘Name Game’ and ‘Clapping Song’. Lou was prepared to assume the role of director because he knew the tunes, so he told us what we had to do, but there was also the odd thing that Walter and John and I took all this with a grain of salt, especially at first, because we knew they didn’t really know who we were in the sense that we actually did have some particular powers and were not complete ingenues, which is what they had been looking for. They didn’t know shit about who we were. Those gigs were completely mind-blowing to Walter, John and me. I mean we were riding around in a station wagon goofing on the idea that we’re going to be playing rock’n’roll music, then we’re on this stage and we don’t know what’s going on and none of us have really played this kind of music before, and then there’s all this hype and screaming kids and meeting other groups. The whole thing was absolutely unexpected and hypnotizing. We did it about half a dozen times on weekends. It was fun. There was even a flutter of interest including a photo in Vogue, but the record died. After a point we said, ‘We’re not getting anywhere with this, we’re not making any money, and the record isn’t going to break.’ They also kept pressing these contracts on us and it began to be kind of a turn-off, so we just didn’t do it any more.

  “The thing is, John was really impressed with Lou because Lou had this unique ability to sing lyrics. He would go out there without anything in his head at all and just sing songs. Lyrics would just come out of his mouth. You didn’t know where they came from but suddenly he was doing rock’n’roll. It was obvious that Lou really authentically loved rock’n’roll, but he was wrestling with some kind of problems in his personal life and he was also living with his mother
out on Long Island, so he was vanishing into Long Island at this point and not really furthering his scene very much. Then John started getting together with Lou. He was really attracted to Lou’s whole approach.”

  CALE: “When I met Lou, he was a staff writer for some publishing company. He played me the songs he’d written for them, but they were nothing new or terribly exciting. They were just like every other song on the radio. But then he played me several which he claimed they wouldn’t publish. He played ‘Heroin’ first and it totally knocked me out. The words and music were so raunchy and devastating. What’s more, his songs fit perfectly with my music concept.”

  CONRAD: “So Lou began coming into the city and began getting together with John. I took off, so there was more room in the pad and Lou soon moved in, which was great because we got him out of his mother’s place. Lou was like a rock’n’roll animal and authentically turned everybody on. He really hada deep fixation on that and his lifestyle was completely compatible and acclimatized to it. He was definitely a liberating force for John, but John was an incredible person too.

  “He was very idealistic in the sense of putting himself behind what he was interested in and believed in in a tremendous way, and anytime you do that you wind up with fantastic abilities and experiences, so there was a tremendous amount of resonance going on there musically. Lou was definitely possessed by rock’n’roll. He was definitely a rock’n’roll punk straight from the books, but the books were only written twenty years later. On the other hand there was no group of people in music more sophisticated than the group we were involved with. This was an unbelievably alert group of people who were engaged in a way which was part of and in touch with everything, open to everything, particularly John – the way that he sought out LaMonte and engaged himself directly with the group and the way that he lived, which was extremely ascetic and barren and weird. John was a very interesting person in terms of his personal aura and the kind of creative presence that he brought about, and inventive in terms of ideas about techniques. In terms of musical influence what John was doing with the viola, which had grown out of the kinds of things we were doing in our group, was obviously tremendously important and yet it was extremely odd that we wandered into this group of people who tuned their guitars all to one note.

  “Rather than suggesting that there was an influence that flowed one way or another I’m trying to suggest that it seemed like a very powerful encounter in a sense, each of them moving in a direction which was daring and audacious for the other as well as themselves. John was moving at a very very fast pace away from a classical training background through the avant-garde and into performance art and then rock. It was phenomenal for Lou considering his interest in what would be referred to today as punk – somebody who is really living rock and is interested in an extremely aggressive assertive position – to discover that classical musicians and avantgarde artists were also engaged in that. There was a real bonding that occurred between John and Lou in that particular relationship.

  TOM WILSON: “You and John were the original members then. Where did you find Sterling?”

  REED: “I met him on the subway. I hadn’t seen him in three years and he didn’t have any shoes on and I had boots on and we took him home.”

  MORRISON: “This account, though amusing, is preposterous. I did indeed run into Lou (and John for the first time) on the subway – on the ‘D’ train at the Seventh Avenue stop or thereabouts. I was on my way up to school at City College. I have never, ever, gone shoeless on the dogshit streets of Manhattan. And, since it was January, I may be supposed to have been wearing my winter coat too. But meet we did. I hadn’t seen Lou for almost a year. He invited me over to this guy Rick’s place to get high and talk/play music. The three of us kept going from that moment. By then the whole thing with Pickwick had fallen through, so we sat around and said, ‘Well, we’re retired. There’s no way we can put a band together that can work in this city.’ Because all that was going on in Manhattan in the early Sixties were those slick midtown club acts like Joey Dee and The Starlighters who wore matching suits. So we decided to forget about competing and just play songs we liked.”

  CONRAD: “By then, I’d stopped playing with them and Walter De Maria had moved so John, Lou and Sterling started playing with Angus MacLise on drums. He lived in the same building and had also worked with LaMonte Young. A lot of people went through that building on Ludlow Street. Mario Montez (one of Jack Smith’s and Andy Warhol’s original Superstars) lived downstairs, Angus was living upstairs. John and I were there and Piero Heliczer (a poet and underground film-maker who would play a major role in the development of The Velvets’ connection with multimedia presentations) had the apartment next door. They used a series of different names like The Warlocks and The Falling Spikes. Angus had some unique percussion equipment. When he played the bongos, it was just like poetry. He made a number of tapes with Piero, John and myself when we all lived in the same building on Ludlow.”

  REED: “I first started thinking about ‘Metal Machine Music’ as far back as when John used to work with LaMonte Young. It took a long long time. It’s way more complex than people realize, but that’s all right. I wasn’t going to put it out even; I made it for myself. John and I were always making tapes. A lot are still circulating around. We made soundtracks for underground movies of the time. We always encouraged bringing tape recorders to our jobs.”

  CONRAD: “The first thing I heard of what they were doing were those tapes. Angus used to make tapes so there would be these great tapes lying around in a pile and some of them would get erased. Who knew what happened to them. I wish I had copies because some of the stuff they did was very nice. The things they were into were ethereal and ornamental, very very free. In that sense the influence of Angus’s personality was much more visible during that period. Anyway, Angus, John, Lou and Sterling started calling what they were doing a group.”

  It was 1965. They decided to follow Maupassant’s dictum to “Do something beautiful in the form that suits you best according to your own temperament,” and began composing some of the music that would eventually windup on their first album. They also continued to evolve within the milieu of the downtown New York art scene which was developing rapidly. Angus had introduced them to Piero Heliczer who had been his classmate at Forest Hills High School in the mid-fifties. Piero had moved from Ludlow to a gigantic fifth floor walk-up at 450 Grand Street and was conducting a series of multimedia happenings involving films, lights, poetry and music at Jonas Mekas’ Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in the basement of the Colonnades building, a New York Historical Land mark on Lafayette Street.

  MORRISON: “Whenever I hear the word ‘underground’, I am reminded of when the word first acquired a specific meaning for me and for many others in NYC in the early Sixties. It referred to underground cinema and the people and life style that created and supported this art form. And the person who first introduced me to this scene was Piero Heliczer, a bona fide ‘underground film-maker’ – the first one I had ever met.

  “On an early Spring day in 1965 John and I were strolling through the Eastside slums and ran into Angus on the corner of Essex and Delancey. Angus said, ‘Let’s go over to Piero’s,’ and we agreed.

  “It seems that Piero and Angus were organizing a ‘ritual happening’ at the time – a mixed-media stage presentation to appear in the old Cinematheque. Naturally, this was well before such events became all the rage. It was to be entitled ‘Launching the Dream Weapon’, and it got launched tumultuously. In the centre of the stage there was a movie screen, and between the screen and the audience a number of veils were spread out in different places. These veils were lit variously by lights and slide projectors, as Piero’s films shone through them onto the screen. Dancers swirled around, and poetry and song occasionally rose up, while from behind the screen a strange music was being generated by Lou, John, Angus and me.

  “For me the path ahead became suddenly clear – I could work on music
that was different from ordinary rock’n’roll since Piero had given us a context to perform it in. In the summer of 1965 we were the anonymous musicians who played at some screenings of ‘underground films’, and at other theatrical events, the first of which was for Piero’s films (I think that Barbara Rubin showed Christmas on Earth and Kenneth Anger showed a film also). Piero taped the music, and later played it at the other screenings of his films – especially for The New Jerusalem.”

  In July they recorded a tape which included ‘Venus In Furs’, ‘Heroin’, ‘Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams’ and ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ and distributed it as a demo to a few people including rock entrepreneur Miles Copeland in England.

  MORRISON: “This tape was often reproduced and widely circulated in England. It evidently aroused some interest in us, and John was going back and forth throughout 1965 to see what he could get going (and to pick up records – we were very impressed by the singles he brought back. Of course John’s peculiar tastes determined what he brought back for us to hear, but we couldn’t escape the conclusion that these obscure English bands were closer to our sensibilities than the ‘pop’ groups here in the US). At the time when we met Andy we had all but actually packed up and gone to London. I feel certain that we would have been in London by spring 1966, come what may, had not The EPI happened. Cale knew his way around, had spoken to many people over there in preparation for us, and by his daily presence lessened any culture shock we might have experienced. If we could deal with him, there was nothing forbidding about the English.”

  They were basically in limbo and looking for connections, believing strongly in their music, thriving on their collaboration and the milieu in which they found themselves appreciated by a small intelligent audience, but felt the chances of their breaking through in the US were minimal. One day Tony Conrad, who was no longer living at Ludlow or playing with them but maintained a collaborative friendship with Cale, who was still peripherally involved in The Dream Syndicate, found a paperback lying on the sidewalk of the Bowery and brought it back to Ludlow Street where he was still keeping a lot of his stuff. It was called The Velvet Underground.