Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  MORRISON: “We had a name at last! And it was adopted by us and deemed appropriate not because of the S&M theme of the book, but because the word ‘underground’ was suggestive of our involvement with the underground film and art scenes.

  “Around this time, somehow, CBS News decided that Walter Cronkite should have a feature on an ‘underground’ film being made. By whatever selection process, Piero was able to be the ‘underground film-maker’; since he had already decided to film us playing anyway, we got into the act (and besides, we had ‘underground’ in our name, didn’t we? Maybe someone at CBS reads Pirandello).”

  Very shortly after this momentous event Al Aronowitz, the legendary journalist whose writings on pop music – featuring The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, all of whom he was personally acquainted with – were helping to break new ground in the cultural climate, heard about The Velvet Underground’s performances behind the screens at the Cinematheque and Lou Reed’s claim that he was “the fastest guitarist alive,” and took Robbie Robertson of The Band to inspect one of Heliczer’s happenings. Robertson quickly grew bored and, turning to Aronowitz, dismissed Reed’s performance with a “he ain’t nothin’,” but Aronowitz, who had exceptionally good taste and was interested in getting involved in the music business from an entrepreneur’s point of view in the hopes of making a buck – he was already managing a band called The Myddle Class – decided to approach The Velvets with an offer.

  He went to the 5th floor Grand Street apartment where Sterling and Lou were now living and had a 15 minute meeting with them, leaving Brian Jones and Carole King waiting for him in a limousine below.

  MORRISON: “Al had brought Brian Jones around to Ludlow Street on an earlier occasion to score some acid. Brian stayed in the limo with two babes while Al came up to get us. We all wanted to meet him but since there was no room for the three of us in the car, and since John had the connection, he got to ride in the front seat. Lou and I followed in Lou’s mother’s car so we could get John and head elsewhere. We were interested in a guitar/organ made by Vox. The Stones endorsed Vox and Brian played a Vox Phantom, so we wanted John to ask him about it.

  “John: ‘Have you ever played one of those Vox Guitar/Organs?’

  “Brian: ‘Yes.’

  “John: ‘Does it work?’

  “Brian: ‘No.’

  “End of conversation.”

  Aronowitz offered The Velvets a spot opening for The Myddle Class at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey for $75.00. Angus said, ‘You mean we start when they tell us to and we have to end when they tell us to? I can’t work that way.’ The other members were eager to accept the job and expand their audience, so he withdrew from the group. Desperate for a drummer to play the Summit gig, Sterling and Lou remembered old buddy Jim Tucker’s sister Maureen, who always liked to play drums. Maureen Tucker was born in 1945 in New Jersey.

  MAUREEN TUCKER: “I always wanted to play drums. You know when you’re in fourth grade and they sign you up for music lessons? Well, I picked drums, but I never went. Then rock’n’roll came around and I really wanted to get in on the creative end of that. I played guitar for a while, then tambourine, but that wasn’t making it, so I got a really cheap drum set.”

  Maureen remembers Lou visiting her parents’ house when he was a student at Syracuse and she was in the 12th grade, so he wasn’t a complete stranger when he came over this time to audition her for the position.

  TUCKER: “Lou came over and we went up to the room where I kept my drums and he’d say, ‘Can you play this?’ which I could, so I was in. It wasn’t as if I was a full-time member though. John was adamant about not wanting any girls in the band.”

  WILSON: “And what about Mo?”

  REED: “We needed an amplifier and she had one plus she’s an out of sight drummer. She worked as a computer key-puncher and when she’d come home at five she’d put on Bo Diddley records and play every night from five to twelve, so we figured she’d be the perfect drummer and she was.”

  MORRISON: “Maureen had been playing with a band on the Island. She had recently quit when the guitar player in the other band on the bill was shot on stage at a gig in Syosset.”

  WILSON: “She has great time. And, like most things that we found out don’t matter, sex doesn’t matter anymore so far as musicianship is concerned and so far as the love of groovy music is concerned.”

  REED: “I’d second that.”

  The Summit High School gig took place on November 11, 1965. It was the first time they used the name The Velvet Underground, playing after a band called 40 Fingers and before The Myddle Class.

  MORRISON: “At Summit we opened with ‘There She Goes Again’ then played ‘Venus In Furs’ and ended with ‘Heroin’. The murmur of surprise that greetedour appearance as the curtain went up increased to a roar of disbelief once we started to play ‘Venus’ and swelled to a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment by the end of ‘Heroin’. Al Aronowitz observed that we seemed to have an oddly stimulating and polarizing effect on audiences.”

  Aronowitz recognized they had a future, but felt they lacked experience and needed, as he says today, “to acquire some chops. Like The Beatles got chops playing till 3 a.m. eight nights a week in Hamburg.” To this end, he acquired a residency gig for them during December at the Cafe Bizarre, a relatively dead club on West 3rd Street just east of Macdougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village.

  CALE: “When we first put The Velvets together we formeda group around the guitar, bass, drums and my electric viola. We wanted The Velvet Underground to be a group with a dynamic symphonic flair. The idea was that Lou’s lyrical and melodic ability could be combined with some of my musical ideas to create performances where we wouldn’t just repeat ourselves. We used to do ‘Sister Ray – Part Seven’ in which Lou would personify this southern preacher along with a series of different roles all made up on the spot. In the beginning when Al Aronowitz was managing us and we were playing at the Bizarre, we practised a lot and were pretty tight.”

  MAKING ANDY WARHOL, UP-TIGHT, CONTINUED

  By the time Andy Warhol met them at the Cafe Bizarre, The Velvets were doing a number of covers like ‘Carol’ and ‘Little Queenie’, as well as their own unmistakable material, some of which the Bizarre management found too disruptive for their establishment. The band were pretty much fed up playing there having been forced to work on Christmas Day and wanted to get fired, so when the manager told them that if they played ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ one more time they’d be asked to leave, they cranked out their best version ever. They were fired two days after they met Andy. At least Maureen gained tenure as a full-fledged member because, although the owners had refused to let them use drums saying they’d be too loud, the others had chosen to keep her on playing tambourine.

  TUCKER: “It was really a regression, but that’s when it became kind of apparent that I was in the band.”

  MORRISSEY: “After we met them they came to the Factory and right away I proposed that we would sign a contract with them, we’d manage them and give them a place to play. They said yes Andy immediately bought them some new amplifiers and they started rehearsing at the Factory.”

  New Year’s Eve 1965. The Velvets, Edie Sedgwick, her friend from Cambridge Donald Lyons, Andy and Gerard went to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to see James Brown. After leaving the Apollo the whole crowd went in Edie’s limousine over to Danny Field’s apartment to watch the CBS Walter Cronkite show on Piero’s film Venus In Furs featuring The Velvets playing ‘Heroin’ then journeyed on to Sterling and Lou’s apartment at 450 Grand Street where they just sat around. Andy was biting his fingernails and looking at a magazine. There was no heat and everybody had coats on. It was freezing. Edie was wearing her leopard skin fur coat. The atmosphere was weird. Hardly a word was spoken. Gerard seems to remember that John Cale and Edie were already involved in some kind of problem that may have contributed to the uptight feeling in the room. This was a complex group o
f people between whom there was immediately a lot of intrigue and rivalry for each other’s attentions.

  Most complex of all perhaps was Nico, who had come to New York from London, where she’d recorded a single on Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label, hung out with Brian Jones and attracted Dylan’s attention in Paris where he’d given her the song ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’. Nico was born of Spanish and Yugoslavian parents in Budapest, Hungary, March 15, 1943, although there’s no way of confirming this date (she may, in fact, have been born as early as 1940). In the Second World War she took shelter during air-raids in the family bath tub in Cologne and always remembered the sound of the bombs. Nico has been very careful to conceal her real age. Educated first in France and then in Italy, she spoke seven languages.

  At 15 while vacationing at a friend’s villa in Rome, Nico was introduced to some young actors from “Cinecitta” (Italy’s Hollywood), who invited her to the set of a movie they were making with an eccentric director named Federico Fellini. Claiming to be somebody’s cousin, she was admitted on the set with instructions to keep to the sidelines. A party sequence was to be filmed in the exquisite remains of a Renaissance palazzo. The director was late and it was the cocktail hour. It was impossible to distinguish cast from crew. Her friend was dancing with a distinguished man in an elegantly cut suit (Marcello Mastroianni). Slightly bewildered by the noisy confusion Nico took shelter in a cobwebby corner and leaned against a carved marble table. The music died suddenly. A man in shirtsleeves, probably the prop man, yelled, “Porte mi la candale.”

  Realizing he was addressing her, Nico picked up the large baroque silver candelabra from the table and walked slowly towards this man who took a step back with each step Nico advanced. Silence slowly overtook the room as people cleared a path. The jadedsophisticates were enchanted by the aloof elegance of the naive schoolgirl, as was Fellini, the man gesturing her towards him from across the silent room.

  The movie? La Dolce Vita. Nico got a sizeable role. Her parents, enraged by a film in which their daughter certainly didn’t do anything more offensive than walk up a staircase, prevented Nico from signing a contract with the great director.

  Nico went to a private school in Germany where she says, “They gave me a very hard time.” She also worked as a child model and studied acting and singing at the Lee Strasberg Method Studios. When she auditioned for a singing job at the famous Blue Angel in New York in 1964 she got so wound up she fainted immediately after the audition. She woke up to find she had got the job.

  NICO: “I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big might have happened for me.”

  Persuading The Velvets to play with Nico was not as easy as one might imagine. First of all she really wanted a backing band so she could sing all the songs. The multi-talented Velvets had no interest in being a backing band. Anyway, some of their best songs, like ‘Heroin’ and ‘Waiting For My Man’, weren’t as well-suited for Nico’s voice as they were for Lou’s. However, everybody was eager to do something and Andy was in a position to offer them a chance to become famous at his upcoming discotheque. Nico had already taken a shine to Lou, so they all agreed to Andy and Paul’s proposal that Nico be allowed to sing some songs, and when she wasn’t singing just stand on stage looking beautiful. Andy then persuaded Lou to write some new songs, like ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and ‘Femme Fatale’, specifically for Nico, and he even, indicating just how strong a will Andy’s enthusiasm carries, persuaded them to change the name to The Velvet Underground and Nico, although that didn’t sit so well with Lou and John, who saw their images as rock stars and positions as leaders of the group rapidly evaporating. However, they were all intuitive enough to realize that, at least for the time being, the direction he was pulling them in was basically right and they agreed to work together. The first evidence of this collaboration was a 70-minute black and white film Warhol shot of them rehearsing at the Factory in January 1966. Called The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound, it was broken up by the New York City Police, who came in response to complaints about the amount of noise the band was making, and was later used as a silent film backdrop to a number of their performances.

  MORRISSEY: “We used the week at the Cinematheque to experiment with what we were going to put into the Michael Myerberg discotheque with the movies behind The Velvets.”

  MALANGA: “Everybody involved with the week at the Cinematheque was very excited about what we were doing together, although it was still more of an art than a rock event and there were a number of kinks to be ironed out before Andy Warhol, Up-Tight would bloom into The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. We all went out to dinner after each show. Andy’s question to everybody was always the same, ‘How can we make it more interesting?’”

  GLENN O’BRIEN: “How did you meet Lou Reed?”

  WARHOL: “He was playing at the Cafe Bizarre, and Barbara Rubin, a friend of Jonas Mekas, said she knew this group. Claes Oldenburg and Patti Oldenburg and Lucas Samaras and Jasper Johns and I were starting a rock’n’roll group with people like LaMonte Young, and the artist who digs holes in the desert now, Walter De Maria.”

  O’BRIEN: “You started a rock band!?”

  WARHOL: “Oh, yeah. We met ten times, and there were fights between Lucas and Patti over the music or something.”

  O’BRIEN: “What did you do?”

  WARHOL: “I was singing badly. Then Barbara Rub in said something about this group and mixed-media was getting to be the big thing at the Cinematheque, so we had films and lights, and Gerard did some dancing and The Velvets played.”

  O’BRIEN: “Was that a light show before the San Francisco light shows?”

  WARHOL: “Yeah, it was, sort of. Actually, the Cinematheque was really combining all the arts together.”

  REED: “We worked with lights and stuff behind us before we met Andy. We did it in the old Cinematheque on Lafayette Street. It wasn’t his original conception. It was a lot of people’s conception. It was a natural step to meet Andy and say, ‘Oh you’ve got a week at the new Cinematheque,’ so obviously since we combined music with movies and everything it was just such an easy step to say, ‘We’ll play along with your movies.’ Then we said, ‘You’ve got all these things. Why don’t we show lights?’ It doesn’t matter whose idea it was. It was just so obvious. It wasn’t Andy putting it all together. It was everybody. It was just Andy had the week at the Cinematheque. That’s what Andy had to do, and then everybody put it together. The thing was that the basic idea was so obvious that you would have to be a fool not to think of it. So everybody thought of it.”

  MORRISSEY: “What really happened is I had this idea that Andy could make money not only from underground films but from putting the movies in some sort of rock’n’roll context. Discovering The Velvets, bringing them up the Factory and working with them was done for purely commercial reasons.”

  After their week at the Cinematheque word about Andy Warhol, Up-Tight began to spread. People were clearly confused about what to expect. Michael Myerberg began to cool off after seeing a night at the Cinematheque, but film departments were calling from colleges to book the show, which they, interestingly enough, took to be primarily an underground movie presentation. Warhol was invited to present the show in a film series at Rutgers University, New Jersey. By the time Andy Warhol, Up-Tight was ready to go out on the road in March, Edie Sedgwick, the first amputee, had definitely left the group in a stormy split that occurred one night at the Gingerman, a restaurant opposite Lincoln Center, shortly after the completion of the Cinematheque shows.

  MALANGA: “All The Velvets were there with Ingrid Superstar, Paul Morrissey, Donald Lyons, Danny Fields, myself, Andy and another of Edie’s friends from Cambridge, the film-maker Chuck Wein. Edie began asking Andy, ‘What’s my place with The Velvets? I’m broke. I have no money. Why am I not getting paid?’ And he said, ‘You gotta be patient.’

  “Edie said, ‘I can’t be patient. I ju
st have nothing to live on.’ She told Andy that she had signed a contract with Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman and he’d said she shouldn’t see Andy so much because the publicity that came out of it wasn’t good and she didn’t want him to show her films anymore.”

  MORRISSEY: “She said, ‘They’re going to make a film and I’m supposed to star in it with Bobby.’ Suddenly it was Bobby this and Bobby that, and they realized that she had a crush on him. They thought he’d been leading her on, because just that day Andy had heard in his lawyer’s office that Dylan had been secretly married for a few months – he married Sarah Lowndes in November 1965. Everything was secret in those days for some reason … all phoney secrecy, so Andy couldn’t resist asking, ‘Did you know Edie that Bob Dylan has gotten married?’ She was trembling. They realized that she really thought of herself as entering a relationship with Dylan, that maybe he hadn’t been truthful.”

  MALANGA: “Edie got up and went to make a phone call, presumably to Dylan. When she came back to the table she announced she was leaving the Factory, or more specifically leaving Andy, since her diatribe was directed at him. And he was saying, ‘But … but … Edie, you have to be patient, we’re not making any money. I’m not making any money from the movies, you just have to be patient.’ But Edie wasn’t buying it. She left and everybody was kind of quiet. It was stormy and dramatic. Edie disappeared and that was the end of it. She never came back.”

  Andy may have been surprised, shocked or hurt by Edie’s defection to the Dylan camp, but he had little time to sit around thinking about it. Throughout 1966 he would make The Exploding Plastic Inevitable more and more interesting, changing the way people looked at rock’n’roll in tune with McLuhan’s understanding in his book The Medium Is The Massage that, “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic social economic and political parochialism.”