Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  REED: “We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It’s just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write. I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things, ’cos things have gone so far that somebody really should say something. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically, I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke! It’s a joke! The kids are being hyped.”

  By the time their three weeks in LA were up The Exploding Plastic Inevitable capitulated and agreed to play two nights at the Fillmore. The feeling of alienation between their party and the West Coast groups seems to have been mutual and a lot of friction developed between Bill Graham and The EPI. Neither group could connect with the other.

  MORRISON: “We actually built the light show at the Fillmore Auditorium. Bill Graham didn’t, nor did any San Francisco entrepreneur. When we showed up Graham had a slide projector with a picture of the moon. We said, ‘That’s not a light show, Bill, sorry.’ That’s one of the reasons that Graham really hates us.

  “Marshall McLuhan gave us credit for inventing the light show in The Medium is the Massage. There’s a photo. He’s the only one. It was nice of him. He showed the group that did it all. San Francisco was rigged. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The fish being the innocent heads prowling around Haight-Ashbury. We came out there as an unshakeable entity. I’d never heard of Bill Graham. In fact, I’ve never heard of him since. I don’t know who he is. I just thought he was an insane slob, totally beneath my abilities to observe. He just didn’t exist as far as I was concerned. An absolute nonentity. He knew what we thought of him. The day I arrived at his club, I was thrown out. I just walked in with my guitar and he said, ‘You, get out of here.’ They told him, ‘You’ve lost your mind, he’s playing here tonight.’ He said, ‘Get out, get out you s.o.b.’ I wish I had.

  “When we arrived it was an attack against their way of life. The Mothers were following us around California. They also had an audition group perform. During the show Zappa would keep putting us down, like on the mike, he would say, ‘These guys really suck.’ So, The Mothers were chasing us around California so we arrived in Bill Graham country. He always had an audition group. The reason for this was they didn’t get any money. He would say, ‘If you’re really good I’ll let you play.’ This guy’s an operator. The audition group that night happened to be The Jefferson Airplane whom he was managing. They wanted publicity and The Mothers wanted publicity because there were so many people capitalizing on our show that night. We were just a neutral party. Graham made so much money that weekend we played at the Fillmore, that he didn’t believe it. That’s what blew his mind. We arrived at a time before Jefferson Airplane was known to anyone. They didn’t even have Grace Slick yet. Everyone was nowhere at the time, The Mothers and, of course, ourselves. Warhol was the name that made the impact with the public.”

  Things finally fell apart completely when Paul Morrissey made Bill Graham get really uptight! The scene is recounted in Warhol’s POPism: “‘Why don’t they take heroin?’ Paul suggested, pointing to the group on stage. ‘That’s what all the really good musicians take.’ Graham didn’t say anything he just fumed. Paul knew he was driving him good and crazy, so he kept it up. ‘You know I think I’m really all for heroin because if you take care of yourself, it doesn’t affect you physically.’ He took a tangerine out of his pocket and peeled it in one motion, letting the peels fall on the floor. ‘With heroin you never catch cold – it started in the United States as a cure for the common cold.’”

  Paul was saying everything he could think of to offend Bill Graham’s San Francisco sensibility but in the end it was dropping the tangerine peels on the Fillmore floor which he had done totally unconsciously that brought on the showdown. Little things mean a lot. Graham stared down at the peels, and he got livid. I don’t remember his exact words, but he started yelling – things like, “You disgusting germs from New York! Here we are, trying to clean up everything, and you come out here with your disgusting minds and whips!”

  After the second night, Gerard Malanga was arrested in an all-night cafeteria in the North Beach area where he had gone with Lou and a friend of Andy’s, an actress named Nancy Worthington Fish who was performing with The Committee. He was charged with carrying an offensive weapon (his whip) by the San Francisco police and thrown into the can where he spent an anxious night. The City clearly felt the same way about the “disgusting hippies germs from New York” as The Velvets felt about the capital of the hippies.

  BOCKRIS: “So you wanted to work with them, but apart from arranging the occasional show on a freelance basis, you weren’t actually working with them.”

  SESNICK: “No, they really didn’t want me. Well, Lou did after San Francisco.”

  BOCKRIS: “What happened in San Francisco that led him to want to work with you?”

  SESNICK: “Oh, I predicted a number of things and they all worked out that way and he realized they needed a manager. Everyone else was well-meaning; there wasn’t anything naughty going on particularly, except they weren’t managers. That was my interest.”

  BOCKRIS: “After the end of the West Coast scene in May, did you all return to New York and then go out to Chicago from New York?”

  SESNICK: “That’s a long story; there’s a lot of confusion there. There was a tremendous amount of confusion as to where anything was happening because of the money needed to keep the group together. The expenses were a real problem and everybody went in different directions. All sorts of problems happened in San Francisco while we were there.”

  MORRISON: “Danny Williams stayed behind to design a light show after we went back to NY. He went from there directly to Chicago to set up our show at Poor Richard’s.”

  CHICAGO

  At the beginning of June Nico took off for Ibiza. Lou contracted hepatitis and went into Beth Israel Hospital in New York. Andy and Paul were shooting the footage which became Chelsea Girls. So when Steve Sesnick arranged another booking for the group, June 21–26 1966 at Poor Richard’s in Chicago, some changes had to be made.

  MALANGA: “Just before the Chicago gig, Andy, Angus MacLise and I went to visit Lou in the hospital, because Angus was going to play with the group in Chicago. I distinctly remember Lou telling Angus, ‘Just remember you’re only coming back for two weeks. You’re on a temporary basis. I don’t want you to get any idea that you’re coming back into the group again.’”

  MORRISON: “Lou always was nice like that.”

  With Angus on drums subbing for Lou, Maureen switched to bass and Sterling and John took over the lead vocal spots. Ingrid Superstar replaced Mary Woronov as Gerard’s dancing partner. Andy, Nico and Lou were absent. Danny Williams flew in from San Francisco to work the lights.

  FINKELSTEIN: “Everybody was on Danny’s case. You could watch him disintegrate. He came in as a clean-cut preppy and left looking like a real seedy character. The silver dust at the Factory just coated his skin. The image I have of Danny is that he went out with his eyeglasses patched together with masking-tape.”

  MORRISON: “Danny was involved in a Factory power struggle with Paul Morrissey, and Paul won. At issue was who was going to be Andy’s ‘technical’ advisor. The struggle was so intense by Chicago that Danny and Paul actually came to blows over an extension cord – Danny wanted it for the lights, and Paul wanted it for the projectors. The only way I could deal with that was to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but perhaps Danny felt that he had no support in the group either, which wasn’t the case. Danny was excellent at what he did, and a very hard worker.

  “Angus had originally left the group because he anticipated all kinds of compromises that would have to be made and then when he finally did play with us out in Chicago he realized that that was not true. We were as careless as ever.”

&nb
sp; BOCKRIS: “At this point did he want to come back into the group?”

  MORRISON: “Yeah, evidently.”

  Poor Richard’s was inside an old church. Without ventilation the temperature was 106 degrees. The Velvets arrived just after the Chicago race riots. Andy had been promised by the promoters to do a series of interviews for radio and TV stations but sent Brigid Polk instead. All the local press and Playboy people were there to inspect Warhol’s latest, and when the group went on without both lead singers the media were acutely disappointed. Other witnesses in the audience and on stage say that it was just as good as ever.

  MORRISON: “Everybody thought we’d be a flop without Lou but we were great. We just had to work a lot harder. In fact, we were held over for a second week, which was at least as successful as the first. We had a lot of fun there: Gerard and I went to a beach in Winnetka, an affluent suburb of Chicago, and were run off by the police (Gerard was wearing a novel Rudi Gernreich bikini which exposed the top 3 inches of his ass, and plunged even lower in the front); while I was staying at the Commonwealth Hotel I met a dwarf in the elevator who said he had a gun and would kill me with it if I ever got in there with him again. Is it because I’m tall, I wondered, or because I look happy? I later met another dwarf in Boston and he, too, had a gun that he said he would kill me with. I don’t know what the pattern is to all this, but I’m still working on it. And for a long time afterwards, when attending large indoor gatherings, I would immediately upon arrival move quickly through all the rooms, peeking into the closets and behind the drapes. At outdoor events I would peer intently into the shrubbery before joining the throng. Now I’m sure that many people consider this to be odd behaviour, but I didn’t think I was acting oddly at all. Just checking for dwarfs. Anyway, I left the Commonwealth and joined Angus over at the Hotel Lincoln. Safer there. As for Playboy, they hired us to play in the club at a noon fashion show – the clothing was given to us by a mod shop in Old Town. It was written up with a picture in their VIP magazine. We went on Studs Terkel’s TV show, did a couple of radio shows, and all that sort of on-tour stuff. We didn’t lay low just because we didn’t have Lou, Nico, or Andy. On the contrary, I would say we made ourselves rather conspicuous.”

  Chicago Daily News: “Warhol has indeed put together a total environment but it is an assemblage that actually vibrates with menace, cynicism and perversion. To experience it is to be brutalized, helpless – you’re in any kind of horror you want to imagine, from police state to madhouse. Eventually the reverberations in your ears stop. But what do you do with what you still hear in your brain? The flowers of evil are in full bloom with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.”

  One night Angus arrived half an hour late for the show so he made up for it by continuing to drum for half an hour after the set was over. “This show is a new phase for Andy,” Malanga explained to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune between sets. “It has no message. It’s just entertainment. Yes, the films, the lights, the music are all parts, but the main thing is the music. Andy is the catalyst for this, but he has no part in the show itself.”

  Was Warhol beginning to lose interest in The EPI as its personalities continued to fragment and become increasingly difficult to conduct? “Andy was reportedly ‘uptight’ with nerves in New York,” said the Chicago Daily News. “A condition one would expect to be normal judging by the corners of himself he reveals in The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.”

  The Velvets played part of the gig with their backs to the audience, a practice they would increasingly use as they played to less and less acceptance. “Let’s hope it’s killed before it spreads,” the Daily News concluded their lengthy put-down. Ron Nemeth filmed one of the shows. The Velvets hardly appear in it, but the film does have an unreleased soundtrack. Two young kids called Susan Pile and Ed Walsh attached themselves to the group in Chicago and later followed them to New York where they ended up working for Warhol.

  INGRID SUPERSTAR: “I remember when I was in Chicago there was one last song they did in the show, and they had the feedback from the guitars which sounded like 12 million guitars going at one time with these amplified, intensified screeches that really hurt the eardrums, and it was nothing but a chaotic confusion of noise. You couldn’t even make out any distinction or hesitation between the notes. I wouldn’t call it beautiful and I don’t know what I’d call it. It’s different. And I’m sure the audience readily would agree with me.

  “And, like we seldom got any applause, maybe one or two claps here and there and when the audience walked out they just walked out struck in a daze and a trance because they were just so shocked and amazed they didn’t know what to think. They didn’t know whether they were being put on or being put out or being put in or whatever you want to call it.

  “I must say the band did quite well without Lou Reed and Nico in Chicago, and they created their own little variations on ‘Heroin’ and ‘Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Venus In Furs’. Well, some of their sounds I must say, like that … those last two real, real fast songs are sort of like, I wouldn’t call them music Louis, I just call them noise. I hope I … did I hurt your feelings on that? Well is it supposed to be that, I mean are you doing that intentionally?”

  REED: (indistinct)

  INGRID: “You know, making all those noises and feedbacks and everything.”

  REED: (indistinct)

  INGRID: “Well, it’s something different to everybody. Everybody has their own opinion, but most of the people I’ve talked to at the shows, you know, I’ve asked them what do you think of the show, what did you think of the music? And they just scratched their heads, shook their heads and … in awe … and shock, and said I don’t know, I can’t describe it, it’s just different psychedelic music. It’s associated to sort of like a very intensified LSD trip.”

  REED: (indistinct)

  INGRID: “Oh, well, it is. A lot of people have told me that it does sound like that. It’s very fast and speeded up and intensified and hypertensial and hypersensitive …”

  REED: (indistinct)

  INGRID: “I think those last two songs are very psychedelic. The other songs they all tell a story, like ‘Venus In Furs’, and ‘Waiting For The Man’, and ‘Cast Your Troubles And Dreams Away’, to which I often get misty. And one thing I must say, Louis is a very good songwriter. Like when we were in Chicago, we gave a reading, Gerard, me and Angus MacLise, who was like their fill-in drummer, and John Cale. And when John Cale read off ‘Venus In Furs’, ‘Heroin’ and ‘Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams’, which is a very, very sentimental song. Well, Nico usually sings that song. And she usually sings it sitting down, while Louis has one leg perched up on a chair playing the guitar. And there are low lights, well there’s hardly any lights, and like there’s a big spotlight projected on Louis and Nico.”

  REED: (indistinct)

  THE DEATH OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ

  In July Delmore Schwartz died in New York. Gerard took Lou to the open casket wake held at Sigmund Schwartz Funeral Home, 152 Second Avenue. They arrived in the middle of a eulogy being delivered by Dwight MacDonald. A few heads turned, including that of M.L. Rosenthal, upon their stumbling in and finding places to sit in the rear of the room. Gerard wore a black tie for the occasion, although they were both wearing black denim jeans. Lou was silent throughout the entire series of eulogies and prayers. Upon departing a former female classmate and student of Schwartz recognized Lou in the crowd and hustled him into one of the limos and off they went to the burial service, leaving Gerard to return to the Factory. At the end of July Bob Dylan had a motorcycle accident in Woodstock and broke his neck.

  MORRISON: “Dylan was always lurking around, giving Nico songs. There was one film Andy made with Paul Caruso called The Bob Dylan Story. I don’t think Andy has ever shown it. It was hysterical. They got Marlowe Dupont to play Al Grossman. Paul Caruso not only looks like Bob Dylan but as a super caricature he makes even Hendrix look pale by comparison. This was around 1966 when the film was made and his hair
was way out here. When he was walking down the street you had to step out of his way. On the eve of the filming, Paul had a change of heart and got his hair cut off – close to his head and he must have removed about a foot so everyone was upset about that. Then Dylan had his accident and that was why the film was never shown.

  “By August the album was ready and we all went crazy wondering what was happening with the tapes. Some recordings got lost. I know that Zappa and his manager wanted to be first with their release on Verve. And we were totally naive. We didn’t have a manager who would go to the record company every day and just drag the whole thing through the mud.”

  UP-TIGHT IN PROVINCETOWN

  At the beginning of September The EPI entourage travelled to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Steve Sesnick had arranged for them to play on two consecutive days at Walter Chrysler’s Chrysler Art Museum. Apart from Mo, John, Lou, Sterling, Paul, Andy, Gerard, Ronnie, Mary and Faison, the troupe now also included Susan Bottomly (aka International Velvet) and her boyfriend, fashion illustrator David Croland, as well as Eric Emerson, a dancer and actor Andy and Paul had discovered at the Dom, who began living with Nico in Provincetown. These excerpts from the previously unpublished Secret Diaries of Gerard Malanga serve to illustrate the atmosphere within which The EPI was working.

  2 September 1966, Provincetown, Mass.

  Everyone is uptight for amphetamine. It’s great to see everybody frantic when you can work on your own juice and not have to think about where the next source of supply is going to come from. We’re all waiting in front of the museum to go to the beach.

  3 September 1966

  Early in the evening we did three shows at the Chrysler Art Museum. We wore mod fashions, got free flower print shirts, I adjusted the strobes to reflect on the body of a girl wearing a bikini. I inquire about her. Elena. She lives three quarters of the year at Florida, and spends her summers at Provincetown. I made it with her last night … 15 people stayed overnight. Wall to wall mattresses. I was just handed a letter Mary (Woronov) wrote to me when I was at Chicago three months ago. The letter travelled thousands of miles, passed through many hands and came to me still sealed. Got into an argument with Andy that was triggered by the accusation made that I didn’t clean up the dirty dishes, when in fact I hadn’t made anything for myself to eat, nor was I anywhere near the house when the mess was made, nor was I aware of the fact that there was a mess. The friends gathered tonight in the small room. Andy was acting very peculiar and seemed quite comfortable and happy, which seems peculiar.