Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  Meanwhile, as a taste of what was to mushroom out of what The EPI had pioneered, Timothy Leary was conducting his Celebrations for the League of Spiritual Discovery (LSD) around the corner at the Village Theater that would later become the Fillmore East. Standing in front of films upon which he projected slides and working with various celebrity guests like Allen Ginsberg, Leary was doing his own Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In June Denis Deegan, catalyst extraordinaire, a friend of Warhol and Malanga’s called from Paris with a series of concert bookings for The EPI. This offer was, however, never taken seriously by Andy, and the opportunity for the group to cross the Atlantic, which might have made a big difference in their future, was passed up.

  (This tape was made by Nat Finkelstein of Lou Reed talking about his music at the Factory in the Fall of 1966.)

  REED: “All by myself. No one to talk to. This is very peculiar. Come over here so I can talk to you. It’s very hard for me to sit here with a microphone like this. No, you just come over here so I’m talking to you, or go over there so I don’t see you. One or the other.

  “We were playing together a long time ago, in a $30-a-month apartment and we really didn’t have any money, and we used to eat oatmeal all day and all night and give blood to (indistinct) among other things, or pose for these nickel or 150 tabloids they have every week. And when I posed for them, my picture came out and it said I was a sex maniac killer that had killed 14 children and tape recorded it and played it in a barn in Kansas at midnight. And when John’s picture came out in the paper, it said he had killed his lover because his lover was going to marry his sister, and he didn’t want his sister to marry a fag.

  “And then we decided that since we were playing all the time anyway, why not try to get paid for it, so we ended up at a terrible coffee house working six sets a night, seven nights a week, $5 a man a night, and that lasted a week-and-a-half and we were fired, because they hated our music so much.

  “And then we met Andy. And we’re now able to play the kind of stuff we really like to play. Well we always have played the stuff we really like to play, but now we can play it and not get fired from terrible coffee houses. We’ve had so many ideas about things, we wanted to get lots of cheap Japanese guitars and string them and tune them all right and lots of amplifiers and they’d all be humming to different pitches and we can play against them.

  “Or we wanted to have 30 metronomes with contact mikes all over them, so when you walked in … you walk into a theatre and there’d be no seats, everybody would be on the floor and Andy’s silver balloons would be all over the place with his cows on the ceiling and on the walls and on the floor, and the metronomes would be going, electrified, and Mo would be playing a drum solo against it and Sterl and me and John would just be watching.

  “Then John had an idea about the electric eyes they have in supermarkets when you walk through the electric eye it makes the door open. Well, if we had an electric eye that could change pitch, and was fed by solar energy, sunlight for instance, then if we played outdoors, depending on the weather conditions, and cloud formations and everything, that would determine the pitch. Music of the earth.

  “We want to play a recital hall because that’s where rock’n’roll should be as opposed to serious music, by serious dead people. And that’s really awful.

  “We’ve been trying to get Sterling to play the trumpet again, but he won’t. He’s too busy looking for a psychiatrist to get out of the army.

  “One of the nice things is working with Andy because he thinks the same way and lets anyone do whatever they want, which is always nice. One of the ideas he came up with, which was very beautiful, was that we should rehearse on stage, because the best music always takes place in rehearsals, so why not rehearse on stage, which was the best idea probably anyone had come up with.

  “But now everything’s changing because we’re getting more and more equipment and the ideas are just opening up so fast, so quickly, that the best thing is not to be able to play an instrument. We were thinking of taking Mo and blindfolding her and plugging her ears up, and then she’d be able to play along with us because you can never be out of rhythm. There’s no such thing as being out of rhythm or being out of time. It’s very nice playing. Especially with Andy’s movies, ’cause our music’s like Andy’s movies and Andy’s movies are like our music, and they just go together. For instance, Andy did a photograph of a banana for the album cover, and now I’ve just seen a blow-up of the banana and it’s really gotten huge and enveloped all other types of significance as a banana. It’s an extremely pretty sexy banana, and the album cover peels which is nice, to reveal the inside of a very sexy, groovy banana.

  “What we really would like is oh, if we had bagpipes or if we had a lot more violins and thousands of guitars and what we really want to do is build machines if we could get some money, we’d build machines, we never seem to have money because every time we do a show everyone says oh, this show has to be the most fantastic of all, and so we run out and get more projectors and more lights and more instruments and so the show is fantastic and we’re broke, which has always been the way it is.

  “But it’s nice making something pretty.

  “Some of the music we really like is records by The El Doradoes or The Harpchords, all the really very nice old, old records. The El Chords, The Starlighters, ‘Valerie’, Alicia and The Rockaways, Buster Brown, Bo Diddley.

  “Everyone’s going crazy over the old blues people, but they’re forgetting about all those groups, like The Spaniels, people like that. Records like ‘Smoke From Your Cigarette’, and ‘I Need A Sunday Kind Of Love’, ‘The Wind’ by The Chesters, ‘Later For You, Baby’ by The Solitaires. All those really ferocious records that no one seems to listen to anymore are underneath everything we’re playing. No one really knows that. But the records everyone’s making now are just fabulous. Everything’s fabulous. Everything’s absolutely better than it’s ever been. Because all the people are getting so beautiful. The young people are getting beautiful, and that’s why very young people like music, because the music’s very beautiful and if it scares people it’s because the people are that way, and they’re scared anyway. But our stuff’s very pretty. The show is very pretty and Andy is very beautiful, because he lets it happen.

  “We’re attacked constantly. No one ever writes anything nice about us, or even looks at it very seriously, which is fine. You get tired of being called obscene. It just seems to go on and on and on and on and on. We’re going to use all the putdowns for the liner-notes on the album. Anyone who writes for a newspaper or something has to be sick. People who criticize other people. There must be a reason for it. They must have something else to do. Why don’t they go do something with themselves. They think it’s so easy.

  “Our favourite quote was ‘the flowers of evil are in bloom. Someone has to stamp them out before they spread.’

  “What the music really has to do with is electricity. Electricity and different types of machines. One of the ideas we had was like, for instance, John would be playing one of his viola solos and we’d have two jack-cords coming out of the viola; in other words, he’d have two, three, four contact-mikes on the viola, put into two, three, four different amplifiers, and then Nico and me and Mo would control each amplifier. One amplifier would be concerned with the bass and another amplifier would be concerned with volume, and another one … or we could have a mixer, or we could have lots of mixers and what we would all be playing John is what it would amount to.

  “Or another version of it is if Mo, John and Sterl are playing and I play the amplifier. And we have a number that we did using that where John has a thunder machine, which is a fabulous instrument and the only kind in the entire world. It’s in our apartment on West 3rd Street. Our new apartment. We’re being evicted. And we were playing again today and for the second time a cop came up and threatened us, but he doesn’t like the music and he told us to go into the country if we were going to play that way or be that way. H
e also stopped us at the door once and accused us of throwing human shit out the window. And what’s worse is that we thought it was just possible.

  “We play in the dark so that the music’s just there.

  “Andy had a great idea for ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ at the end. We would have the record fixed with a built-in crack so it would go, ‘I’ll be your mirror, I’ll be your mirror, I’ll be your mirror,’ so that it would never ever reject, it would just play and play until you came over and took the arm off.

  “Our music’s for the pretty people, all the beautiful people. We’re just starting, if we ever got any bread, to build some of the machines we’d like to build, there’d be no end to what’s happening.

  “A lot of it just takes a little bit of money. John wanted to get car horns, go down to used car lots, or the car dump and just get car horns. Thousands and thousands of car horns and wire them, so they don’t stop.

  “At the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, we played one particularly good set. Towards the end of the set we did one of our instrumental numbers, we set all the instruments up, turned them on, had them running, so they were humming by themselves and we all played drums and as the instruments played themselves we finally left the stage and they played and played and played, and we told the other group, why don’t you leave our machines on and you can play against them. But by then the manager of the theatre had gotten afraid, and because he was scared he turned all the machines off.

  “Anybody who made love to our music wouldn’t necessarily need a partner. Andy mentioned that some of the records we’re doing end up sounding so professional. No one wants it to sound professional. It’s so much nicer to play into one very cheap mike. That’s the way it sounds when you hear it live and that’s the way it should sound on the record.

  “In the album we had out we wanted to have one professional record and one unprofessional record and then one backwards record. No beginning, no middle, no end. Angus’s ‘Crystal’ tape was sent back from a record company for that reason; they said they couldn’t differentiate between the beginning, the middle and the end. They missed it.

  “Sometimes we set our instruments up so that anyone can play them and it would be nice to manufacture a guitar that’s just a book to tell people this instrument can be played, all you have to do is touch it. So that way the guitar has its particular sound. You touch it it makes its sound. People have their sound. If you touch them in the right spot they make it. Trees. Concrete, plastic. It’s unfair of people to ask you to be concerned about them dropping dead in your room. You have to concentrate on your tape recordings. If you push them on high enough you can bow it like a string. And then eventually you don’t need a bow.

  “John had a composition once which involved taking everybody out into the woods and having them follow the wind. As of late though we play indoors so we have to be the weather.”

  CRUSADING

  MORRISON: “We never did anything to ingratiate ourselves with the media, through lack of interest more than arrogance. I was convinced that if it was going to happen it would happen anyway. We were all really contemptuous of hype. Crusading was the word I always used. It took absolute conviction that we were doing the right thing – that was the only thing that could sustain us.

  “In the Fall of 1966 John and I got a place on E 10th Street just east of First Avenue. Shortly thereafter, Lou got his place on E10th just west of First Avenue, so the three of us were living about 50 yards apart. We would have lived together if we could have found a place large enough. We were hanging around together day and night.”

  From the end of October through the middle of December The EPI played a number of dates in the Midwest, Canada and on the East Coast. The following extracts from The Secret Diaries of Gerard Malanga give a unique sense of life on the road with The EPI.

  October 29, 1966

  Today Benedetta (Barzini, Malanga’s love obsession at the time), Rona (Page, who starred in the Pope Ondine sequence of Chelsea Girls) and Rene (Ricard, poet) and I are to go to Boston for an Exploding Plastic Inevitable show with The Velvet Underground and Nico and films by Andy. Also Andy has a show of his paintings in an adjoining exhibition room of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Arts. We reach Boston; we take our belongings and bags over to Gordon’s (Baldwin, architectural artist) apartment. He gives us his bedroom to have for the night.

  We rush over to the Contemporary Arts Institute just in time to prepare for the first show. In the meantime, the movies, including Vinyl, are being projected and two spotlights are aimed directly upon the revolving mirror-ball giving the entire auditorium a luminous revolving atmosphere. The movies end; The Velvets, one by one, walk onto the stage and prepare setting up and tuning their instruments. After about 15-minutes into their first number I walk on the stage and begin my interpretative dancing to the electronic sounds being projected out into the audience. Rona and Ronnie (Cutrone) join me on stage for the last long number. I interpret an entire Crucifixion scene with Rona standing behind me, arms outstretched with two flashlights in each hand, aiming their beams through my outstretched arms, at the audience.

  BOSTON, October 30, 1966

  We were to do a show this evening in a small town outside of Boston. The first show was in the late afternoon. Benedetta became extremely nervous and said she couldn’t stay for the second show and that she had to get back to New York. I decided it would be foolish of me to stay behind with Andy and The Velvets and instead decided, along with Rene and John (Wieners, poet), to go to New York with Benedetta. We immediately left after the end of the first show. Andy was quite annoyed with me, but even more annoyed with Benedetta for acting as an unconscious influence.

  MORRISON: “The show took place in a converted airplane hangar in Leicester, Mass. The promoter was John Sdoucos from Boston and he had assembled an audience of young teenies to see us. I remember looking at them sadly and thinking that they were too young and innocent to be exposed to our music. I didn’t think there was any reason why they should like it and I hoped they wouldn’t. I needn’t have worried. They didn’t.

  October 31, 1966.

  I tell Benedetta that everyone, including Andy, The Velvets and Paul feel that I am the most replaceable in the show because of my abrupt departure last Sunday before the last show. The Velvets and Andy don’t realize that I am the irreplaceable part of the show because no other dancer could interpret The Velvets’ music as well as build up a concrete structure of dance around their music and the light show, and interpret their music into choreographic arrangements the way I could. No one will be dancing with me on stage. Last week The Velvets tried to dump Nico. This week they’re trying to dump me. John Cale blackmailed Paul into giving him money at the airport before going to Chicago last June. He admitted his guilt jokingly one night last week in front of Paul and me when going to Paul’s apartment to sleep. Faison carelessly neglected to bring the strobe lights to Boston. He also held up the show. Andy didn’t tell me, when I spoke to him on Sunday at approximately 1:20, that there would be a 3 p.m. show that same afternoon at Leicester.

  The changes that would lead to the end of this group collaboration continued. The Velvets no longer rehearsed at the Factory, although they all continued to drop by and never really stopped.

  At the beginning of November they went out on the road for a brief tour of Ohio.

  November 2, 1966

  This is my last night in New York with Benedetta before leaving for my round-the-states tour of Ohio with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

  November 3, 1966

  I meet The Velvets and Nico and Paul at the Factory (Andy didn’t go on this tour again, because he wasn’t needed). We ride out to the airport to catch a jet to Cincinnati our first stop on the tour.

  NEW YORK–CINCINNATI

  The Velvet Underground, Nico, Paul and I are at Cincinnati. My head is about to burst from all the amphetamine I took before boarding the jet in New York.

  November 4, 1966


  Last night The Velvets quit playing and wouldn’t let Nico sing. John and Lou have yellow eyes and might end up in the hospital. Nico has plans to leave the group. Paul suggests it wouldn’t be a bad idea if I leave the group, also. Nico doesn’t know if she wants to sing with the group.

  November 5, 1966

  Today Paul, Nico and I took pictures in the Columbus, Ohio bus terminal. We’re on our way to Wheeling, West Virginia to do a concert for $900.00 at the University of West Virginia. On the bus from Columbus to Wheeling, Nico is sitting beside me. I look at her and remember at one time we had an intense relationship which has developed into a lifelong friendship.