Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  November 6, 1966

  Sitting with Paul in the front part of the bus. Left Pittsburgh one hour ago. On the last leg of our tour to Cleveland with hope that we can board Flight No. 146 to New York without any hassles. Lou Reed’s sister Elizabeth, who was a student, showed up at the Cleveland gig. She immediately reminded me of Suzanne Pleshette.

  MORRISON: “I don’t remember seeing Lou’s sister at this time, but met her later at one of the La Cave dates. Lou obviously liked his sister, and was very protective of her. This was a weakness that John and I could not help but exploit for our amusement. The technique by then had been well established, each of us being impervious to direct abuse from any of the others. What you had to do was get at them through people they cared about in their ‘personal’ lives, by rudeness, slander, or whatever. So when Lou walked into the dressing room and announced that his sister was going to drop in, and would we please try to act like humans, John and I leaped at the chance to make merry at his expense. We began with speculation about his sister’s maidenly virtue, or lack thereof, and conjured up lurid visions of her secret life as a coed. Horrified, Lou expressed strong displeasure with this conversation. John and I pressed on happily, delighted with Lou’s response, each of us offering to pay the other $100 if he could seduce this unseen sister, with the amount to double if she turned out to be ugly. Lou was almost speechless, but did manage a few phrases of profound loathing as John and I laughed and laughed.

  Later Lou’s sister did drop in for a moment, and seemed pleasant enough.

  2:45 a.m. November 7, 1966

  John, Nico, Paul and myself are on board United Flight #146 en route to Newark Airport, making one stop at Philadelphia. We are above the clouds. I see only darkness outside my window. The lights inside the cabin of the jet have not been turned off. I wish they would be, so I could get some sleep. I feel like I’m up on the amphetamine I took yesterday with the coffee I drank.

  By the time they went to Hamilton, Ontario in Canada, November 12, 1966 even an art magazine was billing them as The Velvet Underground and putting Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable in small letters, although Barry Lord writing for Arts/Canada still saw The EPI as a visionary Warhol work: “His interest in the reputation of an image screened at different values of detail and intensity led naturally to the newspaper photograph, and thereby to the motion picture: the successive frames of a film are a vertical correlate of the still photo reproduced with varying screens, and a Warhol film, like the one of the Empire State Building with its lights going on and off over a period of many hours, is a logical extension of works like the Jackie Kennedy series, where the uneven screen sets up a comparable play of light values on an immediately recognizable image.

  “These characteristics – significant distortion of the image, interest in the visual and psychological results of its repetition, collaboration with others, the maintenance of a single environmental effect through experienced time, and a concern with mechanically produced light effects are evident in Warhol’s latest work, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Inevitable is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor cinema; it cannot be called a happening, since it recurs at regular intervals on schedule. Nor is it an environment limited to one place, as McMaster University in Hamilton proved by inviting it up to open an arts festival in November.

  “On a wide screen behind the stage, Vinyl, a film by Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s foreman in his New York art factory, was projected from two machines: to the right, the first part of the film, in which Malanga dances, exercises, sits watching a man and a girl, and finally becomes aggressive; to the left, shown in the same time period, the second part, in which Malanga is beaten, stripped to the waist, and bound to a chair with his head encased in a black vinyl hood covered with metal studs. The same persons remain or re-appear in both halves, so that we are watching two images similar in general character, but significantly different in specific detail – a cinematic equivalent to the repeated faces of Marilyn and Liz in Warhol’s screened paintings of several years ago. The loudspeakers provided sound, the film dialogue purposely distorted on one track, and on the other the recorded sound of The Velvet Underground, the group which Warhol chose to play with The Inevitable.

  “Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s art foreman and film-maker, is also the group’s dancer. Before a constantly flickering battery of strobe lights, Malanga uses a variety of props – a Marlon Brando shirt, a variety of sashes and ropes, and spoon and gear for a ‘fix’ in the set piece ‘Heroin’. Sometimes he used the strobes directly, sometimes a candle suggesting again the Warhol interest in light values. The final half-hour song created an environment in time as well as place, so that it began to seem to at least some of the McMaster audience as if life had always been this way. To others, it had been a con-fusing, noisy, probably frightening experience, and when the lights went up it was found that a good number had left. The ones who stayed had been a little more than an audience; like the newspaper photographs and Brillo boxes that Andy formerly used, they had become part of a Warhol art work.”

  Returning from this job in Hamilton, Ontario, outside Toronto, it was discovered that Nico had purposely left her German passport, which had expired, in New York because she didn’t want anyone to discover her birth-date. Consequently she had to be smuggled back into the States through a minor border checkpoint. Her vanity almost caused her to be detained in Canada.

  The troupe played a pop wedding at which Andy gave the bride away to the tune of The Velvets doing ‘Here Comes The Bride’ then moved on to their most pop-oriented show so far, The Detroit Music Festival hosted by Dick Clark at which they played on the same bill with The Yardbirds. Everybody was very up-tight. Jeff Beck was carrying a gun in his guitar case.

  DESPITE ALL THE AMPUTATIONS

  RONNIE CUTRONE: “You couldn’t blow your cool ever. You were not allowed to be a human being even. Everything worked through guilt and paranoia.”

  1. 1967 – THE BANANA YEAR

  Nico had always been a problem. She wanted to sing all the songs. What was she supposed to do when she wasn’t singing? Looked at from today it seems just right – the tall, thin, hauntingly beautiful blonde in a white suit standing in front of four thin guys (it took people some time to catch on that Maureen was a … chick) in black wearing sunglasses – but then, Nico was uptight. She didn’t have anything to do. She felt uncomfortable just standing there. Why couldn’t she sing more songs? Nico was always very unhappy. Everybody was uptight. Lou was always jealous of her. It all came to a head one day when he stormed into the Factory screaming, “So she photographs great in high contrast black and white, I’m not playing with her anymore!” The record’s release had been delayed. A special machine had to be made to make the original cover, on which the banana peeled. Zappa’s Mothers of Invention ‘Freak Out’ record had already been released. Nico was still playing downstairs in the small bar called Stanley’s. She stood behind the bar backed by an acoustic guitar. Sterling says that he, John and Lou took turns as did Rambling Jack Elliott, Tim Hardin (who Paul called ‘Tim Heroin’), Tim Buckley and Jackson Browne, who was living with Nico on Columbus Avenue at 51st Street. They still ran the films behind her. Paul Morrissey was pushing Nico’s solo career. The press continued to pay attention to the “Andy Warhol Superstar”. Paul was always trying to persuade Nico to stop taking drugs. Among other personalities on the scene an earnest Leonard Cohen attended her every performance, and later made use of some of her techniques on his own recordings.

  By the time The Velvet Underground And Nico Produced By Andy Warhol (which is how the first album is represented) was released in March, 1967, The EPI was naturally dissolving.

  BOCKRIS: “How were you feeling when the record came out?”

  TUCKER: “I was very excited. I ran out to the store and bought one.”

  BOCKRIS: “Didn’t they give you a copy?”

  TUCKER: “Oh yeah, but I wanted to buy one. Finding it in stores was nice, but that didn’t las
t long because MGM fucked up. They didn’t really distribute it at all. But I was very excited, and Sterling was too, as I recall, and I’m sure John and Lou were thrilled.”

  MORRISON: “I was never more excited about anything, and used to call up Cashbox to find out our chart position before the magazine hit the stands. I couldn’t wait to know.”

  BOCKRIS: “What were you doing in March?”

  TUCKER: “I lived on Long Island during the group’s days, so I didn’t really hang out much, because they were all in the city. I don’t think Sterling and Lou did that much socializing really. They might meet at Max’s by chance, but they didn’t hang out together that much.”

  MORRISON: “We lived close by, and were together most of the time. We went to Max’s every night that we were in town. That’s where our friends were.”

  MORRISSEY: “As soon as the record came out The Velvets didn’t want to work anymore. They thought they became very famous when their album was finally released. I think they just wanted to separate from Andy, although we went on tour with them all over the country! I forget who booked that tour but God Almighty I could never forget that gruelling ordeal on the buses. We were going on buses! We got all these bookings.”

  The success of Chelsea Girls, which was now showing in a major theatre in New York, had drawn Andy and Paul into the movie business. During ’66 they had spent little time filming anything except Chelsea Girls, focusing the majority of their time on The EPI. Now as Andy began the incessant filming that was to lead to the 24-hour movie released at the end of ’67, the focus of his attention was shifting. In essence they had done everything they could with the rock’n’roll genre – in the space of one year isolated and frozen for inspection several groundbreaking ideas – and they could see that any further collaboration was not going to lead to anything different.

  MORRISON: “Antonioni wanted to use us as the band in the rock club sequence in Blow-up, and we were more than willing. However, the expense of bringing the whole entourage to England proved too much for him. The sequence was one of the last things to be shot in the film, and he was running low on funds. So he used The Yardbirds doing a Who impersonation.”

  MALANGA: “Are you surprised by the longevity of The Velvets now?”

  MORRISSEY: “I am in a way, but I do think it was good music, it was a good album, it was different, it was unusual. I think most of the songs were really good. They certainly were an innovation, but you know we went on tour with them, I was a manager of the goddamn thing for almost a year or more and I remember, because they never released the album, but once the album came out I think that’s when they wanted to go off and be themselves, and not have any revenue go back to Andy and me, and they didn’t want to do anything. They said they didn’t want to work and suddenly the whole thing was over. The album didn’t take off or anything right away.”

  BOCKRIS: “What was Andy’s take on working with The Velvets?”

  CUTRONE: “It was great for Andy because he got a totally captive audience to watch such films as Eat and Sleep, whereas before the general public would see it as a curio, last twenty minutes into the film and split, or sit it out just to be cool. Now here was a way to display his films – the boring ones are great classics but they’re still boring – and have an audience totally captive watching a man eat an apple in a rocking chair. That was a giant breakthrough.”

  BOCKRIS: “Was their career largely based on intuition?”

  CUTRONE: “I think it was largely as unspoken as possible, because you have to remember that being cool then was really important. And you couldn’t blow your cool ever. You were not allowed to be a human being even. Everything worked through guilt and paranoia and through what feels best and what looks best that night. It was pretty much surface. I mean, however deep and intense the music was. One of Andy’s famous quotes from that period is, ‘Your worst reviews are your best reviews.’ So, from the I-will-not-budge-an-inch attitude, their bad reviews were the kind of publicity that set The Velvets apart from anybody else. From a dollars-and-cents point of view that was not too cool. That was just like, you know, ‘Uh, uh, we hope we make some money here too.’ So there were mixed feelings about the critical reactions. The Velvets always got put down but instantly other groups started recognizing that art sometimes goes with music and they could really cash in on captivating an audience in that particular way and giving them not only music but visuals, and then it just took off.”

  MALANGA: “There was always a problem between Lou and John ultimately when it came to who was the leader of the group.”

  MORRISSEY: “Well, you know, I don’t think so. I think John idolized Lou. And he thought anything Lou said was wonderful and Lou knew. And when Lou was against Nico, John was a thousand times against Nico 100 per cent. In the end Andy’s connection with The Velvet Underground, like anything that happens to Andy, just made a gold-mine of good fortune for him and he became identified with rock’n’roll and the young generation. So, in a way, it was the best thing that ever happened to Andy to connect with a group that became that well known. So, in a way, it was a very good thing that happened to him. But I did it hoping to make some money. Do you remember we went to a place in Detroit with Dick Clark and they gave us a cheque, it was a two-party cheque, and I never could collect the two-thousand five-hundred dollars, because it had only one signature on it? Oh, it was all so awful, that life. I always felt sorry for rock’n’rollers afterwards, what a horrible life they lead running around to these horrible things. But we worked with The Velvets from the beginning for pure commercial reasons.”

  It is one of the paradoxes of Warhol’s career that he is constantly criticized for being too much of a businessman to be an artist, and that his major motivation is money. After doing great innovative work in a field, he often immediately left it for others to reap the sometimes great financial benefits. This was particularly true in his film work (i.e., My Hustler in terms of its influence on John Schlesinger’s very successful Midnight Cowboy). Warhol’s films deserve the highest praise for doing the ultimate in art – making people see life differently, as it really is. His work during 1966 in rock, where he literally created the light show and developed the whole multimedia dimension that was gobbled up by every conceivable rock entrepreneur, is still hardly credited in the plethora of rock histories that have been published.

  The Velvets had made a great record, and were at the vortex of the most creative scene in New York when it came out, but they were not feeling as great as we might imagine. MGM was trying to do something new with its Verve label by bringing out some freaky records, but everybody got uptight when it was noticed that The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out album was getting all the publicity. MGM either didn’t understand The Velvets, or were censoring their subject matter and sound. It’s also true, however, that Zappa had a rock’n’roll manager Herb Cohen, who was experienced at working with music industry executives, whereas Warhol and Morrissey were not. The group sorely needed some business muscle in the music industry which is where they were getting ignored. While The EPI had a good electrician who knew how to work a fuse-box, a good roadie, good projectionists, good dancers, good photographers, great musicians and fabulous art directors, The Velvet Underground didn’t have anyone who really just wanted to be a good business person for them, which is probably the major factor in the faltering momentum of The EPI Velvet Underground that became apparent. But then again, even if they had been able to get the gritty business together, they’d really done what they set out to do.

  In the face of this total lack of support from their record label The EPI once again joined forces and played Rhode Island School of Design. On April 11 they returned to the scene of their first real triumph, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where they played for the Architecture School. At a party after the show a young man called Jim Osterburg, aka Iggy Pop, caught his first glimpse of The Velvets, Andy and Nico who was playing with them again.

  In April, the son of
the Dom’s Polish owner approached Andy with an idea for a new club in New York. Originally a Czechoslovakian health and social club in the East 70s, it was called the Gymnasium. The idea was to leave all the gym equipment for the guests to play on. The EPI played there and tried to resuscitate the atmosphere they had created the previous April at the Dom, but they couldn’t get an exclusive lease on the place and the location was poor.

  CHRIS STEIN: “Everything picked up when Sgt Pepper came out in 1967. I used to play out in Brooklyn with my friends’ bands. It was just an ongoing thing, it wasn’t career oriented, it was just communication. Everybody was always on the periphery of the art scene and I had this friend who was a cute little boy with superlong blond hair who was a gofer for Andy at the Factory. One night he said, ‘Listen, I can get you guys a gig opening for The Velvet Underground at the Gymnasium.’ I had never seen The Velvet Underground but we had the Banana album and everybody knew who they were, so we said, ‘Oh fantastic!’ The night of the gig we got on the subway with our instruments and we were totally hippied out. We had balloons and a couple of girlfriends and everybody was dressed in beads and feathers. It was like a be-in on the subway floating towards Manhattan. We were ready to go, although we had previously only played in the living room or the basement.

  “It was pretty late at night by the time we got out of the subway in Manhattan and headed toward the Gymnasium. Walking down the block with our guitars we actually saw some people coming down the street and they said, ‘Oh, are you guys the band, because we’ve been waiting there all night and we couldn’t take it anymore, we left because they never showed up.’ So we said, ‘Yeah, we’re the band.’ We went inside and there was hardly anyone there. Somebody said Andy was supposed to be there, but he was off in the shadows with his entourage, we never saw him. We hung around for a little while and they played records, then we headed up for the stage. It was a big echoey place, we had absolutely no conception of playing a place like this whatsoever, but Maureen Tucker said we could use their equipment. So we plugged into their amps and the amps were all cranked up superloud. All Maureen had was a bass drum and a snare drum, but they were both turned on their side so the drummer was completely thrown off, but she said, ‘Well, it’s okay, you can put them right side up,’ and somehow they produced a bass pedal from somewhere. Then we tried to play, but we were totally floored because we couldn’t play in this huge resounding echo. It was a giant gymnasium with basketball hoops and everything was echoing so we couldn’t really handle that, but we hacked our way through our little blues songs and people sort of watched us at first and then some of them tried to dance. The only song I remember doing was ‘You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover’. We must have done a few more, but I remember sitting down after a while because the whole thing had gotten me pretty discouraged. Then somebody came over and said, ‘Oh Andy likes you, he thinks you’re great.’ We must have played five or six songs then we just gave up. By that time the rest of The Velvets had arrived. After a while they started to play and they were like awesomely powerful. I had never expected to experience anything like that before. They just completely filled up the whole room with their sound. They were really into this huge fucking volume, and it was completely awesome. I was really disappointed that they didn’t have Nico, because we thought she was the lead singer, but I distinctly remember the violin and their doing ‘Venus In Furs’ because a couple of people in dark outfits got up and started doing a slow dance with a chain in between them. They did practically all the stuff from the Banana album. There were maybe thirty people there. It was very late, but it was a memorable experience. It was the dominant confident power of the whole thing that stayed with me.”