Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  BOCKRIS: “Is it true that John Cale’s father is deaf and his mother is mute?”

  BETSEY JOHNSON: “No! His father’s got a coal-miner’s sense of humour. They don’t talk in Wales, they sing. He was very, very funny and their whole thing was watching Tom and Jerry. They had no cars on the street in Cumminford. We were there the Christmas of ’67. We lived together a year before we got married.”

  BOCKRIS: “When did you first become aware of The Velvet Underground?”

  JOHNSON: “When they asked me to do clothes. That must have been the linkage. That’s when I fell in love with John. Lou and I don’t and never did sync. It’s in the stars, because underneath John is an old-fashioned romantic who wants to come home and have the wife with apron, kiss and hello, scratch his back and get his slippers and pipe. After going to Wales I really understood what he was all about. The first real time I talked with The Velvets was on a work-collaboration. I figured that’s when we really had something to say to each other. Lou wanted grey suede. For Sterling and Maureen I did dark green and maroony velvets with all the little nail-head studs. But John wanted his hands to be on fire while he played. And he wanted to wear a mask. I think he wore masks a couple of times. I never did masks for him but I think he had them in black. I remember them a lot in Philadelphia and Boston. I thought that they were great. I mean, they were our band. I fell in love with John and we started living together when we were both in the Hotel Chelsea. Janis Joplin was there. Later I got a loft on La Guardia Place, and we were there for a while, and then we just decided to get married. The awful thing was The Ladies’ Home Journal, the Magazine of Togetherness, was very much interested in us freaks then. I must have established some kind of something for myself at Paraphernalia, the press was really great. Ladies’ Home Journal found out we were getting married and was going to pay for this huge bash. They just wanted to be there and photograph the freaky little rock’n’roll scene wedding ceremony and party even though we did it at City Hall. It was all set up and we had all the wedding invitations printed and they were all set to go to the mailbox and the day that they were supposed to go in the mail John was turning bright yellow! He went to the hospital and I said, ‘Well, dear, when shall I mail these out? I’ll wait for you to get your blood test.’ He didn’t even leave the hospital. He went straight into quarantine with hepatitis and a non-existent liver. He was in the hospital for four months. Then the doctors took a sample and he walked out with a perfect liver. They could not believe it! They were afraid he was going to kick over, he was so saffron. Ladies’ Home Journal was so outraged that they wanted me to go on with the whole wedding, go to City Hall, no John and then they said, ‘Well later we’ll take a picture of John and strip him in!’ Lou was not very happy John was getting married period, to me period. Because it was like two guys wanting to be stars. They were the perfect match, but they were the perfect mismatch in that their true-deep-down directional head for music was very different and I think John really respected Lou’s more commercial kind of ability. That was when the group was together because Lou was just … it was like the girl breaking up the group …”

  BOCKRIS: “What sort of financial state were they in at this point?”

  JOHNSON: “Well … I don’t remember chipping in. I loved John. I loved his work. I loved the group’s craziness. I had a place. I was making money. He didn’t have to worry about rent or food.”

  BOCKRIS: “It’s hard to know from this perspective to what extent The Velvets recognized their talent and lived the lifestyle to the full.”

  JOHNSON: “They never did. In the Sixties none of us did.”

  BOCKRIS: “It was always very uncertain?”

  JOHNSON: “The Velvets were totally insecure all the time I think. I worried that John was going to be alive every day, even though I didn’t want to know at all about what he was doing to himself. It was an on-the-edge kind of time every day. That was the great side of it.”

  BOCKRIS: “Was this vulnerability like, in a sense, a very strong paranoia or just sheer fragility of the creative being on the edge the whole time?”

  JOHNSON: “All of it. I never took a drug in the ’60s. I wanted to smoke grass but John could never smoke grass, so I never got introduced.”

  BOCKRIS: “Why not?”

  JOHNSON: “He’d get paranoid craziness. So I didn’t even go near. I thought he was real special because of that, that craziness to me was incredibly interesting. But especially after I moved away, too. He was really the kind that would be afraid to go out into the street – from paranoia or whatever makes you that way. I don’t think any of us were too secure outside of our little realm. I always felt very out of it because I was in a commercial business with a price-tag. I felt, they’re the creative people, I’m the commercial kind of thing. I had that kind of schedule to keep to.”

  BOCKRIS: “Did you get the sense that The Velvet Underground was John’s whole life?”

  JOHNSON: “Yeah! But then I remember Terry Riley and his peanut butter ‘Eat Me Out!’, being around a lot, and La Monte Young. Nico under the sink! Nico used to come over and live under my big stainless steel sink. And the whole loft was just music. We had a little bed in the corner.”

  BOCKRIS: “Did you see John’s personality breaking in two, in the sense that on the one hand he was a very creative personality balancing on the edge, on the other hand he had a very old-fashioned romantic sensibility?”

  JOHNSON: “Yeah … and on the other hand he always wanted that hit-45 or hit single. He’s the same way now.”

  FINKELSTEIN: “I could never figure out whether John Cale wanted to be Elvis Presley, the Frankenstein monster, or young Chopin.”

  THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO

  CALE: “We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible. On some tracks it worked. ‘Venus In Furs’ is the best, and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and ‘Sunday Morning’. The band never again had as good a producer as Tom Wilson. He did those songs, plus ‘Heroin’ and ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’. They were done in LA at Cameo-Parkway. Andy Warhol (credited prominently as producer) didn’t do anything; the rest were done by a businessman who came up with $1500 for us to go into a broken-down studio and record the thing. I wasn’t writing songs until Lou and I did ‘Little Sister’ for Nico’s Chelsea Girls LP. Whenever Lou and I worked together, I’d play piano and he would flip whatever version he had around it. I didn’t contribute lyrics to any of his songs; he contributed to some of mine. We collaborated slightly on ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ and, later, ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’. Most of it would be written, but a small part would be unresolved and Lou would resolve it.”

  SIDE ONE:

  ‘Sunday Morning’ was originally composed by Lou Reed and John Cale sitting at a piano together in a friend’s apartment at 6 a.m. one Sunday morning after being out all night (according to Lynne Tillman who was going out with Cale at the time).

  ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ is about scoring heroin in Harlem.

  ‘Femme Fatale’ was written for Nico, with Andy’s encouragement by Lou, partially in collaboration with Sterling Morrison.

  REED: “We wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ about somebody who was one, and has since been committed to an institution for being one. And will one day open up a school to train others.”

  ‘Venus In Furs’

  REED: “The prosaic truth is that I’d just read a book with this title by Leopold Sacher-Masoch and I thought it would make a great song title so I had to write a song to go with it. But it’s not necessarily what I’m into.”

  MORRISON: “We do love songs of every description. ‘Venus In Furs’ is just a different kind of love song (Malanga knelt on stage and kissed Mary Woronov’s black leather boots during this song). Everybody was saying this is the vision of all-time evil and I always said, ‘Well, we’re not going to lie.’ It’s pretty. ‘Venus In Furs’ is a beautiful song. It was the closest we ever came in my mind to
being exactly what I thought we could be. Always on the other songs I’m hearing what I’m hearing, but I’m also hearing what I wish I were hearing.”

  ‘Run Run Run’ is about Union Square, a notorious drug park, between 14th and 17th Streets in downtown Manhattan.

  ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, Andy Warhol’s all-time favourite Velvets’ song, was also written by Lou for Nico.

  SIDE TWO:

  ‘Heroin’

  MORRISON: “‘Heroin’ is a beautiful song too, possibly Reed’s greatest and a truthful one. It’s easy to rationalize about a song you like, but it should be pointed out that when Reed sings he’s only glamorizing heroin for people who want to die. The real damage, particularly in New York, has been done through the cult of personality. Rock fans have taken heroin thinking Lou took heroin, forgetting that the character in the song wasn’t necessarily Lou Reed.”

  REED: “I’m not advocating anything. It all happened quite simply at the start. It’s just that we had ‘Heroin’, ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Venus In Furs’ all on the first album, and that just about set the tone. It’s like we also had ‘Sunday Morning’ which was so pretty and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, but everyone psyched into the other stuff.

  ‘There She Goes Again’ is a tough song about a tough chick.

  ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’: Lou must have been in love with Nico when he wrote this beautiful, tender love song.

  ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ was a precursor in a number of different veins.

  MORRISON: “A good friend of ours who saw many shows (and even played bass in one at the Dom) Helen Byrne ran up to me after the release of the album and exclaimed, ‘“The Black Angel’s Death Song” … it’s got chords!’ Apparently she hadn’t noticed in the live performances. ‘Of course, it’s got chords!’ I replied. ‘It’s a song, isn’t it?’”

  ‘European Son’: Dedicated to Delmore Schwartz (who hated rock lyrics intensely, which is why the piece employed the fewest words on the album) simply because they wanted to dedicate something to him. John Cale ran a chair into some metal plates which scatter and sound like broken glass on this track.

  MORRISON: “‘European Son’ is very tame now. It happens to be melodic and if anyone actually listens to it, ‘European Son’ turns out to be comprehensible in the light of all that has come since, not just our work but everyone’s. It’s that just for the time it was done it’s amazing. We figured that on our first album it was a novel idea just to have long tracks. People just weren’t doing that – regardless of what the content of the track was – everyone’s album-cuts had to be 2:30 or 2:45. Then here’s ‘European Son’ which ran nearly eight minutes. All the songs on the first album are longish compared to the standards of the time.”

  “Their themes were perversity, desperation and death,” reads an RCA press-release for Lou Reed’s ‘Rock & Roll Diary’ (1978) describing The Velvet Underground. “Instead of celebrating psychedelic trips they showed us the devastating power, horror and false transcendence of heroin addiction; they dared to intimate that sado-masochism might have more to do with their – and our – reality than universal love. Musically as well as verbally they insisted that possibility, far from being limitless, was continually being stifled and foreclosed. At a time when hippie rock musicians were infatuated with the spontaneous jam, The Velvets’ music was cerebral, stylized. They maintained a poignant ironic tension between the tight, formal structure of the songs and their bursts of raw noise between their high artfulness and their street level content, between fatalism and rebellion.

  “Though The Velvets overall sound owed nearly as much to John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, it was Reed who defined the bands sensibility, embodied its contradictions. He was a romantic alienated bohemian and anti-romantic pop ironist, a middle-class Jewish kid from Brooklyn who came on like a street-wise punk in tight jeans and shades, a classical piano student turned rock’n’roller, Bob Dylan cum Nelson Algren cum Jean Genet. He talked his songs in an expressive semi-mumble that made you think of James Dean without the naiveté. Not that Lou did not display his own kind of innocence. His songs hinted, when you least expected it, that underneath the meanness and paranoia, the affectless brutality that smothered pain, there was after all the possibility of love. His depictions of urban hell contained occasional glimpses of redemption. Still, the inhabitants of Reed’s universe experienced love mainly through its absence; the glimpses were not only rare but as likely as not to be illusory.

  “The Velvet Underground and Nico came out the same year The Beatles released Sergeant Pepper. It offered an extended tour of the urban underworld that included the now classic ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Heroin’. The latter saga of a man on his way to spiritual death, fighting and embracing it at once, is the most profoundly moving and disturbing drug song ever written.”

  Fair enough in the “sensibility embodied by contradictions” department which is its main point, but the sound was an equal collaboration and anyone wanting to really appreciate the sound captured on their first album should imagine Cale, Morrison, Tucker and Reed in the studio together all banging away and pulling as hard as they can in their different directions, creating out of dissension a tension that lives today, while Warhol encouraged them with his confidence and support. As Danny Fields now says, “What Andy did was very generously reproduce the sound of The Velvets for them, making sure they got it down the way it sounded to him when he first fell in love with it.”

  While it cannot produce the effect of the combination of films, lights and dancing interacting with a live performance that was The EPI, The Velvet Underground and Nico produced by Andy Warhol is an extraordinarily, classic work arising out of their collaboration. “I was worried,” Andy says, “that it would all come out sounding too professional. But with The Velvets, I should have known I didn’t have to worry – one of the things that was so great about them was they always sounded raw and crude. Raw and crude was the way I liked our movies to look, and there’s a similarity between the sound in that album and the texture of Chelsea Girls, which came out at the same time.” The record did not, however, receive the same amount of front page coverage his film Chelsea Girls was getting. In fact, the album was banned on the radio in New York because of its content, unacceptable sound, and length of tracks.

  MORRISON: “Even advertising for the album was refused by the fledgling FM rock radio trip in NYC. AM advertising was likewise out of the question. Perhaps a restraint of trade suit was in order, but we just grit our teeth. WBAI (Bob Fass) was the only one who played the album; he would air a few cuts a night for a long time. Then we had a falling out over a bail-fund benefit at Thomkins Park, and even he wouldn’t play it. The silence was complete thereafter on the home front.”

  CUTRONE: “With songs like ‘Heroin’ you’re certainly not going to get any radio play in 1967. The Beatles were singing about broken relationships and ‘all you need is love’. ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ was the heaviest The Rolling Stones ever got. And then you get a group coming out and saying, ‘When I’m rushing on my run/I feel just like Jesus’ son,’ you’re not going to get any radio play – it’s as simple as that.”

  It was ironic that the music was banned in New York. They were the only band who spoke for the city, delineating so accurately the love-hate relationship it inspired. New York was an equivalent for The Velvet Underground of what Paris was for Baudelaire. In each case the city provided an existential justification for their creations. However, after the album was banned they refused to play New York with the intent of punishing the city by their absence. After the spring of 1967 The Velvet Underground didn’t play New York City again until they returned to Mickey Ruskin’s Max’s Kansas City in the summer of 1970.

  BOCKRIS: “Did you feel the reaction was flat considering what a striking record it was?”