Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  LINICH: “Coming back from Philip Johnson’s they were trying to decide whether or not Steve should be their manager. I sensed they were in need of a professional arm, so to speak, to deal with the music and record industry. That they were actually not suited, or didn’t want, to do that themselves – they wanted to make music. They really needed a professional who was capable of doing that. As far as Steve goes, I know he was a lot of mouth. I didn’t think he had connections or anything like that. However, there was no one else bidding for the job so I recommended that they take a positive stance and just do it. There was no other option and they would just have stagnated otherwise.”

  BOCKRIS: “Were you involved in the conversations about Steve Sesnick managing you?”

  TUCKER: “Yeah, I remember being in the car driving back from Johnson’s. As I recall it was a limousine.”

  BOCKRIS: “Steve was not in the car?”

  TUCKER: “No.”

  BOCKRIS: “On what basis was that decision made?”

  TUCKER: “We all just felt that he was more our style. There were a couple of other guys lurking and they wanted to manage us, but they were just too businessey and I think we thought we wouldn’t relate to them too well. And Sesnick was much more our type of person. And he was very enthusiastic. The other guys were too, but they were business-types, they weren’t hippies. Two gentlemen in suits. I don’t know if they heard us play somewhere … or read about us; but they came to Philip Johnson’s to listen to us and talk to us, too.”

  BOCKRIS: “Billy Linich was in the car with The Velvets driving back from the Philip Johnson gig in the summer of ’67, which is the time they apparently had a long conversation about agreeing to go with your proposal to manage them …”

  SESNICK: “I see …”

  BOCKRIS: “I don’t know if you’re aware of that …”

  SESNICK: “Billy liked me very much as I remember.”

  BOCKRIS: “Billy was apparently the one who suggested they should go with you.”

  SESNICK: “I believe that’s accurate, yes.”

  BOCKRIS: “He told us that and Maureen was in the car and remembered it quite well, too. So for the sake of historical accuracy is it correct that you formally became their manager in the summer of 1967?”

  SESNICK: “Yes, I would say yeah.”

  BOCKRIS: “This must have been an extreme change for you to suddenly achieve this goal that you have been wanting to achieve for some time. From what Maureen told me it was very much of a full-time job.”

  SESNICK: “It certainly was!”

  BOCKRIS: “Did you move to New York at that point?”

  SESNICK: “Later. But there was quite a bit that went on prior to that decision being finalized. There were months of negotiations with various people acting as messengers between Lou and myself and the group, so there was quite a bit of time that was spent that spring and summer before it was settled.”

  BOCKRIS: “What was the nature of these negotiations?”

  SESNICK: “Those are the things I don’t want to talk about.”

  FIELDS: “It was so weird for them to go from whom they had been with, which was us, to Steve Sesnick. It’s like your daughter marrying someone from the wrong race. He wasn’t so bad after all. He was devoted to them. He just wasn’t our kind of person. He kept them together for a period of time.”

  BOCKRIS: “When you were managing them were you still trying to make some arrangements with Brian Epstein to do things together?”

  SESNICK: “Publishing.”

  BOCKRIS: “He was trying to buy the publishing rights to their music?”

  SESNICK: “That’s correct. It had nothing to do with management.”

  BOCKRIS: “He was not approaching them on the basis of trying to manage them?”

  SESNICK: “No.”

  BOCKRIS: “Is it true that he proposed to arrange a European tour for them?”

  SESNICK: “Not to my knowledge. I had no negotiations or discussion with him about that.”

  BOCKRIS: “When did Brian Epstein come into the picture?”

  TUCKER: “When Sesnick was first managing us. Sesnick met him through Lester Persky.”

  BOCKRIS: “But if Sesnick was managing you, why would he introduce you to Brian Epstein, who was apparently offering to manage you himself?”

  TUCKER: “I suppose there was some deal they could have struck. Maybe he had it in mind to get us on Capitol.”

  FIELDS: “I had given Brian the Banana album once and one night I was with Lou at Max’s and Brian came in briefly. He said he was on his way uptown. I went outside to his limousine with him and then I said, ‘Wait a minute, I have an idea.’ And ran back in and said to Lou, ‘This is your big chance to talk to Brian Epstein, come uptown.’ He got in the car but there was like total silence because they were both too proud to say anything to each other. We’re on our way to Ondine (the disco). Finally Brian leaned over and said, ‘Danny recommended this album to me and I took it to Mexico with my lover. It was the only album we had there. We rented a phonograph, but we couldn’t get any more albums, so we listened to it day and night on the beach in Acapulco. Consequently my memory of my whole week in paradise was your album.’ They dropped us at Ondine’s and then Lou had to take a taxi back to Max’s because he was really in the middle of a conversation. I dragged him out and nothing happened. Brian Epstein didn’t want to manage The Velvets. He didn’t want anything. He was just looking around. He was trying to build an empire and trying to figure out what to do next. He must have been a little bored with his enormous reputation. I’m sure he wanted to do something new. He was intrigued and he loved the music. I’m sure he got captivated periodically with what was brought to his attention. As far as I know it ended there and then.”

  MORRISON: “Brian was looking for a group, though, and eventually settled on The Cyrkle (‘Red Rubber Ball’, etc). He did want us, and we had numerous dealings through Nat Weiss on this and the other matters mentioned (publishing; tour). Why Sesnick chooses to deny the tour plan is best known to him.”

  One cannot help but wonder what would have happened if they’d signed with Brian Epstein. Would The Velvets have become big stars? Would Epstein have lived to see the punks he loved take over? Unfortunately, we’ll never know. However, it is interesting to note that The Velvets considered themselves to be working at least upon the same level as The Beatles.

  REED: “I remember him best for a story that may or may not have been true. In his mansion Brian Epstein kept Spanish servants, none of whom could speak English. Let that be a lesson to us all in discretion.”

  Danny Williams, who had left The EPI, in July of 1966, after the Chicago shows, died under mysterious circumstances that summer. Shortly after his return to his parents’ home on Cape Cod he had driven to the shore, undressed, left his clothes in a neat pile by the car, and swum out until, according to some, he drowned. Sterling Morrison questions whether it was suicide, pointing out that Danny was a good swimmer and he may have hit his head on a rock or something, but shortly thereafter a brown paper parcel containing two brass doorknobs arrived at the Factory addressed to Andy Warhol by Danny’s parents. Apparently, in a suicide note, Williams had left instructions that the doorknobs be sent to Andy who he thought would appreciate them. Nobody at the Factory could figure out what this meant. Lou has his own theory about Danny Williams’ death.

  REED: “Tony Conrad, who had by now become a film-maker, did a thing called Flicker. Now Flicker was using the same basic idea, playing around with strobes, that we used with The EPI. The guy who was doing the lights in our show, Danny Williams, committed suicide eventually. But he got into the same idea, which was combinations of strobe lights. If you didn’t do it randomly – people still think that ‘Metal Machine’ is random, which it isn’t – people could literally get bowled over. Tony showed Flicker, which was exposed frames and unexposed frames, at the old Cinematheque, and the first night he showed it two kids had a heart attack. The next day they had
to have a disclaimer. People thought they were kidding, but bam! There was an epileptic fit. It worked. Danny Williams would sit for hours up at the Factory using himself as a test-subject for seven strobe lights we were using when we were doing The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. You can imagine! That’s why John and I used to wear sunglasses when we played. We didn’t want to see it. We knew. Danny was so far gone he killed himself.”

  In July, 1967 Al Grossman sold his lease on the Balloon Farm to Jerry Brandt for a lot of money. Brandt turned it into more money when he opened the Electric Circus, a plush new multimedia club that emphasized just how much rock’n’roll had changed since The EPI had played its first show on the same site slightly more than a year before.

  Although they continued to live in New York, Boston became The Velvet Underground’s number two stronghold as soon as they started playing at the Tea Party.

  FIELDS: “They were phenomenally popular in Boston. I think that everybody in New York loved them, but they really could make a living in Boston. It was just circumstances that prevented them from making a living in New York.”

  REED: “Boston was the whole thing as far as we were concerned. It was the first time we played in public and didn’t have all those things thrown at us: the leather freaks, the druggies, the this or the that. It was the first time somebody just listened to the music, which blew our minds collectively …”

  BOCKRIS: “The Boston Tea Party would mark a turning point?”

  SESNICK: “Well, there was a lot that went on in between. There was a lot of, for the lack of any better word, negotiations going on between what was happening with them in New York and with Andy I guess. I was a part-owner of the Boston Tea Party which was famous and very successful at that point and then through various ways Lou and I got together.”

  BOCKRIS: “When you say you owned the Boston Tea Party and it’s not known, do you mean it wasn’t known then or the fact has never been released?”

  SESNICK: “It’s not known till today.”

  BOCKRIS: “Did Lou know that you owned it?”

  SESNICK: “Sure. I was a partner, I wasn’t sole owner, but I was the person I guess who ran it. I did all the booking.”

  BOCKRIS: “What was your perception of their relationship with Andy during this period. I gather you felt they really needed a real manager, and he wasn’t acting in that capacity …”

  SESNICK: “Oh, that goes without saying, because any group does. Andy needed his own management – he’s an artist. He has a different method of projecting what he feels he does, and they needed what they needed. It was really not a very complicated thing.”

  BOCKRIS: “But did you feel he was beneficial to them to a certain point?”

  SESNICK: “Oh immensely, immensely. I wouldn’t have gone to Andy originally if I didn’t feel he was helpful.”

  BOCKRIS: “Am I right in thinking that you were closer to Lou than other members of the group?”

  SESNICK: “Pretty much.”

  MORRISON: “The second round of talks with Brian Epstein was about Three Prong Music, our publishing company. He wanted it to merge with Nemperor, The Beatles publishing company. We fretted and fretted over this and decided that if Epstein thought the stuff was so great, maybe we should hang onto it. We couldn’t see any advantages to being part of Nemperor – who was ever going to record our stuff? So that was the end of that.”

  Chelsea Girls was being premiered in San Francisco in late August 1967 and everyone was keen to go on this trip, but for the first time Andy chose not to take Gerard Malanga. When Gerard found out he wasn’t going he got very uptight and decided to accept an invitation to go to the Bergamo International Film Festival in Italy and show his film In Search Of The Miraculous, about three generations of the Barzini family. However, when Malanga told Warhol of his plans, Andy got uptight because he had counted on Gerard to run the Factory while he was in California. Consequently, Andy changed his mind about taking Gerard to San Francisco, but Malanga told him that it was too late. Knowing that Gerard only had a one-way ticket and no money to get back Andy replied that if he needed a return ticket to let him know and he would send one.

  While Andy was out on the West Coast with Chelsea Girls and Gerard was in Bergamo, Nico was at the Monterey Pop Festival with Brian Jones. In New York The Velvets went into Mayfair Sound the second week in September to record White Light/White Heat.

  MORRISON: “The so-called ‘Summer of Love’ was a lovely summer in New York City, for in addition to the usual eastward migration of the vapid chic set (comprising socialites, Arabs, and whatnot) to the Hamptons, another and even more welcome exodus took place westward, to San Francisco. Inspired by media hype, and encouraged by shamelessly deceitful songs on the radio (Airplane, Mamas and Papas, Eric Burdon), teenage ninnies flocked from Middle-America out to the coast; hot on their heels came a predatory mob from NYC. Roughly speaking, every creep, every degenerate, every hustler, booster, and rip-off artist, every wasted weirdo packed up his or her clap, crabs, and cons and headed off to the Promised Land. This sleazy legion – like Harvey Korman’s goon squad in Blazing Saddles – then descended upon the hapless hippies (and their dupes) in San Francisco. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

  “But behind them in Manhattan, all was suddenly quiet, clean, and beautiful like the world of Noah after the Flood. If you hadn’t seen a particular lowlife for a while, there was no need to inquire about his or her whereabouts: you knew where they all were, and had a pretty good idea of what they were up to.

  “And so, at the height of the ‘Summer of Love’, we stayed in NYC and recorded White Light/White Heat, an orgasm of our own.”

  REED: “We wanted to go as high and as hard as we could (Reed had a Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar, which had been fitted with pre-amps and speed/tremolo controls so that it could virtually play itself, producing 16 notes for each one he played).”

  JONATHAN RICHMAN: “Sterling helped Lou work on The Country Gentleman by giving him a pickup off his own Stratocaster to put on it. That’s brotherhood. I saw Lou play with: a Fender solid body 12 string guitar, a Gibson semi-hollow body, a Gibson stereo semi-hollow body, an Epiphone semi-hollow body (towards the end at Max’s Kansas City) – pretty much stock I’d say. The Gretsch Country Gentleman had four pickups (they usually have two), built in pre-amp, built in tremolo unit, added Gretsch pickup, added Stratocaster Fender pickup for more treble. Those guys used Vox amps and Vox fuzz boxes for the first two albums. On stuff like ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘The Gift’, the fuzz is important. Vox fuzz boxes are distinct from other fuzz sounds. Lou used to use the built-in mid-range boost peculiar to Vox amplifiers a lot. Their sound changed when the group switched to Acoustic brand amps in ’69 then again when they switched to Sunn brand in ’70. The Voxes had a darker sound with more mid-range tone. Much more. And it was easier to get feedback out of ’em. Like on ‘Heroin’, ‘European Son’ etc. Some of that feedback was John Cale on his electric viola playing through the Vox amps. One thing more. That Gretsch was converted to stereo, enabling him to get low bass and hi-treble at the same time.”

  BOCKRIS: “Was it true that White Light/White Heat was recorded in one day?”

  MORRISON: “No, but almost. Gary Kellgren was the engineer. He was completely competent. The technical deficiencies on the album are attributable to us. We would not accommodate what we were trying to do to the limitations of the studio. We kept on saying we don’t want to hear any problems.”

  BOCKRIS: “It says on the record Tom Wilson was Executive Producer. Was he actually in the studio working with you?”

  MORRISON: “He was in there, but no producer could over-ride our taste. We’d do a whole lot of takes.”

  BOCKRIS: “How were the working conditions in the studio when they recorded White Light/White Heat?”

  SESNICK: “That’s a long complicated question. They were quick. To sum it all up, it did go very fast. I think it was done in three days of recording. They were very rapid. They w
ere well prepared when they went in. And their method of recording was such that it could be done very quickly and they believed in that particular manner at that time and it just went real fast.”

  BOCKRIS: “Would it be accurate to say that Lou was particularly proficient in working fast in the studio or is that putting too much emphasis on his contribution?”

  SESNICK: “I would say that Lou was beyond proficient. He was a master at understanding the time and reasons for things.”

  BOCKRIS: “At the time of recording that album were he and John Cale working well together or was the tension that caused the split between them already obvious?”

  SESNICK: “It was not obvious at that time. They worked together fairly well because of the speed with which things were done. Had they had more time who knows what would have happened? But no, there was no problem at all. They were rehearsing quite a bit too. We arranged for various rehearsals and particular dates were set up to do certain things to augment our recording.”

  MORRISON: “There would be a big brawl over which take to use. Of course everybody would opt for the takes where they sounded best. It was a tremendous hassle, so on ‘Sister Ray’ which we knew was going to be a major effort we stared at each other and said, ‘This is going to be one take. So whatever you want to do, you better do it now.’

  “And that explains what is going on in the mix. There is a musical struggle – everyone’s trying to do what he wants to do every second, and nobody’s backing off. I think it’s great the way the organ comes in. Cale starts to try and play a solo. He’s totally buried and there’s a sort of surge and then he’s pulling out all the stops until he just rises out of the pack. He was able to get louder than Lou and I were. The drums are almost totally drowned out.”

  CALE: “The second album was like hanging by your fingernails. The songs were hypes. We always played loud in order to get the symphonic sound, but the loudness was supposed to bring clarity, and that wasn’t true of the second album.”