First, through MacLise’s connections in the Lower East Side underground-film scene, the most potent movement of the moment embracing arguably the largest, most intelligent, and creative audience in New York, they were invited to play their rehearsal tapes or sometimes perform live to accompany screenings of the mostly silent underground films by Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, and Barbara Rubin, which were making a big splash that season. Nineteen sixty-five was the climactic year of the Lower East Side art community and in particularly the underground-film scene. One of the scene’s most outstanding, enigmatic figures, the poet and filmmaker Piero Heliczer, who often screened films at his enormous art factory loft on Grand Street, three blocks from 56 Ludlow Street, first offered the group a venue to play. Soon they were playing regularly at Heliczer’s and other artists’ spaces, sitting behind the film screens or off to the side. The most popular underground-film cheater space at the time was Jonas Mekas’s Cinémathèque, which became the band’s most regular venue. “Center stage of the old Cinémathèque was a movie screen, and between the screen and the audience a number of veils were spread out in different places,” recalled Sterling. “These were lit variously by slide projections and lights, as Piero’s films shone through them onto the screen. Dancers and incense swirled around, poetry and song rose up, while from behind the screen a strange music was generated by Lou Reed, John Cale, Angus, and me, with Piero back there too playing his sax.” Occasionally they would play bare-chested with painted torsos or try to look outrageous in some other way. They gained enthusiastic audiences, among whom Barbara Rubin would become their most influential fan.
Their second breakthrough came in July when they recorded a demo tape at 56 Ludlow Street that included early versions of “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” and “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.” “‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,’ that’s relentless,” said John Cale. “Lou’s often said, ‘Hey, some of these songs are just not worthy of human endeavor, these things are best left alone.’ He may be right.” The tape also included a song that Morrison later recalled as “Never Get Emotionally Involved with a Man, Woman, Beast or Child.” Cale took the tape over to London in the hope of securing a recording contract with one of the most adventurous British companies (after all, the Who and the Kinks used similar techniques), and there was considerable interest from, among others, Miles Copeland, who would go on to manage the Police.
By the fall, with their music mature and their audience growing, they felt that something was happening. This seemed confirmed in November when they stumbled upon the name they would keep, the Velvet Underground, “swiping it,” as Lou put it, from the title of a cheap paperback book about suburban sex Tony Conrad literally picked out of the gutter and brought to Ludlow Street. The name Velvet Underground seemed to fit perfectly their affiliations and intentions. That same month they got their first media boost when filmed playing “Venus in Furs” for a CBS documentary on New York underground film, featuring Piero Heliczer and narrated by Walter Cronkite. When the prestigious rock journalist Alfred G. Aronowitz offered to manage them, they accepted.
AI Aronowitz, who had an influential pop column in the New York Post and had written extensively about the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, was an important player on the New York rock scene. “Aronowitz was famous,” wrote one onlooker. “Aronowitz was the man who’d introduced Allen Ginsberg to Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan to the Beatles. He’d known Billie Holiday and Jack Kerouac and Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. He could get Ahmet Ertegun, George Plimpton, Clive Davis, or Willem de Kooning on the phone. He’d been Brian Jones’s American connection and Leon Russell’s New York guru and the one who introduced Pete Hamill to Norman Mailer. Only Aronowitz could write a rock column in a daily newspaper that’d make the whole country snap to attention.” His interest in the Velvets was a sure sign of impending success.
Suddenly, however, their unorthodox background clashed with their progress. As soon as Aronowitz presented them with their first paying job, opening for another group he managed, the Myddle Class, Angus MacLise, as Lou recalled, “asked a very intriguing question. He said, ‘Do you mean we have to show up at a certain time—and start playing—and then end?’ And we said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Well, I can’t handle that!’ And that was it. I mean, we got our electricity out of Angus’s apartment, but that was it. He was a great drummer.”
Lou, who put his beloved group before anything and anyone, never forgave MacLise. But as it developed, Angus’s withdrawal set in motion one last chance meeting that would perfectly complete the band. With the Aronowitz date booked for December 11, only days away, Lou and Sterling suddenly remembered that their Syracuse friend Jim Tucker had a sister who played drums and wondered if she might be able to fill in. Cale, horrified by the mere suggestion that a “chick” should play in their great group, had to be placated by the promise that it was strictly temporary. When he acquiesced, Lou shot out to the suburbs of Long Island to audition Moe Tucker. “My brother had been telling me about Lou for a while, because he had known him for a few years before that,” Maureen recalled. “I was nineteen at the time, living at home and had a job, keying stuff into computers. Lou came out to my house to see if I could really play the drums. He said, ‘Okay, that’s good.’”
When she first went to John’s apartment in New York to hear the band play their repertoire, Maureen, whose favorite drummer was Charlie Watts, was knocked out. She could see that Lou was a bona fide rock-and-roll freak, and the whole band was amazing. “When they played ‘Heroin,’ I was really impressed. You could just tell that this was different.”
Maureen’s drumming was a distillation of all the rock and roll that had gone before, and yet, influenced by African musicians, she played with mallets on two kettledrums while standing up. “I developed a really basic style,” she said, “mainly because I didn’t have any training—to this day I couldn’t do a roll to save my life, or any of that other fancy stuff, nor have I any wish to. I always wanted to keep a simple but steady beat behind the band so no matter how wild John or Lou would get, there would still be this low drone holding it together.” Methodical and steady as a person and a drummer, Maureen kept up the backbeat. But, young as she was in comparison to her older brother’s friends, she held her own, rarely keeping her opinions to herself when they mattered. Though bowled over by the Velvets’ music, she was not always impressed with the lifestyle that went along with it. She thought it was crazy for John and Lou to go out and look for firewood to heat their apartment. “It wasn’t very romantic,” she commented later about the flat. “It stank.”
The Velvet Underground’s first job took place at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey, on December 11, 1965. They were squeezed in between a band called 40 Fingers and the Myddle Class. “Nothing could have prepared the kids and parents assembled in the auditorium for what they were about to experience that night,” wrote Rob Norris, a Summit student. “Our only clue was the small crowd of strange-looking people hanging around in front of the stage.”
What followed the gentle strains of 40 Fingers was a performance that would have shocked anyone outside of the most avant-garde audiences of the Lower East Side. The curtain rose on the Velvet Underground, revealing four long-haired figures dressed in black and poised behind a strange variety of instruments. Maureen’s tiny hermaphroditic figure stood behind her kettledrums, making everyone immediately wonder uneasily whether she was a girl or a boy. Sterling’s tall, angular frame shuffled nervously in the background. Lou and John, both in sunglasses, stared blankly at the astonished students, teachers, and parents, Cale wielding his odd-looking viola. As they charged into the opening chords of the cacophonous “Venus in Furs” louder than anyone in the room had ever heard music played, they rounded out an image aptly described as bizarre and terrifying. “Everyone was hit by the screeching urge of sound, with a pounding beat louder than anything we’d ever heard,” Norris continued. “About a minute i
nto the second song, which the singer had introduced as ‘Heroin,’ the music began to get even more intense. It swelled and accelerated like a giant tidal wave which was threatening to engulf us all. At this point most of the audience retreated in horror for the safety of their homes, thoroughly convinced of the dangers of rock and roll music.” According to Sterling, “the murmur of surprise that greeted our appearance as the curtain went up increased to a roar of disbelief once we started to play ‘Venus’ and swelled to a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment by the end of ‘Heroin.’”
“Backstage after their set, the viola player was seen apologizing profusely to an outraged Myddle Class entourage for scaring away half the audience,” Norris concluded. “AI Aronowitz was philosophical about it, though. He said, ‘At least you’ve given them a night to remember,’ and invited everyone to a party at his house after the show.”
Observing that the group seemed to have an oddly stimulating and polarizing effect on audiences, Aronowitz advised them to get some experience playing in public by doing a residency at a small club. Four days later they started a two-week stand at the Cafe Bizarre on MacDougal Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. “We played some covers, ‘Little Queenie,’ ‘Bright Lights Big City,’ the black R-and-B songs Lou and I liked—and as many of our own songs as we had,” Sterling reported. “We needed a lot more of our own material, so we sat around and worked; that’s when we wrote ‘Run Run Run,’ all those things. Lou usually would have some lyrics written, and something would grow out of that with us jamming. He was a terrific improvisational lyricist. I remember we had the Christmas tree up, but no decorations on it, we were sitting around busy writing songs, because we had to, we needed them that night!”
This fortuitous opportunity was pivotal for their career. First, since there was so little time between the two dates, they decided to keep Maureen, initially much to Cale’s chagrin. Moe remembered standing in the street with John, who kept saying, “No chicks in the band. No chicks.” Second, at the very time they were playing at the Cafe Bizarre to unreceptive tourists twice a night for $5 apiece per night, the pop artist and entrepreneur Andy Warhol was looking around for a group to manage for a nightclub he had been asked to host by the theatrical impresario Michael Myerberg (who had brought Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to the USA in 1956). Barbara Rubin, for whose film Christmas on Earth the band had played in their previous incarnation, was spending a good deal of time at the Warhol studio, the famous Silver Factory, and thought the Velvets would be the perfect band for Warhol’s upcoming discotheque. She took two of Warhol’s leading talent scouts, the film director Paul Morrissey and the underground film star Gerard Malanga, to see them. Malanga, who has just starred in Warhol’s version of A Clockwork Orange, Vinyl, was an outstandingly handsome young man with a potent sexual aura. Combining the looks of Elvis Presley and James Dean with the long hair of Mick Jagger, Malanga dressed head to foot in black leather and carried, purely for dramatic effect, a black leather bullwhip, which he wore wrapped around the shoulder of his jacket. During the Velvets’ set, Gerard suddenly leapt up from his table onto the empty dance floor. All of the other customers were too terrified by the music to move. Making ample use of his whip, he undulated in a sinister, erotic dance that perfectly illustrated the visceral, throbbing music. The band was dumbfounded by Gerard’s mind-blowing performance. In the intermission Lou and John went over to his table and told him to come back and dance anytime. Instantly spotting a starring role for himself in the scenario, Malanga thought the group would be perfect for Warhol.
Lou performing in the Paraphernalia footage of Gerard Malanga’s Film Notebooks, 1966. (Victor Bockris)
The following night Malanga returned to the Cafe Bizarre with Rubin, Warhol’s business manager Paul Morrissey, and Warhol himself, accompanied by an entourage including his reigning superstar Edie Sedgwick. They were thrilled by the weird and raucous performance of the Velvet Underground. Not only did the group do the same thing Warhol’s films did—make people uncomfortable—but their name, and the fact that they sang about taboo subjects, perfectly fit Warhol’s program. To top it off, Morrissey was intrigued by the band’s androgynous drummer. After the set Barbara brought the Velvets over to Andy’s table. The curly-haired Lou Reed, with his shy smile, shared a temperament with Warhol. He sat next to the pop artist and the two of them immediately hit it off. “Lou looked good and pubescent then,” Warhol recalled. “Paul thought the kids out on the Island would identify with that.”
Morrissey, who was the most influential person in Warhol’s world after Malanga, was fascinated: “John Cale had a wonderful appearance and he played the electric viola, which was a real novelty; but best of all was Maureen Tucker, the drummer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her because you couldn’t work out if she was a boy or a girl. Nobody had ever had a girl drummer before. She made no movement, she was so sedate. I proposed that we sign a contract with them, we’d manage them and give them a place to play.”
“We looked at each other,” Lou Reed remembered, “and said, ‘This sounds like really great fun.’”
Chapter Six
Fun at the Factory
1966
Reality was the key.
Lou Reed
When Andy met the Velvets, they were unglamorous and unknown. “Andy, the problem is these people have no singer,” said Paul Morrissey. “There’s a guy who sings, but he’s got no personality and nobody pays the slightest attention to him.” In the following days Warhol and Morrissey transformed them from a four-piece unit led by Lou to a band fronted by the stunningly beautiful singer-actress Nico, a statuesque German blonde who had walked into Warhol’s studio a week earlier. Lou initially didn’t want her to be their chanteuse, but the arrangement was worked out under the convincing influence of Warhol’s business manager, Paul Morrissey, who “just didn’t think Lou had the personality to stand in front of the group and sing. The group needed something beautiful to counteract the screeching ugliness they were trying to sell, and the combination of a beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed. Right away that sour little Lou Reed bristled. He was hostile to Nico from the start. I told them I thought that Nico could be part of the Velvet Underground and just fit in there under that name.” Quick to grasp the essence of the problem, Lou replied, “Let’s keep Nico separate in this. The Velvet Underground—and Nico.”
“Andy was this catalyst, always putting jarring elements together,” Lou noted. “Which was something I wasn’t so happy about. He wanted us to use Nico. Andy said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta have a chanteuse.’ I said, ‘Oh, Andy, give us a break.’ But we went along with it at the time. Andy wanted her so he got her.” Unbeknownst to Lou, back in 1963 Andy had tried to put together his own rock-and-roll band with none other than La Monte Young and Walter De Maria. Now, in as much as Warhol saw himself in Nico, Andy could fantasize that he was fronting the band.
The most remarkable thing about Lou Reed’s progress in 1966 was his uncharacteristic willingness to accept Warhol’s control in order to achieve the extraordinary success it would bring him. But, in the process, Lou made something of a Faustian bargain with Andy. Warhol had miraculously pulled the group out of the toilet, elevating them to his level when he was at the height of his fame. In exchange, however, Andy demoted Lou from fronting the band to being, employing a phrase by Nico, its “janitor of lunacy.” Imagine what would have happened if Andrew Loog Oldham had tried to pull the same moves on Mick Jagger, promoting, for example, Brian Jones over his head as the front man, or indeed if Brian Epstein had suggested to John or Paul that they take a backseat in the Beatles and let George Harrison come up and front them. It is very rare that rock groups in their first flush of success find lead singers and songwriters willing to bow into a background role at the very moment of their initial triumph. It revealed several sides of Lou. First, his ambivalence about being in the spotlight. Second, his unusual ability to accept what would be best for the band w
ithout thinking about his own fame. Third, his discipleship to Andy Warhol.
Andy choreographed his group within a context that had been predicted by one of Lou’s favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote one hundred years earlier, “The next step may be the electrification of all mankind by the representation of a play that may be neither tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, pantomime, melodrama or spectacle, as we now comprehend these terms, but which may retain some portion of the idiosyncratic excellence of each, while it introduces a new class of excellence as yet unnamed because as yet undreamed of in the world.” It was also based on—some people said ripped off from—the 1965 multimedia performances of La Monte Young and Piero Heliczer as well as the “happenings” that were rife in the art world of the early sixties. In the band’s first performance, at a dinner for a psychiatrists’ convention at the elegant Delmonico’s Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York on the night of January 13, 1966, the group turned the tables on their audience, putting on an act of resentment and rage that Lou characterized as “fun.”
Originally, the psychiatrists had invited Warhol to give an after-dinner speech at their convention. When the artist who had enraged the underground film community by screening epics like Sleep and Blowjob asked if he could show some films instead, they indulged him. Now, as one hundred of the leading psychiatrists in America settled behind coffee and snifters of brandy ready to analyze the contents of the blank screen at the far end of the dining area, their tranquillity was shattered by Barbara Rubin, who came screaming into the room brandishing a movie camera with a powerful sun-gun lamp atop it. The seemingly crazed woman rushed from table to table shoving the camera into their faces and baraging them with questions like, “Do you eat her out?” and “Is your penis big enough?” No sooner had they been blown out of their after-dinner stupor by this horrible spectacle than an unbelievably loud cacophony erupted at the far end of the room, and they swiveled in their seats to see a brand of mangy-looking young men in dirty denim jeans and jackets performing a howling song about heroin. Behind them was a starkly lit, high-contrast black-and-white film of a man tied to a chair being tortured, in front of which a real man was brandishing a whip. Embarrassed, insulted, and perplexed, the psychiatrists reacted by grabbing their partners and storming the exits, or sitting forward with benevolent smiles trying to “understand” the spectacle in front of them. As Warhol stood off to the side, staring impassively at the panicked throng with a trace of a smile, and Nico stared impassively from the stage, Lou reached the climax of his paean to nullification, intoning, “And I guess that I just don’t know, and I guess that I just don’t know.” The event was reported in the New York Times the following day under the title “Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists.”
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