by Harvard, Joe
Licata may have been one of the few engineers at that time who could have done the job for the album—a time of which Lou Reed says, “engineers would walk out on us … ‘I didn’t become an engineer so I could listen to you guys jerk off! This is noise and garbage.’ We ran into a lot of that.”22 By contrast, Dolph says Licata was a seasoned pro:
He was Scepter’s full time studio engineer. As a perk, he did custom jobs when the studio wasn’t booked. He could engineer material he couldn’t stand, but he would give it his all. He’d give the client what the client wanted. John would be over there doing soul-R&B acts one day and Dionne Warwick-Burt Bacharach orchestral stuff the next … “It’s two o’clock so it must be a gospel session” … he was a journeyman engineer, with no “star attitude” that I imagine some engineers have now, but he gave it his all. He was a pro. He would not treat the material with any disdain or “what the fuck!?”23
Fair is fair; with Warhol in and out of the studio, only Dolph and Licata were present in the control room for the entire time the album was being made. This record wouldn’t have happened without them. Dolph tips his hat to Licata and Cale though, saying: “Great credit for the sound of the recording itself has to go to John Licata … I was more what you would today call a line producer. The job of creative producer I would have to say was Cale’s; anything to do with music or arrangements, Cale was in charge.”24 (Author’s note: I once did a session with the late Stones’ producer Jimmy Miller, a beautiful and brilliant cat, and he brought along a line producer … the guy just kept producing lines.)
Dolph remained in music, as a lyricist and music publisher, “mostly during the disco era,” placing songs with Isaac Hayes and KC and the Sunshine Band. He wrote the lyrics for Joey Levine’s 1974 hit “Life is A Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me),” a swank bit of bubblegum rapping, in which he managed the impressive feat of mentioning Dr. John the Night Tripper, Doris Day and Jack the Ripper in one line; he also worked in Johnny Thunders, Bowie, and J.J.—but not John—Cale.
Little is known about the role of the recording engineer credited in LA, Omi Haden, also listed in credits as Ami Hadani. Haden engineered on the Mothers of Invention LPs Freak Out and Absolutely Free, and the Animals’ Animalism, all done at TTG Studios. He also worked on Lowell George’s Factory auditions for Zappa, at Original Sound in LA, in the fall of 1966. All but the last are Tom Wilson productions, and every one of these projects has a Zappa connection, so he may have been either TTG’s house engineer, or the LA go-to guy for Zappa or Tom Wilson in ‘66 and ‘67.
Tom Wilson had been primarily a jazz producer, working with late ‘50s and early ‘60s progressive artists Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and others until a 1963 management power play forced Columbia Records to hire him as Bob Dylan’s producer, replacing the more staid John Hammond. Wilson, who held an economics degree from Harvard, was neither folkie nor rocker, but he was impressed enough by Dylan to assume control of sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Wilson’s experiments with placing electric guitar on some tracks Dylan had laid down in ‘62, and his production on Bringing it All Back Home and “Like A Rolling Stone” make him a pioneer of the new folk-rock sound, a style he helped further define through his work with Simon and Garfunkel (who were on the verge of disbanding when Wilson’s drum and guitar treatment propelled “Sound of Silence” into a reborn No. 1 hit). Richie Unterberger has written:
Overall, Wilson’s stay at Columbia had turned into one of those “only in America, and only in rock and roll” scenarios: an African-American jazz producer, who professed not even to like folk music when he began recording it, turned out to be a main agent of folk’s transition into folk-rock.25
Wilson would later work with the Soft Machine and the Blues Project, but it was his move to MGM/Verve that paved the way for his involvement in avant-garde rock. In 1966 he produced the Animals, the Mothers of Invention, and Burt Ward—all at TTG Studios in Los Angeles, where he worked with the Velvets in May, and where he edited, remixed and remastered the “Banana” album using engineers David Greene and Gene Radice. He later produced “Sunday Morning” in New York.
But it’s Andy Warhol whose name appears on the record’s spine, and he resembles neither Dolph nor Wilson. In hands-on terms Cale has said, “Andy Warhol didn’t do anything.”26 Warhol’s unique style might disqualify him from the title of “producer” at all, making him effectively an executive producer. But Warhol’s role, and his effect as producer cannot be denied. You could say he produced the producers as well as the band.
Longtime friend of the band, rock manager and A&R legend Danny Fields spoke eloquently on the subject in Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story:
Andy doesn’t know how to translate ideas into musical terms … Andy … was making them sound like he knew they sounded at the Factory. That’s what I would do if I were an amateur at production … What Andy did was very generously reproduce … the way it sounded to him when he first fell in love with it.27
The group had their sound together before meeting Warhol. They had Lou Reed’s experience at Pickwick to prepare them for the studio’s technical challenges, and the good fortune to luck into Dolph and Licata at the right moment. In Los Angeles fortune smiled again, and they added Tom Wilson’s expertise as well. So there was no need at all for Warhol to be a knob twiddler—which he clearly wasn’t.
Reed: Andy was the producer and Andy was in fact behind the board gazing with rapt fascination …
Cale: …at all the blinking lights.
Reed: …At all the blinking lights. He just made it possible for us to be ourselves and go right ahead with it because he was Andy Warhol. In a sense he really did produce it, because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren’t large enough to be attacked … as a consequence of him being the producer, we’d just walk in and set up and do what we always did and no one would stop it because Andy was the producer. Of course he didn’t know anything about record production—but he didn’t have to. He just sat there and said “Oooh, that’s fantastic,” and the engineer would say, “Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic, isn’t it?”28
This alone made Warhol indispensable to the album. But, of course, he did more than that. Fricke calls Warhol “a specialist in subtly engineered collisions of people and ideas,”29 and in that role Warhol (with help from Paul Morrissey) coaxed the group into accepting Nico as a vocalist, completing the chemistry that makes the album so amazing. He was also the umbrella under which Dolph in New York and Wilson in LA (and later New York) worked, unfettered by label interference. And he got the album heard, for even if Dolph and Wilson had done brilliant work, without the carte blanche Warhol provided it’s doubtful the recording would have made it onto vinyl. Thus, Warhol did precisely what a great producer should: he achieved an effective translation of the sound that the band heard in their heads on to tape, and then he got it out into the world in tact.
A trade-off of Warhol’s inexperience in the studio could have been a disastrous loss in sonic clarity. Cale also claimed that Norman Dolph “didn’t understand the first fucking thing about recording … he didn’t know what the hell he had on his hands,”30 and while Dolph didn’t dispute the charges (he responds “nobody knew what they were doing”), I think Cale’s criticism is way off the mark. First of all, with Cale filling the role of creative producer without portfolio, Dolph says:
I never felt I had the authority to pick takes, or veto them—that, to me, was clearly up to Cale, Reed and Morrison … Lou Reed was more the one who’d say “this needs to be a little hotter,” he made decisions about technical things … and the mixing was really between Cale, Sterling and John Licata, ’cause that was all, again, done in real time.
As for sound quality, over-saturated tapes caused some audible distortion, and noise from less-than-perfect overdubs is also in evidence. But considering the unprecedented sonic attack in songs like “European Son” and “Black Angel’s Death Song,” which few engineers would have b
een comfortable capturing (or tolerating) in 1966, you have to agree that the Dolph-Licata team performed brilliantly. Any doubts on that score can be dispelled with a few “this is what might have been” moments of comparative listening to Reed’s primitive-sounding Pickwick recordings, which aren’t even in the same ballpark as Licata’s engineering work. And any noise/distortion issues on the LP detract little from the overall listening experience. Moreover, the band happily accepted these slight technical shortfalls at the time, and—whether by their own design or Warhol’s—band and producer shared an aesthetic that made errors part of the modus operandi. Reed noted:
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.31
Warhol elaborated:
I was worried that it would all come out sounding too professional … one of the things that was so great about them was they always sounded so raw and crude. Raw and crude was the way I liked our movies to look, and there’s a similarity between sound in that album and the texture of Chelsea Girls, which came out at the same time.32
The studio approach they took, as recalled by Dolph, left little threat of things sounding too professional:
From a take-wise point of view you weren’t presented with many options. They either got it right, or broke down, or did a couple of takes; but it wasn’t as though you got 17 takes … either you chose this one or you chose that one and then you went on and did the next one. Usually they’d do a piece of one and then come in and listen to it. If one got largely through and it broke down, they’d come in and listen to it and say “yeah that sounds like we got it right”; or, if one got all the way through, they’d come in and either buy it, or adjust the mix or do it again. But there were not a whole lot of complete takes.33
I’M STICKING WITH YOU
To a man or a Moe, the Velvets themselves have never wavered in their appreciation of Warhol’s key role in their careers and on the first album. When personalities as disparate and intelligent (not to mention picky) as the Velvets all agree that they owe a huge debt of gratitude to Warhol, you have to take it at face value: after all, they were there. Cale and Reed would bury their oft-sharpened hatchet to write Songs For Drella together in 1989, an homage full of love and respect. (It’s also a strong LP, which gets better with each listening, and among the more vital works by either writer since the Velvets dissolved.) Sterling Morrison offered his own tribute, citing Warhol as the most important influence on his own life, saying, “It sounds crazy, but on reflection I’ve decided that he was never wrong. He gave us the confidence to keep doing what we were doing.”34
Confidence was precisely what the band needed most in 1966. They were about to go into the recording studio—in those days, still a place with a rarified atmosphere. It would be another 20 years before musician-run, independent studios such as Athens, Georgia’s Drive-In and Boston’s Fort Apache (my place—our credo was “the nuts should run the nuthouse”) became common. Some studios, like Abbey Road, had technicians in white lab coats, and even the less formal studios usually had actual engineering graduates behind the consoles. Studios were still more about science than art. Clients who dared make technical suggestions were treated with bemusement, derision, or hostility. The Velvets were a young band under constant critical attack, and the pressure to conform in order to gain acceptance must have been tremendous. Most bands of that era compromised with their record companies, through wholesale revamping of their image from wardrobe to musical style, changing or omitting lyrics, creating drastically edited versions for radio airplay, or eliminating songs entirely from their sets and records. With Andy Warhol in the band’s corner, such threats were minimized.
The group often cites Andy’s advice just before the first sessions that “everything’s really great, just make sure you keep the dirty words in.”35 The phrase, which even appears in Songs For Drella, was understood by the band to mean “keep it rough … don’t let them tame it down so it doesn’t disturb anyone.”36 Thus bolstered, they had the courage to stick to the way they knew it should go: “Don’t make it slick. Don’t make it smooth and ruin it.”37 Lou Reed has recounted how, before they entered the recording studio:
Andy made a point of trying to make sure that on our first album the language remained intact…“don’t change the words just because it’s a record.” I think Andy was interested in shocking, in giving people a jolt, and not letting them talk us into us into taking that stuff out in the interest of popularity or easy airplay. The best things never get on record … he was adamant about that. He didn’t want it to be cleaned up, and because he was there it wasn’t.38
The band had everyone in their corner on this, the point where their goals dovetailed with those of Warhol and Dolph. When we spoke, Norman downplayed his role in the sessions in all but one respect, and that was his effort to keep the sessions moving at a pace that would allow the group to achieve a goal so simple it was nearly impossible in 1966:
They knew what they wanted, and nobody got off the path of that. They wanted it to sound like it had the night before, at the Dom, and … the money supply was finite and predetermined … I kept it on the rails, doing what had to be done under the constraints of time and money… beyond that I don’t want to try and take any more credit.39
For once, Danny Fields may have got it wrong when he says, “Andy had no influence on the sound of the band whatsoever.”40 It’s true that the band had their sound together before they met Warhol, but Warhol’s creative input was felt outside of the recording studio, conceptually and creatively. It was Warhol’s comment that the band should just rehearse onstage that helped push them toward their flights of improvised daring. He suggested that Reed write or make (sometimes small but significant) changes to “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “Sunday Morning.” Sometimes it was just a simple statement to Lou that triggered the change, or inspired a part. At other times it was a more direct involvement, as with “Femme Fatale.” Were it not for Warhol, of course, Nico would never have joined the group, and that in and of itself gives him a colossal role in the sound on the first album, and by extension the band.
ENTER NICO
Joe Harvard: Cale said after she died that Nico was the only one who’d carried on the Velvets’ tradition—I believe he said “she was the one carrying the flag for the VU all those years …”
Norman Dolph: I think that’s a fair statement … the one Cale produced, Desertsbore … sounds like right where “I’ll Be You’re Mirror” left off.41
Christa Paffgen was born in 1938 in Cologne; her earliest memories were of the war in Germany, and her father’s death in battle when she was six. She learned early to fend for herself and developed an independent streak that she would keep for life. As a teenager she capitalized on her wholesome Nordic beauty by modeling, and followed that calling on an odyssey with stops in Berlin, Paris and New York, culminating in her arrival as an international model for the Ford Modeling Agency. Christa became Nico, and soon added “actress” to her resume when she landed herself a walk-on role in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Modeling and acting would turn out to be mere preambles to the musical career that Nico would turn to next, and stick with for the rest of her life. Her bohemian lifestyle turned out to be incompatible with pesky little details like early morning set calls, and Rome’s loss was soon New York’s gain. But first she was off to London, where she recorded a single, “The Last Mile” b/w “I’m Not Saying,” produced by crack session player and future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. The folk bandwagon was traveling at high speed then, and for Nico’s benefit Page put together a single that made a convincing attempt to jump on it. Rolling Stones manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham released the Nico single on his Immediate label, so she had a very hip calling card to bring along to New York. There she met and was briefly involved with Bob Dylan
.
It was in Paris that she first encountered Andy Warhol—which guaranteed that her path would soon cross that of the Velvets. Gerard Malanga, one of the EPI’s main dancers in ‘66, nicely sums up Nico’s professional life prior to joining the Velvet Underground:
Nico latched onto Andy and myself when we went to Paris. I just put two and two together that Nico had slept with Dylan … she got a song out of Bob, “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” so he probably got something in return, quid pro quo. But Nico was of an independent mind. She had her own personal history going for her—Brian Jones, Bob Dylan, she had been in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and she was the mother of Ari, Alain Delon’s illegitimate son. Yeah, Nico already had a lifestyle when we met up with her.42
Nico accepted Warhol’s invitation to visit him in New York; when she got there she also met and impressed Paul Morrissey, by then co-manager of the Velvets. Morrissey had developed strong doubts as to Lou Reed’s ability as a front man. Not exactly a fan of Reed’s capabilities or personality (onstage or off), Morrissey made a fateful suggestion to Warhol:
“She’s wonderful and she’s looking for work,” I said. “We’ll put her in the band because the Velvets need someone who can sing or who can command attention … she can be the lead singer” … of course Lou Reed almost gagged when I said we need a girl singing with the group … I didn’t want to say that they needed somebody who had some sort of talent, but that’s what I meant. Lou was very reluctant to go with Nico … he gave her two or three little songs and didn’t let her do anything else.43
