POPism

by Andy Warhol

  We did two shows for over 650 people. We screened Vinyl and Lupe and also movies of Nico and the Velvets while they were playing. It was fantastic to see Nico singing with a big movie of her face right behind her. Gerard was dancing with two long shining flashlights, one in each hand, twirling them like batons. The audience was mesmerized—when a college kid set off the fire alarm system by holding a match near it, nobody paid any attention to it.

  I was behind one of the projectors, moving the images around. The kids were having a lot of trouble dancing, because the songs sometimes started out with a beat but then the Velvets would get too frenetic and burn themselves out, losing the audience long before that. They were like audio-sadists, watching the dancers trying to cope with the music.

  A few days later, we left New York for Ann Arbor in a rented van to play at the University of Michigan. Nico drove, and that was an experience. I still don’t know if she had a license. She’d only been in this country a little while and she’d keep forgetting and drive on the British side of the road. And the van was a real problem—whenever it stopped, it was hard to get it started again, and not one of us knew anything about cars.

  A cop stopped us at a hamburger drive-in near Toledo when a waitress got upset and complained to him because we kept changing orders, and when he asked, “Who’s in charge here?” Lou shoved me forward and told him, “Of all people—Drella!” (“Drella” was a nickname somebody had given me that stuck more than I wanted it to. Ondine and a character named Dorothy Dyke used it all the time—they said it came from combining Dracula and Cinderella.) We spent the night in a motel near there, and once again it was the-boys-in-one-room-the-girls-in-the-other scene, even though somebody kept telling the little old lady who ran the place, “But we’re all queer.”

  At Ann Arbor, we met up with Danny Fields, who’d just been made the editor of a teenage magazine, Datebook. He was out there covering the concert. I hadn’t seen him in a while.

  “Well,” he laughed, “I finally have an identity of my own. Up until now, I was just a groupie with no real reason to exist.”

  “And to think you launched your career,” Lou reminded him, “getting out the wrong side of a limousine.”

  Nico’s driving really was insane when we hit Ann Arbor. She was shooting across sidewalks and over people’s lawns. We finally pulled up in front of a nice big comfortable-looking house, and everyone started unloading the van. Danny wouldn’t believe that anyone was going to let “a truckload of freaks” pull up and walk right into their house until a beautiful woman came running out to meet us. She was Ann Wehrer, whose husband, Joseph, was involved with the early “happenings” and had arranged for the E.P.I. to come out there.

  Ann Arbor went crazy. At last the Velvets were a smash. I’d sit on the steps in the lobby during intermissions and people from the local papers and school papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. “If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen,” I’d explain. “That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”

  Danny remembers that one interviewer asked if my movies had been influenced by the thirties and forties and that I told him, “No, the tens. Thomas Edison really influenced me.” And as a matter of fact, we had a strobe light with us for the first time. The guy we rented spotlights from in New York had brought it to the Factory to show us—none of us had ever seen one before. They weren’t being used yet in the clubs. The strobes were magical, they went perfectly with the chaos music the Velvets played, and that long piece of phosphorescent green Sylvania tape that Gerard was now using for his dance numbers, whipping that around, looked terrific when the strobes flashed on it.

  When we got back to New York, Paul tried to pin the disco producer down to a definite date for the opening, but he just kept assuring us, “Don’t worry.” Then somehow we found out that he’d already hired the Young Rascals to open the place.

  Paul and I went down to meet the Velvets at the Café Figaro—they were staying at an apartment just down the street—to tell them that the big gig had fallen through. When we walked in, they were already there, sitting around in their wraparound “girl watcher” dark glasses, all in a great mood, full of plans for the gala opening.

  “We have a new number using John’s thunder machine,” Lou said as we sat down; then he laughed. “For the second time this week, a cop threatened us. He came up to the apartment and told us to go out into the country someplace if we were going to play that kind of stuff. This is a week after he stopped us on our way out the door and accused us of throwing human shit out our windows…. The awful thing is that it was just possible.” Lou’s voice was dry and flat, and he had droll timing with a little Jack Benny in it.

  “We want to play all in the dark so the music will be the only thing. Tomorrow we’re going to go to used car lots and buy hundreds of car horns and wire them all up so the honking will be nonstop.”

  “Yes, no, that’s great, but listen—” Paul started to tell them, but Lou just went on, more and more enthusiastic.

  “We’re going to play some of the ferocious songs that no one listens to anymore—the ones that run underneath everything we usually play—like ‘Smoke from Your Cigarette’ and ‘I Need a Sunday Kind of Love’ and ‘Later for You, Baby’—everybody’s going crazy over all the old blues people, but let’s not forget about the Spaniels and people like that. And we’re working on Sterl to play trumpet again; he’s been too busy looking for a psychiatrist to get him out of the army.” Sterling was right across the table, telling John about a friend of his with aquaphobia who slept on air mattresses in the Hamptons in case the sea level rose and carried rubber diver’s fins in the backseat of his car in case the 59th Street Bridge should ever collapse while he was crossing it. “He feels that with the fins, he won’t be screwed….” Sterling was an on-again off-again English lit student but he struck you as a preoccupied scientist type. His thought patterns seemed very methodical. It was as if he got up in the morning, got a certain thought, then spent all day developing it—he might, say, pause for an hour, but when he started talking again, it would be to make an “additional point,” or to “clarify,” no matter what everyone else had been talking about in between.

  I noticed that Paul was eavesdropping on the conversation of two people at the next table. Incredibly, they were talking about a big Polish dance hall they’d just rented over on St. Mark’s Place that they didn’t know what to do with. Paul swiveled around and introduced himself. He told them he lived around that neighborhood and hadn’t ever noticed a big dance hall. The two introduced themselves—they were Jackie Cassen and Rudy Stern. They told us they did “sculpture with light” and that they’d rented this big Polish dance hall called Stanley’s the Dom (Polsky Dom Narodny—Dom is Polish for “home”) but that they wouldn’t be ready to use it till May and that they didn’t know what to do with it for April. Paul asked if we could go and see it right away. We left the Velvets at the Figaro without telling them about the airplane hangar falling through—it’s always better to wait with bad news till you have some good news to go with it.

  The Dom was perfect, just what we wanted—it had to be the biggest discotheque dance floor in Manhattan, and there was a balcony, too. We sublet it immediately from Jackie and Rudy—I gave them the rent check, Paul had a fight with the owner over the insurance, then we signed a few papers, and the very next day we were down there painting the place white so we could project movies and slides on the walls. We started dragging proptype odds and ends over from the Factory—five movie projectors, five carousel-type projectors where the image changes every ten seconds and where, if you put two images together, they bounce. These colored things would go on top of the five movies, and sometimes we’d let the sound tracks come through. We also brought down one of those big revolving speakeasy mirrored balls—we had it lying around the Factory and we thought it would be great to bring those back. (The balls really caught on after we revived the look, and p
retty soon they were standard fixtures in every discotheque you walked into.) We had a guy come down with more spotlights and strobes that we wanted to rent—we were going to shine them on the Velvets and all around the audience during the show. Of course, we had no idea if people would come all the way down to St. Mark’s Place for night life. All the downtown action had always been in the West Village—the East Village was Babushkaville. But by renting the Dom ourselves, we didn’t have to worry about whether “management” liked us or not, we could just do whatever we wanted to. And the Velvets were thrilled—in the Dom, the “house band” finally found a house. They could even walk to work.

  The Velvets were staying in an apartment on 3rd Street in the West Village above a firehouse, across the street from the Gold Bug, near a Carvel place and a drugstore. The apartment belonged to Tom O’Horgan, but Tom had sublet it to Stanley Amos, who was living in the back part (the front and back apartments were joined in the middle by a semisecret doorway), and all of Tom’s furniture and fixtures were still in it. In the early days of the Velvet Underground, everybody from the Factory spent a lot of time just hanging around down there, going to Chinatown at two in the morning, then up to the Flick on Second Avenue in the Fifties for ice cream at four, or over to the Brasserie.

  Tom’s apartment looked just like a stage set. The living room was raised and there were long mirrors on both sides of the door with primitive instruments hanging down them from the ceiling. And there were lots of dried flowers and a big black coffin and a couple of chairs with lions’ heads on the arms. The room itself was pretty bare—just a few big pieces of furniture. And then there was the heating system—a fifteen-foot gold dragon built onto the ceiling with flames from the heater shooting out its open mouth.

  People on amphetamine didn’t really have “apartments,” they had “nests”—usually one or two rooms that held fourteen to forty people, with everyone paranoid that somebody would steal their stash or their only magenta Magic Marker or let the water in the bathtub overflow into the pharmacy downstairs.

  John Cale used to sit in the front room for days and days with his electric viola, barely moving. Maureen—Mo—the girl drummer, was somebody I could never figure out: she was very innocent and sweet and shy, so then what was she doing there?

  The foyer of Stanley’s apartment in the back was dark and had jungle murals of a stuffed parrot and of monkeys eating oranges painted on the walls. The only light came from a big black spider lamp whose tail lit up. Then you walked through another small hall into a library that had a fur rug and a beaded lamp and a brick wall, and into the main room, where there was a wonderful piece of art by Johnny Dodd—a portable wall of sixtyone thousand canceled George Washington postage stamp heads cut out with a nail clipper. (Johnny had put an ad in the Voice to get all the stamps.) There were Tiffany lamps all over the place, too, and Art Nouveau Mucha prints in colors like beige and dark green of women with flowing hair, and wind-up Indians beating tom-toms, and lots of tapestries and Persian rugs. It looked like a battle of the set decorators.

  There was a houseboy who came in once every few days, and Stanley explained that this boy was a homosexual, a Roman Catholic, and an alcoholic who’d dress up in little sailor suits to go out cruising but first he always had to get drunk, otherwise he felt too guilty. He straightened up Stanley’s apartment to make the extra money to get drunk on. It was a good thing Stanley had him, too—after the Glitter Festivals.

  Stanley had a bureau drawer that was completely filled with bags of glitter—no clothes or anything, just glitter. (It was where Freddy Herko had stored it for his dance concerts, and after Freddy killed himself, Stanley left it all just the way it was.) He would open the drawer and pass out the bags, and about half the people there would drop acid and shower sparkles in the air till the whole house was covered in them and Judson dancers would twirl through the room with flowers in their hair and the whole floor would change color because it was the multicolored kind of glitter, and outside the kitchen window people would be swinging in a hammock that was strung up across the dead-end alleyway. Most of the guys stayed calm—except for the usual jokes and hysterical laughing—but Ingrid Superstar would go over to the mirrors, put her hands on her face, and start to freak out, hallucinating over and over again, “I’m so ugly, so ugly,” and everyone would try to cheer her up by taking out their cocks and doing ventriloquism, making them talk to her—that always got her laughing—but she would only stay distracted for a few minutes and then they’d have to think up something else—it was like trying to make a little kid stop crying.

  The other half of the room would be paranoid on amphetamine, staring at the half that was tripping on the LSD. They were each other’s audience.

  Lou and Ondine would have furious fights over trading Desoxyn for Obetrols—Desoxyn was twice as expensive and had fifteen milligrams of Methedrine, whereas Obetrols apparently had that much Meth plus something like five milligrams of sulfate. I could never figure out what they were talking about, which one was better.

  And Rotten Rita used to come in with his homemade speed that everyone knew was the worst in the world. Periodically he’d try to upgrade his credibility by giving somebody their money back, but then the next day he’d be in there trying to sell them the exact same stuff back again, but telling them that it was a much superior batch so naturally it was more expensive. But as Lou said, “It’s part of the natural environment to have Rotten do things like that. That’s why he’s ‘Rotten.’ ” Once, I asked the Duchess why Rotten was also called the Mayor, and she said, “Because he screws everybody in town.”

  The Turtle was the switchboard operator at a modest midtown hotel, but he also dealt drugs on the side. He would trade heroin to somebody for Placidyls and then stand back and watch them shoot up once and go to sleep. Then, while they were passed out, he’d grab the rest back and swear to them when they woke up, “Man, you’re crazy. You did up three times.”

  The Duchess would rip off her blouse, pull a bottle of vodka out of her bag, swig it, then give herself a poke of speed in the fanny, right through her jeans, then pull them down to show everybody her abscesses (even the boys were a little shocked at that). She’d shoot up anywhere—waiting in a movie line, if she felt like it.

  Richie Berlin would sit writing quietly in a corner in khaki shorts and kneesocks and a little necktie—sort of a birdwatching outfit—and she’d tell anyone who tried to talk to her, “Go back to Europe and leave me alone.”

  Stanley didn’t care much about music. There were only a few records in the place—an avant-garde jazz thing called “Bells” and some classical Indian music (this was right before the big sitar craze started) and two 45’s—“Sally Go Round the Roses” from ’63 and a thing called “Do the Ostrich” that Lou had written and recorded after reading in Eugenia Sheppard’s fashion column that ostrich feathers were going to be big that season. (Lou had had a job writing for a budget record company that made those “three-for-ninety-nine-cents” records that they sold in bargain stores. As “The Beachnuts” he’d tuned all his guitar strings to the same note and bashed away like crazy screaming, “Do the Ostrich!” till the record people made him stop. But then, later on, when the company was low on products, they listened to it again and decided why not, that maybe it could be a hit after all. So they pressed it, but people kept returning it to the stores for refunds because it was a defective pressing. There’d always be someone new at Stanley’s who didn’t know what that record was who’d say, “Oh, what’s this?” and put it on.)

  Silver George would usually be taking amphetamine, dying part of his hair another color, and lying on his stomach on the bed holding a coat hanger up to a clear light bulb with one hand and holding on to a big plant with the other. He had two pet theories: one, that the Japanese had promoted amphetamine so that they could keep their postwar labor force working around the clock, and, two, that plants needed electricity supplements. His idea was to attract the electricity from the light bu
lb with the metal hanger and transmit it through his body to the plant. The plant was in a wooden stand; it was so big I always wondered where he’d gotten it from—he probably just walked out of some office building lobby with it, but he said no, he’d just “befriended” it. Whoever walked through the room he’d tell, “Look at it move. Did you see it move? Now look, I’m not kidding.” And one time, I have to admit, I did see it twitch.

  At two o’clock every morning a six-foot-six blond hospital orderly dressed in his whites walked into Stanley’s. He was the only person who actually contributed toward the rent—he’d been an ethnologist in Canada working with Eskimos for the Canadian government, he said, but then they’d transferred him to desk work so he decided to move to New York. Before getting a job at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village, he’d sold hot dogs in Union Square. He didn’t even take drugs; he just sat around chatting very pleasantly with whoever was there, and then around five in the morning he’d go off to sleep. He lived there for about two months and then one day he just didn’t come back.

  Another sort of permanent person there was a young kid named Ronnie Cutrone who was living in the back part with his girl friend. He was from Brooklyn and he’d been hanging around the Village since he was eleven—“because I loved all the dykes on Sixth Avenue over by 8th Street, they sold me Tuinals—Olga the Terrible, Sonny, Tommy…”

  Ronnie told me that he used to go cruising with that clique of lesbians near the Women’s House of Detention where the inmates screamed down at their lovers out the windows of that huge Deco building in the triangle where all those streets meet—8th and Sixth Avenue and Christopher and Greenwich—over to Howard Johnson’s and Prexy’s and on to Pam-Pam’s, a luncheonette that was open all night on Sixth Avenue, and go with them to dyke hangouts like the Club 82.