Chameleon Dreams Part 3 The Musician Pub, Leicester U.K.
Category Archives: Andy Warhol
New York Poets Theatre
Interesting piece of history about the amazing St. Mark’s Place. One of my favourite streets anywhere in the World! A bit further down, at this time, was Andy Warhol’s club “The Electric Circus”.
“The East End Theatre was an Off-Off-Broadway theater venue located at 85 East 4th Street. Existing in the 1960s, the theater was the creation and home from January 1, 1965 to December 31, 1965 of the New York Poets Theatre, an experimental theater project founded by artists James Waring, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Alan Marlowe, Fred Herko and Diane di Prima. Being the last, and arguably the most serious, of the theatres of the New York Poets Theatre group, Marlowe, who spearheaded this property, converted what was once a basic dance hall into ‘A jewelbox of a theatre…like the best art theatres of Europe’ as remarked by Frank O’Hara, according to Diane di Prima’s memoir Recollections of My Life as A Woman: The New York Years. In the memoir she recalls how Marlowe spent a great deal of money decorating the space by ‘buying used…
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All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Warhol Years 1965–1967| PopMatters|Peter Hogan
In meeting Andy Warhol, the Velvets acquired what few fledgling bands have been lucky enough to achieve: a wealthy patron. In addition, Warhol’s Factory, populated by an enormous range of people of varying talents, provided a fertile cross-pollination of ideas and personalities, whilst also constituting a powerful PR machine.
Enter Nico
For John Cale, Andy Warhol’s Factory was like entering a fountain of ideas, with “new things happening every day”; for Lou Reed it was “like landing in heaven”. Everywhere they turned there were odd characters and odd situations, and Reed would write down in a notebook fragments of what he heard and overheard. Many of these fragments would end up in song; others would suggest a title or a story situation. The Factory crowd also noticed Reed as well. “Everyone was certainly in love with him — me, Edie, Andy, everyone,” confessed Factory regular Danny Fields. “He was so sexy. Everyone just had this raging crush… he was the sexiest thing going”.
Warhol and Morrissey had recently been approached to get involved with setting up a new discotheque in Long Island; the plans would come to nothing (after seeing the Velvets, the club owner hired The Young Rascals instead), but at this point Warhol was actively looking for a rock band to play there. Bizarrely (according to Victor Bockris), Warhol had actually contemplated forming his own rock band three years earlier, with LaMonte Young and Walter De Maria.
Seeing The Velvet Underground at Café Bizarre, Warhol liked the fact that Lou Reed looked “pubescent”, and that the audience left the gig looking “dazed and damaged” — according to Reed, Warhol saw them the night they were fired. Paul Morrissey claims that it was his idea to marry underground films to rock’n’roll, but that it was a purely commercial decision to work with the Velvets, rather than an artistic one. At the time, Morrissey also thought that Reed and Cale lacked presence, and that what the Velvets needed was a singer with “a bit of charisma”. He suggested someone who was already a part of the Warhol camp: Nico.
The suggestion that Nico should join the band didn’t go down too well with the Velvets, to put it mildly. Morrissey played them her single on the Immediate label, and according to him Reed was “hostile to Nico from the start”. What changed Reed’s mind was the fact that Warhol was offering them an enticing management and recording deal. There was of course the recognition that his patronage would bring. In the end, it was too good a deal for the Velvets to turn down. According to Nico, Reed agreed simply because he lacked the confidence to refuse — or perhaps, lacked enough confidence in himself as a vocalist. Still, at his insistence the billing would distance Nico from the group, making it crystal clear that she was not a band member. They would be The Velvet Underground and Nico. So Aronowitz was ousted (he’d only had a “handshake deal” — something he subsequently regretted) and Morrissey and Warhol officially became joint managers of The Velvet Underground. In return for 25%, Warhol would invest in new equipment, get them gigs and a recording contract. In fact, after buying two instruments from Vox, Warhol got them to supply further equipment for free, having arranged an endorsement deal (the band would later endorse Acoustic, and then Sunn).
But a problem remained: Nico wanted to sing all the songs, which Reed refused point blank to allow. But since her presence meant that some gentler songs were now needed, Reed wrote three ballads for her, which suited her unique, breathy singing style (“like an IBM computer with a German accent”, as Warhol put it): “Femme Fatale”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror”. The gentler songs contrasted interestingly with John Cale’s experiments in drone-like repetition.
According to Cale, Nico was deaf in one ear (from a perforated eardrum), which caused her to go off-pitch from time to time, much to the band’s amusement. “Lou never really liked me” Nico later complained — though that’s hard to believe when you listen to ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’. She and Reed were lovers early on, and even lived together for a while. Recalling this period, Nico described Reed as “very soft and lovely. Not aggressive at all”, and even that “you could just cuddle him like a sweet person”. Sterling Morrison was more cynical: “You could say Lou was in love with her, but Lou Reed in love is a kind of abstract concept”. The relationship lasted eight weeks, and was supposedly ended by Nico. Cale, meanwhile, had been seduced by Edie Sedgwick within 48 hours of arriving at the Factory, and moved in with her for the duration (six weeks) of their relationship. Edie had also had a brief affair with Nico. John Cale has described the material Reed wrote for Nico as “psychological love songs”, and even Reed acknowledged her strengths as a performer. Yet after Nico left the Velvets, Reed would write no more songs for her — despite being asked to by both Cale and Nico herself.
Nico had little to do on stage when she wasn’t singing except stand stock-still and play tambourine (usually out of time), and at times things could get a little tense between her and the band. Even so, she was a striking vision: dressed all in white in contrast to the Velvets’ black attire. Her modeling days had certainly taught her how to strike a dramatic pose. She was also taller than all the men surrounding her and, inevitably, she captured most of the media attention. As Maureen Tucker said: “She was this gorgeous apparition, you know. I mean, she really was beautiful”. Critic Richard Goldstein described Nico’s stage presence as “half goddess, half icicle”.
Singing For ’Drella
However little Andy Warhol knew about music (and he never expressed any noted preferences), even he must have sensed that in TheVelvet Underground he’d found more than just another rock band. “Andy told me that what we were doing with music was the same thing he was doing with painting and movies i.e. not kidding around” Lou Reed recalled. He was bowled over by Andy’s way of looking at the world and once remarked that sometimes he would spend days thinking about something Andy said. Reed was also impressed by Warhol’s work ethic: “I’d ask him why he was working so hard and he’d say, ‘Somebody’s got to bring home the bacon’”. Warhol would ask Reed how many songs he’d written that day; Reed would lie and say two. Lou also remarked on Andy’s generosity, pointing out that though Andy was the first to arrive for work at the Factory and the last to leave he’d still take them all to dinner: “He gave everyone a chance”.
But the exact nature of the group’s relationship to their new manager remains vague. As Sterling Morrison pondered: “Was The Velvet Underground some happy accident for him, something that he could work into his grandiose schemes for the show? Would another band have done just as well? I don’t think another band would have done just as well. At that time we seemed uniquely suited for each other”.
John Cale described Warhol as “a catalyst” for the Velvets, that he understood exactly what they were about, how best to bring that out. “I doubt that Lou would have continued investigating song subjects like he did without having some kind of outside support for that approach other than myself” he elaborated. “I think it was just basically Andy and I who really encouraged that side of a literary endeavour”. Morrison echoes the fact that Warhol gave them “the confidence to keep doing what were doing”.
It’s probable that Reed and Warhol each saw echoes of themselves in the other. But Warhol had earned the nickname of ’Drella (a combination of Dracula and Cinderella) that Ondine, another of the Factory crowd, had given him. Warhol had an acid wit that Reed could seldom match, and his jibes were less malevolent than Reed’s — they could be bitchy and funny at the same time, whereas Lou was often just bitchy. But as Malanga states, Warhol also had his dark side: “he could slice a person with a glance”. In fact, Lou actually came in a poor third to Nico when it came to put-downs. Meeting again shortly after their break-up, there was a moment of frosty awkwardness between the two, followed by a long pause after which Nico came out with the charmless “I cannot make love to Jews any more.”
In the end, the Velvets’ relationship with Warhol is best summed up by Mary Woronov, artist and collaborator: “They were with Andy and Andy was with them and they backed him absolutely. They would have walked to the end of the earth for him”. All of the Velvets spoke highly of Warhol ever after, Cale perhaps most succinctly of all: “He was magic”.
At this point the Velvets had been ordered by police to stop rehearsing in their West 3rd Street apartment (above a firehouse), and told to rehearse in the country if they were going to make that kind of noise. Cale was experimenting with an electronic “thunder machine” at the time. The same cop had also accused them of throwing human excreta out of their window. So they began to rehearse at the Factory every day, accompanying Warhol in the evenings to art openings, cocktail parties, dinners and nightclubs, as part of his permanent 10–20-strong retinue. It’s doubtful whether the drug-free Tucker tagged along, and she must have been somewhat bemused by the Factory’s denizens. (They in turn liked the fact that she looked boyish, which fitted right in with all the blurring of gender going on there.) Later on, Moe worked at the Factory briefly, transcribing tapes of Ondine’s rantings for Warhol’s book A: A Novel. However, she refused to type any of the swear words, substituting asterisks instead. Meanwhile, Ondine had turned Lou Reed on to methedrine, which became became his main indulgences for years to come.
Factory people
Gerard Malanga
A poet and photographer in his own right, Gerard Malanga (b.1943) met Andy Warhol while still a student at Wagner College on Staten Island. He soon became Warhol’s assistant in silk-screening (where he probably did most of the actual physical work, and originated at least some of the ideas), also introducing him to New York’s literary, theatrical and movie crowds. Malanga also eventually assisted Warhol in his own movie-making. His habit of carrying a leather bullwhip everywhere led to his “whipdance” routine on stage with the Velvets during ‘Venus in Furs’ (Malanga had earlier been a dancer on DJ Alan Freed’s Big Beat TV show). He went on to found Interview magazine with Warhol. in 1983, Malanga co-wrote (with Victor Bockris) Up-tight: The Velvet Underground Story, the first book to appear on the Velvets.
Billy Name
A photographer and lighting designer who subsidized his artistic work with hairdressing, Billy name (real name Billy linich) once decorated his entire apartment with silver foil. Warhol liked the look so much (“Silvermakes everything disappear”) that he asked Linich to decorate his new studio — the original Factory — in the same way. Billy also worked with Gerard Malanga as an assistant on Warhol’s silk screens, designed the cover for White Light/White Heat, and claims to have been one of Reed’s lovers. Also a musician, Linich was in LaMonte Young’s group for a year, leaving them just before the arrival of John Cale. A genuinely eccentric character, Name was effectively the Factory’s caretaker, living in one of its black-painted toilets (which he used as a photographic darkroom) for years, studying astrological charts and books on the occult given him by Reed; when the Factory moved home, Billy simply moved into the equivalent space in the new one. In 1968, he sealed himself into this room, and was seldom seen at all between then and the time he finally left the Factory (in the middle of the night) at some point in Spring 1970, leaving a note behind telling Warhol not to worry. Linich subsequently gave up amphetamines, moved back home to Poughkeepsie and pursued his own individualistic spirituality. Today, his photographs of the Factory era are much in demand.
Edie Sedgwick
A Californian debutante from a rich but troubled Bostonian socialite background, Edith Minturn Sedgwick (b.1943) had spent her late teens in a mental institution (as had several of her brothers, two of whom committed suicide). In 1964, at the age of 21, she moved to New York and met Andy Warhol in early ‘65; for the following year, they were virtually inseparable. She dyed her hair silver to match Warhol’s wig and became a kind of mirror image of him, escorting him to society parties and appearing in a dozen of his movies. “She had more problems than anybody I’d ever met”, Warhol later said. Perhaps that was the appeal of their relationship, which was certainly not sexual (Truman Capote thought that Andy wanted to be Edie).
She became the face of young Manhattan; Vogue magazine dubbed her a “youthquaker”, and she seemed the archetypal poor little rich go-go girl. Reed wrote “Femme Fatale” about her (at Warhol’s request) and, according to some, Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman” and “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat” are both about her. But though undeniably beautiful and pursued by innumerable suitors (including John Cale), Edie was not so much a femme fatale as a femme catastrophique. She might have been a mainstay of Warhol’s movies and danced on stage with the Velvets during their first couple of gigs, but most of the time she was out of her head on a cocktail of drugs of every description, many prescribed by the legendary “speed-doctor” Dr Roberts (immortalized by the Beatles as “Dr Robert”). She later blamed Warhol for her condition. “Warhol really fucked up a great many people’s — young people’s — lives”, she once complained. “My introduction to heavy drugs came through the Factory. I liked the introduction to drugs I received. I was a good target for the scene. I bloomed into a healthy young drug addict”. “Edie never grew up”, Warhol responded, probably accurately. However, comments of his such as “a girl always looks more beautiful and fragile when she’s about to have a nervous breakdown” don’t show him in too sympathetic a light. When Edie left him in 1966, Warhol joked bleakly to playwright Robert Heide: “When do you think Edie will commit suicide? I hope she lets us know so we can film it”. After Warhol, Edie attempted to carve a career as an actress (but didn’t really have the talent) and a model (but her reputation as an unreliable druggie preceded her), without much success. She died in 1971 of an overdose of barbiturates, at the age of 28.
Paul Morrissey
Underground filmmaker Morrissey (b.1938) had made his own movies ever since his teenage years. As well as managing Warhol’s business affairs for many years, from 1966 Morrissey worked closely on numerous movies with him, eventually making several of his own movies under the Warhol banner. The best known of these are the trilogy of Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972), all of which starred hustler Joe Dallesandro. Morrissey parted company with Warhol in the mid-1970s, after two final exploitation films, Flesh For Frankenstein (1973) and Blood For Dracula (1974), made with Warhol’s backing. he continued to make movies into the late 1980s.
Ondine
Real name Bob Olivo (b.1939) he was also nicknamed “the Pope”. Ondine was a manic and charismatic actor and writer, the hub of the amphetamine-driven “Mole People” gay crowd at the Factory. he had nothing to do with the fashionable new York nightclub Ondine’s — Olivo had adopted the name of the lead character in Jean giraudoux’s 1939 play Ondine, which had been played on Broadway by the iconic Audrey Hepburn. He appeared in numerous Warhol movies, beginning with Batman Dracula (1964), and Warhol’s A: A Novel was simply a transcription of tape-recordings of Ondine’s speed-fuelled rantings over a 24-hour period. he toured the college lecture circuit during the 1970s, talking about Warhol and screening his performances in Warhol’s S&M movie Vinyl (1965) and Chelsea Girls (1966). In the 1980s, he appeared in numerous off off-Broadway plays, until ill health forced him to retire. After Ondine’s death from liver failure in April 1989, his mother burnt all his writings.
Brigid Polk (Berlin)
Brigid Berlin (b.1939) and her sister Richie, who also hung out at the Factory, were heirs to the Hearst publishing empire. Brigid created montage “trip books” — scrapbooks of anything that took her fancy, the most extraordinary containing the impressions of the scars, genitalia, breasts or navels of anyone willing to contribute. She appeared in Chelsea Girls (1966), and also with Edie Sedgwick in the film based on the Factory crowd Ciao! Manhattan (1972). She tape-recorded pretty much everything she encountered, from phone calls to orgies. This led to her taping Lou Reed’s last concert with The Velvet Underground in 1970 — eventually released commercially as Live At Max’s Kansas City in 1972. Her “Polk” nickname evolved from Factory slang — “taking a poke” meant shooting up with a needle. Berlin gave up amphetamines and alcohol in the 1980s.
Mary Woronov
Mary Woronov (b.1943) was an art student at Cornell University when she met Andy Warhol and became involved with the Factory. She was one of the principal dancers with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, accompanying Gerard Malanga’s whipdance to ‘Venus In Furs’. Having appeared in Warhol’s movies Hedy The Shoplifter and Chelsea Girls, Woronov moved to Los Angeles and acted in a zillion B-movies, of which the most notable is probably Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 (1975). She revealed herself as a talented comedy actress in Rock And Roll High School (1979), and Paul Bartel’s black comedies Eating Raoul (1982) and Scenes From The Class Struggle In Beverley Hills (1989), as well as making cameos in mainstream Hollywood movies. Liver damage caused her to give up all drugs and alcohol in the 1980s. She has been a writer-director for the TV show The Women’s Series and is the author of four volumes of fiction: Snake, Niagara, Blind Love and Wake For Angels, which also contains some of her paintings, and Swimming Underground (a memoir of her time with the Factory).
Excerpted from The Rough Guide to the Velvet Underground, publishing 1 September 2007 by Rough Guides, a division of Penguin Group International. Copyright 2007 by Rough Guides. All rights reserved.velvet undergroundrough guidesnicoandy warhol
Source: All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Warhol Years 1965–1967, Part One – PopMatters
The lasting influence of The Velvet Underground and Nico | Riley Fitzgerald
The Velvet Underground and Nico embodies a seldom realised idea: that music really can change the world. A financial failure in its time, the loose collection of these New York artists’ self-titled debut took a decade to sell 100,000 copies.
However, despite its commercial failings, The Velvets’ humble flop was a primitively bright conceptual spark. While simultaneously hitting the bargain bins, greater forces were at play. Ripples of inspiration were subtlety mutating the face of popular culture. A powerful influence, the group’s deep-seated creative forces unified into something truly iconic.
Over a prolonged period of gestation word of mouth built in the musical underground. The innovative album passed hands while outspoken critics like Lester Bangs lionised the group’s achievement. To cite Brian Eno’s famous remarks to the LA Times in 1982:
“I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
The Velvet Underground and Nico embodied the ultimate album ideal: how the creative influence of five musicians could inform the next twenty years of music.
A central reference point in seemingly every shake-up in rock music since its release, generations of unrelated musical movements drew something different from between the vinyl grooves. Post-punk, glam rock, art rock, new wave, noise, and even industrial can trace their twisted lineages to the iconic album. Its influence still courses fluidly throughout modern music, and remains a seminal name-check for anything primal and completely outside the norm.
Commercial pressures, powerful personalities and creative impulse can often lead to compromise in a band. The Velvets were by no means immune to these factors, but what is remarkable is how true each creative contributor remained to their individual inspirations. Take a moment to profile the unlikely constituents which gave rise to the sonic schizophrenia of the band.
Lou Reed was the cantankerous black sheep of a middle-class Jewish family. Informed by literary studies and a stint in a mental institution at age 17, Reed looked to expand the idea of what popular music could entail. Musically the young songwriter cut his teeth churning out Motown, surf rock and bubblegum pop sound-alikes for the unscrupulous Pickwick Records.
Yet the Long Island native sought to follow in the steps of the visceral literature of William S. Burroughs and his beat generation forbears. Hidden behind the clichés of rock and roll, Reed saw an unlimited potential to accommodate a broader range of meaning.
Breaking down the barrier between rock music and poetic narrative, Lou injected sleaze and degradation into rock. At a time when puritanical values and obscenity laws could still place a chokehold on the avant-garde, Reed sang about heroin, transvestites and rent boys. Yet the band didn’t kick off as some grand artistic endeavour. Looking to capitalise on a more contrary sound Pickwick encouraged Reed to bring together a mock rock group to perform single Ostrich live. Known as The Primitives, the group started gigging live; securing a fortuitous residency at New York’s Cafe Bizarre in 1965.
Playing alongside Reed at this time was John Cale. A Welsh emigrant, Cale was an acolyte of the avant-garde. After finishing his study in London he relocated to New York in 1963 where he made a name for himself playing alongside influential neo-classical musicians like John Cage and Terry Riley. The young artist was probably just as happy to play a single piano chord 50 times with his elbows as anything else, but after meeting Reed at a party, he agreed to join his group.
Sterling Morrison was a Syracuse University graduate who was invited to play with The Primitives after a chance meeting with Reed, his old high school acquaintance, on a Manhattan subway. Contributing a more conventional grounding to his counterparts, he provided both rhythmic bedrocks and duelling solos to ground Reed’s more obtuse fretwork. Leaving the band in the early 70s, Morrison would evaporate from popular music entirely until a brief return in the early 90s.
Filling in for Primitives’ drummer Angus MacLise, Maureen “Mo” Tucker’s biting percussive edge kept the group together. Like Cale, Tucker looked to music from further afield when informing her self-tutored approach. While MacLise had introduced ideas from eastern music into the band’s sound, Tucker made an even greater impact with her appetite for the African beats of Babatunde Olatunji and the economic rhythms of Bo Diddly. The metronomic Tucker provided a viciously pervasive thump. She would only play standing.
Indirectly Andy Warhol remains one of the great unacknowledged influences in popular music. Although he did little in helping the group sculpt its sound, few would deny his influence in fostering their attitude and style. “The Velvet Underground was part of Andy’s group, and Andy wasn’t part of anything,” Reed told Spin in 2008.
Even prior to meeting The Velvets, Warhol shared many links with the group. Andy was familiar with avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, both of whom had played with Cale in the Theatre of Eternal Music. This aristocrat of the New York scene also had associations with artist Walter De Maria, a drummer from an early iteration of The Primitives. Introduced through a shared acquaintance, Warhol quickly extended his patronage to the fledgling Velvets.
As art took an interest in popular culture and the mundane, pop and art collided with the Velvet Underground. Trashy could be classy. Ugly could be beautiful. He deconstructed consumer culture and captured unfiltered depictions of modern life. Like Warhol, Reed and company were particularly engrossed with that which was ignored or glossed over by the mainstream. As manager of the group, Warhol impressed into The Velvet Underground the idea that everything and anything could be art.
It was with Warhol’s patronage that the group was brought into the nexus of New York’s underground scene. The group transplanted from Cafe Bizarre to The Factory. With Warhol’s encouragement they become a house band and the sonic centrepiece of Warhol’s multimedia phenomena the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
The group’s immersion within the polaroid art world of Warhol’s Factory placed them within a surrealistic scene where hustlers, transvestites, socialites and living theatre converged. Warhol would also help co-finance their debut album along with Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records sales exec.
Chanteuse Nico was a late addition to the band. Thrown in by Andy Warhol, it was his belief that the chic actor, model and vocalist could provide the group with some extra edge. In his on words the group were lacking a much needed “charisma.” Noted for her acting in French drama La Dolce Vita, the femme fatale’s icy persona belied a burgeoning (if moth-like) creative impulse. In line with Warhol’s fetish for film, she lent a detached and cinematic quality to the group.
Her injection into the band was far from a smooth transition. The German expat struggled to find acceptance amongst her peers. She would often clash with her bandmates due to her partial deafness and general eccentricity. But with her addition the cards were stacked; recording the album in early 1966 the group had few creative restrictions other than what the ubiquitous clarion call of “no blues.”
The deceptively tranquil Sunday Morning opens the album with sweetened pop. A crooning Reed embodies an effortless cool. Jangled guitar and beguiling innocence provide a moment of alluring misdirection, while subtly paranoiac lyrics anticipate the album’s darker undertow.
Things take a turn towards the more abrasive with Waiting For a Man. The second track’s lyrical world is intended to be real. Relating the details of a drug exchange, it weaves outsider depictions of the stark realities of street life and subterranean culture. A jilted piano echoes the Tucker’s juddering pulse.
With all the defiant deviance the group can muster, I’m Waiting For The Manconflates drugs and sexuality. The song lives within a reality aligned against the prevailing values of the day. It conveys a sense of moral decay which would see the record banned from major retailers and banned from radio airplay. Reed is the model of passivity and dependence. As raunchily as the song resounds, its feeling is voyeuristic.
While earlier tracks exude desperation and the idea of living on the edge, Femme Fatal swirls into gentle fantasy. The track places Nico in central focus. Her alluringly deadpan vocals are carried above a baroque chord progression.
The velour S&M fantasy of Venus in Furs verges on hypnotic. While the band averted themselves from the lysergic ripples of West Coast counterculture, it’s difficult to classify the paradoxical Venus in Furs as anything but psychedelic.
Run Run Run raggedly demonstrates the group’s celebration of stupidity and ugliness. Musically they revel in circular-minded banality. All Tomorrow’s Partiesmakes musical sketches of Warhol’s Factory scene.
Despite Reed’s contentions that he wasn’t glorifying anything in his music, Heroinprovided a directness and frankness about substance abuse which made the missives of counterculture seem childish in comparison. Cale’s sound experiments drone over the ostinato of a two-chord motif. Tucker’s percussion imitates a pulsing heart before inexplicably dropping out. Out of tune, primitive and never far from falling apart, here the group remain vital at every moment.
The punchy There She Goes Again situates itself as a straight ahead rocker, albeit one incorporating elastic time signatures. I’ll Be Your Mirror shimmers, while The Black Angel’s Death Song teeters into formless noise. Closer European Son pays homage to poet Delmore Schwartz while distortion and feedback dominate the album’s dissonant conclusion.
The black-clad Velvets would not last long. The group quickly parted ways with Warhol and exited The Factory scene in ’68. Nico and Cale would also depart. After dropping another two albums the group had all but disintegrated. 50 years onward the beauty and rawness of the group’s untamed innovation continues to resound throughout popular culture.
Much of music’s modern history has crossed currents with these New Yorkers’ commercial folly. It provides proof of concept that a group of individuals can instil music with a sense of intelligence and meaning. The Velvet Underground and Nico remains an enduring cornerstone of popular culture, echoing through time with an unwavering magnetism.
Source: The lasting influence of The Velvet Underground and Nico
Q&A: A.J. Weberman on Dylan, Lennon, Garbage, New York, and the JDL – Tablet Magazine
Good interview and article about A.J. Weberman by David Samuels of the Tablet.
Source: Q&A: A.J. Weberman on Dylan, Lennon, Garbage, New York, and the JDL – Tablet Magazine
Alan Weberman is a stone cold meshugganeh. He is by no means a reliable news source. Yet, by the same token, the legalese that these days must precede any printed record of the former Yippie, drug dealer, JDO activist, and pioneering garbologist’s nonstop provocations should not be taken as evidence that Weberman is somehow innately any less truthful than the celebrities, political figures, and power structures that he delighted in tweaking, torturing, and maligning for the past half-century. Weberman is no more or less corrosive than he always was, and politicians and rock stars are no more honest.
What’s changed, in the meanwhile, is us. We don’t see the point of Webermans anymore. They’re too abrasive. Or maybe, we are all Webermans now, thanks to the Internet, which flushed away the grittiness of a true oppositional culture down the social media toilet bowl. Thanks to Google, Facebook, and Twitter, there is no longer anything thrilling or shocking about calling celebrities bad names and going through their garbage. Or maybe it’s because famous people have more money, and better lawyers. Or because what’s left of the press is run by Ivy League conformist-types who are eager to maintain the pure ivory of their permanent records and are very anxious about keeping up institutional appearances, which are the only real form of capital they have, because the press is broke, which is a fool-proof recipe for boring.
If it helps, you can think of Weberman as a bullet-headed human keyhole into the oppositional culture that New York City nurtured in the bad old days, before Giuliani and Bloomberg cleaned the place up and turned it into one big dormitory for knowledge workers who were good with numbers and would die before eating at the wrong restaurant or sending their kids to the wrong preschool. Everything that was wrong about the old New York is right about Weberman, and everything that is right about the new New York is wrong about Weberman. So, like most things in life, it depends on your angle. Without Weberman, the world will become an even colder and less hospitable place for weirdos, which is something that I oppose.
I met Alan Weberman in his high-rise apartment, which is located in the upper part of the Upper East Side and offers a spectacular view of Queens. Through a haze of smoke, he offered me some of his memories, while being interrupted by the incessant demands of an ill-mannered bulldog, who is clearly the main focus of his affections. An edited transcript of our conversation was then redacted by a lawyer. I put the lawyer’s version aside, as I wrestled with the question of whether a lawyered version of Weberman was even worth publishing.
After an appropriate period of prayerful reflection, which lasted over a year, I have decided that it is important to hear Weberman speak about Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Meir Kahane, being a drug dealer, and some of his other pet subjects. It’s good to remember that being Jewish once meant being half-crazy, in addition to being neurotic and annoying. Anyone who wants to hear a recording of Weberman talking to Bob Dylan on the telephone can click here.
Where did your obsessive focus come from? Were you that way as a kid?
It started when I was in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 22, 1973, as part of an organized demonstration to find out who stole John F. Kennedy’s brain from the National Archives. You know, because the brain was missing. A New York Times reporter came across that. There was an article recently that some people say RFK took it.
So, we had this demonstration, and this guy Bernard Fensterwald was having a conference on the same day. I’d gotten vibes from working with Fensterwald that there was more to him than really met the eye. So, I’d been working all week, not smoking pot, putting up posters, handing out leaflets all over D.C. Then I came back and gave a little speech at Fensterwald’s conference.
Then I met this girl who was working for Fensterwald, and I says, “Let’s get high,” you know. So we started, I had a little hash, but it was Georgetown University, and these nuns were coming in and out. And so I said let’s go back to your dorm room so we went back to her dorm room, getting high and listening to rock and roll. And then somebody starts yelling from downstairs. It’s Steven Soter, you know Carl Sagan’s sidekick. And he shows me these pictures of the tramps who were picked up an hour after the assassination in a freight car you know behind the Texas schoolbook depository. So, you know so one of them looks like, says oh I thought this one was Frank Sturges, but Bernard Fensterwald said he went down to D.C. to Dallas and did a fucking study and it wasn’t the guy.
And I says, “You believe Fensterwald man? Fensterwald’s probably working for the CIA.” I looked at the tramp shots and I says, “Hmm, one of them looks like Howard Hunt, one of them looks like Frank Sturgis, and the other one looks like this guy who I rented a room to when I was going to Michigan State before I got expelled for dealing pot.” So I says, “Wait a minute, how can one guy, one tramp, can look like Sturgis, the other looked like Hunt, they’re both Nixon’s plumbers in Watergate?” Howard Hunt was involved in Bay of Pigs, and Frank Sturgis was involved with every goddamn thing imaginable.
So, I went to the National Archives, and that’s when I started speed-reading documents, and I read every document in the National Archives about the Kennedy assassination. Then I hooked up with this guy Mike Canfield, and Canfield convinced Congressman Gonzalez to introduce a bill to investigate the Kennedy assassination. And that’s how the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed.
Did you ever read Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost?
No. I went through his garbage, though.
What did you find?
Betting slips.
Haha.
He’s a chicken shit, though. I was there going through his garbage and he came out of his house in Brooklyn Heights and I expected a big confrontation. But I was wearing a trench coat, so he must have thought I was a Fed or something. He just moved along.
I lived on that block, just up the hill from that big Jehovah’s Witness “Watchtower” building. Do you think Dylan was inspired to write “All Along the Watchtower” because of his view of that sign from downtown Manhattan?
(Photo courtesy of A.J. Weberman)
No, no. All along the watchtower, princes kept the view, while all the women came and went, it’s about his career. Before, when I was at a very primitive stage of Dylanology, I thought the wind began to howl meant Dylan, the wind, like blowing in the wind, began to howl, like Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” So, I went and asked Ginsberg about it. He comes to the door naked. He says, “No, Weberman no, no.”
But he would ask me for advice. He got mugged a lot, and he wanted to know what to do.
He is a human being.
You know, he fucked around with needles and he got fucking hepatitis. And then he finally got some money.
Why did everybody love the needle so much back then?
Don’t ask me. I didn’t mess with needles. But it’s just a very pleasurable thing, apparently. And when I knew Lennon, he was an addict. See the way he looks at the end of his life: He’s skinny, he’s emaciated. Him and Yoko, time and time again, they didn’t have clothes on. I would follow him into the fucking bathroom and watch him take a piss. You know, what difference did it make, he was nude anyway.
I feel like gestures that seemed perverse and counter-cultural when you made them first back in the day, like digging through Bob Dylan’s garbage, have become widely shared social instincts. In a way, garbage-ology is the soul of the Internet.
You know, the term garbologist existed—in Australian, it meant a garbage collector—but there was no garbology, which is the study of garbage. So, I invented the word “garbology.” It’s come to mean studying garbage to see what you can know, to increase recycling and understand socioeconomic divides and this and that. I did it just to spy on Dylan, essentially.
I’ve read some of the stuff you’ve written about your purported—and in some cases, recorded—phone conversations with Bob Dylan, which are hilarious. Why do you think he kept talking to you?
Well, I brought my Dylan class over to his house on a field trip. And he came out and he says, “Al, whatchu bringing all these people around for?” So I says, “Oh, it’s a field trip for my Dylanology class. But actually it’s a demonstration against all you’ve come to represent.” You know, and so it went. He rolled up his sleeves and he says, “Look, I’m not a junkie.”
Then Dylan called me later on, when I got back to Sixth and Bleecker, and he says “Hey, how’d you like a job as my bodyguard or a chauffeur?” So I says, “You’re trying to buy me off, man. You’re trying to co-opt me and it’s not going to work.” And I started hanging around the studio with him and we had a great time. He writes about it in Chronicles, you know—allegorically.
You know, we always moved in the same circles, druggie-type circles in the West Village. The guy who lived next door to me in the West Village was the guy who Dylan originally crashed with, Ray Gooch. So, there was a connection right there. There were generally fewer people around back then.
Then Dylan wrote “Dear Landlord,” which was the first song about the Dylan- Weberman relationship, and it’s full of threats.
He was right to see you as threatening, no?
No. He was threatening my life and stuff. He could get into a really creepy fucking head, where we’ll be sitting around and he wouldn’t turn the lights on in Houston Street, and he’d be looking at that church on Houston and Sullivan—St. Anthony’s—and it would all get real gray and everything. And then he’d say, “Al, if you get into my life, I might gain a soul.”
I says, “Gain a soul? What do you mean, man? Are you threatening to kill me, are you gonna kill me?” He says, “No, but I know some mafia people who might.”
But guess what. He didn’t want to be blackmailed by the mob for the rest of his life. You know so he went around, he did a number on me himself. He caught me on Bleecker Street and beat the shit out of me.
(Photo courtesy of A.J. Weberman)
You were like something he couldn’t get off his shoe.
I was threatening his whole thing. He couldn’t shoot junk in peace. And then I chased him out of Greenwich Village by having a birthday party in front of his house and it was in the centerfold of the Daily News. After that, he couldn’t live in that neighborhood anymore. There were too many hippies camping out in front of his house and stuff.
You could have just left the man in peace. Why did you bother him?
I thought he was a sellout. You know, he sold out the left. But guess what, Dylan was never a leftist. He just fell into the easiest thing that would make him famous.
It was a big fuckin’ laugh what Dylan did. He had people singing how many years can the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned? And if you look at Dylan in other contexts, he says “catch a cannonball bring me down the line, my bag is sinking low and I do believe it’s time.” So he’s saying, “Let’s find a black heroin connection, my bag is sinking low”—i.e., I’m running out of dope. “How many times must the cannonballs fly”—cannonballs are out of control, namely black people, “before they’re forever banned.” And what he means by banned is, people were banned in South Africa who were part of the ANC, because they opposed Apartheid.
That’s nuts.
Dylan sings racist sub-content, pro-apartheid sub-content, in his lyrics.
You understand that this is your own, very personal interpretation of Dylan’s lyrics, right?
Time after time these things come up. You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat, you used to have diplomatic relations with the biggest exporter of chrome, South Africa. Who carried on his shoulder—Who shouldered the white man’s burden—a siamese cat, slang for a black man, a nigger. Ain’t it hard when you discovered that he really wasn’t where it’s at—wasn’t it hard for you to rationalize what you’d done when you decided to break diplomatic relations with South Africa.
So, that’s where Dylan’s head is at, man. He’s a fucking racist, he’s a fucking Holocaust revisionist, and he’s a Nazi fucking sympathizer. But when I knew him he was a proud Jew, OK? And I was a self-hating fucking Jew, pro-Palestinian, digging my own grave. And not just because I was Jewish. I was a hippie, too.
But then in the eighties, when Dylan wrote “Neighborhood Bully” about the scapegoating of Israel, did you feel some sense that maybe the two of you were on the same trajectory, after all?
Oh, it was a great song, you know. But then Dylan became a Christian. So, he sang, your father was an outlaw and a wanderer by trade, he taught me how to pick and choose and how to throw a blade. OK, so your father is an outlaw—your antecedents killed Christ—and a wanderer by trade, and they were forced to wander the world because of that. He taught you how to pick and choose—the chosen people—and how to throw the blade, circumcision. He oversees his kingdom so no stranger does intrude—he watches very carefully who he takes in and allows to convert to Judaism.
I also discovered backwards masking. You know, when I played “If Dogs Weren’t Free” backwards, it said “If Mars Invades Us” or something. I was friends with Jann Wenner, and so Jann ran it on Random Notes in Rolling Stone. Then people began to play records backwards and they got “Paul Is Dead.”
When you look at Jann Wenner now, he’s buff, right?
I don’t know how he did it, he must be taking steroids or something. When I knew him he was a little wimp I could push around. You know, I got him in the Eastside Bookstore once and threw him up against the wall. But now, I don’t know.
Do you believe that decoding Dylan lyrics for the past 50 years has really been the best use of your highly original mind?
It was like, you know, when you’d buy Ovaltine and if you get enough wrappers they would give you the Ovaltine secret decoder ring, where each number on the ring represented a letter. So, you’d tune into the Ovaltine hour and then you’d copy a letter and then another letter and then what was the message? Drink Ovaltine.
This is another case of that. I wasted my fucking life trying to fucking understand this stuff.
So, you went from Dylanology to Meir Kahane and his followers or proteges in the JDO, the Jewish Defense Organization.
It was Mordechai Levy who came by to spy on the Yippies for the secret service, essentially. Levy came across to spy on me and he didn’t find much anti-Israel stuff among the Yippies. It was all basically, you know, pro-pot single-issue politics. And then he started doing data mining on Nazis. You know, he would find a Nazi’s phone number, call up the business office and say “Could you read me back the numbers that were called from this number.” And then from those records he’d do another search on everyone that the Nazis called. And in that sense he sort of unraveled the neo-Nazi network in the United States at the time.
I was very impressed by his methodology. And essentially he rolled me over. He let me hear calls with Palestinians where he would get them to admit they were working with the Klan. Then he started the Jewish Defense Organization, and then any alleged acts of, shall we say, vandalism, ceased after we formed the JDO, because you can’t do both things at once.
What is the point of what you do now?
The purpose is to fight the Nazis essentially. I’m not like an armchair anarchist or revolutionary. You know, when we were fighting against the war in Vietnam, we were instigating riots.
Well, it would hard to get the Jews of America to riot about anything these days. You could give Iran, say, a nuclear bomb in broad daylight, and you would barely hear a peep from these folks. You could round up all the Gypsies, or the Guatemalans, and put them into concentration camps. Regardless of their political orientation, Jews in America are some pretty wealthy, self-satisfied white people these days, and they are largely ignorant of their own history. That’s why I like hearing stories from people like you.
You’re just mad at Bob Dylan, because you wanted to have a relationship with him that he clearly didn’t want to have, because he thought you were a nut.
No, I’m not. I’m telling you the truth, so you know.
Back in the days of the JDO, a lot of Jews were being put into schools that were integrated for the first time. And then you had the whole Bed-Stuy-Brownsville, community control of the school of school boards, where they threw out the Jewish teachers. So, a lot of Jewish kids were radicalized.
What turned me off to the JDL was the “nigger, nigger, nigger” all the time, you know. The Yippies were opposed to the JDL. We published their credit card numbers in the Yipster Times, and then they came around with baseball bats to beat my head in. I said, “Hey, you’re getting all these charges on your bill, you know what you can do you can get the legitimate charges taken off too you know while you’re at it.”
Kahane was an interesting guy, got kosher food in the prisons. Common fare. That benefited the Muslims, too.
What do you think of Kahane now?
He was a theocrat. He wanted religious police. He was a racist. Israelis decided he was a racist. Ultimately it’s their call.
The Soviet Jewry issue was one place that he had a positive impact. His violence was appropriate there. It threw a scare into people, especially the brain-dead Jews who ran the national Jewish organizations in America, both then and now. It also scared the Russians.
Yeah, absolutely. He put a lot of heat on the Russians. There’s no doubt about it. He went to prison for it, too.
And what do you think about the fact that Kahane worked for the FBI all those years?
He hated the left essentially. But I would have to file an FOIA request and see if I can get his reports to the Feds or his contact sheets or whatever.
Kahane gets out of school and becomes an undercover informant for the FBI infiltrating Klan activity, so he almost looks like a civil rights guy. Then he moves to the Russians and the Soviet Jewry thing, and then he is revealed as an extreme theocrat and a racist. What I’ve always wondered is, did he continue working for the FBI the whole time?
No. Once he started with the so-called terrorists, they don’t want to touch him. You know he’s committing, he’s inciting the commission of illegal acts, he’s participating to some degree. You know they dropped him after that.
Then, of course, in an irony of history, Kahane is the one that al-Qaida ends up targeting first, because they recognized him. They’re like, “That guy’s is really dangerous, because he’s the Jewish version of us.” And the failure to really follow up on the investigative leads in the Kahane assassination—because everyone thought that Kahane was simply a crazy Jewish racist who embarrassed everyone and probably did deserve to get shot—opened the door to the first World Trade Center attack, and then to the success of the Sept. 11 plot.
It was stupid. They had Emad Salem in there for the first World Trade Center bombing, this guy Carson Dunbar took him out, he was head of the New York FBI office. Then the bombing occurred, they put him back in the cell, and then they arrested everyone including Sheikh Rahman, and they made tapes of Sheikh Rahman talking to Emad Salem. And Emad Salem is saying, “Let’s bomb the FBI building.” And Rahman says, “Slow down slow down. It took us three years to train the one who killed Kennedy.” You know, and when this came up on trial, everybody the U.S. attorney, Lynn Stewart, the whole fucking crew, they weren’t going to say, “Hey, that could have been Robert Kennedy.” They all just laughed and said, “Oh, how could it be John Kennedy?”
And guess what: Rahman was close to Mohammad [M.T.] Mehdi, and Mehdi was close to Sirhan Sirhan, who did kill Robert Kennedy.
When you read accounts of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, it’s always presented as some inexplicable Oswald-like lone gunman event—except the man who did it, Sirhan Sirhan, had a very clear political purpose, which was to mark the anniversary of the Six Day War and to protest American support for Israel. He killed Robert Kennedy because he understood him to be a powerful American Zionist who was running for President.
Robert Kennedy was going to send U.S. fighter jets to Israel. Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian, and he was trained by a Muslim Brotherhood cell. The FBI still won’t give me documents about this one suspicious guy who ran a little study group in which Sirhan Sirhan participated, an Egyptian. They won’t give me his name.
Let’s talk about your relationship with John Lennon.
How that started was that we invaded Allen Klein’s office, he did the fucking Concert for Bangladesh album, and he kept all the money instead of giving it to the Muzzies in Bangladesh. So, New York magazine does a whole story on it, and we figure, “Hey, if this guy has to rip off the starving people of Bangladesh, he must be one hungry motherfucker.” So, we had our free lunch for starving music executives program where we went to the dumpsters on 1st Avenue near the fruit stands, got all this rotten fruit, came into Klein’s office, and tossed it around. Fucking Phil Spector was there man, he attacked my old lady, Anne. So, then he had the bodyguards throw us out.
So then, John and Yoko call me. And Yoko says, “Come on over for tea with you and Anne.” You know, so we went over to Bank Street. And then the friendship started.
What do you think they wanted? Did they want protection, because they were new to New York?
No, no. They were pissed off at Allen Klein, they liked what we did, you know. We spoke for them, too. They liked activism.
That guy John Lennon was a revolutionary. You know, “working-class hero.” He was into that fucking IRA. I met IRA guys over there who were selling hash and smurfing arms and sending it back to the IRA in Ireland. He was crazy, you know. He gave me money to start riots in Miami, at the Republican Convention.
So, Lennon believed in his politics, unlike Dylan?
You know, Lennon, he was using smack a lot of the time. You’d go there and they’d say, “Oh he’s depressed, you can’t go in the room.” They’d just load me up with records and Yoko’s art and everything, you know. And, in retrospect, you know, I would say he was going through cold turkey. He had no track marks, he was snorting at the time.
Back when Lennon convinced me he was up to revolutionary shit, we went and we put a phone line, we went to the back of the house, to John Cage’s phone line, and put an extension into Lennon’s house so when Cage went to sleep at night, Lennon could make his calls on Cage’s line without the FBI tapping them.
Did John Cage ever know that?
I don’t think so. I know Andy Warhol knew that we stole his furniture. What happened was, we’d just moved, we got back from Miami and we had the Yippie headquarters on 3rd Street and 2nd Avenue in a basement on the Angels block. So, we were looking for like a space heater or something. So, I was walking by Cooper Square and I saw this door was busted open. So, I walked upstairs and then holy shit, there was all this art deco stuff was there. You know bureaus and lamps and clocks made out of marble. I said, “Wow, somebody abandoned this.”
So, I had this guy come with a truck and loaded it all into a truck and brought it back to my loft and to the Yippie house. A week later, I read in New York magazine that somebody looted Andy Warhol’s art deco stash. So, later at a party, Dana Beal went over and told him, “Andy, we were the ones that took it, we thought it was abandoned property.” Andy says, “I don’t care, as long as you didn’t sell it, it’s OK with me.”
What did Lennon want from America?
What did he want? He loved New York, you know. He liked Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. You know, they’re entertaining people. And David Peel, of course. He was a revolutionary, so he just fit right into the crew basically. He came to demonstrations.
I had one, you know, “Paul Is Dead,” we were demonstrating outside Linda Eastman’s parents’ house. You know we had a hearse and we had a big mock funeral for Paul McCartney because his album was so apolitical. So, he and Yoko, they showed up in bags and read a whole statement.
When did you stop seeing him?
After he moved to the Dakota. Then they got real heavy into heroin. Really heavy, you know. They became addicts.
Did you ever see John Lennon use heroin?
No, he knew I was opposed to it. Because I was saying that Dylan was an addict, and he had sold out his left-wing thinking to use heroin—when of course there was no left-wing thinking. He just became the Marxist minstrel, because that’s what was happening at the time.
You’re just mad at Bob Dylan, because you wanted to have a relationship with him that he clearly didn’t want to have, because he thought you were a nut.
No, I’m not. I’m telling you the truth, so you know.
But you admire Dylan. You think he is very smart.
Oh yeah, he’s smart. He’s a freak. He played at Hubert’s Flea Circus. You know, you could ask him to sing any song and he’d sing it, like some kind of machine on 42nd Street. I’m waiting for him to write about that, because I used to go to Hubert’s all the time. He loved it in New York at the time, the gaslight. The Café Wha? I worked at the Wha? I paid Jimmy Hendrix $30 a night for three sets.
Jimi Hendrix is the one person in music history that I would trade everything I own for the chance to spend three hours in a small room where he was playing live.
(Photo courtesy of A.J. Weberman)
Oh, I heard him all the time. We would drop the actual glassware on the floor when he started to play, and then sweep it up later on, you know, so we wouldn’t miss a second. We’d go out and listen to him. Man, he’d go crazy, he’d play with his tongue, he’d play behind his back, he had all kinds of stuff—a lot of Dylan covers, “All Along the Watchtower,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Wild Thing.”
I remember Jimi saying to me when Eric Burdon was in the audience one night—“He’s going to sign me to go to England, I’m going to have plenty of money man, and I’m going to take every drug there is.” And I says, “You sure you want to take every one?” He says, “Yeah, I’m sure.”
He was a nice guy. Friendly, not condescending. He saw himself as basically a black Yippie. He gave the money to Abbie Hoffman to send joints to Congress. Every congressman got a joint. And, according to Abbie, a big percentage of them didn’t turn their joints over to the FBI.
Did you believe that pot was going to change people’s heads and change American society for the better?
And acid. We were going to squirt the cops with DMSO and LSD in water guns. DMSO would make their skin a permeable membrane. And of course the LSD would be psychotomimetic, it would make them crazy. But people don’t take acid anymore.
I don’t even know where I’d get acid in New York City these days. And if I did drop acid in my present condition, I would probably flip out and become a real-estate broker at Corcoran or something. So that part of my life is clearly over with.
It became an ordeal. But it could end regressive behaviors it can end alcoholism, it has good therapeutic value if taken under the right circumstances.
What do you make of the speed at which pot is being legalized in America?
I’m happy about it. You know, I got radicalized when I sold five joints to a fuckin’ undercover cop at Michigan State. I was facing 20 years on the sail, minimum mandatory, 10 years, when they vacuumed my pockets and found little minute amounts of cannabis. I had to come to New York City, get a job from the Lawrence employment agency, go see a shrink, you know, and then pay the district attorney 5,000 to let me off the fucking hook.
I turned Dana Beal on to pot, and then Dana came to New York City, escaped from a mental hospital where his mother put him for attacking someone in his class, he got a job at Klein’s on Union Square, in the record department, and then he moved on to the Record Hunter on 5th Avenue and 42nd, enrolled at NYU, was an A student. And then I turned him on to LSD. And he said, I want to be a revolutionary. So we had the first smoke-in in Tompkins Square Park, in 1967 in the Summer of Love. The East Village Other gave us an office on Avenue A and 10th Street, and we put a big sign in the window, Psychedelic Revolution. And anyone, we had marches. Anyone, anytime there was a pot bust we’d march through the East Village, and people were very happy to have us doing that. They’d throw flowers at us. Including the fucking flower pot.
So, then we opened three stores, Dana got busted, he had to go underground, and he hooked up with the Weather Underground in Wisconsin, and we continued to push for legalized marijuana. Myself, publisher Rex Weiner, and some other people, we had the first Marijuana Day Parade. May Day is J Day. John and Yoko sponsored it one year. We had a giant joint on stage. Yossarian, the underground cartoonist, would do the posters. We had had somebody smoking pot in an iron lung, had a hippie tied a little kid in a wheelchair or a high chair and a hippie forcing him to smoke pot, you know all kinds of weird, bizarre stuff. And then NORML came along, and so it became more widespread.
The current President of the United States writes in his memoirs about smoking pot.
Yeah, he lived next door here, in the adjoining building. You can see from the terrace downstairs, that fire escape where Obama said he went out to smoke dope. I think it’s a progressive thing. But then you know you’ve got Nazis like Ron Paul who want to make all drugs legal for people who are looking for a shortcut to happiness, who are never going to be able to find that happiness via traditional economic means. That’s part of his hidden agenda to fuck up the African American community, because he is basically a Nazi at heart.
I was staying at Grover Norquist’s town house, right—
Grover Norquist, the Republican direct-mail guru?
He was like a libertarian, he loved rock and roll, he had the greatest collection of rock records, man.
You were friends with Grover Norquist because of his record collection?
We had a friend in common, and I needed a place to stay in D.C. So, my friend takes me over to Spotlight, which was a real right-wing John Birch-type magazine, right, because I’ve done research for [late Congressman Henry] Gonzalez and [Sen. Richard] Schweiker, who created a Congressional Commission to investigate the conclusions of the Warren Commission about the circumstances around Kennedy’s death. And so I show them the tramp shots.
And so they say, “Oh this is very interesting. What’s your name?” And I say, “Allen Jules Weberman.” And then the guy says “Allen Jew Weberman?” And so I say, “Who are these fucking guys?” So, then I went back and listened to their stinking broadcast and I says, “Holy shit, it’s fucking Father Coughlin has come to life again.” And then I started to subscribe to the Spotlight. And in every issue, it was Ron Paul this, and Ron Paul that. Ron Paul was at this meeting. Ron Paul was their hero. That was his fan club, his base.
To have somebody like Ron Paul alive is like having a cancer. His big catch-phrase is “the New World Order.” Do you know what the new world order is? The new world order is where the Jews control everything. It’s another way of saying ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government. It’s dog-whistle politics.
Do you feel the same way about Ron’s kid, Rand Paul?
Yeah. He wants to cut off aid to Israel. And he goes to Israel and says how much he likes the place and then ultimately he wants to destroy it. You know what he was named after? The Rand, the South African currency.
That’s hilarious. But is that true?
That’s what I believe. Ask Ron Paul.
What do you think of this city now? I was born here, I grew up here, but I stay out of Manhattan these days, because it generally depresses me.
Well, it’s lost a lot of its interesting places, really, like 4th Avenue and the bookstores, the electronic places on Courtland Street. You know it’s become pretty homogenous—Payless Shoes, Starbucks, ATMs, Duane Reade. And basically you have de facto segregation now, in that you need to have an income that’s like 40 times the amount of the rent per year or something.
Right. No one is a racist anymore, because even that would mean that they had an allegiance to something other than money. But then I remember the shooting galleries and the junkies, the people living in abandoned buildings, and that time wasn’t so good, either. I hate that fake nostalgia for the New York I grew up in from people who came here in 2011 to be stockbrokers or work for some crappy Internet company. The old New York City had its virtues, but it was pretty dangerous and shitty.
Everybody was getting ripped off. You know you work at a job, make $50 a week and you buy something and then next thing you know the junkies have come and stolen it from you. My customers at low numbers in the East 60s were getting home and people were trying to break down their doors in home invasions.
The city was fucking chaos, you know. But for me, it was wonderful. Because they were taking riff-raff. Everybody wanted to rent to me, even on MacDougal Alley, a little town house they were going to rent opposite Washington Square. I finally settled on 240 Central Park South, overlooking the park there. Antoine Saint Exupery’s old apartment. It was a love nest for somebody who owned 6th Avenue Electronics. So I had a terrace, wood-burning fireplace, in a tower of 240 Central Park South. And it was rent stabilized. I had to pay money to get the guy out and pay a fee to the broker, but they didn’t really scrutinize your records so much, because it was a buyer’s market.
But the city was deteriorating. There were pornography places on every block. There were all kinds of roving gangs around 8th Avenue and 42nd Street and 9th Avenue.
Was it fun being a drug dealer in the city?
Yeah, except for the rips.
Did you have guys with guns take stuff from you?
No, just once. What happened was this idiot guy from High Times was doing some story on coke dealers. So he calls me up and he says, “Oh do you want me to bring my friend around, he’s a big coke smuggler.” I says, “No, don’t bring him around.” So, he brought him around anyway. Then the guy sent his crew back to rip me off. You know so when somebody left, they came up, they cuffed me up, you know hit me a couple of times with a gun, kicked the dog, and stole a bunch of reefer from Gainesville, but they missed the mushrooms, you know. So, I says, “Aw fuck.”
So, what I did was I put double doors on there so you got buzzed in one door, and you’re in a little hallway and then you get buzzed in the other door with a TV camera to see who it was and then tear gas that could be remotely controlled. I hired somebody to put the doors in.
And sure enough the rips came back. And what they did was there was next door we had Studio 10 at 10 Bleecker Street, Quiet Riot played there and other bands of note. So I look out the window and all of the sudden, the black guards are white. The rips had kidnapped the guards, they’d kidnapped the black guards and tied ’em up and put ’em inside 10 Bleecker, and got their uniforms and were outside the door. So then this woman comes who was not a criminal herself, but comes from a crime family whose name would be easily recognizable, and she refused to open the door.
So they let her go, and then I buzzed the guy in. You know, so he comes in and then all of a sudden, the lights go out, the tear gas goes off, and then me and this guy who later actually ended up working in Times Square as a bouncer in one of the peep shows, cleaning up the semen with a fucking mop, and this other guy Smitty, who was also happened to have organized crime connections, but was forced into it by his father. And they come down and we have two fuckin shotguns, Ithacas—we cocked the fuckin Ithacas and said “We’re gonna fuckin blow you away.” And then boom, we hear a fuckin shot goes off. I release the front door and he goes limping away. He shot himself in the leg!
So that was the Wild West back then, man. The cops saw everybody going in and out in and out, all these people like Jim Jarmusch, I ran into him the other day, he was a customer. Ginsburg brought a whole bunch of people around. The President’s brother [name has been excised at lawyer’s request]. Other people I don’t want to mention. That photographer dude who did the pictures of the young kids, Robert Mapplethorpe, brought his crew around. The people from Saturday Night Live, the writers, it was a salon. You know, everybody you could get jobs, you could meet, advance your career, meet other people. And then the cops chased us out and I had to start a delivery service.
And now you comment on stories on the Internet. What’s the pleasure in that?
Well, a lot of my comments are pretty absurd. Like this woman today, she ran, she came in number 75 in the marathon. So she said, “Oh I finished in 5 and 40.” So I says, “How can you finish in 5 minutes and 40 seconds?”
What are your favorite sites to comment on?
Well, I’m barred from Huffington Post, and I’m barred from the Gothamist. Wenner got me barred. You know because when they came out with the Rolling Stone thing, with the Chechen bomber’s picture on the cover of Rolling Stone, you know, then I said “Aw, man, Wenner is doing intellectual limbo. He’s reached a new fuckin low.” You know, I knew the guy was a fucking low-life from years back. But I didn’t realize it went this deep. Even his own writer Matt Taibbi wouldn’t defend him, put his heart in the defense, because he was almost killed by Chechnyan separatists in Moscow. And the Daily News, somehow I got banned from there.
The Forward, I was banned for a little while because I said that a lot of gay Jews don’t like Israel, because they were maltreated when they were younger by other Jews.
Do you think the open information culture that the Internet has created has been a good thing for American democracy?
It spread a lot of ignorance. It gives a lot of ignorant people a chance to express themselves. When you see some kind of a factoid, a lot of times it’s repeated time after time, so you just put it in quote marks and put it in the Google search, and then you can see that it comes up in certain groups over and over again. So you know that somebody’s started it and the rest of the idiots just promulgated it. But the big thing is that Facebook has changed a lot of people’s lives.
You like Facebook?
Facebook is good. It gives people a chance to express themselves.
There was something in your spirit, in good ways and bad, that is now widely diffused throughout the culture because of the Internet. It’s become part of our cultural DNA. You had so much passion and aggression and interest and you had tools and you were an obsessive. I think that energy is part of what makes the Internet run. That, and porn.
Right, right. Well, you know we were tied in with Cap’n Crunch, you know he lived at 9 Bleecker, and he was making the—
Yeah, the long-distance phone hacks. Ron Rosenbaum wrote a great magazine article about that, in the days when there were great magazine articles.
[Stops to take a phone call]
They’re putting up like a garbage transfer point here, so all the wealthy people at Asphalt Green are pissed off. But guess what? Asphalt Green used to be an asphalt plant that the mob used to make inferior cement and stuff. So what are they so afraid of? It’s not going to be toxic, it’s just going to be people’s garbage. Rich people’s garbage!
Overloaded: The Story Of White Light/White Heat | MOJO
BY DAVID FRICKE (Mojo Magazine)
“NO ONE LISTENED TO IT. BUT THERE IT IS, FOREVER – THE QUINTESSENCE OF ARTICULATED PUNK. AND NO ONE GOES NEAR IT.”– Lou Reed, August, 2013
BY MID-1967, ONLY a few months after The Velvet Underground’s debut album was released, their iconic ice queen singer Nico was a solo artist, and pop art svengali Andy Warhol was no longer managing and feeding the group. Warhol’s parting gift: the all-black cover idea for their follow-up – the album they would name White Light/White Heat. Meanwhile, the band scrabbled to survive in the drug-soaked art-scene demi-monde of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
“Our lives were chaos,” VU guitarist Sterling Morrison told me in 1994. “Things were insane, day in and day out: the people we knew, the excesses of all sorts. For a long time, we were living in various places, afraid of the police. At the height of my musical career, I had no permanent address.”
There were mounting internal tensions, too, over direction and control between Lou Reed and John Cale, the group’s founders, especially after their debut album’s failure to launch. “White Light/White Heat was definitely the raucous end of what we did,” Morrison affirmed. But, he insisted, “We were all pulling in the same direction. We may have been dragging each other off a cliff, but we were definitely all going in the same direction.”
From that turbulence and frustration, Reed, Cale, Morrison and drummer Moe Tucker created their second straight classic. Where The Velvet Underground And Nico was a demonstration of breadth and vision, developed in near-invisibility even before the band met Warhol – “We rehearsed for a year for that album, without doing anything else,” Cale claims – White Light/White Heat was a more compact whiplash: the exhilarating guitar violence starting with the title track, peaking in Reed’s atonal-flamethrower solo in I Heard Her Call My Name; the experimental sung and spoken noir of Lady Godiva’s Operation and The Gift; the propulsive, distorted eternity of sexual candour and twilight drug life, rendered dry and real in Reed’s lethal monotone, in Sister Ray.
“By this time, we were a touring band,” Cale explains. “And the sound we could get on stage – we wanted to get that on the record. In some performances, Moe would go up first, start a backbeat, then I would come out and put a drone on the keyboard. Sterling would start playing, then Lou would come out, maybe turn into a Southern preacher at the mike. That idea of us coming out one after the other, doing whatever we wanted, that individualism – it’s there on Sister Ray, in spades.”
White Light/White Heat was also the Velvets’ truest record, the most direct, uncompromised document of their deep, personal connections to New York’s avant-garde in the mid-’60s; the raw, independent cinema of Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas and Piero Heliczer; Cale’s pre-Velvets experiences in drone, improvisation and radical composition with John Cage and the early minimalists La Monte Young and Tony Conrad; Reed’s dual immersion, from his days at Syracuse University, in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and the metropolitan-underworld literature of William Burroughs and Hubert Selby, Jr.
“I’m in there with a B.A. in English – I’m no naif,” Reed told me shortly before his death. “And being in with that crowd, the improvisers, the film-makers, of course it would affect where I was going. We said it a hundred times; people thought we were being arrogant and conceited. We’re reading those authors, watching those Jack Smith movies. What did you think we were going to come out with?”
The Velvet Underground as they were on the eve of White Light/White Heat’s release. Clockwise from top left: Maureen “Moe” Tucker, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale.
“WE WERE ALL PULLING IN THE SAME DIRECTION. WE MAY HAVE BEEN DRAGGING EACH OTHER OFF A CLIFF…”– Sterling Morrison
The Players
LOU REED
1942-2013. Guitarist/vocalist and primary songwriter. “No one censured it,” he said of WL/WH. “Because no one listened to it.”
JOHN CALE
Bass guitar/viola/keyboards. The classically trained Welshman provided the deadpan monologue for The Gift: “Everyone was hellbent on being heard.”
STERLING MORRISON
1942-1995. Guitar and “medical sound effects” on Lady Godiva’s Operation: “Maybe our frustrations led the way.”
MOE TUCKER
Drums. Provider of the group’s relentless, unfussy propulsion. “The songs were the songs,” she drily notes.
ANDY WARHOL
1928-1987. Pop art icon, art-director and manager of The Velvet Underground. Parted ways with the group in the run-in to White Light/White Heat.
TOM WILSON
1931-1978. WL/WH producer and babe magnet. Notable track record with Dylan, Zappa, Simon & Garfunkel, the VU and Nico (pictured).
HUBERT SELBY JR.
1928-2004. Novelist/poet of the New York demi-monde. Inspired Sister Ray: “It’s a taste of Selby, uptown,” said Reed.
ORNETTE COLEMAN
Saxophonist/composer, architect of free jazz. His lines influenced Reed’s splintering lead guitar approach on I Heard Her Call My Name.
CECIL TAYLOR
Jazz pianist and poet admired by Lou Reed. His experimental approach fed into WL/WH. Tom Wilson produced his 1956 album, Jazz Advance.
Players Photos: Getty / Rex
II.
In September 1967 at Mayfair Studios – located on Seventh Avenue near Times Square and the only eight-track operation in town – The Velvet Underground put White Light/White Heat to tape. “I think it was five days,” Cale once told me.
Gary Kellgren, Mayfair’s house engineer, previously worked with the Velvets on part of the debut ‘Banana’ album and engineered the spring-’67 recording of Nico’s solo debut, Chelsea Girl. The producer, officially, was Tom Wilson, also with a track record with the group. In 1965, when the producer was still at Columbia, he invited Reed and Cale to play for him in his office. “We dragged Lou’s guitar, my viola and one amplifier up there,” said Cale. “We played Black Angel’s Death Song for him. He knew there was energy and potential.” At Mayfair, Cale mostly remembered Wilson’s “parade of beautiful girls, coming through all the time. He had an incredible style with women.”
But the Velvets’ volume and aggression posed problems for the recording men, and Reed insisted that Kellgren simply walked out during Sister Ray. “At one point, he turns to us and says, ‘You do this. When you’re done, call me.’ Which wasn’t far from the record company’s attitude. Everything we did – it came out. No one censured it. Because no one listened to it.”
On Sister Ray, Reed sang live across the feral seesawing of the guitars, drums and Cale’s Vox organ as each pressed for dominance in the mix. “It was competition,” Cale says. “Everyone was hellbent on being heard.” The ending, though, was easy. “We just knew when it was over,” Morrison remembered. “It felt like ending. And it did.”
There was a real Sister Ray: “This black queen,” Reed says. “John and I were uptown, out on the street, and up comes this person – very nice, but flaming.” Reed wrote the words, a set of incidents and character studies, on a train ride from Connecticut after a bad Velvets show there. “It was a propos of nothing. ‘Duck and Sally inside’ – it’s a taste of Selby, uptown. And the music was just a jam we had been working on” – provisionally titled Searchin’, after one of the lyrics (“I’m searchin’ for my mainline”).
“The lyrics aren’t negative,” Reed argues. “White Light/White Heat – it has to do with methamphetamine. Sister Ray is all about that. But they are telling you stories – and feelings. They are not stupid. And the rhythm is interesting. But you’d think that. I studied long enough.”
White Light/White Heat is renowned for its distortion and unforgiving thrust. But it also features the simple, airy yearning of Here She Comes Now, one of the Velvets’ finest ballads. And there are telling, human details even in the noise, like the breakdown at the end of White Light/White Heat, when Cale’s frantic, repetitive bass playing leaps forward in an out-of-time spasm. “I’m pretty sure it broke down,” he says of his part, “because my hand was falling off.”
Lady Godiva’s Operation was, Cale explains, “a radio-theatre piece, trying to use the studio to create this panorama of a story” – lust, transfiguration and ominously vague surgery that goes fatally wrong. The Gift was just the band and Cale’s rich Welsh intonation. Reed wrote the story – an examination of nerd-ish obsession peppered with wily minutiae (the Clarence Darrow Post Office) and ending in sudden death – at Syracuse University, for a creative writing class. Reed: “The idea was two things going at once” – Cale in one stereo channel, music in the other. “If you got tired of the words, you could just listen to the instrumental.”
Cale’s reading was a first take. The sound of the blade plunging through the cardboard, “right through the centre of Waldo Jeffers’ head,” was Reed stabbing a canteloupe with a knife. Frank Zappa, also working at Mayfair with The Mothers Of Invention, was there. “He said, ‘You’ll get a better sound if you do it this way,’” Reed recalled. “And then he says, ‘You know, I’m really surprised how much I like your album,’” referring to the ‘Banana’ LP. “Surprised? OK.” Reed smiled. “He was being friendly.”
Wayne McGuire’s ecstatic review of White Light/White Heat, in a 1968 issue of rock magazine Crawdaddy, cited Reed’s playing in “I Heard Her Call My Name” as “the most advanced lead guitar work I think you’re going to hear for at least a year or two.” McGuire also noted the jazz in there, comparing the album – especially Sister Ray – to recordings by Cecil Taylor and the saxophonists John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. “Sister Ray is much like [Coltrane’s] Impressions,” McGuire wrote, “in that it is a sustained exercise in emotional stampede and modal in the deepest sense: mode as spiritual motif, mode as infinite musical universe.”
It was rare understanding for the time. A brief review in the February 24, 1968 edition of Billboard was more measured: “Although the words tend to be drowned out by pulsating instrumentation, those not minding to cuddle up to the speakers will joy [sic] to narrative songs such as The Gift, the story of a boy and girl.” Still, the trade bible promised, “Dealers who cater to the underground market will find this disk a hot seller.”
“THERE WAS CLOSE COMPETITION WITH BOB DYLAN. HE WAS GETTING INTO PEOPLE’S HEADS. WE THOUGHT WE COULD DO THAT.”– John Cale
III.
That didn’t happen. There was a single, the title track coupled with Here She Comes Now. It didn’t help. By the fall of 1968, Cale was gone. Forced to leave the group he co-founded, the Welshman embarked on a second career as a producer, composer and solo artist that continues to this day.
The Velvets went back on the road, and soon into the studio, with a new bassist, Doug Yule. They found a new power in quiet and more decorative pop on their next two albums, until Reed left in 1970 to begin, eventually, his own extraordinary solo life. Live, without Cale, the Velvets still played Sister Ray.
This new Deluxe collection includes Cale’s last studio sessions with The Velvet Underground. Temptation Inside Your Heart and Stephanie Says were recorded in New York in February, 1968, produced by the band for a prospective single (according to Cale and Morrison). Temptation was their idea of a Motown dance party, with congas and comic asides caught by accident as Reed, Cale and Morrison overdubbed their male-Marvelettes harmony vocals. Stephanie Says was the first of Reed’s portrait songs, named after women in crisis and overheard conversation (Candy Says, Lisa Says, Caroline Says I and II). Cale’s viola hovered through the arrangement like another singer: graceful and comforting.
On a spare day in May, 1968, between shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Velvets returned to L.A.’s T.T.G. Studios – where they had worked on The Velvet Underground And Nico – and taped two versions of another viola feature, Hey Mr. Rain. In a 1994 interview, Cale described the song’s droning melancholy and rhythmic suspense as “trying to have a pressure cooker. That’s what those songs were about – Sister Ray, European Son [on The Velvet Underground And Nico], Hey Mr. Rain. They were things we could exploit on stage, flesh out and improvise. But we were driving it into the ground. We hadn’t spent any time quietly puttering around the way we did before the first album.”
The classic quartet cut another song at T.T.G., a recently unearthed attempt at Reed’s Beginning To See The Light. The song, briskly redone with Yule, would open Side Two of the Velvets’ third album. This take has a vintage kick – Martha & The Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street taken at the gait of I’m Waiting For The Man. You also hear the impending change. “Here comes two of you/Which one would you choose?,” Reed sings, an intimation of the cleaving that would alter the Velvets for good.
“John has said we didn’t get to finish what we started – that is sadly true,” Reed acknowledged. “However, as far as we got, that was monumental.” White Light/White Heat, everything leading to it and gathered here – “I would match it,” he says, “with anything by anybody, anywhere, ever. No group in the world can touch what we did.”
Back in 1994, I asked Moe Tucker about the fuzz and chaos of White Light/White Heat – how much they reflected the daily trials and tensions of being The Velvet Underground, always first and alone in their ideals and attack. She replied with her usual, common sense: “I don’t know if I go along with that. The songs were the songs, and the way we played them was the way we each wanted to play them.”
Anything else, she declared with a grin, was “a little too philosophical.”
“THAT WAS MONUMENTAL. I WOULD MATCH IT WITH ANYTHING BY ANYBODY, ANYWHERE, EVER. NO GROUP IN THE WORLD CAN TOUCH WHAT WE DID.”– Lou Reed
Brushstrokes series – Roy Lichtenstein (1965-66)
Brushstrokes (1965) was the first element of the Brushstrokes series.
“Brushstrokes series is the name for a series of paintings produced in 1965–66 by Roy Lichtenstein. It also refers to derivative sculptural representations of these paintings that were first made in the 1980s. In the series, the theme is art as a subject, but rather than reproduce masterpieces as he had starting in 1962, Lichtenstein depicted the gestural expressions of the painting brushstroke itself. The works in this series are linked to those produced by artists who use the gestural painting style of abstract expressionism made famous by Jackson Pollock, but differ from them due to their mechanically produced appearance. The series is considered a satire or parody of gestural painting by both Lichtenstein and his critics. After 1966, Lichtenstein incorporated this series into later motifs and themes of his work. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein reproduced…
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Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale’s Track Commentary
John Cale offers his memories of recording each song on the iconic Velvet Underground debut
Source: Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale’s Track Commentary
Everyone’s heard the famous maxim, generally accredited to legendary music producer Brian Eno: while the Velvet Underground’s debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, sold a paltry 30,000 copies upon release in 1967, every person who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band. Though a slight exaggeration, the line is a testament to the album’s far-reaching influence trumping its commercial failure. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker merged raw rock and roll with musique concrète and the avant-garde to create an untamed and menacing sound that perfectly underscored their poetic tales of drug deals, sadomasochistic sex and other snapshots of the urban underworld.
Emboldened by manager and patron Andy Warhol—who linked them up with featured vocalist, Nico—the Velvet Underground’s brand of leather-clad Lower East Side cool emerged onto vinyl with all of its grit and daring intact, serving as a beacon to generations of young artists unwilling to conform to pop music niceties. Decades ahead of its time, it planted the seeds for punk, glam, goth, and a host of others genres to flourish.
In honor of the groundbreaking album’s 50th anniversary this month, Cale spoke to PEOPLE about his memories recording The Velvet Underground & Nico. Read on for his exclusive track by track commentary.
“Sunday Morning”
“That happened one Sunday morning at Lou’s friend’s house. We were out boozing and running around the Lower East Side and Lou suddenly had a great idea. He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a friend who lives around the corner, let’s go see him.’ And it was like three o’clock [in the morning]. I said, ‘Yeah, ok!’ We ran over, and he had a harmonium in the corner of his living room. Generally what we did when we went anywhere, we just zeroed in on the instruments and started playing. It was kind of manic—anywhere you’d go, if you saw an instrument you’d just pick it up and start playing. Lou saw the guitar, I saw the harmonium, and off we went writing ‘Sunday Morning.’
“I’m Waiting for the Man”
“I remember the first gigs we did with just him and me —I had a recorder and a viola, and he had an acoustic guitar. We’d go sit on the sidewalk outside the Baby Grand [bar] up in Harlem on 125th and see if we could make some money. Every time we got moved on the cop always had a suggestion of where we should go. ‘Try 75th on Broadway! That’s a good spot.’ So we’d go down there and make a little bit more money.”
“Femme Fatale”
“Andy saw that Lou was moping around the factory, and he gave him a list of words. He said, ‘Here are 14 words, go write songs with these words.’ And Lou was never happier. He had a task in hand and he sat down. That was a lot of fun for him. We had our own thing going [before Warhol] but he showed up and was more of a guy helping us not forget who we were. He would always say things like, ‘Tell Lou, don’t forget to put little swear words in that song.’ He was reminding us of who we really were. And he didn’t have to say very much to do that, he could just be around and it would be like that because he’d notice what was going on around you. He’d notice the art that was going on. We didn’t understand it. We were just flabbergasted by it, but we loved it at the same time.”
“Venus in Furs”
“Lou wrote ‘Venus in Furs’ while we were playing around when we met at Pickwick. He told me that the label wouldn’t let him record all of the songs he really wanted to do. That sort of pissed me off. I asked him what they were and he showed them to me. He’d play them on acoustic guitar and I said, ‘These are rock songs. These can be really big and orchestral if you want them to be.’ Then I said, ‘Let’s just do it ourselves, let’s get our own label and get our own recording situation—not here.’ So we put a band together. That was a signature number for us.”
“Run Run Run”
“’Run Run Run’ was always the first number to do, because it was up-tempo and got everybody going. It was great.”
“All Tomorrow’s Parties”
“We had made the arrangement for ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ before Nico came along. That was the result of a year of weekend work—sitting around on the weekend and just playing and playing and playing and playing until you slowly gradually moved out of the folk music side of things.
The record was all done with just us playing, there were no effects involved in that. We tried a version where Nico doubles her vocal, but the vocal just became too heavy. “But the noise of putting paper clips in between the strings of the piano gave it a ring that made it a little more orchestral. We were trying to make orchestral stuff. We were trying to be Phil Spector, really. Phil Spector would mix Wagnerian orchestrations with R&B. That was a really unique combination. We had the drone. The viola wasn’t wasn’t used, so the piano became the drone. Whenever we’d try to do something, we’d always try to find something that would be the drone.”
“Heroin”
“’Heroin’ is really special. At that point it was kind of a resident of the band because it was so important to the set. Everybody had heard of it. It was one of the attractions of the set, apart from the attitude of the band. Whatever we were doing, we were trying to get more people in the door. But we had a lot of different ideas of how to do that. My idea of getting people in the door was doing something experimental. I tried to get Lou to see that we don’t have to do the same set every night. That was a direct result of all these club owners in New York saying, ‘You’ve got to play one or two songs that are in the top 10, otherwise you won’t get a gig.’ We said, ‘We’re not doing that. We’ve got our own numbers.’ And until Andy showed up we barely got any venues at all. I thought, ‘One selling point that we can have is that we never do the same set twice.’ We improvised songs every night, which was rather fun with Lou. I said, ‘We can give Dylan a run for his money if we just improvise every night, because our lyrics are just as good.’”
“There She Goes Again”
“That was probably the easiest one, with a soul riff from Marvin Gaye. You could hear Lou’s time at Pickwick writing pop songs.”
“I’ll Be Your Mirror”
“Lou was writing songs for Nico, and some of the best songs he’d written were written for her. That was one of them. She was becoming more interested at that time in being her own songwriter. She’d sit down and write poetry, and to her it was in a foreign language. She was trying to find poetic language in a foreign language, because she was German-speaking. But she was determined, she bought a harmonium for herself and was really single-minded about doing all that.”
“The Black Angel’s Death Song“
“’Black Angel Death Song’ no one ever got. It would go over everybody’s head. But in general, I think what people responded to, even if they didn’t understand it, was the energy that we had. Lou and I, we knew we could play these songs, but we were never genuflecting to each other about how to play them. The performances were more done as a bald statement of fact: ‘This is what we do. Whether you like it or not, we don’t care.’ And we didn’t care whether we played it well. We really were on top of that. And we were excited about what we were doing. And then the band gets a record deal right away? Come on, that’s great. Really exciting.”
“European Son”
“’European Son’ in my mind was purely for improvisation. Whenever we played anywhere, we couldn’t wait to get to the point where we’d improvise and do ‘European Son.’ It was always different. That was the fun part for us, doing those improvisations. And those improvisations would really get the best of us in the end, because they’d go on and on and on and on. We’d be up there for an hour just improvising before we’d even done a song! In San Diego we did that. That’s kind of the rep we had when we got to San Francisco and L.A.
Bill Graham didn’t appreciate all the songs and improvisations that were going on. He thought we were invading [the San Francisco group’s] territory. There wasn’t much love lost between us and the West Coast. Lou was always talking about, ‘Never mind the flower children, give us the hard drugs!’ We were happy that Woodstock ended up in the mud—that kind of resentment was very healthy, I thought.”
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