Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (10 page)

MILSTEIN:
“He died in 1978 in California.”

WARHOL:
“Really?!”

MILSTEIN:
“I read about it somewhere.”

WARHOL:
“Oh, well gee, I didn’t know that …”

While they were in LA The Velvet Underground met Steve Sesnick, who was to become their manager in 1967 and play a large role in the rest of their career.

VICTOR BOCKRIS:
“My understanding is that you met and became involved with the group when they were in LA playing the Trip. Is that correct?”

STEVE SESNICK:
“Yes.”

BOCKRIS:
“Were you involved with them in any practical manner?”

SESNICK:
“The entire idea was mine.”

BOCKRIS:
“To go to LA?”

SESNICK:
“To start the whole Exploding Plastic Inevitable.”

BOCKRIS:
“Maybe you could fill me in on that.”

SESNICK:
“My room-mate at the time was Tim Hauser who was the founder of Manhattan Transfer. I told him I had come up with this space idea. All that was was an idea of film and dancing and music – space music – and he was working at the time on doing 30s and 40s so we were very diametrically opposed in our personal interests. I mentioned it to Andy at a party at the Factory and he said, ‘Oh gee, Steve, that sounds great. Do you think we can do it?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and we had a series of meetings with Brian Epstein on the telephone through Nat Weiss. Danny Williams was the only one I remember, besides Andy and Edie Sedgwick, who was in on the original meetings for this whole idea. Epstein and Nat Weiss were partners. Nat was his American attorney. I was very friendly with Nat for a number of years, prior to his even getting into music. So having access
to him I went to speak with him about this idea and he passed it on to Brian, and Brian went nuts over it. He said it really is fantastic and they did want to get involved. But their idea of what it was and mine and Andy’s were just really different.”

BOCKRIS:
“So how come you were out in LA when they played at the Trip?”

SESNICK:
“It was related to the project. I was looking for an act.”

BOCKRIS:
“I was under the impression that you helped in some capacity on the deal between The Velvets and MGM whilst in LA.”

SESNICK:
“I did, but I didn’t initiate that relationship.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was your perception of The Velvet Underground that made you feel they were the right group for you to work with? Was the music they were making purely the right kind of music, or was the image they were projecting the right image? When you saw them, what clicked in your mind?”

SESNICK:
“I didn’t see them at first, I just heard the music playing in the Castle. My immediate feeling was the words – somebody was putting out messages that I found interesting. Which turned out to be a fellow by the name of Lou Reed.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was your age at this point?”

SESNICK:
“22. We were the same age.”

BOCKRIS:
“And what was your background?”

SESNICK:
“I was a basketball player. I played for St. John’s University of New York. Freshman Year.”

BOCKRIS:
“Lou was heavily into basketball too, right?”

SESNICK:
“Oh, yeah.”

BOCKRIS:
“Had you done anything in the music business?”

SESNICK:
“I coached my mother. That was about all. No, in fact, I don’t like music.”

In LA Sesnick began to become involved with The Velvet Underground on a loose freelance basis since they already
had a managerial contract with Morrissey and Warhol. According to him he arranged for them to play at Bill Graham’s Fillmore in San Francisco at the end of May, although in
POPism
Warhol says it was Graham who kept calling Morrissey in LA trying to book The Velvets into the Fillmore on the same bill as The Mothers of Invention and The Jefferson Airplane.

REED:
“We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It’s just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write. I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things, ’cos things have gone so far that somebody really should say something. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically, I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke! It’s a joke! The kids are being hyped.”

By the time their three weeks in LA were up The Exploding Plastic Inevitable capitulated and agreed to play two nights at the Fillmore. The feeling of alienation between their party and the West Coast groups seems to have been mutual and a lot of friction developed between Bill Graham and The EPI. Neither group could connect with the other.

MORRISON:
“We actually built the light show at the Fillmore Auditorium. Bill Graham didn’t, nor did any San Francisco entrepreneur. When we showed up Graham had a slide projector with a picture of the moon. We said, ‘That’s not a light show, Bill, sorry.’ That’s one of the reasons that Graham really hates us.

“Marshall McLuhan gave us credit for inventing the light show in
The Medium is the Massage
. There’s a photo. He’s the only one. It was nice of him. He showed the group that did it all. San Francisco was rigged. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The fish being the innocent heads prowling around Haight-Ashbury. We came out there as an unshakeable
entity. I’d never heard of Bill Graham. In fact, I’ve never heard of him since. I don’t know who he is. I just thought he was an insane slob, totally beneath my abilities to observe. He just didn’t exist as far as I was concerned. An absolute nonentity. He knew what we thought of him. The day I arrived at his club, I was thrown out. I just walked in with my guitar and he said, ‘You, get out of here.’ They told him, ‘You’ve lost your mind, he’s playing here tonight.’ He said, ‘Get out, get out you s.o.b.’ I wish I had.

“When we arrived it was an attack against their way of life. The Mothers were following us around California. They also had an audition group perform. During the show Zappa would keep putting us down, like on the mike, he would say, ‘These guys really suck.’ So, The Mothers were chasing us around California so we arrived in Bill Graham country. He always had an audition group. The reason for this was they didn’t get any money. He would say, ‘If you’re really good I’ll let you play.’ This guy’s an operator. The audition group that night happened to be The Jefferson Airplane whom he was managing. They wanted publicity and The Mothers wanted publicity because there were so many people capitalizing on our show that night. We were just a neutral party. Graham made so much money that weekend we played at the Fillmore, that he didn’t believe it. That’s what blew his mind. We arrived at a time before Jefferson Airplane was known to anyone. They didn’t even have Grace Slick yet. Everyone was nowhere at the time, The Mothers and, of course, ourselves. Warhol was the name that made the impact with the public.”

Things finally fell apart completely when Paul Morrissey made Bill Graham get really uptight! The scene is recounted in Warhol’s
POPism:
“‘Why don’t they take heroin?’ Paul suggested, pointing to the group on stage. ‘That’s what all the really
good
musicians take.’ Graham didn’t say anything he just fumed. Paul knew he was driving him good and crazy, so he kept it up. ‘You know I think I’m really all for
heroin because if you take care of yourself, it doesn’t affect you physically.’ He took a tangerine out of his pocket and peeled it in one motion, letting the peels fall on the floor. ‘With heroin you never catch cold – it started in the United States as a cure for the common cold.’”

Paul was saying everything he could think of to offend Bill Graham’s San Francisco sensibility but in the end it was dropping the tangerine peels on the Fillmore floor which he had done totally unconsciously that brought on the showdown. Little things mean a lot. Graham stared down at the peels, and he got livid. I don’t remember his exact words, but he started yelling – things like, “You disgusting germs from New York! Here we are, trying to clean up everything, and you come out here with your disgusting minds and
whips!”

After the second night, Gerard Malanga was arrested in an all-night cafeteria in the North Beach area where he had gone with Lou and a friend of Andy’s, an actress named Nancy Worthington Fish who was performing with The Committee. He was charged with carrying an offensive weapon (his whip) by the San Francisco police and thrown into the can where he spent an anxious night. The City clearly felt the same way about the “disgusting hippies germs from New York” as The Velvets felt about the capital of the hippies.

BOCKRIS:
“So you wanted to work with them, but apart from arranging the occasional show on a freelance basis, you weren’t actually working with them.”

SESNICK:
“No, they really didn’t want me. Well, Lou did after San Francisco.”

BOCKRIS:
“What happened in San Francisco that led him to want to work with you?”

SESNICK:
“Oh, I predicted a number of things and they all worked out that way and he realized they needed a manager. Everyone else was well-meaning; there wasn’t anything naughty going on particularly, except they weren’t managers. That was my interest.”

BOCKRIS:
“After the end of the West Coast scene in May, did you all return to New York and then go out to Chicago from New York?”

SESNICK:
“That’s a long story; there’s a lot of confusion there. There was a tremendous amount of confusion as to where anything was happening because of the money needed to keep the group together. The expenses were a real problem and everybody went in different directions. All sorts of problems happened in San Francisco while we were there.”

MORRISON:
“Danny Williams stayed behind to design a light show after we went back to NY. He went from there directly to Chicago to set up our show at Poor Richard’s.”

At the beginning of June Nico took off for Ibiza. Lou contracted hepatitis and went into Beth Israel Hospital in New York. Andy and Paul were shooting the footage which became
Chelsea Girls
. So when Steve Sesnick arranged another booking for the group, June 21–26 1966 at Poor Richard’s in Chicago, some changes had to be made.

MALANGA:
“Just before the Chicago gig, Andy, Angus MacLise and I went to visit Lou in the hospital, because Angus was going to play with the group in Chicago. I distinctly remember Lou telling Angus, ‘Just remember you’re only coming back for two weeks. You’re on a temporary basis. I don’t want you to get any idea that you’re coming back into the group again.’”

MORRISON:
“Lou always was nice like that.”

With Angus on drums subbing for Lou, Maureen switched to bass and Sterling and John took over the lead vocal spots. Ingrid Superstar replaced Mary Woronov as Gerard’s dancing partner. Andy, Nico and Lou were absent. Danny Williams flew in from San Francisco to work the lights.

FINKELSTEIN:
“Everybody was on Danny’s case. You
could watch him disintegrate. He came in as a clean-cut preppy and left looking like a real seedy character. The silver dust at the Factory just coated his skin. The image I have of Danny is that he went out with his eyeglasses patched together with masking-tape.”

MORRISON:
“Danny was involved in a Factory power struggle with Paul Morrissey, and Paul won. At issue was who was going to be Andy’s ‘technical’ advisor. The struggle was so intense by Chicago that Danny and Paul actually came to blows over an extension cord – Danny wanted it for the lights, and Paul wanted it for the projectors. The only way I could deal with that was to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but perhaps Danny felt that he had no support in the group either, which wasn’t the case. Danny was excellent at what he did, and a very hard worker.

“Angus had originally left the group because he anticipated all kinds of compromises that would have to be made and then when he finally did play with us out in Chicago he realized that that was not true. We were as careless as ever.”

BOCKRIS:
“At this point did he want to come back into the group?”

MORRISON:
“Yeah, evidently.”

Poor Richard’s was inside an old church. Without ventilation the temperature was 106 degrees. The Velvets arrived just after the Chicago race riots. Andy had been promised by the promoters to do a series of interviews for radio and TV stations but sent Brigid Polk instead. All the local press and Playboy people were there to inspect Warhol’s latest, and when the group went on without both lead singers the media were acutely disappointed. Other witnesses in the audience and on stage say that it was just as good as ever.

MORRISON:
“Everybody thought we’d be a flop without Lou but we were great. We just had to work a lot harder. In fact, we were held over for a second week, which was at least as successful as the first. We had a lot of fun there: Gerard and I went to a beach in Winnetka, an affluent suburb of Chicago,
and were run off by the police (Gerard was wearing a novel Rudi Gernreich bikini which exposed the top 3 inches of his ass, and plunged even lower in the front); while I was staying at the Commonwealth Hotel I met a dwarf in the elevator who said he had a gun and would kill me with it if I ever got in there with him again. Is it because I’m tall, I wondered, or because I look happy? I later met another dwarf in Boston and he, too, had a gun that he said he would kill me with. I don’t know what the pattern is to all this, but I’m still working on it. And for a long time afterwards, when attending large indoor gatherings, I would immediately upon arrival move quickly through all the rooms, peeking into the closets and behind the drapes. At outdoor events I would peer intently into the shrubbery before joining the throng. Now I’m sure that many people consider this to be odd behaviour, but I didn’t think I was acting oddly at all. Just checking for dwarfs. Anyway, I left the Commonwealth and joined Angus over at the Hotel Lincoln. Safer there. As for Playboy, they hired us to play in the club at a noon fashion show – the clothing was given to us by a mod shop in Old Town. It was written up with a picture in their VIP magazine. We went on Studs Terkel’s TV show, did a couple of radio shows, and all that sort of on-tour stuff. We didn’t lay low just because we didn’t have Lou, Nico, or Andy. On the contrary, I would say we made ourselves rather conspicuous.”