Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (14 page)

This is my last night in New York with Benedetta before leaving for my round-the-states tour of Ohio with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

I meet The Velvets and Nico and Paul at the Factory (Andy didn’t go on this tour again, because he wasn’t needed). We ride out to the airport to catch a jet to Cincinnati our first stop on the tour.

The Velvet Underground, Nico, Paul and I are at Cincinnati. My head is about to burst from all the amphetamine I took before boarding the jet in New York.

Last night The Velvets quit playing and wouldn’t let Nico sing. John and Lou have yellow eyes and might end up in the hospital. Nico has plans to leave the group. Paul suggests it wouldn’t be a bad idea if I leave the group, also. Nico doesn’t know if she wants to sing with the group.

Today Paul, Nico and I took pictures in the Columbus, Ohio bus terminal. We’re on our way to Wheeling, West Virginia to do a concert for $900.00 at the University of West Virginia. On the bus from Columbus to Wheeling, Nico is sitting beside me. I look at her and remember at one time we had an intense relationship which has developed into a lifelong friendship.

Sitting with Paul in the front part of the bus. Left Pittsburgh one hour ago. On the last leg of our tour to Cleveland with hope that we can board Flight No. 146 to New York without any hassles. Lou Reed’s sister Elizabeth, who was a student, showed up at the Cleveland gig. She immediately reminded me of Suzanne Pleshette.

MORRISON:
“I don’t remember seeing Lou’s sister at this time, but met her later at one of the La Cave dates. Lou obviously liked his sister, and was very protective of her. This was a weakness that John and I could not help but exploit for our amusement. The technique by then had been well established, each of us being impervious to direct abuse from any of the others. What you had to do was get at them through people they cared about in their ‘personal’ lives, by rudeness, slander, or whatever. So when Lou walked into the dressing room and announced that his sister was going to drop in, and would we please try to act like humans, John and I leaped at the chance to make merry at his expense. We began with speculation about his sister’s maidenly virtue, or lack thereof, and conjured up lurid visions of her secret life as a coed. Horrified, Lou expressed strong displeasure with this conversation. John and I pressed on happily, delighted with Lou’s response, each of us offering to pay the other $100 if he could seduce this unseen sister, with the amount to double if she turned out to be ugly. Lou was almost speechless, but did manage a few phrases of profound loathing as John and I laughed and laughed.

Later Lou’s sister did drop in for a moment, and seemed pleasant enough.

John, Nico, Paul and myself are on board United Flight #146 en route to Newark Airport, making one stop at
Philadelphia. We are above the clouds. I see only darkness outside my window. The lights inside the cabin of the jet have not been turned off. I wish they would be, so I could get some sleep. I feel like I’m up on the amphetamine I took yesterday with the coffee I drank.

By the time they went to Hamilton, Ontario in Canada, November 12, 1966 even an art magazine was billing them as The Velvet Underground and putting Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable in small letters, although Barry Lord writing for
Arts/Canada
still saw The EPI as a visionary Warhol work: “His interest in the reputation of an image screened at different values of detail and intensity led naturally to the newspaper photograph, and thereby to the motion picture: the successive frames of a film are a vertical correlate of the still photo reproduced with varying screens, and a Warhol film, like the one of the Empire State Building with its lights going on and off over a period of many hours, is a logical extension of works like the Jackie Kennedy series, where the uneven screen sets up a comparable play of light values on an immediately recognizable image.

“These characteristics – significant distortion of the image, interest in the visual and psychological results of its repetition, collaboration with others, the maintenance of a single environmental effect through experienced time, and a concern with mechanically produced light effects are evident in Warhol’s latest work, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Inevitable is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor cinema; it cannot be called a happening, since it recurs at regular intervals on schedule. Nor is it an environment limited to one place, as McMaster University in Hamilton proved by inviting it up to open an arts festival in November.

“On a wide screen behind the stage,
Vinyl
, a film by Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s foreman in his New York art factory, was projected from two machines: to the right, the
first part of the film, in which Malanga dances, exercises, sits watching a man and a girl, and finally becomes aggressive; to the left, shown in the same time period, the second part, in which Malanga is beaten, stripped to the waist, and bound to a chair with his head encased in a black vinyl hood covered with metal studs. The same persons remain or re-appear in both halves, so that we are watching two images similar in general character, but significantly different in specific detail – a cinematic equivalent to the repeated faces of Marilyn and Liz in Warhol’s screened paintings of several years ago. The loudspeakers provided sound, the film dialogue purposely distorted on one track, and on the other the recorded sound of The Velvet Underground, the group which Warhol chose to play with The Inevitable.

“Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s art foreman and film-maker, is also the group’s dancer. Before a constantly flickering battery of strobe lights, Malanga uses a variety of props – a Marlon Brando shirt, a variety of sashes and ropes, and spoon and gear for a ‘fix’ in the set piece ‘Heroin’. Sometimes he used the strobes directly, sometimes a candle suggesting again the Warhol interest in light values. The final half-hour song created an environment in time as well as place, so that it began to seem to at least some of the McMaster audience as if life had always been this way. To others, it had been a con-fusing, noisy, probably frightening experience, and when the lights went up it was found that a good number had left. The ones who stayed had been a little more than an audience; like the newspaper photographs and Brillo boxes that Andy formerly used, they had become part of a Warhol art work.”

Returning from this job in Hamilton, Ontario, outside Toronto, it was discovered that Nico had purposely left her German passport, which had expired, in New York because she didn’t want anyone to discover her birth-date. Consequently she had to be smuggled back into the States through a minor border checkpoint. Her vanity almost caused her to be detained in Canada.

The troupe played a pop wedding at which Andy gave the bride away to the tune of The Velvets doing ‘Here Comes The Bride’ then moved on to their most pop-oriented show so far, The Detroit Music Festival hosted by Dick Clark at which they played on the same bill with The Yardbirds. Everybody was very up-tight. Jeff Beck was carrying a gun in his guitar case.

RONNIE CUTRONE:
“You couldn’t blow your cool ever. You were not allowed to be a human being even. Everything worked through guilt and paranoia.”

Nico had always been a problem. She wanted to sing all the songs. What was she supposed to do when she wasn’t singing? Looked at from today it seems just right – the tall, thin, hauntingly beautiful blonde in a white suit standing in front of four thin guys (it took people some time to catch on that Maureen was a … chick) in black wearing sunglasses – but then, Nico was uptight. She didn’t have anything to do. She felt uncomfortable just standing there. Why couldn’t she sing more songs? Nico was always very unhappy. Everybody was uptight. Lou was always jealous of her. It all came to a head one day when he stormed into the Factory screaming, “So she photographs great in high contrast black and white, I’m not playing with her anymore!” The record’s release had been delayed. A special machine had to be made to make the original cover, on which the banana peeled. Zappa’s Mothers of Invention ‘Freak Out’ record had already been released. Nico was still playing downstairs in the small bar called Stanley’s. She stood behind the bar backed by an acoustic guitar. Sterling says that he, John and Lou took turns as did
Rambling Jack Elliott, Tim Hardin (who Paul called ‘Tim Heroin’), Tim Buckley and Jackson Browne, who was living with Nico on Columbus Avenue at 51st Street. They still ran the films behind her. Paul Morrissey was pushing Nico’s solo career. The press continued to pay attention to the “Andy Warhol Superstar”. Paul was always trying to persuade Nico to stop taking drugs. Among other personalities on the scene an earnest Leonard Cohen attended her every performance, and later made use of some of her techniques on his own recordings.

By the time
The Velvet Underground And Nico Produced By Andy Warhol
(which is how the first album is represented) was released in March, 1967, The EPI was naturally dissolving.

BOCKRIS:
“How were you feeling when the record came out?”

TUCKER:
“I was very excited. I ran out to the store and bought one.”

BOCKRIS:
“Didn’t they give you a copy?”

TUCKER:
“Oh yeah, but I wanted to buy one. Finding it in stores was nice, but that didn’t last long because MGM fucked up. They didn’t really distribute it at all. But I was very excited, and Sterling was too, as I recall, and I’m sure John and Lou were thrilled.”

MORRISON:
“I was never more excited about anything, and used to call up
Cashbox
to find out our chart position before the magazine hit the stands. I couldn’t wait to know.”

BOCKRIS:
“What were you doing in March?”

TUCKER:
“I lived on Long Island during the group’s days, so I didn’t really hang out much, because they were all in the city. I don’t think Sterling and Lou did that much socializing really. They might meet at Max’s by chance, but they didn’t hang out together that much.”

MORRISON:
“We lived close by, and were together most of the time. We went to Max’s every night that we were in town. That’s where our friends were.”

MORRISSEY:
“As soon as the record came out The Velvets didn’t want to work anymore. They thought they became very famous when their album was finally released. I think they just wanted to separate from Andy, although we went on tour with them all over the country! I forget who booked that tour but God Almighty I could never forget that gruelling ordeal on the buses. We were going on buses! We got all these bookings.”

The success of
Chelsea Girls
, which was now showing in a major theatre in New York, had drawn Andy and Paul into the movie business. During ’66 they had spent little time filming anything except
Chelsea Girls
, focusing the majority of their time on The EPI. Now as Andy began the incessant filming that was to lead to the 24-hour movie released at the end of ’67, the focus of his attention was shifting. In essence they had done everything they could with the rock’n’roll genre – in the space of one year isolated and frozen for inspection several groundbreaking ideas – and they could see that any further collaboration was not going to lead to anything different.

MORRISON:
“Antonioni wanted to use us as the band in the rock club sequence in
Blow-up
, and we were more than willing. However, the expense of bringing the whole entourage to England proved too much for him. The sequence was one of the last things to be shot in the film, and he was running low on funds. So he used The Yardbirds doing a Who impersonation.”

MALANGA:
“Are you surprised by the longevity of The Velvets now?”

MORRISSEY:
“I am in a way, but I do think it was good music, it was a good album, it was different, it was unusual. I think most of the songs were really good. They certainly were an innovation, but you know we went on tour with them, I was a manager of the goddamn thing for almost a year or more and I remember, because they never released the album, but once the album came out I think that’s when
they wanted to go off and be themselves, and not have any revenue go back to Andy and me, and they didn’t want to do anything. They said they didn’t want to work and suddenly the whole thing was over. The album didn’t take off or anything right away.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was Andy’s take on working with The Velvets?”

CUTRONE:
“It was great for Andy because he got a totally captive audience to watch such films as
Eat
and
Sleep
, whereas before the general public would see it as a curio, last twenty minutes into the film and split, or sit it out just to be cool. Now here was a way to display his films – the boring ones are great classics but they’re still boring – and have an audience totally captive watching a man eat an apple in a rocking chair. That was a giant breakthrough.”

BOCKRIS:
“Was their career largely based on intuition?”

CUTRONE:
“I think it was largely as unspoken as possible, because you have to remember that being cool then was really important. And you couldn’t blow your cool ever. You were not allowed to be a human being even. Everything worked through guilt and paranoia and through what feels best and what looks best that night. It was pretty much surface. I mean, however deep and intense the music was. One of Andy’s famous quotes from that period is, ‘Your worst reviews are your best reviews.’ So, from the I-will-not-budge-an-inch attitude, their bad reviews were the kind of publicity that set The Velvets apart from anybody else. From a dollars-and-cents point of view that was not too cool. That was just like, you know, ‘Uh, uh, we hope we make some money here too.’ So there were mixed feelings about the critical reactions. The Velvets always got put down but instantly other groups started recognizing that art sometimes goes with music and they could really cash in on captivating an audience in that particular way and giving them not only music but visuals, and then it just took off.”