Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (21 page)

REED:
“I agree. I know she’s doing something important.”

1965 seems to have been a year of amputations. It was a year in which everybody’s position changed or was changed. The Velvets set out to tour the US, making $600 one week,
$2500 the next. It was the only way they could make money and they liked to play, but the pressures of life on the road did little to assuage the developing tension between Reed and Cale, who are said to have come to blows on occasions during this period.

BOCKRIS:
“Were you on the road for months at a time playing one-nighters?”

TUCKER:
“No, we were never into that. The longest we were ever away was two months and that was hell. If we went out to the Coast we couldn’t afford to fly back and forth so we’d stay out there for six weeks and play up and down the coast a little bit. Being on the road is mostly real boring. The only real good thing is playing. We didn’t really do full tours, though. We played five or six times on the West Coast, and we’d play Chicago and Texas and a few places, but it wasn’t like long tours playing every night.”

BOCKRIS:
“So during this period did you have a road manager?”

TUCKER:
“Yeah, we had Hans Onsager. He was with us from when Dave Faison left through to the end.”

MORRISON:
“Faison left late in 1966 because he needed more money. He later did well in sound systems and various rock music ventures on the West Coast. Next came Phil Schier in 1967. He was Lou’s room-mate for a while at Syracuse and played bass with him at times. He was a Formula 1 race driver, and general car freak. When he left late in 1967 or so, it was to open up a recording studio in LA, which became successful. Hans Onsager was our equipment manager from then on. His father won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 while at Yale. Hans is a New England Yankee, well brought up, and fun to be around.”

John Cale and Betsey Johnson married in New York in April 1968. The band was in Los Angeles, playing and recording when the news of the Andy Warhol shooting reached them on June 4.

BOCKRIS:
“Do you remember where you were and what
your reaction was to Andy Warhol being shot?”

SESNICK:
“I was with Lou. We were going down in an elevator in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. In that particular hotel they put the morning papers on the floor of the elevator. We were both extremely shocked and startled when we looked down and saw the headlines. Bobby Kennedy was shot a few days later. I remember the two incidents came at the same time. We were both extremely upset. It also struck us as very scary because apparently Lou knew who the girl was who did it. So we were upset for Andy and I was upset and concerned for Lou that something like that might happen to him some day. As a manager who watches over those things, it was a very serious shock.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, as all those who loved him waited to see if Andy would survive, a blackness descended. The image became more seriously negative. The party was really over. It was a hard, depressing time for everyone. Lou and John were constantly at odds. Nothing seemed as pure and noble as it had. The silver tarnished. On 19 to 21 July they were at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Even the original rock’n’roll animal was beginning to feel the grind.”

REED:
“Who can you talk to on the road? Long-haired dirty drug people wherever you look. The boy passes over a bag of green powder and passes out. Don’t take that, it has horse tranquillizer in it. Oh, I shot up to your song. I got busted to your song. Oh, please bless me and touch me and make it all go away. I loved you.”

CALE:
“I was thinking one time about creating weather by using music. In brain surgery they use ultrasonics for cutting away tissue. They do that by a heating process. I think of high frequencies creating heat in matter. Low frequencies are made up of pulses and movements of columns of air – an example of an extremely low frequency would be a hurricane or a whirlwind. In France a professor has studied a death-ray machine which propels very low sounds. He has
this organ-pit which is several hundred feet long and when they tested it out they killed a lot of people in the factory. A lot of people became sick. The machine made everything vibrate. The music I’d been writing six years ago was a set of instructions for the wind and listening to it – all the vibrations of sound. Some of the things I’ve been finding out about electronics seem to suggest that it’s possible to produce sound to alter the temperature, make the air warmer or cooler, according to which combination of pitches you use. I’d like to have a tape that would create a 75-degree temperature. Over a period of days you could play a tape that would regulate the heat around you. The kind of heat that would give off would be in some cases like summer or autumn.”

It’s a pity Cale couldn’t have created music that would have altered the way he and Reed reacted to one another.

LYNNE TILLMAN:
“The relationship between John and Lou was symbiotic in a certain way. They were very close. They loved each other, but they also hated each other. It was competitive musically. John knew Lou got much more attention because he was the singer in the group, but then John cut a more flamboyant figure. He was being dressed by Betsey Johnson. Lou used to call him the ‘Welsh Bob Dylan’.”

BOCKRIS:
“What about his relationship with Lou?”

JOHNSON:
“I don’t remember any specific crack. He just wasn’t with them. It seemed real logical to me. I just really supported him and thought he ought to do his own music. It was really his music and then Lou’s music. It seemed like they went as far as they could go in a way being The Velvet Underground. There was no kind of growth for them. Now they’re heroes for what they did, but then, to keep a group together for what? – a record contract, social acknowledgement, acceptance? Not people like that. John’s split was personal, but it was kind of more John just realizing he had to do his own stuff.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was the atmosphere of these gigs? How were they together?”

JOHNSON:
“I wasn’t very comfortable. Probably because I wasn’t taking drugs but I was very attracted to people taking drugs, or just attracted to anything that I hadn’t been around when I grew up. Going to a gig I remember not saying much, feeling what I said was not very important. I remember hanging around with Susan Pile. I remember them being very quiet. They weren’t the buddy-buddy gang. Mo was a woman of a few succinct, wonderful words. I really liked her. And Sterling was very, very sweet. They were never like their image except for Lou because that’s in the stars. I really feel Lou is kind of what people think of as The Velvet Underground. I remember going to see him backstage a few years ago and saying, ‘Hi, Lou,’ and he said, ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ John had the visualness of what people like to think of as The Velvet Underground, but John’s just that little pussy cat underneath the pantheresque facade. John used to love to tell me about Wales and growing up. He used to show me walls of his house where he would go throw up the cough medicine all over the walls. His parents kept him on that Dr. Brown’s mixture. Now you can’t get it at all. It was heavily laced with codeine, and he had some kind of bronchial problem – you can imagine in that climate – till he was like eight or ten, so he was on really heavy doses. Prescribed. It’s just really codeined-out. So he was high the whole time as a kid. And then being high in Wales, which is just weirdness in the air. The out-house was way in the backyard, icy, icy, icy, icy cold. You had to go out to go to the bathroom. His father chopped coal. He had no refrigeration. It wasn’t like they were a poor family isolated from middle-class people. The whole situation there was poor. Very close but very weird.”

BOCKRIS:
“John said it took him a long time to regain his vitality after he left the group.”

JOHNSON:
“No collaboration.”

MORRISON:
“John and I were very happy with ‘Sister Ray’-type music. Although I’m teaching English now, I
don’t really care about lyrics in music. I like energy and emotion, yelling and grunting. Snarls and hisses like in ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ – that’s Cale hissing. Lou placed heavy emphasis on lyrics, while Cale and I were more interested in blasting the house down.

“In August Lou called and asked me to meet him at the Riviera Cafe in the West Village. When I got there Maureen was also present. Lou had called a meeting to announce John was out of the band.

“I said, ‘You mean out for today, or for this week?’ And Lou said, ‘No, he’s out.’ I said that we were the band, that it was graven on the tablets. So then a long and bitter argument ensued, with much banging on tables, and finally Lou said, ‘You don’t go for it? All right, the band is dissolved.’ Now I could say that it was more important to keep the band together than to worry about Cale, but that wasn’t really what decided me. I just wanted to keep on doing it. So finally I weighed my self-interest against Cale’s interests and sold him out.”

BOCKRIS:
“Do you remember the meeting Lou called at the Riviera to announce that Cale was out of the group?”

TUCKER:
“I wasn’t that shocked because the tensions were there and John was obviously not too happy, but I was real sad, and worried that we wouldn’t proceed. Sterling was rather furious as I recall. I guess he felt that it wasn’t really fair for one person to say this guy’s out.”

BOCKRIS:
“Was Lou presenting it as if he had fired John?”

TUCKER:
“Yeah, and his idea was, ‘Do you wanna go with him or do you wanna stay with me?’ I felt disappointed, but I guess I knew it was coming. I knew it was what had to happen because of the personality problem. I myself never understood what the problem was between them. I think maybe John wanted to have more of a hand in writing the songs. Maybe going in a different direction. But it just became too much tension. For Lou I guess, and John. There was a bad period right around when John left. Like I said, I
lived out on the Island so I wasn’t around it every day. But when we were together you could really sense it.”

WARHOL:
“Why did he break up with John? They had a fight?”

CUTRONE:
“That I don’t know.”

WARHOL:
“You know.”

CUTRONE:
“It was ego.”

CALE:
“We were very distraught at the time. There was pressure building up. God knows from where – and we were all getting very frustrated.”

BOCKRIS:
“Did he feel betrayed and fucked over by Lou?”

JOHNSON:
“I just remember a real edge with Lou all the time. Ego-jealousy. Lou was definitely the star. Any guy that is out there singing is the star. It was hard for John because he was back-up star. He had so much charisma. He had the balance of The Velvet Underground charisma. Lou without John, it wouldn’t have had the edge. John gave it that romantic … I mean the sound of The Velvet Underground was John. The words and the music were Lou but it was those weird nails on the blackboard sounds and the holding of the notes and that La Monte Young/Terry Riley preface to The Velvet Underground – that cold edgy Wales edge and John just visually was the person I always looked at. I don’t know if John knew that … John knew it enough that he was jealous. I just didn’t feel so great about Lou either.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was it about Lou that put you off.”

JOHNSON:
“Just that we didn’t click. I was definitely not with the in-crowd. I was John’s wife. I wasn’t jumping in with the drugs. I had a place there because I was John’s wife and I was doing something.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was happening with their records? They’re great, great records and they must have realized how great they were.”

JOHNSON:
“I don’t remember ever talking business to John, ever feeling that it was interesting enough to talk about.”

BOCKRIS:
“What was Warhol’s reputation at the time?”

JOHNSON:
“He was the one that made it happen because he was a Sixties success story. The clothing, the music, was all under the label of art, I don’t remember any wonderful laid-back feeling of success. When you’re doing something that interesting, to get good coverage, it’s never successful financially for you. It’s only when you don’t get coverage that you know you’re really doing well. I just remember more struggle than craziness, and funny stuff. How could John ever talk to me about music? I knew the frustrations within the group. I was going through the same frustrations. I don’t think he felt good about Steve Sesnick. I don’t think inside the group they thought of Lou as being leader of the group. I know personally it was hard for John because he really felt that Lou was the leader of the group. But they were so good together that I think that’s why it was so hard for John to break … it was a survival thing.”

BOCKRIS:
“What about the musical atmosphere at the time. In ’66, ’67 and ’68 they were making this really great music. What were they up against?”

JOHNSON:
“Jim Morrison. I never liked his music. The Stones were underground enough. They weren’t everybody’s favourite rock band. It was alright to be whatever you were all about. You didn’t have to join a clique to be able to make sense being there. It was such a weird vegetable soup. I used to think it was so much bigger than what it was. I thought everybody wore silver and mini-skirts and now when I look back it was such a tiny group of people. We were all getting screwed and we weren’t working in any kind of establishment.”

MORRISON:
“I agree. It seemed that it was happening all over to everybody, but really it wasn’t. In a sense it never happened at all. At this moment schoolgirls are being hassled anew by school administrators over the wearing of miniskirts. Sad, but true. Perhaps the Sixties will have to repeat themselves every 10 or 15 years just to keep driving home
the same lessons. I used to think everything was obvious, now I think that nothing is.”