Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (7 page)

MORRISSEY:
“I remember going down to the Cafe Figaro in the Village where Gerard had taken Andy to see Allen Ginsberg, who was about to go to Europe. I said, ‘Andy, they’re not going to sign the agreement, we don’t have a club for The Velvets.’ Andy had already invested this money in their equipment. I think we even got a management contract out of them.”

MALANGA:
“What were the stipulations?”

MORRISSEY:
“For presenting them and financing their equipment and supporting them and making them famous we got 25 per cent of their earnings.”

MORRISON:
“Our agreement with Warvel, Inc., which we set up with Andy, called for our sharing in his many sources of revenue. After the initial purchase of a Vox Super Beatle and a Vox Westminster bass amp, we soon were able to make an endorsement deal with Vox and got all of their stuff free (even guitars). I’m playing a Vox Phantom in the movie that Andy made of us. We were the first American band on endorsement to Vox, and in England they only had The Beatles, Stones, and Hollies. I always liked Vox. Later we endorsed Acoustic, and finally Sunn (very good
equipment). Paul, in other words, is not talking about major expenditures.”

MORRISSEY:
“The idea was that they could’ve become very famous from being presented in this night club. Now, suddenly, my plans for presenting them fell through. But, as I was telling Andy this at the Figaro, sitting at the table behind me was Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern and they heard me talking. They said, ‘You’re looking for a dance hall to present a rock’n’roll group? We present dance concerts with light shows and we know a wonderful place.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding, where?’ They said, ‘On St. Mark’s Place.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding, I know that street. I never knew there was a place there.’ I went over with them and I saw the Dom and I came back and arranged a rental deal through Sy Litvinoff on Wednesday. It was only signed on Friday and that afternoon The Velvets and Faison moved their equipment in. They never saw the place before. We couldn’t go in until the lease was signed. It was very hard getting the lease signed. Andy paid the money for the lease for the month of April. We moved in on Friday. Gerard was up on the back painting the wall white. I had to put the ad in the
Village Voice
the previous Monday. It was put in on the deadline. It was some sort of miracle that with in that short space Andy Warhol presenting
THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE
was created. The term ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ came from sitting around with Gerard and Barbara Rubin thinking of a name. I picked up a record album with Barbara on the back massaging Bob Dylan’s head(‘Bringing It All Back Home’). There were some amphetamine Bob Dylan gibberish liner notes. I looked without reading and saw these words appear: something was ‘exploding’, something was ‘plastic’, something was ‘inevitable’.

“I said, ‘Why not call it “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” The Velvet Underground and Nico?’ We moved in on Friday afternoon at 3 o’clock and at 8 o’clock that night all
these people showed up. It was packed. It was an enormous success from its very first night.”

Gerard’s new dancing partners were Mary Woronov, a tall, beautiful art student he discovered at Cornell University and brought to the Factory, Ingrid Superstar, and Ronnie Cutrone, a 17-year-old super bopper, who hung out on the fast scene.

RONNIE CUTRONE:
“The great thing about the ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ was that it left nothing to the imagination. We were on stage with bullwhips, giant flashlights, hypodermic needles, barbells, big wooden crosses. In a sense it controlled your imagination. That’s what you saw. Before that when you heard music you drifted off and you associated the music with what you thought about. This time make no mistake about it there was a clear image of what the group was conveying, and so it left nothing to the imagination. You were shocked because sometimes your imagination wasn’t strong enough to imagine people shooting up on stage, being crucified and licking boots.”

WARHOL:
“The Velvets played so loud and crazy I couldn’t even begin to guess the decibels, and there were images projected every where, one on top of the other. I’d usually watch from the balcony or take my turn at the projectors, slipping different coloured gelatin slides over the lenses and turning movies like
Harlot, The Shoplifter, Couch, Banana, Blow Job, Sleep, Empire, Kiss, Whips, Face, Camp, Eat
into all different colours.”

WALTER DE MARIA:
“There was a serious tone to the music and the movies and the people, as well as all the craziness and the speed. There was also the feeling of desperate living, of being on the edge. The present was blazing and every day was incredible, and you knew every day wasn’t always going to be that way.”

RICHARD GOLDSTEIN:
“The sound is a savage series of atonal thrusts and electronic feedback. The lyrics combine sado-masochistic frenzy with free association imagery. The
whole sound seems to be the product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade.”

WARHOL:
“We all knew something revolutionary was happening. We just felt it. Things couldn’t look this strange and new without some barrier being broken. ‘It’s like the Red Seeea,’ Nico said, standing next to me one night on the Dom balcony that looked out over all the action, ‘paaaaarting’.”

DANNY FIELDS:
“It was an audience event to me, but it was also a musical event, because I preferred many times to close my eyes rather than see this psychedelic light-show travesty flashing on the group. To me it was the music. The great credit due Andy is that he recognized it. He heard music when he first saw The Velvets. He thought that they were great. So, they were great before Andy. So, they were great during Andy, and afterwards, too. Andy may have created The EPI but he didn’t create the sound of the band. That was always there long before Andy found them. Lou’s song-concepts were avant-garde and his lyrics were avant-garde, but I don’t know if his melodies without John at that point would have been avant-garde. John really put a psychedelic air to it. I thought The Velvets were ahead of everybody. It’s the only thing that ever, ever, ever swept me off my feet as music since early Mahler. They were a revolution.”

Ed Sanders, the lead singer for The Fugs, another New York band that thrived on the Lower East Side in the same period, and with whom Gerard Malanga had originally danced before he met The Velvets, was taken by Barbara Rubin to see them at the Bizarre and remembers going to the Dom.

ED SANDERS:
“I liked that tune that started out real slow -‘Heroin’. I liked the drummer. I always liked Lou Reed’s voice. The time was pretty good. Then it was more organic, yet within the organism it had certain time changes that were interesting. My wife Miriam seems to remember that the Dom gigs were crowded out by dopers. They had a kind of
Allen Kaprow happening factor. I liked the show because it had a lot of energy. I liked the way everything was wrapped up in a goodtime-change. What The Fugs were doing wasn’t exclusive nor were we competitive. There was plenty of room in the whole world for both The Fugs and The Velvets. I didn’t feel competitive about anybody. I felt camaraderie towards The Velvets. We overlapped. So people would come to both shows. Nico used to come to my bookstore, The Peace Eye.”

MORRISON:
“I agree with Ed completely. We often played together at shows and benefits, and liked and were liked by the same people. The Fugs, The Holy Modal Rounders and The Velvet Underground were the only authentic Lower East Side bands. We were real bands playing for real people in a real scene. We helped each other out if we could and generally hung out at the same places. I have a complete collection of Fugs albums and they bring me great joy.”

MORRISSEY:
“Even at the first weekend, this horrible Charlie Rothchild came down. He said he was no longer working for Albert Grossman but I think he was. He said, ‘You really have a great thing going here. You need somebody professional to manage it for you, and who’s going to book The Velvet Underground?’ He said, ‘I did the bookings for Grossman, I could run the box-office here with a friend.’ He had a kinda young blond partner who seemed rather on the up-and-up. I stupidly let them do it. They ran the box-office and collected the money.”

MALANGA:
“Did you feel at that point that Nico would make it rather than The Velvets?”

MORRISSEY:
“No, I thought they both would, really. I didn’t think one more than the other. But I thought they really belonged together. Right after we opened and we had that success I told Andy, ‘Now we have to make a record with them,’ and we went into a recording studio for three or four nights. It didn’t cost that much. It was like a couple of thousand dollars.

MALANGA:
“Andy didn’t go every night to the recording studio?”

MORRISSEY:
“Maybe once or twice.”

MALANGA:
“What were your impressions about what went down at the studio?”

MORRISSEY:
“I thought what they were doing was good. All I remember is suddenly Nico had no material to sing. Lou didn’t want her on the album. Lou was always jealous of Nico and he only let her sing little songs on the album and then he wrote a song for her called ‘Sunday Morning’ and wouldn’t let her sing it. You see Lou and John were such ‘brothers’. They loved each other so much. Nico wasn’t pure rock’n’roll or something.”

As Andy was more involved with The Velvets than anything else, it was natural that he produce the album and continue to lend his name to their productions. People often ask exactly what did Andy do in the studio? He mainly contributed by having the vision to see how good The Velvets were and consequently encouraging them, he gave them confidence to follow their intuition and go to extremes to recognize and get their unique sound. He also suggested some ideas for songs (e.g. make ‘Sunday Morning’ about paranoia), encouraged Lou to write others (‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’) and discussed the merits of different tracks, commenting on the way he liked the sound best. During this first recording session in a small studio on Broadway they only had time to do ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, ‘There She Goes Again’, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘I’m Waiting For My Man’. The major conflicts during the sessions revolved around Nico.

MORRISON:
“Nico had two voices. One was a full-register, Germanic,
gotterdammerung
voice that I never cared for, and the other was her wispy voice which I liked. She kept singing ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ in her strident voice. Dissatisfied, we kept making her do it over and over again until she broke down and burst into tears. At that point we said, ‘Oh, try it just one more time and then fuck it – if it doesn’t
work this time we’re not going to do the song.’ Nico sat down and did it exactly right. As for the haunting quality in her voice, it’s not because she’s singing to Bob Dylan or Lou Reed. Nico was just really depressed.”

WARHOL:
“The whole time the album was being made, nobody seemed happy with it, especially Nico. ‘I want to sound like Bawwwhhhb Deee-lahhhn,’ she wailed, so upset because she didn’t. The Velvets didn’t want to turn into a back-up band for a chanteuse, but ironically, Lou wrote the greatest songs for her to sing, like ‘Femme Fatale’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’. Her voice, the words, and the sounds The Velvets made all were so magical together.”

FIELDS:
“Andy had no influence on their sound whatsoever. Andy doesn’t know how to translate ideas into musical terms. The songs on that first record sounded very much like the way I was used to hearing them live. What Andy was perhaps doing on the record was making them sound like he knew they sounded at the Factory. That’s what I would do if I were an amateur at production, I would try and make them sound like the way I was used to hearing them. I think that’s a great credit to the producer-artist relationship that you try to get them to sound like the person you fell in love with.”

Back at the Dom, George English in an article in
Fire Island News
wrote, “The rock’n’roll music gets louder, the dancers get more frantic, and the lights start going on and off like crazy. And there are spotlights blinking in our eyes, and car horns beeping, and Gerard Malanga and the dancers are shaking like mad, and you don’t think the noise can get any louder, and then it does, until there is one big rhythmic tidal wave of sound, pressing down around you, just impure enough so you can still get the best; the audience, the dancers, the music and the movies, all of it fused together into one magnificent moment of hysteria.”

FIELDS:
“
The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
made a theatrical impact. We have very few records of that. But it was The
Velvets who made the musical impact. If you were there the record will immediately bring it all back. But the show and the ambience isn’t on the record. You just have to rely on the music and that’s all that’s left. And especially as history goes further away and as witnesses die there’s no one really to remember it and that record is all that will be. So, you have to say yes, it was that music. Also out of respect to the people in the band. It was the house band of that scene and everybody danced to them. I was a big critic of not showing the band. I always thought that was retarding their popularity. You had to watch a fucking psychedelic light show! All these fucking plaids and water-colours and drippings. I thought The Velvets were fabulous-looking people and there they were drowned out by this god-damned psychedelic mediocrity. I complained all the time about that. I said this may be art or a happening but I love the band. I thought then that if this light and movie show wasn’t happening more people would see them and come to be intrigued with them, because I was so in love with Lou. I thought he was just the hottest looking sexiest person I ever have seen. The Velvets are an enormous influence on the music of today. And if their influence lives on it’s going to be as a musical group because rock groups with light shows on top of them never became a very big thing. It was an experiment that didn’t work, because audiences really went to see the band. They didn’t go to see a live movie.”