Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

by Victor Bockris

  REED: “He looks very Mephistophelian.”

  INGRID: “He looks very Mephistophelian. What does that mean?”

  REED: “The devil.”

  INGRID: “Oh, yes, he looks like a devil. The devil’s disciple. He usually wears baggy pants and boots that are way too big for him, so he trips all over the place, and he wears a baggy shirt or a flower-print shirt, with puffed sleeves, Gerard Malanga-style. Well, that’s what he was wearing in Chicago. And he’s got black eyes, and he’s very very relaxed, boring at times, but then aren’t we all? And it’s not an excuse. And he usually wears sunglasses. He’s Welsh. One of the interesting characteristics about him is his little Welsh accent. And then last but not least there’s Maureen Tucker. The only girl in the band.”

  REED: “She isn’t a girl.”

  INGRID: “Oh, she is too, Louis. Listen, I stayed with her the whole time in that hotel in Chicago and she is a girl, who was always the biggest mystery because nobody could ever figure out Mo. She’s a beer drinker. She sits in the pub and knocks them back! She’s absolutely straight – you keep on looking for the Buster Brown shoes! If something embarrassed her she just turns red! Maureen’s very natural. She doesn’t wear any make-up. She told me, I asked her. I even felt her hair. She’s got freckles, and she’s a cute little Irish girl, very religious, goes to church every Sunday.”

  REED: “You know what her favourite expression is?”

  INGRID: “Yeehaw.”

  REED: “No.”

  INGRID: “Ho hum.”

  REED: “No.”

  INGRID: “What?”

  REED: “You piece of shit.”

  INGRID: “You piece of shit. I thought that was Faison’s expression.”

  REED: “No, it’s Mo’s.”

  INGRID: “Well, then Mo must have plagiarized it from Faison. She’s got average build. She never wears a skirt, except when she works or goes to church. She’s a very sweet …”

  REED: “She doesn’t wear a bra.”

  INGRID: “She wears a bra.”

  REED: “She doesn’t have to.”

  INGRID: “I think every girl has to, or every girl should. So, anyway she’s a very quiet, calm, sweet person. And very easy to get along with.”

  REED: “She’s no virgin.”

  INGRID: “Oh, yes she is.”

  REED: “Oh, get out of here. She wouldn’t be in the band if she were.”

  INGRID: “I don’t believe anything Louis says. He’s crazy. Like the rest of us. But, what would this world be if it weren’t for us crazy people? Oh, and last but not least, I must describe the road manager, Faison. Oh, God. Oh, well you could call him like Captain Kidd, because he looks like a pirate, he’s got real, real curly almost kinky brown hair, level with the bottom of his ears, and he’s got a full beard with a moustache, and like the front of his beard curls up, and he wears one earring, pierced in his ear. Probably sterling silver earring, similar to the one that Edie used to wear, only much shorter. He can be a bitchy person, but so can everybody. He’s a real pool shark, along with the rest of The Velvets. He’s got a mean temper, and he says he’s a Scot but I don’t believe him, because he looks more Jewish. All he needs is a pole, you know, and he’ll look like Moses, oh, but that’s Allen Ginsberg’s award.

  “Now, last but not least, we come to the beautiful flawless, chanteuse, Nico. She’s got blonde hair, sort of Jane Asher style, down to her shoulders. She’s got blue eyes, and she’s about 5′ 9,” 5′ 10″. A very good photographic model, and actress, and she’s got great potential. She could be like 5 or 50, like being an actress in a movie, and she could make it in Hollywood any day.

  “Her voice is very bland and calm and low and smooth. Some people mistake it like for a boy’s voice. And she sings sort of like in one tone mostly. She doesn’t have too much modulation, which is groovy, it’s like a new sound. She’s just a very, very beautiful girl – a cool Dietrich for a cool generation.”

  REED: “How old is she?”

  INGRID: “She’s 23. And she’s got a very, very cute little German accent.”

  A SHORT ESSAY IN APPRECIATION OF NICO

  (This piece was written by Gerard Malanga in early 1967 for the magazine Status & Diplomat.)

  If there exists beauty so universal as to be unquestionable, Nico possesses it.

  The face is perfect. Impeccable features – mouth precise, nose straight and finely chiselled, eyes limpid in delicate balance, visage framed by a curtain of pale shining hair. No feature dominates Nico’s face; all is in improbably perfect proportion. Nothing is outstanding, yet everything is. Symmetry tends to boredom, but Nico arrests, startles, seizes. The appearance of a smile, a pout, a tear, thoroughly assaults with incongruity. But the most incongruous is the look of the eyes, focused most frequently on the imperceptible.

  As superstar and chanteuse, Nico is unceasingly noted for the paradox of her beauty and its function – the contrast between Nico, on screen behind The Velvet Underground, languidly munching a Hershey bar or casually combing her hair in Chelsea Girls and Nico, on stage, who “hovers over a microphone, cupping her voice in an endless groan, the sound of an amplified moose.” More apparent evidence in the dichotomy is Nico as “Nico,” frolicking and giggling through La Dolce Vita or smiling malignantly from an Esquire cover, and Nico as Nico, walking with detachment after a performance, laughing vaguely. Yet, the critics’ discovery of the paradox of effortless innocence on film and macabre, death-like stage presence is only a secondary manifestation of the real enigma: the eyes.

  Because of her impact as a three dimensional whole, Nico would be most effectively represented in sculpture, but not even the most profound artist could capture the strange and unexplainable quality of her eyes. They captivate, but do not beckon; they ignore, but cannot be forgotten; they reflect the inner reality, but leave no clue to its contents. Their expression, or lack of a comprehensible expression, does not relate to the thoroughly comprehensible phenomenon of her beauty. Nico’s eyes seem to guard a great mystery which, hidden in aloofness, they do not want anyone to know exists. Whether or not a mystery is there, the eyes with the enigma of their absence from what surrounds them eclipse the perfection of features and form to add great magnetism. It is this magnetism, cool and inviolable, which enhances Nico’s identification with the Garbo-Dietrich tradition, which elevates her above the genre of uniform Nordic beauties to the elite of an unapproachable mystique.

  THE VELVET UNDERGROUND ON TOUR

  LICKING LOLLYPOPS IN LA

  Charlie Rothchild booked The Exploding Plastic Inevitable into the Trip May 3–29.

  Fourteen of them packed their whips, chains, lights, guitars and drums and flew out to LA on May 1. Most of them stayed at the Castle, a large imitation-medieval stone structure in the Hollywood Hills which rock musicians often rented for $500 a week. Dylan had just been there with Edie Sedgwick. Nat Finkelstein and Faison stayed at the Tropicana.

  The Mothers of Invention opened at the Trip. The hometown crowd cheered them and booed The Velvets. Lou hated The Mothers. Of Frank Zappa he said, “He’s probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s a two-bit, pretentious academic, and he can’t play rock’n’roll, because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself and I think he’s right.” On the second night they played LA they turned up all their amplifiers after their last number, walked off the stage and let the feedback play. The owners didn’t like the music, nor did the critics: “Screeching rock and roll reminded viewers of nothing so much as Berlin in the decadent Thirties,” said Los Angeles Magazine. “A three ring psychosis that assaults the senses with the sights and sounds of the total environment syndrome … Discordant music, throbbing cadences, pulsating tempo,” said Variety. The Los Angeles Times was less critical: “Not since the Titanic ran into the iceberg has there been such a collision as when Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable burst upon the audience at the Trip, Tuesday. For once a Hap
pening really happened, and it took Warhol to come out from New York to show how it’s done. The Velvet Underground is so far out that it makes the tremendous thumping beat of the great groovy group which opened the program seem passe.”

  The Medium is the Massage includes a photograph of the group performing at the Trip. At the heart of his thesis McLuhan describes what was happening here: “‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village … a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.

  “Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically configured world has forced us to move from the bait of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block by block, step by step, because instant communication ensures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay. We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of ‘art’.”

  Indeed it was the “artist” who seemed most welcome in the land of the silver screen: “The arrival of Andy, the hippie’s hippie, on the Sunset Strip, the hippies’ paradise, makes for the most perfect combination since peanut butter discovered jelly,” said The Los Angeles Times after The Velvets second night at the Trip.

  WARHOL: “I love LA. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. Nico could probably make it here tomorrow. She has that ability to be 5 and 50 at the same time but, actually, it’s Gerard who wants to be the new pop girl. He tries very hard and the East Village Other has already named him Slum Goddess of the Year. After The Velvets opened, a lot of people wondered if they could last the full three weeks, and critics wrote things like, ‘The Velvet Underground should go back underground and practise.’ But The Velvets in their wrap-around shades and tight striped pants went right on playing their demented New York music, even though the easygoing LA people just didn’t appreciate it; some of them said it was the most destructive thing they’d ever heard. On opening night, a couple of The Byrds were there and Jim Morrison, who looked really intrigued (he was still a student at the UCLA Film School at the time), and Ryan O’Neal and Mama Cass were there, kicking up their heels. We read a great comment by Cher Bono the next day in one of the newspapers, and we picked it up for our ads – ‘It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.’ But Sonny seemed to like it all – he stayed on after she left.”

  They needn’t have worried about their ability to fill the club throughout their engagement because it was closed down by the Sheriffs office on their third day. The troupe stayed in LA, hoping the club would re-open, and the musicians’ union said if they stayed in town for the (union rules) duration of their engagement they would have to be paid the complete fee. They used the time to continue recording the first album. Nat Finkelstein left the group because of an argument about money.

  MORRISON: “We had a horrible reputation. Everybody figured we were gay. They figured we must be, running around with Warhol and all those whips and stuff. One day Andy cooked eggs for everybody at the Castle. After about a week and a half waiting for the Trip to re-open I moved to the Tropicana. Los Feliz, the street that led to the Castle, was too far from the club scene on Sunset Strip. Faison and Danny were already there at the Tropicana and I had had enough of Patrick Tilden imitating Bob Dylan’s grating speech patterns up at the Castle. There wasn’t much partying at the Castle while we were there because of our reputation -rumours so sinister were making the rounds on the Strip that hardly anyone had the courage to visit. And those who dared come up at night found dark rooms and passageways, lit only by an occasional flickering brazier, strains of music from the acetates of the first album, mutterings, shufflings and an occasional human form, such as Severn Darden gliding by in his monk’s attire. I do not exaggerate. At the Tropicana we partied with The Buffalo Springfield who were staying there too, and various others from the LA music scene. I rode all over the place on a motor cycle that Kurt von Meier lent me, and as often as not was at the Castle anyway. It’s just that I wasn’t stuck up there.

  “We made the album ourselves and then took it around because we knew that no one was going to sign us off the streets. And we didn’t want any A&R department telling us what songs we should record. We took it to Ahmet Ertegun and he said, ‘No drug songs.’ We took it to Elektra, and they said, ‘No violas.’ Finally we took it to Tom Wilson, who was at Columbia, and he said to wait until he moved to MGM and we could do whatever we wanted with him on their Verve label, which turned out to be true and MGM did sign us. They signed The Mothers of Invention at the same time, trying to revamp Verve and go psychedelic, or something.”

  MORRISSEY: “And then we sold the record to MGM but Lou, who was always conniving and trying to make a deal, said, ‘We’ll only make the deal if it’s in my name. The money has to come to us and then we’ll give Andy and you the percentage you’re entitled to.’ Not only for presenting them and inventing them, but for making and recording the album. He was just selfish.”

  MILSTEIN: “How did Tom Wilson come to produce the ‘Sunday Morning’ song on the Banana album?”

  WARHOL: “He was a friend of Nico’s. When they went with MGM, Tom Wilson was the person there. What is Tom Wilson doing now? Do you know?”

  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.