One of her last Warhol films was shot in December and released in 1966. In Lupe, Sedgwick plays the real-life Mexican actress Lupe Vélez, who was found dead with her head in the toilet after overdosing on barbiturates. After the shoot, she hung out with Dylan at the Kettle of Fish. When Warhol showed up later, he mused to one of his Factory acolytes, “I wonder if Edie will commit suicide. I hope she lets me know so I can film it.”8
Shortly thereafter, Dylan came by the Factory for a “screen test,” allowing Warhol to film him for fifteen minutes while he sat completely still. As payment, Dylan took one of Warhol’s silk screens of Elvis Presley, driving off with it tied to the top of his station wagon. Warhol wrote in his memoirs, “Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I’d ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I’d invariably get hearsay answers like ‘I hear he feels you destroyed Edie,’ or ‘Listen to “Like a Rolling Stone”—I think you’re the “diplomat on the chrome horse,” man.’ I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that—I never listened much to the words of songs—but I got the tenor of what people were saying—that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.”9 Dylan eventually traded the Elvis painting to Grossman for a couch. But the joke was on Dylan: in 2012, Warhol’s Double Elvis (Ferus Type) sold for more than thirty-seven million dollars.10
* * *
When Brooklyn native Lou Reed was seventeen, his folks were alarmed by his bisexual tendencies. A psychiatrist recommended shock therapy three times a week at Rockland State Hospital. Reed said later, “I resent it. It was a very big drag. From 12 on I could have been having a ball and not even thought about this shit. What a waste of time. If the forbidden thing is love, then you spend most of your time playing with hate. Who needs that? I feel I was gypped.”11
At twenty-three, the future poet laureate of depravity got a job as a staff songwriter at budget label Pickwick Records, which put out imitation surf-rock and Merseybeat (the pop/rock style of bands from cities along England’s River Mersey such as Liverpool). “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs. They would say ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’ then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio.”12
Reed needed a band to play his dance-craze spoof “The Ostrich,” which actually didn’t sound that far removed from later Velvet Underground classics like “Sweet Jane.” To back him he found the Primitives. Their bassist, John Cale, also played atonal viola for the composer La Monte Young, whose minimalist “drone music” was inspired by Indian and Japanese music—as well as the hum of the transformers on telephone poles. Cale did performance art, too, such as Plant Piece, in which he tried to kill a plant by screaming at it.
Throughout the spring and summer of his twelfth year, Cale was molested by his organ tutor at church. “Like so many boys who lack a close relationship with their fathers, I was extremely insecure and susceptible to this kind of predator. There was a second guy I became involved with around the same time who was also into molestation,” he writes in his memoir. “I’d stop and visit this man. It happened a couple of times, then I quit out of self-disgust. I remember feeling there was something wrong somewhere, and I remember consequently being cruel to a cat, strangling it with a fascination to see how far I could go without killing. Obviously I saw myself in the cat, and I had to come to terms with male relationships, to calm that aspect down … Anyway, I never came to terms with the problem. It always haunted me … It was there when I fought the school bully during lunch break. It was there when I laid my first sweetheart in the mud and grass behind the stones.”13
Reed and Cale formed their own group, the Warlocks, the same name the Grateful Dead were using that year. They rechristened themselves the Velvet Underground after a paperback that sensationally reported on all the sexual activity secretly going on beyond the bounds of heterosexual intercourse.
Lou Reed got Sterling Morrison, a friend from Syracuse University, to play guitar or bass, depending on whether Cale was playing the bass, viola, or keyboards. A friend of Morrison’s had a sister who was a drummer—Maureen Tucker. She was influenced by African drummer Olatunji and Bo Diddley. She didn’t play the bass drum with her foot, as most drummers did, but instead tipped the drum up like a tom-tom, and she rarely used cymbals. She was one of the first female rock drummers.
In July, at their loft on Ludlow Street in Manhattan, they recorded six demos of songs that they would rerecord a year later for their debut album. The demo of Reed’s ode to “Heroin” was close to the final version. Perhaps Reed had been encouraged to write the groundbreaking song after Life ran one of its most controversial photo spreads in February, on New York’s “Needle Park,” actually named Sherman Square, where heroin addicts congregated. The article follows a real-life couple, Karen and John, as John gets locked up and then overdoses. “To get money, Karen prostitutes [herself] and pushes, John loots cabs.”14 The Life portrait inspired the 1971 feature film Panic in Needle Park. Junkies figure as characters also in the play Balm in Gilead, which premiered in January, the first full-length Off-Off-Broadway production.
Reed’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” relays in journalistic detail his protocol for going into Harlem and scoring heroin. “Run Run Run” is another song about addicts selling their soul for a fix, overdosing, and turning blue. “There She Goes Again” lifts the hook of Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike.” In the song, Reed’s ex has left him, and when he sees her on the street back down on her knees, he decides he’d better hit her.
“Venus in Furs” was inspired by the 1870 novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name the term masochism is derived. Sacher-Masoch was the great-great-uncle of folk-pop star Marianne Faithfull, so John Cale managed to get the Velvet Underground’s demo to her. Faithfull never responded when the group tried to follow up.15
In 1967, Faithfull’s friends the Beatles would win raves for an innovation that echoed that demo. “Heroin” features guitar and viola rising to a shrieking crescendo, imitating a drug rush. On “A Day in the Life,” the Beatles instructed an orchestra to play their instruments from the lowest to highest notes in a cacophony before Lennon sings of “four thousand holes,” which some Beatle fans believed to be an allusion to the mark left by a needle. Certainly the Beatles always had their ear to the ground, but whether the Velvets truly influenced them is unknown.
Al Aronowitz, the journalist who introduced the Beatles to Dylan, started managing the band in November and got the Velvets a gig opening for the Myddle Class, the group he managed with Carole King and Gerry Goffin, at Summit High School in New Jersey. On December 11, they played “There She Goes Again,” “Heroin,” and “Venus in Furs,” and promptly drove all the kids out of the auditorium.
On December 15, Morrissey saw the Velvets playing at New York City’s Café Bizarre and convinced Andy Warhol to manage them. Aronowitz was a pretty well-connected manager himself; he brought Brian Jones to Lou Reed’s pad to score some acid for Jones and Dylan the night of the Great Northeast Blackout (November 9). But the Velvets jumped ship for Warhol, and within two weeks were spotlighted on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, in a piece called “The Making of an Underground Film.” The segment focused on Morrissey making a short film about the Velvets’ song “Venus in Furs.”
Part of the group’s appeal to the Warhol crowd was their androgynous female drummer—and Warhol and Reed would become good friends. Reed wrote “All Tomorrow’s Parties” about the Factory scene, and it became Warhol’s favorite song. Warhol loved to annoy his audience, so tracks such as “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” with screeching viola and feedback, was just his cup of meat. He even wanted the Velvet Underground’s album to have a skip built into “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” so it would repeat the title infinitely.
Still, at the time, Warhol and Mo
rrissey did not find Reed a completely compelling front man, and paired the band with Nico to alternate with Reed as lead singer. Reed was annoyed at sharing the spotlight, though Nico would hook up with both him and Cale. Morrissey projected film onto the Velvets while they played, accompanied by a series of multimedia events (whip-twirling dancers, Edie Sedgwick frugging, and strobe lights) called the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” thus creating the East Coast version of the Acid Tests. The Doors caught their show at the Trip in LA, and seeing dancer Gerard Malanga’s black leather pants, Jim Morrison was inspired to get his own. “He stole my look!” Malanga later screamed.16
Their first album would be produced by Dylan’s old producer Tom Wilson, who must surely rank as one of the hippest producers of all time, with a resume that includes Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Dion, the Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention (he was convinced to handle Zappa after hearing his song about the Watts riots, “Trouble Every Day”). Wilson pushed Lou Reed to write “Sunday Morning” for Nico for the single.
Warhol asked Reed to write “Femme Fatale” for Sedgwick, just before she left his scene altogether. After her tragic OD in 1971, her legacy consists of numerous photographs, a few hours of celluloid, and a few Dylan songs that may or may not be about her on Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. But she continues to fascinate later generations as the archetypal party girl raging past the edge of decorum in a futile effort to forget her troubled past, in the tradition of Zelda Fitzgerald, Brett Ashley, and Holly Golightly.
Though their commercial success in the ’60s was limited, the Velvet Underground went on to become one of the most groundbreaking and influential bands of all time. And as Warhol’s movies grew (relatively) more sophisticated and were co-opted by mainstream films like Midnight Cowboy, he became, with Ginsberg, the premier outlaw of gay liberation. In an era when gay men like the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein were blackmailed by hustlers who demanded exorbitant amounts to keep their secrets, Warhol took everything he’d been told to hide and shoved it back in society’s face.
23
Acid Oz
LSD permeates both coasts thanks to the CIA and Timothy Leary. In the San Francisco Bay area, Hunter Thompson introduces Merry Prankster Ken Kesey to the Hells Angels. The Angels attack anti-war protestors on October 16, prompting Allen Ginsberg to invent Flower Power. The same evening, the Jefferson Airplane play The Tribute to Dr. Strange and the Haight-Ashbury begins to percolate. The Grateful Dead play their first Acid Test on December 4.
Dr. Albert Hofmann was a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. He was experimenting with ergot, a fungus that grows on rye bread, to see if it could improve blood circulation. He synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) on November 16, 1938, but put it on a shelf and forgot about it until he accidentally touched some on April 19, 1943, and had his first accidental acid trip while riding home on his bike.
He wrote in LSD, My Problem Child, “This condition of cosmic consciousness, which under favorable conditions can be evoked by LSD or by another hallucinogen from the group of Mexican sacred drugs, is analogous to spontaneous religious enlightenment, with the unio mystica. In both conditions, which often last only for a timeless moment, a reality is experienced that exposes a gleam of the transcendental reality, in which universe and self, sender and receiver, are one.”1
Neuroscientist Marc Lewis wrote in Newsweek that LSD “goes to work in the brain by blocking serotonin receptors. Serotonin’s job is to reduce the firing rate of neurons that get too excited because of the volume or intensity of incoming information. Serotonin filters out unwanted noise, and normal brains rely on that. So by blocking serotonin, LSD allows information to flow through the brain unchecked. It opens up the floodgates—what author Aldous Huxley called The Doors of Perception.”2
Sandoz Laboratories marketed the drug to the psychiatric community for therapeutic use. Psychiatrists experimented to see if the drug could treat alcoholism or mental disorders such as schizophrenia. LSD was legal, and Sandoz distributed it for free to anyone with proof that they were conducting medical research, as long as they shared whatever results they found.
The CIA thought LSD could be used to make the enemy disoriented and vulnerable, and perhaps serve as a tool for interrogation and brainwashing. To explore its efficacy as a truth serum, the CIA’s Project MKUltra set up brothels in San Francisco and Greenwich Village, where prostitutes paid by the government served drinks dosed with LSD to unsuspecting johns while CIA agents watched from behind two-way mirrors and recorded the results.3 The CIA devised the setup in part because it believed the men would be too embarrassed to talk about where they had been. These “safe houses” operated for over a decade.4
But by the end of the year, as the hippie counterculture’s experiments with LSD began to make headlines, the CIA decided to close down operations in San Francisco. Officials became concerned that their reputation would be tarnished if word leaked out, since the subjects of their experiment had not given informed consent.5 The New York safe house was closed the following year. By this time, the Agency had determined that LSD’s effects were too unpredictable to serve as a reliable truth serum. The CIA’s program was revealed in 1974, in the hearings held by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate past CIA activity. Senator Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee focused on MKUltra.
The most famous acid proselytizers were two former Harvard professors named Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (who would later change his name to Ram Dass and, in 1971, publish Be Here Now, a book on spirituality and yoga). Leary and Alpert believed that LSD shared the ability to induce religious experiences, along with the mescaline in the peyote cactuses used in Native American sweat lodge rituals, the DMT in the ayahuasca brew drunk by Amazonian shamans, and the psilocybin found in two hundred kinds of mushrooms. Their entourage was based in Millbrook, New York, in the sixty-four-room estate owned by William Mellon Hitchcock, the grandson of the founder of Gulf Oil. In Millbrook, Leary introduced the drug to visiting artists and politicians, believing that if society’s elite were enlightened, humanity could be steered toward Eden. They took LSD in the morning and tripped until late afternoon, often playing Indian music and meditating.
Sometimes their trips threatened to become bad ones, and in those instances Leary turned to The Doors of Perception for advice. Huxley wrote that he could be calmed from panic if someone was there to remind him of the Clear Light referenced in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Leary, Alpert, and psychologist Ralph Metzner developed the practice into a guide for LSD users they called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, dedicated to Huxley. The word psychedelic itself was invented by Huxley (with the help of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond) to describe the acid experience. The word is derived by combining the Greek words for “mind” (psyche) and “to reveal, make visible” (deloun).
On the West Coast, Stanford creative writing student Ken Kesey had taken part in an experiment that, unbeknownst to him, was funded by MKUltra. A psychology grad student told him that the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital was paying volunteers seventy-five dollars a day to take drugs that mimicked psychosis in order to study their effects. Kesey took part, and he liked the drugs so much that he started sneaking them out and sharing them with his friends. He got a job as a night aide at the hospital’s psychiatric ward and wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest based on his experiences there.
He used his profits to buy a school bus, which he and his gang, called the Merry Pranksters, painted like a Day-Glo Jackson Pollock explosion. They cut out a hole so they could sit on the roof, wired the bus for sound, painted “FURTHUR” (sic) above the windshield, and took off on a cross-country trip. The bus driver was Kesey’s friend Neal Cassady, the real-life hero of Kerouac’s On the Road, thus turning the trip into a Technicolor sequel to the Beat classic, with the Pranksters the missing link between the beatniks and the hippies. Their bus ride inspired th
e Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” the Doors’ “The End,” and the Who’s “Magic Bus.” Tom Wolfe immortalized the Pranksters in the non-fiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Kesey bought property in the redwood forest of La Honda, California, forty-five miles south of San Francisco, and it was there the Pranksters spent much of 1965 trying to assemble a movie out of the sixteen-millimeter footage they had shot during their trip, but it would remain unfinished until documentarians used it in 2011 for the feature Magic Trip. Mainly, they hosted a series of Saturday night acid parties, frequented by counterculture luminaries such as Cassady’s close friend Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg himself had been given acid at Stanford, in experiments funded by the CIA in 1959. He, in turn, gave the drug to bebop musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.6
The woods around Kesey’s place were filled with trees painted fluorescent colors and strung with black lights. Spotlights were placed two hundred feet up in redwoods, and artwork such as random glued-together doll parts and a hanged man sculpture swayed from the branches. Speakers blasted music and weird sound effects. A metal sculpture of nude figures, called Boise’s Thunder Machine, was mic’d to create a deafening echo if you hit it. It was the Burning Man Festival twenty-one years ahead of time.
“The most bizarre [party] was when we invited Kenneth Anger and the San Francisco diabolists out for Mother’s Day,” Kesey recalled. Prankster Page Browning got a hen and “put its head on the stump and chopped the head off. Page threw the chicken, still alive and flopping, right into the audience. Feathers and blood and squawking and people jumping and screaming and all these diabolists and Kenneth Anger got up and left. They didn’t think it was funny at all. We thought we were paying them the sort of honor they would expect. We out-eviled them. It all had that acid edge to it of ‘This is something that might count.’ We might conjure up some 80-foot demon that roared around. As Stewart Brand said, ‘There was always a whiff of danger to it.’”7
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 29