Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Despite the fact that Reed and Cale were doing most of the work, Warhol played an important role. According to Lou, “Andy was like an umbrella. We would record something and Andy would say, ‘What do you think?’ We’d say, ‘It’s great!’ and then he would say, ‘Oh, it’s great!’ The record went out without anybody changing anything because Andy Warhol said it was okay. It’s hilarious. He made it so we could do anything we wanted. But when we recorded the album, we had our sound. The first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, was cut in three hours. We just wanted to make a record. We didn’t know good equipment. It wasn’t even a matter in those days whether it was good equipment, it was just, did it work? In those days, engineers would walk out on us anyway. “I don’t want to listen to this. I didn’t become an engineer so I could listen to you guys jerk off. This is noise and garbage.” We ran into a lot of that.”

  Cale claimed Dolph ran the sessions, but “he didn’t understand the first fucking thing about recording. He’d say, ‘Hold it, I think we’ve got a hot one here!’ He didn’t know what the hell he had on his hands.” According to Dolph—a former Columbia Records sales executive, not a shoe salesman—the sessions were held at the decrepit Scepter Records studio on 54th Street. He agreed that he may not have been the most together of producers, “but nobody knew what they were doing.” “We were really excited,” said Cale. “We had this opportunity to do something revolutionary-to combine avant-garde and rock and roll, to do something symphonic. No matter how borderline destructive everything was, there was real excitement there for all of us. We just started playing and held it to the wall. I mean, we had a good time.”

  For Lou, the most important thing was “Andy made a point of trying to make sure that on our first album the language remained intact. He’d say, ‘Make sure you do the song with the dirty words, don’t change the words just because it’s a record.’ I think Andy was interested in shocking, in giving people a jolt and not let them talk us into taking that stuff out in the interest of popularity or easy airplay. The best things never get on record. A couple of guys in the East Village made a tape of two girls screaming. That’s all—just two girls screaming. Great. But when they took it to the record company, the man said, ‘But it has no beginning and no end,’ but that was the whole point. Andy said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to make sure you leave the dirty words in.’ He was adamant about that. He didn’t want it to be cleaned up, and because he was there, it wasn’t. And, as a consequence of that, we always knew what it was like to have your way as opposed to these other assholes trying to do exactly the opposite of what Andy wanted. By producing that LP, he gave us freedom and power. I was always interested in language, and I wanted to write more than ‘I love you—you love me—tra la la.’ He wasn’t the record’s producer in the conventional way, but when the record-company people would say, ‘Are you sure that’s the way it should sound?’ he’d say, ‘Sure, that sounds great.’ That was an amazing freedom, a power, and once you’ve tasted that, you want it always.”

  Chapter Seven

  Exit Warhol

  1966–67

  Andy Warhol’s studio became the equivalent to Walt Disney studios. Lou was going to be Andy’s Mickey Mouse, the idol-hero. But originally, in the first Tugboat Mickey cartoon, Mickey was a nasty guy. And so Lou in his Mickey Mouse period was never able to achieve the lovable one and had to live underground like Tugboat Mickey.

  Billy Name

  Warhol specialized in capturing young, as yet unformed, eccentric, creative people on the edge of a nervous breakdown in a painting or on film. Now he had done the same thing in music, pulling out of Lou not only the three great songs that would balance out the content of the first album, but pushing him so that he played and sang like a man passing through the center of a storm of inner turmoil. However, there was one significant difference between Lou Reed and anyone else who worked and played with Warhol at the top of his game. And it was what would make Reed a star in time and give him the duration so rare in rock and roll. Whilst remaining open to all of Warhol’s input, and taking all the death-defying trips he took during his season in “hell” (one of Reed’s many descriptions of the Factory), Lou had, in fact, retained an inner control that nobody else had. Essentially this was because he was there primarily as a writer. “I watched Andy,” he explained. “I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things. I used to write it down.” The voyeuristic medium gave him the distance of an observer and allowed him to maintain control of his own craft. It would in time allow him to escape traps and hells far worse than anything he experienced at Andy Warhol’s Factory.

  Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and even Lou Reed did not comprehend just how cutthroat and competitive the rock business was. They reached the zenith of their collaboration in April with the dual triumph of the Dom shows and the recording of the album, which would not be released until the following year, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them by Charlie Rothchild—an associate of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman—who promised to help them out by handling the booking end of the business. He immediately got them a May-long job at the Trip in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that the EPI was the hottest thing happening in rock and roll in New York that spring, it made sense to Reed and Warhol to go out to L.A. because major record companies had their headquarters there.

  On May 1, the entire EPI company packed their guitars and drums, their whips and chains, and their thirteen selves onto a jet plane and streaked across the continent. Brimming with enthusiasm, they were confident that the rock gods were on their side and that in Lala Land they would find an environment freaky enough to embrace their far-out sounds. After all, what could be more plastic, more California, more Hollywood, than Nico, Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, and songs about sex, drugs, and paranoia?

  They were wrong. From the moment they landed at L.A. International signs that they had made a disastrous mistake erupted like cockroaches out of the woodwork. Driving in from the airport, the first song they heard on the radio was a soupy ballad called “Monday Monday” by a leading West Coast group, the Mamas and the Papas. According to Morrison, a chill ran through the group.

  The truth was, everybody in the band despised the sixties West Coast sound. Nobody hated it more than Lou Reed, who proved himself a vituperative critic. “We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene,” he said. “It’s just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write. I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things, ’cause somebody really should say something. Frank Zappa is the most untalented bore who ever lived. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, all those people are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically. I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke.” Asked what separated them apart from distance, he snapped, “The West Coast bands were into soft drugs. We were into hard drugs.”

  Lou was not alone in despising the West Coast groups and the hippie styles they advertised. “Our attitude to the West Coast was one of hate and derision,” said Cale. “We all hated hippies,” affirmed Morrison. “We really despised all of the West Coast bands,” concluded Tucker.

  Despite this negativity, the EPI’s engagement at the Trip got off to a big start when showbiz celebrities (many of whom they hated—like John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, Sonny and Cher) and movie stars like Ryan O’Neal showed up on opening night. Also in attendance were a host of unknowns, including a UCLA film student named Jim Morrison, who would shortly cop every inch of Malanga’s act to turn himself into the Lizard King of rock and roll as the front man of the Doors. There was no question that Warhol’s show had an enormous impact on the L.A. scene, but it was so intense it burned itself out in a record three days. Flouncing out of the club on the first night, a terrified Cher snapped that th
e music would replace nothing except, perhaps, suicide (a quote the Warhol people could not but relish). As soon as news spread that the Warhol gang was in town, every weirdo in L.A. gravitated toward them. Unfortunately, the local sheriff rapidly found reason to close the club. His action left the thirteen people who comprised the Warhol entourage stranded in their $500-a-week residence, the Castle. According to Musicians’ Union rules, they had every right to collect their full fee as long as they remained in town for the duration of the booking.

  Lou sat out the failed engagement at the Castle, listening to the Velvets’ record over and over again, and socializing with Gerard Malanga. Reed and Malanga filled time in L.A. taking drugs and hanging out in the clubs. “Lou was the first person, and the last, to turn me on to Placydils,” recalled Gerard. “He said, ‘Gerard, I want to turn you on to something,’ and then we went out on the town that night. It was a tranquilizer. It was legal and you could buy it over the counter. Now you’ve got to get it by prescription. My system just couldn’t take experimenting with these drugs—and Placydils is a funny name for a drug because it comes from the word placid or tranquil—and it just put me in a state that made me feel clumsily numb. Not in control but in control. Lou obviously relished it.”

  One night, Gerard ran into two women he had met at the Trip and invited Lou to join in: “Lou and I were involved with these two babes, Linda [the mother of Brian Jones’s child, and who would go on to marry Donovan] and Cathy. They had beautiful bodies and blonde hair. Our initial situation took place in a motel room and then continued on at the Castle. And we had a wild sex scene in the motel room. The four of us were taking a shower in the motel and I peed down Lou’s leg.”

  Relations between Reed and Warhol soured during this frozen time in the spooky environs of the Castle. Reed began to be persuaded by the sharks circling the wounded enterprise that Andy was not, perhaps, the most focused of rock managers. And it was true. The rock business was growing rapidly. Millions of dollars were at stake. Andy and Paul, for all their perspicacity, simply didn’t seem to know how to get down in the dirt with the real rock-and-roll swine and root around to suck up the cash. Not only did Andy lack the temperament for this unpleasant job, he was overextended. He was the most famous pop artist and underground film-maker in the world, plus he had an enormous number of personal and financial problems to deal with on a daily basis.

  Lou, on the other hand, was devoting all of his attention to the Velvet Underground. He was the only member of the group who saw what wasn’t going on with the Velvets’ album. “Lou had worked for his father’s accounting firm, so he had a strong background in the business side of things and his feet never left the ground,” noted Cale. “Mine definitely did.”

  At first, the band’s immediate future did not look as disastrous as it would turn out to be. After having their album turned down by every rock mogul they could contact in New York, in L.A. they finally encountered the record producer Tom Wilson, who had created the folk-rock sounds of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel. Wilson heard the Velvet Underground music on a par with that of his other superstar clients. Explaining that he was about to move from Columbia to head a division of MGM, Verve Records, which was just attempting to enter the relatively new rock field, he guaranteed them a deal if they would be patient. Warhol, Morrissey, and the band were relieved to have encountered such a receptive and established producer.

  Wilson suggested making the album more commercial by adding more songs by Nico and releasing one of them as the single. Lou complied, writing the relatively commercial “Sunday Morning.” “Andy said, ‘Why don’t you just make it a song about paranoia?’” Lou explained. “I thought that was great so I came up with ‘Watch out, the world’s behind you, there’s always someone watching you,’ which I feel is the ultimate paranoid statement in that the world even cares enough to watch you.”

  “‘Surn-day Mourning’ sounded all right for Nico because she brought something weird to everything,” Morrissey recounted. “Tom said okay, and we went into a studio paid for by MGM-Verve. Somehow, at the last minute, Lou didn’t let her sing it. I had a fight with him. I’d say, ‘But Nico sings it onstage,’ and he’d reply, ‘Well, it’s my song,’ like it was his family. He was so petty. And then he sang it! The little creep. He said, ‘I wanna sing it ’cause it’s gonna be the single.’ Tom Wilson couldn’t deal with Lou, he just took what came.”

  Lou then proceeded to sing the song in a voice that was so full of womanly qualities that on first hearing it you paused, wondering just who the hell was singing.

  The terms of the Velvet Underground’s contract with Warhol specified that all moneys earned by them would be paid to Warvel (the corporation that Warhol and Morrissey had created specifically for that purpose). Warhol was to keep 25 percent and pass the rest on to the band. However, when it came time to sign the record contract, Lou refused to accept its terms unless it was revised to state that all moneys went first to the Velvets, who would then pass on 25 percent to Warhol and Morrissey. Reed was acting on his own in a show of remarkable determination and increasing leadership of the band, but he was also taking advice from several people who wanted to take over management of the VU.

  Warhol grudgingly agreed to the demand over Morrissey’s protestations. The contract was amended and the record deal signed. But Lou’s victory over Warhol was shortsighted. The contract failed to stipulate the percentage of royalties the band would receive! As a result, it would be many years before anybody in the Velvet Underground would receive any royalties from their first album. Warhol never received a penny from sales of The Velvet Underground and Nico, which sold steadily around the world for the twenty years (1967–87) between the time of its release and his death.

  Even though they all still believed that the record was going to be a big moneymaker, the hassle over the contract stripped the veneer off Warhol’s artistic affair with Reed. “At a certain point Andy didn’t take Lou as seriously as Lou wanted Andy to take him,” claimed Malanga. “Because when you do something against Andy, Andy would cut you off. Andy distanced himself from Lou, he’d be gracious to Lou in his presence, but Andy never really involved Lou in anything after that. There were no portraits of Lou, there was no type of that stellar involvement that Andy had.”

  ***

  The final debacle of the West Coast trip came in San Francisco. Begged by the rock impresario Bill Graham to play his Fillmore Ball Room, the EPI company, who had by then been stranded in L.A. for three weeks, were loath to further explore the West Coast. Then, when they finally agreed, arriving in San Francisco on May 26 for a two-night stand with the Mothers of Invention and the early Jefferson Airplane, they were met with a more vicious hostility than anything L.A. had thrown at them.

  Before they even set foot onstage, the band provoked the considerable ire of Graham. Perturbed by Morrissey’s sarcastic air and bold-faced recommendation that all rock musicians take heroin, he was incensed by the insular aura of the Warhol entourage, who traveled everywhere by limousine, rejecting what they saw as the phony hippie culture. Seconds before they went onstage, Graham screamed, “I hope you motherfuckers bomb!” Ralph Gleason wrote a particularly scathing review for the San Francisco Chronicle, saying the EPI was an East Coast poison intended to corrupt, defile, and destroy their pure innocence.

  Gleason’s review went on, “Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable show was nothing more than bad condensation of all the bum trips of the Trips Festival. Few people danced (the music was something of a dud, the Velvet Underground being a very dull group). It was all very campy and very Greenwich Village sick. If this is what America’s waiting for, we are going to die of boredom because this is a celebration of the silliness of cafe society, way out in left field instead of far out, and joyless.” On the second night, when the band leaned their instruments up against their amplifiers and left the stage to a barrage of sonic feedback, the great rock impresario Bill Graham finally pulled the plug.

  To make matters
worse, the San Francisco poet and playwright Michael McClure refused to sign a release allowing Warhol to show a film he had made of McClure’s play The Beard; Gerard was arrested in a restaurant for carrying his whip, labeled an offensive weapon, and spent a nervous night in jail; and Lou shot up a drug that seized up all his joints. He was diagnosed (incorrectly) as having a terminal case of lupus.

  A shattered EPI company, who had only four weeks earlier left New York in triumph, limped back across the continent separately, leaving behind one member, the lighting man Danny Williams, who would subsequently commit suicide. Back in New York, Lou checked into Beth Israel Hospital with a serious case of, as it turned out, hepatitis. Nico departed to Ibiza, her favorite island off the coast of Spain. The rest of the band rehearsed for an upcoming June booking in Chicago. Warhol, disappointed by the lack of money from his five-month investment in the group, returned to his first love, making films.

  While Lou was laid up in the hospital undergoing a six-week course of treatment, he became increasingly paranoid about losing control of the group. Not only was he excluded from the one-week stint in Chicago, but the band adapted to cover his absence with relative ease. Angus MacLise was brought back in as drummer, John took over on vocals, while Maureen switched to bass. According to Sterling, Angus realized what a mistake he had made in quitting the group and hoped to be allowed back in. Lou, however, still angry about MacLise’s defection, was adamant about punishing Angus and maintaining his loyalty to Moe.