When Warhol, Malanga, and MacLise stopped by Beth Israel Hospital to inform Reed of the alterations in the lineup, Gerard could see that he was disturbed by it. The reappearance of MacLise once again turned the power axis of the Velvet Underground against him. “Lou was sitting on the edge of his bed in a bathrobe,” recalled Malanga. “Lou was yellow in the face, he had a yellow pall and looked sickly—he always looked sickly. Sitting at the end of the bed having this discussion about what was happening with the Chicago gig. And I remember distinctly Lou turning to Angus and saying, ‘Just remember, this is only temporary.’ Like, ‘Don’t think you’re coming back into the group.’ There was a real tug-of-war between Lou and John—not so much with John, but with Angus, which caused Angus to leave. Lou had a very specific agenda, and Angus was the antithesis of that agenda. Angus was too idealistic for Lou. Lou wanted the group to be rock and roll, and there was a real confrontation there.”
The success of the band’s Chicago dates at Poor Richard’s provided a revealing glimpse into Reed’s unusually well-hidden insecurity. Despite the absence of its stellar members—Nico, Warhol, and Reed—the band was so successful they were held over for an extra week. Back in the hospital, Lou’s paranoia was fed with catty gossip. Andy called, saying, “Oh, they got great reviews. Gee, it seems okay without you. Everyone’s happy.” He was just trying to make him uptight. Lou worked himself into a rage.
In July 1966, Delmore Schwartz, to whom the Velvet Underground had dedicated “European Son,” died of a heart attack in New York at fifty-three. Gerard called Lou in the hospital and suggested they make the wake. Lou, who had been told he couldn’t leave the hospital for three weeks, donned a pair of black jeans, a black T-shirt, black jacket, and boots and cut out to the funeral. “I checked myself out of the hospital to go to Delmore’s funeral and never went back.”
“We were very informal,” Gerard complained. “I think Lou relished the idea of bad taste. Lou was into anything that had a disguise to it. He just showed up like a slob. Lou didn’t have much of a sense of sartorial splendor about him.”
Malanga took Reed to the open-casket wake at Sigmund Schwartz Funeral Home, 152 Second Avenue. They arrived in the middle of a Dwight MacDonald eulogy. As they filed past the body afterward, the effects of alcohol and drug addiction were evident on Delmore Schwartz’s ravaged, rutted, puffy face. Lou was silent, withdrawn, and didn’t react. Outside afterward a former classmate of Lou’s said, “Why don’t you come to the burial?”
In one of his more telling descriptions of the emotional lives of his mentors as they mirrored his, Lou said, “Delmore Schwartz was the unhappiest man who I ever met in my life, and the smartest—till I met Andy Warhol. I’m just delighted I got to know him. It would have been tragic not to have met him. But things have occurred where Delmore’s words float right across. Very few people do it to you. He was one. His mother wouldn’t allow him to use curse words until he was thirty. His worst fear was realized when they put him in a plot next to her.”
***
In the summer of 1966, Lou was supposed to write the theme song for Warhol’s new film Chelsea Girls; Nico was to sing it. Strangely, despite the fact that he and John recorded part of its soundtrack, Lou failed to deliver. For a man who wrote songs as regularly as he ate breakfast (and preferred to write on assignment), it was a passive-aggressive signal of how he felt about any further collaboration with Warhol and Nico. If he could have sung it himself, it seems likely he would have written it.
Other factors helped create the split between Lou and Andy. Upon returning from California, the EPI company had discovered that Bob Dylan’s manager had stolen their idea for a nightclub and taken over the Dom, renaming it the Balloon Farm. It was a terrible blow with severe, lasting consequences. Not only was potentially significant revenue lost, but it would be years before the Velvets would find as good a venue in the city. Out of sheer frustration and paranoia, the band would soon boycott New York shows altogether. Morrissey encouraged Warhol to support Nico’s career. She was, he thought, a more marketable star than Lou.
When Morrissey arranged for Nico to sing solo in a small bar underneath the Dom called Stanley’s and asked the band to provide a backup acoustic-guitar player, he slammed into Reed’s wall of resentment. “Lou didn’t want to do it,” he recalled, “of course he didn’t. And he didn’t want Sterling to do it. And he knew that John was terrified of him, so that was difficult to negotiate. ‘Oh, Lou, if you don’t want me to …’ It was so stupid. Lou said, ‘It’s not good for the group’s image.’ I replied, ‘This is awful. She needs work, she has some songs. Couldn’t one of you help her?’ Then Lou said, ‘We’ll put it on tape.’”
Lou, John, Sterling, and Moe were working on their next album, White Light/White Heat, on which there were no songs for Nico. Hitting a creative roll, they made July and August highly productive months. Sterling, John, and Lou moved into a building on West 3rd Street, which they dubbed “Sister Ray house” after their favorite new song, to work on the album. Unlike rock stars who write on the road, Lou and John created their best songs when living either together or a few blocks from each other in New York. “Sister Ray” was worked up over the summer. They played music all day, going out at night to their favorite new haunt, the club on Park Avenue South and 17th Street that had become Warhol’s social headquarters, Max’s Kansas City.
Run by Mickey Ruskin, a restaurateur and club owner who catered to the art world, Max’s was divided into two sections. The first room was a standard bar-restaurant. The bar ran down the left-hand wall of the rectangular room, the rest of which was occupied by tables and chairs. The back room, which was guarded, usually by Ruskin himself, and into which only the hip elite were allowed, was smaller. Lit by a red Dan Flavin light sculpture in one corner and furnished by a series of booths along the left- and right-hand walls, its habitués included visiting Hollywood aristocracy like Roger Vadim and his wife, Jane Fonda, rock stars like the Rolling Stones, writers, plus top-of-the-line groupies, drug dealers, and drag queens. In 1966–68, the supercharged, Fellini-esque atmosphere was dominated by the arrival, presence, and departure of Andy Warhol, who made it a habit of arriving between midnight and 2 a.m.
The artistic netherworld of Max’s back room offered the perfect setting for Lou Reed’s anthropological reports on the hell and heaven of the thriving sixties underground. Everybody was dressed to kill, and either blissfully content or raging with paranoia, lust, greed, hatred, and contempt. The room vibrated with all the elements of the sixties as they were in New York. Many an affair was started, carried out, and finished at Max’s—often in the phone booths. Girls like the Warhol starlet Andrea Feldman would leap onto a table and entertain the crowd with a song and strip show, while Warhol superstar Eric Emerson would piss into a glass and bolt down his bodily fluid screaming that it tasted good! The half of the room held by the Warhol elite would be on speed, whilst the other half, representing an anti-Warhol faction, would be on acid or other hallucinogenics. The free-for-all atmosphere created eruptions that would in time sound the death knell of the sixties. It was here, for example, that one could encounter Warhol’s hard-core lesbian would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, slumped dejectedly at a corner table, or overhear beat poet Gregory Corso snarling at Warhol, “You and your faggots and rich women and Velvet Undergrounds, I don’t understand!” only to be shushed into silence by the bardic presence of Allen Ginsberg. The background of Max’s was an extension of the Factory. Here Lou was afforded the attention due a star of his caliber. Here he could be seen with his arm wrapped around a girl, a boy, or somebody of undetermined gender.
***
However, in the fall of 1966, Lou suffered a series of disappointments, the biggest being the nonappearance of The Velvet Underground and Nico. While Verve brought out the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out, the Velvets’ album was on hold. The band was alternately told that MGM/Verve was having difficulties in reproducing Warhol’s cover portrait of a
banana that actually peeled, and that the company had temporarily mislaid one of the master tapes. Meanwhile, the Velvets found their EPI performances transformed into a freak show that Warhol now rarely had time even to attend. “It wasn’t very good when Andy started losing interest in the whole project,” recalled Cale. “We were touring round the country and then he just wasn’t interested anymore. For one thing, traveling with thirteen people and a light show is a kind of mania if you don’t get enough money. And the only reason we got a lot of money, probably, while we toured was because Andy was with us. And there was a lot of backbiting going on in the band.”
That summer Lou had had a brief affair with one of Gerard’s girlfriends, creating more unspoken tension.
As they changed from an art-rock band into a touring band, Lou grew weary of the mundane experiences that greet all such entertainers. In October and November the EPI did a short tour of the Midwest, playing in venues that sometimes paid less than $1,000 a night. A pall of bad humor hung over the whole event. Relations soured. Paul, acting as road manager, had to slog his way through an unglamorous Greyhound bus tour. Nico was now sleeping with Cale. That Nico had emerged as the new superstar of Chelsea Girls and become far more famous than both Reed and Cale also grated on Lou’s nerves. He took to attacking her in public. According to one witness, Lou was at times wildly critical of Nico. During their unhappy tour he was relentlessly critical, yelling at her that she couldn’t sing and she couldn’t play. Meanwhile, the continued delay in the release of the album aggravated everyone.
It was a violent fall. Driving downtown in a cab with Malanga, Lou was in an accident that left him with cuts and bruises. Walking into Max’s with Warhol in October, Lou was hit by a table aimed at Andy by some drunken freak screaming obscenities. In the fall of 1966, Warhol was pushing everybody to the edge, and violence had begun to erupt around him constantly.
As the watershed year 1966—the year of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, of the Stones’ Aftermath, and of the Beatles’ Revolver—neared its end, it looked to Lou as if a great moment had been lost, perhaps forever. Then when Verve belatedly released two singles, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”/“I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Sunday Morning”/“Femme Fatale,” the company failed to give them the necessary promotion. “Sunday Morning” stalled at No. 103 on the Cashbox charts.
***
In March 1967 the poorly timed and little publicized release of The Velvet Underground and Nico finally arrived. So little enthusiasm was left from the original Warhol collaboration, begun fifteen months earlier, that there were no celebrations. Instead, the event became fodder for more negativity. The famous Warhol cover—consisting of a white field graced by a life-size bright yellow banana, prominently signed with his trademark rubber-stamp signature in the bottom right-hand corner—did little to publicize the band. Warhol was also credited as producer on the spine of the gatefold sleeve. Consequently, those lucky enough to catch a glimpse in stores of the poorly distributed record were confused about its contents. Had Warhol embarked on a recording career?
“We were all having fun and didn’t care about credits, and things like that,” Reed later explained. “‘Produced by Andy Warhol.’ It was like being a soup can.” Unfortunately, the cover contributed to a popular misapprehension that the Velvet Underground was Warhol’s put-on band, “And if you really got into the sticks,” Lou would bitterly joke, “they thought Andy Warhol was the lead guitar player.” To top it all off, the album’s appearance sparked the kind of critical backlash Andy was used to, but was new to Lou. The songs about drug use and sadomasochism drew intense criticism. The print media refused to run ads for the record apart from Grove Press’s Evergreen Review. The majority of radio stations refused to play it. One deejay who played a cut snapped, “That was the Velvet Underground, a very New York sound. Let’s hope it stays there.” Scattered reviews were dismissive, and MGM/Verve further cut their scant marketing budget.
Although, as a person who specialized in making people feel uncomfortable, Lou may have wanted the album to elicit hostility, he asserted otherwise: “The Velvet Underground very consciously set out to put themes common to movies, plays, and novels into pop-song format. I thought we were doing something ambitious and I was taken aback that people were offended by it and thought I was causing some kids to become drug addicts. I used to hear people saying we were doing porn rock. What happened to freedom of expression? I remember reading descriptions of us as the ‘fetid underbelly of urban existence.’ All I wanted to do was write songs that somebody like me could relate to. Why not have a little something on the side for the kids in the back row? At the worst, we were like the antedated realists. At best, we just hit a little more home than some things.”
In May, Warhol tried to re-create the heady nights at the Dom by renting a new hall, the Gymnasium, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But with attendance low, it became clear that the EPI’s initial magic was gone. Furthermore, people started to focus on the music, criticizing the band’s unorthodox playing. The deejay Terry Noel, who had a considerable influence on the club circuit, vividly described the Gymnasium shows: “We went because it was a big deal and people were talking about the Velvets. Because of Andy. Normally I never went to any Andy Warhol things, but I was interested in new things and this was a new thing going on and it was hot. We all went there, and, oh my God! None of them can play instruments. They’re all off-key. It wasn’t like today, today they’re all off-key because they mean to be—it was so bad I couldn’t believe it. Nobody could believe it.”
Recognizing yet another failure on the growing list, the Velvets decided they had had enough of the EPI. “As soon as the Gymnasium shows were over,” recalled Morrissey, “the Velvets didn’t want to work anymore. I was a manager of the goddamn thing for almost a year or more and I remember, because they never released the album, but once the album came out, I think that’s when they wanted to go off and be themselves and not have any revenues go back to Andy and me.”
When the album started to make some headway on the charts—despite bad reviews—a maverick Warhol superstar, Eric Emerson, sued MGM for putting his picture on the back cover without getting a release. Rather than paying him off or getting Warhol to shut him up, the company withdrew the album from the stores for six weeks while they had Emerson’s face airbrushed off the cover. Embittered by the lack of support from both MGM/Verve and Warhol, who, like the record company, hadn’t lifted a finger to dissuade Emerson from his legal action, Lou flicked his switchblade tongue. “The New York radio scene is so awful,” he snapped. “A record won’t be played unless it’s already number seven all over. All over has phenomenal records no one in NY gets to hear. There’s great music in the hills.” Lou decided that in response to his album’s rejection in New York, the band should no longer play in the city. They did not play New York again publicly until 1970.
Thus, they were left with an audience of totally unappreciative teenagers at, for example, La Cave on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. The writer Glenn O’Brien, then a student in Ohio, recalled the first time he ever saw them just after the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico: “That spring the Velvet Underground were on tour and they were coming to this club, La Cave, which I went to all the time to see people like Caroline Hester or lan and Sylvia. It was a Saturday night and the club was full. They came out one at a time. John came out first and he looked so fucking weird. He had this really long hair and this diamond rhinestone collar, which you’d never seen anything like. And then Moe came out and you couldn’t tell what sex she was. The first song took about twenty minutes and Lou was the last one to come out. He just looked amazing. His neck looked so muscular and he had this weird kind of Roman haircut. It was hip to have long hair then, but he had pretty short hair and these amazing sunglasses and a hollow-bodied Gibson guitar. We were all sitting there thinking, ‘These are really junkies!’”
In fact, by this time the Velvets, at a performing peak, were an astonishing act to see li
ve. The audiences who managed to discover the band experienced something they had never before witnessed in another rock band. Togged out in mean-looking black outfits, the Velvets ground out a wailing symphony of invention and power whilst standing rigidly stock-still.
As they began to play clubs without the EPI, the Velvet Underground put some distance between themselves and Andy Warhol. However, they remained open to continuing the arrangement if Warhol would turn his attentions in their direction. However, the final nail in the coffin of Lou Reed’s collaborative relationship with Andy Warhol came at the end of May 1967, when Warhol took an entourage to the Cannes Film Festival in France to show Chelsea Girls—excluding the Velvets, who had since 1966 been invited to play at several European venues. Among other offers, the Italian director Antonioni had wanted to film the band for a nightclub sequence in his famous movie Blowup, and Barbara Rubin had offered to put them on in London at the prestigious Albert Hall. Now, when Warhol had the opportunity, not only did he choose to leave them home, but in a move typical of the perverse way in which he operated, he included among his entourage Eric Emerson, who had caused the Velvets so much trouble only a month earlier.
With Warhol away for a month, Lou had some room to start looking for a new manager. Clearly, the Velvet Underground needed professional business help. An increasing number of managers on the expanding rock scene had the resources to make things happen. A number of them had approached Reed soon after he and the Velvets achieved their initial success at the Dom, whispering in his ear that he could be making more money. One of these go-getters was a young Bostonian named Steve Sesnick, who had part ownership of a popular club in that city called the Boston Tea Party. Sesnick had been involved in earlier discussions about Warhol’s multimedia performance ideas. He was friendly with the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein’s New York lawyer Nat Weiss. Unlike Warhol, who was unresponsive to Reed’s questions on business matters, Sesnick made himself available to explain the machinations of the music business. Now, he virtually promised to deliver the Velvets success on a silver platter.
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