The two warriors, Burroughs and Gysin, had developed other defensive techniques. To keep his mind free from the bonds of social conditioning, Gysin dropped acid once or twice a week with his new lover, a young poet named John Giorno, in room 703, secure in the knowledge that Timothy Leary had explained to Bard how important it was for artists to explore the collective consciousness through whatever methods they chose to use. “It was very exciting,” Giorno recalled years later. Only at the Chelsea could a half-open package of hashish arrive in the mail from France and be delivered to the addressee’s room with no questions asked.
For those without access to hallucinogenic drugs, Burroughs and Gysin hoped to market their Dream Machine, a device they had developed with Ian Somerville, a friend of Burroughs’s in England. The Dream Machine was a simple contraption: a paper cylinder with slits cut into its sides and a light bulb suspended in its center, mounted on a record turntable that rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. When the user switched on the light and the turntable and faced the rotating cylinder with his eyes closed, light flashed through the paper slits and struck the eyelids at a rate theoretically corresponding to the brain’s alpha waves, thus altering the electrical oscillations in the brain. The result was said to be an explosion of kaleidoscopic color behind the user’s eyelids that opened the mind to new insights and ideas.
Gysin and Burroughs’s activities clearly made an impact on Arthur C. Clarke, who endowed his black monolith in 2001 with the Dream Machine’s ability to hypnotize an audience of man-apes with spinning, dancing shapes and who re-created his neighbors’ psychedelic experiences in astronaut David Bowman’s journey through the Star Gate and final transformation into a Star-Child. Others at the Chelsea were also capable of contributing to the kind of creative synergy that could lift the population to a more rarefied state—not just the longer-term residents, like Arthur Miller, Virgil Thomson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Claes Oldenburg, Larry Rivers, Shirley Clarke, and Carl Lee, but also transient guests, including the avant-garde poets and artists Bernard Heidsieck, Henri Chopin, and Mary Beach and her partner, Claude Pélieu. Beach would soon republish, under her own imprint at City Lights, Burroughs’s Fuck You essay on the effective but illegal apomorphine treatment for drug addiction, but she was currently at work on a translation of the anthropological text Le renard pâle (“The Pale Fox”), a book of particular interest to both Smith and Clarke as its references to the presence of sophisticated astronomical knowledge in the legends of Africa’s Dogon tribe implied the possibility of extraterrestrial contact in ancient times. Discussing the prospect on the roof on warm spring evenings, this group could be forgiven for feeling as though the entire Hotel Chelsea were about to lift off like one of NASA’s Saturn rockets with all of them on board.
There was much for Smith to accomplish in an environment like this. Perhaps, as he would remark in later years, it was just as well that he’d lost his earlier work because “it gives you the inclination to work further.” He unpacked his borrowed Wollensak tape recorder, affixed a neatly lettered Do Not Disturb sign to his door, and prepared to start something new.
Downstairs, the group of experimental filmmakers who occasionally gathered amid the cardboard windmills and carved donkeys at El Quijote were often in a celebratory mood: Mekas’s arrest and the bannings of the group’s films had brought references to a new “underground movement” in Newsweek and the New York Times. Mekas, who’d been screening their films under the name Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque at any cheap venue he could find, now fielded requests for prints from university film departments, and the number of requests was expanding exponentially. The group had even attracted a few new patrons, such as the literary hostess Panna Grady, who had recently announced her intention to marry Burroughs and now allowed Harry Smith to film her draped in pearls.
But by far the most exciting development in the filmmakers’ world was the ballooning fame of one of its newer members, Andy Warhol. Since 1962, when the artist had attended his first New Cinema screenings at Mekas’s loft, Warhol had produced a captivating series of 16-millimeter black-and-white films, beginning with Sleep, an eight-minute portrait of John Giorno sleeping that was looped to create a six-hour film, and followed by the fifty-minute Kiss, Haircut, Blow Job, Eat, and the first of what would become hundreds of captivating, starkly lit close-up studies collectively called Screen Tests. Warhol’s use of a static camera to silently observe his subjects engaged in mundane acts of daily life produced portraits as oddly revelatory as the filmmaker Robert Flaherty, Warhol’s poetic-realist predecessor, would have predicted. Warhol amplified this silent, subtle “spiritualization of the image” by shooting the footage at sound-film speed but projecting it at the slower speed used for silent films.
Only nine people attended Sleep’s premiere, and two fled during the first hour, but that was par for the course for this new movement. The filmmakers themselves welcomed Warhol, teaching him their camera techniques, casting him in their films, and appearing in his. In July 1964, John Palmer, a young filmmaker much admired by Harry Smith, came up with the concept for Warhol’s Empire, which Mekas then filmed from the window of the Time-Life Building while Warhol and other friends looked on. The result—a film of the floodlit Empire State Building that ran for more than eight hours—profoundly affected the filmmakers who saw it, despite the casual way it was made. Rubin called Empire “the most beautiful movie I have ever seen.” Mekas described it as a “religious” film and wrote that if only everyone would sit and watch that building for eight hours and meditate upon it, “there would be no more wars.”
As Warhol’s artistic reputation grew, however, a rift began to form in the community regarding his evident comfort with some of the institutions of power symbolized by the building he had filmed. While some of the older filmmakers admitted to a certain rueful envy of the skill with which Warhol manipulated the mainstream press into covering his shows, others objected on moral grounds to his ties to the advertising world. Jonas Mekas’s writings during that period were filled with attacks on the art and entertainment establishments that Warhol courted, yet in December 1964, Film Culture, the magazine Mekas had founded, gave its annual Independent Filmmakers’ Award to Warhol.
When the announcement was made, Stan Brakhage (winner of the award the previous year) resigned from the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, writing to Mekas, “I cannot in good conscience continue to accept the help of institutions which have come to propagate advertisements for forces which I recognize as among the most destructive in the world today: ‘dope,’ self-centered Love, unqualified Hatred, Nihilism, violence to self and society.” But the gesture apparently had no effect on Warhol, as he moved on to the even more directly provocative and attention-getting Hollywood parodies Harlot, featuring the drag queen Mario Montez, and The Life of Juanita Castro, with the artist and filmmaker Marie Menken, and began frequenting New York’s nightclubs with a series of beautiful superstars, as he called his glamorous escorts. When his most recent discovery, the stunning Edie Sedgwick, walked into the Film-Makers’ Cooperative one night in 1965 with a new colleague, the avant-garde poet Ondine, Mekas literally fell off his seat at the sight of them, scalding himself with hot coffee. “He couldn’t take the idea that this whole stardom thing—Edie, this poor little rich girl, and I, this vicious street thing—were actually happening in his world, his realm,” Ondine recalled.
Glamour like this had never before touched down in the impoverished filmmakers’ community. At Sedgwick’s first visit to Warhol’s Factory, he had spontaneously included her in a torture scene he was shooting for his black-and-white film Vinyl. Sedgwick’s Madonna-like radiance as she casually tapped her cigarette ashes onto the torture victim’s back amped up the scene’s impact in a way that stunned everyone, including Sedgwick herself. Despite her gamine beauty and obvious good breeding, Sedgwick hadn’t felt like a superstar the night Warhol discovered her dancing at the new nightclub Ondine. A descendant of Boston Brahmin contemporaries of Wil
liam Dean Howells on her father’s side, and of the Old Guard of Gilded Age New York on her mother’s, Edie had grown up a virtual prisoner on her father’s California ranch before escaping to boarding school, then Harvard, and finally New York. Barbara Rubin, who knew Sedgwick from the psychiatric unit where they had both been confined, could tell plenty of stories about Edie’s amphetamine habit, her relationship with her abusive father, and her grief over her favorite brother’s recent suicide. But it was precisely this shadow aspect to her character that attracted Warhol, a practicing Catholic who was deeply sensitive to the connection between suffering and the sublime.
For Sedgwick, meeting Warhol was a life-changing experience. Feeling truly seen for the first time—magically legitimized as a human being by the camera’s objective eye—she surrendered herself to her new friend’s vision. Warhol and Sedgwick became inseparable; the heiress lavished her trust fund on Warhol and his entourage. She dyed her hair blond to match Andy’s silver wig; paired striped boat-neck T-shirts like his with her black tights, miniskirts, and leopard-skin coat; conveyed him through glittering evenings in her chauffeured limousine; modeled fashions with him for the trendy Mademoiselle guest editor Betsey Johnson; and treated everyone to dinner at the Ginger Man without bothering to review the charges on the bill. She invited Warhol into her luxurious Upper East Side apartment and allowed him to film her morning routine for Poor Little Rich Girl, and to study her in extreme close-up as she talked, laughed, and teared up for Face. The more the pair parodied the Hollywood cliché of director and ingénue, the more extensive the press coverage became.
Warhol’s flirtations with the media may have offended Brakhage, but they excited Harry Smith, who believed that popular appeal could be as powerful a tool for social change in the film world as it was in music. “There must be lots of kids all over the world that would make films if they saw some of the things that are being made now,” Smith told an interviewer. Proud enough of his connection to Warhol to brag (untruthfully) that the artist had agreed to help finance his next project, Smith also talked of making a global collaborative film with Warhol and Stan VanDerBeek. “I would like to make an ‘underground movie’ that could be shown everywhere,” he told an interviewer—a transformational experience sufficiently widespread and paradigm-shattering to be “helpful to the progress of humanity.”
Warhol’s understanding of the iconic power of certain images particularly appealed to Smith, who had been moving away from cut-out illustrations in search of potent real-life archetypes. Seeking to re-create the reality of the city around him in images sufficiently universal to be communicated across all cultures, he filmed brief sequences of passing pedestrians, the façade of Fleischman’s butcher shop, and Chelsea denizens laughing and mugging for the camera and then superimposed over them some of the footage of the secret Kiowa rituals he had shot in Oklahoma. As he worked, he played and replayed a 1956 recording he’d recently discovered of the Weimar-era opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill called Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The modernist score, the harsh, heavily accented German voices, and the politically tinged story of an imagined American “pleasure city” full of criminals and prostitutes, whiskey and gold, added such an effective extra dimension to his first New York film, eventually called Film No. 14: Late Superimpositions, that Smith would later add it as the soundtrack.
For now, even as his neighbors complained good-naturedly that their ears were bleeding from the constant repetition of Lotte Lenya’s warbled “Oh moon of Alabama,” the music’s subversive sound drew the occasional curious young writer, musician, filmmaker, or political activist to Smith’s impossibly cluttered room. There, if admitted, the visitor would discover an environment as disorienting as the one Ginsberg had encountered five years before. “It wasn’t just all the pot smoke,” one guest recalled. “It was like this very bizarre sense of time and reality in which he’d talk about one thing and then go to something else and from subject to subject to subject, and you’d all of a sudden catch yourself and it would be almost like, ‘Where am I? Where have I come? How can we be talking about this, when a second ago we were talking about that?’”
As word spread of Smith’s presence at the Chelsea, the number of visiting potential acolytes increased, turning Smith’s room into a nexus for philosophical conversation and debate. As others talked, Smith carried on as usual with various projects in field anthropology, often aided now by Peggy Biderman, a former civil rights activist and resident earth mother who had taken Harry on as her special project. Without leaving the Chelsea, he was able to tune in to the cultural changes taking place on the West Coast through daily briefings from Rosebud, who had wandered off to Haight-Ashbury and reported back via the “liberated” phone booth that provided the district with free long-distance service. He could document on audiotape such recent permutations in the folk-music tradition as the powerful “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” by the twenty-five-year-old songwriter-activist Phil Ochs, his neighbor at the hotel. Smith was even able to persuade Moses Asch of Folkways Records to let him produce a first album by the Fugs, a new “anarchist folk-rock /poetry band,” created by the poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg and the drummer Ken Weaver, that had begun shaking things up in the clubs, galleries, and theaters of the Lower East Side that year.
Potentially powerful as this new work was, Smith could not have imagined the revolutionary impact soon to be made by another singer-songwriter recently arrived at the Chelsea, a contemporary of Ochs’s whose connection to Smith’s Anthology was equally profound. Bobby Zimmerman, born in the North Country mining territory that had inspired Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and nurtured the Communist Party leader Gus Hall, had grown up listening to the radio, most notably—when the signal came through—to the race music and country ballads broadcast alongside Crazy Crystal laxative ads by the outlaw border stations in Mexico. Songs like that, full of the “wildness and weirdness” of life out in the wilderness of America, were “the way I explored the universe,” he later wrote. They tuned his ears to the “underground story” passed from one generation to the next and primed his antenna to pick up on the messages in the songs of Woody Guthrie and the writings of Ginsberg and Kerouac; later, they helped him perceive the “power of spirit” in Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. “All those songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels” sounded like Shakespeare to a fledgling folksinger in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.” Their message—that “America is what you make it. America is what you say it is”—was so real to him that when the time came for the inevitable move to Greenwich Village, it seemed natural to reinvent himself as his own Anthology character—an orphaned, straw-hatted, carny drifter named Bob Dylan.
In New York, he took in the songs of Uncle Dave Mason, the Five Blind Boys, the Clancy Brothers, and the Mighty Clouds of Joy; read Balzac and Voltaire; studied paintings by Max Liebermann and Jasper Johns; and stood on frozen sidewalks pondering the façades of Walt Whitman’s former workplace and Edgar Allan Poe’s former home. From his new girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, daughter of a pair of American Communists from Queens, he learned about the Paterson strike, the Living Theatre, and the political songs of Brecht and Weill. Like Harry Smith, he spent long afternoons in the New York Public Library’s reading room, immersing himself in nineteenth-century newspaper reports of reform movements, slave-wage factories, religious revivals, and temperance campaigns, sensing that if he could just capture the truth of that “Civil War period” when “America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected,” it would provide him with the template behind “everything that I would write.”
The music, the books, and the paintings sharpened Dylan’s perceptions. Walking down the street, Rotolo observed, he saw things no one else saw. “I had a heightened sense of awareness,” he acknowledged later. “My mind was like
a trap.” Performing for spare change in the Village, he attempted to put into his singing all he had learned. When the traditional songs failed to satisfy, he tried writing his own, experimenting with ways to “go past the vernacular” to that “chilling precision that those old-timers used . . . no small thing.”
Planning his first album for Columbia Records in 1961, less than a year after his arrival in the city, Dylan studied the Anthology of American Folk Music hard. He recorded versions of two songs from the collection, Clarence Ashley’s haunting “House Carpenter” and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” though just the latter made it onto the album. He included only two of his own compositions on that initial venture, but in the months that followed, as he was pulled into the maelstrom of political songwriting, he kept working on ways to merge his own sensibility with the traditional framework. The results—“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War”—created a sensation in the Village with their release on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in the summer of 1963. Now, when he performed in the clubs, audiences stood on chairs and yelled “It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall” along with the song.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 24