(Richard Witts) The Velvet Underground
(Richard Witts) The Velvet Underground
(Richard Witts) The Velvet Underground
UNDERGROUND
Icons of Pop Music
Edited by Jill Halstead and Dave Laing
Books in this series, designed for undergraduates and the general reader, offer
a critical prole of a key gure or group in twentieth-century pop music. These
short paperback volumes will focus on the work rather than on biography, and
emphasize critical interpretation.
Elton John
Dave Laing
Bob Dylan
Keith Negus
Joni Mitchell
Jill Halstead
Björk
Nicola Dibben
THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND
RICHARD WITTS
Published by
Equinox Publishing Ltd
Unit 6, The Village
101 Amies St
London, SW11 2JW
www.equinoxpub.com
eISBN: 1845534700
To Kate Lister
– une femme pas fatale
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes 138
References 160
Bibliography of The Velvet Underground 163
Index 164
Acknowledgements
Although New York is not the capital of the United States, it is without
doubt the capital of America’s broken rules. And it’s by far the largest city in
the land, the nation’s focus for nance, fashion and freakery. Many heart-
land Americans resent the place. They see New York City as a spot solely for
making money and throwing it around. Others consider it a shred of old
Europe that drifted over the Atlantic ocean and got stuck around the mouth
of the Hudson River, an island full of churlish mists. Nevertheless, these
critics concede – even admire – the productive, adrenalin energy and the
kinetic vigour to be found in “the city that never sleeps”. Perhaps, as Jean
Baudrillard argues, “There is no human reason to be here, except for the
sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.”2 The Velvet Underground’s chief
songwriter Lou Reed describes it as a place where you must “Run run run
run run” just to keep yourself in drugs.
A reason put forward for this ant-like intensity is that a lot of pushy peo-
ple live cheek by jowl in these cramped acres. When The Velvet Underground
(henceforth, when it suits, “the Velvets”) was formed in 1965 the population
of New York City measured 7.8 million.3 They endured an extreme density of
25,000 people per square mile (the density of Los Angeles – determined at
the time to become New York’s cultural rival – was one-fth of that, at 5,000
per square mile4). It’s due to such compression that this otherwise at city
shoots up in the air. Its iconic verticality – the monumental needles or slabs
of cement and glass we call skyscrapers jostling for attention on Manhattan
island – overshadows the antique stoops and blocks, the tenement buildings
and warehouses (nowadays converted into homely “lofts”) already consid-
ered “immensely tall” by the Russian composer Tchaikovsky when he visited
New York in 1891. He couldn’t understand even then how so many people
2 The Velvet Underground
could live “on top of each other”.5 This peculiar, physical “pressure” is often
used to explain away the intensity of certain New York art, especially that of
the Velvets, as we’ll hear.
Another explanation commonly offered for its manic virulence is that
New York City is built for business. Its main district, Manhattan, is constructed
for the most part as a transport grid of 12 numbered avenues (north–south)
and 220 numbered streets (east–west). Only the old American Indian dust
track called Broadway, running through them at an angle, offers variety to
this rational scheme. Connecting the avenues and streets underground is the
subway train system, each line duly numbered and lettered. It’s this subway
that provides a primal reference point to the music of a band that pointedly
has “underground” in its name.
While New York is divided into ve large administrative “boroughs”,
only two of these need concern us here: the central island of (uptown/mid-
town/downtown) Manhattan, and the suburban district of Queens. It was
in Queens on Long Island where Lou Reed grew up and in 1970 stumbled
back, weighed down by the total failure of the Velvets, to work as a typist
for his father’s accounting rm. These ve boroughs are then split into 38
“neighbourhoods”, from Battery Park to Yorktown.
The Velvet Underground was a pioneer “downtown” band, associated as
such with the neighbourhood known as the Lower East Side. Being south of
central Manhattan, the quarter was literally “down-town” on the subway
maps, but also “down” in its degenerate, mongrel contrast to the diamond-
studded “uptown” lifestyle of ne wines and string quartets. Known for
many generations to be the quintessential American “melting pot” spot for
immigrant communities, the Lower East Side was commonly the rst dis-
trict in which the poor would stay after disembarking from transatlantic
ships that docked nearby. Wave upon wave of migrancy can be detected
from the remains of Jewish, Italian, and Chinese settlements still sheltering
there. By the 1960s Puerto Ricans had become the majority ethnic group in
the Lower East Side (before many dispersed north to Spanish or East Har-
lem, “El Barrio”). There were 650,000 on Manhattan island in 1965 (a total
Hispanic émigré rise from 70,000 in 1940 to 1.4 million in 1970).6
Lower East Side was always considered less of a place to live in than
to endure and, in due time, quit. During the 1960s the area was registered
as comprising no less than 43,000 cockroach-troubled tenements, “dark,
smelly, hovels” according to one observer.7 It was in one of these “hovels”
at 56 Ludlow Street that the Velvets rst lived together, rehearsed and
1 N e w Yo r k C i t y 3
formed their identity. And it was one of those 650,000 Puerto Ricans who
would become “The Man”, the mysterious man in the big straw hat and
fence-climber shoes for whom Lou Reed waited on 125th Street in El Barrio,
“twenty-six dollars in my hand”.8
The Velvets were themselves immigrants to the downtown scene. Not
one of the nine principals involved in the band between 1965 and 1970 came
from the area. They had migrated there with the same motive that many
other young, creative men and women moved to the neighbourhood – it
was considered cheap(er), communal and artistic, with hundreds of like
minds scrimping around for work, cash and drugs. As artist Frank Stella said,
“You start at the bottom in New York, and the bottom is pretty bottom-like
in New York.”9
Nevertheless the East Side was a district that was being carved up for
gentrication by estate agents at the very time, around 1965, that the group
came into existence. This socio-geographic re-guration reected, in bricks
and boundaries, the shifts of cultural power taking place in the city at the
time. For example, the modern art market moved downtown away from
the commercial midtown galleries originally located around the Museum of
Modern Art. In early 1964, artist Andy Warhol initially established his “Sil-
ver” Factory midtown at 47th Street, but in early 1968 he moved it south to
become part of the East Village locale at Union Square.
The northern section of Lower East Side came to be called the East
Village, really to sanction rent rises and underscore the groovy, “happen-
ing” scene there. At the centre of it were the Velvets, in the guise of Andy
Warhol’s resident band at the Dom hall on St Mark’s Place in early 1966.
Guitarist Sterling Morrison later claimed: “It really sickens me still when I go
to St. Mark’s Place because more than anyone we invented that street.”10
“East Greenwich Village” was the implication of this rebranding, at the
same time marking it off culturally, racially, and economically from the
Lower East Side. A physical frontier between East Village and Lower East
Side was xed by Houston Street (pronounced “How-ston”), which had also
set the southern limit for Greenwich Village to the west. Below it – “South of
Houston” – a similar district was abridged in name to SoHo and bolted on to
the Village to undergo the same estate agent alchemy.
Greenwich Village itself was where the Velvets rst played New York in
December 1965, at the Café Bizarre, 106 West 3rd Street.11 Coincidentally the
neighbourhood was home to Lou Reed’s hero Bob Dylan,12 whose song “Pos-
itively 4th Street” and 1963 album cover shot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
4 The Velvet Underground
paraded his Village afnities. This rather demure district lay at the bottom
of the imposed grid pattern of Manhattan streets and avenues. Besides its
low-numbered streets (from 1st to 14th) it also possessed its own criss-cross
of named byways, disclosing its early nineteenth-century origins. From the
start of the twentieth century onwards, when the increasingly afuent resi-
dents had moved uptown to live by the verdant bliss of Central Park, artists
took advantage of cheap rents and moved in. Greenwich Village, hosting
new music in bars and poetry readings in cafés, became a centre of creative,
progressive bohemianism, which to a reduced degree it has maintained
(both Cale and Reed of the Velvets live there now). So, for an artist to live
in the Lower East Side in the 1950s or East Village in the 1960s betrayed a
desire to associate oneself with the aesthetic radicalism of the area long
established to the West.
Of course, it was equally an economic choice to do so. The East Vil-
lage and SoHo had once housed a number of busy light-industry plants
and cast-iron warehouses. But, as these closed down during the 1950s and
1960s, they freed up space for visual artists of all kinds to take on. Musicians
like the Velvets would thus nd themselves within a set of lively experimen-
tal arts communities, and this factor within their domestic location would
inuence the band momentously, at least in its rst, most famous years.
Yet the handing-over of workshops by engineers to artists was more conse-
quential than this. The shift, chiey between 1960 and 1965 when 227 large
manufacturing companies left the city,13 marked the economic decline of
New York, one that would lead to its sensational bankruptcy ten years later
in 1975. In terms of failure and decay, the link between The Velvet Under-
ground and its city will become a nagging theme in this book.
The East Village was also a refuge for those who wished to reclaim radi-
calism, both political and artistic, for their time. Such an attitude as this was
energized in the watershed year, 1963, that John Cale arrived in New York.
Rebel spirits rose in response to the US government’s escalation of military
manoeuvres in the Asian country of South Vietnam, as well as the growing
awareness of the value of civil disobedience, such as boycotts and sit-ins,
informed by the black civil rights campaigns. On August 28th, 1963, over
200,000 people (including Bob Dylan) demonstrated in the nation’s capi-
tal of Washington DC, where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream”
speech.
But the main detonator was the assassination of the youngish presi-
dent, John F. Kennedy, in Dallas on November 22nd of that year. These
1 N e w Yo r k C i t y 5
through Bob Dylan and, in turn, Lou Reed. They added, however, one crucial
feature to make this portrait a truly American one – sunglasses.
New York School existentialism could be found in the work as well in
the man. Painter Clyfford Still wrote typically in 1950 that, “My work is [as]
equally independent [as me]… not proven by a continuum. I am myself,
– not just the sum of my ancestors, and I know myself best by my gestures…
not through a study of my family tree.”23 Fellow artist Barnett Newman even
compared the viewer of his paintings to a cave dweller, a primordial being:
“Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger
at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness, and at his own helplessness
before the void.”24
If this intellectual framework served to give fat-headed condence to
these Tarzans of the cultural jungle in the immediate post-war New York
arts scene, it was the buoyant imperialist economy of the United States that
crated the art market over from old Europe to New York. Through World
War II the USA had already drawn the United Kingdom into an arrangement
named Lend–Lease whereby money and weapons to ght Nazi Germany
would be loaned to Britain and paid back over many years and, in return – it
was expected – the British Isles would be converted readily into a cultural
colony of America (the nal Lend–Lease payment was made as recently as
2001). In 1947 the States added the rest of Western Europe to a massive sup-
port scheme of grants, rather than loans, called the Marshall Plan.
General Marshall, its architect, intended it to build a strong Western
European economy, one that would grow in alliance with the USA against
the Soviet Union’s claims on Eastern Europe.25 This hegemony, this ability
to exercise control with the carrot not the stick, enabled the USA to move
the cultural market in its favour, especially with regard to consumption and
mediation – fast food and drink, lm, television and popular music. Not only
that, the expanded trafc of goods into Europe beneted States-side busi-
nesses so that by the mid 1950s conditions allowed for a local luxury market
in works of art to be established in New York City, one that understandably
favoured new, all-American goods.
Such art had already been fortunate in grabbing spectacular media
attention from the late 1940s onwards. This, however, proved to be the
doing of the Central Intelligence Agency as much as culturally minded
reporters. Articles in popular magazines like Life championed these artists,26
who found themselves being used in “Cold War” propaganda against the
Soviet Union. The Russians, limited by economic circumstance to promoting
1 N e w Yo r k C i t y 9
only their cultural assets, used their artists – composers like Prokoev and
companies such as the Bolshoi – to advocate “socialist realist” qualities. In
response the American media seized on the Greenwich Village avant-garde
as audacious models of free will and creative adventure. If realism expressed
repression, then abstraction embodied liberty. America was “with it”, Russia
without it. This game would end in October 1957 when the USSR futuristi-
cally launched the Sputnik satellite and then sent the rst cosmonaut into
space, leading to the Soviet–American “space race” of the 1960s when art’s
job was taken up by science.
In particular, the American press made a star of Jackson Pollock, who
placed large canvases on the oor and worked over them, sploshing and
smearing paint; reporters dubbed him “Jack the Dripper”.27 His paintings
were large because they were his one-man version of the 1930s collective
murals. Pollock’s dynamic, gestural acts, concerned with the direct physi-
cality of paint and painting, dened a new style, swiftly marketed out of
the city as “abstract expressionism” (“AbEx”) or the “New York School”.
Mark Rothko’s “fuzzy doors” (mystical blocks which hovered over coloured
grounds) and Willem de Kooning’s violent cartoon abstractions formed the
bookends of this stylistic rack.
Although the “AbEx” painters worked in disparate studios around town,
they gathered to eat, drink and quarrel at the Cedar Tavern in the Village’s
University Place, where they mixed with colleagues in the literary, music,
performance and lm scenes.28 In this regard even the most singular of art-
ists found intellectual need in New York for a communal forum between
disciplines, in order to discuss common demands and trends. It was through
their leisure time, not their work, that they found their workmates.
But soon, as critic Edward Lucie-Smith points out, “This least academic of
styles made an astonishingly rapid descent into academicism. The art boom
of the middle and late 1950s created a spate of bubble-reputations.”29 In a
belated defence of abstract expressionism, the commentator Donald Kuspit
called it “the last modern American art we had which deals signicantly with
the question of individuation in the megalopolis of New York”.30 In so far as
“AbEx” related to lonely-guy stuff, to matters of existentialist authenticity,
this is plausible, but other styles quickly emerged linked with the urban con-
dition of being in New York, one of which launched Andy Warhol’s amazing
ascendancy in the mid 1960s to a point where Warhol could give up painting
to run a rock group and yet maintain the degree of media attention previ-
ously devoted to Jack the Dripper.
10 The Velvet Underground
At least two creative reactions emerged out of the 1950s “AbEx” scene.
One set of artists simply dumped the “expressionism” and carefully lined in
colour elds and strips, named in style “post-painterly abstraction” or “hard-
edged art”. Its coolness and play of surface inuenced its successor, the “pop
art” most associated, through Warhol, with The Velvet Underground. The
other, more essential to our story, took its cue from the physical, “living”
actions and spontaneity of Jackson Pollock. One of the key artists here, Allan
Kaprow, wrote in 1958:
A walk down 14th Street, at the top end of Greenwich Village, might have
led to the door of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), once a controversial leader of
the anti-art “Dada” movement around the time of World War I, who now lived
as a cultural sage at 220 West 14th Street. In 1916 he and his American friends
had declared Greenwich Village “a Free Republic, Independent of Uptown”.35
1 N e w Yo r k C i t y 11
While Jackson Pollock and his colleagues had been affected by Surrealism’s
automatic-writing exercises of the 1920s and 1930s, the younger Kaprow and
others of his kind (Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine among
them) took a step further back to Dada. But now, in Duchamp’s view, this
new generation was far too pro-art to be Dada. While in 1917 Duchamp had
attempted to display in New York a urinal (titled Fountain) as an art object
– in order to question what art was – Rauschenberg as a neo-Dadaist had sent
a telegram stating, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”, which is more a
questioning of the artist’s authority.
Two elements of the old Dadaist tendency especially took the neo-
Dadaists’ interest. Firstly they liked its use of everyday objects, such as
Duchamp’s “ready-mades” and combinations of materials. When the Texan
Rauschenberg rented a sequence of downtown studios in the 1950s, he took
up discarded objects that he’d found on the streets around the Bowery and
xed them to his canvases, or made indescribable sculptures out of them
(such as his Coca Cola Plan of 1958 combining Coke bottles and angels’
wings). Most famously, he stuck an old tyre around the torso of a stuffed
goat;36 “I wanted to see if I could integrate an object as exotic as that”, he
explained.37 Curator Richard Koshalek saw these works as a link between
“AbEx” and its upcoming antithesis in realism: “Bob painted himself into the
picture, much as Velásquez did. The difference is that ‘himself’ is what he
happened to have around him at the moment.”38
Rauschenberg’s successful devising of these “combines” led to such an
interest in this eld that in 1961 New York’s Museum of Modern Art ran an
exhibition titled The Art of Assemblage. Its curator, William C. Seitz, wrote
that, “The method of juxtaposition is a vehicle for feelings of disenchant-
ment with the slick international idiom that loosely articulated abstraction
has tended to become, and the social values that this situation reects.”39
This mirrors John Cale’s concerns about the comparative abstraction of
the experimental world he was in around 1965 and the grittier realism of
rock music that beckoned through Lou Reed; Cale desired to combine the
two into epic forms. Some artists certainly considered Rauschenberg’s
“combines” a move back to reality after the all-too-transcendent abstrac-
tions of the New York School. New York was now nding itself physically
in, and on, art.40
The second element of Dadaism that attracted the neo-Dadaists con-
cerned acts of spontaneous performance (the happening, the moment).
They liked the idea that a work of art is lived in, as though the artist is
12 The Velvet Underground
active in the studio making the composition in three dimensions. Here was
a transition away from the ideology of the private to that of the shared.
Performers made independent actions, unrelated to their neighbours, but
together they were in the same work. The viewer could gaze, even step
around the studio, from the particular to the whole. Onto this, composer
John Cage had added the use of games of chance, because he didn’t like
improvisation, which he thought merely allowed participants to be indul-
gent and rework favourite stunts. Warhol, who followed these movements
and schools with a kind of “Gee! Wow!” regard, would make his own “rock”
version of a Happening, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable “experience” at the
Dom on St Mark’s Place (and elsewhere around the States in 1966) with The
Velvet Underground at its core.
In sum so far, then, the New York post-war visual arts scene worked
through and played out a number of concerns that The Velvet Underground
would take up – freely breathe in out of the downtown air – during the
middle 1960s. There were other direct artistic inuences to be wrought from
the town, most especially in music and literature, but they will be dealt
with later in the book by scrutinizing the artists most associated with these:
sound and John Cale, songs and Lou Reed.
2 The Band
In his clever backwards-history book about genes, The Ancestor’s Tale, Rich-
ard Dawkins writes that:
July LaMonte
Tony Angus Walter LaMonte Marian
1962 Young's
Conrad MacLise de Maria Young Zazeela
Group
January The
Tony Walter John Lou
1965 Primitives
Conrad de Maria Cale Reed
Warhol was the band’s manager (18 months – January 1966 to July 1967).
At that latter date Lou Reed sacked Warhol (and Morrissey) to replace him
with Boston-based promoter Steven Sesnick. That The Velvet Underground
needs to be dened in terms of its management only goes to show how odd
its biography is. To summarize, there have been four basic incarnations of
the “famous” Velvets:
(i) The Velvet Underground before Warhol: circa April–December 1965
(ii) The Warhol Velvet Underground: January 1966–July 1967
(iii) The Sesnick Velvet Underground: July 1967–September 1968
(iv) The Sesnick Velvet Underground without Cale: September 1968–August
1970
On August 23rd, 1970 Lou Reed quit the band. His look-alike and sound-
alike alter-ego Doug Yule took over the sporadic engagements until the
2 The Band 15
middle of 1973 when Yule’s project zzled out entirely. As the group often
worked in a part-time way, it’s difcult to determine exactly when people
joined and left, but here is an attempt. It assumes that The Velvet Under-
ground project began as The Primitives, the name given to a “scratch”
band (that is, a group made up on the spur of the moment of freelance
musicians) created to exploit a novelty record by Lou Reed titled ‘Do The
Ostrich’:
The other performers associated with The Velvet Underground in the total
period of 1965 to 1973 are as follows, also in alphabetical order:
As to the ve protagonists, it’s notable how close the three men were in age.
John Cale and Lou Reed were born within a week of each other, in March 1942.
Guitarist Sterling Morrison was born ve months later. They are framed in age
by the two females – singer Nico from 1938 (although she wouldn’t thank you
for noticing that she was the oldest among them) and drummer Moe Tucker
of 1945. In terms of births the ve are typical wartime “baby boomers”, and
they can be placed in a popular music context of birthdays thus:
More signicantly, this was a group that was formed by chance encoun-
ters (many groups are, of course). Its key players arrived from dissimilar
backgrounds and even different countries. With one exception it was in
New York City that they rst came across each other. Yet there is little of a
thread as to how they landed there, apart from the point already made that
they hungered to be in a place, as Nico called it, which was “a city of now, a
city that is always now, also where yesterday can be now too”.3 (English was
her fourth language, in case you’re wondering.) The following is an attempt
to record how they each arrived in this “city of now”.
Lou Reed
The most local of the Velvets was Lou Reed, who was born Lewis Reed in
Brooklyn, across the East River from Manhattan, on March 2nd, 1942. The
Reed family, however, quickly moved to Freeport on nearby Long Island, a
mainly middle-class environment of around 40,000 suburbanites. His father
was an accountant, his mother a housewife and apparently a former beauty
queen.4 Their surname had earlier been anglicized from the Jewish family
name Rabinowitz. Lou Reed’s upbringing was bourgeois but more New York
State than New York City and more out-of-town than downtown. According
to his biographer Victor Bockris, it was at the age of 13 that Reed discov-
ered he was gay, and, although his subsequent behaviour has been that of a
scrupulous bisexual,5 the family’s concerns for his “feelings” – considered a
sickness at that time – led him, at the age of 17, to undergo 24 electro-shock
treatments at the Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital.
At any rate this is the reason Reed has put forward through his biogra-
pher. Yet Cale has referred obliquely to Reed’s schizophrenia6 (“split from
reality”), intimated when he rst met him in early 1965. Cale went on to
mention both Reed’s ongoing depression and his addiction to Placidyl at
this time. But Placidyl is a sedative to cure insomnia, not an antidepressant,7
and, as Reed was still living with his parents “who kept him on a tight rein”,
the drug was probably a replacement, prescribed by the psychiatrist he was
still seeing, for the heroin he’d taken at university. It appears that, despite
assumptions, rock stars are not necessarily the best people to pass on to
us what’s wrong with them, nor to explain away their drugs, prescribed or
not. Ultimately, although homosexuality was in those days diagnosed as a
disorder in need of treatment, what the doctors of the Creedmore institute
encountered in the teenage Reed may have been far more complex than
we’ve been led to believe.
18 The Velvet Underground
strength soon after the formal censure by the US Senate in 1954 of Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s “witch hunt” against Leftists,19 allowing for a re-emerged
interest in “the music of the people” to advance. During the post-war period
this ideological regard for “roots” culture had been associated up to then with
the Soviet Union and Sovietized Eastern Europe, and while it therefore car-
ried counter-cultural credentials in the United States, it was nevertheless also
considered somewhat patriotic in its rediscovery of residual songs – especially
ballads – while likewise constructing others in their style.
This revival was kick-started by the popular “raise-your-voice” group
The Weavers, who, blacklisted by McCarthy, reformed in 1955 after his fall
from grace. But what really swept this alternative folk revival along was the
opportunity it gave for teenage baby boomers to make music. Many of them
formed amateur, communal groups mixing acoustic instruments and voices
to perform in local bars and folk clubs; the songs most enjoyed were there-
fore those that were the simplest to play and sing. It was this sort of group
that Reed joined. However, the folk revival scene was readily commercial-
ized and professionalized in the American free-market fashion. This tran-
sition was accelerated by the annual Newport Folk Festival begun in June
1959, together with the success of The Kingston Trio (1959) and Joan Baez
(1960) in the singles and albums market.
As Reed had spent his rst university year as an individualist, eso-
teric modern jazz fan and opened his second as a communal, afrming
“folkie”, it shouldn’t surprise us that he soon turned to a third genre, that
of rock’n’roll, by now a “retro” good-times style ecked with irony and a
moody discontent with the present in favour of the “lost” past. He joined
friends on the campus in setting up around late 1961 a band called “LA
and the Eldorados” (the “L” for Lewis as lead vocalist) which played mainly
Chuck Berry covers as well as nascent versions of Reed’s own mature songs
such as “Coney Island Baby”.20 A local success, it’s said that the band earned
good fees playing up to three or four times a week for parties. A fellow
student had taken up the band’s management while another became its
agent. However, one of the Eldorados claims that Reed was so obnoxious
and contrary in his behaviour21 that they went out sometimes as “Pasha
and the Prophets” or other titles because they’d been barred under the
other name from venues thanks to him.
What altered Reed’s subcultural afnities yet again was the debut album
of Bob Dylan, released in March 1962. Although there are only two of his
original songs on it, Dylan presented a persona with which Reed could
2 The Band 21
to this, his hepatitis and his record as a mental patient, “I was pronounced
mentally unt and given a classication that meant I’d only be called up if
we went to war with China. It was the one thing my shock treatments were
good for.”24 So, while others opposed the war or burned their draft cards in
deance of the war, Reed was excused it.
Instead he found a job through the former manager of The Eldorados,
who had a social contact with Pickwick International and persuaded the
record company to hire Reed as one of its songwriters. A tawdry entrepre-
neurial company on Long Island, Pickwick specialized in records that looked
and sounded all too cannily like other people’s records. Aside from produc-
ing discs that cashed in on crazes and genre fads,25 it gained income through
licensing, say, a hit single for use on one of its thematic compilation discs while
lling the remainder with hastily written numbers by its backroom team.26 As
the royalties from each of these numbers equalled that of the borrowed track,
Pickwick made fair money by that means.
Over the nine months he worked there, until February 1965, it’s estimated
that Reed helped to write 15 published songs, including his one near-hit, ‘Do
The Ostrich’, supposedly by The Primitives. Emerging as a skit on a spate of
novelty dance crazes in 1964, such as the Twist, it’s often claimed that Reed’s
lyrics ask the dancers to place their heads on the oor to enable their part-
ners to stamp on them.27 However, it simply asks them to stick their head
between their knees (and then “You do just about anything you please!”). Its
music is based entirely on Phil Spector’s main riff for ‘Then He Kissed Me’28
which ts the rhythm of the title line, ‘Do the Ostrich’, and comprises only
two chords, the tonic and the subdominant (I and IV),29 the eventual chords
of choice of The Velvet Underground. As a pointer to future mannerisms it’s
also an early example of Reed’s tendency to use “master of ceremony”-style
verbal ll-ins, such as “Now c’mon, yeah” and “Go, go, go”.
One of the in-vogue television teen-beat dance shows30 phoned up
Pickwick asking to book The Primitives for an appearance. As there was
no such band, a Pickwick employee hastily sought some suitably modish-
looking backing musicians for Reed. He struck lucky at a Manhattan party
where he met by chance the long-haired John Cale and Tony Conrad, who
were then working with composer LaMonte Young. They, as supposed
guitarists, brought along their fellow Young performer, Walter de Maria,
to play drums, and thus Reed, Cale, Conrad and De Maria became The
Primitives, playing at various promotions for the few weeks that ‘Do The
Ostrich’ had a life.
2 The Band 23
Reed mentioned to them that he’d written songs he liked but which
Pickwick declined to record (as they weren’t novelties or genre remakes).
The other Primitives offered their services to work on the material in a cas-
ual fashion. In this random way The Velvet Underground was conceived in
January 1965, though not in name. Reed gave up his Pickwick job the next
month and soon moved in with John Cale at 56 Ludlow Street, Lower East
Side. Reed would be jobless until December, when The “famous” Velvet
Underground started to play in public.
John Cale
Cale was born in the Welsh coal-mining town of Garnant in South Wales,
March 9th, 1942. His father was a miner, his mother a primary school
teacher who taught her son to play the piano. In Cale’s move from a pro-
vincial upbringing to a university college in London, he followed a course
envisaged for working-class children in the government’s wartime Educa-
tion Act of 1944. Winston Churchill, prime minister at the time of Cale’s
birth, had told the boys at his privileged alma mater that, “after the war the
advantages of the Public Schools must be extended on a far wider basis”.31 In
response a Ministry of Education ofcial, alluding to the Greek philosopher
Plato, divided children into “golden” (gifted), “silver” (technically minded)
and “iron” (“couldn’t handle ideas”).32 Golden children went to the post-war
grammar schools which were modelled on the fee-paying academy where
Churchill had forewarned of change. Cale grew up a “golden” child and
gleaned the rewards of post-war liberal education, such as it was.
Various post-war education schemes ornamented the basic system. One
such was music peripatetic teaching, by which professional players were
hired to travel around schools teaching children how to play instruments.
County-wide (that is, regional) stores held assorted collections of instru-
ments for schoolkids to take home and use, and there were county youth
orchestras for trained youngsters to participate in. This is how Cale became
a viola player, a beneciate of state cultural provision, although he empha-
sized how it was doled out to him by chance. As a string instrument that falls
between the high violin and the lowish cello, the viola tends to ll out the
middle of a texture and doesn’t therefore often have very interesting parts
to perform. That Cale would end up in adult life playing drones on his viola
isn’t so surprising, then. That these drones were often open strings wouldn’t
astonish other string players either, who tend to think of viola players, rather
unfairly, as the village idiots of the concert stage.
24 The Velvet Underground
While Cale as a teenager sat at the front desk of the violas in the
Welsh National Youth Orchestra, he said he developed a rebellious inter-
est in “teddy boy” culture. Considered the rst of the post-war subcultural
British trends displaying discontent through style, it was a curious, racist
referral to the nal period of British imperialism at the turn of the twen-
tieth century (during the reign of Edward VII – hence “teddy” and “teds”).
First associated with conventional pop music,33 teds only later switched to
rockabilly when the rst American white-artist records made an impact
from 1955 onwards.34 Cale, like many working-class young men around the
country, would have adopted the stylistic features of a quiffed and slicked
hairstyle with a long jacket as a sign of alienated social distinction.35 That
he was inclined to evince this urban trend within a conservative rural com-
munity, displays the degree that he was willing to dissent as an individual
through his appearance.
By his early adult life he had become a tall, lithe and unconventionally
handsome bohemian, once described as an “elongated Dustin Hoffman”.
From October 1960 (at the same time that Reed started at Syracuse) until
the summer of 1963, Cale was a student on a teachers’ training course at
Goldsmiths College in south-east London. It’s clear from his own accounts
that he developed an interest in contemporary music by living composers.
Such an environment was developing in Britain at this very time, where
musicians were trying to catch up with – or evade – adventurist shifts
on mainland Europe. The old neo-classical scene, which in the 1920s and
1930s (through composers such as Stravinsky and Kurt Weill) had taken a
direct interest in popular dance music and “hot” jazz, was confronted after
World War II with an elite modernism absorbed exclusively with unprec-
edented sound worlds and structures. While 1950s Britain was still drink-
ing in the dregs of neo-classicism, avant-garde music scores of extreme
virtuosity were written by composers like Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) in France,
while Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928) in Germany, who also made com-
plex instrumental works, explored synthetic sounds constructed by elec-
tronic means.
A young British composer with the distinctive name of Cornelius
Cardew (1936–81),36 who worked between 1961 and 1963 as a liberal studies
tutor at Goldsmiths’ art department, was interested in both composers,
so much so that he learnt to play a endish guitar part in order to perform
in the British première of Boulez’s formidable song cycle “Le marteau sans
maître”.37 The fact that he couldn’t play the guitar didn’t discourage him.
2 The Band 25
Fluxus artists considered that the role of their art – and it had a
directly social role – was to criticize conventions and assumptions, and
to do so by playing on the absurdity of situations. Fluxus and neo-Dada
were a humorous reaction to the high seriousness of 1950s modernism.
In Germany in the early 1960s the composers Mauricio Kagel (b. 1931)
and György Ligeti (b. 1923) created droll works that scrutinized the con-
ventions of concerts, while Ben Vautier and others in France made com-
ical art pieces and wild theatrical gestures in everyday settings. There
was even an emerging scene in England, and it seems that Cardew and
Cale were a part of it for at least one concert (one that they appear to
have co-organized) which took place at the very end of Cale’s stay at
Goldsmiths, in the college’s Great Hall on July 6th, 1963 – “A Little Fes-
tival of New Music”.39
26 The Velvet Underground
Yet Cale does not seem to have endeared himself at this time to his
Fluxus peers. George Maciunas (1931–78), Fluxus luminary in the USA,
wrote to Tomas Schmit in Germany, probably about this concert: “But who
is this John Cale?? I have never met him. Seems to have funny attitudes
about changing programmes – very stuffy.”40 Nevertheless Cale had two
2 The Band 27
small scores printed in the journal Fluxus Preview Review of July 1963, and in
1966 – while in The Velvet Underground – he’d make a “Fluxlm” (a Fluxus
lm) titled Police Car lasting one minute and described as an “underexposed
sequence of blinking lights on a police car”.41
It was at the time of the concert that he nished his teacher’s training
course, although it seems he did not pass. It’s claimed that for one of his exams
(possibly composition) he placed a painting of a reclining nude on the piano
stand and proceeded to “interpret” the picture to the consternation of his
examiners. Aside from Cale, there is no one left alive to conrm the story and,
while it’s conceivable, it sounds like the sort of thing a student would do who
knew he’d already failed. It’s possible that Cale was asked to re-sit an exam or
two to get his education degree, but he ew to America instead.
If Cale’s connection to Fluxus was brief and tangential, the next stage
in his musical career as an avant-garde musician would prove inuential
and momentous. He had applied in late 1962 for a Bernstein scholarship
to attend the 1963 Tanglewood Summer School in Lenox,42 Massachusetts,
near to Boston. These international scholarships were set up by the glam-
orous American conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) to enable young
composers to attend workshops given by their eminent elders. A trustee
of this awards scheme was the veteran American neo-classical composer
Aaron Copland (1900–90). When he visited London in May 1963,43 Copland
invited Cale, as one of several applicants, for lunch. This was more or less
the limit of Cale’s involvement with Copland and Bernstein despite what he
has implied, and from that what journalists have subsequently written. Cale
was accepted for the course, and so, in August 1963 he went to Tanglewood,
supposedly on a short one-off visit.
Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) was the workshop teacher, a Greek-born
French resident who, inuenced by modernist architecture, composed with
militant clusters and streaks of sound charged with energy. Cale, still a Flux-
ist, remained xed on performance and critical action. Instead of writing a
score, he said that he wanted to smash an axe into a table. Xenakis, who had
been a socialist resistance ghter in World War II and had an eye shot out
by the British, would have had little sympathy for absurdist games of mock
violence. Cale decided after a short while there to abandon Tanglewood
for New York City, American home of the Fluxus movement. A contact on
the course told him that work might be found at the Orientalia bookshop
in Greenwich Village.44 Thus Cale’s arrival in New York came about in this
unprepared way.
28 The Velvet Underground
It must be said that Cale’s time at Goldsmiths – and the entire career
following it – has been subject to a breathtaking measure of mythologiz-
ing. Reed, Nico and Cale have each enjoyed a propensity to be discrete with
facts, but for different reasons – Reed to hide his suburban upbringing,
Nico to protect her mother and son, and Cale to underwrite his musical
status.
Much of what he claims in his autobiography of 1999, What’s Welsh for
Zen?, cannot be veried. While many factual mistakes make his assertions
improbable, formal or informal encounters with people are aggrandized
into signicant attachments. For example, his supposed creative relationship
with the celebrated American composer John Cage is unlikely. The 51-year-
old Cage, on meeting Cale in September 1963, would have taken delight in
the consanguinity of their names, and Cage surely gave him advice on how
to survive in New York, just as he gave advice to many others, proposing
he contact LaMonte Young.45 But that’s about it. The photograph from that
time of Cage taking over from Cale at the piano in an all-night recital of
Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ is a moment of coincidence.46 Cale never studied with
Cage, Cage doesn’t mention him in his diaries, and they worked in different
elds – Cage rmly rejected the improvisation that was an essential feature
of Cale’s method. As to Cale’s understanding of Cage, a sample sentence
from his autobiography is telling: “I was convinced that John Cage was at
that moment performing a rendition of his silent ‘4' 33" ’ (from Preludes
and Interludes, which came out in 1954).”47 4' 33" (from 1952) has little to
do with Sonatas and Interludes (from 1948); only someone who knows next
to nothing of Cage’s work could think that it did.
Nevertheless, Cale the immigrant did encounter, and work among,
an assortment of stimulating experimental artists between his arrival in
downtown New York City in September 1963 and the debut of the Velvets in
December 1965. Most important among them was the composer LaMonte
Young (b. 1935), six years older than Cale, with Young’s constant partner, the
artist Marian Zazeela.48 The pair had just married49 and begun to observe
a 27-hour day, which they considered a more natural time frame than that
imposed on the rest of us. This 27-hour day soon turned into an elastic 28–
36-hour day. How anyone like Cale knew when to drop in on them remains
a mystery; Young and Zazeela enjoy even now their limousine-stretched
“days” and “nights”.
Young’s innovations in music and performance, and their effect on The
Velvet Underground, will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter. Here is an
2 The Band 29
overview: LaMonte Young had come to New York from California in 1960
on a scholarship50 with a team of experimental artists. He quickly became
associated with the Fluxus movement, organizing a series of provocative yet
inuential concerts for Yoko Ono in her downtown loft51 during the rst
half of 1961. Young soon moved on from Fluxus, though, to focus directly on
music through a reworking of the blues, using its repetitive chord sequences
as a basis for jazz-inected improvisations (“I am wildly interested in repeti-
tion, because I think it demonstrates control”, Young has said52 ). Around the
same time, he worked in clubs and bars improvising on pianos to accom-
pany one of his fellow Californian migrants, Terry Jennings, who played alto
sax meditations on modes53 not unlike John Coltrane (who was also living
and playing in New York at this time). It was Jennings who took on Cale as
a atmate for his Lispenard Street loft when the Welshman rst arrived in
New York from Tanglewood.
Young was quite the entrepreneur. He established a performing group
from among his Californian fellow travellers – Terry Jennings was one of
them – and it was this ensemble that Cale joined as a viola player in Sep-
tember 1963. Young has admitted that the group used drugs of various kinds
as a “consciousness-expanding tool” – “We got high for every concert: the
whole group”.54 Cale has claimed that Young “was the highest-quality dope
dealer in the avant-garde movement”.55 Fellow artist Walter de Maria said of
Young that, “He was sort of like a criminal, a dope dealer, you know, which
is also interesting.”56 Young used Cale as a drugs courier on occasion,57 for
which Cale earned an income. Cale recounts that the reason he eventu-
ally left Terry Jennings’ at to live with Tony Conrad on Ludlow Street was
because he, Cale, feared that the police had got wind of his drugs storage
system at Lispenard Street.
Use of cannabis (also opium and heroin) was certainly common in the
modern jazz scene, and such habits inuenced in turn the cross-related
experimentalists who were searching for the same sort of enhanced atmos-
phere in which to encourage creative spontaneity. Young’s supplies assisted
three related ensembles – a duo, a quartet which Cale calls The Dream
Syndicate58 (Cale, Conrad, Young, Zazeela), and roughly an octet called The
Theatre of Eternal Music (Cale, Conrad, Young, Zazeela, with – at differ-
ent times – mathematician Dennis Johnson, drummer/poet Angus MacLise
and composer of “In C” Terry Riley). The last group was formed to realize
Young’s composition The Four Dreams Of China which combined very long
sustained tones with improvisation. So, for 15 months Cale made his living
30 The Velvet Underground
somewhere between the Orientalia, the quartet project and the Theatre of
Eternal Music, no doubt scurrying between them with someone’s drugs in
his pocket.
When he rst met Lou Reed at Pickwick Records in January 1965, Cale
was glad to earn extra cash for playing a simple-tuned guitar as one of The
Primitives in the promotion of ‘Do The Ostrich’. He was already thinking
of “getting a band going” and Reed had mentioned that he had written a
number of songs that Pickwick wouldn’t record. “We got together and
started playing the songs for fun… We improvised and I showed him what
LaMonte could do with one-note chords and de-tuning.”59 By this time Cale
had moved into Tony Conrad’s at at 56 Ludlow Street. In March, Conrad
left to allow Reed to move in. Down the corridor lived the periodic Young
associate Angus MacLise who played hand drums and joined in on the Reed
song rehearsals. In April, Reed’s old university friend Sterling Morrison had
turned up on guitar to replace Conrad, and by now Cale’s hopes for a rock
band project was turning into a possibility.
As Reed had no job he and Cale began to look for bar gigs and also to
busk on pavements, which they once did quite successfully – after failing a
club audition – at the corner of Broadway and 125th Street, at the west end
of that spot where Reed in his lyrics waited “for the man”. Selling their blood
and posing for trashy magazines as murderers were said to be other ways
they earned cash. Along with Angus MacLise they took part in providing
improvised sound for a number of experimental lm shows organized by
the New York Cinematheque in various locations. Tony Conrad was one such
lm-maker interested in sound, and they worked for his colleagues such as
Piero Heliczer (1937–93) and Jack Smith (1932–89). As Andy Warhol went to
these screenings, it’s certain that he rst encountered Cale and crew there,
but in the guise of avant-garde musicians rather than as a rock band. At the
end of the year, CBS News would record a small mainstream news feature
about a Cinematheque performance of a Heliczer lm, in which the early
Velvets could be seen and heard as subjects.
Jack Smith had bought a professional tape recorder to enable Conrad to
splice music for some of his experimental lms.60 In July 1965 Reed, Cale and
Morrison borrowed it to make a demonstration tape (“demo”) of Reed’s
songs, including ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus In Furs’ (the title of a lm by Helizcer).
Cale took these tapes to London over the summer in an attempt to get
managers and record companies interested61 (Cale says he had a “green
card” visa allowing him to work in the United States and travel freely from
2 The Band 31
ion. Robertson dismissed them, saying of Reed’s guitar playing, “He ain’t
nothin’”.67 Nevertheless, Aronowitz offered them a support slot for his
band The Myddle Class. The Velvets agreed. On December 11th The Velvet
Underground made its debut under this name at the Summit High School,
Summit, New Jersey, where the band was contracted to play just three
songs. According to Sterling Morrison, the audience gave “a roar of disbe-
lief once we started to play ‘Venus’ [In Furs] and swelled to a mighty howl
of outrage and bewilderment by the end of ‘Heroin’”.68 Cale had nally con-
summated the effect of smashing an axe through a table simply by playing
his viola in a high school. Five days later, thanks again to Aronowitz, Cale
found himself playing the rst Velvet show of a six-week residency at the
Café Bizarre, although it hardly lasted six nights.
Sterling Morrison
The youngest male in the band by all of ve months, Holmes Sterling Mor-
rison, was born on August 29th, 1942 and brought up in East Meadow69 on
Long Island, a small town not far from Lou Reed’s Freeport. As he admitted,
“I stepped in and out of a scholarly life, back and forth, like someone pacing
irritably between the library and the stage.”70 A conventional middle-class
upbringing led him to receive, just in time for his 18th birthday in 1960, the
same undergraduate scholarship as his friend Jim Tucker. Although Morrison
had decided to follow Tucker to the upstate University of Syracuse, instead
he enrolled at the University of Illinois to study physics. He left after only
two semesters (terms). According to Morrison, his dissolute undergraduate
life was led as follows:
Morrison graduated in English at the end of his course and joined The
Warlocks. He carried on in The Velvet Underground after Lou Reed quit in
August 1970 but left a year later after registering for his doctorate (in medi-
eval studies) and relatedly landing a lecturing job in English literature, both
opportunities offered concurrently by the University of Texas at Austin. At
2 The Band 33
this point he called himself Holmes Morrison and for three years he made
no mention of his previous rock career until he started to play guitar infor-
mally with a local Austin band.71 Around 1982 (perhaps earlier), when he
received his doctorate, he became a tugboat captain on the Houston Ship
Channel. He joined in the short-lived 1990 and 1993 revival of the Velvets,
and later toured with Moe Tucker’s own band. He died in Poughkeepsie,
New York State, of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a lymphatic cancer) two days
after his 53rd birthday in 1995.
It was while Morrison was visiting Jim Tucker at Syracuse in late 1960
that he rst came across student Lewis Reed, a fellow guitarist and dissident:
“That’s how we met, in college dining halls”, Morrison recalled.72 He consid-
ered himself a recreant, justifying his stand as follows:
in Syracuse76 – with singers called The Three Screaming Niggers; this is hardly
a dazzling justication, though, for Morrison’s lack of concern over civil rights.
Morrison joined in on guitar with The Eldorados so long as his travels and
courses permitted, which became limited to the less frequent vacation breaks
once he had started at City College, and which must have ceased entirely,
given that Reed was surprised to come across him in New York in 1965.
It seems that Morrison entered the Velvets in the same myth-laden way
that Conrad found the book – on the pavement, in the gutter, down the
subway. Morrison agreed that he met his old friend Reed by chance while
he was in a subway train (“on the D Train at the 7th Avenue stop or there-
abouts”77), but, while Reed claimed Morrison was “barefoot” at the time,
Morrison thought this to be an idiotic assertion, especially in a dirt-strewn
city like New York, but also because he resented the notion that he had to
be “looked after” by the others. This chance meeting possibly took place in
February or March 1965 and led to Morrison taking over from Conrad, work-
ing with Cale and Reed at the downtown at from April onwards and taking
part in the Ludlow Tapes over the summer.
In looks and stature he was not unlike Cale, though taller. They framed
the smaller Reed, like sentries. Yet Morrison was unlike Cale in his relation to
Reed. Morrison and Reed came from the same suburban setting. Through a
mutual friend they had developed a rapport between them just at the same
time that they’d left their families. They developed a friendship at college
around a music scene rather than through a music profession. Morrison eas-
ily accepted Reed’s bisexuality, only worrying that Reed would waste his time
with “some really abby effete fairy”.78 He also had less at stake than the other
two; after all, he was on holiday from an academic career, not tied to music.
Finally, Morrison could bypass the competitive streak that lay between Reed
and Cale. As Morrison often said, he was the one who was “in it for the fun”.
When they made their debut at the Café Bizarre for ve dollars a night
each, the only fun they had was “pissing [off] the owners by playing ‘The
Black Angel’s Death Song’ more times than they could bear”.79
Clearly Maureen Tucker had forgotten the moment in December 1965 when
she was about to join The Velvet Underground and overheard Cale declar-
ing, “No chicks in the band. No chicks”. But Tucker was hardly a “chick”. She
looked like a tomboy at that time, small and lithe with little or no make-up,
thick laddish hair combed over. Her gender-vague nickname of “Moe” suited
not only her persona then, but it also fed into the modish androgyny with
which the group became associated through Warhol. When she compared
herself to the six-feet tall Nico, she said, “She was worldly, gorgeous and
guarded. I was the schlep from Levittown wearing T-shirts and dungarees,
having no self-condence whatsoever, trying not to be seen.”81 In turn Nico
said of Maureen, “She was the most normal in the group and also the most
strange. Andy [Warhol] didn’t know if she was a boy or a girl just by seeing
her, and that is funny, as he knew so many girls who were really boys. But
Moe was not a diva – unlike Lou.”82
Maureen Tucker was born in 1945 and brought up in Levittown on west-
ern Long Island, near the childhood homes of both Morrison and Reed. She
knew Morrison from the age of 1283 because he was her brother Jim’s friend.
Tucker claims that she took up drumming as a teenager because a drum
seemed quicker to learn than a guitar (and it was cheaper to buy a snare
drum than a Gretsch). She played very simple patterns, and so – as she had
little time for virtuosity – she had little to learn. Tucker played alone at home
on Long Island for her own pleasure, drumming along to the pulse of Bo
Diddley records as well as a cult LP, Drums Of Passion, by the Nigerian drum-
mer Babatunde Olatunji (1927–2003). His record of spiritual drumming in
praise of the Yoruba religion (an inuence on voodoo) had been released in
1960. From 1963 onwards Tucker had a job as a key-presser for rudimentary
computers. Apparently her mental and physical coordination was extraor-
dinary. Morrison said that, “She worked for a temping agency. They would
call her at noon and she’d work the afternoon but they’d pay her for a full
day… She could do more in an afternoon than most people could manage
in three days.”84
Tucker certainly had a rational approach to her drumming as well as
acutely specic values. In a very ne interview in Karen O’Brien’s survey
of women musicians, Hymn to Her, Tucker states: “I consciously, purposely,
didn’t learn more about drums because I didn’t want to sound like anybody
else… What I liked about the drumming was that the person was just in the
background, playing drums, keeping the tempo and not ever taking over the
song. I like Charlie Watts [of The Rolling Stones] for instance; he’s just there,
36 The Velvet Underground
he’s perfect, he never overtakes a song… I can’t stand drum solos. I just hate
them! I can’t stand really fancy drummers who are thrashing around… And
also I can’t stand songs where all you hear is that bass drum throughout the
whole song, it begins to drive me crazy!”85
What is most remarkable about Tucker – aside from her eventual role
as the rst famous female drummer in rock – is that she was thoroughly
idiosyncratic in her approach, as much from reasons of logic as ideology.
She didn’t like cymbals (she apparently had one but it was so clanky that
it was beyond use). Her kit comprised a standard four-piece set of snare,
two tomtoms and a bass drum (no hi-hat cymbals), but Tucker liked to
use the snare drum as a high tom-tom, and she didn’t use the bass drum
with a foot pedal but instead laid it on its side to strike it with her hand-
held beaters. As she had no foot pedals to control, instead of sitting on a
drum stool, she stood.
Tucker would play in this manner with The Velvet Underground from
December 1965 to late 1971. In 1970 she became pregnant with the rst of
her ve children, and Doug Yule’s brother Billy took over as drummer for a
period, a role he retained when she quit in 1971 following Morrison’s depar-
ture. She moved with her husband to Phoenix, Arizona. Having neglected
music for a decade, in 1982 she released her solo debut of cover versions,
with a further record of her own songs following in 1986. Now separated
from her husband, she moved to Douglas, Georgia, working for Wal-Mart.
Another Tucker album was released in 1989, nanced by one of the cele-
brated Penn and Teller magic entertainers, Penn Jellete. It included contri-
butions from Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground-inuenced post-punk
band Sonic Youth.86 She toured venues around Europe with Morrison and
her sons in 1994. Like Cale and Reed, she is still active as a creative musician
– but, unlike them, a grandmother.
Tucker entered the world of The Velvet Underground just two days
before its rst appearance at Summit High School on December 11th, 1965.
Up to that point the nascent Velvets had beneted from two different
drummers, Walter de Maria (January–April) and then Angus MacLise. De
Maria (b. 1935) is now one of the world’s leading sculptors, a founder of
the late 1960s Earthworks movement, and famed for his New Mexico site-
piece The Lighting Field (1977). Yet he started out in California as a trained
drummer, having studied as a teenager with a percussionist from the San
Francisco Philharmonic Orchestra. He became interested in free jazz and,
when he arrived in New York in 1960 as part of the LaMonte Young inva-
2 The Band 37
sion, he played a few sessions with trumpeter Don Cherry. His colleague
Tony Conrad asked him to help out in January 1965 as the drummer of The
Primitives with their crazy song, ‘Do The Ostrich’, and then on into the
emerging world of the Velvets.
However, this dramatically led the 29-year-old De Maria to face a crisis
and a change of creative focus, from music to art. As he put it, “When I
was with the Velvets, here was a real choice… Do I want to go to rehearsal
every day and every night, you know, take all these drugs?87 Do I really
want to keep playing these rhythms, is that going to be enough?… No, I’m
not going to haul those drums to another place and I just can’t keep play-
ing these songs.”88
Astonishingly, in the very next at to Cale’s there was another profes-
sionally trained Californian progressive drummer to take over. An excep-
tional gure on the downtown experimental scene as a poet, composer
and organizer of multimedia events throughout the 1960s, Angus MacLise
had in his youth enjoyed a formidable education in various styles of drum-
ming,89 including jazz at the Buddy Rich School (Rich was a celebrity swing
band drummer), orchestral percussion and Latin American techniques. In
1964 he travelled to Morocco to learn something of North African drum-
ming traditions, and when he returned in early 1965 he put what he’d
learnt at the disposal of LaMonte Young and also his Ludlow Street house
neighbours, Conrad and Cale. MacLise used his collection of free-stand-
ing, ethnic drums of various sizes including some from North Africa, India
and the Middle East. In comparison to the traditional rock drummer on a
coordinated drum set of snare drum, tom-toms, bass drum and cymbals,
MacLise was utterly extraordinary.
Unique he was, too, in his treatment of time. In line with Young and
Zazeela’s dilation of days and nights, MacLise had invented a new calen-
dar, the Universal Solar Calendar, with new names for each day of the year,
a practice of classifying which he and other artists observed in their writ-
ings.90 MacLise had so little sense of clock time, according to Cale, that it
was difcult to arrange rehearsals with him, and he would play along only if
he felt it right to him to do so. When Aronowitz announced the rst Velvets
gigs in December 1965, MacLise was said to have complained, “You mean we
start when they tell us to and we have to end when they tell us to? I can’t
work that way.” And he left.91
Desperate for a replacement in order to play at Summit High School,
Morrison suggested his friend Jim’s 19-year-old sister. According to
38 The Velvet Underground
A local gay fashion photographer became her best friend (Nico wanted
to be him, and he wanted to be her, she said), put her face in German fash-
ion magazines, and took her to Paris where Willy Maywald, one of the chief
fashion photographers of the 1950s, took her up as a cover girl. While work-
ing in Paris she heard of a celebrated nightclub owner, producer of a banned
lm by Jean Genet,93 and husband to the stunning French lm star Anouk
Aimée. He was called Nico Papatakis. Christa liked his rst name so much
that she stole it for herself, the androgyny of a male name on a tall, awless
paragon like Nico being a characteristic choice. Eventually by chance (Nico
preferred to call this fate) the two Nicos met at a Harper’s Bazaar dinner
party and “fell in love”.94 He ew her to New York now and again when he
had business there (they became a part of the archetypal “jet set”), while she
continued her work as a photographers’ model in Paris, eventually earning
enough to buy a villa for her mother on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Mean-
40 The Velvet Underground
while, Nico met the young French lm star Alain Delon and had a child by
him, Ari, whom Delon declined to recognize as his son.95
Among the many “beau monde” encounters and adventures around
this time, Nico managed to appear in one of the most controversial and
emblematic lms of the early 1960s, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, where
her character was called Nico. This appearance became her passport for the
next decade, as many viewers of the lm could remember the scene where
Marcello Mastroianni calls out “Nico!” on Via Veneto and, instead of a man,
a sensational woman appears. But she also relished the infamy of the lm,
traduced at the time as a “nihilist parade of depraved and idle scum”.96
In May 1964 she met Bob Dylan in Paris, had a short affair with him, and he
wrote a song or two for her, including ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ possibly about Ari
(although Nico said she couldn’t understand what Dylan sang to her. “Twing,
twang, twing, twang, baybee: that’s how it went”, she complained). When Lon-
don took over as the chic place to be, around 1964, Nico started to hang out there
where, among so many others, she had a quick but effective affair with Brian
Jones of The Rolling Stones. He arranged for Nico to record a Gordon Lightfoot
song, ‘I’m Not Sayin’’, which was released as a single in August 1965.
On this record Nico’s naturally low voice is raised and lightened a lit-
tle, revealing a fragile vibrato (too much like that of another Rolling Stone
girlfriend-singer, Marianne Faithfull). But the stronger, liquid, subterranean
timbre and the diction that would dene Nico in later years is already per-
ceptible. She based her vocal style entirely on that of the post-war German
lm star Hildegard Knef, whose songs were popular when Nico was growing
up. Knef in turn based hers on the Nazi pin-up Zarah Leander, who was heav-
ily promoted as the pro-Nazi version of the anti-Hitler Marlene Dietrich. In
all cases these voice were maternal, a phenomenon of the 1940s (Vera Lynn
in Britain, Edith Piaf in France, Dinah Shore in America, for example), and it
may be no coincidence that Nico took up singing only after the birth of Ari.
Therefore, when critics claim that Nico based her voice on Dietrich’s, they
are only three times removed from the truth.
Although Nico’s single was not a chart success, she later remembered an
aged record company man at a London party telling her, “Singles are history.
Each year people buy less and less. And girl singers only account for 20 per cent
of the sales… There is a future – a future for groups and a future for albums.
And I’ll tell you what – a girl leading a group, that would be a winner!”
While in Paris she had met Andy Warhol and his assistant Gerard Malanga,
who invited her to visit Warhol’s midtown studio The “Silver” Factory next
2 The Band 41
time she was in New York. As her London contacts, including photographer
David Bailey and Beatle Paul McCartney, began to tire of Nico’s loitering pres-
ence, her thoughts turned to New York. Armed with a copy of her single, she
ew there in November, where she found a little modelling work to keep her
going (she was now a venerable 27 years old). The Rolling Stones were tour-
ing the States then, and so Brian Jones took Nico to visit The Factory, which
she was disappointed to discover was merely the fourth oor of a warehouse,
covered in silver baking foil.
Warhol immediately gave her a “screen test”, which every intriguing
visitor had to endure, and she in turn gave him her copy of ‘I’m Not Sayin’’,
which the Warhol crew promptly played and “sort of liked”. A few days later
Warhol invited her to appear in one of the xed-camera two-reel lms he
was making at The Factory. Called The Closet (the gay subtext of which was
lost on her), Nico lived in a cupboard with gay boy Randy Borscheidt for 70
minutes of non-adventure. She would eventually appear in six Warhol lms,
including a leading part in his most famous, Chelsea Girls.
Warhol and his team, led by his manager Paul Morrissey, went along
to see The Velvet Underground perform, somewhere around the 19th of
December, during its curtailed residency at the Café Bizarre. While Mor-
rissey was interested in the band, he equally had a problem with it, and he
believed that the solution would be Nico. “I turned to Andy and said, ‘Andy,
the problem is these people have no singer. There’s a guy who sings [Reed]
but he’s got no personality and nobody pays the slightest attention to him.
They need someone with a bit of charisma.’ Andy nodded. So I suggested
Nico but I can’t remember if we got her to see the band.”97 Nico said that she
did once see the band at the Café.
Morrissey went on to recount how he offered the band a management
deal with money for the band to live on, to cover their rent and buy some
equipment. “But”, he added uneasily, “you need a singer…and, er, we know
this singer, and er, what if she sang with your group?” They listened to Nico’s
record. Morrissey watched their reaction: “Right away that sour little Lou
Reed bristled. He was hostile to Nico from the start. I told them I thought
that Nico could be part of The Velvet Underground and just t in there under
that name. Lou replied, ‘Let’s keep Nico separate in this. The Velvet Under-
ground – and Nico’.” As Nico observed on how she was placed last, “That’s
because I was the girl”.
The Velvet Underground – and Nico – was nally formed, though hardly
primed, for the next stage of its highly erratic life.
3 Reed
Three supreme rocksong writers have turned the ordinary into the extraor-
dinary. They are Chuck Berry (b. 1926), Ray Davies of The Kinks (b. 1944),
and Lou Reed. In his pre-Velvet years Reed played Berry songs in public such
as ‘No Particular Place To Go’, ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘School Day’, ‘Carol’, ‘Mem-
phis, Tennessee’ and ‘Rock And Roll Music’. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones
and The Animals played these, too; John Lennon said, “If you were trying to
give rock & roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.”1
When the Velvets rst performed publicly in late 1965, and even dur-
ing 1966, they often covered such songs, initially because they didn’t have
enough of their own, but also to offset the more experimental improvisa-
tions they offered. The improvisations told the audience where the Velvets
“were at”, while the Berry songs make it clear where they came from. Berry’s
simple but slyly witty songs, mainly about the frustrations of teenage life, at
once evoked a 1950s world left behind by the Velvets’ audiences.
In Britain The Kinks had also begun with Berry numbers, in 1962, and their
early albums mixed rhythm & blues standards with Ray Davies’s rst songs
such as ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day And All Of The Night’. When John
Cale returned from London in the late summer of 1965 with the Kinda Kinks
album, he and Reed realized that they faced pressing competition in their aim
to expand the subject matter and the sound world of rock. Two Kinks’ songs
in particular must have raised an alarm. ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’ is almost
– almost – a heroin song, and ‘See My Friends’ runs mainly on a drone. How-
ever, Reed had no need to chase Davies. Their careers ran a remarkable, parallel
course. While Reed’s songs always dealt through subtle wit with social obser-
vation, Davies moved only gradually to satire, starting in 1966 with ‘Dedicated
Follower Of Fashion’ and following it with ‘Sunny Afternoon’, about the new
phenomenon then of whinging rock stars. By 1970, however, it is as though
Reed and Davies had interfused in the latter’s “Lola”, an account of meeting,
in “a club down in old Soho”, Lola who “walked like a woman and talked like a
man”. There is an irony that this immensely successful song of Davies’s, com-
prising just three adjacent pitches, would appear at the very time that Reed
quit not only The Velvet Underground but the music business entirely. Three
years later Reed would live with Rachel, formerly known as Tommy.
3 Reed 43
(1) Observation
Reed’s songs are often about people who are characterized. That is, they
are identied, through words, by distinguishing features or qualities. These
characters are described, given an account of. Sometimes they have names
(“Severin awaits you” in ‘Venus In Furs’; “Teenage Mary said to Uncle Dave”
in “Run Run Run”) but other times not (“Here she comes, you better watch
your step” in ‘Femme Fatale’). We the listeners are often given roles, too.
We are “You” in ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Femme Fatale’, and the “Your” in ‘I’ll Be
Your Mirror’; we are “my friend” in ‘There She Goes Again’. In other words,
we too are assigned a status within the situation wherein the characters
operate. In most cases Reed is the narrator, describing a scene or warning
us of our position in it (“Watch out, the world’s behind you” in ‘Sunday
Morning’), but, to add a disconcerting insecurity in order to enrich the
account, he often switches between narrator, subject, and character. For
example, ‘Sunday Morning’ shifts between “I” and “you”; ‘I’m Waiting For
The Man’ also moves between “I” and “you” – “You gotta wait, I’m waiting
for my man”, while Reed plays a third character who shouts “Hey, white
boy…”, and nally describes “my dear, dear friend” the dealer, “he”.
Reed has often commented on the way he likes to be other people,
to embody a character but at the same time to stress that this character
isn’t him: “Put all the characters together and it’s certainly an autobiogra-
phy. It’s just not necessarily mine.”2 He has also implied that, as he is the
singer throughout the second and third albums, this consistency provides
a narrative unity. By this means the main character of the third album
(1969) is apparently the girlfriend of the junkie narrator of the rst two3
(released 1967, 1968). There is actually very little to link the songs together
44 The Velvet Underground
for this work, which we’ll come to. But part of this need for characterization
derives from his generally weak singing voice, the reason why Morrissey
and Warhol wanted Nico in the band as “the singer”. Just as Reed had “taken
up” Dylan’s nasal brogue in the early 1960s, these characters are surely his
attempt to construct his own Dylans, in that they exist for the benet of his
voice as much as they do for his words.
(2) Simplicity
While admitting that “I personally think that writing something simply is
the hardest thing you can do”,8 Reed conrms time and again that this is
his objective. To achieve this he mostly uses words of one syllable (“And
I guess that I just don’t know” in ‘Heroin’; “When you think the night has
seen your mind” in ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’) or one and two syllables (“I’ll be
your mirror, reect what you are” in ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’; “Downy sins of
streetlight fancies” in ‘Venus In Furs’). The most extravagant words he tends
to use are those of three syllables: “myriad”, “demurely”, and, for that mat-
ter, “heroin”, where, in the song of that name, each syllable is smoothly
savoured.9
Reed’s economy in choice of syllables is partnered with an economy
of expression, such as “Let me be your eyes” in ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’. He has
said elsewhere that “I always wanted to write a song called ‘I Love You’ and
make it fresh. If I could take a phrase like that and turn it into something,
then that would be a real accomplishment.”10 Above all there is the very
notion of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ for which “the poor girl” sits and cries
in “a hand-me-down gown”. This was understandably Warhol’s favourite
song.
Morrissey considers that Reed got on so well with Warhol for this voyeur-
istic reason, that they were both “a little without personality so they looked
around to absorb it from others”.13 Reed saw himself in a more positive light
as a kind of ethnographer, reporting on the behaviour of those he came
across who were dispossessed of convention, or indisposed to it.
Characters Reed lighted on tended anyway to be the most self-seeking, like
the transvestite Candy Darling (James Slattery) of ‘Candy Says’ or the drugged
Bridget Polk “all wrapped in foil” (‘Chelsea Girls’). In fact, although there are in
his output only a few descriptions of transgendered characters, such as Pep-
per in ‘Chelsea Girls’ who’s “having fun/She think she’s some man’s son”, it
remains one of the few factors by which we can connect Reed to that project
of sexual emancipation by which the 1960s has been strongly identied. In his
references to gay life, for example, he said, “My gay people don’t lisp. They’re
not any more affected than the straight world. They just are.”14
In this regard, by the way, it is sometimes wondered whether ‘I’m Waiting
For The Man’ has a gay subtext, as the phrase “The Man” appears only in the
title. Reed sings “my man” – “I’m waiting for my man/Twenty-six dollars in my
hand”. The subway station rendezvous (“Lexington 125”) adds a hustler touch,
and the line that women are furthest from his mind aids this alternative read-
ing, as does the “sweet taste” satisfaction once he’s met “his man”.
For a more direct example of candid sexual reportage, ‘Sister Ray’ is about
“a bunch of drag queens taking a bunch of sailors home with them, shooting
up on smack and having an orgy when the police appear”.15 But, while ‘Chelsea
Girls’ is an account of real people (rather sad ones, it has to be said, some of
whom we see in Warhol’s corresponding lm16), ‘Sister Ray’ is ction, which
may explain its more cartoon-like, exultant style. Reed has explained that it
“echoes” scenes from Hubert Selby Jr’s novel Last Exit To Brooklyn (1962).17 Yet
‘Sister Ray’ may in the end be one of Reed’s aberrant songs, of which there
are three others of the same period – his spoken stories ‘The Gift’ and ‘The
Murder Mystery’ and his experimental ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’, which was
an attempt at spontaneous writing in the style of Jack Kerouac and his fellow
Beats (the Black Angel in question was a yacht tethered at the 79th Street Basin
and owned by one of the former Eldorados18). For the most part Reed based
his characters and situations on observations of those who, as Phil Lesh of The
Grateful Dead said, were “breaking out”.
Reed’s second link to the 1960s Zeitgeist is that of drugs. While the West
Coast rockers were advocating psychedelics, Reed was writing about heroin
and amphetamine, drugs as much associated with danger as with pleasure
3 Reed 47
due to the criminal scene associated with the trafcking of them. Just as ‘I’m
Waiting For The Man’ – at least on the surface – describes how Reed scored
smack in Spanish Harlem (his university girlfriend recalled driving him to buy
drugs: “I remember going up to 125th Street. Really vile, nasty hallways”19), so
‘Heroin’ and ‘White Light/White Heat’ are songs of experience.
‘Heroin’ doesn’t acclaim the drug or censure it. Instead an encounter is
described. The effect of injecting heroin into a vein is likened through a sim-
ile to a trip on a subway train, represented by the music accelerating from
a terminal and hurtling along, ecstatically faster and faster (“rushing on my
run”), but ultimately, “Thank God I’m as good as dead”, only for the cycle to
recommence. It’s probably the rst song written about heroin that doesn’t
preach or pretend it’s about something else. The religious rapture invoked in
it (“And I feel just like Jesus’ son”) was endorsed by Nico: “It is when you use
it the rst thousand times that you feel like a god. Of course, I am supposed
to be a goddess now and so I am bored after a million million times. But it
is something he knew. It is a song of feeling, not about Lou being someone
else.”20
(4) Latency
When Bridget in ‘Chelsea Girls’ is “all wrapped in foil/You wonder if she
can uncoil”, this eccentric image presumably refers to the act of “chasing
the dragon”, of heating heroin powder on a sheet of baking foil and sucking
in the resultant fumes through a foil tube. Nico’s own account of the effect
of heroin is that “you are wrapped in fur”. Reed’s metonymic image of foil
for the effects of heroin, together with the triple meaning of “wrapped (up)/
rapt”, is one of a small number of more complex images in his output, as he
otherwise prefers to be direct. Perhaps his most inferential song is ‘Sunday
Morning’, a seemingly innocuous number that is really about the morning-
after paranoia a night on drugs can release (“Watch out, the world’s behind
you”), which is how Nico understood it to be.21
In this, Reed is unlike Dylan who, from 1964 onwards, made a speciality
of surreal images (“Einstein disguised as Robin Hood/With his memories
in a trunk…”, ‘Desolation Row’, 1966). The re-emergence in the 1960s of
bizarre juxtapositions (of the kind we nd in dreams) by which surreal-
ism had made its name, was partly a result of the baby-boom generation
nding parallels between the work of inter-war surrealist writers and art-
ists (especially Salvador Dalí, who visited Warhol’s Factory in 1966) with
48 The Velvet Underground
– Delmore Schwarz. Sarcastic lines like “You spit on those under twenty-
one”/“You want to make love to the scene” echo Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling
Stone’ (released in July 1965) with Dylan’s recurring accusatory use of “didn’t
you?”27 Reed even uses a Dylanesque voice. That he had to echo Dylan to
achieve this degree of bile shows how far it helped Reed with his singing
to adopt characteristics of others, however ctitious they may have been.
Yet this spiteful song also brings together two of Reed’s heroes, Dylan and
Schwarz. It seems to show off that side of Reed described by Paul Morrissey
as “sour”, and by Nico who said that “Lou could spit poison when he kissed
you”.28 There is more to mention on Schwarz and ‘European Son’.
(5) Humour
It’s on the second album, White Light/White Heat, where the “funny” songs
are, in all senses. Reed has explained that the sole spoken track, ‘The Gift’,29 is
a story he wrote when he was a student at Syracuse. While his girlfriend was
back home in the Midwest he wrote letters to her, including this narrative
parodying his own situation – of a boy who posts himself as a parcel to his
girlfriend only to be sliced in half as she tries to open the box with her father’s
sheet-metal cutter. But this is wet-blooded rather than dry humour. As a lyric
it came out of the band’s desire to improvise (being a spoken short story, it
can be adjusted to t any length of musical material), and also Reed’s need
to recycle good material from his university days when put under pressure to
produce repertory. For the record, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ was apparently another
song for his university sweetheart (although elsewhere Reed mentioned that
he elaborated this from a phrase of Nico’s when they were briey lovers),
while ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ was a further undergraduate lyric.
Most well known among Reed’s waggish output is his solo song ‘Walk
On The Wild Side’ (“Shaved her legs and then he was a she”) and the lit-
tle comic song of 1968 sung by Maureen Tucker ‘I’m Sticking With You’
(“cause I’m made out of glue”). Yet his earlier songs are also peppered with
humour and irony. Take, for example, the misunderstanding in ‘I’m Wait-
ing For The Man’ as to why he’s in East Harlem (“Hey white boy, you chasin’
our women around[?]/Oh pardon me sir, it’s furthest from my mind…”),
the “Don Giovanni” realization that the Femme Fatale has a book of con-
quests (“You’re number 37, have a look”), or the whole satire of ‘Venus
In Furs’ with its baroque inversions (“Comes in bells, your servant, don’t
forsake him”) and the sick fun of ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ from the sec-
ond album, where surgery – possibly for a sex change – goes wrong. This
50 The Velvet Underground
(a) The “Beat” writers of the 1940s and 1950s such as Jack Kerouac (1922–69)
whose “spontaneous” On The Road (1957) set the Beat fad for writing as
reporting, William Burroughs (1914–97) whose novel The Naked Lunch helped
to establish his notion that language is a virus and not a tool of liberation, and
the poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–97), author of the angst-ridden confessional
epic Howl (1956).
3 Reed 51
(b) Classy detective writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as
well as the novelist Hubert Selby.
(c) The pre-Beat elegance of Delmore Schwarz, who was a writer-in-residence at
Syracuse University from September 1962, during Reed’s last two years there.
(d) The writers of the rock’n’roll and doo-wop repertory from the 1950s with
whom Reed associated himself, Chuck Berry above all.
What connects these diverse American artists are their creative contribu-
tions to those aspects of 1940s and 1950s US culture delineated in the rst
chapter, and their work as, or about, American “outsiders” – for example,
Allen Ginsberg claimed that to be a junkie in America was like having been
a Jew in Nazi Germany.33 To take each in turn:
(a) Beat
In summary, the “Beat Generation” is the name given to a mainly metro-
politan subculture34 prevalent in post-war USA (main duration, 1943–63).
Principally dened by literature – and so by a few key writers – it was rmly
inuenced by the philosophical viewpoints of existentialism in its efforts
to address human detachment. There’s a slight paradox, then, in the Beat
writers’ account of their adversarial abandonment of social norms on the
one side, and their rampant desire for social fellowship on the other. It was
rather “lonesome cowboy” and “live it up, lads” at one and the same time.
At the level of lifestyle,35 a Beat follower was dened in 1960 by Elias
Wilentz as “a kid with a beard, rumpled clothes, sandals, bongo drum, jazz
records and a copy of Howl. Hints of sexual immoralities and use of drugs
add a perverted glamour.”36 Lou Reed is discernible in the second sentence,
if not the rst. The movement to which Reed subscribed from 1958 was con-
sidered by several critics of it to be pseudo-intellectual, full of affected pos-
turing, and to consist of young people who wished they were old, tired of
life, hanging around café-bars for death to catch up with them, intemperate
of those who embraced “the (capitalist) system” with its notion of working
optimistically in the present for the future. This different view of time led
the Beats and their associates to turn to improvisation with its “ever-present
newness now”.37
In one sense, then – that of existential despair – the Beat writers were
a literary counterpart to the abstract expressionist painters. But there was
an inversion of principles at play. The Beats were working in reaction to a
literary clique of inter-war abstract modernism. That is, the Beats moved
back to representation and aimed to deal with depictions of “real life” as
52 The Velvet Underground
they each subjectively saw it. Being bourgeois Romantics, the Beats cut out
of their concerns the social conformists around them to replace them with
the outlawed, the urban reprobates and the vagabonds of the street scene.
In other words, the Beats were the most recent revival of the Bohemians, an
early nineteenth-century youthful reaction to the development of mecha-
nized industry, where Bohemian meant “gypsy-like” (“of Bohemia”), a sub-
culture associated with unbridled artistic aspiration, poverty from being in
advance of the market, and in consequence a connection with the disen-
franchised in order to be free of conventional social responsibilities.
So, in among their subcultural selections of difference, the Beats one cen-
tury on chose criminality (in 1946 William Burroughs became an apprentice
pickpocket; ve years he later accidently shot his wife) while in music they
picked the polarizing improvisations of Dizzy Gillespie and his “hepcat” kind,
with an overstated regard for black creativity that ran near to racism.38 Down
in the cellar bars of the Beats, it was all about sex and drugs and be-bop jazz.
But the “beat” in question was not the beat of jazz drummers. A self-
conscious, constructed term, its original meaning was “beaten up”. In 1950
Kerouac had written about “the pit and prune-juice of pure beat life itself”.39
“Beat” as a subcultural signier really evolved after a Beat-friendly writer,
James Clellon Holmes, introduced it in a New York Times magazine article of
1952. As “Beat” became taken up by the media, Kerouac, who had converted
to Buddhism in 1955,40 suddenly attempted to give the term a positive spin,
relating it to a state of blessedness – “beatitude”. As this contrived pun was
hardly consistent with the miserablist, downbeat character of his writing,
the former meaning stuck. It became, in fact, by this time an alternative
term to another epithet put to use, from the mid 1940s onwards, to describe
someone – black or white – who was into the new jazz and the style of
dress, drugs and patois associated with the marking-out of this new subcul-
tural territory – “hep”.
From the West African Wolof name for savvy or smart, “hep/hip” evolved
in a way that held on, throughout its use, to the notion of being aware of
the new and of being condent with it. In contrast “Beat” took on the role
of dening those who, although they embraced difference, did not acknowl-
edge the progressive changes that the “hepcat” accepted. In their maturing as
a boundaried, absorbed scene the Beats became easy targets for media sat-
ire. When the rst Soviet satellite went into space in 1957, a journalist wrote
that the Beats were as “far out” as Sputnik.41 Thus the “beatnik” was launched,
and the commercialization and Hollywoodization of the oversized-black-
3 Reed 53
sweatered rebel image followed on.42 As a nal shift in this taming of “Beat”,
it would be taken up in name for cute, identically suited and hairstyled pop
stars. The etymological path of both “beat” and “hip”43 is roughly as follows:
Reed was 16 in 1958 and he took on the lifestyle of a beatnik, just before
the time that his “deviancy” was rewarded with electroconvulsive therapy at
the Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital. This truly radical act permitted by
his parents and administered by the authorities should not divert us from
understanding just how restrained in its own radicalism Beat subculture was.
More than anything it was a backlash against the oppressively condent,
positive and economically liberal nature of the dominant culture.
Given the apolitical, abstracted condition of beatnik subculture,44 an
alternative emerged from those who shared the Beats’ dissatisfaction with
social values but who sought change through cooperative and directly
political action rather than personal non-conformism. These were the activ-
ists, especially students, who together became known as The Movement.
According to student activist Casey Hayden in 1963, “the beatniks were – and
are – just the Movement without altruism and energy. They are alienated by
exactly the same things we are, but they just can’t act on their discontent in
an effective political way.”45
A difference in musical taste distinguished them, too. Activists tended
to support folk music of the kind Reed took up for a time at university (see
Chapter 1), while beatniks followed modern jazz, shifting from be-bop
(Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk) and hard bop, through
the “cool” subgenre of the mid 1950s (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill
Evans) to the free jazz of the late 1950s (Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman,
Cecil Taylor). Bob Dylan’s success in 1963 came from his extraordinary abil-
ity to appeal simultaneously to these two subcultures, as a beatnik poet
with a guitar as much as a civil rights “folkie”. He was aided by the fact that
around that time the free-jazz movement had become highly politicized
and supportive of black consciousness campaigns, thus posing an exclu-
54 The Velvet Underground
sion too far for some white fans, who then switched to Dylan and the
emergence of folk-rock. In sum, the contrast is as follows:
1945–60 1955–65
Jazz Folk
Individualist Activist
Esoteric Popular (“of the people”)
Instrument-based Lyric-based
Polyphony Homophony
Black White46
By the time that The Velvet Underground started up in 1965 there were
three main radical, adverserial “tribes” available for afliation in the social
life of young adults. While the Hippies and the Activists advanced towards
maturity, the third grouping was a remnant of 1950s Beat ideology. It was
searching for a clear stylistic position from which to differentiate itself from
these formidable, utopian, progressive forces. Generally, beatniks of Lou
Reed’s tendency had by now manneristically taken up 1950s rock’n’roll, a
musical movement concordant with the original Beat period, and with an
apolitical, “good-times” feel that was now being evoked ironically (Sterling
Morrison was the Velvet member most consistently plugged in to this cur-
rent). Practitioners were here concerned far more with the force of the
music than with nesse, and it was a move against the growing trend to
virtuosity (see Maureen Tucker’s comments on this in Chapter 2).
But this subculture had also shifted resolutely against intellectualism. Since
the 1950s, a prominent intellectual wing associated with the Beat scene had
adopted a less elitist and more radical socialist agenda, aligning itself with the
growing wave of activism. In contrast, the anti-intellectual wing emerged out
of the misanthropic, unsociable side of the beatnik subculture, and it gained
the tentative name “punk”, meaning crude or rotten, in part from a 1957
book about deviants by Leo Margulies, The Young Punks. Their music became
described as “garage”, from the domestic site where a band might work it up,
a name that promoted the notion of home-grown amateurism.
In terms of ideology the differences may be listed thus:
So, Lou Reed could not only claim that he was inuenced by Beat writers
but also that he took up their agenda one generation on, emerging from the
caterpillar of the beatnik to the buttery of the punk, a black-leather buttery
in blue jeans and dark glasses. However, we’ve yet to determine how he might
have been attracted to the likes of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac and how
they may have inuenced his lyric writing. There are seven aspects:
Lou’s women in their songs are mad, you know. They are
deranged in some way. Of course, Andy told me that Edie
[Sedgwick] was mad, that her brothers went mad and com-
mitted suicide. And she went mad. ‘Femme Fatale’ is sup-
posed to be about Edie, isn’t it? It’s also supposed to be about
me. Maybe we are all mad to Lou. Maybe that’s why he likes
boys so much.52
56 The Velvet Underground
(ii) Sexuality
One of several reasons why Ginsberg committed himself to psychiatric care
in 1949 was that he wanted to be cured of his homosexuality. Told by his
university professor that he must choose between “criminals and society”
he sought the latter, but in the end he found the world not through the
nuthouse but through his poetry where he declared his gay sexuality and
celebrated it in many of his works.
Ginsberg was gay, as was Burroughs. Kerouac was bisexual, if not,
as the navy claimed (and the navy would know), ambisexual. Ginsberg
wrote that “Burroughs is one of the very few gay liberation minds…that
has actually questioned sex at the root – not merely rebelled from het-
erosexual conditioning or heterosexual social/moral xed formation – to
explore love between men as he experienced it.”53 This encomium places
Burroughs on a more exalted plane than his actual books might have you
believe, with their down-to-earth allusions to “queers”, “fruits”, “fags” and
“cocksuckers”, but perhaps “cocksucker” is what Ginsberg meant by “sex
at the root”.
While Kerouac carried too much Catholic guilt to write openly about
his male encounters, it was well known that the “buddy” odyssey On The
Road was a record of his affair with fellow writer Neal Cassady. How-
ever, Ginsberg made up for any confessional reluctance by his colleague
Beats in his narrative poem Howl, its biblical vocabulary evoked in homage
to the pioneer gay poet Walt Whitman. As historian John D’Emilio has
observed:
One of the things [Lou] did was sit down and just make up
songs. At the drop of a hat he would be singing about how we
would go and see Walter de Maria in his loft and so on… He
had such an ease with language.61
58 The Velvet Underground
Although his facility in improvising texts had been honed by his work for
Pickwick International, Reed’s interest in marrying this with improvised music
incontestably arose from his experience of free-jazz performances and record-
ings between 1959 and 1962, when he was a young beatnik attending shows
at the Five-Spot Club (see Chapter 2). Cecil Taylor, whose tracks he played on
the university radio station, would often vocalize while playing the piano, and
in early 1965, when the Velvets were starting up, John Coltrane’s album A Love
Supreme was released with a poem by Coltrane, which determined the struc-
ture and melodic rhythm of the nal section, printed on the album sleeve.
In sum, there were many recent and current examples of the marriage
between words and improvised music to be found in the modern jazz scene.
That Reed managed to transfer this to rock music is an intriguing, if short-
lived, achievement, and one entirely lost to account. He was supported by
Cale whose original idea was “to create an orchestral chaos in which Lou
could spontaneously create lyrics”.62
There was a major difference, however, between Rexroth’s “talkin’ with
music” and Reed’s: Rexroth maintained that the sound world should be
“small and comparatively quiet”.
(v) Reality
The Beat project came about originally in 1944 as “The New Vision”, a literary
pursuit made against what its protagonists saw as a tired imitation of Euro-
3 Reed 59
pean styles by Americans such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. They felt that they were
Americans who wanted to be Americans, while the other Americans wished to
be French. “Real words” and American vernacular phrases were used to make
clear to readers and critics how little the Beat writers were concerned with
current and, to their eyes, outmoded and elitist notions of “ne writing”.
The character based on Neal Cassady declared in Kerouac’s On The Road
that, “One should write as newly as possible, as if he were the rst person on
earth and was humbly and sincerely putting on paper that which he saw and
experienced and loved and lost.” When Ginsberg rst read Howl to a public
at a gallery in San Francisco, October 1955, the poster boasted an evening of
“ALL SHARP NEW STRAIGHTFORWARD WRITING”.
Time and again Reed refers to the realism of his songs, which were writ-
ten about people he knew in situations he’d faced (the most signicant of his
remarks on this appear in Chapter 2). Yet he also considered the “reality” of the
genre in his desire to create lyrics capable of commanding attention by them-
selves and thus evading their depreciation as “words to a song”. He attempted
this by composing his texts with other generic forms in mind: “Instead of mak-
ing a division between pop songs and a real story or a real poem, [I was] merg-
ing them so the separation didn’t exist any more.”65 In 1970 he gave his rst
poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in East Village, announcing that from now
on he was a poet. He would include song lyrics in this and subsequent recitals,
on which he’s observed that, “I was continually struck by the different voices
that emerged when the words were heard without music.”66
In 1991 Reed organized a book of his selected verses, Between Thought and
Expression, which included both ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ and ‘The Mur-
der Mystery’ as well as ‘Heroin’ and ‘Chelsea Girls’ (certain lines were repeated
in print as he would have sung them). In this way, thirty years on in print, he
aligned himself through the bookshop rather than the record store with the
Beats’ afrmation of poetry as “all sharp new straightforward writing”.
New York writer Norman Mailer in 1957. In his essay of that year, “The
White Negro: Supercial Reections on the Hipster”,71 Mailer identied
that: “the source of Hip is the Negro” who had lived for two centuries on
“the margin between totalitarianism and democracy”. In contemporary
Greenwich Village, Mailer notes how “the bohemian and the juvenile
delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro”, the ménage-à-trois form-
ing the hipster.
As the essay shifts ground from the “Negro” to the “White Negro” as its
subject, Mailer goes on to consider the hipster as a “philosophical psycho-
path”, the latter term used in its contemporary sense then of someone who
is not actually delusive or inchoate but is nonetheless emotionally unstable,
unable to form personal relationships and indifferent to social obligations.
Adding the former term to the latter, though, allows that “Hip is the sophis-
tication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle”, for hipsters are conscious
of their state, unlike the “ten million Americans who are more or less psy-
chopathic” but unaware of it. He cites popular psychologist Robert Lindner
whose term “rebel without a cause”, to describe a psychopath, Mailer now
applies to the hipster.
After considering Hip patois as a dynamic, pictorial language about
change – go, beat, cool, dig, ip, creep – Mailer presciently wonders
whether Hip’s sexual impetus may “rebound against the anti-sexual
foundation of every organized power in America” – yes, it did – and he
concludes by considering whether a radically different world is truly con-
ceived by “the hipster’s desire for absolute sexual freedom” or whether
this desperate outlaw is “equally a candidate for the most reactionary and
most radical of movements”.
In sum, Mailer’s essay is all about Lou Reed the beatnik, the punk, and
the writer of ‘Heroin’, ‘Sister Ray’, and ‘I Wanna Be Black’.
(vii) Intensity
According to Thomas Newhouse, the Beats didn’t care “about whether it was
well-made, but about its intensity”; their mode of operation was “behavioural
rather than aesthetic”.72 The Velvet Underground characterized the punk con-
viction that virtuosity was arid decoration. They gazed at the burning building
not the curls of smoke in the air above it. It has become a cliché to write, as far
too many have, that White Light/White Heat is the worst-recorded album in
the history of music. In terms of its sound, however, it is certainly one of the
most intense.
62 The Velvet Underground
(c) Schwarz
This need not detain us long. The association between Delmore Schwarz
(1913–66) and Lou Reed is a brief and exaggerated one, more material than
intellectual. It may be read as a case of undergraduate hero worship aggran-
dized afterwards into a “buddy-buddy” coupling straight out of a Beat book.
Schwarz was the rst famous writer Reed had met. Before they encountered
each other as drugged-up lecturer and drugged-up student in the autumn of
1962 at Syracuse, there were two links between them:
(i) Schwarz and Reed were both Jewish and born in Brooklyn, Schwarz three
decades earlier.
(ii) In 1957 Schwarz was committed to the psychiatric division of the Bellevue Hos-
pital in Manhattan and later moved to the Payne-Whitney Clinic, where he was
diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1959 Reed attended the Payne-Whitney
Clinic following his treatment at the Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital to
cure his teenage angst.
of that elitist literary clique so detested by the Beats; the modernist James
Joyce was his literary hero. In turn, he called Ginsberg and company the
“San Francisco Howlers” and dismissed them as “faggots”, even though he
conceded that they tted into the overarching American literary project
he dened as “criticism of American life”.76 He poked fun at existentialism,
dousing Heidegger’s formulation that “no one else can die for you” as “no
one else can take a bath for you”.77
Reed has never mentioned Schwarz’s poems but four aspects of the
elder’s work may have vaguely inuenced Reed’s lyric writing:
like little more than a song of loathing to the eminent poet, one who detested
rock music. Schwarz had refused to see Reed when the former student had
tried to visit the forlorn recluse, who was living out his last days in a downbeat
mid-town New York hotel.
How far this song is about, rather than “for”, Schwarz, it’s not possible to
discern, and in later pressings of the album the dedication is missing. Never-
theless, and fortunately for Schwarz, he was far better memorialized by Saul
Bellow, as Schwarz – the “East River grey”-faced “hero of wretchedness” – is
the Humboldt of Humboldt’s Gift (1975) which helped Bellow win the 1976
Nobel Prize for Literature.
(1) Fluxus
When Cale co-produced “A Little Festival of New Music” at Goldsmiths Col-
lege in London on July 6th, 1963, he gave the British première of X for Henry
Flynt, composed by LaMonte Young two years earlier.2 Composer and Gold-
smiths tutor Cornelius Cardew had introduced Cale to this text composition.
Cardew met Young when the American was a guest of Strockhausen’s at the
Darmstadt Summer School (for Modern Music) in Germany in the summer
of 1959. At that time Young was still writing some pieces that used conven-
tional notation while he was also developing an interest in giving instructions
to performers through the written word – “performers” rather than “musi-
cians”, by the way, meaning that you didn’t have to play an instrument or
read music to take part. These instructions were conceptual in character, and
Young through his Fluxus pieces became a progenitor of what became called
“conceptual art”.3 Wim Mertens, in his book on minimal music,4 divides
Young’s work of this time into three periods:
X for Henry Flynt falls into the middle period of Merten’s bald sum-
mary, one that conceals the infamously seditious and controversial nature
of Young’s music. Its proper title is Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. Flynt
4 Cale 67
At the time that Cale gave this British première Young was merely a
name to him, one among a number associated with the Fluxus movement,
centred in New York City. Cardew had considered Young to be especially
interesting because he was a composer, while other Fluxus artists had
joined in from visual arts or poetry backgrounds. However, the whole
point of Fluxus was that it fused different art forms together. Artist George
Brecht wrote that:
68 The Velvet Underground
While the line-up changed now and again,24 readers will recognize three
names from Chapter 2 who are linked to the early days of the Velvets – Tony
Conrad, the drummer Angus MacLise, and the lm director Jack Smith who
had bought the tape machine on which the Velvets’ Ludlow Tapes were
made (Smith was also a decisive inuence on Warhol’s decision to make
lms about sex). Cale with his viola joined this ensemble around September
1963. At some point in the life of the group, MacLise moved over to his hand
drums (perhaps shifting from violin when Cale joined). Without setting a
regular pulse, he would play subtle rhythms and micro-patterns.25 When he
left for a time to travel to North Africa in February 1964 he was not replaced
and The Theatre of Eternal Music was drumless once again. The overall
sound remained throughout the combining of extensively sustained notes
with silences in between, and a fair degree of improvisation.
The Theatre of Eternal Music also split into components to perform
other Young-conceived improvisations. Sometimes they would take one of
Young’s blues, where Young would play his E-at sopranino saxophone26 and
other times give public performances of samples of Young’s repertoire. One
studio recording mentioned by Potter uses MacLise’s calendar27 to describe
its date: “The First Twelve Sunday Morning Blues” (that is, Sunday January
12th, 1964). Cale performs on this. The order of pieces form a symmetrical
sequence as follows:
1 2 3 4 5
Sax and drones Gong duet Young piano solo Gong duet Sax and drones
The common factor is Young who fronts all of the sections. His egoism
began to irritate Cale, who then developed ambitions to run his own ensem-
ble. Cale hadn’t come all the way to New York to play one note for two years
without recognition and advancement. This explains the contrary accounts
of Young’s next project:
72 The Velvet Underground
(e) The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964– )/The Dream Syndicate
(1964– )
What seems to be agreed between Young and Cale is that they, with Zazeela
and Conrad, came together as a quartet at some point after MacLise’s Atlan-
tic crossing: Young and Zazeela singing, Conrad on violin, Cale on viola (he
also played an Indian – plucked – string drone instrument called the sarinda,
which can also be heard on the “Ludlow Tapes”). According to Young he used
the quartet to realize his new work called The Tortoise, His Dreams and Jour-
neys (Young and Zazeela kept turtles). Like The Four Dreams Of China, it was
epic in scale and composed of sections with lengthy, poetic titles. One such
is The Tortoise Droning Selected Pitches from the Holy Numbers for the Two Black
Tigers, the Green Tiger and the Hermit. Zazeela explains that the totem animals
were herself and Young as the two black tigers (because they dressed alike in
black), Conrad was the Green Tiger and Cale the Hermit; “If you know him
he’s a very interior kind of person and has a lot of secrets”.28 The Holy Num-
bers are the integers 2, 3 and 7 which feature a lot in Young’s work. Sections
were realized around a constant sine tone (60 Herz29) which later became
the hum of the electrical motor on the turtles’ tank in Young and Zazeela’s
loft, which they amplied.
In contrast to this version of Young’s, Cale states that “Tony and I formed
The Dream Syndicate… The concept of the group was to sustain notes for
two hours at a time.” He adds, “This was my rst group experience and what
an experience it was! It was so different! The tapes of it are art objects.”30
Cale seems to be describing Tortoise under another name (one where only
the notable word “Dream” is kept) and under another leader. It seems that
for Cale this project was the transitional step between The Theatre of Eter-
nal Music and The Velvet Underground. He tantalizingly mentions tapes of
the undertaking. Young taped all rehearsals of all projects that took place
in his loft, and he is the owner of these tapes. But these particular tapes
are not commercially available due, it’s claimed, to a quarrel between the
protagonists. This is a state of affairs due, so it seems, to the question of a
composer’s role within an already creative group dynamic, indeed to the
difference between the musical work as a construction and the work as an
experience.
Young has said of his compositions around this time, which are not
notated,31 that he set “rules and elements” for the performers, who worked
within – or from – this concordance. Individual improvisation by its nature
means that each performer makes a creative contribution to the overall
4 Cale 73
work at some stage, not just in a particular performance, but – while the
work is rehearsed – within its genesis.32 As Keith Potter puts it:
However, the dispute appears to run even deeper than that. It is apparently
about the intellectual property34 – the creative ownership – of the project.
Whatever subsequent disagreement there has been about this vocal/
strings quartet, one aspect of its genesis in Cale’s version surely rings true. On
the tape of ‘Sunday Morning Blues’, mentioned above, Young can be heard
playing a continuous, bubbling and very high-register stream of sound on his
sopranino saxophone (Smith has transcribed this in his essay35). Cale writes
that on a similar occasion he started to imitate Young’s sound of this kind
on his viola by using high harmonics. Young noticed this but also recognized
that the viola was playing natural harmonics which were “out of tune” in the
equal temperament system of his saxophone yet “in tune” with natural law.
It was this that apparently led Young to turn to Just Intonation in his group
improvisations.36 He rstly adjusted his playing and tuning of the saxophone
(which was invented by Adolphe Sax37 in the nineteenth century wholly for
equal temperament) to t in with this different tuning system, but at some
point in the summer of 1964 he abandoned his sax for singing. This may well
have been the start of the quartet project. But this is not the only signicant
switch that took place. To put them in a rather arbitrary order:
(i) Amplication
As far as the facts currently present themselves, in order to achieve a
balance in The Theatre of Eternal Music, the string instruments were
amplied by being placed near acoustic microphones, or, at least, this was
explored. A need to balance the sound between the string instruments and
the saxophone was the cause of this experiment. Then during the quar-
tet project Tony Conrad tried a guitar pick-up (a clip-on contact micro-
phone38) on his violin, with one for Cale on his viola, which gave a far
stronger sound (Cale calls it “an enormous noise”39). They determined a
balanced sound between the violin and the viola by using a sound mixer.
Young and Zazeela eventually sang through microphones in order to get a
74 The Velvet Underground
steady balance between the four performers. From this point it’s correct
to say that Cale played an amplied viola (but not an “electric” one, which
didn’t exist then and is anyway a separate sort of instrument with a solid
body). This amplication didn’t just make the instrument sound louder
but allowed the listener to hear greater detail, especially to detect better
the component harmonics, the overtones, that made up the sound, as well
as the sympathetic resonance from the other strings. In contrast, a viola
next to an acoustic microphone would have mainly rendered the articula-
tion of the bowing in greater detail.
By transferring his amplied viola into the sound world of a rock band,
Cale gave it sonoral parity with solid-body instruments but also with voices,
as he’d learnt from Young. Reed is a rather thin-toned bass-baritone40 and
Nico a contralto. Their ranges align upwards from D at the centre of the
bass stave (see Example 1), and these ranges cross those of the viola. This is
why Cale often uses the higher harmonics in order to allow the voices more
space to dene themselves.
Cale went on to explore amplication in the Velvets by commissioning
suspension speakers for his bass guitar. The experiment didn’t work, but he
used the band’s money to pay for it and this became a key source of friction
between the members. That said, Reed was also keen on new technology,
and the band was always looking for sponsorship deals from companies
providing them with their latest backline equipment; to do so made sense
as they were operating in a period where amplication systems were being
rened year on year.
(ii) Adaptation
According to Marian Zazeela, in order to play drones for Young’s projects, “John
adapted his viola. First he made a two-string drone and then [for Tortoise/
Dream] he led down the [wooden] bridge to make a three-string drone, and
that really was his own idea, how to get more sounds going together.”41 Filing
down the bridge attened it, in the style of a guitar, to enable the bow to pass
over the strings simultaneously and evenly. This was Cale’s ingenious attempt
to turn a viola into a bowed guitar (four-stringed mandolins had already been
used in Young’s projects in this way). To add to the effect, he used metal gui-
tar strings in place of traditional viola strings to get “a drone that sounded
like a jet engine”.42 Cale endorses Zazeela’s description in his account of the
Dream project, of how the quartet held six pitches for two hours: “LaMonte
would hold the lowest notes, I would hold the next three on my viola, his wife
Ex. 1 VOCAL RANGES
Lou Reed
(a) Sunday Morning (b) I'm Waiting (c) Venus (d) Run Run Run (e) Heroin (f) There She Goes (g) Angel (h) European Son
Nico
Marion [sic] would hold the next note and Tony Conrad would hold the top
note.” It was this led-down, guitar-stringed, amplied viola that Cale used
throughout his time in The Velvet Underground.
(iii) Attunement
This project was concerned with the exploration of discrete, “pure” intervals,
of which the intervals of a fth and second are prominent. Young would
often use the pitches G, D, and A (two consecutive fths, but also intervals
of a fourth, a fth and a second in aggregate, or inverted, form, D–G–A).
According to Smith, “Young improvises vocally on these drone frequencies
in rhythmically free fashion, sliding from note to note at varying speeds.
The vocal style seems to have close associations with Indian models, but in
reality stems more from his earlier work.”43 In other words, the work is con-
cerned with non-functional harmony rather than melody.
This forms the basis of Cale’s vision for The Velvet Underground. He
transposes these features over to tonality and rock music. The harmonies
to Reed’s songs on the rst two albums (that is, those on which Cale par-
ticipated) are almost always restricted to the tonic and the subdominant
(the songs are in different keys, although this is sometimes the result of
reducing the speed of the tape on which they were recorded to make the
song sound deeper and slower). For example, ‘Heroin’ is in C sharp major. Its
two harmonies comprise the tonic triad, C#–E#–G# and the subdominant
F#–A#–C# (see Example 2a). The common pitch between these two is the
tonic C# (to put it in a less than elegant way: the tonic becomes the domi-
nant of the subdominant in the second triad). The C# is thus Cale’s drone,44
to which he adds the dominant G sharp.
Ex. 2 Heroin
Young
(a) (b) (c)
Viola
Voice comes in bells... strike him mistress...
4
Viola
(instrumental)
Another variant of the drone is found on ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’
where Cale employs C–G–D over two octaves using harmonics (these
pitches are the bottom three open strings in a conventional viola tuning,
making strong and easily produced harmonics).46 Even where the viola
is not present, the drone is used. ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ has it on piano
throughout in a relentless paradiddle47 pattern, while the guitar naggingly
opens ‘Heroin’ with a pulsed tonic reiterated in turn against the tonic and
subdominant triads. Cale introduces an organ drone on G–D near the start
of the G-major-keyed ‘Sister Ray’, and then reiterates it into the chaos at
7:25–8:12 (only to be followed by a contrasting chromatic episode). Later he
plays a drone on the subdominant C (11:29–12:22), followed again by G–D
(12:22–13:06) against which Reed sings for the only time in the song.48
78 The Velvet Underground
(iv) Apperception
Smith observes that “Young is deeply interested in the psychological effects
of his music”.50 Young has claimed that, “the artist…has the potential, if
it can be preserved over time, to make statements which are much more
encompassing and affect both the conscious and the unconscious in a way
that is so profound and so powerful that…it can go deep within the human
consciousness”.51 According to this hypothesis, drones, as the ear attunes
to their nuances, induce over time a psychological state fusing conscious-
ness and unconsciousness. Such a state is related in intent to the surrealists’
aim of inducing a revelation of the latent and the hidden by holding back
the intellect and instead “bringing to mind” the otherwise inaccessible. In
this regard Young has pointed out the use in classical Indian music of ragas
(congurations of pitches) for use at certain times of the day and night, for
certain circumstances, and to produce or reect particular moods on its
meditative listeners.
Cale took on these precepts and adapted them to The Velvet Under-
ground. He stated that “the aim of the band on the whole was to hypno-
tise audiences [through repetition and drones] so that their subconscious
would take over”,52 and elsewhere that “it was an attempt to control the
unconscious with the hypnotic”.53 However, he is no more clear than this,
and Young’s comments need to be added in to make some sense of what
was being attempted. Any difference here surely lies between Cale’s “sub-
conscious” and Young’s “unconscious”. The latter is derived from Freud, to
explain how we have desires of which we’re not aware. What Cale’s hypno-
4 Cale 79
(v) Ambience
It was through Angus MacLise that in 1962 Young met Zazeela. They mar-
ried in July 1963, a month before Cale began his bohemian adventure in
New York. Zazeela was then a young artist. She became concerned to
develop a distinct visual identity for Young’s projects, which, given her
success in this, are now considered Young and Zazeela’s joint projects.
Using ambient light, she dened a stylish visual setting for The Thea-
tre of Eternal Music (1963– ), and for the Bowed Disc Ensemble (1963)
she designed the stark lighting mentioned earlier. Her most elaborate
arrangement yet was devised for The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys.
Although rehearsals had begun in May 1964 the public première was only
given a year and a half later, on the weekend of October 30th, 1965 at the
Pocket Theatre (where Cale had made his performance debut in New York
when he took part in Cage’s Vexations marathon). The long title of that
improvised performance was the one previously mentioned where Cale
was “the Hermit”.56
As the quartet was by now entirely amplied, and to an acute degree
so that the component partials of the pitches could be clearly heard, Young
chose to place the speakers around the space so that the audience was sur-
rounded by the sound. Working to produce a visual parallel to this, Zazeela
assembled her most sophisticated visual design just in time for the largest
of these opening performances, for the Film-makers’ Cinematheque Festi-
val of Expanded Cinema (in the basement of the Wurlitzer Building, of all
places, on 41st Street) on 4th and 5th of December. This version of the sec-
tion of Tortoise was titled The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers
as They were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong
and Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Tooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line
Stepdown Transformer.
80 The Velvet Underground
process that got a song tape-recorded and duplicated onto shellac or vinyl
discs for packaging, distribution, and sale. There was even somebody who
took responsibility for the song to be recorded on time and within budget,
but a name for this task wasn’t exactly necessary, as this person usually
had some other managerial function in a small, maybe sole-run, opera-
tion. Spector gave this domestic endeavour a regal dimension, turning the
handicraft of recording into an executive vocation (he bought a smoked-
glass-windowed Rolls Royce car in 1961, at the age of 20, and employed a
bodyguard,61 which, due to his ego, he needed).
Rather than provide a dressing for a song, like an arranger, what
Spector sought to dene was the aura of the recording. He did have an
arranger, Jack Nitzsche (1937–2001), who employed many of the nest
session musicians, known as the “Wrecking Crew”, and provided Spec-
tor with the successful backing tracks for hits from 1962’s ‘He’s A Rebel’
up to the 1966 chart failure of ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. But Spector
supervised the overall timbre which he determined through experimen-
tation in the studio, racking up thousands of dollars in costs where just
hundreds had been set aside. He was indeed a record producer rather than
a music producer, though it was through the music – the selection of
instruments and backing voices, their registers, the choice of tempi, the
generic derivation of the drum pulse (often Latin) – in harness with the
technical decisions he made – the degree of mechanical echo he set for
each sound, the creative aspects in the process of mixing-down on tape
– that he attained his sensational results. At its simplest he wanted the
songs he took on to be placed inside an endless orchestra, one controlled
by a mighty percussion section at the centre of operations, hammering a
vigorous pulse into an innite, echoing tunnel. The complete experience
was known as Spector’s “Wall of Sound”. He called these records “little
symphonies for the kids”.
For someone like Cale, who had played in youth and local orchestras in
his teens, Spector’s use of traditional acoustic instruments, sometimes in
novel combinations, would have been highly seductive. Although Spector’s
orchestration recalled the use of studio orchestras in popular songs of the
1950s,62 the ultra-romantic size of the sound and the overstated use of rever-
beration took it into a domain of conspicuous production, to coin a phrase.
Spector’s sound was camp63 in its self-conscious exaggeration. Yet it was also
poignant as the overstated last gasp of traditional production processes in
the face of two challenges – the rhythm & blues-inuenced rock band64 and
4 Cale 83
Spector’s. We learnt earlier that Maureen Tucker had to play one in place
of a drum kit at the Café Bizarre. Nico was given one to play on stage when
she performed with the Velvets, although Cale agreed that “it wasn’t the
best thing to give her given her sense of time”.74 On record the tambourine
anchors, in Spector style, “‘Venus In Furs’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, and ‘I’ll
Be Your Mirror’ (it also appears in ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Femme Fatale’, and
‘There She Goes Again’, played with a drumstick).
(d) Production
Cale considered himself “a composer and arranger”. He did not produce the
two Velvets albums with which he was associated, and he would have been
frustrated if he had by the economic limitations of investment placed on
the recording process. For the debut album, ten tracks78 were taken from
a recording session in a poor if adequate studio in New York (April 1965).
But a professional producer called Tom Wilson – of whom more later –
arranged for one new track to be recorded, ‘Sunday Morning’, and four to
be re-recorded in a better studio in Los Angeles (May 1965). They were:
It’s noticeable that these tracks are superior in clarity to the New York
ones, if only from Spector-sized percussion tone on ‘Venus’ and ‘Parties’.
In each case the magisterial bass drum thud on the main beat and the
tambourine on the back-beat emulates Spector’s sound on The Righteous
4 Cale 85
Brothers’ hit ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ (1964), for example. In the
early 1960s Spector had been told of a New York studio engineer, Bill Mac-
Meekin, who had placed the microphone inside the bass drum to get a
“thunderclap” effect. Spector added to this an echo by placing an ancillary
microphone in a stairwell.79 When it came to the Velvets, Maureen Tucker’s
physical arrangement of her drums would have aided the sound their Los
Angeles engineer achieved on the debut album, as the bass drum was laid
horizontally like a tom-tom and hit with drumsticks.
The admitted tendency on the rst two albums to reduce the speed in
mixing down to the master tape and thus make the sound deeper is prob-
ably inuenced by Spector too. He preferred to use deep-voiced singers,
such as Bill Medley of The Righteous Brothers, or Darlene Love, and he often
used instruments in low ranges, especially at the opening of numbers. It’s
surely this sound that the Velvets wish to emulate in ‘Venus In Furs’, ‘All
Tomorrow’s Parties’, and ‘Heroin’, among others. Further, it was in the Los
Angeles studio that Cale found the celesta and the glockenspiel lying around
with which, by “bouncing down” the two tracks to one, he opens ‘Sunday
Morning’. There is some irony here that the debut album opens “high” with
these delicate, tinkling sounds from the West Coast and closes “low” with
the murk of Reed’s “Ostrich”80 guitar, whistling feedback and an unfathom-
able rumble from the East Coast. If only in this range of recorded sound,
Cale exceeded Spector.
Rock and “beat” artists of the middle 1960s brought together two sets
of textures: the aural dazzle of pop’s gem-bright pinning and the visceral,
transgressional hispidity of the blues. While rock’n’roll bands of the 1950s
were like small swing bands in their variety of instruments – the saxo-
phone, the guitar and organ of Bill Haley’s Comets, for example – the
rock group was quite corporate in its instrumental conformity of guitar,
guitar and (bass) guitar with a drum kit behind them. Due in part to the
baby-boom teenage interest in music-making, and the eager equipping of
this new market by electric guitar manufacturers, the guitar band evolved
in the late 1950s out of Buddy Holly’s Crickets. In 1959 two guitar groups
came into being almost simultaneously in Seattle (The Ventures) and
London (The Shadows), supplying instrumental novelty hits between the
demise of rock’n’roll in 1959 and the launch of Merseybeat in 1963. Their
sound was pristine, confederate, and as uniform as their chic, identical
suits.
But, thanks to the subcultural vogue at the time around Europe82 for
urban blues and “rhythm & blues” records (R&B – a liberalizing but market-
constructed name replacing the term “race” records), edgling white gui-
tarists heard how to turn this technique “dirty”, how to make the guitar a
richly expressive resource through a nger-shaking vibrato, or the bending
of strings, or glissandi (slides), or by stressing the shift of the hand between
chord changes, or the use of devices on the strings such as a bottle neck
or a metal ring, as well as exploiting the possibilities on the electric gui-
tar of its amplication – overdriving the system, feedback and so forth. By
intersecting these two guitar styles – the clean, commercially successful
“white” pop style with the passionate, vocalizing “black” style of R&B, the
guitar band became the customary conguration for those wishing to mix
singing and playing while in control of their own resources. The alterna-
tive was to be found in the all-vocal groups, derived from 1950s doo-wop
and gospel, identied with the black subgenre named soul – The Miracles,
The Supremes, The Temptations – who relied on professional backing bands
consisting of varied instruments in the swing band tradition.
In this sense The Velvet Underground was, in its instrumentation of two gui-
tars (Reed, Morrison), bass guitar (Cale) and drums (Tucker), one more part of
a conformative, market-driven scene. Nor was it unique in offsetting this corpo-
rate pattern by having an active multi-instrumentalist like Cale. The most com-
mercially successful bands of this period retained a remnant of the rock’n’roll
band’s diversity by employing at least one multi-tasker such as Brian Jones of
4 Cale 87
The Rolling Stones, George Harrison of The Beatles, Brian Wilson of The Beach
Boys. These inquisitive all-rounders didn’t have to be universally procient, but
they displayed a willingness through experiment to vary the overall texture
through freshness of timbre. Even Eric Clapton of Cream played the violin. John
Cale fullled this role for the Velvets. He moved between his amplied viola,
keyboards, backing vocals and bass guitar.
Cale had learnt the last especially to play in the group, and his bass guitar
patterns offer an insight into his very hazy understanding of the rhythm &
blues style. Morrison said of Cale that his bass pattern formulas “were strange
and difcult to learn. I had to play bass guitar when John was playing some-
thing else and I hated it. Hated it!”83 By the way, this explains why there is little
or no bass guitar on numbers like ‘Heroin’ or ‘Sister Ray’, as the players were
normally involved in other functions.
Morrison singled out ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ as “weird”. It is.
Although Cale has adopted a standard bass pattern, the rise to the domi-
nant of D major (G–G#–A) at the end of each second bar isn’t justied
harmonically, as the song remains in the subdominant at that point (see
Example 3b). Also curious is the pattern at the end of the verse which runs
chromatically up from the dominant and crashes into the tonic under a
dominant chord. In both cases Cale has used stock bass patterns but which
contradict their harmonic functions. In ‘European Son’ the bass shifts
maniacally between a symmetrical arc of fourths through D–G (high)–
D–A (low) with chromatic runs in between, although the harmony is
grounded entirely on the tonic. The band’s uncertain conation of sub-
dominant and dominant functions explains the unusual drift in the coda
of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ in G major where the male backing vocal harmonies
move from D major to C major against the bass which moves in the oppo-
site direction from C to D.
A different kind of example is ‘Femme Fatale’ in C major, where the bass
drops from the tonic to the subdominant, thus foreshadowing the tonic/
subdominant pattern of the chorus, but does so under an A minor 7th chord
(A–C–E–G); this appears to be an attempt by Cale to lock the verse into the
Velvets’ basic tonic/subdominant pivot, never mind how applicable.84 In ‘All
Tomorrow’s Parties’ the bass follows the voice two octaves below in one bar
and then the lead guitar for the following two bars. Presumably the more
conventional bass patterns, such as that of ‘Sunday Morning’, are by Mor-
rison. After Cale leaves, the bass patterns become drearily conventional or
self-conscious in their desire to be interesting.
88 The Velvet Underground
Glockenspiel
Violas
Bass Gtr.
Voice
(Reed)
Sun - day mor - ning Brings the
Guitar
Piano
Bass Gtr.
Voice
(Reed)
I'm wai - ting for my man
Guitar
Bass Gtr.
Voice
(Nico)
Here she comes you bet - ter watch your step
4 Cale 89
Guitar
Viola
Voice
(Reed)
He ro - in be the death of me
Of the 17 songs on these two albums made during Cale’s membership of The
Velvet Underground, only ve might be considered “standardized” as Theo-
dor Adorno86 dened it: that is, units of eight bars leading to a chorus of 32
bars (4 × 8) and a range of “one octave and one note”. While the formal tra-
jectory was a matter for Reed as the writer of the songs, most Velvets songs
were determined by the combination of vocal and instrumental passages, in
which Cale had a hand. ‘Sunday Morning’ would be the most conventional
of all if it wasn’t for the odd effect of the conspicuous reverberation added
to the voice in verse two; but in formal terms it simply comprises nine cycles
of eight bars each. ‘White Light/White Heat’, the music to ‘The Gift’, and
‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ fall into eight-bar patterns, as does the outline
form of ‘Sister Ray’ – but not its improvised content. In the remaining 12
songs, each has something structurally peculiar in it to avoid Adorno’s accu-
sation of being “standardized”.
‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ falls into verse sections of 12 bars followed by
choruses of six bars with a “middle eight” instrumental section of 18 bars.
‘Venus In Furs’ is also in units of 12 bars. ‘Femme Fatale’ has a chorus of 10
bars. ‘Run Run Run’ runs along in units of 5, 8, 11, and 15 bars. Similarly ‘I’ll
Be Your Mirror’ contains odd-numbered units in verses of 17 bars (vocal ele-
ment 3 + 3 + 4 + 2 + 2). The accelerating sections of ‘Heroin’ form units of
4 Cale 91
and The Rolling Stones, or the nurturing studio environment those bands
enjoyed, and they struggled creatively, socially, and economically thanks to
this dearth of facility. They didn’t lack ambition, but they lacked nous. They
also lacked a generosity towards each other. It appears in the end that New
York was simply not the place to make rock, or to make rock work, or to
make rock pay.
5 The Factor y
It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what you think you are.
Andy Warhol
Simply put, rock’n’roll trades on the act of sex while rock trades on the act of
masculinity. ‘Rock Around The Clock’, ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, ‘Whole Lotta
Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and so forth celebrate the performance of Rabelaisian
coupling, coded as a dance between two partners who touch each other, if
only palm to palm. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’
(1964) make a transition that reects the dance crazes of the time – twist,
jump, jerk, and even Reed’s ostrich – which began a new phase because they
detached dancers from each other (masturbatingly so in ‘Can You Jerk Like
Me?’). Meanwhile, ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’, ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’, ‘Got
To Get You Into My Life’ and so many other hit songs of 1965 portray the sin-
gle male gazing out to identify what serves him best, and least.
Given how McCartney joined Cale, Morrison, and Reed in reaching the
age of 23 in that year, while the others on our list in Chapter 2 fell between
the ages of 20 to 27 (with apologies to Nico), it’s not unexpected that many
of the songs, at least sung by those who were not Velvets, left teenhood for
manhood,1 forsaking sex as carnal gratication in favour of love as a perplex-
ing, erotogenic mutuality. Of course, an interplay of this kind was mainly
addressed song-wise in the form of the man as subject rather wishing he
were the object. Still, it was a signicant development that band members in
general had by now started up songwriting partnerships to attempt a more
mature and protable, in-house, phase of production. They were inspired
by the alliance of Beatles Lennon and McCartney who had begun by cover-
ing existing songs such as those by Chuck Berry previously mentioned, but
gradually they had moulded their own, increasingly sophisticated, construc-
tive methodology, a exible one where it could not always be said that one
supplied the words while the other supplied the music.2 It took The Rolling
Stones slightly longer to effect a writing partnership but Jagger and Richards
eventually succeeded.3
94 The Velvet Underground
make the band out of place in 1967’s Summer of Love, but would also give it
– ultimately – unprecedented cult esteem.
In terms of rock music, the central 1960s is as complex to map as its many
historians have claimed, certainly so in terms of getting a grip on the genre
shifts and the musical artists working in diverse markets which were at that
time being constructed (folk-rock especially, and the “proto” stages of punk,
hard rock, jazz-rock fusion). Cale’s mentor at Goldsmiths, Cornelius Cardew,
went on in the 1970s to put forward a theory11 that, under the emergent
phase of global capitalism in the early 1960s, all sorts of music was being
made in a kind of “cottage industry” environment of people offering home-
made goods (songs, “numbers”). The music industry systematically tried out
samples of the broad range that was on offer to see what might arouse pub-
lic interest. From that point, rather than markets being identied, markets
were constructed to rope in the makers and the consumers of the music, to
render the music useful in the ideological terms of the ruling class. He saw it
as a kind of order out of chaos leading to a dead end. Cardew’s trajectory is
seductive, as it makes it much easier to delineate what took place by work-
ing backwards into the creative magma, but at some point a halt can be
conveniently called when the going gets tough.
Still, an attempt must be made here to place The Velvet Underground in
the context of other bands at the time of its entry into the public domain,
when Warhol and Morrissey took them on in January 1966. Applying the cat-
egories used earlier – “activists”, “hippies” and “punks” – it becomes crucial to
make the point that, while some artists were activists, some were also hippies
(The Grateful Dead) while other activists were punks (such as the MC512). So,
a basic division is attempted here between “activists” (usually, but not always,
of the Left) and “non-activists”, who did not align themselves directly with
progressive movements or perhaps spoke against activism (some shifted
ground towards such a position around this time, including Bob Dylan). These
are then divided into three loose genre categories,13 and band or artist names
offered that may be identied with those divisions around 1966–7 (see over).
While the attempt here is to map the Velvets’ ideological stance in rela-
tion to prevalent discourses, it also intends to place the band in relation to
its competitors by positioning it transversally to its “sworn enemy”,14 The
Mothers of Invention led by Frank Zappa. It also throws up the issue of how
far West Coast musicians dominated the scene at the time, isolating the East
Coast Velvets – even more so when The Mothers took up residence in New
York City, as we’ll learn.
96 T h e V e l v e t U n d eActivist
rground
Activist
Satirical Reflexive Experimental
Country Joe & The Fish The Byrds The Grateful Dead
Satirical
The Fugs Reflexive
Tom Paxton Experimental
Jefferson Airplane
Country Joe & The Fish The Byrds The Grateful Dead
Non-Activist
Non-Activist
Satirical Reflexive Experimental
The Mothers of Invention The Doors Captain Beefheart
Satirical
The Monkees Reflexive
Bob Dylan Experimental
The Velvet Underground
The Mothers of Invention The Doors Captain Beefheart
The Monkees Bob Dylan The Velvet Underground
Yet the speed at which The Velvet Underground had itself asserted its
presence in New York City was remarkable. Within a month of making its
debut in a high school hall in December 1965, it found for itself a marked
identity and a mediated status through its association with the celebrity of
Andy Warhol, which we’ll examine in this chapter. By January 1966 it had
a management contract with the artist, and the members each enjoyed a
monthly nancial retainer to pay their rents, as well as a studio – Warhol’s
midtown “Silver” Factory – to rehearse in. Yet thanks to this arrangement
the band was promptly considered by the media and eventually by the pub-
lic to be part of the “degenerate” scene surrounding Warhol. Critic Robert
Hughes has summarized in retrospect a common view of Warhol’s Factory:
Judiciously, Hughes goes on to single out Cale and Reed as owning this
scattered talent. Moreover he was writing after the event, in 1982, when a
certain enlightenment16 had by then proscribed the word most cuttingly
used in the mid sixties to describe the Warhol scene: “faggots”. The Velvets
were seen as a “faggot” (homosexual) band,17 which was a claim likewise
5 The Factory 97
While Reed revelled in the ambience of the “Silver” Factory where “eve-
rybody was rude to each other and nice at the same time” and “everyone
looked good and terrible at the same time”,19 he and Cale were the ones who
got most out of it beyond its use as a workplace. For a short time around
January 1966 Cale had an affair with Warhol’s rst “superstar” Edie Sedg-
wick, an ultra-fashionable heiress whom he met at the Factory;20 she went
on to have a desultory affair with Bob Dylan and become a heroin addict in
the process, from which she died of an overdose in 1971. “I felt sorry for her,
but the rest of the Factory thought she was a stupid cunt”, said Nico. Nico
herself had a short affair with Lou Reed at the start of her professional asso-
ciation with the Velvets, which resulted in Reed’s “pyschological” ‘I’ll Be Your
Mirror’ and ‘Femme Fatale’ being given to her to sing. Cale called the affair
between Reed and Nico “both consummated and constipated”.21 It ended,
according to Cale, when:
So, the liaison with Warhol which gave the Velvets public life, as well as
a second singer in Nico, may also have hastened its public demise and pro-
voked the private insecurities that undermined its identity. Warhol’s offer
of patronage, proposed after he and his retinue had heard the band play
at the Café Bizarre, was a sensational opportunity for a band not quite a
year old and with barely half a dozen gigs to its name. So greatly was this
offer remarkable that we must examine quite what was going on. In tracing
the itinerary of the Velvets and Warhol through 1965, it becomes clear that
the Café Bizarre date wasn’t the rst time he had encountered the musi-
cians, nor heard the type of music they played, nor been unaware from
where their special sound derived. Their circles of contact were closer than
has been assumed, and what brought them in range of each other prior
to the Café Bizarre performance was underground lm. In order to explain
Warhol’s interest in this medium, his background up to this point needs to
be set down.
5 The Factory 99
In contrast, Warhol was gay and a born shopper. He wrote, “Buying is much
more American than thinking, and I’m American as they come.”30 With his
gauche demeanour, his ultra-pale skin and scrawny frame, he moved increas-
ingly around a gay art constituency of the 1950s that included dealers, critics
and curators as well as celebrated gures such as writer Truman Capote, who
characteristically thought of Warhol that, “He seemed one of those hopeless
people that you just know nothing’s ever going to happen to. Just a hopeless,
born loser.”31 But here Warhol found an understanding community of similar
“outsiders” and “losers” who sniggered like him at the oppressive posturing of
the AbEx circle and who found their revenge by taking pleasure from those
parts of life that the AbExes cast out – the mass-produced, Hollywood, popu-
lar music, “horror comics”, the tabloid press – even life itself.32
Among the gay artists who were looking to undermine the authority of
AbEx, Warhol ran across Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (see Chap-
ter 1). He knew them as fellow window dressers,33 working for the same
swanky stores that he did – Bonwit Teller, Tiffany & Co. But in their otherwise
modernist artwork they introduced something of real life. While Rauschen-
berg used objects he found in the street, Johns painted numbers, letters, and
the Stars and Stripes ag, using in a sardonic manner the gestural smears and
drips of abstract expressionism. Rauschenberg was given a De Kooning draw-
ing which he rubbed out to turn it into a “Rauschenberg”. In these ways they
gave Warhol the condence and the ideas to be both a “fairy” and a “real art-
ist”.34 As critic Kenneth Silver put it, “Warhol made American blue-collar gay
American art. His subjects were drawn from both the mass culture in which
he grew up and the ‘campy’ culture he grew into.”35
So it’s not surprising that Warhol tried to turn abstract expressionism
into camp. He started in 1960 by painting, in a drippy AbEx way, newspaper
ads onto canvas. Like Johns, these gestural strokes and drips were his rst
mockings of the imperious AbEx style (one such prank of his – a Barnett
Newman “zip” banana – would be done for the Velvets and would become
his most well-known parody). In this mix of the common and the exclu-
sive he also tried to paint famous comic book characters, but fellow artist
Roy Lichtenstein was doing this more deftly around the same time, and so
Warhol sought a substitute subject. Working on two paintings – a straight,
graphic, “real” painting of two Coca-Cola bottles against an AbEx parody
of the same – an art dealer friend told him to go with the graphic version
(hard-edged work had become popular among the new buyers who were
too late for AbEx bargains36). He transferred the idea to 32 Campbell’s soup
cans (the brand his mother served him each lunchtime), and these paint-
5 The Factory 101
ings nally brought him a degree of notice as a “real artist”, with his rst
one-man exhibition, at a commercial gallery in Los Angeles, taking place in
the summer of 1962, exactly a year before Cale came to America.
In this search for a distinctive niche he found himself linked by the media
to other American artists – Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist,
Tom Wesselmann – who were allied to an existing British movement known
as pop art which both admired and critiqued American popular culture.37
The thing about Warhol, though, was how he claimed that he – as a rst-
generation American – genuinely celebrated consumerism and admired the
mass production of uniform goods because “All Coca-Colas are alike, and all
Coca-Colas are good.”38 Yet his most radical “inversion” of abstract expres-
sionism came in his refusal to interpret what he was doing. Unlike the pro-
lix statements about their work made by the Barnett Newman generation,
Warhol’s famous blankness – his “um, gee” mumbling – certainly played on
the shy provincial he had been but it was also a staged persona devised to
disturb the modernist establishment for whom adroit articulation justied
the worth of one’s work. To an extent it was this academic-graduate-play-
ing-dumb routine by which Warhol came close to Reed.
Looking for a way to exalt the standardization of goods that was so
much feared by the abstract expressionists, Warhol chanced upon the semi-
mechanical process of screen-printing. He rst tried this method out with his
“200 one-dollar bills” of April 1962. From then on he would discard painting
in favour of this quicker, idiosyncratic system. Warhol was a hard worker
and, as attention grew, he produced new ranges of items. They can be sum-
marized in the following way:
2-D Film
1962 Early Paintings: Campbell soup cans
Mid Silkscreen multiples: Marilyn Monroe39
23 portraits
Late Multiples: Campbell soup cans, Coca-
cola bottles
1963 Multiples: Elvis Presley with Gun,
Warren Beatty
Mid Society “portrait” multiples: Ethel Scull Tarzan and Jane Regained,
36 Times Sort of
Sleep
Kiss
Late Multiples: “Death and Disaster”: Haircut
(a) Electric chair, suicides, race riot, car Eat
crash
102 The Velvet Underground
1964 3-D
Brillo boxes/ Del Monte Peach boxes Blowjob
2-D
Mid Black and white mural: 13 Most Wanted 13 Most Beautiful Women
Men41
Late Multiples: Flowers 13 Most Beautiful Men
Empire
but emphasized the reality of the medium. The Velvets’ Tony Conrad was one
of these. His 1966 Flicker, with its intense strobe effect, is still considered the
most radical of its type.47 Secondly, lm-makers like Jack Smith recorded the
staged reality of taboo subjects – sex, and especially gay sex. Their lms were
piquantly camp versions of Hollywood,48 doting on the glamour that the “sil-
ver screen” provided rather than the storyboard it presented. Sensationalist
media coverage got The Film-makers’ Coop a reputation that fermented the
(still) undecided debate of the 1960s between “art” and “porn”. And it was this
that rst brought The Coop to the attention of the voyeuristic Warhol.
Using domestic equipment, Jack Smith had made a 50-minute lm in 1962
called Flaming Creatures. It kept getting banned by the authorities who licensed
screenings. Described as an orgy of “legs where heads should be…rage, rape
and hairy paws”49 while “the sex of the strange personages is certain only
when their genitals are showing”,50 the lm heralded that crusade of sexual
liberation which the 1960s has since emblematized.51 Among “the strange per-
sonages” in Flaming Creatures were Marian Zazeela and LaMonte Young, who
also provided some of the music (bowed disc), the whole montage of which
was put together on tape for Smith by Tony Conrad. Flaming Creatures was
shown now and again at The Film-makers’ Coop, which screened a range of
such lms at various temporary locations around mid and lower Manhattan.
Warhol began to attend these screenings and, on seeing Flaming Creatures,
decided to participate in the underground scene by making his own lms in
this style, as it appeared to be a satisfying vehicle in which to portray gay sex.
For this purpose he bought a Bolex 16 mm camera in July 1963. He started
by lming his boyfriend, poet John Giorno, sleeping; the lack of movement, or
rather, the sense of iconicity in the screen portrait, was an approach Warhol
had premeditated. A locked, passive camera – with silent lm – turned cel-
luloid into print to render to the viewer a ickering canvas. The effect of
Sleep was too similar to Young’s examinations of stasis to be coincidental,
and it’s now known that Warhol attended performances of Young’s work at
this time.52 One of Warhol’s “tribe”, Billy Name – who turned the Silver Fac-
tory silver by covering pipes and ducts with foil and became its “caretaker”
– had played in Young’s group between 1962 and 1963. When Warhol chose
to add music to his “still” lms for the 1967 New York Film Festival, he com-
missioned Young to make drones.
Yet Warhol executed two types of lm, and although the other style
emerged soon after the rst, it did so for a contrasting set of reasons. First of
all Smith was shooting his all-colour follow-up to the monochrome Flaming
104 The Velvet Underground
Creatures, called Normal Love, during the summer of 1963 in outdoor spaces
near New York which had been made available by sympathizers. Smith had a
xation on the Dominican-born Hollywood star Maria Montez (1920–51),53
who as “The Queen of Technicolor played princesses, queens, and dancing
girls who all wear colourful, erotic outts… She was a terrible actress but
she was perfect for these ridiculous escapist lms. Playing two parts in Cobra
Woman she is doubly bad.”54 In Normal Love a transvestite performer on the
New York experimental scene, Rene Rivera, changed his name to Mario
Montez in order to play his namesake for Smith, where Montez as a mer-
maid is threatened by a werewolf.
Warhol went to see what was happening and took along his new Bolex.
What he shot of the production became his short movie Andy Warhol Films
Jack Smith Filming Normal Love. Warhol later claimed of this experience that
“I picked something up from him for my own movies – the way he just kept
shooting until the actors got bored.”55 However this was not all he learnt. He
saw how he could make his own camp versions of the Hollywood movies
that he adored. An opportunity to do so presented itself very quickly, but
there was an ulterior reason for taking it up – that of revenge.
A second art exhibition had been arranged in Los Angeles in September
1963, a year after the rst. He travelled there in a station wagon driven by
a playful performer on the New York underground lm scene, the hyper-
mincing Taylor Mead, who acted in Smith’s lms. Although by now Warhol
had gained notice as a “real artist” on the West Coast, and despite atten-
tion from Hollywood actors who showed up for a party in his honour, the
show was a op and he sold next to nothing. An early collector of his work
had been the lm actor Dennis Hopper, and – in reprisal for his Hollywood
defeat – Warhol used Hopper and Mead to lm with his Bolex a parody of
a genre that epitomized Hollywood machismo – the Tarzan lm. Tarzan and
Jane Regained, Sort Of became the rst of his absurd, camp caricatures of
the silver screen in the Jack Smith style where every aspect of the profes-
sion is traduced by technical ignorance. Batman Dracula (1964), The Life of
Juanita Castro (1965), Hedy (1966, “starring” Mario Montez, with music by
the Velvets) and others followed in its wake. They represent the cinematic
equivalent of the garage band. This is the third connection one can make
between Warhol’s work and that of The Velvet Underground, and it explains
how Warhol could approve of Nico’s “amateur” participation in the group,
in that she offered an iconic presence that the others lacked. And, after all,
she really was a lm star, at least in La Dolce Vita.56
5 The Factory 105
One of the lm-makers most interested in using music was Piero Heli-
czer. Born in Rome, Heliczer became a child lm actor. In 1944 his father
was killed by the Nazis and soon after the end of the war his mother took
the family to Washington DC. At school there he met the young Angus
MacLise, with whom in 1958 he moved to Paris where he set up The Dead
Language Press. Moving on to Brighton, England, he made his rst lm
in 1961, Autumn Feast. Arriving in New York City in 1962 he acted in Flam-
ing Creatures and began to make his own lms there, adding the music
to Autumn Feast using MacLise and Conrad to do so (Heliczer also played
ute and saxophone). LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela appear with
Jack Smith and MacLise in The Soap Opera (1964) and the subsequent Dirt
made in the summer of 1965 includes Warhol, Cale, Edie Sedgwick, Young
and Zazeela and others alongside “the New York police department”. Heli-
czer also appears in Warhol’s 1964 lm Couch, lying – as you might guess
– on a couch and talking to Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga.
Heliczer sometimes used recorded music – Charpentier, The Rolling
Stones – but he cultivated the use of live sound. As Sterling Morrison recalled
of this period, which developed between April and November 1965,
Indeed they did, as they also did to showings of lms by Jack Smith, Ron
Rice (for his sensuous Chumlum) and the 19-year-old Barbara Rubin, who
would be the one who alerted Warhol to the Velvet Underground residency
at the Café Bizarre. On the underground lm scene Warhol would have come
across the musicians named as The Warlocks or as members of LaMonte
Young’s set and seen them as improvisers rather than a rock group, but he
certainly had heard and seen them before his encounter in December 1965.
Cale recalls that, “Whenever we performed music for [Warhol’s] lms we
could do anything we wanted. And the more distance there was between
the music and the lm, the better the drama created by that tension.”58 Up
to this point it was Heliczer who most exploited their creativity on the lm
scene; he also used them as actors. On his website59 can be found images
of Angus MacLise in Satisfaction and Maureen Tucker (being lmed by CBS
television during the making of Heliczer’s Venus in Furs for a documentary
about the New York underground lm scene, broadcast on December 31st,
1965, where the Velvets can be heard playing an extract of ‘Heroin’ and
‘Venus In Furs’, but with Heliczer on saxophone). Lou Reed’s song ‘Venus
In Furs’ was not written for the lm but his awareness of the Baron Sacher-
Masoch novel came from it.
Cinematheque mastermind Jonas Mekas naturally took an interest in
this fusion of two-dimensional lm with three-dimensional action. Under
the heading “expanded cinema” he organized a festival of it in October and
November of 1965, the one at the Wurlitzer Building where Cale gave his last
performance with Young, and when Warhol saw Zazeela’s Ornamental Light-
years Tracery that he would turn into the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (readers
5 The Factory 107
ing for ways to keep his name in the papers, and it turned out
that the lm critic of the New York Times reviewed this stuff at
the Cinematheque, and so we’d put something on there and
it’d get Andy’s name in the Times. I’d project a reel for 30 min-
utes and then there was no cut in it so that it just went on and
on, the camera maybe zoomed in and out a couple of times,
but it was pretty boring. One day I got fed up with this and put
the other reel on at the same time on the other projector to
see if there was anything of interest in either, and putting them
on together made them better. I told Andy; he said, “Oh, gee,
um, okay” and so we started showing lms at the Cinemath-
eque two reels at a time. That’s how the multi-projection thing
started up that we used in The Velvet Underground shows and
got us all that avant-garde reputation.
Morrissey and Warhol were always keen for ways to bring new money
into the Factory and get “employment for our employees”. Anything would
do, they said, simply anything. Nevertheless, they were amazed when an old
theatre producer called Michael Myerberg phoned in November 1965 with a
plan to have Warhol host a discothèque he was building. At this time the dis-
cothèque – a French word for a French concept – was a fairly novel notion,
that of having a club space designed for dancing to records. The idiom was
gaining ground in a transitional period where groups were beginning to think
of leaving the stage for the recording studio;61 it was also a way that white
people could dance to black music with the “blackness” being consigned to
invisibility. Morrissey continues:
Morrissey phoned Myerberg that Warhol would do the deal if he’d pro-
mote their band for the opening. Myerberg said, “Fine. What’s the name
of the band?” Morrissey gulped. He had no band. He garbled and said he’d
let him know. He sat around the Factory for a week, head in hands, trying
to sort it out: “It turned out that the Factory kids didn’t like to go out and
hear bands,” he complained. “They’d only go if it was an event like The Roll-
ing Stones.” It was then that Barbara Rubin mentioned that her Cinemath-
eque contacts had a residency at the Café Bizarre. Gerard Malanga borrowed
Warhol’s Bolex camera to take to the café to lm them as a screen test.
Morrissey went with him in order to work the light meter. He thought they
were fascinating:
But you have to remember that we’d gotten hold of this group
only because of Myerberg’s discothèque deal. But he kept stall-
ing, the date kept getting postponed. Finally, we got a date in
April 1966. The Velvets were going to open the place on the
Friday. On the Monday before, I phoned Myerberg but he said,
“There’s been a change of plan. I can’t use your group. We’re
gonna open with The Young Rascals.” The Rascals were a group
of New York Italians managed by the kind of people who run
West Village cafés [he means the Maa]. I shouldn’t really have
been surprised. However, there I was, sitting in this room with a
band who think they start work on Friday in a big club.
In order to manage the band on a legal basis Morrissey had set up a com-
pany called the Warvel Corporation. The War(hol) Vel(vet) directors were
Warhol and Morrissey, who racked up 25 per cent of the Velvets’ earnings and
25 per cent of Nico’s earnings from the work that the Corporation got them.
Morrissey already earned 25 per cent of Warhol’s earnings, “which made it
a bit complicated because I got something stupid like 15.625 per cent of Nico
and Andy got 9.375 per cent – well, we never made a buck so it doesn’t matter
in the end!” With the contract signed in early January, the nancial stake was
large enough to warrant a few try-outs before their debut, then still immi-
nent, at Myerberg’s discothèque in Queens. They started with a television
feature for the WNET cable station (not to be confused with the CBS Venus
5 The Factory 111
in Furs feature). The WNET crew had come to make a short item on Warhol
which was subverted into a promotional item for the group then rehearsing
at The Factory. Warhol taped an introduction in which he gauchely chatted for
the considerable length – for him – of 30 seconds:
The so-called audition was hardly a try-out, being the annual dinner of
the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry at the dapper Delmonico Hotel on
the 10th of January. Warhol had been asked to give a lecture but instead he
proposed a “performance”. Ultra Violet described the event as “Andy and the
Underground giving shock treatment to the 175 well-dressed shrinks and their
perfumed, carefully coiffed wives”.64 The clinical psychiatrists must have seen
several past and future patients posing on the stage, not only Reed but also
Sedgwick. Jonas Mekas recorded a little of the occasion for his lm Walden;
Edie Sedgwick can be seen dancing the watusi next to a notably frigid Nico,
who – when she wasn’t singing her songs – never knew quite what to do.
When she asked Reed he replied, “Nico, you can always knit”. When she said
he could go to hell, he shot back, “Well, where do you think we are now?”
The Velvets were bemused with the event because their identity was being
blurred between the rock band persona they were attempting to dene and
their role within the underground lm scene which was being replicated on
a huge scale. Warhol and Morrissey had brought in lm and slide projec-
tors. While Warhol’s black and white lm of a Velvets rehearsal, titled The
Velvet Underground and Nico (A Symphony of Sound) was being projected on
two simultaneous reels behind the band, Warhol was sometimes holding and
moving slide projectors showing images in the manner of Marian Zazeela, but
in a nascent form. More problematically for the band, Gerard Malanga, Bar-
bara Rubin, Sedgwick and others were taking up space on the stage with their
dancing (Malanga with a whip). Clearly Warhol was encouraging this to make
the expanse look exciting, but it would later become more formalized and
ritualesque. In any case, the night was a sensation.
112 The Velvet Underground
was – not the chic area it is now – met this guy called Stanley,
who was Polish, because the club was a Polish nationalist social
club [Dom means “home”], and rented it.
The next day Morrissey placed an ad in The Village Voice for the opening on
8th of April – the only publicity – which ran:
The New York Times mentioned the event, on the women’s page. “The
rst [ever] story about The Velvet Underground was on the women’s page
of the Times and it was all about Nico,” recalled Morrissey.
You can imagine how well that went down with Lou Reed. It
was really all about Nico being the new girl of the year. Then
it talked about this extraordinary event that did things that
hadn’t been used before – strobe lights, lms, ve carousel
slide projectors – oh, did I tell you about that? That was
Andy’s one contribution, I must say. He took some coloured
gels (green, I think, and red) and took a cutter for making
holes in paper – he remembered this from his art school
days! – and he made holes in the gel and put them in frames
to sit in the slide projectors. These little things worked won-
ders because they went over the black and white lms they
were showing. The colours were just bouncing around the
hall, it was so kinetic. You can see how they worked because
we put them on the original [back] cover of the Velvets’ rst
LP. Then we used them in the Chelsea Girls movie. Nico has
these holes on her face.
114 The Velvet Underground
Readers will remember the red and green lighting and slide projectors
of Zazeela. As Cale commented,
Whether, as Cale believes, the “events” (plural) decorated the Velvets’ set, or
whether, as Warhol saw it, the event (singular) included the Velvets as part
of his rock version of a “happening”, remains a matter of debate. The set-up,
in general graphic form, is shown in the diagram below, with the slide pro-
jectors directed at random angles, the strobe lights directed at the stage, and
– suspended in the centre of the hall – a spinning silver glitterball which,
according to Cale, “splintered the strobes’ powerful beams”.69
Gauze Gauze
The Velvet Underground
The E.P.I. nished its April season at The Dom on April 30th. During this
month Morrissey paid $2,500 for the Velvets to record their debut album at
the run-of-the-mill Cameo Parkway Studio on Broadway. Cale recalls that, “It
only had four working microphones, and there were holes in the oor.”70 Over
three days 13 songs were recorded, of which ten made the LP (but only six in the
version recorded at these sessions). Morrissey had the job of selling the tapes
to a record company:
But Wilson was just about to leave Columbia for a subsidiary of MGM called
Verve, which was a jazz label hoping – by hiring Wilson – to get rebranded
as a rock label; Frank Zappa’s The Mothers of Invention from the West Coast
were signed by Verve at the very same time.
Yet Wilson wasn’t that happy with the recording quality of the tape or,
indeed, the songs, which lacked the single he would need to promote the
album. Morrissey recalls Wilson telling him, “ ‘There’s not enough Nico. Why
don’t we get Nico to sing another song that would be right for radio play?’ ”
As The Velvet Underground had a month’s residency with the E.P.I. booked at
a Los Angeles club called The Trip throughout May, Wilson hired the superior
TT&G Studios, where he produced the re-recordings with the new ‘Sunday
Morning’ as the single, previously mentioned. This productive use of time
proved helpful, as the club residency was closed down on the third night and
the entourage was forced to hang around California for a month under Musi-
cians’ Union regulations in order to get paid the full fee. This was the rst of
a number of work disappointments which resulted in the break-up between
Reed and Warhol and Reed and Cale.
A second setback was the delay in the release of the debut album, which
was completed by August 1966 at the time that The Mothers of Invention’s
Freak Out! was issued by the company. Wilson was determined to sell the
Velvets on Nico’s voice rather than Reed’s, and so Verve put out two sets of
singles, the rst in October of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ (with Nico’s voice,
capitalizing on Nico’s participation in Warhol’s lm Chelsea Girls which had
been very successfully premièred in September72) and then afterwards the
album’s “single” ‘Sunday Morning’ with Reed’s voice. The Velvet Underground
& Nico was nally released in the USA in March 1967 and in Europe in October.
On the one hand, it arrived in time for the Summer of Love. On the other
hand, the Summer of Love was not enamoured of what was on offer in it.
The two singles and the album had to compete in the American market with
albums or singles by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and others:
116 The Velvet Underground
Before the Velvets’ album appeared in the UK, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You
Experienced? (May), The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (June)
and Pink Floyd’s debut The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (August) were released.
It received little or no attention from the press in the USA or Britain, and the
only English mention of it is to be found in the August gossip column of
Melody Maker as a “West Coast” import being used to sell clothes:
This is not to say that the album was ignored. It peaked at 197 in the
US charts, which means at least that it was bought in quantity to a degree.
An American student at that time, Alan Campbell, recalls that, “The group
was known. Their album was talked about; it was part of the ‘underground’
scene. But so were The Fugs and similar alternative bands. The Velvet Under-
ground were on that kind of level.”75 In an attempt to get better known, the
band needed to tour, but while Warhol’s E.P.I. gained publicity as a cross
between an avant-garde spectacle and a freak show, it didn’t procure much
work. The dates for 1966 were limited to two nights in San Francisco in
May, six nights in Chicago in June (caught on lm by Ron Nemeth), the odd
university booking, and on November 20th a wedding in Detroit. Warhol
told the Velvets, “Other people succeed who have no talent. Here we are
with you gorgeous people and we can’t make it.”76 Morrissey stressed the
fact that it was hard to know how to work things because:
You have to remember that there wasn’t this big rock indus-
try structure yet. A good example was accommodation. I
went to LA a few days ahead to check on dumb things like
whether the club had enough sockets to plug the projectors
in, and the toughest job I had was nding somewhere for
the band to stay. Hotels did not take bands. I put Andy and
“respectable” folk in the Tropicana Motel, but they wouldn’t
take the Velvets or Nico. They said bands rented houses, and
118 The Velvet Underground
By the autumn, when the singles were due to come out, Morrissey scru-
tinized The Dom again. The E.P.I. had been so successful an enterprise there
that, while the band was on the West Coast, Dylan’s manager Albert Gross-
man had surreptitiously taken the lease to open it up in the autumn as The
Balloon Farm.77 Morrissey was offered a residency there for the Velvets (“The
son-of-a-bitch!”) but instead got Nico a turn as a solo singer in Stanley’s base-
ment bar, where one of her admirers, the young Leonard Cohen, would go to
listen. Morrissey put 8 mm lm loops behind her of people sky-diving, a kind
of mini-E.P.I. Cale, Morrison, and Reed would take turns with Tim Hardin and
the 17-year-old Jackson Browne in accompanying Nico on guitar, while Nico
started to learn to play an Indian harmonium. But at the same time Nico’s
employment as a soloist was a message to the band that Warhol’s musical
project could carry on without them.
It was then that the band started to prepare for the second album. They
moved in communally to a West 3rd Street tenement, which they dubbed
“the ‘Sister Ray’ house”; it lasted for a year before they split up. At the same
time Reed started talking to a young Boston promoter called Steven Sesnick,
part-owner of a popular club called The Boston Tea Party. In the following
months Sesnick would increasingly destabilize the existing arrangements in
an attempt to obtain more regular work for the band and a higher prole
independent of the Warhol scene. When The Velvet Underground & Nico came
out in March 1967 Morrissey revived the E.P.I. to help publicize the record, with
the participation of Warhol and Nico. In April, Stanley’s son approached him
with a proposal to lease a Czech sports club on the lines of The Dom, but
uptown, called The Gymnasium. Although the revival took place, it wasn’t
successful. Reed declared that the band shouldn’t play in New York again, and
indeed it didn’t until 1970, by which time its membership had changed. The
failure of Warhol’s Gymnasium, together with the lack of media interest in
the album, brought matters to a head.
In July Reed told the others that he’d sacked Warhol, and Sesnick was
now managing the band. This came as a surprise, even a shock, to the others
5 The Factory 119
and Reed’s autocracy was a major factor in the breakdown of the communal
living project. In July Nico recorded her rst solo album, Chelsea Girl, with
Tom Wilson as the producer. It really looked as though the Velvets were being
left behind, and so, in September, the second album – White Light/White
Heat – was recorded under their Verve contract, with Tom Wilson producing
although only in the sense of him arranging matters with the engineers.78
The Velvets recorded over three days in an endeavour to replicate their live
sound, which was in fact what Warhol had told them to do for their rst
album. As Cale put it, “We insisted on playing at the volume that we played
on stage… because we were so good [by] that point [from touring].”79 Mor-
rison recalled that, “Everything was leaking and the needles were constantly
hitting the red. The engineer kept warning us, and we kept ignoring him.”80
One of the tracks, ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’, was secretly remixed by Reed,
who, according to Tucker, was “having a little ego trip at the time – there’s
no rhythm, no nothing. You can’t hear anything but Lou.”81
White Light/White Heat was released at the end of January 1968 (May
1968 in the UK) and it sold less well than the rst album. The Reed–Sesnick
axis blamed Cale’s experimentalism. After some endeavours to try out new
songs, a nal attempt in August to record tracks for the third contracted
album for Verve yielded no helpful results, and a month later Reed red
Cale. He got Morrison to do it for him. In Cale’s words, “We were supposed
to be going to Cleveland for a gig and Sterling showed up at my apartment
and effectively told me that I was no longer in the band.”82 Given that Cale
has often declared how Reed revelled in confrontation, it seems remarkable
that he would depute this task to another. Perhaps it shows how far Reed
was fearful of Cale, who was himself demonstrative. As Cale admits, “Things
had been pushed pretty far between us and I can’t say I was entirely blame-
less.”83
For the next two years The Velvet Underground would be merely the
convenient name for Lou Reed and his backing band.
6 Death and Transfiguration
On June 3rd, 1968, a year after he was sacked by Lou Reed, Andy Warhol faced
a further disappointment. He was shot in the chest by Valerie Solanas, a radi-
cal feminist writer who felt he owed her money. At one point clinically dead,
Warhol survived, but the wounded husk that nally returned to work was chris-
tened “Cardboard Andy” by Billy Name. Yet even Cardboard Andy retained Flesh
Andy’s fetish for celebrity and, once revived, he was eager to see how the press
had covered his shooting. Imagine his disappointment to learn that, just as the
news of his apparent death had been breaking, Robert Kennedy was assassi-
nated in Los Angeles. Kennedy – brother of the President killed in Dallas in 1963
– had just won the Californian Democrat “primary” election in the contest to
become the next President, which he did on an anti-war agenda. The artist had
been wiped from the papers to make way for the politician.
And this is how it was for the Velvets. Whatever impact they hoped to
make, events on the streets, on campuses, on the Left Bank of the Seine, in
the napalmed schools of Vietnam – all conspired to make the Velvets imma-
terial. Consider the political and military events that took place around the
release of the rst three albums:
It would be naïve to expect that songs should directly reect these events
and portents, although some did, such as Country Joe’s ‘Feel Like I’m Fixin’
To Die Rag’; MC5’s ‘The Human-Being Lawnmower’; Crosby, Stills and Nash’s
‘Chicago’; The Temptations’ ‘Message From A Black Man’ and ‘Cloud Nine’;
Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Volunteers’; even Hendrix’s all-guitar ‘Star-Spangled
Banner’. Yet the point here is that some critics do consider that in fact the
uncontrolled, menacing, “dark” sounds of The Velvet Underground mirror
or indeed represent the wrenching episodes of the central 1960s, against
which 1967’s Summer of Love was attempting to more positively confront
through “ower power”. It’s suggested that ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘Heroin’ offer a
soundtrack to this immensely exhilarating but fraught period. Yet, as it has
been argued in Chapter 4, those sounds derive from an entirely different
set of inuences – rstly from Cale’s neo-expressionistic transformation of
the “pure”, meditative compositions of LaMonte Young, and secondly from
122 The Velvet Underground
(a) Irrelevance
Other people of the band’s age were active in attempts to change US imperi-
alist policy, or to improve domestic welfare systems, or to assert a libertarian
or civil rights agenda in the domains of ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual-
ity, and ecology. And, in accordance with these efforts – as music historian
Anthony DeCurtis put it in a radio interview – the bands most associated
with these times
You read everywhere that Andy never took drugs. But it wasn’t
true. He took amphetamine – a type of amphetamine, I forget
its name.5 Andy took pills. He told me that pills were normal.
His mother took pills, the President of the United States took
pills. He didn’t like anything more mysterious than a pill. This
was our biggest difference. Brian [Jones] said that it was the
world we had not yet discovered, a world inside. America and
Russia had a ght to go to outer space, but we wanted to go
into inner space; we would not be Astronauts, we would be
Intranauts. Andy said, “Oh no, Nico, there’s nothing inside. I
wear my soul on my sleeve.” Well, anyway, he took a drug so
he would go faster and miss what there was inside. Maybe
that’s why he got so bored.6
Reed
Beat
Cale Warhol
Neo-Dada Pop
Warhol supported the Velvets in ways other than nance and projects.
At the aesthetic level he championed the following:
Reed:
Beat
Beat (lyrics)
Cale: Folk- Reed:
Neo-Dada rock Folk-rock (music)
126 The Velvet Underground
However, while Warhol’s engagement with the Velvets had been predi-
cated on a need to construct projects other than painting or screen-printing
– a policy that caused his shift to lm (with The Factory as a lm studio)
– by mid 1967 he had handed over lm-making to Morrissey, who had some
success with it, and, in the wake of a subsequent demolition order, trans-
ferred the work space from the midtown Silver Factory to the new down-
town Union Square Factory,14 which – Morrissey saw to it – became more
business-like than its predecessor.
At this point Warhol was not considered successful as an artist in
New York. During 1967 his dealer Castelli sold only $20,000 of his work.15
To an extent this was one sign of the New York art market reecting an
intensifying economic crisis facing city investors, but it was also a snub
to Warhol whose celebrity as a media icon and socialite was at its height.
He would not have another New York show until 1977; this withholding
reected a general disengagement from New York City, which was facing
increasing infrastructural problems (culminating in the 1974 metropolitan
bankruptcy). As a result Warhol now turned to commissioned socialite
portraiture using the screen-print technique, and eventually to magazine
publishing. At this level Warhol and Reed were as one in their determina-
tion to turn their projects into commercially successful enterprises. But,
while the former succeeded, the man who had sacked Warhol from his
own undertaking failed.
This defeat returns us to our substantive theme, that of Reed’s dis-
tance from the drift of lyric writing of the period. His decision to place his
lyrics at the centre of attention made this seclusion all the more appar-
ent. As Cale saw it, “There were a lot of soft songs and I didn’t want that
many soft songs… I was trying to get something big and grand and Lou
was ghting against that. He wanted pretty songs.”16 Yet these “soft” and
“pretty” songs17 concerned odd relationships and dissatisfying sex (‘What
Goes On’, ‘I Can’t Stand It’, ‘Lisa Says’, ‘Some Kinda Love’: “Put jelly on
your shoulder/lie down upon the carpet”), men as women (‘Candy Says’,
‘Stephanie Says’ – about their new manager) as well as weak, half-written
drafts like ‘That’s The Story Of My Life’ or ‘Ferryboat Bill’, and the maudlin
folly of ‘Jesus’. Together these exemplify what the Texan band, The 13th
Floor Elevators, had dismissed in 1966 as “old reasoning”, which “involves a
preoccupation with objects…and takes on a supercial aspect of the quest”
which is “childishly unsane”. In contrast the “new reasoning”, which dealt
with inner emotions, “involves a major evolutionary step for man”.18 This
6 Death and Transfiguration 127
(c) Blatancy
In April 1966, as the Velvets were recording their debut album, The Byrds
released the song ‘Eight Miles High’. This title alone caused a great deal of
international comment, as it was assumed to be a drugs song where “high”
was a reference, perhaps, to the potency of ingested cannabis. Radio sta-
tions declined to play it for this reason. Byrds’ singer Roger McGuinn
retorted, “If we’d wanted to write a drug song, we’d have written a drug
song”, and argued that the title referred to a ight to, or from, England.
Yet the song can indeed be interpreted as a drugs song, and member David
Crosby did later admit that the inference was fair.23 There were many other
songs of this period where the media suspected – and consumers frankly
6 Death and Transfiguration 129
(d) Presence
Cale: “You can only get a avour of what we did from the recordings. On ‘Sister
Ray’ you can hear the cues [on the organ] I would have to move the music along,
but we did more than you hear on the album. And we had no set line-up. We
could swap around. One time we all played percussion. Even Nico improvised,
singing without words, while Lou could improvise lyrics for himself.”28
Morrison: “You’d have to time-travel to hear what we could do. It’s not on
the albums, it wasn’t done in the studio. It’s one of those ironies that what-
ever we did in the studio – prepared and redone or just worked through live
like on stage – it never captured what we were, man.”29
130 The Velvet Underground
Tucker: “You had to hear us live. It’s a crying shame that all these young peo-
ple who have all the records and know everything about us never heard us!…
I kept a beat going for the others and what they did was wild. It sometimes
drove me mad trying to keep that beat going. There was nothing like it.”30
Nico: “My rst music was in a studio [London, 1965] and I didn’t know
the etiquette of performing.31 I discovered that it was so different, it was
closer to modelling. Modelling with your mouth open… There were some
songs where we did what came to us from the air. It is all lost.”32
(i) de-tuned strings on guitars and viola, generally lower, sometimes all to same
pitch class (e.g. E) to nourish feedback;
(ii) harmonics and feedback, sometimes in combination;
(iii) drones that get overshadowed by the feedback tones;
(iv) structural junctions where the soundframe could be moved into new territory
(addition of pulse from the drums, introduction of bass guitar or voice, and so
forth).
Morrison: “We would practise the beginning and end of a song. As we never
played it the same way twice, it didn’t matter if we practised the middle.”34
However, the most extended of these experimental works was made a
decade later as a solo studio piece by Reed and titled Metal Machine Music.35
Clearly a prolongation of ‘Loop’ of 1966, and four times as long, it comprised
tape manipulation (that is, octave displacement and accelerated or deceler-
ated fusions creatively edited by Reed) of two guitars each placed close to
a speaker to generate feedback in two monaural images simultaneously, as
did ‘Loop’. Metal Machine Music was considered by some media reviewers,
and thus their public, to be little more than fullling in the most sardonic
manner a contractual obligation to RCA Records.36 Yet it was successfully
promoted on RCA’s classical Red Label imprint as an experimental work,
one intended to position Reed as a “serious” artist by reminding followers
of the Velvets’ remarkable contribution to an exploratory scene of the mid
1960s. He made Metal Machine Music shortly following the release in 1974
and 1975 of three live albums: Reed’s Rock’n’Roll Animal (February 1974), Lou
Reed Live (March 1975) and The Velvet Underground Live 1969 (September 1974)
which provided a very limited impression of lineage, inuences, and genres.
It was also the follow-up to his most successful LP to date, Sally Can’t Dance
(August 1974). At this time, too, Reed was in competition with Cale and Nico
as solo artists and with a new generation of punk performers.
Reed called it “an electronic instrumental composition” in reference to the
contemporaneous modernist work of Stockhausen and Cale’s Tanglewood
tutor Xenakis (which it most resembles37) and he divided it into four equal
sections determined by clock time in the manner of Cage, doing so in order
to site the work on vinyl. On the one hand, it could be a parody, in the style
of Warhol’s send-ups of abstract expressionism. Yet Warhol made his game
jokingly clear to insiders, while Metal Machine Music is anything but funny.
132 The Velvet Underground
On the other hand it ts squarely alongside the experimentation of which all
the Velvets partook between 1965 and 1968. In either case, the work remains
controversial in that it is an attempt to transfer, to an epic degree, an improvi-
sational sound world of performance onto record through the medium of not
performing (the feedback performs). In this, like the Velvets’ attempts to cap-
ture presence, there remain the regrets of the Velvets themselves, noted above,
that it was a band to be experienced in the esh rather than through a at disc.
In its inability to negotiate the demands of these distinct spheres,38 The Velvet
Underground failed – rstly against its more adept market competition, and
secondly in underestimating the need to maintain consumer support by com-
bining concert performances with more frequent releases of records.
The Velvet Underground failed but ultimately thrived. In conventional
accounts of popular music history the story runs as follows. From 1968
onwards a number of disparate bohemians on the art and music scene –
Richard Hell (b. 1949, Kentucky), Iggy Pop (b. 1947, Michigan), Jonathan Rich-
man (b. 1951, Boston), Patti Smith (b. 1946, Chicago), Johnny Thunders (1954,
Florida – 1991), Tom Verlaine (b. 1949, New Jersey)39 – cultivated their interest
in garage rock to which the two-chord Cale/Reed Velvets were now associ-
ated. Yet these artists took a different turn. Back in the early 1960s Young and
Warhol, among others, had helped to evolve multimedia actions with a focus
on simultaneity, a pursuit that ran in parallel with a general social demand
for equal rights. With 1967’s “Summer of Love” now seen as a culmination
of democratic hopes, against the devastating events of 1968 as its nemesis in
asserting conservatism (the election of Nixon, complicated by the realization
that the Vietnam War was a lost and costly cause), the East Side scene of the
late 1960s splintered in the face of growing economic tensions. Those stresses
not only led to the consequent insolvency of the New York City authority but
also informed the artistic shift of interest away from objects and construc-
tions towards concepts and the artists’ own bodies in order to conrm that,
as nothing was being bought, there was nothing to buy.
Within the competing factions were those who were attracted to simple
sex-and-drugs music-making as a means to gain cultural capital and, let’s be
frank, monetary capital. Most of these artists had prioritized literature (Ver-
laine and Hell – out of Rimbaud – making this clear to insiders in their choice
of names), and, following Dylan by prioritizing words in a folk/blues narrative
frame, they had wanted to present sophisticated lyrics over unaffected music.
Yet they took this on within a more cynical dynamic than hitherto, one that still
recognized ties with the bohemian/Beat/punk scene most recently exemplied
by the Velvets, with the difference that these new artists were fervid perform-
6 Death and Transfiguration 133
ers, keen to strut and rile the crowd,40 eager to show, as Nico said of Patti Smith
that “she means business [while] Lou looks like he couldn’t care less”.41
This style of assertiveness had been inuenced on the one side by the
development of performance art, and on the other by the posturing and
theatrical dressing-up of “glam rock” (as in “glamour”), a mannerist devel-
opment of the very late 1960s42 – again, a consequence of a utopia that
wasn’t delivered – concerned with camp amboyance and a play on gender
conventions which resulted in a desire to project blatantly constructed, vain
personas in the manner of lm and rock stars, where ostentatious wealth is
represented by cheap glitter. If garage rock considered itself authentic and
reductive, glam was articial and exaggerated. Both, however, dealt with
undiluted expression enacted through the directness of the post-war rock’n’
roll style, which was what drew the rats and the peacocks onto the same
Lower East Side stages.43 Between them The Ramones (garage) and The
New York Dolls (glam) were inuences on the short-lived British punk scene
and its more signicant successor, post-punk.44
But so was Lou Reed. His revival in late 1971 as a solo artist had been
advanced by entrepreneurs putting him in touch with David Bowie in Lon-
don, where Reed – recognizing a resemblance with Warhol’s Factory – now
134 The Velvet Underground
joined in with the glam scene as something to do rather than to watch, even
though he was nearly 30. In view of his apparent stand against the prevailing
virtuosity and fantasies of programme rock – although he relied on excep-
tionally ne session musicians for his recordings – the cartoon punks (from
1976) and the more musically literate post-punks (from 1978) traced a her-
itage back from Reed to The Velvet Underground in order to keep Reed in
view but to denude him of his glam persona, which had become passé. The
Velvets became iconic gures by having presented existentialist views and
deadpan observation in a simple but epic and deranged musical style. Songs
from the rst two albums were covered by a large number of successful or
failed bands,45 often as training exercises.
It was no coincidence that this canonization took place in similar social
conditions to those a decade earlier when the Velvets were dissolving – now
with Europe and the USA at the end of the 1970s reacting to major cultural col-
lisions and economic grief46 by retreating to political conservatism (Reagan
and Thatcher). That several of the key bands who most claimed afnity with
the Velvets held reactionary principles – such as the Warsaw/Joy Division/
New Order cadre and the “Goth” (neo-Gothic) artists who revered Nico47 –
was not surprising either. Nevertheless, in 1982, for the rst time ever and due
to this interest, The Velvet Underground, which no longer formally existed,
came “into the black” and nally made money from record sales which were
split as royalties among the separated members, including Nico (and, after
her death in July 1988, her estate), a fair-minded situation which still applies
at the time of writing.
Nico’s ghastly demise – left to die from a brain haemorrhage in a hos-
pital on Ibiza because she looked to the duty doctor like just another stoned
hippie – followed that of Andy Warhol, who, in February 1987, had also died
of medical negligence following a routine gallstone operation in New York.
His unexpected death brought Cale and Reed together to compose a sequence
they called Songs for Drella (their nickname for Warhol, mixing Dracula with
Cinderella). That Cale and Reed could still bear to work together, although in
exceptional circumstances, led to hopes from promoters and new fans that
they might reform the band with Morrison and Tucker. A business meeting
regarding royalties in November 1992 did indeed bring the quartet together,
and, following a couple of days jamming as a band in February 1993, a reunion
tour of Europe was arranged for the summer of that year. But the four weeks
of rehearsals for this led to tensions so deep that following this desultory tour,
collaboration ceased. Soon after, Morrison died.
6 Death and Transfiguration 135
sity for fabrication50 was passed on in print, helped greatly by the method
Bockris used in 1983 for Up-Tight, the rst history of the Velvets – that
of uncritical blocks of direct quotation.51 In terms of mystication, the
appeal of ‘Sister Ray’, as an exemplar to copy or imitate, lay in its mod-
erate tempo and its I/IV simplicity against its seemingly endless length
lled with competing layers of activity; it had already mystied itself. Joy
Division’s producer Martin Hannett described the Velvets as, “Primitive
and complex at the same time, and just a fantastic, moody atmosphere.
It was the atmosphere that interested us.”52 In other words, nothing you
could put your nger on.
The legitimation of The Velvet Underground as a concestor, to borrow
Dawkins’ term again, came from dening it as a group ahead of its time,
hence its frequent designation as “proto-punk”. However, this book has
proposed the opposite – that the reason for the Velvets’ lack of success
was to do with it facing away from its present, or at least not being per-
tinent to the times. Reed had worked on a manifesto in 1965 which read,
“Western music is based on death, violence and the pursuit of progress…
Our band is the Western equivalent to the cosmic dance of Shiva. Playing
as Babylon goes up in ames.”53 To see this in more general terms, the need
to mythologize, for the reasons mentioned above, demands a degree of
historicization – of viewing the past from the present – which reshapes its
trajectory in order to render it as being aware of its future. In the specic
case of The Velvet Underground, here is apparently under these conditions
a band that suffered for its vision, died (rather than zzled out in 1973)
and whose sound world was revived by a new generation. This exercise
reorientates the group towards its future, and as a by-product obscures its
relation to the past. Let us call this practice anteriority, a term to describe
a condition of anticipating, envisioning or even precluding, but especially
in this case indicating how something from the past, looking to the past
within its own present, or facing laterally to it, can be reorientated – in
retrospect – to face the future, in order that those responsible for, or com-
plicit with, this operation will benet in terms of reputation, that is, social
status. In this case study The Velvet Underground produced a sound world
that failed in its time to nd support, but eventually found eminence
through other artists inuenced by it who then, by indicating the source
of their inspiration, gave it new life as an inuence to address all futures;
in this case it is the Velvets’ foresight that is ultimately rewarded, but also
in equal measure their successors’ judgment.
6 Death and Transfiguration 137
After all, wasn’t it an American boy who did it? The terror has become as
real as life.” Quoted in Thomas Hess, introduction to the Barnett Newman
catalogue (London: Tate Gallery, 1972).
19. Cage (1912–92) arrived in New York in 1942, settling in the Village at Sutton
Place from 1946, but from 1954 he lived out of town at Stony Point, returning
in 1970 to live at 107 Brook Street in the West Village. Therefore he was absent
from New York City during the essential period of The Velvet Underground’s
existence. See David Revil, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (New York:
Arcade Publishing, 1992).
20. 4' 33", rst performed on August 29th, 1952 by David Tudor at the piano,
Maverick Concert Hall, New York City.
21. Interview with A. Berman (Part 1, p. 1, Archives of American Art), quoted in
James A. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), p. 283.
22. “[At Syracuse 1960–4] I was very into Hegel, Sartre, Kierkegaard. After you
nish reading Kierkegaard you feel like something horrible has happened to
you – Fear and Nothing. That’s where I was coming from.” Lou Reed quoted
in Bockris, op. cit., p. 22.
23. Still, letter, July 1950, in John P. O’Neill, ed., J.P. Clyfford Still (New York: Metro-
politan Museum of Art, 1979), p. 21.
24. Barnett Newman, “The First Man Was An Artist,” article, 1949, quoted in
Charles Harrison, “Abstract Expressionism,” in Nikos Stangos, ed., Concepts of
Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 3rd ed., 1994), p. 197.
25. See Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991
(London: Michael Joseph, 1994), pp. 241–2.
26. Starting with Life magazine, August 8th, 1949: “Jackson Pollock – is he the
greatest living painter in the United States?” See reproduction in Steven Naifeh
and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (London: Barrie &
Jenkins, 1990), p. 595.
27. Jackson Pollock lived in Greenwich Village from 1930 to 1945, when he moved
to East Hampton on Long Island. He continued to socialize in the Village; there
are many anecdotes of his brawling there.
28. John Cage, who socialized almost nightly at the Cedar Tavern, talked of
“the climate of being together… Each had absolute condence in our work.”
See Mary Lynn Kotz, Robert Rauschenberg: Art and Life (New York: Harry N.
Abrams Inc., 1990), p. 89.
29. Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Art Since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson,
2000), p. 37. See also George Cotkin, “The spontaneity that had originally been
part of Abstract Expressionism had hardened into a style, transformed into
objects of veneration and commercial value,” in Existential America (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 133.
30. Quoted in Leonard Wallock, ed., New York: Cultural Capital of the World 1940–
1965 (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 154.
31. Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958), quoted in David Joselit, American
Art Since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), pp. 50–1.
140 The Velvet Underground
32. See RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1979, rev. ed. 1988), p. 126.
33. See Goldberg, op. cit., pp. 128–30.
34. Kaprow, article in It Is journal, No. 4 (1959), quoted in Wallock, op. cit., p. 149.
35. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1993), p. 14.
36. “Monogram” (1955–9), Collection Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
37. Quoted in Kotz, op. cit., p. 90. The artist had a pet goat as a child, and so there
is an argument around “Monogram” as to whether it relates to urban collage
or to nostalgia.
38. Kotz, op. cit., p. 87.
39. Seitz, “Introduction to the catalogue” (The Art of Assemblage, MOMA, 1961),
quoted in Lucie-Smith, op. cit., p. 97.
40. “Rauschenberg’s and [Jasper] John’s images of coffee cans, ags, targets and
jet ghters, created under the inuence of the beat poets, returned New York
painting to the details of daily life, making the content of their work obvious.”
W. B. Scott and P. M. Rutkoff, New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 319.
2 The Band
1. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 10.
2. “Throughout the whole time I was in The Velvet Underground we never sorted
out any set line-up. Sometimes we’d even get Moe to play bass, it was that
unstructured.” John Cale in John Cale and Victor Bockris, What’s Welsh for Zen?
(London: Bloomsbury Press, 1999), p. 106.
3. Richard Witts, Nico interview, London, February 12th, 1986.
4. Bockris, op. cit., p. 2.
5. Paul Morrissey declared in a January 1991 interview with this author, “He mar-
ried a man. He married a woman. What the hell’s wrong with him?”
6. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 69. Reed has often made the observation that a
number of personalities inhabit him (“up to eight”); this merely conforms to a
popular and coarse rationalization of schizophrenia as “split personality.”
7. A brand name of Ethchlorvynol. See William Martindale, The Complete Drug
Reference (London: Pharmaceutical Press, 32nd ed., 1999).
8. On February 3rd, 1959 Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper were killed
together in a plane crash. In 1958 Elvis Presley was called up for his two-year
national service, and in the same year the House of Representatives set up a com-
mittee to scrutinize the independent record companies most associated with
rock and rhythm & blues music, while in 1960 rock DJ Alan Freed was arrested
for violating New York’s commercial bribery laws, the so-called “payola scandal.”
These signalled the end of rock’n’roll as a primary commercial market and in its
place the revival of Brill Building pop song writing.
9. See Peter Doggett, Lou Reed: Growing Up in Public (London: Omnibus Press,
1992), p. 16.
Notes 141
which featured Bill Haley and his Comets’ song ‘Rock Around The Clock’. Cale
was then 13 years old.
35. “The ted was uncompromisingly proletarian and xenophobic…and the teds’
shamelessly fabricated aesthetic – an aggressive combination of sartorial
exotica (suede shoes, velvet and moleskin collars, and bootlace ties) – existed
in stark contrast to the beatniks.” Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of
Style (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 51.
36. Cardew earned his living in London mainly as a graphic designer. His scores
such as The Great Learning (1968–70) comprise elegant graphics. Cardew later
abjured Stockhausen in his Maoist treatise Stockhausen Serves Imperialism
(1974).
37. Composed 1952–4. The British première took place in 1959.
38. Essay by Kaprow in Geoffrey Hendricks, ed., Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus,
Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972 (Piscataway, NJ: Rut-
gers University Press, 2003), p. 7.
39. No details of this performance survive at Goldsmiths College, but a copy of the
programme is held in the “Happening und Fluxus” collection of the Koelner-
ische Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany, which was reprinted in the catalogue
on the subject of 1970.
40. Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus Codex (Detroit: Gilbert & Lila Silverman Fluxus
Collection, 1988), p. 221.
41. Fluxus Codex, op. cit., pp. 61-3; see also Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Ber-
keley: University of California Press, 2002).
42. For an account of Tanglewood and Bernstein’s close relationship to it, see
Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 73–
83.
43. Copland visited London to conduct the European première, by the London
Symphony Orchestra, of his new work Connotations for Orchestra (1962) which
had been commissioned by Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic Orchestra
to inaugurate the Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York City,
première September 23rd, 1962. See Howard Pollock, Aaron Copland: The Life
and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999; London: Faber &
Faber, 2000), p. 501.
44. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 57.
45. Strange Brew, BBC Radio 3. LaMonte Young interviewed by Richard Witts,
May 11, 1993. “And when John came over he had this Leonard Bernstein
scholarship and he went to Tanglewood and I guess he got a little bored with
the academic situation and he asked John Cage, you know, what should he
do, and John Cage said, ‘Well why don’t you go and work with LaMonte
Young?’ and John came and I immediately recognized he was very talented
and I asked him to play viola in my group.”
46. September 9th–10th, 1963, 6 pm–12:40 pm the next afternoon, at the Pocket
Theatre (100 3rd Avenue).
47. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 30.
48. Birthdate unknown.
Notes 143
71. See Bill Bentley, “Sterling Morrison: Appreciation,” Austin Chronicle 15.2 (Sep-
tember 1995).
72. Interview with Nick Modern for Slugg fanzine (1980?), reprinted in NYRocker
fanzine July/August 1980. It is this interview from which the Morrison quotes
are taken for Bockris and Malanga (op. cit.), although the source is not credited
there.
73. Modern, op. cit.
74. Modern, op. cit.
75. Richard Witts interview with Morrison, 1994.
76. Bockris and Malanga, op. cit., p. 43.
77. Bockris and Malanga, op. cit., p. 23.
78. Bockris and Malanga, op. cit., p. 40.
79. Richard Witts interview with Morrison, op. cit.
80. Quoted in Karen O’Brien, Hymn To Her: Women Musicians Talk (London: Virago,
1995), p. 109.
81. Quoted on http://www.velvetunderground.co.uk/index/Tucker (accessed
April 10th, 2005).
82. Richard Witts interview with Nico, 1986.
83. In another interview she says she was aged ten: http://www.spearedpeanut.
com/tajmoehal (accessed February 7th, 2006).
84. Ibid.
85. O’Brien, op. cit., p. 100.
86. O’Brien, op. cit., pp. 97–9.
87. Cale claims that at these rehearsals the band would ingest blue tranquillizers,
four quarts of beer and a joint. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 78.
88. Cumming, op. cit.
89. Source: Mela Foundation, New York. See http://www.melafoundation.org.
90. Marian Zazeela: “[Angus] was really a great poet, and one of his inventions
was the poem called ‘Year’… The name of the day that [LaMonte and I] met is
called Day of Wages. So we thought, ‘We’re getting our due here!’ and then
it went on to Day of the Heart’s Release and some certain various things that
seemed terribly poignant.” Strange Brew, BBC Radio 3. Zazeela interviewed by
Richard Witts, May 11, 1993.
91. Story quoted by René van der Vort in Blastitude webzine 13 (August 2002), p. 8.
92. Richard Witts, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon (London: Virgin Books, 1993),
p. 20. All of the information in this section is a summarized version of that to
be found in this biography.
93. Un chant d’amour (1950).
94. Richard Witts, interview with Nico Papatakis, Paris, March 4th, 1991.
95. Nevertheless, Delon’s mother did formally recognize Ari and adopt him. He’s
known as Ari Boulogne, from the surname of Delon’s mother by her second
marriage.
96. “Hip is hip, and groove is groovy/life’s a wild Fellini movie” – lyric from Far Out
Munsters, The Munsters TV series, transmitted USA, March 18th, 1965.
97. Morrissey to Richard Witts, January 1991.
Notes 145
3 Reed
1. Chuck Berry documentary, Programme 1, School’s Out production for BBC
Radio 2, broadcast May 21st, 2003.
2. Quoted in Chris Roberts, Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side: The Stories Behind the
Songs (London: Carlton Books, 2004), p. 9.
3. See Doggett, op. cit., p. 60. He couldn’t make this claim for the debut album, as
Nico sang some of the songs.
4. For example, on the sleeve note to Metal Machine Music (1975).
5. Press release for Street Hassle (Arista, 1978), quoted in Bockris, op. cit., p. 322.
6. Unattributed quote in Bockris, op. cit., p. 219.
7. Bockris, op. cit., p. 68.
8. Victor Bockris, interview in The Independent, July 22nd, 2004, Review section,
p. 6.
9. See Music Example 3(d) in Chapter 4.
10. Roberts, op. cit., p. 34.
11. Sleeve note to Metal Machine Music.
12. Bockris, op. cit., p. 130.
13. Morrissey interview with Richard Witts, January 1991.
14. Bockris, op. cit., p. 326.
15. Bockris, op. cit., p. 155.
16. Reed’s song was commissioned for the lm but it was not ready in time. It
appeared on Nico’s rst solo album, Chelsea Girl (1968). Chelsea is a neighbour-
hood north of Greenwich Village, but in both cases here it refers to the Chelsea
Hotel, 222 W23rd Street, where some Warhol associates lived for a time (it is
mainly a residential hotel), including John Cale, Viva, and, later, Nico.
17. Bockris, op. cit., p. 155.
18. Bockris, op. cit., p. 91.
19. Bockris, op. cit., p. 61.
20. Nico interview with Richard Witts, February 12th, 1986.
21. Paul Morrissey: “Then Tom [Wilson, the producer of the debut LP] said, ‘Listen.
The only thing I don’t like about the record is, there’s not enough Nico. You’ve
got to get another song for Nico…’ So, Lou comes up with this song which is
terribly insipid, called ‘Sunday Morning’: ‘Suuunday Mor-ning, Withooout a
warning.’ Yech, it’s so dopey… Somehow at the last minute he wouldn’t let
her sing it. He sang it! The little creep.” Interview with Richard Witts, January
1991.
22. Lesh to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit., 1993.
23. Bockris, op. cit., p. 145.
24. “Beyond The Teacup” or “Déjeuner en fourroure” (1936) – cup, saucer and
spoon using the fur of a Chinese gazelle. See Bice Curiger, Meret Oppenheim:
Deance in the Face of Freedom (Zurich: Parkett Publishers Inc., 1989).
25. Man Ray (Emmanuel Rudnitsky), 1890–1976.
26. See William Plank, Sartre and Surrealism (Ann Arbor: Michigan University
Press, 1981).
146 The Velvet Underground
27. John Cale said that he hated Dylan’s songs “because they were full of ques-
tions.” Interview with Richard Witts, January 1991.
28. Richard Witts interview, February 12th, 1986.
29. There is a short story by Delmore Schwarz from 1958 titled The Gift. This
appears to be a coincidence, however, as the stories are not related.
30. Lenny Bruce, Obscenity, Busts and Trials (Shefeld: Pirate Press, 1992), p. 22.
31. According to record producer Phil Spector, “Bruce died of an overdose – of
police.”
32. The Village Fugs: Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dis-
satisfaction, Folkways Records, 1965. Re-released on CD, Fugs Records (UK),
1993.
33. In “Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs,” San Francisco Chronicle, July
26th, 1959. Quoted in James Campbell, This Is The Beat Generation (London:
Secker & Warburg, 1999), p. 252.
34. A set of norms, values, and stylistic traits consciously adopted by a class-derived
group in order to distinguish themselves, in terms of a collective identity, from
the most common cultural order and from other competing subcultures. See
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979). But
see also Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital
(London: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 8–12.
35. “Lifestyles are patterns of action that differentiate people… Dependent
on cultural forms, each is a style, a manner, a way of using certain goods,
places and times that is characteristic of a group but is not that totality of
their social experience.” David Chaney, Lifestyles (London: Routledge, 1996),
pp. 4–5.
36. Elias Wilentz, ed., The Beat Scene (New York: Corinth Books, 1960), p. 8.
37. Cecil Taylor, interview with Richard Witts, Royal Festival Hall, May 4th, 1985.
38. Preston Whaley Jr states that, “The Beats certainly trafcked in primitivisms”,
dening the “vogue of the Negro” as a desire by artists and intellectuals to
return to the alienated personality “what machine-age modernity had taken
away – nature”. See Blows Like A Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in
the Transformation of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004), p. 29.
39. Jack Kerouac, On The Road, written 1950, published 1957.
40. In line with the religious shifts outlined in Chapter 1.
41. Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle, April 2nd, 1958.
42. Campbell, op. cit., p. 245.
43. See Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats and Others (London: Penguin, 1967). See also
C. R. Starr: “I Want To Be With My Own Kind – Individual Resistance and Col-
lective Action in the Beat Counterculture,” in Jennie Skerl, ed., Reconstructing
the Beats (London: Palgrave, 2004).
44. The poet Kenneth Rexroth, father gure to Beat poets, wrote about the “utter
nihilism of the emptied-out hipster” in 1957. See Campbell, op. cit., p. 206.
45. Quoted in James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism
(London: Routledge, 1997), p. 69.
Notes 147
46. Of course there are exceptions of the period, such as Gil Evans and Bill Evans in
jazz, Odetta and Richie Havens in folk music.
47. A term used in Campbell, op. cit., p. 12, as is much of this information (pp. 5–9),
which can be also veried in the standard biographies of these writers.
48. See Whaley, op. cit., pp. 47, 83, 85.
49. In March 1959 Ginsberg told the New York Port Authorities (trying to hold
back distribution of Howl) that the Beat Generation “is prophets howling in the
wilderness against a crazy civilisation”.
50. Howl, Part II, in Collected Poems 1947–1980 (London: HarperCollins, 1984).
51. Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 25.
52. Nico interviewed by Richard Witts, February 12th, 1986.
53. Ginsberg quoted in Jesse Monteagudo, The Death of the Beat Generation (1997)
at http://gaytoday.com/garchive/viewpoint/102797vi.htm (accessed Febru-
ary 13th, 2006).
54. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), p. 181.
55. See D’Emilio, op. cit., p. 181.
56. Lower case was her chosen spelling.
57. Whaley, op. cit., p. 12.
58. Kenneth Rexroth, “Jazz Poetry” (from The Nation, March 29th, 1958) in B. Mor-
row, ed., World Outside The Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New
York: New Directions, 1987).
59. Miles, op. cit., pp. 424–5.
60. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 106.
61. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 70.
62. Bockris, op. cit., p. 158.
63. Seeing the need for reection, the Beat poet Brion Gysin introduced the “cut-
up” method of reassembling in chance ways words and phrases and by this
“nding the truth”. This technique was taken up by Burroughs in 1960 when
he was working on The Naked Lunch. Some songwriters subsequently used the
method, including Nico, who said she was introduced to it by Jim Morrison of
The Doors.
64. Stereophonic discs for the domestic market were rst issued in 1958. Through-
out The Velvet Underground’s period of activity, monophonic discs were still
manufactured.
65. Bockris, op. cit., p. 244.
66. Introduction to Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed (New
York: Hyperion Books, 1991; London: Viking, 1992).
67. Whaley, op. cit., p. 29.
68. There is a theory, expounded by broadcaster Tony Wilson among others, that
popular music runs on 13-year cycles, possible related to the arrival of a new
teenage market (13 being the start of the “teen”).
69. Track on Street Hassle (Arista, 1978).
148 The Velvet Underground
4 Cale
1. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 70.
2. First performance, May 14th, 1961, New York City.
3. Young: “The work that allows members of the audience to sit on the stage and
look at the audience, reversing the roles, this was getting into a very conceptual
level. It was geared towards making people really think about what is this experi-
ence that we allow ourselves to walk into and be hand-fed, and are we going to
put up with it or are we going to do something about it?” Young to Richard Witts,
Strange Brew, op. cit.
4. Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music (London: Kahn & Averill; New York:
Broude, 1983).
5. Young: “Probably I started to work on the way that became LaMonte Young in
1957 when I rst composed long, sustained tones in the middle of a work for
brass and then in 1958 when I composed the trio for strings which was the rst
work composed of sustained tones. And this led through a series of works to a
work called Composition 1960 no. 7 which was just B and F sharp sustained for
a long time.” Young to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
6. Dave Smith, “Following a Straight Line: LaMonte Young,” in Contact magazine
18 (Winter 1977–8), pp. 4–9. This article remains a ground-breaking source of
information on Young. An updated version of this article can be found at the
JEMS – the online Journal of Experimental Music.
Notes 149
7. Young: “[Compositions 1960] were a very strong social statement about what
we’d been having in our concert halls, and what does it mean, and what could
be happening in our concert halls. At the same time poetry was within the
works.” Young to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
8. However, the audience had been invited to bring sounds with them, although
inaudible ones.
9. Cornelius Cardew, “On the Role of the Instructions in the Interpretation of Inde-
terminate Music,” in Treatise Handbook (London: Peters, 1971), p. xiv. See also
Cardew, “One Sound: LaMonte Young,” Musical Times 107.11 (1966), p. 959.
10. Quoted in Fluxshoe (Devon: Beau Geste Press, 1972).
11. Smith, op. cit.
12. Smith, op. cit.
13. Indica Gallery, October 9th, 1966. Lennon offered Ono an imaginary ve shil-
lings to knock an imaginary nail into one of her exhibits.
14. Young: “You have uxus and you have statis. I really was not very interested in
uxus. I was interested in concept art, but I was interested in statis.” Young to
Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op cit.
15. Potter, op. cit., pp. 21–76, and Smith, op. cit.
16. Potter reports that a big inuence on Young was John Coltrane’s recorded
improvising to Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s song ‘My Favourite Things’. Potter,
op. cit., p. 63.
17. Potter, op. cit., p. 57 (unpublished material in composer’s archive, p. 348).
18. His connection with modern jazz is stronger. For example, at school Young
shared with Eric Dolphy (1928–64) the saxophone desk and the clarinet desk
in the dance band and the orchestra respectively. Dolphy became a leading
modern-jazz virtuoso, playing on Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz LP and also per-
forming with John Coltrane and Charles Mingus.
19. J.S. Bach, Das wohltemperirte Clavier, oder Praeludia, und Fugen durch all Tone
und Semitonia (“24 Preludes and Fugues in all keys”) BWV 846-69 (1722). But
see Malcolm Boyd, Bach (London: J.M. Dent, 1983), pp. 97–9 on the relation-
ship between “well tempered” and “equal temperament.”
20. Première, Rome 1974, New York 1975.
21. First performance, outdoors at George Segal’s farm, May 19th, 1963.
22. Readers of Chapter 1 will recognize here the “American pioneer” parable being
asserted through this, and the link with Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat, in some-
thing exceptional being related to something much more ordinary in child-
hood. Young: “You have to remember I was a hillbilly. I was born in Idaho, in
a log cabin. My dad was up in the hills herding sheep, living in a tepee, then
coming down and staying at the cabin.” Young to Richard Witts, Strange Brew,
op. cit.
23. Young: “I remember that we composed some of the rst titles together as a
kind of group stream of consciousness.” Young to Richard Witts, Strange Brew,
op cit. This connects with the mid-1960s, drug-related revival of surrealism
mentioned in Chapter 2.
24. Potter, op. cit., p. 76.
150 The Velvet Underground
25. Cale: “The music has a beat-poet quality, these interesting, pitter and pat-
ter rhythmic patterns behind the drone.” David Fricke, liner notes to Velvet
Underground, Peel Slowly & See (USA: PolyGram, 1995), p. 17.
26. I labour the point about saxophones in B at and E at because Coltrane
moved from tenor to soprano which are both in B at, while Young took the
corresponding move, but, as his rst instrument was the alto sax in E at, he
took up the sopranino, also in E at.
27. See Chapter 2.
28. Zazeela to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
29. Herz = cycles per second.
30. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 58.
31. Young used no notation between 1962 (Death Chant) and 1990 (a commission
for the Kronos Quartet). Potter shows a one-page “complete score” of one
version of a section of Tortoise (example 1.9, p. 75) where Cale’s viola part and
voice part can be clearly made out. But this “score” was constructed as part of
a grant application to the Guggenheim Foundation, which stipulated that a
score must be submitted.
32. Cale: “To this day he refuses to acknowledge our contribution.” Cale and
Bockris, op. cit., p. 61.
33. Potter, op. cit., p. 76.
34. See Ann Harrison, Music – The Business: The Essential Guide to the Law and the
Deals (London: Virgin Books, 2003). See also Michael F. Flint, Nicholas Fitz-
patrick and Clive D. Thorne, A User’s Guide to Copyright (London: Butterworth,
5th ed., 2000).
35. Smith, op. cit., ex. 3.
36. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 60.
37. Adolphe Sax 1814–94. Sax invented the saxophone in 1846 as a military band
instrument. Its carrying power made it a favourite instrument in the dance
hall, which was the origin of its use in jazz, and it was ultimately Young’s cho-
sen instrument. Young: “I started playing saxophone when I was seven years
old. My father taught me. He had learned from his uncle who was my Great
Uncle Thornton. My Uncle Thornton had a swing band in Los Angeles.” Young
to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op cit.
38. They were soon developed by the rm Barcus-Berry directly for string instru-
ments.
39. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 60.
40. This may be why Reed adopted Dylan’s nasal style in order to get his voice to
“carry”.
41. Zazeela to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
42. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 58.
43. Smith, op. cit.
44. Cale: “I could just pick two notes on the viola that really t for the whole songs.
It would give a dream-like quality to the whole thing.” Fricke, op. cit., p. 11.
45. As the chord in aggregate is B–D#–F#–A, the D natural conjoins with F#–A to
make a D major/B major composite.
Notes 151
46. Cale uses his viola on four tracks out of the eleven on the debut album, the
fourth being ‘Sunday Morning’, where it’s used in the traditional context of
backing harmonies; see Example 3a.
47. R–L–R–R L–R–L–L.
48. Reed otherwise uses Sprechgesang, a vocal technique halfway between singing
and speaking, throughout ‘Sister Ray’.
49. Young to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
50. Smith, op. cit., para. 23.
51. Young to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
52. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 91.
53. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 113.
54. Richard Witts: “Looking at this language, to me it’s…almost the vocabulary of
the hippie.” Zazeela: “Yes!” Young: “Absolutely, completely.” Zazeela to Richard
Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
55. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 93.
56. Further performances were given there on the weekend of November 20th,
1965. Potter, op. cit., has the chronology.
57. Zazeela to Richard Witts, op. cit.
58. Young: “I think we all know from an historical point of view that, if we look
back at Baroque times, Bach and others, and even Mozart, were great impro-
visers. But this aspect of our classical tradition began to get lost as printing
improved… We began to lose our improvisation skills, so that being involved
in jazz was very exciting for me.” Young to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
59. Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968),
p. 183. Quoted in Potter, op. cit., p. 72.
60. Cale would later wear masks.
61. See Nik Cohn, “Phil Spector,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
(New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1980), p. 153.
62. There are thousands of examples, from Doris Day’s ‘Whatever Will Be Will Be
(Che Sera, Sera)’ of 1956 to Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’ (1961).
63. Camp in the sense of self-consciously underdone or overblown – that is, miss-
ing the target. See Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp (1964),” in A Susan Sontag
Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 105–19.
64. Spector became marginally involved with both The Beatles and The Roll-
ing Stones, though in neither case successfully. His “Wall of Sound” records,
especially “Be My Baby,” were a key inuence on Brian Wilson of The Beach
Boys.
65. The American guitarist Les Paul started multi-tracking as an idiosyncratic nov-
elty in 1948. RCA had started 3-track recording experiments in 1954, and the
4-track machine had been quickly developed, but it was only in the middle
1960s that the 4-track (and fairly soon after multiples of it, usually up to 32-
track) were used, the most famous example being The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Heart’s Club Band, which they started to record (with ‘Strawberry Fields
Forever’) in November 1966, eventually using two 4-track machines.
66. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 73.
152 The Velvet Underground
67. Yet the description is closer to the “sonoral” group of Polish composers which
sprang up from the late 1950s, in particular Penderecki (b. 1933) and Górecki
(b. 1933). The 2nd Symphony of Lutoslawski (1913–94) famously opens with an
increasingly chaotic stream of fanfares (1966).
68. Bockris, op. cit., p. 158.
69. Bowing near the bridge to produce a glassy tone saturated with harmonics.
70. Starting at 1:21 with an arpeggiated drone, G–D–G.
71. Bockris and Malanga, op. cit., p. 115.
72. Cale to Richard Witts, January 1991.
73. This enlarges Reed’s persistent tendency to place the opening of a verse halfway
through the bar (e.g. ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, etc.).
74. Cole, interview with Richard Witts, January 1991.
75. See, for example, Dave Thompson, Wall of Pain: The Biography of Phil Spector
(London: Sanctuary, 2003), p. 74.
76. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 74.
77. Vocals at I 2:55–3:56; II 6:35–7:25; III 9:04–9:38; IV 10:21–11:53; V 12:26–13:11; VI
16:06–16:48.
78. In fact 13 tracks in total were recorded.
79. See Thompson, op. cit., pp. 48–9.
80. Untuned or, at least, de-tuned. The “Ostrich” guitar was the one used for “Do
The Ostrich” in early 1965. From Cale’s account (Cale to Richard Witts, 1991), it
seems that this guitar (where the six strings were tuned to the same pitch class)
was eventually left to be played without being tuned, so that it produced for The
Velvet Underground a twanging texture as the six strings clashed against each
other.
81. Roger McGuinn of The Byrds: “The Beatles were a strong inuence. They kept
us moving… They were going from one direction to another, not wanting to
be locked in a box, and we didn’t either.” Quoted in Robert Palmer, Dancing in
the Street (London: BBC Books, 1996), p. 99.
82. A European-wide interest brought about in part by the presence (through the
post-war occupation of the USA military) of American Forces network radio
stations playing, sometimes on segregated shows, a range of rhythm & blues
and urban blues records. This helps to explain the knowledge of, and interest
in, the American blues tradition to be found throughout Germany.
83. Morrison to Richard Witts, op. cit. Because of Morrison’s aversion, even Tucker
was known to play bass guitar in performances.
84. This raises the issue of how far it matters quite what pitches bass guitarists
play in performance or when recording conditions are poor. In the late 1970s
it became considered appropriate by some musicians (most usually male) for
females to play bass guitars in punk and post-punk bands on the understand-
ing that it was easier to play than a guitar and it didn’t really matter what
notes they played as long as they kept in time.
85. Beats per minute.
86. T. W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, eds.,
On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 301-14.
Notes 153
5 The Factory
1. Keir Keightley in his essay “Reconsidering Rock” writes of the concept “teen”
music (its opposite being “adult” music) being replaced by “youth” from 1964–5
onwards, admitting that “youth” is a more complex term. See Simon Frith, Will
Straw and John Street, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 122–5.
2. The system of two people writing one song, or a number of songs, together has
a long history and stems from the practice of one composer writing the music
and one lyricist writing the words. Although solo song writers such as Cole
Porter existed, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in the 1920s and 1930s were
exemplars (they often started with the music, Hart adding words), followed by
Leiber and Stoller in the 1950s. In the early 1960s the Brill Building and Aldon
company nearby employed female/male pairs of songwriters such as Carole
King and Gerry Gofn, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff
Barry. The solo female singer-songwriter genre grew very slowly out of the folk
movement. Odetta, Joan Baez and Judy Collins sang traditional works and those
of contemporary writers, but from this background emerged Joni Mitchell in
the late 1960s. Rock groups were exclusively all male in membership (with the
exceptions noted in the main text) and so in consequence male writing partner-
ships were the norm.
3. Their manager locked them in a room until they came up with something of
their own.
4. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 73.
5. The Doors, ‘Light My Fire’ (lyrics by Robby Krieger and Jim Morrison), 1967.
6. Bockris and Malanga, op. cit., p. 96.
7. ‘White Light/White Heat’.
8. Quoted in Robert Hughes, American Visions (London: Harvill Press, 1997),
p. 563. Warhol also wrote: “Love and sex can go together. And sex and unlove
can go together. And love and unsex can go together. But personal love and
personal sex is bad”, in Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to
B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
9. Morrissey to Richard Witts, January 1991. Possibly a reference to Oscar Levant’s
droll comment on Day, “I knew her before she was a virgin”.
10. Nico to Richard Witts, February 12th, 1986.
11. As a Maoist – a revolutionary communist – which he became at that time.
12. The MC5 (Motor City 5) from Detroit came to be known around 1968, hence
its exclusion from the 1966/7 list.
13. A fourth category could be added, that of “mainstream”, to cover the most
economically successful bands; The Beatles were “activist”, at least in relation
154 The Velvet Underground
33. Unlike Warhol they chose a pseudonym of “Matson Jones” to hide their trade
from other artists.
34. Poet John Giorno: “[The art world was] completely homophobic and that’s
what had always terried Andy and Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper. Having
grown up in the fties, coming into the sixties was like punching out of a
paper bag.” Quoted in Bockris, op. cit., p. 203.
35. Kenneth E. Silver, “Andy Warhol 1928–1987,” Art in America 75.5 (1987).
36. See Chapter 1 on hard-edged abstraction.
37. See David E. Brauer et al., Pop Art: US/UK Connections 1956–1966 (Houston, TX:
Hatje Cantz, 2001).
38. Quoted in Rodley, op. cit. (41:00).
39. Begun a week after Monroe’s suicide.
40. From press photographs taken before and after the shooting of her husband,
and also at the funeral.
41. Commissioned through architect Philip Johnson for the 1964 New York World’s
Fair, but rejected. Warhol had it painted over in silver.
42. Quoted in Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture (51:00). Additionally Warhol
desired to alter his name, partly to reverse the decreased circulation of his
existing work. Sam Green: “He decided not to sign his name that year [1965].
In fact that was the year he applied to the Library of Congress to have his name
ofcially changed to John Doe.” In Warhol Denied, dir. Chris Rodley, BBC1 TV,
transmission January 24th, 2006.
43. “Underground” was a term taken from the French, where it had rst been
descriptive of the World War II anti-Nazi resistance movement, but post-war
came to epitomize the cultural underground, a modish subculture associated
with the Left Bank of Paris, where existentialist-inspired youths would gather
in “caves” – underground bars – to listen to singer-songwriters. Nico Papatakis
owned one of the rst and most famous of these, La Rose Rouge, where singer
Juliette Greco was “discovered”.
44. Quoted in Sheldon Renan, The Underground Film: An Introduction to its Develop-
ment in America (London: Studio Vista, 1968), p. 100.
45. Warhol’s Slovakian background, Nico’s German, Maciunas’ Estonian, Cale’s
Welsh and Mekas’ Lithuanian backgrounds, illustrates the notion of New
York City as a city of immigrants.
46. Renan, op. cit., p. 101.
47. Conrad: “My principal motivation was to explore the possibilities for harmonic
expression using a sensory mode other than sound…. I was interested to see
whether there might be combination-frequency effects that would occur with
icker, analogous to the combination-tone effects that are responsible for
consonance in music.” Brian Duguid interview with Tony Conrad, Table of the
Elements 1996, at http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/intervs/conrad (accessed
August 8th, 2005).
48. “What the comic book and the soup can were for painters, Hollywood and
home movies were for some lm-makers.” Stephen Dworkin, Film Is: The
International Free Cinema (London: Peter Owen, 1975), p. 50.
156 The Velvet Underground
77. It was sold on in 1967 to a man who wanted to promote coffee to teenagers as
a coffee-shop-cum-discothèque called The Electric Circus.
78. Cale: “He spent all the time on the phone, talking to various girlfriends.” Cale
interview with Richard Witts, January 1991.
79. Cale and Bockris, op. cit., p. 108.
80. Morrison interview with Richard Witts, September 1994.
81. Quoted in Bockris, op. cit., p. 157.
82. Bockris, op. cit., p. 168.
83. Bockris, op. cit., p. 168.
14. From 231 E 47th Street to the fth oor of 33 Union Square West, February
1968.
15. Victor Bockris, Warhol (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 337.
16. Peter Hogan, The Complete Guide to the Music of the Velvet Underground (London:
Omnibus Press), p. 25.
17. Here I’m including the songs released not only on the third and fourth albums,
The Velvet Underground (1968/1969) and Loaded (1969/1970), but also those
songs recorded in 1968 and 1969 yet only released in the 1980s on VU (1985)
and Another View (1986).
18. Liner notes to The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966), quoted in
Palmer, op. cit., p. 163.
19. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Rizzoli, 1978).
See also Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1986),
p. 14.
20. Cale to Richard Witts, January 1991.
21. See Michael Keith and Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1993).
22. LP Cotillon, May 1972; CD on Atlantic. It’s supposedly recorded on Reed’s last
night with the band (August 23rd, 1970), though there is nothing to conrm
this. Morrison was certainly sceptical of the claim that this was the recording’s
date.
23. Palmer, op. cit., p. 166.
24. Morrissey to Richard Witts, January 1991.
25. Originally a quote from 1961 by painter Frank Stella.
26. Even in 1997 the discography of the fan-focused Velvet Underground Compan-
ion (ed. Albin Zak; London: Omnibus Press) mentions “Heroin” consistently
as “H.”
27. Nico to Richard Witts, 1986.
28. Cale to Richard Witts, Strange Brew, op. cit.
29. Morrison to Richard Witts, September 1994.
30. Tucker to Richard Witts, September 1994.
31. Morrison complained that, in between her songs, Nico would wander off-
stage and talk to friends in the audience, because that’s what she’d seen Mar-
lene Dietrich do during cabaret scenes in lms.
32. Nico to Richard Witts, February 1986.
33. According to Hogan, op. cit., p. 92.
34. Bockris and Malanga, op. cit., p. 142.
35. Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music (Double LP on RCA, 1975; CD on Buddha
Records, 2000).
36. In fact his nal contractual commitment to RCA was realized with Coney Island
Baby released January 1976, his sixth solo album. He had provided four albums
of a ve-album deal prior to Metal Machine Music. This surely accounts for the
press comment that Metal Machine Music was a cynical, effortless “spoiler” to
discharge his legal obligation.
37. It is rather close in sound to Xenakis’ Persepolis of 1971.
Notes 159
38. The general move from the stage to the studio has already been noted. How-
ever, from 1968 onward there came a reaction by artists considering the studio
an inauthentic environment.
39. Their given names were Tom Miller (Verlaine), Richard Meyers (Hell), John
Gezale (Thunders), James Osterberg (Pop). Osterberg was one of Nico’s lovers.
40. Ron Ashton of The Stooges: “Our audiences were the opposite of fans.” They
threw eggs, cigarette butts and whiskey bottles at the stage. Iggy Pop: “I had to
quit. It’s hard to beat yourself up every night.” In Punk Rock USA, BBC Radio 2,
March 13th, 2004.
41. Nico to Richard Witts, February 12th, 1986. When Nico lost her Indian harmo-
nium, Patti Smith bought her a new one.
42. Most conspicuously brought together by the British singer David Bowie (David
Jones, b. 1947) who trained as a mime artist and worked in an arts centre.
43. While popular bands moved into large arenas and stadiums, the alternative
scene lost the wide range of performance spaces available in the 1960s and
moved into small bars and clubs, the most well-known New York club of this
kind being CBGBs (“Country, Blue Grass and Blues”) which could be hired on
an otherwise empty Monday night.
44. Also known as New Wave, both terms being music-industry constructs.
45. Perhaps with the exception of “Run Run Run”. I’m grateful to Graham Duff for
pointing this out.
46. Brought on by the Yom Kippur War of 1973 between Israel, and both Egypt and
Syria, and the subsequent global rise in the price of oil.
47. See Paul Hodkinson, Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
48. Congested not only by artists but also by the burgeoning number of small,
independent record companies. It was also a period of recession; the market
itself was small.
49. Liner notes to Metal Machine Music, 1975.
50. As previously noted, Reed, Cale, and Nico each had felt the need to hide some
facts about age, drugs, or relationships. The exception has been Tucker whose
accounts of events have been convincingly straightforward.
51. However, his later books surpassed this.
52. Hannett to Richard Witts, New Manchester Review, April 1980.
53. Bockris (1994), op. cit., p. 98.
54. Bockris (1994), op. cit., p. 21.
55. Nico to Richard Witts, February 12th, 1986.
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Index
‘4’ 33” ’ (Cage) 7, 28, 139 Bellevue Hospital, New York City 55, 62
13th Floor Elevators, The 117, 126 Bellow, Saul 63–4
800 Club, Syracuse 33–4 Ben (Vautier) 25
Berlin 38
Abstract Expressionism 7–9, 18, 99– Bernstein, Leonard 27
101, 124, 129, 139 Berry, Chuck 42, 51, 64, 93
activism 4–6, 33, 53–4, 95–6, 120–2, Between Thought and Expression
153–4 (Reed) 59
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 90 ‘Black Angel’s Death Song, The’ (Reed
‘After Hours’ (Reed) 91 etc.) 34, 46, 58–9, 77, 81, 90, 94, 122
Aimée, Anouk 39 Black Mountain College 10
Alexander, Willie 14–15 blues, the 31, 57, 69, 85, 132, 152
‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ (Reed) 45, 50, Bockris, Victor 17–18, 94, 136
69, 77, 83–5, 87, 90–1, 115–6 Boulez, Pierre 24
A Love Supreme (Coltrane) 58 Boulogne, Ari 38, 40, 94, 134, 144
Americanism 7, 99–100 Bowed Disc Ensemble, The
amplication 73–4, 86–7, 109, 119, (Young) 69–70, 79, 103
123, 132 Bowie, David 133–4, 159
Ancestor’s Tale, The (Dawkins) 13 Brecht, George 67–8
Andy Warhol’s Up (club) 108–9 Breton, André 48
Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Broonzy, Big Bill 57
Normal Love (Warhol) 104 Brown, Tally 110
Animals, The 31, 42, 85 Browne, Jackson 118
Aronowitz, Al(an) 31–2, 37 Bruce, Lennie 50, 65, 146
Atlantic Records 114, 129 Buckley, Tim 116
Austin, Texas 32–3 Buddhism 7, 52
authenticity 135 Burroughs, William 50, 52, 55–6, 124
Byrds, The 96, 116, 128, 152
baby boom 5, 138
Bach, J. S. 70 Café Bizarre 3, 15, 32, 34, 37, 41, 98, 106,
Baez, Joan 16, 20 109
Bailey, David 41 Cage, John 7, 10, 26, 28, 48, 58, 68, 79,
Balloon Farm, The 118, 123 131, 139, 142
Band, The 31 Cale, John 7, 12–13, 15, 23–32, 36,
Baudrillard, Jean 1 66–91, 93–4, 135
Beach Boys, The 87, 115, 151 as an arranger 58, 81–92, 94, 118,
Beat Generation, The (lm) 55 126
Beat subculture 50, 51–61, 55, 94, 122, and bass guitar 86-7
124–5, 132, 137, 146, 150 birth 16, 23
Beatles, The 12, 31, 42, 53, 85, 87, 91, 93, and Cage 28, 68, 79
115, 127, 151–4 pro drugs 29, 31, 70
beatniks 19, 52–3, 55, 61, 127 against Dylan 146
Index 165
drums 34–8, 71, 82–6, 129–30, 137 Genet, Jean 39, 144
Drums of Passion (Olatunji) 35 Gillespie, Dizzy 52–3, 60
Duchamp, Marcel 10–11 Ginsberg, Allen 50–1, 54–7, 59, 112,
Dylan, Bob 3–4, 8, 16, 19–21, 23, 40, 124, 147
47–9, 53, 63, 83, 95–6, 98, 112, glam scene 133–4
115–6, 118, 125, 132, 138, 146, 157 Goldsmiths’ College, University of
London 24, 26, 28, 66, 85, 94, 142
Echols, Alice 5–6 goth scene 134
Education Act 1944 (UK) 23 Grateful Dead, The 5, 31, 46, 48, 95–6,
‘Eight Miles High’ (Byrds) 128 122
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 5 Greenwich Village 3–4, 6, 10, 19, 21, 27,
Eldorados, The 20, 33–4, 46, 65 61, 124
Electra 14–15 guitar 18, 32, 35, 83, 86, 91, 123
‘European Son’ (Reed) 48–9, 50, 63–4,
81, 83, 87, 90, 94 Hammett, Dashiell 51, 62, 148
existentialism 7–8, 48, 63, 122, 134, 137, Hannett, Martin 136
139 happenings 10, 58, 114
Expanded Cinema, Festival of 79–80, Hardin, Tim 118
106 harmonium, Indian 57, 118, 148
Exploding/Erupting Plastic Inevitable
‘Head Held High’ (Reed) 91
(E.P.I.) 12, 80, 106–7, 112–15, 117–18,
Hedy (Warhol) 104, 112–3, 130
124–5
Heliczer, Piero 30, 105–6
Factory (Silver) 3, 40, 47, 96, 98, 107, Hell, Richard 132
109, 111, 125–6 Hendrix, Jimi 16, 116–7, 121
Factory (Union Square) 3, 126 hepcat 52–3, 59–61
Faithfull, Marianne 40 ‘Here She Comes Now’ (Reed) 44,
Falling Spikes, The 14, 31 89, 94
Fellini, Federico 40, 144 heroin 17, 19
‘Femme Fatale’ (Reed) 43–4, 49–50, ‘Heroin’ (Reed) 30, 32, 45, 47, 59, 61–2,
55, 84, 87–8, 89, 90, 98 65, 76–7, 83, 85, 87, 89–91, 106,
‘Ferryboat Bill’ (Reed) 126 121–2, 129
Film-makers’ Co-op 79–80, 102–3 ‘He’s A Rebel’ (Spector) 82
lm, underground scene 102–5, 107, hipness 61
155 hippy/hippie movement 48, 53–4, 79,
Five-spot Club 18, 58, 124, 141 95, 123, 151
Flaming Creatures (Smith) 103, 105, 156 Holmes, James Clellon 52
Fluxus 25–27, 29, 66–8 Holy Modal Rounders, The 50
folk-rock 19, 33, 53–4, 91, 95, 125, 132, homosexuality 41, 46, 56, 63, 96–7, 99,
143, 157 103–4, 154–6
Forever Bad Blues Band, The 69 Hopper, Dennis 104
The Four Dreams of China (Young) 29, Howl (Ginsberg) 50–1, 55–6, 59, 147
70–1 Hughes, Robert 96
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan 3 Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow) 64
Fugs, The 50, 91, 96, 117, 130 hypnotism 78–9
garage rock 53, 81, 89, 91, 102, 104, 132–3 Ibiza 39
Garnant, Wales 23 ‘I Can’t Stand It’ (Reed) 126
gay – see homosexuality ‘I Couldn’t Get High’ (Fugs) 50
Index 167
‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ (Reed) 62, L.A. & the Eldorados – see Eldorados
89, 119 ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ (Reed) 49–
Illinois, University of 32 50, 89–90, 122
‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ (Reed) 43, 45, 49, Last Exit to Brooklyn (Selby) 46
64–5, 84, 87, 90, 98 ‘Leave Her For Me’ (Reed) 18
‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ (Dylan) 40, 112 Leiber & Stoller 65
improvisation 19, 56–7, 69, 70, 72–3, Lend-Lease 8
76, 79, 81, 125, 129–32, 151 Lennon, John 42, 68, 85, 149
‘I’m Sticking With You’ (Reed) 49 Lesh, Phil 5, 46, 48, 143
‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ (Reed) 3, Lichtenstein, Roy 48, 100
43–4, 46–7, 49, 64, 81, 84, 87–90, Life magazine 8, 55, 139
122, 129 Ligeti, György 25
incest 65 Lightfoot, Gordon 40
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities lighting 80, 113–4
(Schwarz) 63 Lightning Field, The (De Maria) 36
‘It Was A Pleasure Then’ (Reed) 130 ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (Dylan) 49
‘I Wanna Be Black’ (Reed) 60–1 ‘Lisa Says’ (Reed) 126
‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ (Lennon, Little Festival of New Music, A
McCartney) 31 (Goldsmiths’) 25
Loaded (album) 91, 158
Jades, The 18
‘Lola’ (Davies) 42
‘Jailhouse Rock’ (Leiber, Stoller) 65
Long Island 22, 32, 35
Jagger, Mick 97
Loop 130–1
jazz 18, 24, 52–4, 57–60, 122, 124, 137,
Lou Reed (album) 44
149
Love, Darlene 85
Jefferson Airplane 48, 96, 116, 121–2
‘Love Me’ (Leiber, Stoller) 65
Jellette, Penn 36
Lower East Side, New York City 2–4,
Jennings, Terry 29, 69
133
‘Jesus’ (Reed) 91, 126
Ludlow Tapes, the 34, 71–2, 143
Johns, Jasper 100, 140
Johnson, Dennis 29
Johnson, Lyndon B. 21, 120–1, 138, 156 McCarthyism (Joseph McCarthy) 6,
Joyce, James 36, 63 20, 141
Joy Division 134, 136 McCartney, Paul 41, 93, 143
Just intonation 70, 73 Maciunas, George 26
MacLise, Angus 14–15, 29–30, 36, 57,
Kagel, Mauricio 25 71–2, 79–80, 105, 144
Kaprow, Allan 10, 25 McLuhan, Marshall 122
Kennedy, John F. 4–5, 21, 120 madness 17, 22, 55
Kennedy, Robert F. 120–1 Mailer, Norman 61, 121
Kerouac, Jack 46, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58–9, Malanga, Gerard 40, 105, 107, 109, 111,
141 130
King, Martin Luther 4, 121 Marshall Plan 8
Kingsmen, The 91 Max’s Kansas City Bar 127
Kingston Trio, The 20 Maywald, Willy 39
Kinks, The 31, 42, 116 MC5, the 95, 121, 153
Knef, Hildegard 40 Mead, Taylor 104
Korea 6, 21 Mekas, Jonas 102, 106–7, 111–12
Kostelanetz, Richard 81 ‘Melody Laughter’ 57, 130
168 The Velvet Underground
San Francisco 36, 57, 59, 117 Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort
Sartre, Jean-Paul 7–8, 48 of (Warhol) 101, 104
Satie, Erik 28, 79 Taylor, Cecil 18, 53, 58, 122
Schmitt, Tomas 25 teddy boys (teds) 24, 142
Schwarz, Delmore 49, 51, 62–4 Temptations, The 86, 121
Sedgwick, Edie (Edith Minturn) 55, 98, Texas, University of, Austin 32
105, 108, 111–2 ‘That’s The Story’ (Reed) 91
‘See My Friends’ (Davies) 42 Theatre of Eternal Music 29, 70–2, 79
Selby, Hubert Jr. 46, 51 ‘Then He Kissed Me’ (Spector) 22
Sesnick, Steven 14, 118–9, 126–7 ‘There She Goes Again’ (Reed) 43–4,
Shades, The 18 84, 90
Shadows, The 86 Three Screaming Niggers 34
Shepp, Archie 18 Thunders, Johnny 132
‘Sister Ray’ 44, 46, 50, 57, 61, 77, 83–4, ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’ (Davies) 42
87, 90, 94, 121–2, 129, 136 Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, The
‘Sister Ray no. 3’ 57–8 (Young) 72–4, 79
Sleep (Warhol) 103 Tucker, Jim 19, 32, 35, 37, 109
Smith, Dave 68, 73, 76, 78 Tucker, Maureen (Moe) 13–15, 34–38,
Smith, Jack 30, 71, 103–5 119, 134
and African drumming 35, 60
Smith, Patti 132, 159
her own band 33, 36
‘So Blue’ (Reed) 18
and drums 35, 85, 86
sodomy 65
family 19, 36, 109
‘Some Kinda Love’ (Reed) 126
in lm 106
Sonatas and Interludes (Cage) 28
gender issues 34–5, 97
Songs For Drella (album) 134
as a performer 35, 90
Sonic Youth 36
in photos 16, 128
sound poetry 57 as a singer 49
Soviet Union (USSR) 8–9, 20, 52, 123 with tambourine 84
Spector, Phil 22, 66, 81–5, 137, 151
‘Stephanie Says’ (Reed) 126 Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin
stereophony 58, 83, 147 Dufresne) 111
Still, Clyfford 8 Up-Tight 112
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 24–5, 125,
127, 131 Varese, Edgard 80, 124
‘Story Of My Life’ (Reed) 126 Vautier, Ben 25
Subterraneans, The (lm) 55 Velvet Underground, The (3rd
summer of love (1967) 121, 132 album) 43, 84, 91, 118, 121, 158
Summit High School, New Jersey 32, Velvet Underground & Nico, The (1st
36–7, 80, 96 album) 43, 68, 84, 89–90, 94, 120,
surrealism 47–8, 149 128–9
‘Sunday Afternoon’ (Davies) 42 Velvet Underground and Nico – A
‘Sunday Morning’ (Reed) 43, 47, 84, Symphony of Sound (Warhol) 111
87–90, 94, 115, 145, 148 Ventures, The 86
Syracuse University 18–19, 21, 24, 32, ‘Venus In Furs’ (Reed) 30, 32, 43, 45,
49, 51, 56, 63 49, 65, 69, 77, 84–5, 89–90, 106,
122, 129
tambourine 83–4 Venus in Furs (Heliczer) 30, 106
Tanglewood Summer School 27, 31 Verlaine, Tom 132
Index 171
Verve Records 115, 119, 122 and The Velvet Underground & Nico
‘Vexations’ marathon 28, 79 114–5, 129
Vietnam 4, 21, 31, 120–1, 132 Zazeela’s inuence on 80, 106–7,
viola 23–4, 70–1, 73–4, 76–7, 80, 83, 113–4
87–9, 123, 150–1 Warlocks, The 14, 31, 105, 143
Warvel Corporation 110, 112
‘Waiting For The Man’ (Reed) 3, 43–4, Watts, Charlie 35
47, 49, 64, 81, 84, 87–90, 122, 129 Weavers, The 20
Walden (Mekas) 111 Well-Tuned Piano, The (Young) 70
‘Walk On The Wild Side’ (Reed) 49 Whaley, Preston Jr. 57–60
Warhol, Andy 93, 99–118 ‘White Light/White Heat’ (Reed) 46,
and AbEx 9–10, 99–101, 129, 131 89–90, 122
as an American 99–100 White Light/White Heat 43, 49, 57, 61,
changing his appearance 102 83, 89–90, 94, 119, 120–1
birth 99 Who, The 31, 91, 116
death 134 ‘Who Loves The Sun’ (Reed) 91
as Drella 134 Wilson, Brian 87
and drugs 123 Wilson, Tom 84, 115, 119, 122, 130, 145,
and the Factory scene 45, 96, 103, 157
107, 154
and lm 30, 44, 102–5, 107–8, 130
X for Henry Flynt (Young) 66–7, 81
in gay culture 99, 104
Xenakis, Iannis 27, 131, 158
and gender issues 35
and ‘happenings’ 12
on love 94 ‘Yesterday’ (Lennon, McCartney) 85
in mass media 9, 110–1, 113 yippies 121
and multimedia 12, 80, 111–4, ‘You Can Never Tell’ (Berry) 64
117–18 Young, LaMonte 14, 22, 26, 28–9, 36,
in New York City 3, 99, 126 66–74, 76, 78–81, 102–3, 105, 121,
and Nico 40, 104, 110, 123 125, 127, 137, 142, 144, 149–50
as a painter 100–2, 107, 126 Young Rascals, The 110, 112, 156
lack of personality 46, 100, 107 ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ’
in photo 97 (Spector) 85
and pop art 10 Yule, Billy 14–15, 36
as a screen-printer 102, 126 Yule, Doug 14–15, 36
shooting of 120–1
and The Velvet Underground 9, Zappa, Frank 95, 115, 123–4
13–14, 101, 104, 109–18, 122, Zazeela, Marian 14, 28, 69, 74, 79–81,
124–5, 130 103, 105–6, 111, 114, 125, 144