Close to the Frozen Borderline

NICO: “I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big may have happened for me.”

JOHN CALE: "She'd get somewhere she always thought she wanted to be and the next thing you knew she'd be somewhere else. That was Nico all over."

JOHN CALE: “Nico totally changed her image: from hennaing her hair and wearing white to wearing totally black and living the dream. Everything she did was part of this statement that now she was a different person.”

JIM CONDON: “Do you think Brian Jones had a death wish?”

NICO: “Not at all. He was totally separate. Why Brian?”

CONDON: “Some people have described him as being very self-destructive.”

NICO: “But a true artist must self-destruct.”

CONDON: “Do you think that you’re going to?”

NICO: “I think I’m already doing it. Don’t you?”

CONDON: “That’s not for me to judge. I’d like to say that I don’t see that happening.”

NICO: “Can’t you tell by the way I live? It’s a continual battle, a drama, being a stranger to myself. I don’t have any references to know who I really am. I mean everyday.”

CONDON: “I don’t think anyone ever really knows.”

NICO: “I mean to be really always in exile. I’m a total stranger to myself. Except sometimes when I get reminded.”

DANNY FIELDS:  “I knew she had more to offer and so did she. She wanted people to realize there was more to her than beauty. She hated being famous just for that. In fact, she came to hate her beauty. In her more difficult later days, she purposely became unattractive. In those days, she was the Moon Goddess. That was her nickname. She was unstoppably beautiful.”

IGGY POP: “Nico had a great sadness about her. You know, she had all the accoutrements of a really groovy international gal – the right boots, the right sheepskin coat, the right hair, and she knew people on the right level, and yet she was fucked-up – she had a twist to her. She was a great, great artist. It was just a real kick to be around her. I’m absolutely convinced that some day, when people have ears to hear her, in the same way that people have eyes to see a Van Gogh now, that people are gonna just go, ‘WHOOOAAA!’”

DANNY FIELDS:  “The Wordsworth poem, it had the lines, 'Newton with his prism and silent face/The marble index of a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.'  I know that must have resonated with her. It was a craving of hers to be alone. Alone for her was sexy, alone was interesting, alone made people curious and want to know more about you and alone made you magnetic.”

MATTHEW LINDSAY: “Wordsworth's recollection of Roubiliac's Lucretius-inscribed sculpture of Newton in The Prelude, with "his prism and silent face" would be the source of The Marble Index' title. To Danny Fields it was a name "sufficiently gothic, lovely and meaningless". But the rich cultural heritage it economically refers to, stretching across hundreds of years, perfectly embodies "the real Nico"'s oceanic immersion in her art: Gesamtkunstwerk.”

JOHN CALE: “Nico’s use of the harmonium was partly to do with Leonard Cohen, and partly to do with the Indian side of her.  She always had an interest in the exotic.”

VIVA: “She had this damn harmonium, which she operated for hours. She took the whole thing terribly serious like a Nazi organist. She drew the curtains and lit candles around her, and sang the whole day these dirges. It was as if I lived in a funeral home.”

MATTHEW LINDSAY: “This had nothing to do with the blonde siren the Factory set had declared an instant icon. If this was glamour it was in the original, purest sense of the word as used by Walter Scott in 1805: uncanny, incantatory, enchanting. Guy Webster's sleeve photograph, with Nico's hennaed hair (allegedly to woo the redhead-loving Morrison) says it all. A skeletal, sculptural visage gazes directly at the camera exuding the fierce confidence of an artist at the peak of her powers, far from the embalmed mannequin of culture's crude sketch pad. The Chanel trouser suits were gone too, supplanted by bohemian peasant chic, ponchos, boots, all in dark hues.”

FRAZIER MOHAWK: “The budget for ‘The Marble Index’ was miniscule and the studio was tiny. I’d agreed to do it as a favor to Jac Holzman, but then I met Nico and I immediately fell in love with her. She was so beautiful, a poseur and very theatrical, and so crazy. I guess you’d say she was bonkers. There was a lot of heroin. We were all so smacked up. Well, I don’t know about Cale, but I know Nico and I were pretty stoned. A lot. I reasoned that to make sense of this music I’d better get in the same state she was in. After it was finished, we genuinely thought people might kill themselves. ‘The Marble Index’ isn’t a record you listen to. It’s a hole you fall into.”

UNCUT:  “The Marble Index speaks of something more than mere melancholy, evokes a sadness deeply trapped in tangled roots, the aching gasp of someone looking at a past that has been obliterated, along with everyone you might expect to find there, every yesterday a ruin, consumed by fire or ice, nothing left in the world that doesn't call out for pity.  Such is its daunting atmosphere, The Marble Index has long had a reputation for being almost unlistenable, suffocated by gloom, wracked by despondency, as if it consisted of nothing more than the wailing of a Trojan widow and the amplified rattle of butcher's hooks.”

LESTER BANGS: “There are no cheap thrills on ‘The Marble Index,’ no commercials for sadomasochism, bisexuality, or hard drugs dashed off for a ravenous but vicarious audience – rather, it stares for a relatively short time that might just seem like eternity to you into the heart of darkness, eyes wide-open, unflinching, and gives its own heart to what it finds there, and then tells you how that feels, letting you draw your own value judgments. I played ‘The Marble Index’ for a woman I loved about a year ago. She had never heard about Nico, never heard of John Cale, never really heard about the Velvet Underground except in the context of this whole humorous but basically jive media game I set up with Lou Reed for a while. She listened to the whole thing in a state of mesmerism bordering on shock, then said of Cale, ‘He built a cathedral for a woman in hell, didn’t he?’”

JOHN CALE: “We played one of the Elektra’s executives the album with all the lights turned off. He sat there in the dark thinking he was going through a deep psychological change. When it finished he just heaved a sigh of relief and said ‘I had no idea this was going on.’”

  JACKSON BROWNE: “She had made herself ugly on purpose and it was a shock. She was in rebellion against the fashion industry, against the superficiality of being a beauty, and I was so pleased when I heard ‘The Marble Index,’ because it all made sense to me. I love that record. A black and white cover, stark organ music… that’s what I’m talking about. Jac Holzman was one of those rare record industry people who wanted to nurture genuine talent, and he understood what Nico was trying to do.”

LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Whoever came up with the idea that John Cale should produce the Stooges was a genius, and whoever came up with the idea of Iggy and Nico was insane.”

IGGY POP: “When we started recording, Nico and John Cale used to sit in the booth looking like they were in the Addams family – Cale was wearing a Dracula cape with a great big collar on it. He looked like Z-Man in ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ and he had this funny haircut. And Nico was knitting. Throughout the whole album, she sat there knitting something, maybe a sweater.”

DANNY FIELDS: “You kind of expected that Iggy would be someone Nico would fall in love with. He was everything she would like in a guy: wounded, brilliant, fragile but made of steel, insane, demented. So it was no surprise. Nico fell in love with everyone who was extremely brilliant, insane or a junkie.”

NICO: “I told everybody that Iggy would be a big star and I took him to the Factory to see Andy and they all laughed at me, they were kind of teasing me for bringing him around. This little kid with a runny nose.”

RON ASHETON: “When Nico moved into the Fun House, we hardly saw her, because Iggy kept her up in the attic. She’d make these great curry dishes and just leave them on the table with really expensive wines.”

JIMMY SILVER: “It was totally bizarre, this striking regal creature, who somehow didn’t look real, living up in the attic.”

IGGY POP: “Nico liked to drink. And she got me into that, too, and while she was living with us my shows started getting really, really bad. Because Nico was a bad seed… She used to say to me ‘Zhimmy, oh Zhimmy, you must be totally poisoned to do what you do. You are only mostly poisoned, you must be totally poisoned.’”

IGGY POP: “And she’d do things… Like, I’d go away for a few days and come back looking healthy. And she’d scream, ‘Jimmy, what are you doing to yourself? You are ugly. Don’t you know you are only good skinny. Skinny as a rail.’ And Danny Fields was always fussing about my hair in his usual way, and it had reached a point where my hair had become so long and curly it pretty much totally hid my face. Anyway, Danny said something about me having my bangs cut. Nico just freaked completely and screamed, ‘But, Danny, Jimmy’s face is not meant to be seen!’ And she immediately grabbed this wine glass and smashed it against the table, which made everybody run away. Except me, ‘cos I knew her little games and wasn’t afraid anyway. And she turned to me and said, ‘Good, Jimmy, now we are rid of them.’ And she proceeded to carve a most incredible sketch of me – somewhat in the style of Cocteau – with maybe two cubic inches of my face showing. And she summoned everybody back and pointed to this sketch and said, ‘Now this is Jimmy’s face. And if you could see it, it would be a drag!’ And I thought, ‘Right on, Nico.’”

IGGY POP: “I would never call her responsible. Nobody ever said, ‘Here comes Nico. Everything’s gonna be alright now!’ She didn’t inspire confidence, but she was a great sport. She was very cute, charming, and a hell of a lot of fun. She was a little crazy, too.”

RICHARD WITTS: “Nico, striving to be deadly serious and aesthetic when everyone around her was acting ‘decadent and frivolous, like a party at the end of the world,’ sought a soulmate who would toil with her and contemplate the meaninglessness of existence, just as she’d seen wracked artists do in real films. Philippe Garrel was the very man she sought, she decided, an avant-gardist down to his booths of Spanish leather – imagine! A man even more boring than Jean-Luc Godard.”

PAUL MORRISSEY: "Nico came with Garrel to New York and looked hideous. She had been one of the most famous blonde models, an icon.  And here she was with this foul crimson hair and bulky clothes and called out to the world: "I no longer want to be beautiful."  That was the moment where the drugs were significant. It was the beginning of falling into hell. This Garrel had reversed her. She had become artistic and did what artists do in their opinion. Be crazy, be overtightened, go to hell."

VIVA: “Nico leads men on and then refuses to sleep with them on mystical grounds, unless they’re real young boys and they’re really sick… then she digs them… and if she thinks they’ve got some kind of a talent.”

WILL HODGKINSON: “Nico and Philippe Garrel removed all the furniture from their apartment, cut off the electricity, painted the walls black and lived on candle light and heroin.”

JAC HOLZMAN: “Nico was an apparition, a sprite with a spike, floating hazily in and out of focus. She would suddenly… materialize. Turn around and she wasn’t there, turn back and she was filling the bench. She’d call up and, in her low moan, tell you ‘I’ll be in on Tuesday, set up some interviews.’ Tuesday would come and no Nico.”

JOHN WILCOCK: “Where do you most like to travel?”

NICO: “I like the desert best. All deserts because they were originally underwater, and I like that.”

JW: “What do you like about it so much? Would you like to live in the desert?”

NICO: “When I turn into a snake, I might live there.”

JW: “Do you believe in that stuff, that maybe you are reincarnated and come back in a different form?

NICO: “I don’t know if reincarnation is the right word, but I know that 50 years’ time is not long enough to live. It’s just inevitable to continue living in some way or another.”

JW: “Do you think you might have lived before?”

NICO: “I, as the same person, no. How can you say of something that wasn’t you, but that was you?”

JW: “Do you feel that you might have been something else, that you might have been in this world in some way?”

NICO: “I might have been the wind.”

VIVA: “She was obsessed with Jim Morrison. Nico asked me to come over to the art gallery she was staying at in Paris.  I found her in a bedroom above the gallery.  She had photographs of Jim Morrison all over the room with vigil lights burning under them.  And he was still alive, then!”

PETER HOGAN: “Back in Paris, Nico claims she was walking down a street on 3 July 1971, when a black car passed her; on the back seat sat Jim Morrison, now bearded and fat. She tried to attract his attention, but without success. Morrison died that night – two years to the day after the death of another of Nico’s conquests, Brian Jones – and Nico believed that his spirit (or a part of it) entered into her. She also had a premonition that she herself would die in the month of July (as proved to be the case).”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Nico was very sad when she heard that Jim Morrison had died. She bought all the Paris and London papers and wept as she read the stories… When the crying stopped, Nico went into the bathroom and began rinsing the red dye out of her hair. It took her several days to wash her long hair back to its natural blond color. Then she dyed it black.”

 

ANDY WARHOL: “Nico was a true specimen; among other things, she thrived only in the gloom – the gloomier she could make the atmosphere around her, the more radiant she became. She liked to lie in the bathtub all night with candles burning around her, composing the songs that would be on her second album, ‘The Marble Index.’”

MARISA INDRI: “Throughout the 1970s and ’80s Nico stayed with my family whenever she was in the United States. Occasionally she would take off — she said to visit John Cale in Upstate New York — though she spent the rest of the time with us. Nico had a very deep, velvety speaking voice, that would rise up in lilts when she spoke to me - very nurturing and loving. She would welcome me into her bedroom to sit on her bed, talking as she started her daily ritual of applying Chinese white rice powder to her face — in a square box still available today — patchouli oil, and black kohl eyeliner. She wore cowboy boots from Spain, and long Moroccan tunics that hit just above her ankles. She would tell me stories and give me warnings about the dangers in life - mostly betrayal, sometimes love. She would come downstairs, speak with my mother - whom she adored, perhaps smoke a joint, and then set out on her daily walk from Highland Park, to the New Brunswick bus stop for New York City. Once in the city, she would go straight to the methadone clinic for her daily dose, then maybe stop at El Quijote in the Chelsea Hotel for a frosty, sugary drink - like a Pina Colada, before heading back to the Port Authority for the ride back to New Brunswick. I know, because sometimes she would take me along. I think my parents, being of the cocktail generation, were naive about drugs, and they saw Nico as a beautiful soul - which she was. I was never in danger.”

LEONARD COHEN: “One year I bumped into Nico at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel where I was staying. The Chelsea by then had fallen on hard times. One or two floors were now occupied by hustlers of one kind or another, and there had been a murder a week before, so the place was swarming with policemen… So we were talking about old times, and I thought I detected some remote invitation. I don’t know if it was the drink, but she said, ‘Let’s go up to your room and talk,’ because they were closing the bar. So we went up to the room and sat on the bed, and I sat close to her and she sat close to me and I put my hand on I think it was her wrist… And she hauled off and hit me so hard it lifted me clean off the bed, and she screamed and screamed. And suddenly the door came down and about 20 policemen came in, thinking I was the killer they were looking for. She was incredible.”

NICO: “Candles make stars of light. A room is a universe. I can see the world from a distance, microscopically. The candles are my stars.”

TIM MITCHELL: “In August 1974 Richard Williams had been trying to set up a Berlin concert for Nico, backed by Cale and Eno, and an appearance at the Meta Music Festival there was duly arranged. They were to play, the night after Terry Riley, in the Neue Nationalgalerie, a beautiful glass construction built in the 1960s by Ludwig Mies can der Rohe, set on a concrete terrace underneath an overhanging roof.  Eno had prepared a table with a line of water-filled glasses which were miked up and during Cale’s performance he proceeded to smash them, sending glass and water across the stage and a wave of explosive sound into the auditorium. Nico insisted on playing the whole of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles,’ including the imperialistic words that had been banned since the end of the Second World War; Cale played piano over the top and Eno created the noise of a thousand-bomber air raid. The spotlights suddenly looked like searchlights, and the audience revolted en masse, throwing their white plastic cushions towards the stage in a blizzard of giant snowflakes.”

DANNY FIELDS: “Her songs are among the best ever written. And they’re good enough for millions of people who haven’t heard them yet.”

NICO: “The other thing the Gestapo did for me was show me to the truth. That is they got to the truth with people and heroin helped me get to the truth with people. A giant propeller over my head that whisked away the layers until we came to the raw intestines of the truth… Andy spotted it the first time. He still scared everybody because he was nestling up with the truth as if they were best friends, not like Lou and I scared to death of truth and lies. Lost somewhere in no-mans-land in between. Totally useless.”

TINA AUMONT: “I think she was haunted by the beauty she still had. It’s terribly hard to be a beauty. People want more and more and more. She wanted to be perfect, to appear always at the right moment. Music was her only release from this pressure to exist only for others.”

VIVA: “She was in need of heavy therapy, that girl. She thought she was the Queen of Sheba. Nico was a spicy combination of insecurity and arrogance. The truth was she was an emotional cripple. When she told me these little stories about the war, I realized how badly it had screwed her up. We would have recognized the condition today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Vietnam veterans overcame it by long bouts of emotional counseling. But, of course, who would have recognized that in Nico, when she never got her story straight.”

MATTHEW LINDSAY: “During her whole life Nico sought the company of those who were already gone: all her homes were foreign countries, all her lovers were ghosts. Similarly, Nico's best work exists in an odd midpoint between anti-romance and romance, cobwebbed caverns and smack-dens; between the imperious and the fragile. As with Tennessee William's own verdict of Blanche DuBois, Nico was the "strongest weak person". 'Ohne Festen Wohnsitz'.”

NICK KENT: “Whilst recording her fourth album ‘The End’ in London, with John Cale once again producing, Nico had met up with my pal Gene Krell from Granny Takes a Trip and they’d become romantically entwined for a brief period. The Chelsea apartment Gene shared with Marty Breslau became a home away from home for both Nico and me during those months because heroin was so freely available there. I liked her a lot – and we developed a friendship. She was a fascinating individual and a quintessential bohemian free spirit. Part of her was like a child – naïve and incredulous – but the other part – the part that kept her surviving – was ruthless and self-possessed. She saw herself quite rightly as a genuine artist. No man was ever going to make her his dutiful spouse. Poor old Gene tried and got his heart broken into a million pieces. He asked for her hand in marriage and she turned him down and ended their affair. ‘You just don’t amuse me anymore,’ she told him. I felt sorry for the guy but I still told him he was emotionally way out of his depth. You don’t fall in love with women like Nico: it’s like trying to bottle a lightning bolt.”

GENE KRALL: “Nico was interested in nothing. Actually, that’s not true – she was interested in heroin. She told me that it was her reason for getting up in the day… She just lived with this constant cloud over her. She was also an incredibly violent person. She broke my nose.”

NICO: “Everything is a drug. Coffee is a drug. Music is a drug, words are a drug, Jim Morrison said that God is a drug. It is a medicine, something to cure you of a disease. Coffee cures you of tiredness. Music cures you of time. God cures you of death, I suppose.”

NICO: “Everyday I feel that the day before doesn’t count. I don’t sing for the audience. I try to remain as much alone as I can, not to make contact at all. I like sad songs, tragic ones. I like to improvise with the notes, with the feeling that I have at the time about the song. They think I’m not polite, but whatever I have to say to these people seems to unnecessary. I just can’t be around… be around anything that is forced. I’d rather just remain how I feel. What happened before happened, now it’s only the sentiment that you can’t scratch out.”

MORRISSEY: “On the flipside of happy, the Nico net caught me early. Her voice equaled the sound of a body being thrown out of a window - entirely without hope, of this world, or the next, or the previous. Onstage, she moved like a big bleak creaking house, never once altering the direction of her eyes. I am in love. Her harmonium heaves and swells like crashing waves answering each other. If Nico could’ve laughed, she would’ve. But she couldn’t, so she didn’t.”

ALAN WISE: “She was the real thing. Fascinated by drugs, she feared whatever her real self was; was scared that she might be mad and changed her mood every minute. She was ashamed of being a German and she was ashamed of being a woman. She was a pretty unusual person — a disaster, but also some kind of angel. I wanted her to love me and she never could, though she said once: “Of course I do.” But she loved only one person, her son, Ari. The rest of us vaguely amused her.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Went to C.Z. Guest’s for drinks. A guy there told me, ‘We have someone in common.’ He said that his family owned all the brandy and sherry in Spain and that in the sixties Nico was the girl in all their advertisements in all the posters and subways and magazines, that she was famous all over Spain. He wanted to know where this beautiful girl was now and I said that it was a whole other person, that he’d never believe it, that she was fat and a heroin addict. He wanted to see her and I said that if she was still playing at the Squat Theater we could go see her.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “One of Nico’s idols, Ulrike Meinhof (one-half of the so-called Baader-Meinhof Gang, a left-wing guerrilla organization that flourished in mid-1970s West Germany) was dead, having committed suicide in prison, and Nico’s natural tendency to absorb the trials of her icons left her feeling as though she, too, was incarcerated on a spiritual death row. On top of all that, her harmonium, the instrument with which she had recorded three of the most remarkable records of the decade so far, was gone, either stolen or sold to pay off a drug debt. She was at rock bottom.”

NICO: “I was without money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti Smith bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said ‘I’ll give you back the money when I get it,’ but she insisted the organ was a present, and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money. I felt like she could be a sister, because she was the double of Philippe Garrel, and I liked to be together with her.”

DR. DEMETRIUS: “Very close to Nico was a desire for her own extinction. Life was a bore to her. And for that I liked her very much; for that is a trait of many a noble character: the sicker things.”

JOHN WATERS: “People I Always Wanted to Meet, Did, and Wasn’t Disappointed: Nico, my favorite singer, who was so out of it when I met her that she asked, ‘Have I ever been here before?’ I had to tell her I really had no idea.”

LUTZ ULBRICH: "There was a party at Hassad Deb's place [in Paris]. Nico was there, completely magnetic and quite intimidating - the most famous person in the room. I was introduced to her because we spoke German, which was a kind of novelty for her there. I was sitting around with the guys, when suddenly she stared at me and walked over quickly and said, "Come with me, let's go outside and talk". I thought, why me? She was this star and I was, well... a guitarist. We got outside and she dramatically said, "I feel like a robot. There are so many thoughts in my mind". I was completely overawed by this. How I was supposed to react? I was 22 and she was 34. It was certainly a seduction, but more a hint of seduction. I was given the distinct impression she was preoccupied but not uninterested. I went back with the group [Agitation Free] to Berlin. Then some time later Agitation Free was invited to play in Clermont Ferrand alongside Nico and Kevin Coyne. I was waiting in the hospitality tent and one of those hippie groups offered me some tea. They hadn't told me it was laced with acid. I got totally stoned on a cup of tea. I was trying to concentrate, desperate before the gig to keep the slightest hold on reality. I played my guitar with my eyes shut. When I opened them, there was Nico sitting next to me like she'd always been there. We flirted…  I didn't want to take hard drugs, but when you are in love with a girl you want to be on the same level. For social reasons you become obliged. Afterwards I became addicted, too. And from there is a period when we played together and my memories are only tales about drugs!  Honestly, I was more dependent on Nico than on the drug itself. I just took it because Nico did".

DR. DEMETRIUS:“It was curious to watch Cale with Nico. He bullied her. They’d sit in the Brixton flat watching the TV and she’d say, ‘John, turn it down.’ He’d turn it up. ‘Why are you teasing me?’ And he’d suddenly jump on her back, shouting,‘And it’s Nico coming round the bend, it’s Nico on the final stretch, Nico by a nose…’ It was the oddest thing to see.”

JOHN CALE: “I always felt somewhat protective towards her music. I felt it needed presentation that elevated her to the status of a serious female songwriter, very different from those celebrated at the time. I think she understood this —felt that I appreciated and “understood” her — although the “understanding” was focused exclusively in musical terms. Her life made me depressed. Every recording session I came away from thinking I had seen her inner self and that it was a little girl trying to reach the daylight. Eventually I was left to consider that the drugs in her life were stronger than my attempts to use music to delineate a pathway ahead. The few times I’d witness her childlike laughter and utter amazement at her finished work — those were the moments a collaborator clings to. The payoff, the reward! Those times were so rare, but they kept me on the string that was Nico’s to dangle — the belief in her, even when she didn’t believe.”

NICO: “My mind and my life are two different things. My mind is called Christa Paffgen. My life is Nico. Christa had made Nico, and now she is bored with Nico, because Nico is bored with herself. Nico has been to the top of life and to the bottom. Both places are empty; she has discovered this. But Nico does not want to be in the middle either, where people turn their backs on each other. To avoid these places of unhappiness it is better to be nowhere, and drift. That is the conclusion I have come to.”

NICO: “I already know everything about life. In death I might find… the mystery. Maybe… not God, maybe myself.”