Days of Steam

LOU REED: “It was a speedy world – New York – and revolutions were taking place in it – art, life, and rock and roll. It was palpable and exciting. A young reckless nighttime bunch were we. The dark brigade who never saw the sun.”

 

JOHN CALE: “To Andy, the joke would be how you endured, not as a conversation, but as a massive statement to the outside world.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Lou told me that he was trying to stop taking speed, but that Ondine was making it hard. ‘I just about told Ondine, ‘I’m stopping,’ and he showed up at my place with two ounces and said, ‘Oh, why don’t you have some?’’ Lou now had a loft on Seventh Avenue and 28th Street.  He was one of the very few actual residents in the fur business district, which was jammed in the daytime and absolutely deserted at night.  ‘I bought a pool table last week at Korvettes on Herald Square,’ he told me, ‘and Sterling and I carried it the six blocks to my place and then everybody spent hours trying to position match books under it.  This marathon went on for days.  When Max’s closed, we’d go back and play records with all the amps up: there’s only one other person living in a radius of four city blocks.  Ironically, he lives on the floor above me. A fat black junkie.  And when the music was on, he jumped up and down and the ceiling sagged and Ondine got very excited and then we danced in a circle.  And then Ondine took the two ounces and emptied it out on the pool table.  He was leaving and I vowed, ‘I will not take it,’ He said, ‘Well, in case you change your mind.’’ Can you imagine?”

LOU REED: “In New York I can pick up a phone and have anything I want delivered to the door. I can step a foot outside the door and get into a fight immediately. All the energy, people going crazy, guys with no legs on roller skates. It’s very intense, the energy level is incredible. It’s nice at five in the morning to be stoned on THC and go down to Hong Fows, have some watercress soup, then you take a taxi uptown with some maniac and say, ‘Go ahead, drive fast, wise guy,’ and you just zip around. When you go up Park Avenue there’s a very funny turn and it’s always fun to wonder if they’ll make it.”

TIM MITCHELL: “Although each member of the Velvet Underground was living separately, they were still playing and socializing together regularly. Against this background, Lou Reed wrote Cale a four-line poem, ‘Forewarned is Forearmed,’ threatening to kill him should he ever emotionally desert him. Back in 1965 Cale had written his own poem, ‘Curse,’ to Reed; Angus MacLise had read it and retorted, ‘Hey John, far fucking out. This is a love poem!’ Reed asked whether it was really a curse and, if it were, would Cale please remove it.”

IGGY POP: “Gerard Malanga was… if you can have a crush on a guy without being gay, I had a crush on Gerard. I liked his… ah, I liked the way he looked and he had a certain balance. There was something about the guy that I admired very much and I always felt, Boy, I’d like to be…”

GERARD MALANGA: “I found Mary Woronov at Columbia and she knocked my socks off. I said this girl is so talented, and she doesn’t even know where it’s all coming from. I didn’t know what she was talented for, but she was a very striking individual, this tall woman with an incredible face and a long mane of hair. She was like a wild horse, she had a filly feel.”

MARY WORONOV: “Gerard just wanted to film me and be filmed with me, that was the concern and it was an all-consuming one. When I first saw him I thought he was beautiful, dressed in black leather with a Bolex camera in one hand and a bullwhip in the other. Obviously he loved being stared at. Life was a twenty-four hour stage; even when no one was looking, he acted like he was being watched – it was eerie. What I didn’t realize was that Gerard was the silver hook of a very different fisherman and I was being reeled in. He brought lots of girls back to the Factory, all of them beautiful and excited, but I didn’t care, I was mesmerized by this underground, and grateful to its silver messenger for choosing me.”

MARY WORONOV: “Want is better than have, that was my motivation. You want to want. You don’t want to have me. That would be a grave mistake… Another minor correction was that I might have been beautiful, but I was also six-feet tall, flat chested, and foul mouthed, not to mention extremely rude to anything I was attracted to.”

 

RONNIE CUTRONE: “Nico was too odd to have any kind of relationship with. She wasn’t one of those women who you stay with or you love or you play with or you hang out with. Nico was really odd. She was very icy and reserved on one level, and then annoyingly insecure on another. She was a weirdo. Nico was a fucking weirdo, I mean, that’s all there is to it. Beautiful, but a weirdo.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Many of the Velvets were staying in an apartment belonging to Tom O’Horgan, that had been sublet to Stanley Amos.  In the early days of the Velvet Underground, everybody from the Factory spent a lot of time just hanging around down there, going to Chinatown at two in the morning, then up to the Flick on Second Avenue in the Fifties for ice cream at four, or over to the Brasserie.  Tom’s apartment looked just like a stage set.  The living room was raised and there were long mirrors on both sides of the door with primitive instruments hanging down them from the ceiling.  And there were lots of dried flowers and a big black coffin and a couple of chairs with lions’ heads on the arms.  The room itself was pretty bare – just a few big pieces of furniture.  And then there was the heating system – a fifteen foot gold dragon built onto the ceiling with flames from the heater shooting out its open mouth.  The foyer of Stanley’s apartment in the back was dark and had jungle murals of a stuffed parrot and of monkeys eating oranges painted on the walls.  The only light came from a big black spider lamp whose tail lit up.  Then you walked through another small hall into a library that had a fur rug and a beaded lamp and a brick wall, and into the main room, where there was a wonderful piece of art by Johnny Dodd – a portable wall of sixty-one thousand canceled George Washington postage stamp heads cut out with a nail clipper.  There were Tiffany lamps all over the place and Art Nouveau Mucha prints in colors like beige and dark green of women with flowing hair and wind-up Indians beating tom-toms and lots of tapestries and Persian rugs.  It looked like a battle of the set decorators.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Stanley had a bureau drawer that was completely filled with bags of glitter – no clothes or anything, just glitter.  He would open the drawer and pass out the bags, and about half the people there would drop acid and shower sparkles in the air till the whole house was covered in them and Judson dancers would twirl through the room with flowers in their hair and the whole floor would change color because it was the multicolored kind of glitter, and outside the kitchen window people would be swinging in a hammock that was strung up across the dead-end alleyway.  Must of the guys stayed calm – except for the usual jokes and hysterical laughing – but Ingrid Superstar would go over to the mirrors, put her hands on her face, and start to freak out, hallucinating over and over again, ‘I’m so ugly, so ugly,’ and everyone would try to cheer her up… The other half of the room would be paranoid on amphetamine, staring at the half that was tripping on the LSD.  They were each other’s audience.”

ANDY WARHOL: “John Cale used to sit in the front room for days and days with his electric viola, barely moving.  Lou and Ondine would have furious fights over trading Desoxyn for Obetrols – Desoxyn was twice as expensive and had fifteen milligrams of methedrine, whereas Obetrols apparently had that much meth plus something like five milligrams of sulfate.  I could never figure out what they were talking about.  And Rotten Rita used to come in with his homemade speed that everyone knew was the worst in the world.  Periodically he’d try to upgrade his credibility by giving somebody their money back, but then the next day he’d be in there trying to sell them the exact same stuff back again, but telling them that it was a much superior batch so naturally it was more expensive.  But as Lou said, ‘It’s part of the natural environment to have Rotten do things like that.  That’s why he’s Rotten.’ Once, I asked Brigid why Rotten was also called the Mayor, and she said, ‘Because he screws everybody in town.’”