The Exploding Plastic Inevitable

CHIP BAKER: “I must confess that my largest memory of the Velvet Underground is of the scene around Andy and the Factory. These guys were a circus, let me tell you! His scene came in with a huge box of aluminum foil. I mean, a big industrial box; it must have had hundreds of rolls. The afternoon they arrived, they started tacking up the foil inside this miserable dressing room we had behind the stage. By the time they left, they had covered something like a third of the club with aluminum foil. Andy never talked to anybody. He would take a table midway back in the club, and, surrounded by a modest entourage, he would sit there.”

BOB MOSES: “The whole Warhol crowd would come in – lizard people, man! I didn’t see any emotion out of these people. They all seemed pasty and had never seen the sun and never smiled, didn’t dance, had no rhythm, no joy. There was a weirdness about them that I found very hard to take. There was like a force-field of darkness.”

MARY WORONOV: “On the ceiling an old mirror ball turned, its spots of light jumping from one dancer to another like lost souls looking for a host. The enormous faces of demented queens and ravaged superstars filled the wall behind us as if they were giants peering into a box of dancing Lilliputians.”

ULTRA VIOLET: “When you go into the Dom on St. Mark’s Place in the Village, you step into a magical cave.  Long lines of limousines form outside.  If you don’t have a limo, you may as well skip it.  Everybody mixes together: art people, society people, film people, drag queens, druggies, voyeurs, tourists, rock freaks, kids, kids, kids – a potpourri, which in French means rotten pot…  Ondine, the Queen of Drugs, and Brigid, the Duchess, patrol the crowd and shoot up anyone who offers a hip or an arm.  There’s a choice of LSD, home-made speed, Methedrine, Obetrol, Desoxyn, heroin, and Placidyl.  Desoxyn is the most expensive.  Drug addicts in a hurry get poked right through their pants.  It takes someone with a good technique to be able to shoot through jeans.  The stabbing of the needle has to be assertive, no halfway poking.  Ondine’s hand has a tendency to shake, but practice makes perfect.  One time, Ondine punctures an artery, and his jetting blood hits a light, projecting gore onto the screen.  The kids love it.”

ANDY WARHOL: “The kids at the Dom looked really great, glittering and reflecting in vinyl, suede, and feathers, in skirts and boots and bright-colored mesh tights, and patent leather shoes and silver and gold hip-riding miniskirts and the Paco Rabanne thin plastic look with the linked plastic disks in the dresses, and lots of bell-bottoms and poor-boy sweaters, and short, short dresses that flared out at the shoulders and ended way above the knee.”

 

MARTIN TORGOFF: “The band was always dressed in black, except for the blond German model-chanteuse Nico, who would just stand in her white pantsuit as everything raged around her, trancelike in a lone spotlight. Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga danced ferociously in front of the band, Malanga shaking like a wet dog, with his peroxided hair, whirling flash-lights, and whip, Woronov slinking across the stage in her shiny black spike-heeled boots. The white walls of the large hall were awash in movies projected three at a time, enveloping the performers in images from ‘Couch,’ ‘Banana,’ ‘Sleep,’ ‘Empire,’ ‘Blow Job,’ ‘Vinyl,’ and other Warhol films. The effect was like casting the performers in movies of themselves before an audience that became part of the same movies. Phosphorescent nuggets of light swirled off the old mirrored ball hanging above the stage, which turned the ceiling into a glittery psychedelic firmament; colored spots washed onto the stage from the balcony, where Warhol himself hovered in black leather, a pale, detached figure wearing dark sunglasses and a glow-in-the-dark crucifix around his neck, calmly inserting colored gels into the projectors. With the strobe lights firing off everywhere at once, the scene looked like flickering snapshots of some unsheltered new reality, the very ‘Babylon in flames’ that Lou Reed referred to in an essay he wrote at the time, aptly titled ‘Concerning the Rumor That Red China Has Cornered the Methedrine Market and Is Busy Adding Paranoia Drops to Upset the Mental Balance of the United States.”

PAUL MORRISSEY: “Then of course Nico walked out with this gorgeous face and voice and stood absolutely motionless. Oh, such class and dignity.”

ANDY WARHOL: “We all knew something revolutionary was happening. We just felt it. Things couldn’t look this strange and new without some barrier being broken. ‘It’s like the Red Seeea,’ Nico said, standing next to me one night on the Dom balcony that looked out over all the action, ‘paaaaaarting.’”

LOU REED: “Andy shows movies and we fuck dogs onstage.”

MARY WORONOV: “I invented my own way to complement Gerard, and it worked. There was no Balanchine guiding us, just amazing intuitiveness. Not that I knew about S&M. You had to go to a porno store in some grimy ghetto to find a Bettie Page book… We were the only band that said, this is sexy and hot. We were the only people who were saying, this is not sick, this is fun, this is good for the soul… I don’t know how Gerard knew this, but he took a passive role and gave me the active role. He was always on his knees to me with his head bowed, and I was always above him. We were female/male, but I was never hanging on him, the roles were switched.”

STERLING MORRISON: “Mary was great. Very caustic. But one time we were playing on stage, one of the Dom shows, and Mary was dancing. I see her looking at me, and I’m saying, what’s going on here, is Mary Woronov getting interested in me? Then she gets this strange smile, and I’m still playing away, and she just started sidling up. Maybe it’s true, I’m thinking. And she leans over and whispers to me, ‘Sterling, you have no ass.’ I think I weighed about 140 pounds. I said, ‘Okay, Mary, I’ll take that under advisement.’”

RICHARD GOLSTEIN: “With a single humming chord, which seems to hang in the air, the Velvet Underground launches into another set. John squints against a purple spotlight. Lou shouts against a groaning amplifier. Gerard writhes languidly to one side. Sterling turns his head to sneeze. And Nico stands there, looking haunted. The noise, the lights, the flickering images all happen. Everybody grooves. From the balcony, Andy Warhol watches from behind his glasses. ‘Beautiful,’ he whispers. Sterling sneezes audibly but it seems to fit. ‘Beautiful.’ Gerard hands his partner a bull-whip and the girl in black begins to sway. ‘Just beautiful.’”

RONNIE CUTRONE: “We basically played only for our own enjoyment – no crowd participation, we didn’t say a word to the audience, I mean, an hour and forty-five minute set without a word to the crowd… We’d just come out, shoot up, lift weights, put flashlights in their eyes, whip giant bullwhips across their faces, sort of simulate fucking each other onstage, have Andy’s films blaring in the background, and the Velvets would have their backs to the audience.”

LOU REED: “Allen Ginsberg would play hand symbols and dance around to us, trash that we were."

ULTRA VIOLET: “The revolution we are living is visible in the clothes of the Dom’s patrons.  Some are more undressed than dressed.  A guy in thigh boots sweeps the floor with his long coat.  He looks like a Nazi.  Andy tells me, ‘He’s just wearing a G-string under the coat.’ Two girls go by.  One wears a huge antique hat heaped with feathers, an Edwardian blouse laced to her neck, a full skirt on the floor, gloves covering every inch of her arm.  The other, in a striped mini, has a tiny star covering each nipple.  The designer Rudi Gernreich comes to the Dom, watches the teenagers, then the next summer produces the completely topless bathing suit.  Other designers bare the other end.”

NY SCHERMAN: “Few incidents better illustrate the shift from New York’s fifties artistic subculture to the new sixties version than the reaction of Ginsberg’s fellow poet John Ashbery, recently returned to New York after almost a decade in Paris. Standing in the midst of the strobe lights and guitar feedback and biomorphic slide-projected shapes, Ashbery was traumatized. ‘I don’t understand this at all,’ he said and burst into tears.”

NICO: “I wanted to know what I should do when I wasn’t singing. Lou said, ‘Nico, you can always knit.’ I said he could go to hell. He looked around and said, ‘Well where do you think we are now?’”

STEPHEN KOCH: “The effort to create an exploding (more accurate, imploding) environment capable of shattering any conceivable focus on the senses was all too successful. It became virtually impossible even to dance, or for that matter do anything else but sit and be bombarded – ‘stoned,’ as it were… it came home to me how the ‘obliteration of the ego’ was not the act of liberation it was advertised to be, but an act of compulsive revenge and RESENTMENT wholly entangled on the deepest levels with the knots of frustration. Liberation was turning out to be humiliation, peace was revealing itself as rage.”

PATTI SMITH: “Not 70. Still 60 on the tail where it’s dirty. In schools 64 we used to sit around presupposing the high ass larks that would go down when the jocks would sport a big 69 on the back of their Sports-aire. When it was 69 we didn’t care nor remember neither. Life itself was dirty enough. We were leaning over the jukebox cruci-fix, pissing kisses farewell to flowers fables and the politics of speed and desire.  Lou Reed didn’t seem hung up. Not on this set. The cross don’t seem his true shape. The boy on this record was riding a wave — seeming in a state of suspended joy. Longing checked in some roadhouse like Steve McQueen in Baby the Rain Must Fall. Not Mick Jagger, no muscular sailor just ONE caught in a warp in some lost town and rising. I mean these boys may be outta tune but they were solid IN TIME. There’s nowhere higher while you’re still in the body physical than to embrace the moment, beautiful stranger. Fuck the future man, the moment you are reading this is real. Performing is pain, is pure ecstatic cut with adrenaline paranoia and any white light one can shoot on stage.”

NICO: “I was a model on the stage. I was doing the same thing I had done for ten years, and I was sad because it was not a development.”

RICHARD GOLDSTEIN: “Nico is half goddess, half icicle. If you say bad things about her singing, she doesn’t talk to you. If you say nice things, she doesn’t talk to you either. If you say that she sounds like a bellowing moose, she might smile if she digs the sound of that in French. Onstage, she is somewhat less communicative. But she sings in perfect mellow ovals. It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning.”

JAYNE COUNTY: “As far as I’m concerned, Nico was the shining star of the Velvet Underground. When they came back to do gigs without her, people really missed Nico. I remember one night seeing the Velvet Underground upstairs at Max’s with no Nico and someone in the audience started shouting, ‘We want Nico, we want Nico,’ Lou was not amused – not amused at all.”

TIM MITCHELL: “Mary Woronov remembers Cale’s stage presence at the time as dark and threatening, with a rage quotient that was largely hidden but still tangible. Somber and intense, he would pick up the viola in a sullen, morose manner and play from deep within himself, giving the impression of ‘a stick of dynamite that was going to go off.’ Often playing with his back to the audience, he concentrated solely on the music, a ‘genius in the raw’ with a strange, high intelligence to counterpoint Lou Reed’s street-smartness, attitude and embodiment of rock’n’roll’s mythology. While hanging around waiting to go on, Cale would be belie his on-stage seriousness by cracking jokes. The members of the band, often – with the exception of Moe Tucker – medicated to the hilt, would stumble on stage, knock into things and fall over.”

BOB MOSES: “They had a singer who I would describe as an anorexic junkie vampire who looked like she’d never seen the sun in her life, and sang in a complete monotone with no emotion, no rhythm, no soul, nothing. She was a scary chick. And they were loud as hell. They didn’t seem to have any ability to play their instruments at all. It’s kind of like maybe in one way the punk that came later, but at least with the punk era, I felt there was some energy, even if it was anger, even if it was some ugly shit, they were at least trying to tear it down or destroy it or bust it up. These people, it seemed to me, just had this bored junkie ennui, kind of almost existential ‘It’s all fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it, and we’re just gonna get high’ – that was the vibe.”

LANCE LOUD: “To me, that band was like a bunch of harpies calling to me off in the distance. I wasn’t hoping for a safe landing if I could ever really follow them to where they were calling from. The way I understood their song, half the fun of living was dying – dynamically of course! With pavement below your feet, ravaged and wasted.”

ANDY WARHOL: “The difference between the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Electric Circus that came later sort of summed up what happened with Pop culture as it moved from the primitive period into Early Slick.  It was like the difference between a clubhouse under the back porch steps and a country club.  The year before we’d had to pioneer a media show out of whatever we could improvise from whatever we had lying around – tinfoil and movie projectors and phosphorescent tape and mirrored balls.  But suddenly, during the ’66-’67 year, a whole Pop industry had started and snowballed into mass-manufacturing the light show paraphernalia and blow-your-mind stuff.  And a good general example of how much things had changed in such a short time is ‘Eric’s Fuck Room.’ With us, this was just a small alcove off the side of the dance floor where we’d thrown a couple of funky old mattresses in case people wanted to ‘lounge,’ but it’d ended up being just a place where Eric Emerson hijacked girls to for sex during the EPI shows; later, under the new Electric Circus management, it was transformed into the ‘Meditation Room,’ with carpeted platforms and Astroturf and a health food bar.”

LOU REED: “Oh Andy… It was very sad because he said while we were doing it… ‘You know, it can never happen again.’ And he was right. All that sixties energy and now we’re in the seventies and there’s nothing there.”