ANDY WARHOL: “Nico was a new kind of female superstar. Baby Jane and Edie were both outgoing, American, social, bright, excited, chatty – whereas Nico was weird and untalkative. You’d ask her something and she’d maybe answer you five minutes later. When people described her, they used words like ‘memento mori’ and ‘macabre.’ She wasn’t the type to get up on a table and dance, the way Edie or Jane might; in fact, she’d rather hide under the table than dance on top of it. She was mysterious and European, a real moon goddess type.”
MARY WORONOV: “She was gorgeous and strange to boot, so her value in the Warhol camp was high. She hardly moved, she never danced and if you asked her a question you might get an answer about ten minutes later. You couldn’t exactly go down to the store and buy ten of her.”
PLAYBOY: “Nico is the most ethereal and lovely of Warhol’s superstars; seeing her in her floor-length cloak and listening to her musical, remote talk, one gets the impression of a medieval German Madonna glimpsed in a dream full of images of spring and sunlight.”
JOHN CALE: “Being in New York in the Sixties with that kind of sonorous German accent had specific connotations no matter how beautiful you were. And she played on that. She wanted to explode the air around her.”
NICO: “Andy likes other people to become Andy for him. He doesn’t want to be always in charge of everything. He would rather be me or someone else sometimes. It’s part of pop art, that everybody can impersonate somebody else. That you don’t always have to be you to be you.”
BILLY NAME: “Oh, we all thought she was so beautiful and exotically strange in her silent ways. She was a marvelous thing, the likes of which nobody had seen before. She didn’t do much – she just let things happen around her – but she could really exhaust you with her magical, captive qualities.”
NICO: “You could say it was like a fairy tale; Andy would be the good fairy and Jim would play the giant, Brian would be the witch, Paul McCartney would be the frog who turns into the prince, no, it would have to be the other way around. Well, it didn’t seem like a fairy tale at the time. It was a lot of hassle. But I learned a lot of things, and I began to compose my own songs.”
MARY WORONOV: “There was nobody more serious than Nico. She would say, ‘I want to be a chantoooose,’ and we all thought it was a joke because she was completely atonal. But as it turned out she was entirely genuine, even if she was nuts.”
PAUL MORRISSEY: “I saw Nico was a modern Marlene Dietrich, with a great beauty, voice and presence. She was a wonderful performer: completely poised as a sophisticated person should be. She didn’t jump and scream like Janis Joplin or any of those ugly West Coast hippies.”
JACKSON BROWNE: “She was physically like a goddess. At the time there were these 20 foot high posters of Nico all over Manhattan. It was impossible to walk around the Village and not see these gigantic images of her. At the Dom she sat on a straight-backed chair and crossed her long legs. It was like Dietrich. She did not tout her sexuality. She didn’t need to trade on it. She was dignified in her seduction.”
RICHARD MELTZER: “Sooner or later she wasn’t with the Velvets anymore and she was by herself at the Dom, then right below the Balloon Farm. Not exactly by herself because she was playing opposite (and with) Tim Buckley and Jackson Browne. Her opposite Buckley was like Bessie Smith playing opposite Herman of Herman’s Hermits. But with Jackson the match-up really made it… And all this time she was doing stuff like living with Jackson (who was all of 17 at the time) and fucking him and stuff like that. And then she started claiming he was making nasty phone calls to her in the dead of night and she started insulting him on stage and finally he just walked off in the middle of a performance, only to be replaced by Bobby Neuwirth.”
LEONARD COHEN: “I stumbled into the Dom one night and I saw this girl singing behind the bar. She was a sight to behold, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up to that moment. I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside. My song ‘Suzanne’ was out (Judy Collins had just recorded it) and I had a credential and somehow I managed to meet her. And within five minutes of our conversation she told me to forget it, because she was only interested in young men. But she said ‘I’d love to be a friend of yours,’ and we became great friends. I was madly in love with her. I was lighting candles and praying and performing incantations and wearing amulets, ANYTHING to get her to fall in love with me, but she never did. I started writing songs for her then. She didn’t need them, though. She’s a great songwriter.”
PAT PATTERSON: “Nico sat behind the bar of the dusky Dom down on St. Marks Place and sang very soft, sad songs in a deep voice which, when stretched out, has a little mourn to it; like a child’s last sob. I watched as she sat, her head hanging to one side, her long flaxen hair falling to her waist, catching highlights from the kaleidoscopic lightworks projecting ever-changing images on the walls. She held the mike with both hands, her long neck reaching out toward the ceiling as she went for a note. There was a strange existentialness to her; she was at once both cool and warm and her style of singing stretched words to the point where they were out of shape – their meaning shaded in graduations until they were no longer words conveying thoughts but sounds conveying feeling.”
RICHARD MELTZER: “Folksinger David Roter once tried to get at her by writing songs about her son but she ignored him. Or maybe her Nordic indifference just prevented her from noticing him at all. She never noticed the crowd at the Dom either, all those cats sitting around at ringside drawing unflattering pictures of her on their napkins in ballpoint. Pictures of Nico with a bony face with tears streaming down her face and fragile wings at her shoulders. And spiders crawling across her forehead and they used to pass the drawings around and giggle. But she never noticed because the people talking at other tables were even louder than the laughter. Nobody ever used to listen but once in a while they used to yell out requests. ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ and stuff like that and once somebody even asked for some raga-rock. Jackson usually protected her from such swill and he once said, ‘We know it but we’re not gonna do it.’”
JACKSON BROWNE: “We were lovers for a while. She would never talk about her life like a normal person would – I wasn’t even sure if she was German or not – but every now and then she would give you this enigmatic smile that allowed you a glimpse into her private reality. She had no interest in her beauty. She hated modeling, she hated being objectified, and she had a philosophical distance from life that was disarming. But she was serious about her music. She loved Roger McGuinn’s 12-string guitar on ‘Eight Miles High’ because she considered it avant-garde. She was hip.”
MARY WORONOV: “She was so beautiful she expected everyone to want to fuck her, even the furniture, which groaned out loud when she walked into the room. I had seen chairs creep across the carpet in the hopes that she might sit down on them.”
JEAN BAUDRILLARD: “Nico seemed so beautiful only because her femininity appeared so completely put on. She emanated something more than beauty, something more sublime, a different seduction. And there was deception: she was a false drag queen, a real woman in fact, playing the queen. Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex, and it commands the higher price.”
