PAUL MORRISSEY: “The next month we were invited to take the EPI to the West Coast, to the Whisky a’Go-Go in LA and the Fillmore Auditorium up in San Francisco. The Swillmore Vomitorium, I called it; it was run by that guy Bill Graham, the most goddamn awful human being I’ve ever met; he was crying and begging us to go there, ‘You must come over, it means so much to me.’ Awful fool. Once we got there he told Sterling Morrison, ‘I hope you motherfuckers bomb.’”
JOHN CALE: “The mentality of the West coast was so vapid and directionless. Our attitude during the tour was one of hate and derision.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Vacuous Hollywood was everything I ever wanted to mould my life into.”
ANDY WARHOL: “People want to explain everything. We took a tour of Universal Studios in Los Angeles and inside or outside the place, it was difficult to tell what was real. They’re like not real people trying to say something and we’re real people not trying to say anything.”
DANNY FIELDS: “The Castle is very high in the Hollywood hills. The land was completely neglected. A swimming pool down the hill was full of algae and moss. It hadn’t seen the touch of a gardener in years. Bela Lugosi’s house is right across the street, which looks like a Mayan pyramid and was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Castle has a two-story high living room, a fake gold-leaf vaulted ceiling, big windows, a grand piano, a spiral staircase, and off it are several weird, irregularly shaped bedrooms. There is a tower room. It all looks like it was made of papier-mache.”
NICO: “The Castle was haunted. There was a pentangle in the entrance. I heard the shrieks and funny noises… I hear things rather than feel them. Every morning at four, at the same spot, somebody… the ghost… would make this noise like a broomstick pounding on the floor.”
MICHAEL KALMEN: “I opened the front door – the Castle was empty of furniture – and I looked into the living room. There was Mary Woronov, spinning around and around to Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep Mountain High.’ Nico was out in the garden feeding rabbits.”
JOHN CALE: “Gerard Malanga found and claimed as a piece of ‘found poetry’ a sheaf of papers tacked to the notice-board in the kitchen. It was the Bob Dylan world tour itinerary, left there by his entourage before leaving for Sydney. We pored over it in awe trying to understand what the times and numbers meant.”
STERLING MORRISON: “There’s wasn’t much partying at the Castle while we were there because of our reputation, which was horrible. Everybody figured we were gay. They figured we must be, running around with Warhol and all those whips and stuff.”
LOU REED: “I was one of the first Medicare patients. A drug I shot in San Francisco froze all of my joints. The doctors suspected terminal lupus, but this turned out to be untrue.”
MARY WORONOV: “Our pale skin and black clothes were no longer threatening under the relentlessly happy California sun. Without the protective shell of New York, we seemed to have lost our magic.”
LOU REED: "We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It's just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can't play and they certainly can't write... You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically, I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It's a joke! It's a joke! The kids are being hyped."
MARY WORONOV: “We spoke two completely different languages because we were on amphetamine and they were on acid. They were slow to speak, with these wide eyes – ‘oh wow!’ – so into their vibrations; we spoke in rapid-machine-gun-fire about books and paintings and movies. They were into free and American Indian and going back to the land and trying to be some kind of true, authentic person; we could not have cared less about that. They were homophobic; we were homosexual. Their women – they were these big, round-titted girls; you would say hello to them, and they would just flop on the bed and fuck you; we liked sexual tension, sadomasochism, NOT fucking. They were barefoot; we had platform boots. They were eating bread they had baked themselves – and we never ate at all!”
PAUL MORRISSEY: “That’s the problem with Californians, they are so happy they don’t do anything. It’s LSD. It’s ruined their sense of humor... L.A. I liked, because the degenerates there all stay in their separate suburban houses, and that’s wonderful because it’s so much more modern – people isolated from each other… I don’t know where the hippies are getting these ideas to ‘retribalize’ in the middle of the twentieth century. I mean, in New York and L.A. people take drugs purely to feel good and they admit it. In San Francisco they turn it into ‘causes’ and it’s so tedious… There’s a lot to be said for the hardcore New York degenerates. After one day in San Francisco you realize how refreshing and unpretentious they are… But what I’m really praying for is a great resurgence of good old alcoholism.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “They make it out to LA to play the Trip. The troupe consists of fourteen people and all are essential to the act. Gerard Malanga dances dream-like in front of the Velvets while they work. He wears a Marlon Brando t-shirt. Works out with toy barbells on-stage. When they get to ‘Heroin’ he shoots up with an oversized horse needle. Then he lights a candle. Andy and Danny Williams and Paul Morrissey work the lights and the slides and the films. Each night when the show ends, they repair to this castle up in the Hollywood Hills near Griffith Park. About thirty kids from New York are there with them. Severn Dardern lives downstairs and all the old heads wear nothing by monk’s robes. The ceilings are high arched and vaulted, braziers burn through the night. Ghostlike figures glide, room to room, at three ay em. Pacific Coast Drug Time.”
LESTER BANGS: “They were on with Quicksilver Messenger Service, and much of the audience was apathetic or put off; they wanted those California acid vibes instead of what they took for cold New York negativism. Lou Reed, himself, came out from the dressing room and walked around the audience with his hands in his pockets, a slight, calm figure with a noncommittal expression on his face. Seemingly nobody noticed him, because nobody said anything to him – although almost everybody in that place was so busy being cool they could barely get up the gumption to dance, so it probably doesn’t matter. My girl and I wanted to go up and say something to Lou, shake his hand and tell him how much we dug his music, but I was afraid. I thought he would be some maniac with rusty eyeballs or something, the image made me nervous so we didn’t approach him, even though she said: ‘It seems to me like that was all they really wanted, for someone to just come up and tell them they appreciate what they’re doing.’ And as usual she was right, as Lou confirmed when I talked to him.’”
LOU REED: “Picture the most awful thing anybody can say to you, and odds are that it was said to us. Somebody says something awful to you: if you take them seriously, you might be hurt. Don’t, and you’re not. If they had something constructive to say, you might take them seriously, but they never do. You can’t pay attention to anything anybody says to you, ever.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Bill Graham and I got right to the central incident of our relationship [when we met again in 1978] – him kicking the Velvets off the bill at his San Francisco Fillmore in ’66 – and it finally came out after all these years that what made him really hate us wasn’t the Velvets’ music – it was that he saw Paul eating a tangerine and throwing the peels on the floor of the theater!”
JACK SIMMONS: “Nico was the most beautiful woman, and you could forgive almost anything she did. She had such a weird take on life. This is typical: I was once doing something in the kitchen at the Castle, something ordinary like tossing a salad. Nico came in with her staring eyes, and she studied me doing this basic cookery. I thought she was going to ask me about some technical thing. But she just stared, then she finally said, ‘Oh Jooohn, you haaaands are soooo beau-ti-ful. They’re like po-e-try in mooootion.’ She was so cute, I don’t think anyone could say anything bad about Nico. One day she knocked at my door. ‘Oh Joooohn, I was dri-ving my caaaar, and it sliiii-thered off the rooooad.’ I walked around down the road with her, and I couldn’t believe it, there was her car dangling off a cliff. The drop must have been 200 feet. You see, she was in another world. But whatever she did, whatever she smoked, whatever she shot, in every way, in every shape and form, she was a lady among ladies.”
NICO: “I was not a hippie. It was never true to say that, not to Jim Morrison either, nor to Brian Jones. We were bohemians. Do you understand the difference? Bohemians know they are not hippies, but hippies do not know they are not bohemians. Shall I tell you something about the hippies that I didn’t like? Well, they were always selling you something. They would try to sell you dope, or patchouli oil, or themselves, or what they were thinking. It was like a Black Market, it was der schwarzmarkt all over again. Do you know where they lived, in Haight-Ashbury? That was their ghetto. It was like Kruezberg. It was a Purple Market. That is a perfect hippie color. A Purple Haze Market. What’s that in German?”
DANNY FIELDS: “I met Jim Morrison at the Elektra office in Los Angeles and he followed me back to the Castle in his rented car. Morrison walked into the kitchen and Nico was there and they stood and circled each other. Then they stared at the floor and didn’t say a word to each other. They were both too poetic to say anything. It was a very boring, poetic, silent thing that was going on between them. They formed a mystical bond immediately – I think Morrison pulled Nico’s hair and then he proceeded to get extremely drunk and I fed him whatever was left of my drugs that Edie Sedgwick hadn’t stolen. While I was sleeping, Nico came into my room, crying ‘Oh, he’s going to kill me! Oh, he’s going to kill me!’ I said, ‘Oh, leave me alone Nico! I’m trying to sleep!’ She went back outside, and then I heard her screaming. I looked through the window into the courtyard, and Morrison was just pulling her hair, so I went back to bed. Then David Numan, who was also staying at the Castle, came running into my room and said, ‘You’d better check this out.’ Nico was out in the driveway, still sobbing, while Morrison was naked in the moonlight, climbing around the rooftop. He was jumping from one turret to the other, while Nico sobbed.”
PAUL ROTHCHILD: “Everything at the Castle was theater. Jim Morrison was another colossal madman pursued by his own demons. He was a tester, too, like Dylan but much more cruel. He took Nico up in a tower, both naked, and Jim, stoned out of his mind, walked along the edge of the parapet. Hundreds of feet down. Here’s this rock star at the peak of his career risking his life to prove to this girl that life is nothing. ‘This is theater. I am doing this theater for you.’ He asked Nico to walk the same line and she backed down. Edie would have walked it.”
NICO: “I argued with Jim. He asked if I would walk along the edge of the Castle. I said to him, ‘Why?’ and he couldn’t answer.”
NICO: “Peyote was a spiritual drug. We were in the middle of the desert and everything was natural, you know, in the open air, nature all around, not a hotel room or a bar. And the cactus was natural. You did not buy it from somebody on a street corner. We had visions in the desert. It was like William Blake. Jim was like Blake; he would see visions, angels in trees. He said that there were more poets in the Comanches than there were in bookstores. The Comanches took the cactus, too. We were like the Indians who lived in this way for thousands of years, before the Christians and as long as the Jews.”
NICO: “Jim Morrison was the first man I was in love with, because he was affectionate to my looks and my mind. Everything was open to use; there were no rules. We had a too-big appetite. You could say that Jim took drugs because he wanted visions for his poetry. It is like people in the office who drink coffee to help them work. It is really the same. And Jim showed me this is what a poet sees. A poet sees visions and records them.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Jim loved Nico’s sultry Berlin accent and cold, rock-operatic Wagnerian aura, and he deeply respected her connection to Federico Fellini. She was also extremely intelligent and still bore a slight black eye that Brian Jones had given her when he’d smacked her at Monterey. Jim insisted that Nico tell him everything that Brian had ever said to her. Nico insisted that Jim teach her how to write a song.”
NICO: “I did not feel that Jim was Californian. He lived in Los Angeles, which is a beautiful name – the Angels – and it was really a city for William Blake, not for Hollywood. But Los Angeles was destroyed, like Jerusalem in Blake’s poem. Jim could have built it again, if he had not been surrounded by these tacky women.”
MARY WORONOV: “San Francisco was the culminating horror... By that time, we’d really had it. The group returned broken up. When I went out there I was very close to Gerard. When I came back I wasn’t. And also Warhol was very upset. He expected people to look at his movies. They didn’t even talk to him, they wouldn’t see his band, they wouldn’t do anything. When we flew back, it was like we desperately needed air to breathe, we had to get a New York fix or we would perish.”