LOU REED & ANGUS MACLISE: “Western music is based on death, violence and the pursuit of progress… The root of universal music is sex. Western music is as violent as Western sex… Our band is the Western equivalent to the cosmic dance of Shiva. Playing as Babylon goes up in flames… The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultrasonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don’t be afraid. You’d better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All different kinds of plastic – pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic.”
LOU REED: “We were playing together a long time ago, in a $30 a month apartment and we really didn’t have any money, and we used to eat oatmeal all day and all night and give blood, among other things, or pose for these nickel or fifteen cent tabloids they had every week. And when I posed for them, my picture came out and it said I was a sex maniac killer that had killed fourteen children and tape-recorded it and played it in a barn in Kansas at midnight. And when John Cale’s picture came out in the paper, it said he killed his lover because his lover was going to marry his sister, and he didn’t want his sister to marry a fag.”
JOHN CALE: “Sterling, Piero and I were sharing an apartment on Grand Street. There were all sorts of filmic enterprises going on there. But the thing that pinned Piero off for me in the nut department was that he had cut down and covered a whole wall for one photograph. This was after I’d seen Jack Smith do umpteen things of the same obsessive nature, but had come up with something incendiary and sparkling. Piero had cut every eye from Vogue magazine and pasted them up on the wall, so the wall was covered with these beautiful eyes, all different.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “The Café Bizarre was a long narrow room with sawdust on the floor and a number of tables with fish-net lamps ranged along the walls. The Warhol party, including Edie Sedgwick, Paul Morrissey, Gerard Malanga, and Barbara Rubin, sat at a couple of tables against the wall in front of and to the left of the band. It was a Thursday night. Nobody paid any attention to their arrival. The art and rock worlds were still quite separate and the ten or fifteen people scattered among the tables didn’t recognize the new arrivals. The silver-haired man in dark glasses and a black leather jacket with his chin resting on an elegantly slim hand listened to the animated conversation of his companions, occasionally interrupting with a short, playful comment but remained for the most part silent. As soon as The Velvet Underground started to play however, Andy became quite animated, because he immediately recognized he could work with this band. The music was so loud it was impossible to talk while they were playing, but in a break between songs he asked Edie what she thought about having the band play in front of the movies during her upcoming retrospective. She was understandably unenthusiastic about a suggestion that would clearly have drawn a good deal of attention away from her starring role and got uptight. But when Gerard got up and danced in black leather pants with his whip, eerily mirroring the Velvets’ style with his sinuous, mesmeric movements, which resembled a cross between the Frug and an Egyptian belly dance, Andy saw Gerard become a part of the Velvets and had even more reason to feel that here was a rock band with whom he could really connect.”
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ROSEBUD: “When Andy Warhol swanned into the Café Bizarre with his crew you could tell he was hypnotized right off the bat. Image was all, and the Velvet Underground certainly had it. I could not believe all these tourists were sitting there drinking their bubbly and listening to the Velvets going on about heroin and S&M. I’m sure the audience didn’t have a clue because the lyrics were fairly indecipherable. But I thought, This is great!”
LOU REED: “We came over to Andy, and he said, ‘Why don’t you come up to the Factory?’ We went, it was very funny. It was New Year’s, and Piero Heliczer had filmed us doing something up at Grand Street. We all watched television – Edie and Andy and us – and we were all on the New Year’s Eve news. It was really weird. Andy was getting a week at the Cinematheque, so the idea was broached: Why didn’t we appear in it?”
LOU REED: “That was a very funny period with a very funny group of people. Everybody in a certain section was doing almost exactly the same thing without anyone knowing anybody else.”
LOU REED: “I reading descriptions of us as the ‘fetid
underbelly of urban existence.’ All I
wanted to do was write songs that somebody like me could relate to. I got off on the Beatles and all that stuff,
but why not have a little something on the side for the kids in the back row?”
JOHN CALE: “From then onwards, it was taken for granted that we would now spend our days at the Factory, where we would meet in the late afternoon to rehearse and gather for the evening’s events, which usually meant following Andy around to cocktail parties, art openings, dinner parties, party parties, night clubs, theatres, movies. As we flew around the city we were never less than ten and often as many as twenty. We didn’t so much attend parties as invade them, and Andy’s coterie were not fakes. No sooner had we entered somebody’s house than we would be combing the bathroom for prescription drugs and checking out the cupboards for free clothes.”
LOU REED: “It was like landing in heaven. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things. I used to write it all down.”
TIM MITCHELL: “For the band, Warhol’s Factory, with its cutting-edge social swirl and fascinating, freaky crew, looked like heaven. Warhol himself was a godlike figure, omnipotent in a silver world of his own creation, and he ruled a paradise where creating art brought money, fame, celebrity and glamour. What he had to offer might even lead to artistic immortality. For Cale, there was ‘a feeling of outrageous expectation in the air; we could say anything we wanted to anyone, no matter how famous… There was this magical empathy for the future and what it brought to us, albeit wrapped in a scathing indifference to the possibility of it’s being a mirage.’”
JOHN CALE: “Lou and I had one of these rapports where you think the other guy is thinking what you’re thinking, but he’s not. He couldn’t figure me out, and I couldn’t figure him out. The only things we had in common were drugs and an obsession with risk taking. That was the raison d’etre for the Velvet Underground. We both had tremendous drive and determination and we both hit out at anything that got in our way. Flower power? Get out of here! Acid? Fuck off! Give people hard drugs – heroin, amphetamine. It wasn’t so much the flavor of the drug; it was the mentality involved that we really resented. We thought doing evil was better than doing nothing.”
JOHN CALE: “Lou was very suspicious of Andy, but on the other hand, he was in awe of him. Andy was not interested in music, he was interested in people, so he latched on to Lou because he was this creature of another part of New York life that he didn’t have at the Factory, an example of a Long Island punk. Lou would be completely mystified by somebody like Andy who didn’t have a mean bone in his body, but who could be such a jackal with all his people. Whereas Lou’s whole modus operandi was to get people’s attention by wounding them.”
ANDY WARHOL: “We were all stunned. It was like the old days at the Factory when once in a while somebody with real actual talent would show up and shock everybody with it.”
LOU REED: “Everyone was always doing something, even if it was just selling drugs. ‘That’s your job!’”
TIM MITCHELL: “From his days with La Monte Young, drugs had played a part in the creation of Cale’s new music. Marijuana had helped to provide the meditative approach necessary for the Theater of Eternal Music’s experiments, but Cale had also experimented with LSD at this time. On visits to Harvard with Tony Conrad the two used to take cannabis with them; this they would trade for acid, which they would then take back to New York. Cale had a contact at Harvard, and this person’s father worked at the CIA headquarters in Langley. The CIA in the early 1960s was effectively subsidizing the drug use of the Lower East Side by recruiting ‘subjects’ from the streets for its own experiments into LSD. Decidedly non-academic psychotropic experiments would follow Cale’s return to New York after these expeditions, with the risks taken during them considered worthwhile in order to access further unexplored ground. Cale also applied to take part in sensory deprivation experiments at Columbia University but recalls being met with ‘stunned silence,’ concluding that those running the programme probably thought that he was ‘another nut looking for drug kicks.’ The combination of risk and ‘immersion’ that would have defined his planned drug-laced sessions in the isolation tank actually did characterize his time with La Monte young and with the Velvet Underground: create a new soundscape, climb in and explore.”
STERLING MORRISON: "But our actual salary from Paul Morrissey, who handled the business side for Andy, was five dollars a day, for cheese or beer at the Blarney Stone. He had a ledger that listed everything, including drug purchases - $5 for heroin. When the accountant saw it, he said 'What the hell is this?'"
JOHN CALE: “At first, before they got to know him, everybody at the Factory adored Lou. In many ways, it was the best home he ever had, the first institution where he was understood, welcomed, encouraged and rewarded for being a twisted, scary monster. Lou, for his part, gave them what they wanted, parading his whole catalogue of queeny, limp-wristed poses and ambitions. Lou took to the Factory water like the proverbial duck. I was a little less enthusiastic about the heavy gay scene that dominated the Factory, and the hierarchy by which the inhabitants seemed to live or die.”
INGRID SUPERSTAR: “John Cale? Good grief! I couldn’t begin to describe him. He’s just funny-looking… he looks like the devil.”
JOHN CALE: “It wasn’t until Lou gave me a few sexual nudges that it finally clicked that he was gay, or at least bisexual. When I told him I wasn’t interested, he mumbled ‘They make them differently in Scotland,’ quickly adding that anyway I was not suitable material for a marital partner.”
DANNY FIELDS: “Everyone was certainly in love with Lou – me, Edie, Andy, everyone. He was so sexy. Everyone just had this raging crush… he was the sexiest thing going.”
JOHN CALE: “Lou enjoyed taking situations to extremes you couldn’t imagine until you’d been there with him. He would befriend a drunk in a bar and, after drawing him out with friendly conversation, suddenly ask ‘Would you like to fuck your mother?’”
NAT FINKELSTEIN: “Andy was grooming Lou to be a star and Lou wanted it. They wanted to make as much money as possible. If they could have, they would have made films like ‘Lou Reed in Hawaii,’ ‘Lou in the Navy’ – you know, like Elvis.”
MARY WORONOV: “There were two stars in the Velvet Underground: John Cale and Lou Reed. Lou was unassuming at first, but when he started to sing, you realized that he was a powerhouse. John looked like he was from another country and from another time, medieval even, because of his haircut. He could be very polite, but he wasn’t a guy who worried or buttered people up. He was moody and he usually had a violent temper. Not when he didn’t get his own way (he couldn’t care less about that) but about music or someone being stupid. He could blow up. He was very scary when he was angry, because he would move very fast. John’s presence on stage was extremely strong. But John and Lou worked together. You didn’t think of one more than the other. I didn’t get a sense of one being stronger than the other one. They were like two junkies coping together.”
JOHN CALE: “What Andy did was provide an intellectual location for us; everybody around us was of the same frame of mind, had the same intention. Although it was chaos we were after, this was a very beautiful chaos we were in.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Brian Jones drops into the Factory one day. In tow there’s this fantastic flying Dutchman of a chick. Andy asks her what it is that she does… In a Grimm’s fairy tale Wagnerian gothic voice, she groans, ‘I zeeeung!’ Nico joins the Velvet Underground.”
BILLY NAME: “All of us at the Factory were very taken with Nico. She was just this fascinating creature who was totally nonflamboyant, nonpretentious, but absolutely magnetically controlling. And she didn’t wear all the hippie flowers, she just wore these black pantsuits, or white pantsuits – a real Nordic beauty. She was too much, really, let me tell you, so anything we could think of to have her play a role in our scene, that’s what we were gonna do.”
PAUL MORRISSEY: “Nico played me her record, and I thought it was great and she was absolutely beautiful. She came up looking for work, and said she was going to be managed by Bob Dylan’s manager, Mr. Grossman, and I kept her in mind… I said to the Velvets, ‘We want this girl to sing with you.’ Andy had been connected with Jane Holzer and Edie Sedgwick, so if he’s going to go out with this rock’n’roll group, better that he’s got some wonderful girl, another Girl of the Year. It was common sense, and it was my idea.”
JOHN CALE: “We were stunned by Andy’s suggestion to include Nico in the Velvet Underground. No one knew what to make of her, but we were far too self-concerned to either argue or refuse. Here was this formidable woman, the world’s first supermodel. We were awed by her style – something we were just beginning to taste the fruits of ourselves, with Kenneth J. Lane jewelry and Betsey Johnson designs. Of course we’d seen her in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ – the first time you see her on-screen she’s introduced as ‘that German cow.’ She was quintessentially the person that Andy used to make us aware of another dimension to music: publicity and image making.”
GERARD MALANGA: “Whip-dancing, that was just something I invented. I happened to walk into a weird shop that sold whips and I bought a little whip I could tie to my belt. I pulled the whip off my belt and started dancing with it… Lou and John loved it.”
JOHN CALE: “When Nico first arrived she was very tall and very blonde and just immaculate. We found out later that she was deaf in one ear, but that didn’t really matter. She had the persona on stage and everybody was just riveted by it.”
GRACE GLUECK: “The Chic Mystique of Andy Warhol, described by an associate of the painter as a ‘kind of community action underground look at yourself film project,’ was billed as the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry’s 43rd annual dinner at Delmonico’s hotel. Delmonico’s elegant white-and-gold Colonnade and Grand Ballroom had probably never seen such a swinging scene. Edie Sedgwick, the ‘superstar’ of Warhol’s movies, was on full blast – chewing gum and sipping a martini.”
GRACE GLUECK: “The psychiatrists who turned out in droves for the dinner were there to be entertained – but also, in a way, to study Andy. ‘Creativity and the artist have always held a fascination for the serious students of behavior,’ said Dr. Robert Campbell, the program chairman. ‘And we’re fascinated by the mass communications activities of the Warhol group.’”
GRACE GLUECK: “’I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id,’ said Dr. Alfred Lilienthal. ‘Warhol’s message is one of super-reality,’ said another, ‘a repetition of the concrete quite akin to the LSD experience.’ ‘Why are they exposing us to these nuts?’ a third asked. ‘But don’t quote me.’”
PAUL MORRISSEY: “Nico was spectacular. She had a definite charisma. She was interesting. She was distinctive. She had a magnificent deep voice. She was extraordinary looking. She was tall. She was somebody.”
BILLY NAME: “John had a very clean and sharp image, wearing a black turtleneck with a rhinestone snake around his neck, and this jet-black suit and what was really a Buster Brown hairdo and very good posture. Lou was always turning his back to the front; John was just standing there defiantly, more or less. The first number he was playing when we got there was on electric viola, which immediately gave everyone a shock. It took a while to get used to because the viola is not the obvious instrument for a rock and roller. John had the perfect face for it; he looked perfect holding that thing, absolutely menacing looking.”
BILLY NAME: “The psych convention started out as a con. We were mingling with them as they arrived, but it was more as if Edie Sedgwick’s aunt had thrown a big party… The Velvets were tuning up right out in the open, and then when they did their performance, it was just part of the atmosphere, like a bump in the overall night. The press played it like it was ironic confrontation, which it wasn’t at all. We didn’t shock anybody. Psychiatrists may be stiff but they all have a sense of humor, and they’re all intelligent. It was more playful than confrontational. Barbara Rubin would do these things like set off light flashes in their eyes or stick the mike in their faces, you know, that confrontational technique that basically started with the Living Theatre. To me it was old. I already knew that number, so I wasn’t taken with her. The psych convention was important though, because it signaled a new era at the Factory, the ‘Chelsea Girls’ time.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Nico and Edie were so different, there was no good reason to compare them, really. Nico was so cool, and Edie was so bubbly. But the sad thing was, Edie was taking a lot of heavy drugs, and she was getting vaguer and vaguer. Her Society lady attitude toward pills had changed to an addict attitude. Some of her good friends tried to help her, but she wouldn’t listen to them. She said she wanted a ‘career’ and that she’d get one since Albert Grossman was managing her. But how can you have a career when you don’t have the discipline to work at anything?”
TIM MITCHELL: “As the psychiatrists began their roast beef, string beans and potatoes, the Velvet Underground began their assault on those responsible for the thoughts and behaviors of a nation. While Warhol filmed, Edie Sedgwick in a red skirt and Gerard Malanga in a tuxedo danced. Long, deep Expressionist shadows created by camera lights loomed and lurched behind jeweled candelabra. Lou Reed, who had previously been subjected by psychiatrists to electro-convulsive treatment, was ‘seething almost the whole night,’ remembers Cale, who was ‘delighted to hear that the comments elicited were of universal distaste, including the one suggesting we needed a long recuperative stay in a home.’”
BILLY NAME: “Up until Nico and the Velvets came along, it was always Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. Andy and Edie. They were like a double act. But the night of the psychiatrists’ convention signaled the end of the Edie Sedgwick era. She danced with the Velvets onstage that night. She danced very cool – Edie was always very cool.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Edie had come with Bobby Neuwirth. While the crews filmed and Nico sang her Dylan song, Gerard noticed that Edie was trying to sing, too, but that even in the incredible din, it was obvious she didn’t have a voice. He always looked back on that night as the last time she ever went out with us in public, except for a party here and there. He thought that she’d felt upstaged that night, that she’d realized Nico was the new girl in town.”
LOU REED: “We heard our screams turned into songs and back into screams again.”
HENRY GELDZAHLER: “As far as I can remember the presentation was thrilling but the music was to me much more romantic and melodic. ‘Andy Warhol Up-Tight’ was explosive and abrasive but I kept finding the traditional, almost folk substructure of The Velvets music. I was more impressed with the music than with the other effects, but it was enhanced by the combination.”
JOHN CALE: “Andy’s greatest superstar, Edie Sedgwick, seduced me on my second day at the Factory and I moved into her apartment on East 63rd Street at Madison Avenue on the ritzy Upper East Side. The affair lasted about six weeks, me living with her. She would regale me with stories about her family and all the chain beatings of her father and stuff like that. The only thing that worried me about being close to her was her dependency. She expected that I would become her nurse and eventually be brought down by it. I wasn’t about to get involved. This went on and off for six to eight weeks. ‘That’s enough patronage for now, I’ll see you later. I’ll go over and fuck Bob Dylan because I’ve heard a bum rap about him and he seems like a nice guy and I’ll go and find out’ – in the meantime taking handfuls of Miltown tranquilizers and drinking a lot.”
DAVE THOMPSON: “Rigid in blonde and white, Nico was never less than a dramatic contrast to her black-clad bandmates, yet she did not steal the limelight so much as absorb it. ‘Okay, we’ve got a statue in the band,’ Cale thought, watching as she stood or, just as frequently, perched herself on a convenient stool to bang on her tambourine.”
JOHN CALE: “Although desperate and on her last legs with Andy, Edie still possessed all the elemental magic, frayed beauty, and presence of Marilyn Monroe. She was a really beautiful creature to be around. She was very fragile and was amazing in front of the camera, but was also totally lost; not at all in control of what she was doing.”
TIM MITCHELL: “Cale was more elegant than Reed and was a more flamboyant if always tasteful dresser; he had a moody attractiveness that rivaled his partner’s more up-front appeal. Kenneth Jay Lane, the costume designer, had asked Warhol for help with PR, and in return some of the Factory crowd had been allowed to choose items of his jewelry. As Cale remembers, ‘We got to take our pick from his store… Edie had a lot… I got a snake necklace and a vinyl wristband.’ Cale would combine his usual black clothing with an outrageous piece of jewelry, such as the necklace or a rhinestone choker, to striking effect.”
