RAY MANZAREK: “The Factory was the realm of the cynic, the ironist. A realm of sophistication, of knowledge, of worldliness… but without the sun. It was perpetual pleasure and perpetual darkness.”
MARK LANCASTER: “By ’66 there was an air of what people would call decadence which wasn’t there in ’64. Strange people who were not friendly. In ’64, people were nice… I think it was drugs, basically. And ’64 was pre-superstars. It was pre-Ingrid and pre-Viva and pre-Edie. The fame thing became much bigger then. They were sort of famous then in a way they weren’t in ’64. There was a lot more attention. When I visited in ’66 it was like I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. Only Andy knew me. Everything else had changed, except for Ondine.”
RAY MANZAREK: “Jim Morrison loved the games, the role playing, the attitude of the Factory. The challenges to go further, to go beyond the self-imposed, societally sanctioned boundaries of psychic control. To go beyond the pale. And Jim was born to go beyond the pale. And so was Nico, the Valkyrian angel of death. She met Jim and went gaga. And she would push his buttons at every opportunity, in a deep and Germanic-accented voice. ‘I’m going to take another von. Vhat’s the matter Jeem, are you afraid?’ the Valkyrie would say to the Californian Dionysus, who would always respond to the challenge. ‘Afraid? Shit, I’ll take two!’ ‘Jeem, you are crazy. That’s why I loff you!’ And they would retire to a silver-foiled room for more. More of everything. More drink, more pills, more sex.”
RICHARD MELTZER: “And later on she ended up with Jim Morrison. At least for one night. The Doors were playing the Village Theater, precursor of the Fillmore East, and as the second set began Morrison went up with the curtain, dangling from it all the way up, drunk as a porcupine. He finally got down and then he went on to do one of his best sets ever. And when it was over Nico was waiting for him in the lobby. And then she left with him up 2nd Avenue, her hand in his, and his cuffs were real dirty. He looked kind of awkward and boyish and shy, as if it was something big to be out on the town with such a classy dame. Groupies weren’t really known as such just yet and it was a toss-up anyway was to which one was the groupie.”
JOHN DENSMORE: “I’ve never heard such crashing around. It sounded as if they were beating the shit out of each other. I was worried but never dared to ask what happened. Nico looked okay the next day, so I let it slide. Later she was to say in the press, ‘Ja, Jim ist crazy!’”
NICO: “We hit each other because we were drunk and we enjoyed the sensation. But we made love in the gentle way, you know? It was the opposite of Brian Jones. I thought of Jim Morrison as my brother, so I hoped we would grow together. He gave me permission to become a writer. He said to me, ‘I give you permission to write your poems and compose your songs.’ My soul brother believed I could do it. I had his authority.”
LEONARD COHEN: “I went to see Jim Morrison with Nico – I believe it was the first time he played New York, in some club or other – and Jimi Hendrix stepped into the room and he looked glorious, dazzling. I was with Nico and when it was time to go, she said, ‘No, I’ll stay here for a while. You go ahead.’ Ha ha ha!”
NICO: “I had so many encounters with Andy. So many, it is hard to remember. I enjoyed everything I did with him. I once went to a store with him and he made me wear a paper sack. He wanted to sell it but nobody would buy. We did stupid things like that, every day something strange. This is a good kind of life, yes, I guess? To do something different and strange every day.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Paul Morrissey wasn’t the type to primp in the mirror, but when we’d be going out with Nico, you couldn’t help noticing that he’d check out how he looked a few times. But if he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, a lot of people would agree. Whenever he’d find her picture in magazines for ads like London Fog raincoats that she’d done the year before, he’d tell her to never never smile in pictures – Paul thought beauties should never smile or look happy in photographs. But then ironically, Paul was maybe the one person in the world who could always make Nico laugh. And they’d have ‘arguments’ all the time about drugs: ‘If you keep taking LSD, Nico,’ Paul warned, ‘your next baby will be born all deformed. They’re finding these things out now.’ ‘No, it’s not truuuuuue,’ Nico said. ‘We’ll get better and better drugs and make fantastic children.’”
NAT FINKELSTEIN: “Nico was a real person. She was the only one who wasn’t sucking up to people. She was a complete human being. She was polite and nice to everybody and she didn’t kiss ass like the rest of them.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Nico is the girl on whom Andy silk-screens the word FRAGILE in a window happening at the Abraham and Straus department store in Brooklyn. It’s a promotion to sell a two-dollar paper dress with a do-it yourself paint kit. It turns out to be a do-it-yourself promotion for Andy. A hundred spectators gather inside the store and outside. Gerard, dressed in baggy leather pants, holds a metal frame that contains the silk screen, while Andy pours reddish-purple paint through it. The crowd giggles. Little Ari sprays spinach-green paint on his mother’s stockings. Nico reclines on a platform as the word FRAGILE is printed repetitiously on the front of her dress from the hip down. On the loudspeaker, Nico’s monotonous voice is barely audible against the amplified guitars and male voices. She’s singing ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties.’ A matronly woman in the crowd scratches at her ear in a vain effort to clear up the sound.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Andy grimaces with pain when a microphone is placed in front of him and he is required to speak. Faintly he says, ‘Nico is the first psychedelic singer with the Velvet Underground. They do two hours of songs with only buzzing from a burglar alarm in between.’ The spectators look baffled. The matronly woman scratches her ear again. Shyly Andy takes out of the pocket of his leather jacket some larger-than-life stick-on paper bananas and pastes them on Nico’s dress. A thin woman calls out, ‘I thought he was going to paint something by hand. That’s what I came for.’ A store employee takes the mike: ‘It’s to show you how you can do it yourself. The dress Mr. Warhol has just executed will be donated to the Brooklyn Museum of Art.’ The crowd looks disappointed. Two-dollar paper dresses are not about to sweep the world, but Andy does take one home to his mother.”
STEVEN WATSON: “As Billy Name became more fatigued, the Silver Factory grew more physically bedraggled, especially when it got closer to the end of its lease in January 1968. When Ingrid Superstar was asked to describe the Factory, she gazed at the space and ticked off a mix of objects – a big clock that didn’t work, an old fan hanging on a pipe, one wall with bricks showing through, a red light over the exit sign, a toilet that overflowed, a silver fire extinguisher, a photo of Nico modeling clothes – the reflected the physical state of the Factory. When an occasional sheet of silver foil peeled off the ceiling, Billy left it in its state of artful droop, showcasing his installation in the process of disintegration. Sometimes when the dust got to be too thick, he simply sprayed it silver.”
RONNIE CUTRONE: “Andy was the biggest Al-Anon case I ever met in my life. By which I mean that almost every 1960s friend of his was a drug addict. Andy lived vicariously through their insanity. He always thought that this made the best scripts… He needed addicts around him, because his own life was so dull – workaholics lives are always dull. He always told us never to do drugs, but at the same time he reveled in our dramas and excitement.”
PAT HACKETT: “Andy had had a late adolescence – in his twenties he’d worked very hard at his commercial art career; he didn’t take much time out to have fun, really, until he was in his thirties. So he terrorized people the way, for instance, the most popular girl in high school could – creating cliques and setting up rivalries just for the ‘entertainment’ value of watching people fight for his attention.”
MARY WORONOV: “Murmurs fluttered, the word was passed, ‘Ondine shot up in his eye,’ and we all took it as an omen that a particularly intense high was ahead of us – all except Andy. He was oblivious, buzzing along on his own little yellow pills. He liked to be next to things, feel the energy, but he didn’t want to know what was really going on, and we were very discreet. Yes, to the normal eye it looked as if everyone simply had an extreme bowel disease, but to us a bathroom became a temple of porcelain and tile, the inner sanctum of bodily functions where only the initiated were allowed, where the dealer held communion, and ritual was unavoidable.”
MARY WORONOV: “None of us ever tried to be beautiful. All of us tried to look striking and powerful, including Andy. We had beauty that was tragic or marked. Like Velvet would say, ‘I’m beautiful but I have too much make-up on and I fuck too much. I’m tragically torn.’ They all marked themselves in certain ways. Ondine was probably the only one who was gorgeous, but he was so fierce you never paid attention to how good-looking he was.”
TAYLOR MEAD: “The more destroyed you were, the more likely he was to use you.”
NAT FINKELSTEIN: “Andy was so good at hiding the fact that he was directing and manipulating that it caused a lot of friction, as with Danny Williams of the Velvet Underground. It's not that people were Andy's puppets, or that he spoke through their bodies, but he was always able to insinuate himself as the driving force, Donovan's brain. It was like two Haploid cells coming together and forming a unified cell—though it looked like a mass snake fornication. Andy's great talent was to uncover minor talents, put them together and come out with a great whole made out of minor parts. Gerard was Andy's great discovery. Gerard was the Factory. He was the curry that hid the taste of slightly spoiled meat. The Factory was a stew made out of society's left-overs, rejects, and damaged merchandise. The satellites were peaches, waiting to be bruised.”
BARBARA ROSE: “You couldn’t have a broken heart at the Factory. That place was beyond romanticism.”
GRETCHEN BERG: “I don’t think Andy was completely perceptive about all of the things that were going on about him. He was living in the middle of the vortex of a whirlpool. His good nature and ability to put up with a great deal of shit could have created a very dangerous atmosphere. It was like walking around in a gasoline-filled room holding a match. Periodically he would complain to me and say every few months: ‘We have to go through and get everybody out. We won’t allow them to come up.’ Too much distraction went on there. He realized that in a way he was being used by these people as a hang out… He had this live-and-let-live policy. He believed that you shouldn’t alter the way things really are, that you can’t interfere with things. They have to happen just the way things happen even if it happened to himself. I think it’s a very dangerous policy.”
