POPism (22 page)

The Velvets had done tapes for filmmakers to use while they projected their movies and they'd played live behind the screen during some screenings at the Lafayette Street Cinemathèque. But where we first really became aware of how fabulous and demented their act was at the Café Bizarre on West 3rd Street—“On Go-Go Street for nine bucks a night,” as Lou Reed, the sort of lead Velvet, put it.

When Barbara Rubin asked Gerard to help her make a movie of the Velvets playing at the Bizarre, Gerard asked Paul Morrissey to help, and Paul said why didn't I come along, and so we all went down there to see them. The Bizarre management wasn't too thrilled with them. Their music was beyond the pale—way too loud and insane for any tourist coffeehouse clientele. People would leave looking dazed and damaged. Anyway, the Velvets were about to get fired. We talked to them a little bit that same night while Barbara and her crew went through the audience pushing the blinding sun gun lights and the cameras in people's faces and asking, “Are you uptight? Are you uptight?” until they reacted, and then she would hold the cameras and lights on them while they got madder or cringed more or ran away or whatever.

We liked the Velvets and invited them to come by the Factory.

Paul wanted to do some shows with them. Coincidentally, we'd just been approached by a producer who'd taken over a film studio out on Long Island that he wanted to turn into a discotheque. He claimed that this studio was originally the airplane hangar that Lindbergh took off from. It was around seventeen
thousand square feet and had a three-thousand-person capacity and he was going to call it Murray the K's World. He said he wanted the Factory crew to be disco mascots and hang out there every night making movies so he could get publicity for the place. Paul thought there should be a house band since Jordan Christopher's house band at Arthur did so well, and the producer said that if we could come up with a band, maybe he'd just call the place Andy Warhol's World.

So when we'd gone to the Bizarre to see the Velvets that time, what Paul was trying to do was psyche out how they'd be in a big airplane hangar of a discotheque and how they'd go down with the kids. If any band then could fill up seventeen thousand square feet with blasting sound, it was the Velvets. We liked the idea that their drummer was a girl, that was unusual. Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed—and even Maureen Tucker—wore jeans and T-shirts, but John Cale, the Welsh electric viola player, had a more parochial look—white shirts and black pants and rhinestone jewelry (a dog collar-type necklace and bracelet) and long black spiky hair and some kind of English accent. And Lou looked good and pubescent then—Paul thought the kids out on the Island would identify with that.

Another idea we had in mind when we went to check out the Velvets was that they might be a good band to play behind Nico, an incredible German beauty who'd just arrived in New York from London. She looked like she could have made the trip over right at the front of a Viking ship, she had that kind of face and body. Although Nico got more and more into the swirling capes and medieval monastery look as the sixties went on, when she first came on the scene she dressed very mod and spiffy in white wool pants, double-breasted blazers, beige cashmere turtlenecks, and those pilgrim-looking shoes with the big buckles on
them. She had straight shoulder-length blond hair with bangs, blue eyes, full lips, wide cheekbones—the works. And she had this very strange way of speaking. People described her voice as everything from eery, to bland and smooth, to slow and hollow, to a “wind in a drainpipe,” to an “IBM computer with a Garbo accent.” She sounded the same strange way when she sang, too.

Gerard had met her in London that spring and given her the Factory number to call if she ever came to New York. She called us from a Mexican restaurant and we went right over to meet her. She was sitting at a table with a pitcher in front of her, dipping her long beautiful fingers into the sangría, lifting out slices of wine-soaked oranges. When she saw us, she tilted her head to the side and brushed her hair back with her other hand and said very slowly, “I only like the fooood that flooooats in the wiiine.”

During dinner, Nico told us that she'd been on TV in England in a rock show called “Ready, Steady, Go!” and right there she pulled a demo 45 rpm out of her bag of a song called “I'll Keep It with Mine” that had been written for her, she said, by Bob Dylan, who'd been over there touring. (It was one of a few pressings that had Dylan playing the piano on it, and eventually Judy Collins recorded it.) Nico said that Al Grossman had heard it and told her that if she came to the United States, he'd manage her. When she said that, it didn't sound too promising, because we'd heard Edie telling us so much that she was “under contract” to Grossman and nothing much seemed to be happening for her—having a well-known manager was never a guarantee that things would really happen for you. (We were still seeing Edie, but we weren't showing her films anymore—the idea of the Edie Sedgwick Retrospective at the Cinemathèque had fizzled out, and it looked like our contribution to the Expanded Cinema series would be something with the Velvet Underground instead.)

Nico had cut a record called “I'm Not Sayin' ” in London (Andrew Oldham, the Stones' producer, had produced it), and she'd also been in
La Dolce Vita
. She had a young son—we'd heard rumors that the father was Alain Delon and Paul asked her about that immediately because Delon was one of his favorite actors, and Nico said yes, that it was true and that the boy was in Europe with Alain's mother. The minute we left the restaurant Paul said that we should use Nico in the movies and find a rock group to play for her. He was raving that she was “the most beautiful creature that ever lived.”

Nico was a new type 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.

I was invited to speak at the annual banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry by the doctor who was chairman of the event. I told him I'd be glad to “speak,” if I could do it through movies, that I'd show
Harlot
and
Henry Geldzahler
, and he said fine. Then when I met the Velvets I decided that I wanted to “speak” with them instead, and he said fine to that, too.

So one evening in the middle of January everybody at the Factory went over to the Delmonico Hotel where the banquet was taking place. We got there just as it was starting. There were about three hundred psychiatrists and their mates and dates—and all they'd been told was that they were going to see movies
after dinner. The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail. Gerard and Edie jumped up on the stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with cameras and bright lights came storming into the room and rushing over to all the psychiatrists asking them things like:

“What does her vagina feel like?”

“Is his penis big enough?”

“Do you eat her out? Why are you getting embarrassed? You're a psychiatrist; you're not supposed to get embarrassed!”

Edie had come with Bobby Neuwirth. While the crews filmed and Nico sang her Dylan song, Gerard noticed (he told me this later) 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.

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 Grossman was managing her. But how can you have a career when you don't have the discipline to work at anything?

Gerard had noticed how lost Edie looked at that psychiatrists' banquet, but I can't really say that I noticed; I was too fascinated watching the psychiatrists. They really were upset, and some of them started to leave, the ladies in their long dresses and
the men in their black ties. As if the music—the feedback, actually—that the Velvets were playing wasn't enough to drive them out, the movie lights were blinding them and the questions were making them turn red and stutter because the kids wouldn't let up, they just kept on asking more. And Gerard did his notorious Whip Dance. I loved it all.

The next day there were long write-ups about the banquet in both the
Tribune
and the
Times:
“
SHOCK TREATMENT FOR PSYCHIATRISTS
” and “
SYNDROMES POP AT DELMONICO'S.”
It couldn't have happened to a better group of people.

In January, when the Cinemathèque moved to 41st Street, the Velvets and Nico played together again and we screened
Vinyl
and
Empire
and
Eat
in the background and Barbara Rubin and her crew ran around the audience as usual with movie cameras and bright lights. Gerard was up on the stage whipping a long strip of phosphorescent tape in the air. The whole event was called “Andy Warhol Up Tight.”

These were still the days when you could live on practically no money, and that was about what the Velvets seemed to have. Lou told me that for weeks at a time he and John would go without eating anything but oatmeal and that for money they'd donate blood or pose for the weekly tabloids that needed photos to illustrate their shock stories. The caption to one of Lou's pictures said he was a maniac sex killer who'd murdered fourteen children and recorded their screams so that he could jerk off to the tape every midnight in a Kansas barn; and John's picture appeared with the story of a man who'd killed his lover because the lover was going to marry his sister and the man didn't want his sister to marry a fag.

Paul asked Lou how the Velvets happened to have a girl drummer and he said, “Very simple. Sterling knew her brother, who had an amplifier, and he told us we could use it if we let his sister drum for us.” They needed more amplifiers, though, and we called up a few equipment places trying to get them free, but the best we could do was get a few dollars knocked off when we paid cash. Then the Velvets started practicing at the Factory with their drums, tambourine, harmonica, guitars, Autoharp, maracas, kazoo, car horn, and pieces of glass that they hit.

A reporter once asked Paul if we paid the Velvets, and when Paul said no, the reporter wanted to know what they lived on. Paul had to consider that for a second, then he offered, “Well, they eat a lot at parties.”

I was getting a reputation for taking no less than twenty people everywhere I went, including—especially—to parties. It was like one whole party walking into another one whenever we arrived. Nobody really minded, though—they knew when they invited me in the first place that I wouldn't be coming alone.

The Rolling Stones were around town that February. Brian Jones was a good friend of Nico's and he and Dylan came up to the Factory together one afternoon when the Velvets were rehearsing and I was working—with David Whitney and David White, both from the gallery, beside me—on my Silver Pillows for a show at Castelli that was coming up in April. (I'd used the pillows, too, in a Merce Cunningham dance concert, and they meant something special to me: it was while I was making them that I felt my art career floating away out the window, as if the paintings were just leaving the wall and floating away.)

There were two little high school girls over in another area transcribing down to the last stutter some reel-to-reel tapes of Ondine that I'd made in the late summer of '65 for my taped novel. My original idea had been to hang in with him for a whole twenty-four hours—he never slept—but I didn't quite make the complete twenty-four on the first session and had to finish up the balance on one more day.

I'd never been around typists before so I didn't know how fast these little girls should be going. But when I think back on it, I realize that they probably worked slow on purpose so that they could hang around the Factory more, because these girls were
really
slow—I mean, like a page and a half a day.

Little Joey, the Factory go-fer, was there when Brian and Dylan walked in, and he was thrilled out of his mind. He'd just turned fifteen and these were his two idols. (The Stones around that time were doing “Get Off My Cloud” and “As Tears Go By” and “19th Nervous Breakdown.” And Dylan was between the
Highway 61
album and
Blonde on Blonde
, which wouldn't be released till the coming summer. He was the first rock person I can remember who got super-popular strictly on albums—he hadn't had a big hit single except for “Like a Rolling Stone,” although around that time his “Positively 4th Street” came on the radio now and then where he runs into an old friend in the Village and puts him down, and all the kids loved that.) The little typists were going crazy, too, trying to get over for a good look at Brian. Then Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky dropped by.

The Duchess was frantic because nobody was paying attention to her, to whether she should lose a hundred pounds and put her hair in pigtails or just switch from Honey Amber to Tawny Peach Blush-on. She wasn't impressed with Dylan or the
Rolling Stones because she was over thirty and never listened to rock if she could help it. She glanced over toward tiny Dylan and even more tiny Brian with his pale, pale skin and fluffy strawberry blond hair and said as loud as she could, “Those aren't
men
, my dear. I like them tall and craggy and divine like Greg Peck.” Then the Duchess got up on a bicycle that someone had propped against a wall and started pedaling around the red couch just as Jane Holzer walked in. I was asking Brian about a certain beautiful but dizzy English actress we both knew.