Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (12 page)

“Now, many years later we found out with the revolution of punk, new wave and permanent wave this was accurate. They were that far ahead of their time. And to some extent that couldn’t capture the entire nation. For the performances they wore all black. Everybody was wearing like balloon-sleeve Tom Jones shirts, necklaces, high boots. The Velvets were into amphetamine. They wore total black, white face. They were totally electric, extremely loud. They got run out of Provincetown on a rail.”

They had played Chicago with different personnel. In Provincetown new personnel seem to have caused some tension, at least in the dancing department. Tension was beginning to build overall as the terrific impetus The Velvet Underground had picked up from their collaboration with Warhol began to wane. Release of the record was delayed. They went back to pick up the threads at the Dom and found that the owners had reneged on their agreement and rented it to A.P. Grossman and Oliver Coquelin instead.

MORRISSEY:
“While we were gone Charlie Rothchild had arranged for the lease to be picked up from the owners of the Polish National Home by Mr Grossman and Mr Grossman then had the lease and after the summer opened it the same way that we had, only called it the Balloon Farm, and then Rothchild had the nerve because we had nowhere else to go and The Velvets weren’t making any money to say, ‘Would The Velvets like to open the Balloon Farm, Mr Grossman’s club?’ And since they had nowhere else to play, they went back to this thing called the Balloon Farm.”

The organization cried out for a hard-headed businessman who could have gotten down there in the mud with rock’n’roll executives and sorted out a good deal. But in those days so much was happening so fast and everybody was so purely and intensely interested in what they were doing nobody was interested in spending all their time doing business! Steve Sesnick kept importuning them to allow him to manage the group, but The Velvets were devoted to Andy
Warhol and could not see, with the hindsight we have now, that the collaboration had really achieved all it had set out to do.

INTERVIEWER:
“Do you see yourself as a creator, or more as a magnet who attracts other talents?”

WARHOL:
“More like a pencil sharpener.”

Richard Goldstein described an EPI performance at the Balloon Farm in the
New York World Journal Tribune
that October:

“On one huge screen, a lady who turns out to be a man is eating a ripe banana, her head encased in a snow white bonnet. On another screen a smiling man is eating peanuts – cracking the shells, gnawing the insides, spitting out the husks. And on the centre screen, they have tied someone to a chair and are putting cigarettes out in his nose, winding belts around his neck and fitting a tight leather mask onto his face.

“That film is called
Vinyl
. Its creator, one Andrew Warhol, is sitting quietly in the balcony which overhangs the dance floor. He is working the projector, pensive and quiet in his black-chino-polo-shirt-leather-jacket outfit. Mirror sunglasses make his eyes totally inaccessible. His hair is straight, bright silver. ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘You have come to ask about the films. The one on the left,’ he says, ‘is
Harlot
. On the right is
Eat
, with Henry Geldzahler as the peanut man. On the big screen is
Vinyl.’

“He turns back to the projector, his fingers busily shuffling tins of film. He makes a pillow of his arms. He cushions his head. On stage, poet Gerard Malanga is dancing with a swaying girl. He grabs a roll of phosphorescent tape and wraps it around his partner and himself. Handed a whip, he snaps it against the stage. As a finale, he smothers his body in yellow paint and grabs a purple spotlight, which makes him glow and deepens the shadow around his eyes and teeth. Bad trip make-up. He untangles two blinking strobe lights and swings them around his hips, sending violent, stabbing rays into the audience.

“The third thing the Balloon Farm has going for it is light. Definitely light. An ‘electrician’ in black ear muffs works one spotlight from the stage, shifting colour and design. Bulbs blink patterns onto the ceiling and the mirrored walls. Coloured sparks twinkle ominously and those two portable strobe lights make the entire room sway in slow motion. It is all very much like sitting stoned in the middle of a tinselled Christmas Tree.

“Which brings us to The Velvet Underground, Andy’s group. Sometimes they sing, sometimes they stroke their instruments into a single one-hour number.

“Andy Warhol says he is through with phosphorescent flowers and cryptic soup cans. Now it is all rock’n’roll. Andy may finally conquer the world through its soft teenage underbelly.

“‘It’s ugly,’ he says. ‘It’s a very ugly effect, when you put it altogether. But it’s beautiful. You know, you just look at the whole thing. The Velvets playing, and Gerard dancing, and all the film and light, and it’s a beautiful thing. Very vinyl. Beautiful.’

“‘Beautiful. There are beautiful sounds in rock’n’roll. Very lazy, dreamlike noises. You can forget about the lyrics in most songs. Just take the noise and you’ve got our sound,’ says John Cale. ‘We’re putting everything together – lights and film and music – and we’re reducing it to its lowest common denominator. We’re musical primitives.’

“‘Now it seems we have time to catch our breath,’ says Sterling Morrison. ‘We have more direction – that’s where Andy comes in. We eat better, we work less, and we’ve found a new medium for our music. It’s one thing to hustle around for odd jobs. But now we’re not just another band. We’re an act. When a band becomes an act, you get billing, you get days off. You don’t work anymore – you’re engaged.’

“Nightly at the Balloon Farm, The Velvet Underground illustrates what distinguishes an act from a band. Blonde-haired Nico bellows flaxen sexiness into an electric harmonica
while Andy projects her image on the split screens which surround the stage. All traces of melody depart early in the song. The music courses into staccato beats and then slows into syrupy feedback refrains. All this goes on until everyone is satisfied that the point has got across.

“No one at the Balloon Farm seems anxious to comment on the relation of the drug experience to the creation of the new music. Sterling says, ‘The whole thing is probably easier to understand under LSD because you lose your inhibitions. You stop thinking of this as a series of lights and movies and music and you start seeing it as one abstract whole. The whole thing is twice as heady when you can really let yourself go, but I’m not sure you have to use LSD to let yourself go.’

“Lou is more frenetic. ‘The whole LSD scene on campus is foreign to our sound. The universities are dead; the live music is coming out of people like us. And it’s not because we’re on the Lower East Side, and it’s not because of junk. It’s because we’re us.’

“John Cale, who sits dreamily eyeing a glass of Coca Cola, pushes his hair back from his face exposing a bony nose, and says, ‘You can’t pin it down. It’s a conglomeration of the senses. What we try to get here is a sense of total involvement. Maybe the hip scene is drugs and discotheques but that doesn’t go for the music. Coming here on a trip is bound to make a fantastic difference, but we’re here to stimulate a different kind of intoxication. The sounds, the visual stuff – all the bombarding of the senses – it can be very heady by itself. If you’re geared to it. No one understands about Andy. It’s a totally non-ego thing with him. People say we look like marionettes standing up on that stage surrounded by all those lights and Andy’s movies. But it’s not true. Maybe Andy has given us a sense of direction, but the sound, the words I mean, the whole scene – that’s pure us.’

“Now The Velvet Underground is popping eardrums and brandishing horsewhips with the expertise of pros. Their
new single on Verve-Folkways is a rather restrained performance (‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’/‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’) in the vein of English groups like The Yardbirds and The Who but is still the sound. And the boys are brimming with the glow of innovation.

“‘We want to try attaching two guitars and playing them as a single instrument,’ says John. ‘We’re working on an electronic drum which would produce sub-sonic sounds. That is, you can feel it but can’t hear it. We’d be able to add it to a piece of music and it’d be like underlining the beat.’

“On stage Gerard Malanga motions wildly; they have run out of records. John drains his glass and puts a black corduroy jacket over his black turtleneck. He slides his hair over his face, covering his nose again. Lou tucks his shirt in.

“‘Young people know where everything is at,’ he says. ‘Let them sing about going steady on the radio. Let the campus types run hootenannies. But it’s in holes like this – places on the West Coast without cover charges – that the real stuff is being born. The University and the radio kill everything, but around here, it’s alive. The kids know that.’

“On the floor, everything stops in anticipation. The electrician flips the switches and turns knobs. The stage throbs under a carpet of tangled wires. Gerard plays with a pile of limp fluorescent tape. The group walks on stage – all four of them – together, live, and the projector begins to whir.

“With a single humming chord, which seems to hang in the air, the group launches into a set. John squints against a purple spotlight. Lou shouts against a groaning amplifier. Gerard writhes languidly to one side. Sterling turns his head to sneeze. The noise, the lights, the flickering images happen. Everybody listens.

“And from the balcony, Andy Warhol watches it all. ‘Beautiful,’ he says. Sterling sneezes audibly, but it all seems to fit in. ‘Beautiful,’ Gerard hands his partner a bullwhip. ‘Just beautiful.’”

It was not “beautiful” for the band. Morrison says they
found it “repellent” and quit shortly after this account.

MORRISON:
“What we found ‘repellent’ was not the ‘show’, but rather the fact that we were back in what we considered to be ‘our’ ballroom, and even worse, were working for the very people who had taken it from us. Given a choice between working for them or nothing, we chose nothing. Like so many other decisions, flukes, or whatever in our history, one can hardly speculate about the course of events had this incident not occurred. Perhaps we would have sold the lease and become real estate tycoon/slumlords.”

Morrissey says that his perception was that The Velvets just didn’t want to do anything any more. They thought they would be famous as soon as their record came out and decided to wait until that happened.

MORRISSEY:
“With The Velvets not wanting to play, the guy who had the downstairs-part of the Dom, Stanley, wanted to bring a white crowd to the bar and he thought the best way was if Nico would sing. Nobody from The Velvets would play guitar behind her, neither Lou or Sterling, anybody. Nico had to open. The ‘gracious’ Lou offered to play her guitar solos on a tape recorder and she had to sit there and push a tape recorder button and sing to a tape recorder, which was horrible, and that went on for a week or two. If Sterling filled in one night it was maybe only as a great favour and it would probably have gotten Lou mad. On the second or third week I said, ‘Well, we need somebody else there beside Nico,’ and I hired Tim Buckley to play with her. Then it was Nico and Tim Buckley who was not known at all at the time, and he played his own guitar. Sitting in front of the bar every night was this little boy looking up at Tim Buckley. I spoke with him. His name was Jackson Browne and he said, ‘I’m a fan of his. He’s from Orange County. He’s my hero. I came east just to see him. I follow his career.’ He’s 16 years old. He says, ‘I write songs, I play the guitar.’ I said, ‘You play the guitar!?’ Then I heard him play his songs and I thought his songs were great. And I said,
‘You know, these songs are great. Nico should sing them but you play the guitar in the back of Nico.’ He did, and then he learned the guitar parts for her other songs from The Velvets, and that was the first job he ever had and the first time his songs were performed for anybody I think. So he got up in back of the bar with Nico while Ari was running in front of the bar waiting for her to go home. And he played the guitar in back of her to get rid of this terrible tape recorder that she had been left with, which was so humiliating, and she sang those songs. Tom Wilson, who was great, thought Nico was wonderful and said he wanted to make an album with her too because she was getting a lot of publicity. And Jackson Browne played the guitar for most of the songs on that album, because he had been playing in back of her at the Dom and it was recorded with her and Jackson on the solo guitar and then Wilson went off and put all those other instruments which I think were great, behind it.”

Meanwhile, as a taste of what was to mushroom out of what The EPI had pioneered, Timothy Leary was conducting his Celebrations for the League of Spiritual Discovery (LSD) around the corner at the Village Theater that would later become the Fillmore East. Standing in front of films upon which he projected slides and working with various celebrity guests like Allen Ginsberg, Leary was doing his own Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In June Denis Deegan, catalyst extraordinaire, a friend of Warhol and Malanga’s called from Paris with a series of concert bookings for The EPI. This offer was, however, never taken seriously by Andy, and the opportunity for the group to cross the Atlantic, which might have made a big difference in their future, was passed up.

(This tape was made by Nat Finkelstein of Lou Reed talking about his music at the Factory in the Fall of 1966.)

REED:
“All by myself. No one to talk to. This is very peculiar. Come over here so I can talk to you. It’s very hard
for me to sit here with a microphone like this. No, you just come over here so I’m talking to you, or go over there so I don’t see you. One or the other.

“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 to (indistinct) among other things, or pose for these nickel or 150 tabloids they have every week. And when I posed for them, my picture came out and it said I was a sex maniac killer that had killed 14 children and tape recorded it and played it in a barn in Kansas at midnight. And when John’s picture came out in the paper, it said he had killed his lover because his lover was going to marry his sister, and he didn’t want his sister to marry a fag.