Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (8 page)

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
at the Dom provides a perfect example of how Andy Warhol works so successfully with so many different people’s talents and ideas. He has always been a conduit through which multi-talented people who didn’t know quite how to use their talents could find a way to express themselves succinctly. Sterling Morrison has said that Warhol was the most important influence on his life: “It sounds crazy, but on reflection I’ve decided that he was never wrong. He gave us the confidence to keep doing what we were doing.”

Andy the movie-maker became here Andy the conductor of an orchestra, “but having at his fingertips,” as Jonas Mekas pointed out, “not only many different creative components like sound control, a rock band, slide projectors, movie projectors, camera and lighting but also all the extreme personalities of each operator of each piece of equipment. He was structuring with temperaments, egos and personalities.” The group was all the people contributing to the show and everybody was paid the same amount for each night’s performance, i.e., Lou Reed received the same amount for playing and singing as Gerard for dancing or Danny Williams for working the lights. On an average night at the Dom they would be paid a hundred dollars apiece. During their first week there they took in $18,000. According to Sterling Morrison they kept all the money in brown paper bags and used it to finance some of the upcoming recording sessions and later their trip to California.

None of the ideas being used were Andy’s more than anybody else’s, but it was undoubtedly his presence that gave the discordant production cohesion. It was also a marvellous extension of his work as a portrait artist for here one had a multi-dimensional living portrait operating once a night for a month. The movies were portraits of the people on stage. The people on the stage were portraits of themselves. The songs The Velvets were singing were portraits of people. And the audience, who were being photographed, filmed and sung about as they watched the show, were being portrayed and becoming part of this giant exploding plastic inevitable tableau too.

The Velvet Underground were intrinsically related to Andy Warhol. Between them they reflected both the concept of rock’n’roll and the time in which it was happening more accurately than any other performers that we know of. Picking up on the current temperament, expressing uptightness and making the audience uptight is remarkably accurate. We may think of the Sixties as a “groovy” time of peace and
love, but the international rock scene out of which The EPI grew was an extremely uptight scene. Just consider how uptight the stars in this constellation were: Bob Dylan and Brian Jones, who should be credited for their preparation and introduction of Nico and their catalytic presences on the scene, were both extremely uptight about their positions in the rock hierarchy. Nico was uptight because she wanted to sing all the songs and sound like Bob Dylan and because Bob had given ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ to Judy Collins to record. The Velvets were uptight because they saw that Nico could easily upstage them and they didn’t want to sound like Bob Dylan at all.

MORRISON:
“We most certainly did not want to be compared with Bob Dylan, or associated with him. We did not want to be near Bob Dylan, either physically or through his songs. When Nico kept insisting that we work up ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, for a long time we simply refused. Then we took a long time to learn it (as long as we could take). After that, even though we knew the song, we insisted that we were unable to play it. When we finally did have a go at it on stage, it was performed poorly. We never got any better at it either, for some reason.”

Gerard Malanga was uptight about maintaining his position as the star dancer, and his standing within the group’s hierarchy. Paul Morrissey was uptight about Barbara Rubin’s
Up-Tight
approach, which he couldn’t tolerate so Barbara was uptight with Paul. In fact the only person in The EPI who may possibly not have been uptight was Salvador Dali who was advertised as part of it and appeared on a number of occasions to support it with his presence and reap the free publicity. Andy really loved the multimedia show, but he was uptight about whether Picasso had heard of him yet.

As far as relations between The Velvets were concerned there was some friction between the group and Nico because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for her and she wanted to sing them all. Whoever seemed to be
having more influence, whether it be Lou or John, you’d find her closely involved as she went from one to the other manipulating one or the other with sexual politics, but neither of these affairs lasted very long. For their part John and Lou resented Nico and without being fully aware of their acts would play little tricks on her. Maybe a page of her music would be missing or her microphone wouldn’t work – prankster stuff just to fuck her up a little bit. All in all, however, they could be pretty pleased with themselves at this point. They were getting an unprecedented amount of critical attention and had a great advantage in being able to play at one place nightly. They were attracting a very electric crowd of people and their music was definitely having an impact. True, a great deal of the attention had been drawn by Andy Warhol’s
Exploding Plastic Inevitable, but
the music was being written about increasingly.

MORRISON:
“It was at this time that The Velvets started wearing dark glasses on stage, not through trying to be cool but because the light-show could be blinding at times. Anyone in the audience could come up and work the lights. We never had things like, ‘When we do this ten second break, then hit me with the blue spot.’ That’s what I hate about modern rock’n’roll shows. They’re so regimented. We just played while everything raged around us without any control on our part.”

It’s no wonder Jonas Mekas saw Warhol as a conductor, for it was Warhol, as Mekas wrote, who “manoeuvred it all into sound, image, and light symphonies of tremendous emotional and mental pitch which reached to the very heart of the New Generation. And he, the conductor, stood always there, in the balcony on the left corner, next to the projector, somewhere in the shadow, totally unnoticeable, but following every second and every detail of it, structure wise, that is.

“The Velvet Underground performances at the Dom during the month of April provided the most violent, loudest and most dynamic exploration platform for this new art.
Theirs remains the most dramatic expression of the contemporary generation. The place where its needs and desperations are most dramatically split open. At the Plastic Inevitable it is all here and now and the Future.”

McLuhan’s statement, “In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained-ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other” – could almost work as a formal definition (which Andy Warhol would never make) of the aims of The EPI.

Maureen Tucker contributed her own individual drum sound by using unorthodox materials.

MORRISON:
“We felt that one reason why all bands sounded the same was because all the drumming was the same. In Angus we had a most unusual drummer, who played all sorts of weird drums and other percussion instruments. We wanted Maureen to play differently too, and she was willing to experiment. Her first departure was to play standing up.”

TUCKER:
“What I’d always wanted to do was get an African drum sound, so I got a bass drum and turned it on its side, so I’d sit on the floor and play that. Then I got a cymbal, and I’d really play the hell out of the cymbal. After a while Faison built a stand to put the drum on, and then a box for the pedal so that I could use it horizontally. After that I got a floor tom. However, when we were playing at the Dom, somebody stole my little $50 drum set, so Lou said, ‘Go out and get some garbage cans.’ We went out, and whoever was with me grabbed the first ones we saw and I looked inside and said, ‘No, too dirty.’ So, we went around and finally we found some that had just been emptied and we put them in the truck, but they fell off and got bashed on the sidewalk. Eventually we found some more and took them back, stood them up on stage, and put some mikes
under them. That’s what I played for a week or so. The audience loved it. At the end of every night we’d have to clean up the little piles of garbage that got shook loose during the set. I remember one of the reviewers called it ‘garbage music’. The reviewers didn’t like it at all. But during this time the audience wasn’t primarily there to see us. Andy was pretty much the focus of the whole thing, and they were there more to see what he was up to. We were getting an older artist-type of crowd.”

Allen Ginsberg was asked to join them on stage with Nico one night and he sang ‘Hare Krishna’. Barbara Rubin’s communal spirit, filtering through Andy’s openness to anything, was clearly the basis of this collaboration. Ginsberg, who was himself first brought to the Factory by Barbara, remembers her as “a boyishly beautiful and very feminine art groupie, who was transfixed by star personalities. Being a groupie was honourable to her in the prophetic sense. Her insight into people’s desires and motives, both political and spiritual, was quite correct. Everybody did have the ambition to have giant communal orgy revolution change of culture, and she worked directly on that principle of everybody’s desire to get together to work with their fellow geniuses. She had a spiritual ambition in the best sense of uniting forces to work together to transform the culture.”

“It was a rare thing,” notes Ronnie Cutrone. “I don’t think it’d happened before or has since that a rock group had been totally surrounded by this force of other people that then took on a whole other name.”

In as much as Barbara was responsible for introducing The Velvets to Andy and encouraging them to work together, she was a driving force in The EPI, but Paul Morrissey hated her aspect of the act so much that he got on her case and kept on it until she threw up her hands in frustration and left the Factory one day screaming, never to return. Or, she left when her function uniting the forces and creating the basis of the original
Up-Tight
series was fulfilled, depending on your
understanding of collaboration. The EPI provides the perfect example for a study of spontaneous amputation.

MORRISSEY:
“The third week Charlie Rothchild said, ‘I called California and got The Velvet Underground a four-week booking at the Trip in LA.’ That was for May. We had only signed a lease for April and we couldn’t sign one for May because there was some kind of Polish celebration going on there, so we decided to take the booking at the Trip and pick up the Dom lease when we returned.”

PHIL MILSTEIN:
“What would you say was the general reaction of people to The EPI show?”

CUTRONE:
“If you could get somebody to see the show, nine times out of ten they would love it, simply because they’d be shocked and the look of the group was great. It was very severe. It scared a lot of people, too. Gerard and I got attacked by guys with beer bottles. They didn’t know what the fuck we were. And when people don’t know, sometimes they get frightened, and they react.”

CALE:
“Andy’s a good catalyst. He sort of had a way of picking out situations for us to appear in. He would almost invent places for us to play.”

April 30, 1966. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable played their last show at the Dom.

They didn’t know it then, but they would never play in such a perfect art rock cultural configuration time set again.

This is an extract from a conversation between Ingrid Superstar and Lou Reed taped by Nat Finkelstein at the Factory, Fall 1966. Ingrid Superstar, one of Andy Warhol’s most talkative superstars, is describing the members of The Velvet Underground. The couch referred to in the title is the famous couch on which so many films were made, including
Henry Geldzahler
and
Couch
(both 1964). The couch appears in group shots which include Andy and The Velvets by Billy Linich, Nat Finkelstein and Stephen Shore.

INGRID SUPERSTAR:
“Lou Reed looks like a pretty little girl, with short hair. How tall are you Lou? About 5′ 10,″ or 5′ 11″?”

REED
: “5′ 11¾″.”

INGRID:
“Oh, he’s 5′ 11¾″ – being particular about ¼ of a fraction of an inch. Are you, Lou?”

NAT FINKELSTEIN
: “Have you been trying to make Lou?”

INGRID:
“Have I been trying to make Lou?! No.”

FINKELSTEIN
: “Oh, come on, Ingrid.”

INGRID:
“I don’t make nobody, they make me. And he’s got brown curly hair, he usually wears sunglasses. And he’s slightly built and he’s got a pug nose. That’s about all I can say about Lou. Do you want me to describe Sterling Morrison? Sterling is very tall, and lanky, and slender and lean and he’s got shaggy medium brown hair that looks like it’s never been combed or washed. And he’s got blue eyes, usually concealed by sunglasses, and he usually wears striped
shirts and brown or white Levis and he’s got a couple of faded blemishes on his face. Sterling’s the friendliest. Sterling’s always been a doll, he’s a pussycat. I mean he’ll talk for hours and make jokes. He can tell the funniest jokes. He’ll have you in stitches, rolling, and yet he seems to be so quiet, sort of a Bill Wyman type. But Sterling is the biggest extrovert, the most open. He’s a regular guy. He’ll sit here with a beer and tell jokes and tell stories. John Cale. Good grief. I couldn’t begin to describe him, he’s just funny looking. He’s got straight black hair, parted sometimes in the middle and sometimes on the side. When it’s parted in the middle it gives him that bohemian Buffy St. Marie look, and he’s growing a goatee with a matching moustache, which is really way out. All he needs is a pair of antennae – he can, you know, be an equivalent to a Martian. Yes?”

REED:
“He looks very Mephistophelian.”