Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico (5 page)

In 1966 Norman Dolph was 27, four years out of Yale with a degree in electrical engineering. Although he’d given his notice he was still a Columbia Records sales executive (the job lasted 6 years) at the time of the sessions. Dolph worked in the Customs Labels Division, which handled the plastic moulding for scores of small record labels that had no pressing plant of their own. One of Dolph’s accounts was the independent Scepter Records. Scepter had moved into a new building the year before, and on one of his visits Dolph noticed that it included a new feature: its own recording studio.

In his spare time, Dolph had applied his engineering knowledge to a side venture:

I operated a mobile discothèque, if not the first then at least the second one in New York. I was an art buff, and my thing was I’d provide the music at art galleries, for shows and openings, but I’d ask for a piece of art as payment, instead of cash. That’s how I met Andy Warhol. Then one day I got a call, saying he was opening a new club—this was the Dom—and how would I like to provide the sound for it? We met at my apartment a few times to discuss it, but the
main thing was going to be the records, we never even discussed the band. At the Dom—at first—the band were regarded as just one more thing happening in the room, but then there was so much going on. They’d show Andy’s films, and they actually had a 16mm projector that Gerard (Malanga) would carry around, flashing the movies on the audience, the band, all over … and this was no lightweight machine, either!
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With the amount of speed being taken by Warhol’s retinue at that time they could probably have
juggled
a couple of 16mm projectors, but drugging was decidedly not Norman’s scene: “My life was as far removed from heroin in the veins as it was possible to be.”
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Fortunately for the Velvets, his musical habits were more akin to theirs, and when Warhol mentioned that they were planning on making a record, Dolph signed on (“I was moonlighting, really”). The plan was that he would book the studio, help cover costs, produce, and when the project was done he’d use his connections at Columbia to help get the band signed. He accomplished three of those four tasks, and began by getting in touch with John Licata at Scepter.

Licata may have been one of the few engineers at that time who could have done the job for the album—a time of which Lou Reed says, “engineers would walk out on us … ‘I didn’t become an engineer so I could listen to you guys jerk off! This is noise and garbage.’ We ran into a lot of that.”
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By contrast, Dolph says Licata was a seasoned pro:

He was Scepter’s full time studio engineer. As a perk, he did custom jobs when the studio wasn’t booked. He could engineer material he couldn’t stand, but he would give it his all. He’d give the client what the client wanted. John would be over there doing soul-R&B acts one day and Dionne Warwick-Burt Bacharach orchestral stuff the next … “It’s two o’clock so it must be a gospel session” … he was a journeyman engineer, with no “star attitude” that I imagine some engineers have now, but he gave it his all. He was a pro. He would not treat the material with any disdain or “what the fuck!?”
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Fair is fair; with Warhol in and out of the studio, only Dolph and Licata were present in the control room for the entire time the album was being made. This record wouldn’t have happened without them. Dolph
tips his hat to Licata and Cale though, saying: “Great credit for the sound of the recording itself has to go to John Licata … I was more what you would today call a line producer. The job of creative producer I would have to say was Cale’s; anything to do with music or arrangements, Cale was in charge.”
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(Author’s note: I once did a session with the late Stones’ producer Jimmy Miller, a beautiful and brilliant cat, and he brought along a line producer … the guy just kept producing lines.)

Dolph remained in music, as a lyricist and music publisher, “mostly during the disco era,” placing songs with Isaac Hayes and KC and the Sunshine Band. He wrote the lyrics for Joey Levine’s 1974 hit “Life is A Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me),” a swank bit of bubblegum rapping, in which he managed the impressive feat of mentioning Dr. John the Night Tripper, Doris Day and Jack the Ripper in one line; he also worked in Johnny Thunders, Bowie, and J.J.—but not John—Cale.

Little is known about the role of the recording engineer credited in LA, Omi Haden, also listed in credits as Ami Hadani. Haden engineered on the Mothers of Invention LPs
Freak Out
and
Absolutely Free
, and the Animals’
Animalism
, all done at TTG Studios. He also worked on Lowell George’s Factory auditions for
Zappa, at Original Sound in LA, in the fall of 1966. All but the last are Tom Wilson productions, and every one of these projects has a Zappa connection, so he may have been either TTG’s house engineer, or the LA go-to guy for Zappa or Tom Wilson in ‘66 and ‘67.

Tom Wilson had been primarily a jazz producer, working with late ‘50s and early ‘60s progressive artists Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and others until a 1963 management power play forced Columbia Records to hire him as Bob Dylan’s producer, replacing the more staid John Hammond. Wilson, who held an economics degree from Harvard, was neither folkie nor rocker, but he was impressed enough by Dylan to assume control of sessions for
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
. Wilson’s experiments with placing electric guitar on some tracks Dylan had laid down in ‘62, and his production on
Bringing it All Back Home
and “Like A Rolling Stone” make him a pioneer of the new folk-rock sound, a style he helped further define through his work with Simon and Garfunkel (who were on the verge of disbanding when Wilson’s drum and guitar treatment propelled “Sound of Silence” into a reborn No. 1 hit). Richie Unterberger has written:

Overall, Wilson’s stay at Columbia had turned into one of those “only in America, and only in rock and roll” scenarios: an African-American jazz producer, who professed not even to like folk music when he
began recording it, turned out to be a main agent of folk’s transition into folk-rock.
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Wilson would later work with the Soft Machine and the Blues Project, but it was his move to MGM/Verve that paved the way for his involvement in avant-garde rock. In 1966 he produced the Animals, the Mothers of Invention, and Burt Ward—all at TTG Studios in Los Angeles, where he worked with the Velvets in May, and where he edited, remixed and remastered the “Banana” album using engineers David Greene and Gene Radice. He later produced “Sunday Morning” in New York.

But it’s Andy Warhol whose name appears on the record’s spine, and he resembles neither Dolph nor Wilson. In hands-on terms Cale has said, “Andy Warhol didn’t do anything.”
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Warhol’s unique style might disqualify him from the title of “producer” at all, making him effectively an executive producer. But Warhol’s role, and his
effect
as producer cannot be denied. You could say he produced the producers as well as the band.

Longtime friend of the band, rock manager and A&R legend Danny Fields spoke eloquently on the subject in
Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story:

Andy doesn’t know how to translate ideas into musical terms … Andy … was making them sound like he knew they sounded at the Factory. That’s what I would do if I were an amateur at production … What Andy did was very generously reproduce … the way it sounded to him when he first fell in love with it.
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The group had their sound together before meeting Warhol. They had Lou Reed’s experience at Pickwick to prepare them for the studio’s technical challenges, and the good fortune to luck into Dolph and Licata at the right moment. In Los Angeles fortune smiled again, and they added Tom Wilson’s expertise as well. So there was no need at all for Warhol to be a knob twiddler—which he clearly wasn’t.

Reed:
Andy was the producer and Andy was in fact behind the board gazing with rapt fascination …

Cale:
…at all the blinking lights.

Reed:
…At all the blinking lights. He just made it possible for us to be ourselves and go right ahead with it because he was Andy Warhol. In a sense he really did produce it, because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren’t large enough to be attacked … as a consequence of him being the producer, we’d just walk in and set up and do what we always did and no one would stop it
because Andy was the producer. Of course he didn’t know anything about record production—but he didn’t have to. He just sat there and said “Oooh, that’s fantastic,” and the engineer would say, “Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic, isn’t it?”
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This alone made Warhol indispensable to the album. But, of course, he did more than that. Fricke calls Warhol “a specialist in subtly engineered collisions of people and ideas,”
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and in that role Warhol (with help from Paul Morrissey) coaxed the group into accepting Nico as a vocalist, completing the chemistry that makes the album so amazing. He was also the umbrella under which Dolph in New York and Wilson in LA (and later New York) worked, unfettered by label interference. And he got the album heard, for even if Dolph and Wilson had done brilliant work, without the
carte blanche
Warhol provided it’s doubtful the recording would have made it onto vinyl. Thus, Warhol did precisely what a great producer should: he achieved an effective translation of the sound that the band heard in their heads on to tape, and then he got it out into the world in tact.

A trade-off of Warhol’s inexperience in the studio could have been a disastrous loss in sonic clarity. Cale
also claimed that Norman Dolph “didn’t understand the first fucking thing about recording … he didn’t know what the hell he had on his hands,”
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and while Dolph didn’t dispute the charges (he responds “nobody knew what they were doing”), I think Cale’s criticism is way off the mark. First of all, with Cale filling the role of creative producer without portfolio, Dolph says:

I never felt I had the authority to pick takes, or veto them—that, to me, was clearly up to Cale, Reed and Morrison … Lou Reed was more the one who’d say “this needs to be a little hotter,” he made decisions about technical things … and the mixing was really between Cale, Sterling and John Licata, ’cause that was all, again, done in real time.

As for sound quality, over-saturated tapes caused some audible distortion, and noise from less-than-perfect overdubs is also in evidence. But considering the unprecedented sonic attack in songs like “European Son” and “Black Angel’s Death Song,” which few engineers would have been comfortable capturing (or tolerating) in 1966, you have to agree that the Dolph-Licata team performed brilliantly. Any doubts on that score can be dispelled with a few “this is what might have
been” moments of comparative listening to Reed’s primitive-sounding Pickwick recordings, which aren’t even in the same ballpark as Licata’s engineering work. And any noise/distortion issues on the LP detract little from the overall listening experience. Moreover, the band happily accepted these slight technical shortfalls at the time, and—whether by their own design or Warhol’s—band and producer shared an aesthetic that made errors part of the
modus operandi
. Reed noted:

No one wants it to sound professional. It’s so much nicer to play into one very cheap mike. That’s the way it sounds when you hear it live and that’s the way it should sound on the record.
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Warhol elaborated:

I was worried that it would all come out sounding too professional … one of the things that was so great about them was they always sounded so raw and crude. Raw and crude was the way I liked our movies to look, and there’s a similarity between sound in that album and the texture of
Chelsea Girls
, which came out at the same time.
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The studio approach they took, as recalled by Dolph, left little threat of things sounding too professional:

From a take-wise point of view you weren’t presented with many options. They either got it right, or broke down, or did a couple of takes; but it wasn’t as though you got 17 takes … either you chose this one or you chose that one and then you went on and did the next one. Usually they’d do a piece of one and then come in and listen to it. If one got largely through and it broke down, they’d come in and listen to it and say “yeah that sounds like we got it right”; or, if one got all the way through, they’d come in and either buy it, or adjust the mix or do it again. But there were not a whole lot of complete takes.
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To a man or a Moe, the Velvets themselves have never wavered in their appreciation of Warhol’s key role in their careers and on the first album. When personalities as disparate and intelligent (not to mention picky) as the Velvets all agree that they owe a huge debt of gratitude to Warhol, you have to take it at face value: after all, they were there. Cale and Reed would bury their
oft-sharpened hatchet to write
Songs For Drella
together in 1989, an homage full of love and respect. (It’s also a strong LP, which gets better with each listening, and among the more vital works by either writer since the Velvets dissolved.) Sterling Morrison offered his own tribute, citing Warhol as the most important influence on his own life, saying, “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.”
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Confidence was precisely what the band needed most in 1966. They were about to go into the recording studio—in those days, still a place with a rarified atmosphere. It would be another 20 years before musician-run, independent studios such as Athens, Georgia’s Drive-In and Boston’s Fort Apache (my place—our credo was “the nuts should run the nuthouse”) became common. Some studios, like Abbey Road, had technicians in white lab coats, and even the less formal studios usually had actual engineering graduates behind the consoles. Studios were still more about science than art. Clients who dared make technical suggestions were treated with bemusement, derision, or hostility. The Velvets were a young band under constant critical attack, and the pressure to conform in order to gain acceptance
must have been tremendous. Most bands of that era compromised with their record companies, through wholesale revamping of their image from wardrobe to musical style, changing or omitting lyrics, creating drastically edited versions for radio airplay, or eliminating songs entirely from their sets and records. With Andy Warhol in the band’s corner, such threats were minimized.