Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (6 page)

O’BRIEN:
“You started a rock band!?”

WARHOL:
“Oh, yeah. We met ten times, and there were fights between Lucas and Patti over the music or something.”

O’BRIEN:
“What did you do?”

WARHOL:
“I was singing badly. Then Barbara Rub in said something about this group and mixed-media was getting to be the big thing at the Cinematheque, so we had films and lights, and Gerard did some dancing and The Velvets played.”

O’BRIEN:
“Was that a light show before the San Francisco light shows?”

WARHOL:
“Yeah, it was, sort of. Actually, the Cinematheque was really combining all the arts together.”

REED:
“We worked with lights and stuff behind us before we met Andy. We did it in the old Cinematheque on Lafayette Street. It wasn’t his original conception. It was a lot of people’s conception. It was a natural step to meet Andy and say, ‘Oh you’ve got a week at the new Cinematheque,’ so obviously since we combined music with movies and everything it was just such an easy step to say, ‘We’ll play along with your movies.’ Then we said, ‘You’ve got all these things. Why don’t we show lights?’ It doesn’t matter whose idea it was. It was just so obvious. It wasn’t Andy putting it all together. It was everybody. It was just Andy had the week at the Cinematheque. That’s what Andy had to do, and then everybody put it together. The thing was that the basic idea was so obvious that you would have to be a fool not to think of it. So everybody thought of it.”

MORRISSEY:
“What really happened is I had this idea that Andy could make money not only from underground films but from putting the movies in some sort of rock’n’roll context. Discovering The Velvets, bringing them up the Factory and working with them was done for purely commercial reasons.”

After their week at the Cinematheque word about
Andy
Warhol, Up-Tight
began to spread. People were clearly confused about what to expect. Michael Myerberg began to cool off after seeing a night at the Cinematheque, but film departments were calling from colleges to book the show, which they, interestingly enough, took to be primarily an underground movie presentation. Warhol was invited to present the show in a film series at Rutgers University, New Jersey. By the time
Andy Warhol, Up-Tight
was ready to go out on the road in March, Edie Sedgwick, the first amputee, had definitely left the group in a stormy split that occurred one night at the Gingerman, a restaurant opposite Lincoln Center, shortly after the completion of the Cinematheque shows.

MALANGA:
“All The Velvets were there with Ingrid Superstar, Paul Morrissey, Donald Lyons, Danny Fields, myself, Andy and another of Edie’s friends from Cambridge, the film-maker Chuck Wein. Edie began asking Andy, ‘What’s my place with The Velvets? I’m broke. I have no money. Why am I not getting paid?’ And he said, ‘You gotta be patient.’

“Edie said, ‘I can’t be patient. I just have nothing to live on.’ She told Andy that she had signed a contract with Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman and he’d said she shouldn’t see Andy so much because the publicity that came out of it wasn’t good and she didn’t want him to show her films anymore.”

MORRISSEY:
“She said, ‘They’re going to make a film and I’m supposed to star in it with Bobby.’ Suddenly it was Bobby this and Bobby that, and they realized that she had a crush on him. They thought he’d been leading her on, because just that day Andy had heard in his lawyer’s office that Dylan had been secretly married for a few months – he married Sarah Lowndes in November 1965. Everything was secret in those days for some reason … all phoney secrecy, so Andy couldn’t resist asking, ‘Did you know Edie that Bob Dylan has gotten married?’ She was trembling. They realized that she really thought of herself as entering a relationship
with Dylan, that maybe he hadn’t been truthful.”

MALANGA:
“Edie got up and went to make a phone call, presumably to Dylan. When she came back to the table she announced she was leaving the Factory, or more specifically leaving Andy, since her diatribe was directed at him. And he was saying, ‘But … but … Edie, you have to be patient, we’re not making any money. I’m not making any money from the movies, you just have to be patient.’ But Edie wasn’t buying it. She left and everybody was kind of quiet. It was stormy and dramatic. Edie disappeared and that was the end of it. She never came back.”

Andy may have been surprised, shocked or hurt by Edie’s defection to the Dylan camp, but he had little time to sit around thinking about it. Throughout 1966 he would make
The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
more and more interesting, changing the way people looked at rock’n’roll in tune with McLuhan’s understanding in his book
The Medium Is The Massage
that, “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic social economic and political parochialism.”

REED:
“Andy told me that what we were doing with music was the same thing he was doing with painting and movies and writing, i.e. not kidding around. To my mind nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us. We were doing a specific thing that was very, very real. It wasn’t slick or a lie in any conceivable way, which was the only way we could work with him. Because the first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real.”

Andy arrived at Rutgers on the afternoon of March 9 with an entourage of thirteen people and went straight to the student cafeteria where the boys and girls flipped out gawking at Nico while Barbara Rubin filmed their reactions and Nat Finkelstein took photographs. When campus guards told
him he couldn’t, Nat punched one of them in the nose and the next thing he knew sixteen cops arrived. They asked Andy for his cafeteria pass (which he never had). Gerard and Paul started screaming, and everyone got thrown out.

MORRlSON:
“Ondine, who played the Pope in Warhol’s
Chelsea Girls
, was part of the ensemble at Rutgers. He insists that Paul Morrissey forced him out of the show from then on, to his grief. He had always been our close friend, in or out of the show. We had no hand in, or knowledge of, the machinations that removed him.”

The show, which hadn’t been selling too well prior to their arrival, sold out in the next two hours and 650 students packed the auditorium to see what would happen next. It was a perfect example of the effectiveness of making everyone uptight. Uptight meant interesting. Uptight meant something, as opposed to the perennial nothing, would happen.

Apart from The Velvets, Nico, Andy, Gerard, Barbara and Paul, the other integral members of the team were Danny Williams, a friend of Chuck Wein who had come down from Cambridge and worked at the Factory as an expert electrician – if it could be done with wires, Danny would do it; Nat Finkelstein, a freelance photographer, connected with Black Star Photo Agency, who had come to the Factory in the Fall of ’65 to take pictures for a week and stayed for a year; Dave Faison, the Velvet’s trusted equipment manager, who stayed with them throughout the Warhol period, driving the van that carried their equipment which he single-handedly cared for and set up. Faison was very important to the show.

MORRISON:
“At Rutger’s we were all dressed entirely in white. The effect, with all the films and lights projected on us, was invisibility.”

A few days later the same entourage, including Ingrid Superstar, the new girl at the Factory who had replaced Edie Sedgwick, jammed into a mobile van and headed out to Ann Arbor where another performance was booked at the University of Michigan Film Festival.

MORRISON:
“We rode to Ann Arbor in some kind of ‘recreational vehicle’. The thing was big! It had a 120 volt AC generator on the back that supplied power to the inside. We could play our amps as we rolled along.”

Andy remembers the drive in
POPism:
“Nico drove, and that was an experience. I still don’t know if she had a licence. She’d only been in this country a little while and she’d keep forgetting and drive on the British side of the road.”

NICO:
“Oh my God! He was the only one who wasn’t scared. He just couldn’t care less. He figured that if I could take charge of 15 people on the bus I have to be a good driver not to land in a ditch.”

WARHOL:
“Nico’s driving really was insane when we hit Ann Arbor. She was shooting across sidewalks and over people’s lawns. We finally pulled up in front of a nice big comfortable-looking house and everyone started unloading the van.

“Ann Arbor went crazy. At last The Velvets were a smash. We had a strobe light with us for the first time. The strobes were magical, they went perfectly with the chaos music The Velvets played. I’d sit on the steps in the lobby during intermission and people from the local papers and school papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. ‘If they can take it for ten minutes, then play it for fifteen,’ I’d explain. ‘That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.’”

INGRID SUPERSTAR:
“I remember in Ann Arbor part of the audience went a little berserk, and there were a few hecklers. They’re all a bunch of immature punks. Like we have these problems with a very enthusiastic audience that yells and screams and throws fits and tantrums and rolls on the floor, usually at colleges and benefits like that for the younger people. So, anyway, the effect of the music on the audience is like the audience is just too stunned to think or say anything or give any kind of opinion. But then later I asked a few people in Ann Arbor, who had come to see the
show a couple of nights in a row, what they thought, and they formed an opinion slowly. They said that they thought the music was very way out and supersonic and fast and intensified, and the effect of the sound it produced vibrated all through the audience, and when they walked out onto the street they still had these vibrations in their ears for about 15 minutes, especially from that last piece ‘Nothing Song’, which was just noise and feedback and screeches and groans from the amplifiers.”

The overall effect created by this bombardment of images and sound, with The Velvets often turning their backs on the audience throughout the entire performance, was the opposite of the accepted rock mores of the time. This may have had something to do with the fact that a number of the people involved in the production were on amphetamine, a drug which, among other effects, influences consumers to respond to everything with its mirror, or exactly opposite, image.

JOHN WILCOCK:
“I was on the bus with Nico and everybody. What do you remember most about that?”

MALANGA:
“That we became a gypsy band.”

WILCOCK:
“The eleven member Warhol group (supplemented by accompanying cars) had rented a microbus for the 1, 500 mile round-trip to Ann Arbor ($50 per day plus 100 per mile) and although it offered some of the comforts of home – including a toilet that, like the one in the 47th Street Factory, didn’t work – it proved to be far from the most reliable mode of transportation. The most chaotic moments came on the way back when a stop was made in the parking lot of a pop art monstrosity called the White Hut Superking for everybody to order hamburgers. Even before Nico, blonde locks falling about the shoulders of her black leather jacket, had brought the bus to a halt, a police patrol car came snooping around to see what else it contained.”

MORRISON:
“The AC power came in handy, because we blew the alternator on the engine outside of Toledo on the
way back to NY. The police so despised us that they insisted we get out of city limits at once. It was night, and we had no lights, but Danny cranked up the generator on the back, and ran extension cords from inside to photo floodlamps clamped to the bumper. The police followed us all the way to the line. I began to think that it was dangerous to cross the Hudson. I was a full-time student at City College at the time, but I was seldom seen, and ended up six credits shy of graduating. Good grades, in spite of all. I picked those up in the summer we played Max’s.”

Back in New York the group played at Paraphernalia, the ultra hip clothes store featuring the fashion designs of Betsey Johnson, who would later marry John Cale. The models could hardly gyrate through the mob which glutted both floors of the chic boutique. As Nico danced with Gerard, Andy’s films bounced off the walls and Brian Jones, among others, looked on. Actually the best view was from outside, as bopping spotlights illuminated the models on the platform in the huge second storey glass front. It drew a crowd and eventually the police. “Wow!” said Andy. “A policeman.”

Paul Morrissey was trying to close the deal on Andy Warhol’s UP so The Velvets and Nico could have their own place to play every night and become famous.

MORRISSEY:
“I kept trying to press Myerberg, through our lawyer Sy Litvinoff, to sign an agreement that Andy’s group would open and be paid a certain amount of money. What happened is there was … let’s say an Italian influence in this club and I think they had their own plans for the opening. Somehow, even Myerberg lost control of it a little bit. About a week before they were scheduled to open, this lawyer said, ‘They’ve changed their minds, they’re going to open this weekend with The Young Rascals,’ starring Felix Cavalieri of Syracuse managed by Sid Bernstein who promoted The Beatles in the US.”

MORRISON:
“Murray Kaufman (‘Murray The K’) was involved in this thing too – if not initially, then certainly at
the end. The place was full of gangsters; one night we all went out there to look at the place and a limo full of them spilled out to challenge our right to enter. I’d seen enough already, and perhaps they had too. Inside, for an awkward moment, Lou and I ran into Felix Cavalieri, who must have known what mischief was afoot, but said nothing. The Rascals were a better band to open the place anyway, especially since it was closed down on opening night for liquor violations and never re-opened. Eventually the club, which had finally been called
Murray The K’s World
, burnt down under the usual mysterious circumstances. Still, the price offered us to play there and hang out was $40,000 for the first four weekends. That would have been good pay for one night if we had collected it in advance. I don’t know whether The Rascals got any money out of it.”