FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
Late December 1965, Café
Bizarre, New York
It’s unclear exactly when Andy Warhol sees The Velvet
Underground at the Café Bizarre. But as Lou Reed later tells
John Wilcock, author of The
Autobiography & Sex Life Of Andy Warhol, it’s probably
during the band’s last few days at the club. Despite claims elsewhere
to the contrary, it’s almost certainly not on the very night they get
fired: as contrary an outfit as the Velvets are, they would surely want
Warhol to see and hear as much of them as possible, and not risk being
kicked out after one song.
What is known for sure is that Warhol’s manager,
Paul Morrissey, has been looking for a band to work with for some time
as part of the Factory’s general expansion into multimedia activities.
“The most unusual idea I had in order to make money with Andy’s name
was to have him present a rock’n’roll group, something he was extremely
reluctant to do,” Morrissey explains in the documentary Factory Days: Paul Morrissey Remembers The
Sixties. “The opportunities for getting money from experimental
movies were obviously nonexistent. And therefore the possibilities in
1965, in the era of The Beatles just coming to America, The Rolling
Stones, and everybody supposedly making a lot of money, seemed like a
very good idea.”
More specifically, Morrissey is keen to find a group
to play at a Queens club to be named in Warhol’s honor and launched by
theater producer Michael Myerberg. “Myerberg asked for a meeting with
Andy,” Morrissey later recalls. “He said, ‘I’m opening the largest
discotheque in the US in an old airplane hangar in Queens and I want to
bring you out to Queens. I’ll give you $500 a week and you can come
every night. You can bring Edie or whatever girl you want, and I’ll pay
you a salary.’ Andy sat there, and of course as usual never opened his
mouth. “I said, ‘Well, that’s pretty silly. Why would Andy go to Queens
to see a discotheque? If he wants to do that, he’s got one right here a
few doors away on 47th Street. It’d be different if he was presenting a
rock’n’roll group that was appearing there. Then he would have a logic
to go there. His name would promote your club, and your club would
promote this rock’n’roll group, which we would manage.’ He said, ‘Yes,
it’s a great idea. Why don’t you do that? It’s a couple of months off,
but that sounds like a good deal.’
“I thought of the idea of finding a rock group that
Andy could appear to manage, or present, let’s say. He never managed;
he presented. Basically, movies that I made, or things that I thought
of, he presented. He was incapable of coming up with sensible ideas of
what to do, and he very seldom made the effort. The few times that he
did, I would listen, give them some consideration, but I’d never take
anything too seriously. But I made an effort to try to humor him.
“I thought I could manage a rock’n’roll group,”
Morrissey continues. “I didn’t even mention it to anybody. There was no
interest of anyone in the Factory in going to hear rock’n’roll groups.
Andy seldom went to rock’n’roll groups unless there was a photo
opportunity there.” It should nonetheless be added that, unlikely many
culturally respected figures of his age (late-thirties), Warhol does
actually like rock’n’roll. He plays hits such as Dickie Lee’s ‘I Saw
Linda Yesterday’ and ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ by The Jaynetts over
and over again in his workspace, and uses music by The Kinks and Martha
& The Vandellas in his 1965 film Vinyl.
“When I left the meeting,” Morrissey continues, “I
said, ‘Andy, this could be a very good opportunity to make money if we
find some new group and present it there. We already have a big job for
them and any group that opens the club will get great coverage. Then
we’ll get them a record contract, and we can make some actual money.’
‘What do you mean, manage a group? What does that mean?’
“[Andy was] against the idea from the word go. But
if I said to do something, I said it very politely, and he had realized
already by then that whatever I suggested wasn’t terrible, and he went
along with these things. But he really hated doing it. He said, ‘Will
we have to give them money?’ And I said, ‘We probably will, we’ll have
to support them until the job comes along.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to
be responsible, I don’t want to give them any money. Where would you
get a group?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find one.’ Andy didn’t
have any large income then.”
It’s Barbara Rubin who sets off the chain of events
that bring the Velvets to the attention of Warhol and Morrissey by
asking Gerard Malanga to take some pictures of the group at the
Café Bizarre. “Gerard didn’t know how to use a light meter,”
Morrissey recalls. “I was doing all the lighting for all the movies,
and I had made my own movies; I was a photographer and a cameraman. He
said, ‘Can you come and read the light meter so I can take pictures of
this group?’
“Normally I would never go to hear a rock’n’roll
group, except that it was a very short time, a week or two, after the
Michael Myerberg meeting. Therefore I went and told Gerard what to do.
I liked them enormously, because the drummer was totally androgynous,
and because John Cale had an electric viola and wore a huge necklace of
fake jewelry around his turtleneck with his Richard III haircut. They
had a different look and sound. They weren’t jumping up and down or
humping their guitars. They stood still. And I thought that the music
was very good, distinctive, different. And they were using the word
‘underground’ in their name,
which seemed an obvious connection.
“I went up to them and said, ‘I manage Andy Warhol,
I’m looking for a rock’n’roll group that we could present at a big
nightclub that’s gonna open in Queens. Do you have a manager?’ They
said no. [I said,] ‘I’ll bring Andy tomorrow; you can meet him and
decide.’ So I brought Andy reluctantly… he sat there. Then he said,
‘What are we going to do with them?’ He had no urge or interest in
getting involved in any musical group. I said, ‘Look, don’t worry about
it. I’ll manage it, I’ll figure it out.’ And proceeded from there. They
were a calculated business
attempt on my part to be a financially lucrative enterprise.”
Also in the audience with Warhol that night are Edie
Sedgwick, Barbara Rubin, and Malanga, who is impressed enough to dance
erotically to the music. (He will later reenact a variation on the same
dance as part of the group’s performances with the Exploding Plastic
Inevitable.) Another key figure present is John Wilcock, who co-founded
the Village Voice in the mid
50s and has since turned to even more alternative journalism. He will
soon write some of the very first published accounts of The Velvet
Underground’s live show and will go on to co-found Interview magazine with Warhol in
the late 60s. “We sat in the front row, a few feet from their
horrendous noise, like a hurricane to my ears,” Wilcock later recalls.
“I became fascinated when they left the stage and the sound was still
playing. I was unfamiliar with the concept of ‘feedback.’ Lou chided
me, saying that all I did all night was sit and read a newspaper.”
Although this appearance at the Café Bizarre
marks the first time that Andy Warhol is exposed to The Velvet
Underground’s music, he has probably met at least one or two members of
the band already. He was in the audience when John Cale took part in
the marathon performance of Eric Satie’s ‘Vexations’ in September 1963,
and also for a March 7 1965 concert by La Monte Young’s group. He has
also worked with another Cale collaborator, Jack Smith, and with Piero
Heliczer, for whose films the Velvets have provided live soundtracks in
the past. And he has shot screen tests with both Marian Zazeela and
Susanne De Marie, the wife of
Primitives drummer Walter. In a September 1994 interview with Richard
Witts, Sterling Morrison will note that he thinks the group played to
Warhol films at multimedia happenings. It certainly doesn’t seem
impossible that Warhol himself might have been at one or more of the
experimental film showings at which the Velvets played behind a screen.
By all accounts, however, the Café Bizarre
gig marks the first proper meeting between Warhol and the band, with
Rubin taking them over to the table where the artist’s entourage is
sitting after a set. “The idea then was Andy was getting a week at the
Cinematheque,” Reed later tells John Wilcock. “So why didn’t we appear
in it? That is kind of what happened. “Obviously he loved the music. We
were doing what he was doing, except we were using music and he was
doing it with lights… to my mind, nobody in music is doing anything
that even approximates the real thing, with the exception of us.” Doing
something that’s “very, very real,” Reed adds, “is the only way we
could work with him. Because the first thing I liked about him was that
he was very real.”
Well aware of Warhol’s fame and wealth, The Velvet
Underground immediately agree to a proposed management deal, and reap
some instant benefits in the form of better musical equipment. Warhol
is getting a lot out of the deal too, however. There could be no better
musical match for him than a band that has started to break similar
barriers in pop music to the ones he has been breaking in visual art
and film. Sonically and visually, the Velvets are the perfect fit for
the kind of bold, multimedia extravaganza Warhol and his associates are
probably just starting to formulate. They’re already thinking of
getting a rock’n’roll band to
play at the airplane hangar-sized Queens discotheque tentatively (and
farcically) called Andy Warhol’s Up. But the other events into which
they plug the group will end up being far more interesting.
As unlikely as an alliance between Warhol and an
unknown rock band might seem on paper, it should be noted that Andy has
made a much more unlikely venture into rock’n’roll already – not as a
manager, but as backing vocalist in a group called The Druds.
Intriguingly, the band-members also included Velvets alumni La Monte
Young and Walter De Maria, further fueling suspicions that Warhol might
have already met the group – at least in passing – before going to see
them perform at the Café Bizarre. Jasper Johns, another famous
painter, wrote The Druds’ lyrics, while Claes Oldenburg, his wife
Patty, and multimedia artist Lucas Samaras were also involved. This
strange group probably never played in front of an audience, and are
unlikely to have remained active for more than a few months during the
late winter/early spring of 1963. As Warhol will later explain in an
interview with Glenn O’Brien for the August 1977 issue of High Times, “We met ten times, and
there were fights between Lucas and Patty over the music or something.”
Warhol would also have gained some knowledge of the
embryonic Lower East Side rock scene when he made a rarely seen film of
The Fugs and The Holy Modal Rounders in mid 1965. Warhol never
considered managing either of these groups, but both are at least
moving in directions vaguely similar to those being explored by the
Velvets.
It might still seem like a miracle for the group and
Warhol’s crowd to stumble upon each other at a dead-end Greenwich
Village club, but the meeting would probably have happened sooner or
later, given the two parties’ overlapping social and artistic circles,
assuming the struggling Velvets managed to stay together. This will no
longer be an immediate concern with Warhol’s backing, but changes are
almost immediately in the
offing as 1966 dawns, starting with the introduction – at Warhol’s
insistence – of a new
singer.
unless otherwise specified.
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