The Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1966
Not since the Titanic ran into that iceberg has there been such a collision as when Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable burst upon the audience at the Trip Tuesday. For once a Happening really happened, and it took Warhol to come out from New York to show how it’s done.
Andy’s new Disco-Flicka-Theque was lights, cameras and action. It was SuperKolossal-Kinetic-Karma.
Out came Nico, the long-haired, deep-voiced German model to sing songs as beautifully banal as herself, and the Velvet Underground, a rock group that goes beyond rock. . . . It was like a searing sound from another planet. Out came Superstars Gerard Malanga, a gypsy type, and Mary Woronov, who looks like Joan Baez—really a beautiful pair—to dance their abandoned, frenetic, frenzied dances. There was lots of stuff with leather, ropes and foil—sort of fetishist, perhaps, but effective.
Films of themselves were projected on three screens behind them as they performed. The whole show took on a ritualistic, incantatory quality. Everybody, but everybody, was turned on except some joker who shouted, “Make Believe Ballroom!” when one of those old-timey spotlighted mirrored spheres began to rotate. (Well, maybe in his way he was right.)
The Velvet Underground is so far out that it makes the tremendous thumping beat of that great, groovy group, the Modern Folk Quartet, which opened the program, sound passe.
After the first set of TVU was finished, the leather-jacketed apostle of Pop himself came over for a chat. “I wasn’t being mean, I’m just shy,” said Andy Warhol by way of apology for an earlier brush-off— although he had previously agreed to an interview.
While he does seem truly shy, this pale, slight young man—it was too dark to see if he does in fact paint his hair silver—has a genius for publicity greater than Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jayne Mansfield combined.
The arrival of Andy, the hippie’s hippie, on the Sunset Strip, the hippie’s paradise, makes for the most perfect combination since peanut butter discovered jelly. “I love L.A. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic—but I love plastic. I want to be plastic,” says Warhol, of whom it is theorized that as a serious artist he is dedicated to making himself as insensitive as possible.
Speaking of those ladies he has made the pop girls of the year— Baby Jane Holzer in ’64, Edie Sedgwick in ’65 and Nico, a candidate for ’66—Andy feels that “Edie was the best, the greatest. She never understood what I was doing to her. I don’t know what’s going to happen to her now.”
“Jane wants to make it so bad and Hollywood could make her terrific. I don’t understand why she hasn’t made it already.” When it was suggested that maybe Jane was so complete a creation that there was nothing left for Hollywood to mold, Warhol disagreed. “That should make her double-terrific.”
“Nico could probably make it here tomorrow. She has that ability to be 5 and 50 at the same time. Actually, it’s Gerard who wants to be the new pop girl. He tries very hard, and the EVO—that’s the East Village Other, which is something like your Free Press—has already named him Slum Goddess.” Asked about the absence of Ingrid Superstar, Andy explained that “we had to leave her home—she talks too much.”
Part con man, part prophet, Andy Warhol, whose works are on exhibit at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega, has got to be the biggest put-on of them all.