A QUIET NIGHT AT THE BALLOON FARM

Richard Goldstein

New York, October 1966

. . . THE VELVET UNDERGROUND IS NOT A FIRST-CLASS CAR ON THE LONDON transit system, but Andy’s rock group. Sometimes they sing, sometimes they just stroke their instruments into a single, hour-long jam. Their sound is a savage series of atonal thrusts and electronic feedback. Their lyrics combine sado-masochistic frenzy with free-association imagery. The whole thing seems to be the product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade. It takes a lot to laugh; it takes a train to cry.

Andy says he is through with phosphorescent flowers and cryptic soup cans. Now it’s rock. He may finally conquer the world through its soft, teenage underbelly.

“It’s ugly,” he admits. “It’s a very ugly effect when you put it all together. But it’s beautiful. You know, you just look at the whole thing— the Velvets playing and Gerard dancing and all the film and light, and it’s a beautiful thing. Very Vinyl. Beautiful.”

“Yeah, beautiful. There are beautiful sounds in rock. Very lazy, dreamlike noises. You can forget about the lyrics in most songs. Just dig the noise, and you’ve got our sound. We’re putting everything together—lights and film and music—and we’re reducing it to its lowest common denominator. We’re musical primitives.”

That’s John Cale, composer, guitarist and resident Welshman for the Velvet Underground. Cale plays a mean, slashing viola. And piano, when he has to. He and Lou Reed once shared a three-room flat on Ludlow Street and a group called the Primitives. Their place was cold (broken crates in a wood-burning fireplace looked very chic but also kept the blood circulating). The group was cold too, bassman Sterling Morrison recalls: “Sometimes we’d do more jumping around in a night than the goddam waitresses. Before Andy saw us at the Cafe Bizarre (which isn’t exactly the Copa of McDougal Street) we were busting our balls in work. Up to here. And you can’t do anything creative when you’re struggling to keep the basic stuff coming. Now it seems we have time to catch our breath. We have more direction—that’s where Andy comes in. We eat better, we work less and we’ve found a new medium for our music. It’s one thing to hustle around for odd jobs. But now we’re not just another band; we’re an act. See, when a band becomes an act, you get billing. You get days off. You don’t just work nights—you’re like, Engaged.”

Nightly at the Balloon Farm the Velvets demonstrate what distinguishes an act from a band. They are special. They even have a chanteuse—Nico, who is half goddess, half icicle. If you say bad things about her singing, she doesn’t talk to you. If you say nice things, she doesn’t talk to you either. If you say that she sounds like a bellowing moose, she might smile if she digs the sound of that in French. Onstage, she is somewhat less communicative. But she sings in perfect mellow ovals. It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning. All traces of melody depart early in her solo. The music courses into staccato beats, then slows into syrupy feedback. All this goes on until everyone is satisfied that the point has gotten across.

Oh yeah; the point! John Cale sits dreamily, eyeing a Coke, pushes his hair back from his face to expose a bony nose, and observes: “You can’t pin it down.” (Granted.) “It’s a conglomeration of the senses. What we try to get here is a sense of total involvement.” (You mean acid, scoobie-doobie-doo?)

“Coming here on a trip is bound to make a tremendous difference. But we’re here to stimulate a different kind of intoxication. The sounds, the visual stuff—all this bombarding of the senses—it can be very heady in itself, if you’re geared to it.”

John Cale is a classicist. His first composition was “written on a rather large piece of plywood.” He studied viola and piano at the London Conservatory of Music and came to the United States as a Leonard Bernstein fellow. His sponsor was Aaron Copland. “We didn’t get on very well,” John says. “Copland said I couldn’t play my work at Tanglewood. It was too destructive, he said. He didn’t want his piano wrecked.”

Cale pursued his vision with John Cage. On the viola, he would play a single note for as long as two hours. Then he met Lou Reed, and the sound that John calls “controlled distortion” was born.

The Velvets, with Nico and Andy and all that light, began to construct a scene around the title “Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” They’ve done quite a bit of traveling since, and their reviews reflect the ambivalence a quiet evening at the Balloon Farm can produce. Said the Chicago Daily News: “The flowers of evil are in full bloom.” Los Angeles magazine compared the sound to “Berlin in the decadent thirties.” Even Cher (of Sonny and Cher) was heard to mutter: “It will replace nothing except suicide.”

Dauntless, the troupe returned home. Now they are popping eardrums and brandishing horse-whips on a nightly basis. Their first album sounds a bit restrained (though a long, harrowing cut called “Heroin” isn’t exactly calculated to make the radio as a “good guy sure-shot”). But it’s still The Sound. And the group is brimming with innovation.

“We want to try an electronic drum,” says John. “It would produce sub-sonic sounds, so you could feel it even when you couldn’t hear it. We’d then be able to add it to a piece of music, and it would be like underlining the beat” (in cement).

On-stage, Gerard Malanga motions wildly. They have run out of records, and that means it’s time for another set. John puts down his Coke and wraps a black corduroy jacket over his turtleneck. He slides his hair over his face, covering his nose again. Lou tucks his shirt in.

“Young people know where everything is at,” he says. “Let ’em sing about going steady on the radio. Let ’em run their hootenannies. But it’s in holes like this that the real stuff is being born. The university and the radio kill everything, but around here, it’s alive. The kids know that.”

The girl in the black stockings is leaning against the stage, watching them warm up. “You can tell this is going to be a very atonal set,” she says. “It’s something about the way they handle their instruments when they first come on stage.”

“Beautiful,” sighs her partner, rolling his larynx and his eyes. With a single humming chord, which seems to hang in the air, the Velvet Underground launches into another set. John squints against a purple spotlight. Lou shouts against a groaning amplifier. Gerard writhes languidly to one side. Sterling turns his head to sneeze. And Nico stands there, looking haunted. The noise, the lights, the flickering images all happen. Everybody grooves.

From the balcony, Andy Warhol watches from behind his glasses. “Beautiful,” he whispers. Sterling sneezes audibly but it seems to fit. “Beautiful.” Gerard hands his partner a bull-whip and the girl in black begins to sway. “Just beautiful.”