Fusion, March 6, 1970
NONE OF THIS CONCERNS ANYTHING EXCEPT MAYBE THE BACK ROOM AT Max’s Kansas City which is on Union Square in Manhattan but not worth finding any more. Lou Reed says Max’s is over and like usual he is a-fucking right.
The Velvet Underground has:
But listen. Fuck that. Maureen really typed up a, Andy Warhol’s attempt at a novel. Only she left out all the dirty words because . . . well that’s the way she is. And Andy had to put them all back in.
Maureen beats the drums. Beats them. Her brother’s been writing the GAN (Great American Novel) for six years in their mother’s house in Levittown. He went to Spain for a year and sent Sterling Morrison a postcard from Germany that said, “Hey, I’ve learned to juggle,” and “I said hello to Vincent Price (really).”
So travel back now through time. To the streets of New York before the revolution that never was. Sterl and Lou have retired from music. Both are through with Syracuse University in one way or another (as is Felix of “The Rascals” but side trips are only that). Somehow Al Aronowitz, who’s hanging heavy with Brian Jones and the Rolling Stones and writing for the Sat Eve Post and getting into the scene, managing a group called the Myddle Class, offers Lou and Sterl and John Cale a gig. They pick up on Maureen cause she’s got an amp and she replaces Angus, the original drummer, who’s split to India. They play Summit High School. In Summit, New Jersey.
Pan those faces very fast. Mr. Director, this is Summit High. New Jersey is another country and this is high school gymnasium New Jersey sweat socks romance. Here is the Velvet Underground doing “Venus in Furs” and “Heroin” for seventy-five bucks and quickly in and out. But Sterl thinks he remembers two girls fainting. Leave it in if it plays. Ride them out of town on a proverbial rail with the gym in flames behind them as Summit’s teenagers greedily tie off.
The Underground go into the Cafe Bizarre on Bleecker Street where a guy stands in front pulling kids in off the street. The kids are cookie cutter jobs all in pea coats with Thera-Blem on their faces, sniffling and saying “Meyann” talking about scoring nickel bags of grass while they worry about the last bus from Port Authority back to Graded and Saddle River and Summit, great mother womb New Jersey.
The Velvets do all right considering they’re all pretty drugged. The manager then tells them they’re drinking too much milk, cut it out. Little does he know. As they conspire to have themselves fired before New Year’s Eve. However, before New Year’s come Andy. . . .
No need to say Christ almighty here. They were the band he was looking for. This total environment trip was kicking around in the back of his head somewhere. So it began.
Brian Jones drops into the Factory one day. In tow there’s this fantastic flying dutchman of a chick. Andy asks her what it is that she does. . . . In a Grimm’s fairy tale Wagnerian gothic voice, she groans, “I zeeeung!” Nico joins the Velvet Underground.
Working at the Dom. Hanging at Max’s.
They make it out to LA to play the Trip. The troupe consists of fourteen people and all are essential to the act. Gerard Malanga dances dream-like in front of the Velvets while they work. He wears a Marlon Brando T-shirt. Works out with toy barbells on-stage. When they get to “Heroin,” he shoots up with an oversized horse needle. Then he lights a candle. Andy and Danny Williams and Paul Morrissey work the lights and the slides and the films.
Each night when the show ends, they repair to this castle up in the Hollywood Hills near Griffith Park. About thirty kids from New York are there with them. Severn Dardern lives downstairs and all the old heads wear nothing but monk’s robes. The ceilings are high arched and vaulted, braziers burn through the night. Ghostlike figures glide, room to room, at three ay em. Pacific Coast Drug Time.
After a week and a half, Sterl moves to the Tropicana. “One day Andy cooked for everybody there,” Sterl says.
What did he make?
“Eggs. What else?”
But the coast is bad vibes. The Mothers of Invention jump on the bill in LA and the hometown crowds cheer them and boo the Velvets. Everyone runs out of money. It costs thirty-eight hundred to get back to New York City. Bill Graham flies down to look at them. He books them into the Old Fillmore. Ralph Gleason calls them pure trash. Bill Graham echoes the sentiment and they’ve never worked either of the Fillmores since.
Back they come winging to New York, newyawk . . . sadomasochistic strungout manhole cover in a body shirt with a big collar. Ponder that image as we sacrifice art for the direct interview.
AN INTERVIEW WITH LOU REED—composed of direct quotes except that he didn’t know he was being listened to so that it may not all be direct. (It may in fact be totally made up or said by someone else and attributed to Lou.) “God, you get out on the road into these towns with one television station. Merv Griffin. You get so sick for New York. You have to grab a copy of Vogue.”
“But the people are really nice. We met this kid in Seattle who had three to five years to live. Some kind of terminal illness. I said, ‘Excuse me, but what does that do to your head.’ I mean, I’d be off to Africa to get it all in. He said, No, he liked the people and the place.”
Lou’s left hand flickers to his face.
Some questions here. Andy?
“I don’t see him much. I’m never in New York. Fifteen days out of the last four months. I know where he is. He’s waiting. They’re all bored.”
Dallas?
“It’s getting too hip. People there who’ve done the New York thing backwards and left to live on x acres with no smoke.”
Billy Name?
“Billy Name’s really brilliant. He’s the one who painted the Factory silver. He’s been in that closet for a year now. He’s not coming out.”
George Plimpton?
“Plimpton sucks. We played a party at his house. I asked him for this poster and he wouldn’t give it to me because it was a work of art. Listen, I crumpled up my Marylin Monroe picture by Andy and left it in a friend’s house. When I came back it was framed behind glass and HIS Marylin Monroe picture. Anyway, we started playing and all his guests said—How do you dance to it? Ginsberg and Orlovsky started writhing about in the corner and they all looked and said, ‘Oh, is that what [to] do to it?’”
The chronology resumes.
The Velvets as society’s darlings. Two benefits for Merce Cunningham, one at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one run by Mrs. William Paley, known as “Babe” to her friends. A party for the fun couple Stavros Niarchos and Anne Ford. Gian-Carlo Menotti begins a collection to send them to the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Sterl says send us— screw the festival, we won’t come back. Ten cents is collected.
They work at Philip Johnson’s house in Stanhope, Connecticut. Johnson’s an architect. His house is on a mountain. Braziers burn (again). It’s the Garden of Eden. In Stanhope, Conn., Kort Von Meyer, a UCLA professor turned rock freak, wearing a white linen suit, puffing on a foot long cigar, with wraparound dark sunglasses speaking in an unintelligible Latin accent, tells people he is a Brazilian peasant lord. They believe him.
Old Sterl; out of Freeport, Long Island, wearing wicked green velvet cut into a suit by Betsy Johnson, making that Max’s back room scene, knowing he is right in the middle of the hippest hurricane currently blowing in New York, has one complaint. “No rye at any of those parties. Never a drop. And no beer either.”
In the Fall of ’66, they work a Motown gig in Detroit along with the Yardbirds. Andy shows. Officiates at a mock wedding in an open field as the Velvets’ road manager crushes a car with a sledgehammer. Fantastic.
John Cale leaves as a result of hassling and Doug replaces him. Nico splits. Andy loses interest. Stays on as manager then gives it up. The banana album gets yanked off the market because Eric Emerson’s picture is on it without a release. MGM goes through five presidents in eight months or something like that. Distribution reeks. The Velvets cut two more albums for them anyway. The banana album cannot be held down. Sells 215,000 copies with 700–1000 orders still coming in monthly.
Valerie Solanis (“a peripheral lunatic” one of the Velvets calls her) shoots Andy. The New York Times covers it. Viva, originally a household word in the kitchen, becomes one in the living room. Lou Reed stops singing “Heroin” because, well, when all these guys come up to you on the bandstand after the set and say, “Uh yeah, wow . . . I got into shooting cause of you man. The first time I ever did any. . . .” When that’s not at all what the song is about. And who has the time to explain?
As Sterl says, “Everybody’s beaten. We’ve all lost on every possible level. In sixty-five and sixty-six, even in sixty-eight, you could feel that something was about to happen. Now it’s happened . . . and the merchandisers are rich. We are all shucked, hyped . . . screwed.”
The Velvets keep on. Six hundred one week. Twenty-five hundred the next. Creedence Clearwater did it for ten years before they made it. A new contract with Atlantic is coming up.
Within the month, you can catch the Velvet Underground at Head Quarters in Reading, Pa., or at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr. It’s just down the cross-country street from Max’s in Andy Warhol America, hard by Union Square Park but the back room’s empty . . . and not really worth finding any more.