Chapter Seven
1966–67
Andy Warhol’s studio became the equivalent to Walt Disney studios. Lou was going to be Andy’s Mickey Mouse, the idol-hero. But originally, in the first Tugboat Mickey cartoon, Mickey was a nasty guy. And so Lou in his Mickey Mouse period was never able to achieve the lovable one and had to live underground like Tugboat Mickey.
Billy Name
Warhol specialized in capturing young, as yet unformed, eccentric, creative people on the edge of a nervous breakdown in a painting or on film. Now he had done the same thing in music, pulling out of Lou not only the three great songs that would balance out the content of the first album, but pushing him so that he played and sang like a man passing through the center of a storm of inner turmoil. However, there was one significant difference between Lou Reed and anyone else who worked and played with Warhol at the top of his game. And it was what would make Reed a star in time and give him the duration so rare in rock and roll. Whilst remaining open to all of Warhol’s input, and taking all the death-defying trips he took during his season in “hell” (one of Reed’s many descriptions of the Factory), Lou had, in fact, retained an inner control that nobody else had. Essentially this was because he was there primarily as a writer. “I watched Andy,” he explained. “I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things. I used to write it down.” The voyeuristic medium gave him the distance of an observer and allowed him to maintain control of his own craft. It would in time allow him to escape traps and hells far worse than anything he experienced at Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and even Lou Reed did not comprehend just how cutthroat and competitive the rock business was. They reached the zenith of their collaboration in April with the dual triumph of the Dom shows and the recording of the album, which would not be released until the following year, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them by Charlie Rothchild—an associate of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman—who promised to help them out by handling the booking end of the business. He immediately got them a May-long job at the Trip in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that the EPI was the hottest thing happening in rock and roll in New York that spring, it made sense to Reed and Warhol to go out to L.A. because major record companies had their headquarters there.
On May 1, the entire EPI company packed their guitars and drums, their whips and chains, and their thirteen selves onto a jet plane and streaked across the continent. Brimming with enthusiasm, they were confident that the rock gods were on their side and that in Lala Land they would find an environment freaky enough to embrace their far-out sounds. After all, what could be more plastic, more California, more Hollywood, than Nico, Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, and songs about sex, drugs, and paranoia?
They were wrong. From the moment they landed at L.A. International signs that they had made a disastrous mistake erupted like cockroaches out of the woodwork. Driving in from the airport, the first song they heard on the radio was a soupy ballad called “Monday Monday” by a leading West Coast group, the Mamas and the Papas. According to Morrison, a chill ran through the group.
The truth was, everybody in the band despised the sixties West Coast sound. Nobody hated it more than Lou Reed, who proved himself a vituperative critic. “We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene,” he said. “It’s just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write. I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things, ’cause somebody really should say something. Frank Zappa is the most untalented bore who ever lived. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, all those people are just the most untalented bores that ever came up. Just look at them physically. I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke.” Asked what separated them apart from distance, he snapped, “The West Coast bands were into soft drugs. We were into hard drugs.”
Lou was not alone in despising the West Coast groups and the hippie styles they advertised. “Our attitude to the West Coast was one of hate and derision,” said Cale. “We all hated hippies,” affirmed Morrison. “We really despised all of the West Coast bands,” concluded Tucker.
Despite this negativity, the EPI’s engagement at the Trip got off to a big start when showbiz celebrities (many of whom they hated—like John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, Sonny and Cher) and movie stars like Ryan O’Neal showed up on opening night. Also in attendance were a host of unknowns, including a UCLA film student named Jim Morrison, who would shortly cop every inch of Malanga’s act to turn himself into the Lizard King of rock and roll as the front man of the Doors. There was no question that Warhol’s show had an enormous impact on the L.A. scene, but it was so intense it burned itself out in a record three days. Flouncing out of the club on the first night, a terrified Cher snapped that the music would replace nothing except, perhaps, suicide (a quote the Warhol people could not but relish). As soon as news spread that the Warhol gang was in town, every weirdo in L.A. gravitated toward them. Unfortunately, the local sheriff rapidly found reason to close the club. His action left the thirteen people who comprised the Warhol entourage stranded in their $500-a-week residence, the Castle. According to Musicians’ Union rules, they had every right to collect their full fee as long as they remained in town for the duration of the booking.
Lou sat out the failed engagement at the Castle, listening to the Velvets’ record over and over again, and socializing with Gerard Malanga. Reed and Malanga filled time in L.A. taking drugs and hanging out in the clubs. “Lou was the first person, and the last, to turn me on to Placydils,” recalled Gerard. “He said, ‘Gerard, I want to turn you on to something,’ and then we went out on the town that night. It was a tranquilizer. It was legal and you could buy it over the counter. Now you’ve got to get it by prescription. My system just couldn’t take experimenting with these drugs—and Placydils is a funny name for a drug because it comes from the word placid or tranquil—and it just put me in a state that made me feel clumsily numb. Not in control but in control. Lou obviously relished it.”
One night, Gerard ran into two women he had met at the Trip and invited Lou to join in: “Lou and I were involved with these two babes, Linda [the mother of Brian Jones’s child, and who would go on to marry Donovan] and Cathy. They had beautiful bodies and blonde hair. Our initial situation took place in a motel room and then continued on at the Castle. And we had a wild sex scene in the motel room. The four of us were taking a shower in the motel and I peed down Lou’s leg.”
Relations between Reed and Warhol soured during this frozen time in the spooky environs of the Castle. Reed began to be persuaded by the sharks circling the wounded enterprise that Andy was not, perhaps, the most focused of rock managers. And it was true. The rock business was growing rapidly. Millions of dollars were at stake. Andy and Paul, for all their perspicacity, simply didn’t seem to know how to get down in the dirt with the real rock-and-roll swine and root around to suck up the cash. Not only did Andy lack the temperament for this unpleasant job, he was overextended. He was the most famous pop artist and underground film-maker in the world, plus he had an enormous number of personal and financial problems to deal with on a daily basis.
Lou, on the other hand, was devoting all of his attention to the Velvet Underground. He was the only member of the group who saw what wasn’t going on with the Velvets’ album. “Lou had worked for his father’s accounting firm, so he had a strong background in the business side of things and his feet never left the ground,” noted Cale. “Mine definitely did.”
At first, the band’s immediate future did not look as disastrous as it would turn out to be. After having their album turned down by every rock mogul they could contact in New York, in L.A. they finally encountered the record producer Tom Wilson, who had created the folk-rock sounds of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel. Wilson heard the Velvet Underground music on a par with that of his other superstar clients. Explaining that he was about to move from Columbia to head a division of MGM, Verve Records, which was just attempting to enter the relatively new rock field, he guaranteed them a deal if they would be patient. Warhol, Morrissey, and the band were relieved to have encountered such a receptive and established producer.
Wilson suggested making the album more commercial by adding more songs by Nico and releasing one of them as the single. Lou complied, writing the relatively commercial “Sunday Morning.” “Andy said, ‘Why don’t you just make it a song about paranoia?’” Lou explained. “I thought that was great so I came up with ‘Watch out, the world’s behind you, there’s always someone watching you,’ which I feel is the ultimate paranoid statement in that the world even cares enough to watch you.”
“‘Surn-day Mourning’ sounded all right for Nico because she brought something weird to everything,” Morrissey recounted. “Tom said okay, and we went into a studio paid for by MGM-Verve. Somehow, at the last minute, Lou didn’t let her sing it. I had a fight with him. I’d say, ‘But Nico sings it onstage,’ and he’d reply, ‘Well, it’s my song,’ like it was his family. He was so petty. And then he sang it! The little creep. He said, ‘I wanna sing it ’cause it’s gonna be the single.’ Tom Wilson couldn’t deal with Lou, he just took what came.”
Lou then proceeded to sing the song in a voice that was so full of womanly qualities that on first hearing it you paused, wondering just who the hell was singing.
The terms of the Velvet Underground’s contract with Warhol specified that all moneys earned by them would be paid to Warvel (the corporation that Warhol and Morrissey had created specifically for that purpose). Warhol was to keep 25 percent and pass the rest on to the band. However, when it came time to sign the record contract, Lou refused to accept its terms unless it was revised to state that all moneys went first to the Velvets, who would then pass on 25 percent to Warhol and Morrissey. Reed was acting on his own in a show of remarkable determination and increasing leadership of the band, but he was also taking advice from several people who wanted to take over management of the VU.
Warhol grudgingly agreed to the demand over Morrissey’s protestations. The contract was amended and the record deal signed. But Lou’s victory over Warhol was shortsighted. The contract failed to stipulate the percentage of royalties the band would receive! As a result, it would be many years before anybody in the Velvet Underground would receive any royalties from their first album. Warhol never received a penny from sales of The Velvet Underground and Nico, which sold steadily around the world for the twenty years (1967–87) between the time of its release and his death.
Even though they all still believed that the record was going to be a big moneymaker, the hassle over the contract stripped the veneer off Warhol’s artistic affair with Reed. “At a certain point Andy didn’t take Lou as seriously as Lou wanted Andy to take him,” claimed Malanga. “Because when you do something against Andy, Andy would cut you off. Andy distanced himself from Lou, he’d be gracious to Lou in his presence, but Andy never really involved Lou in anything after that. There were no portraits of Lou, there was no type of that stellar involvement that Andy had.”
***
The final debacle of the West Coast trip came in San Francisco. Begged by the rock impresario Bill Graham to play his Fillmore Ball Room, the EPI company, who had by then been stranded in L.A. for three weeks, were loath to further explore the West Coast. Then, when they finally agreed, arriving in San Francisco on May 26 for a two-night stand with the Mothers of Invention and the early Jefferson Airplane, they were met with a more vicious hostility than anything L.A. had thrown at them.
Before they even set foot onstage, the band provoked the considerable ire of Graham. Perturbed by Morrissey’s sarcastic air and bold-faced recommendation that all rock musicians take heroin, he was incensed by the insular aura of the Warhol entourage, who traveled everywhere by limousine, rejecting what they saw as the phony hippie culture. Seconds before they went onstage, Graham screamed, “I hope you motherfuckers bomb!” Ralph Gleason wrote a particularly scathing review for the San Francisco Chronicle, saying the EPI was an East Coast poison intended to corrupt, defile, and destroy their pure innocence.
Gleason’s review went on, “Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable show was nothing more than bad condensation of all the bum trips of the Trips Festival. Few people danced (the music was something of a dud, the Velvet Underground being a very dull group). It was all very campy and very Greenwich Village sick. If this is what America’s waiting for, we are going to die of boredom because this is a celebration of the silliness of cafe society, way out in left field instead of far out, and joyless.” On the second night, when the band leaned their instruments up against their amplifiers and left the stage to a barrage of sonic feedback, the great rock impresario Bill Graham finally pulled the plug.
To make matters worse, the San Francisco poet and playwright Michael McClure refused to sign a release allowing Warhol to show a film he had made of McClure’s play The Beard; Gerard was arrested in a restaurant for carrying his whip, labeled an offensive weapon, and spent a nervous night in jail; and Lou shot up a drug that seized up all his joints. He was diagnosed (incorrectly) as having a terminal case of lupus.
A shattered EPI company, who had only four weeks earlier left New York in triumph, limped back across the continent separately, leaving behind one member, the lighting man Danny Williams, who would subsequently commit suicide. Back in New York, Lou checked into Beth Israel Hospital with a serious case of, as it turned out, hepatitis. Nico departed to Ibiza, her favorite island off the coast of Spain. The rest of the band rehearsed for an upcoming June booking in Chicago. Warhol, disappointed by the lack of money from his five-month investment in the group, returned to his first love, making films.
While Lou was laid up in the hospital undergoing a six-week course of treatment, he became increasingly paranoid about losing control of the group. Not only was he excluded from the one-week stint in Chicago, but the band adapted to cover his absence with relative ease. Angus MacLise was brought back in as drummer, John took over on vocals, while Maureen switched to bass. According to Sterling, Angus realized what a mistake he had made in quitting the group and hoped to be allowed back in. Lou, however, still angry about MacLise’s defection, was adamant about punishing Angus and maintaining his loyalty to Moe.
When Warhol, Malanga, and MacLise stopped by Beth Israel Hospital to inform Reed of the alterations in the lineup, Gerard could see that he was disturbed by it. The reappearance of MacLise once again turned the power axis of the Velvet Underground against him. “Lou was sitting on the edge of his bed in a bathrobe,” recalled Malanga. “Lou was yellow in the face, he had a yellow pall and looked sickly—he always looked sickly. Sitting at the end of the bed having this discussion about what was happening with the Chicago gig. And I remember distinctly Lou turning to Angus and saying, ‘Just remember, this is only temporary.’ Like, ‘Don’t think you’re coming back into the group.’ There was a real tug-of-war between Lou and John—not so much with John, but with Angus, which caused Angus to leave. Lou had a very specific agenda, and Angus was the antithesis of that agenda. Angus was too idealistic for Lou. Lou wanted the group to be rock and roll, and there was a real confrontation there.”
The success of the band’s Chicago dates at Poor Richard’s provided a revealing glimpse into Reed’s unusually well-hidden insecurity. Despite the absence of its stellar members—Nico, Warhol, and Reed—the band was so successful they were held over for an extra week. Back in the hospital, Lou’s paranoia was fed with catty gossip. Andy called, saying, “Oh, they got great reviews. Gee, it seems okay without you. Everyone’s happy.” He was just trying to make him uptight. Lou worked himself into a rage.
In July 1966, Delmore Schwartz, to whom the Velvet Underground had dedicated “European Son,” died of a heart attack in New York at fifty-three. Gerard called Lou in the hospital and suggested they make the wake. Lou, who had been told he couldn’t leave the hospital for three weeks, donned a pair of black jeans, a black T-shirt, black jacket, and boots and cut out to the funeral. “I checked myself out of the hospital to go to Delmore’s funeral and never went back.”
“We were very informal,” Gerard complained. “I think Lou relished the idea of bad taste. Lou was into anything that had a disguise to it. He just showed up like a slob. Lou didn’t have much of a sense of sartorial splendor about him.”
Malanga took Reed to the open-casket wake at Sigmund Schwartz Funeral Home, 152 Second Avenue. They arrived in the middle of a Dwight MacDonald eulogy. As they filed past the body afterward, the effects of alcohol and drug addiction were evident on Delmore Schwartz’s ravaged, rutted, puffy face. Lou was silent, withdrawn, and didn’t react. Outside afterward a former classmate of Lou’s said, “Why don’t you come to the burial?”
In one of his more telling descriptions of the emotional lives of his mentors as they mirrored his, Lou said, “Delmore Schwartz was the unhappiest man who I ever met in my life, and the smartest—till I met Andy Warhol. I’m just delighted I got to know him. It would have been tragic not to have met him. But things have occurred where Delmore’s words float right across. Very few people do it to you. He was one. His mother wouldn’t allow him to use curse words until he was thirty. His worst fear was realized when they put him in a plot next to her.”
***
In the summer of 1966, Lou was supposed to write the theme song for Warhol’s new film Chelsea Girls; Nico was to sing it. Strangely, despite the fact that he and John recorded part of its soundtrack, Lou failed to deliver. For a man who wrote songs as regularly as he ate breakfast (and preferred to write on assignment), it was a passive-aggressive signal of how he felt about any further collaboration with Warhol and Nico. If he could have sung it himself, it seems likely he would have written it.
Other factors helped create the split between Lou and Andy. Upon returning from California, the EPI company had discovered that Bob Dylan’s manager had stolen their idea for a nightclub and taken over the Dom, renaming it the Balloon Farm. It was a terrible blow with severe, lasting consequences. Not only was potentially significant revenue lost, but it would be years before the Velvets would find as good a venue in the city. Out of sheer frustration and paranoia, the band would soon boycott New York shows altogether. Morrissey encouraged Warhol to support Nico’s career. She was, he thought, a more marketable star than Lou.
When Morrissey arranged for Nico to sing solo in a small bar underneath the Dom called Stanley’s and asked the band to provide a backup acoustic-guitar player, he slammed into Reed’s wall of resentment. “Lou didn’t want to do it,” he recalled, “of course he didn’t. And he didn’t want Sterling to do it. And he knew that John was terrified of him, so that was difficult to negotiate. ‘Oh, Lou, if you don’t want me to …’ It was so stupid. Lou said, ‘It’s not good for the group’s image.’ I replied, ‘This is awful. She needs work, she has some songs. Couldn’t one of you help her?’ Then Lou said, ‘We’ll put it on tape.’”
Lou, John, Sterling, and Moe were working on their next album, White Light/White Heat, on which there were no songs for Nico. Hitting a creative roll, they made July and August highly productive months. Sterling, John, and Lou moved into a building on West 3rd Street, which they dubbed “Sister Ray house” after their favorite new song, to work on the album. Unlike rock stars who write on the road, Lou and John created their best songs when living either together or a few blocks from each other in New York. “Sister Ray” was worked up over the summer. They played music all day, going out at night to their favorite new haunt, the club on Park Avenue South and 17th Street that had become Warhol’s social headquarters, Max’s Kansas City.
Run by Mickey Ruskin, a restaurateur and club owner who catered to the art world, Max’s was divided into two sections. The first room was a standard bar-restaurant. The bar ran down the left-hand wall of the rectangular room, the rest of which was occupied by tables and chairs. The back room, which was guarded, usually by Ruskin himself, and into which only the hip elite were allowed, was smaller. Lit by a red Dan Flavin light sculpture in one corner and furnished by a series of booths along the left- and right-hand walls, its habitués included visiting Hollywood aristocracy like Roger Vadim and his wife, Jane Fonda, rock stars like the Rolling Stones, writers, plus top-of-the-line groupies, drug dealers, and drag queens. In 1966–68, the supercharged, Fellini-esque atmosphere was dominated by the arrival, presence, and departure of Andy Warhol, who made it a habit of arriving between midnight and 2 a.m.
The artistic netherworld of Max’s back room offered the perfect setting for Lou Reed’s anthropological reports on the hell and heaven of the thriving sixties underground. Everybody was dressed to kill, and either blissfully content or raging with paranoia, lust, greed, hatred, and contempt. The room vibrated with all the elements of the sixties as they were in New York. Many an affair was started, carried out, and finished at Max’s—often in the phone booths. Girls like the Warhol starlet Andrea Feldman would leap onto a table and entertain the crowd with a song and strip show, while Warhol superstar Eric Emerson would piss into a glass and bolt down his bodily fluid screaming that it tasted good! The half of the room held by the Warhol elite would be on speed, whilst the other half, representing an anti-Warhol faction, would be on acid or other hallucinogenics. The free-for-all atmosphere created eruptions that would in time sound the death knell of the sixties. It was here, for example, that one could encounter Warhol’s hard-core lesbian would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, slumped dejectedly at a corner table, or overhear beat poet Gregory Corso snarling at Warhol, “You and your faggots and rich women and Velvet Undergrounds, I don’t understand!” only to be shushed into silence by the bardic presence of Allen Ginsberg. The background of Max’s was an extension of the Factory. Here Lou was afforded the attention due a star of his caliber. Here he could be seen with his arm wrapped around a girl, a boy, or somebody of undetermined gender.
***
However, in the fall of 1966, Lou suffered a series of disappointments, the biggest being the nonappearance of The Velvet Underground and Nico. While Verve brought out the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out, the Velvets’ album was on hold. The band was alternately told that MGM/Verve was having difficulties in reproducing Warhol’s cover portrait of a banana that actually peeled, and that the company had temporarily mislaid one of the master tapes. Meanwhile, the Velvets found their EPI performances transformed into a freak show that Warhol now rarely had time even to attend. “It wasn’t very good when Andy started losing interest in the whole project,” recalled Cale. “We were touring round the country and then he just wasn’t interested anymore. For one thing, traveling with thirteen people and a light show is a kind of mania if you don’t get enough money. And the only reason we got a lot of money, probably, while we toured was because Andy was with us. And there was a lot of backbiting going on in the band.”
That summer Lou had had a brief affair with one of Gerard’s girlfriends, creating more unspoken tension.
As they changed from an art-rock band into a touring band, Lou grew weary of the mundane experiences that greet all such entertainers. In October and November the EPI did a short tour of the Midwest, playing in venues that sometimes paid less than $1,000 a night. A pall of bad humor hung over the whole event. Relations soured. Paul, acting as road manager, had to slog his way through an unglamorous Greyhound bus tour. Nico was now sleeping with Cale. That Nico had emerged as the new superstar of Chelsea Girls and become far more famous than both Reed and Cale also grated on Lou’s nerves. He took to attacking her in public. According to one witness, Lou was at times wildly critical of Nico. During their unhappy tour he was relentlessly critical, yelling at her that she couldn’t sing and she couldn’t play. Meanwhile, the continued delay in the release of the album aggravated everyone.
It was a violent fall. Driving downtown in a cab with Malanga, Lou was in an accident that left him with cuts and bruises. Walking into Max’s with Warhol in October, Lou was hit by a table aimed at Andy by some drunken freak screaming obscenities. In the fall of 1966, Warhol was pushing everybody to the edge, and violence had begun to erupt around him constantly.
As the watershed year 1966—the year of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, of the Stones’ Aftermath, and of the Beatles’ Revolver—neared its end, it looked to Lou as if a great moment had been lost, perhaps forever. Then when Verve belatedly released two singles, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”/“I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Sunday Morning”/“Femme Fatale,” the company failed to give them the necessary promotion. “Sunday Morning” stalled at No. 103 on the Cashbox charts.
***
In March 1967 the poorly timed and little publicized release of The Velvet Underground and Nico finally arrived. So little enthusiasm was left from the original Warhol collaboration, begun fifteen months earlier, that there were no celebrations. Instead, the event became fodder for more negativity. The famous Warhol cover—consisting of a white field graced by a life-size bright yellow banana, prominently signed with his trademark rubber-stamp signature in the bottom right-hand corner—did little to publicize the band. Warhol was also credited as producer on the spine of the gatefold sleeve. Consequently, those lucky enough to catch a glimpse in stores of the poorly distributed record were confused about its contents. Had Warhol embarked on a recording career?
“We were all having fun and didn’t care about credits, and things like that,” Reed later explained. “‘Produced by Andy Warhol.’ It was like being a soup can.” Unfortunately, the cover contributed to a popular misapprehension that the Velvet Underground was Warhol’s put-on band, “And if you really got into the sticks,” Lou would bitterly joke, “they thought Andy Warhol was the lead guitar player.” To top it all off, the album’s appearance sparked the kind of critical backlash Andy was used to, but was new to Lou. The songs about drug use and sadomasochism drew intense criticism. The print media refused to run ads for the record apart from Grove Press’s Evergreen Review. The majority of radio stations refused to play it. One deejay who played a cut snapped, “That was the Velvet Underground, a very New York sound. Let’s hope it stays there.” Scattered reviews were dismissive, and MGM/Verve further cut their scant marketing budget.
Although, as a person who specialized in making people feel uncomfortable, Lou may have wanted the album to elicit hostility, he asserted otherwise: “The Velvet Underground very consciously set out to put themes common to movies, plays, and novels into pop-song format. I thought we were doing something ambitious and I was taken aback that people were offended by it and thought I was causing some kids to become drug addicts. I used to hear people saying we were doing porn rock. What happened to freedom of expression? I remember reading descriptions of us as the ‘fetid underbelly of urban existence.’ All I wanted to do was write songs that somebody like me could relate to. Why not have a little something on the side for the kids in the back row? At the worst, we were like the antedated realists. At best, we just hit a little more home than some things.”
In May, Warhol tried to re-create the heady nights at the Dom by renting a new hall, the Gymnasium, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But with attendance low, it became clear that the EPI’s initial magic was gone. Furthermore, people started to focus on the music, criticizing the band’s unorthodox playing. The deejay Terry Noel, who had a considerable influence on the club circuit, vividly described the Gymnasium shows: “We went because it was a big deal and people were talking about the Velvets. Because of Andy. Normally I never went to any Andy Warhol things, but I was interested in new things and this was a new thing going on and it was hot. We all went there, and, oh my God! None of them can play instruments. They’re all off-key. It wasn’t like today, today they’re all off-key because they mean to be—it was so bad I couldn’t believe it. Nobody could believe it.”
Recognizing yet another failure on the growing list, the Velvets decided they had had enough of the EPI. “As soon as the Gymnasium shows were over,” recalled Morrissey, “the Velvets didn’t want to work anymore. I was a manager of the goddamn thing for almost a year or more and I remember, because they never released the album, but once the album came out, I think that’s when they wanted to go off and be themselves and not have any revenues go back to Andy and me.”
When the album started to make some headway on the charts—despite bad reviews—a maverick Warhol superstar, Eric Emerson, sued MGM for putting his picture on the back cover without getting a release. Rather than paying him off or getting Warhol to shut him up, the company withdrew the album from the stores for six weeks while they had Emerson’s face airbrushed off the cover. Embittered by the lack of support from both MGM/Verve and Warhol, who, like the record company, hadn’t lifted a finger to dissuade Emerson from his legal action, Lou flicked his switchblade tongue. “The New York radio scene is so awful,” he snapped. “A record won’t be played unless it’s already number seven all over. All over has phenomenal records no one in NY gets to hear. There’s great music in the hills.” Lou decided that in response to his album’s rejection in New York, the band should no longer play in the city. They did not play New York again publicly until 1970.
Thus, they were left with an audience of totally unappreciative teenagers at, for example, La Cave on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. The writer Glenn O’Brien, then a student in Ohio, recalled the first time he ever saw them just after the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico: “That spring the Velvet Underground were on tour and they were coming to this club, La Cave, which I went to all the time to see people like Caroline Hester or lan and Sylvia. It was a Saturday night and the club was full. They came out one at a time. John came out first and he looked so fucking weird. He had this really long hair and this diamond rhinestone collar, which you’d never seen anything like. And then Moe came out and you couldn’t tell what sex she was. The first song took about twenty minutes and Lou was the last one to come out. He just looked amazing. His neck looked so muscular and he had this weird kind of Roman haircut. It was hip to have long hair then, but he had pretty short hair and these amazing sunglasses and a hollow-bodied Gibson guitar. We were all sitting there thinking, ‘These are really junkies!’”
In fact, by this time the Velvets, at a performing peak, were an astonishing act to see live. The audiences who managed to discover the band experienced something they had never before witnessed in another rock band. Togged out in mean-looking black outfits, the Velvets ground out a wailing symphony of invention and power whilst standing rigidly stock-still.
As they began to play clubs without the EPI, the Velvet Underground put some distance between themselves and Andy Warhol. However, they remained open to continuing the arrangement if Warhol would turn his attentions in their direction. However, the final nail in the coffin of Lou Reed’s collaborative relationship with Andy Warhol came at the end of May 1967, when Warhol took an entourage to the Cannes Film Festival in France to show Chelsea Girls—excluding the Velvets, who had since 1966 been invited to play at several European venues. Among other offers, the Italian director Antonioni had wanted to film the band for a nightclub sequence in his famous movie Blowup, and Barbara Rubin had offered to put them on in London at the prestigious Albert Hall. Now, when Warhol had the opportunity, not only did he choose to leave them home, but in a move typical of the perverse way in which he operated, he included among his entourage Eric Emerson, who had caused the Velvets so much trouble only a month earlier.
With Warhol away for a month, Lou had some room to start looking for a new manager. Clearly, the Velvet Underground needed professional business help. An increasing number of managers on the expanding rock scene had the resources to make things happen. A number of them had approached Reed soon after he and the Velvets achieved their initial success at the Dom, whispering in his ear that he could be making more money. One of these go-getters was a young Bostonian named Steve Sesnick, who had part ownership of a popular club in that city called the Boston Tea Party. Sesnick had been involved in earlier discussions about Warhol’s multimedia performance ideas. He was friendly with the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein’s New York lawyer Nat Weiss. Unlike Warhol, who was unresponsive to Reed’s questions on business matters, Sesnick made himself available to explain the machinations of the music business. Now, he virtually promised to deliver the Velvets success on a silver platter.
When Warhol returned, Lou got a minor, but symbolic, opportunity for retaliation. The night he got back from Europe, Warhol took Nico to Boston so she could join the VU onstage during a concert at the Boston Tea Party. In typical Warhol fashion, the two arrived late. Surprising both Andy and Nico, Lou refused to let her onstage. Nico blamed Lou’s enlarged ego for the incident. “Everybody wanted to be the star,” she said. “Of course Lou always was. But the newspapers came to me all the time. That’s how I got fired—he couldn’t take that anymore. He fired me.” Reed’s refusal to let Nico come onstage could have been excused by the fact that the band had only two more songs to go and they weren’t songs that she could sing. But Andy did not see it that way and took Lou’s action very badly.
This incident prompted a meeting between Warhol and Reed to decide what kind of financial and time commitment Warhol wanted to make to the EPI. He had many film plans in the works. He had a number of art shows coming up. Andy told Lou, “Look, you have to make a decision: Do you want to continue presenting your music in art museums and at colleges? Those are the only venues we can present to you. Don’t you think that you should be moving into the Fillmores and the rock theaters of America?”
As Lou recalled the incident, “I fired him.”
Billy Name, who attended the meeting, explained, “Andy said to everybody who worked with him: ‘You have to start developing your own career and not just be dependent on what’s going on here.’ He had no problem with it because Andy was an artist. Lou was trying to get into the straight music scene and not be the puppet of an artist. So in a sense it was good. He wanted to have a real manager in the music business. There were no problems about leaving Andy.”
However, as Lou remembered it, Warhol “was furious. I’d never seen Andy angry, but I did that day. He was really mad. He turned bright red and called me a rat. That was the worst thing he could think of. This was like leaving the nest. In a way it was terrible to be without him. He wasn’t there to take the criticism. And it was always such fun to be with him, it was a nicer environment. I never felt dependent because at that time I didn’t have anything anyway, so I didn’t having anything to lose, and it didn’t matter. Nothing over here, nothing over there—what difference does it make? We worked until the show couldn’t exist anymore because it was just so expensive. No one knew the business. No one could handle the business. No one could talk to the businesspeople. Business people have a place in this world, and especially now you’re getting a lot of businesspeople who are, let’s say, easier to talk to. But the point is, if you’re going to get involved in business, then you should get a business manager.”
Lou was shaken by Andy’s uncharacteristic display of emotion. The extraordinary thing, and one of the examples of Andy’s generosity, was that he let Lou out of the contract with no argument. Nonetheless, he still presumed that Lou would honor the arrangement that they had made in California, namely, that Andy would receive 25 percent of all earnings from the Velvet Underground’s music created under his management. The record had been produced under his management, and Andy even put up some of his own money to pay for its production and contributed the artwork. He really wanted the Velvet Underground to be successful, so he let them go. Asked to explain this uncharacteristic financial laxity years later, Warhol replied, “I liked them so much it didn’t matter … they just decided to find some other manager.”