Any other time, Morrissey wouldn’t have bothered trudging down the Café Bizarre with Rubin and their mutual friend Gerard Malanga, a Warhol assistant and actor who’d played the equivalent ‘Alex’ role in Vinyl. But since he needed to find a group in any case he had nothing to lose by poking his head through the door.
The band Rubin had raved about were a four-piece, led by a curly and surly 21-year-old singing about whips, razors and what it felt like shooting heroin, sometimes dispensing with words altogether and making funny ‘shhhh’-ing’ noises. Beside him stood a sullen rhythm guitarist and a distracting Richard III lookalike in a turtleneck sweater and rhinestone necklace bowing havoc with an electric viola. Their drummer, who wasn’t allowed to drum because it was a folk venue so had to make do with bashing a tambourine, looked like the Beatle that time forgot, possibly male, possibly female, Morrissey couldn’t quite tell. He only knew that Rubin had saved him the trouble of weeks of fruitless talent scouting by handing him Andy’s dream band on a plate. Even the name resonated with tailor-made Warholian perfection.
The Velvet Underground.
THE CURLY, SURLY singer–songwriter was Lou Reed, born in Brooklyn before moving out to Freeport in Long Island just before his teens. Lou made his first record as part of a doo-wop group while still at high school, an act which appalled his straitlaced middle-class parents. As he’d painfully understate, ‘I represented something very alien to them.’ Anxious over his preoccupation with rock ’n’ roll, his undesirable friends and general behaviour they conservatively deciphered as ‘homosexual’, they sent him to a psychiatrist. The doc’s recommended ‘cure’ for the 17-year-old was an eight-week course of electroshock therapy at a local psychiatric hospital. It ‘cured’ him of nothing.
As an English student at Syracuse University, Lou fell under the rhythmically liberating spell of modern jazz and the guru-like influence of his creative writing lecturer, the poet, paranoiac and fellow electroshock victim Delmore Schwartz. ‘The unhappiest man I ever met in my life,’ said Lou, ‘and the smartest.’ Fate had also thrown him on to the same campus as Long Islander Jim Tucker, older brother of androgynous drummer Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker and friend of guitarist Sterling Morrison, both destined to eventually join him in The Velvet Underground.
Finishing his degree, Lou moved back home, finding work writing low-budget copies of the latest rock ’n’ roll trends for Long Island’s Pickwick Records. Shackled to soulless production-line pop, he embraced the absurdity, developing his bellicose subway-bum drone fronting daft tunes attributed to non-existent acts comprised of his own house band. Lou’s trash masterpiece was a screeching dance-craze pastiche, ‘The Ostrich’, a musical rip-off of The Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’ released under the name The Primitives. The record’s producer, Terry Philips, thought it had a genuine chance of chart success. But first, they’d need to recruit desperate young musicians to make a ‘real’ Primitives line-up to promote it. Philips met his first volunteer at a party in downtown Manhattan. A 22-year-old Welshman with a Beatley haircut named John Cale.
A classically trained violist and pianist, Cale had moved from London to New York in 1963 to study avant-garde composition with his heroes John Cage – experimental theorist best known for his piece ‘4’33”’ consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of absolute silence – and minimalist pioneer La Monte Young. On paper, Lou’s apprenticeship in disposable rock ’n’ roll and Cale’s radicalism weren’t an obvious match. But when they met at the first Primitives rehearsal, something clicked. Cale was especially impressed when Lou told him ‘The Ostrich’ was a cinch to play as all the guitar strings were tuned to the same note. Not uncommon in rock ’n’ roll – Lou’s hero, Bo Diddley, had made a career out of ‘open tuning’ – Cale recognised its shared stripped-bare methodology with his own avant-garde teachers.
They’d quickly forget about The Primitives, moving into the same flat on New York’s Lower East Side, writing, rehearsing, experimenting (Cale now amplifying his viola using an electric pick-up) and laying the foundations of their own band named after a book one of their friends found littering a nearby street. The Velvet Underground was journalist Michael Leigh’s titillating survey of sexual deviancy in contemporary America, from suburban wife-swapping to bestiality and sado-masochism. They didn’t much care for the book itself, even if Lou already had a song in a similarly kinky vein called ‘Venus In Furs’ inspired by a different book by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. But the title, especially the word ‘Underground’, summed up the sonic no-man’s land between Lou’s beatnik rock ’n’ roll and Cale’s ear for the chaotic and unconventional.
In the summer of 1965, Cale made one of his sporadic trips back to London armed with the band’s first rudimentary demo tape. His inexperienced efforts to stir interest went as far as thrusting a copy upon fluttering pop songbird Marianne Faithfull in the hope she in turn would pass it on to her mentor, Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. As Cale recalled, Faithfull closed the door in his face; ironic considering her great-great-uncle was none other than Leopold von Sacher-Masoch; ‘Venus In Furs’ featured on the same tape.
At least being in London meant Cale could gauge the city’s ever-changing pop trends, stocking up on the latest mod noises from The Who’s ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ to ‘What’cha Gonna Do About It?’, the debut from The Small Faces whose singer, Steve Marriott, was a La Gioconda regular and friend of David Jones. Both records whistled with feedback: an encouraging omen the Velvets were already clanging up the right path. Returning to New York, Cale made a point of repeatedly playing them to his bandmate. ‘Shit, Lou!’ Cale teased him. ‘We gotta get a deal. They’re catching up to us.’
The Velvet Underground settled on their final line-up with Morrison and Tucker only weeks before they landed the residency at the Café Bizarre. Their friend and superfan Barbara Rubin acted as human flyer about town. Ed Sanders, singer with local obscenity-courting anarchist hippies The Fugs, was among the first she dragged to see them. A mutual acquaintance of Warhol who, like Nico, would be filmed at the Factory for one of his stillies, Sanders was impressed by their droning repetitiveness and Lou’s obvious star quality. Next Rubin brought Gerard Malanga who, halfway through their set, stood up and started dancing with a whip right in front of the stage. Afterwards Lou told Malanga he should come and do that again. The next time, Malanga and Rubin came with Paul Morrissey. Their velvet road to Warhol was almost complete, bar the consenting nod of approval from Emperor Andy himself.
A few days before Christmas 1965, the downbeat Café Bizarre was blessed with a rare visitation from His Warholness and a Factory entourage including Morrissey, Malanga, Rubin and Edie Sedgwick. Also present was Nico, who’d remember it as ‘the most beautiful moment of my life’. Morrissey made the crafty suggestion that as she needed a band, maybe they’d allow her to sing with them. Warhol watched Malanga repeat his whip dance, entranced by the noise and their grotesque beauty. He agreed, The Velvet Underground should be his Factory’s rock ’n’ roll band. That is, pending one non-negotiable caveat. Concerned over Lou’s ‘lack of charisma’, Morrissey pressed Warhol to insist Nico join the group. If they accepted, he’d manage them, buy them new equipment, pay their rent and provide free rehearsal space at the Factory. If they declined, the deal was off, leaving Lou and Cale to continue eking out a threadbare existence dealing drugs or hawking themselves out as models for trashy crime magazines offering a flat fee to pose as rapists, murderers and child-molesters. It wasn’t even a choice.
Myerberg’s original offer for the disco in Queens had since fallen through. Instead Warhol began integrating the group, now conjoined with Nico, into his own New York multi-media happening, ‘Andy Warhol, Up-Tight’. By April it developed into ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ at The Don in the East Village, the Velvets and Nico playing live upon a stage flickering with strobe lights and film projections (including his droogy Vinyl) as Malanga and Factory star Mary Woronov cast sado-masochistic shadows frugging
in leather boots and flicking whips. By May, lured by the Warhol branding, MGM Records had signed them as a five-piece. ‘But they didn’t really want The Velvet Underground,’ noted Cale. ‘They thought they had a better chance of selling records with Nico as a blonde bombshell than they did with four irascible individuals trying to make noisy cacophonous music.’
Cale’s suspicions were more than justified. Having recorded the bulk of their debut by the summer of ’66, MGM chose two of its three tracks featuring lead vocals by Nico as a promo single, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’. Stalling on a release date for the album, as feared the label insisted it needed ‘more Nico’. Lou’s obstreperous response was to write the Nico-worthy ‘Sunday Morning’ only to sing lead himself. Group tensions were further compounded by their European siren’s romantic follies, plotting a messy love triangle with, first, Lou, then Cale. ‘I’ve had it with the dramatic bullshit!’ fumed Lou. ‘Yeah, she looks great in high contrast black and white photographs, but I’ve had it!’
With ‘Sunday Morning’ as a late addition to the running order, in late October the album was finally complete bar the sleeve. Except that Warhol’s design, a pop-art banana which could be physically unpeeled to reveal a pink fruit beneath the yellow skin, was so complex it required the building of special machinery, adding to the already exasperating delay. His band splitting at the seams and temporarily paralysed, Warhol tried to stay focussed on the future, considering whether, as his friend and actor Denis Deegan suggested, they could bring the ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ experience overseas to Europe. As fortune had it, in early November a mutual friend introduced Deegan to an English pop manager who’d just arrived in New York on business. His name was Kenneth Pitt.
On Deegan’s invitation, Pitt came to the warehouse on East 47th Street, took the famously slow antique elevator to the fourth floor and stepped into the silvery foil-lined neverland of the Factory. There he met Warhol and told him he’d be more than willing to help with any promotion in London. Before he left, Pitt also met Lou and was given an advance copy of his group’s unreleased album, a coverless test pressing bearing only a sticker with Warhol’s signature. Pitt thanked him, and packed the record away safe in his luggage where it spent another month bumped and shunted by baggage handlers from New York to Australia and Singapore before arriving safely back in London. In all likelihood the first copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico in Britain. Property of Kenneth Pitt. Present for David Bowie.
PITT RETURNED IN mid-December to a Britain shivering to the Yuletide comfort of Tom Jones’ ‘Green, Green Grass Of Home’ just as David’s ‘Rubber Band’ single was released to positive reviews if indifferent sales. As requested, Pitt brought him back some original American Batman comics, a reading preference David shared with his own fictitious ‘Uncle Arthur’, and some records of ‘weird stuff’ he thought he’d appreciate. One was the second album by The Fugs, carrying a liner note by his beatnik favourite, Allen Ginsberg. It was ‘great drinking and getting stoned music’ thought David, especially the bad taste blues of ‘Dirty Old Man’, a self-explanatory character sketch he’d soon learn to play live.
The other was the sleeveless album with the Warhol sticker. The first track, ‘Sunday Morning’, didn’t really register. Then came the delinquent head-rush ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, Lou’s account of riding uptown to score drugs in Harlem.
‘Lexington, one-two-five.’
As it sledgehammered towards the first chorus, David was seized by a euphoric queasiness. Everything he already felt and didn’t yet know about rock ’n’ roll at the age of 19 trepanned his skull simultaneously. Streams of silver pouring through the sky into his eardrums. A thousand ‘fuck you’s thunderbolting his thoughts. An undiscovered galaxy of infinite possibilities, all past parameters blown to sick smithereens.
‘Hey, white boy …’
The body of David Bowie was still geographically closer to Penge. But in the sweet taste of The Velvet Underground & Nico his soul had come home to New York City.
THIRTEEN
THE LONELINESS
AS THE CIRCUITRY inside David Bowie’s skull melted with the surge of ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, some twenty-seven miles north of the parents’ house he still called home, another New Yorker was in the process of melting all human understanding of our known universe on a closed film set in Hertfordshire. The same multinational corporation which signed the Velvets, MGM, were pumping ten and a half million dollars into a project taking up the majority of space at their studios in Borehamwood. Its director was Stanley Kubrick, then 38 years-old and already regarded by many in his profession as a cinematic genius. Some might add he was also impossible, insensitive and, quite possibly, insane.
Raised in the Bronx, Kubrick began his career as a professional photographer while still in his teens, documenting the everyday lives of post-war New Yorkers for Look magazine. When not snapping Frank Sinatra, showgirls and shoeshine boys, he’d exploit his precocious intellect by hustling chess games downtown in Washington Square, just a block away from the site later to become Café Bizarre. By the time the beatniks invaded Greenwich Village he was already making a name for himself in cinema, effortlessly mastering low-budget crime thrillers, period war drama and, with 1960’s Spartacus, the star-studded sword-and-sandal blockbuster. Ill at ease in Hollywood, when it came to shoot his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s inflammatory Lolita for MGM, Kubrick moved production to England, deciding to settle there with his family just outside London, close to the studio’s main soundstages in Borehamwood. He followed it with Dr Strangelove, his satirical masterpiece about Cold War nuclear annihilation subtitled How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. When the mainstream American media back home tore into him for its ‘unpatriotic’ poke at US military procedure it only highlighted the intellectual sanctuary and artistic freedom he’d found in exile.
After Strangelove, Kubrick had no concrete ideas for his next film, only a foggy notion to make ‘the proverbial really good science-fiction movie’ based on his belief that until then nobody else had. To do so, he’d need a collaborator. Which is why, in April 1964, Kubrick invited English sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, then living in Sri Lanka, to visit him in New York where he still kept an apartment on the Upper East Side.
Their first meeting took place over lunch in Trader Vic’s, the basement restaurant of the Plaza Hotel beside Central Park where Andy Warhol sometimes dined. ‘Don’t laugh,’ Kubrick told Clarke, ‘but I’m fascinated with the possibility of extraterrestrials.’ Clarke didn’t laugh. He was intrigued by Kubrick’s passion and impressed with his knowledge. Aged ten, Kubrick had been among the millions tuning in live to Orson Welles’ The War Of The Worlds broadcast and could still recite its opening speech off pat.
As a starting point for an original film about extraterrestrial contact, Clarke offered Kubrick half a dozen of his previously published short stories. The director eventually singled out ‘The Sentinel’. Written in 1948, it told of a future exploration of the Moon, when astronauts uncover a strange pyramid structure, a ‘fire alarm’ left by an alien race millions of years earlier to alert them when life on Earth had evolved enough to venture into space. Over the next few months Clarke remained in New York, staying at the bohemian sanctum of the Chelsea Hotel – home at one time or another to Bob Dylan, Nico and Jack Kerouac – working on a rough script for a film he and Kubrick eventually announced as Journey Beyond The Stars.
Constantly rewritten and amended throughout production, the core of their story took the alien ‘fire alarm’ premise, swapping a pyramid for a smooth black rectangular monolith. It also called for the most meticulously detailed designs – everything from suspended animation units to zero-gravity lavatories – and ingenious pioneering camera techniques to achieve as scientifically accurate a vision of humanity’s future in space as was possible. When filming began in late December 1965, their speculation vastly outweighed solid data from the two dozen or so man
ned flights of the American and Soviet space programmes to date; both sides in the Cold War having only progressed as far as one spacewalk apiece. The scale of the sets and effects involved quickly set the budget soaring and the schedule stalling. Early reports that Journey Beyond The Stars would be in theatres by Christmas 1966 proved laughably ambitious. As David Bowie lay rigid in Bromley stupefied by the pulse of ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’, Kubrick was still filming, finessing and deliberating on its final shape.
Their biggest unresolved problem remained the question of how to depict its climactic scenes of human and alien contact without resorting to sci-fi clichés of slimy bug-eyed monsters. Clarke sought guidance by arranging an informal meeting with Brooklyn-born cosmologist Carl Sagan, the man who’d later put Beethoven and Chuck Berry in space on Voyager’s Golden Record. Sagan’s advice to Kubrick was very straightforward. Any explicit attempt to portray extraterrestrial life ‘was bound to have an element of falseness about it’. Far better, said Sagan, to ‘suggest’ rather than ‘display’ such an alien presence. There was also the matter of the title which, purely in terms of physics, made no sense. ‘A film about such a place “beyond the stars” would have to be two hours of blank screen,’ laughed Sagan. ‘A possible plot only for Andy Warhol.’
For the time being Kubrick persevered with his art department, trying to concoct convincing aliens from ‘rubber gargoyle monsters’ to gaseous shapes made of dancing polka dots. But he did, to Sagan’s relief, change the title to reflect the script’s Homeric themes of wandering, exploration and adventure. 2001: A Space Odyssey.