'The Velvet Underground & Nico': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two avant garde apocrypha vetters. You wrote these, your pop art impresarios of pretty awesome facts. You're drug dealers of dense details. That's a very good one. I'm Jordan run Talk. I wrote these. We are your vetus in furs of facts, your buddos of the Banana album. We'll be your mirrors of Minutia here at the drone. On and on about drones.

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Speaker 2: Hey baby, I love drones.

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Speaker 1: I'm still Jordan run Talk. Who are you? I'm Alex Heigel, Yes, Heigel. What are we talking about today? Today?

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Speaker 2: We are talking about The Velvet Underground and Nico. Yes, the album that dropped a grimy East Coast grenade and all that summer of love bullshe it was happening in nineteen sixty seven. They hated that, Oh they sure did, and we're hated right back as we're go into. Not only did it launch the career of all time rock and roll icon Lou Reed, laconic Welsh genius John Kale, and the rest.

00:01:15
Speaker 1: Oh.

00:01:15
Speaker 2: I know, I'm a huge Starling Morrison fan, but isn't Mo Tucker like a weird maga person now.

00:01:20
Speaker 1: At least tea party if not?

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Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, tea party. Yeah. Anyway, the record push the parameters of what could even be considered rock music, mixing real building style pop with gritty lyrics about the underside of mainstream society and avant garde experimental techniques from the burgeoning minimalism movement. Jordan, what do you like about this? Stuff?

00:01:43
Speaker 1: Gets down on his haunches like the guy still Water and almost famous well to start with everything. I mean, you know, rock and roll had been built by rebels, but I feel like this is the first album that really earns the distinction of alternative, with its subversive lyrics, challenging sonic experimentation that basically risked veering fully into noise at points.

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Speaker 2: Hell yeah I did.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, obviously, The Velvet Underground is strongly associated with Andy Warhol, but I feel like the real crux of the collaboration is between Lou Reed and his literary lyricism and gift for melody. And John Cale's orchestral sensibilities and daring, avant garde arrangements, and to me, that's kind of what elevated them from being a you know, a highly literate garage band, something like the Thugs another New York group, to something greater. And I think that you know as much. And we'll get into this in the episode. As much as Andy Warhol was kind of more of a an imprimature, is that the word is sort of like co signed. I think that he did something really important, which is keep everybody else away from.

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Speaker 2: The bands, gave him interference for them.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, so that their sound and there what i'll loosely dub their message, even if that messages want Heroin emerging into the mainstream with its rough edges intact, it wasn't sanded down by corporate committee and years of just kind of grind in a way at you know, at the show biz hamster Wheel. And so you've got these songs that I mean, I can't really think and you know you probably would know better than I, but I can't think of a precedent for these tales of drug deal set a masochistic sex and you know, other snapshots of the urban Underworld. I can't think of anything else from around this period that got such a relatively wide Really you didn't really sell that well famously. That's the bit as we'll talk about.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it is interesting. They are only four years out right from Bob Dylan Free Wheeland, which is like I was always taught and still consider like the ground zero of people writing their own lyrics. Really, you know, everybody else was at this point so informed by Tin Panali and the whole like get a songwriter, and then you get a performer, and then you get into the studio and record with session musicians. And that was all being upended by you know, Dylan's writing first of all, and then to a perhaps a lesser extent, the burgeoning rock and roll movement of just people being like, oh no, we also play and also sing and also.

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Speaker 1: Write, but we write as well as Tin Panale songwriters was the promise as opposed to something.

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Speaker 2: But as far as lyricism, I mean I have to think, well, you know, I don't know, it's interesting, man.

00:04:29
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I.

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Speaker 2: Always take it back to like pre war blues and as is my wont and there was some pretty racy going on in those like not just about you know, porkin, but like stuff about cocaine. Like there's literally a blue standard just called cocaine blues.

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Speaker 1: I call Porter, right, Isn't that I get no kick from cocaine? If I took even one sniff that that bore me terrifically too. But I get a kick out of you.

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Speaker 2: But I don't know that. But I mean I'm a huge Cole Porter fan, other than the standards that have been forced in playing at like brunch jazz, but yeah, I mean definitely as far as just putting heroin in your lyrics, I mean people forget that the sixties folks stuff was coming a lot from like these Southern songs which are all either about murder or porkin, and sometimes about both, as the best ones often were. So I mean, even though those edges were sanded off a lot by like the Kingston Tria, I mean you still had, like, you know, your Dave Van Ronks and your authenticity obsessed people who were definitely putting out commercial records with songs about like murder and you know, cocaine. But yeah, I mean as far as especially like the sexuality stuff, I think that's one thing that we can really credit them with is just getting that side of things out there, because otherwise that was such a taboo and in a way completely informed by their upbringings. I mean, I don't think the blues artists are people who were singing similarly transgressive stuff had access to the idea of BDS or like leather, Like a leather fetish in the South would just be like your boots, not necessarily like you you're going out attire or your sexual attire.

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Speaker 1: I like your boots.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I don't know. I might be talking out of my ass there, but I frequently do and people don't really counter me on it.

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Speaker 1: So that's a doctoral thesis. I like to read the racial privilege of BDSM.

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Speaker 2: I mean it, you know, leather gear is expensive, dude, I don't know.

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Speaker 1: Boots of leather.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And like, you know, even being able to find a transgressive novel on the pavement to name your band after is a truly urbane thing. You know, we're sure weren't going to find that book in Mississippi.

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Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's a beautiful setup to dive right in. I think we've got more than enough to talk about this episode. You got anything else now well, from a young lou Reid's horrifying early mental health struggles to Nico's horrifying entire life to the first hand look inside Andy Warhol's factory that the band gave us to that weird, weird cover art. Here's everything you didn't know about the Velvet Underground and Nico lou Reid.

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Speaker 2: What do you say?

00:07:32
Speaker 1: He was someone who from an early age felt suffocated by social norms and the conformity of the post war.

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Speaker 2: Era, and also was a huge ass. I was writing this whole thing about Nico, and really, you know, I added this whole paragraph about Nico, and I was like, Man, I'm really piling on her. Should we like address the fact that Lou hit women and was like such an unrepentant prick for entire decades of his life that like, no one had a good word to say about him other than he's good at songs sometimes.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes unless sometimes it is underlined.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: He was born in Brooklyn in nineteen forty two. His dad was an accountant and his mom was a stenographer. They moved out to the Long Island suburbs when lou was a little boy, not far from the Levett Town tracked house that housed the young Billy Joel. Could you imagine young Billy Joel and young lou Reed meeting in a playground. It's conceivable that it could have happened.

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Speaker 2: I have to think that Billy Joel would have bullied him.

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Speaker 1: Well, Billy Joel was so used to being bullied though, I had like.

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Speaker 2: Those are the most dangerous ones. Uh, yeah, if you find an even weaker target. Okay, it's hitting the fan, that's very true.

00:08:36
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, well, much like Billy Joel, Lou Reed seemed miserable even as a child.

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Speaker 2: Yes, yes he did. Uh. In the nineteen ninety five Wayne Wang Paul Oster film Blew in the Face, Do you know anything about this? I stud on this just for the lou Reid quotes Paul Ouster being more known as aarus Yeah. Yeah, but uh and recently recently departed.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: But it's just like lou reda is like doing all of his stuff over the counter of a cigar shop. Just really amazing. One of the things he says to that movie is I couldn't have been unhappier in the eight years I spent growing up in Brooklyn. I say that not having realized what it would be like living on Long Island, which is infinitely worse. Yeah, and then I just want to highlight his other quip, which is leaving Brooklyn for Long Island was probably a childhood trauma that I had other than the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, which, if you think about it, is a reason why some of us are imbued with the cynicism that we never recovered from. Obviously, you're not a Mets fan, and you can't possibly be a Yankees fan, so Baseball's just eliminated from your life. Hilarious.

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Speaker 1: Lou attended Hebrew School, which he'd later describe as quote like being in a concentration camp.

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Speaker 2: Taco bell sound. I don't know what we're supposed to do with that one, Luke.

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Speaker 1: Even at this early age, he felt removed from his peers. One friend would later say that we most kids were sneaking beers. Lou was smoking joints and reading French erotic fiction like the story of Oh Hell Yeah Brother. At the first sign that Lou might not be completely heterosexual, his parents apparently took him to a psychiatrist in an attempt to, in Lou's words, shock the gayness out of him, the less successful follow up to Peter Gabriel's Shock the Monkey, Good One, Good One. This is what Lou later claimed, but in the Todd Haynes Felt Underground documentary from a few years ago, his sister strenuously emotionally denies this.

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Speaker 2: So what does she know?

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Speaker 1: Who knows? There's there's a lot of unreliable narrators in this story, as we'll find out. Yeah, that's true, but this much we do know. Doctors apparently thought that he might be schizophrenic and recommended that Lou undergo electroshock therapy. He underwent. I saw the number sited as twenty four ECT sessions, which is just an absolutely archaic, barbaric I think is a safe term procedure that had a very traumatic effect on Lou and permanently damaged to short term memory.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, if you're not up on your quasi medieval medical practices from the mid century, they just put electrodes on the side of your brain and zapia.

00:11:17
Speaker 1: A piece of felt in your mouth or a piece of rubber or something you bite.

00:11:20
Speaker 2: Down on and then they just zapia.

00:11:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean not to put you on the spot, but just medically, what was that supposed to do? Like, I don't understand the physiology behind it.

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Speaker 2: I did you know the brain is all electrical impulses, so maybe they were just like, well, let's see what happens if we'd short that out.

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Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds like holding down the power button until you have a hard resect. Yeah. I mean, do we think that it's more or less targeted than an ice pick lobotomy in terms of like I mean, in theory less damaging, but well, less damaging, but in terms of like, actually like having any idea what the hell you're doing?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know enough about the history of it, but it it is horrifying.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, very much so. So this's not only damaged a short term memory, but it also poisoned his relationship with both of his parents, if not the world as a whole. Lou viewed the experience as an incredible betrayal from the people who were supposed to protect him, and his relationship with his family really never recovered. A friend once said they only seen Lou afraid once when he unexpectedly bumped into his parents on the street.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. For a more interesting view of his bile, check out Kill Your Sons from nineteen seventy four, where aside from his parents, he also takes potshots at his sister, who he was supposed to be kind of close to. Yeah so too, he saying's sister, she got married on the island and her husband takes the train. He's big and he's fat and he doesn't even have a brain. Can I just say the quiet part? Illwed that Lurid's lyrics kind of suck sometimes, like most of the time. Definitely more misses than hits.

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Speaker 1: I do think I recall reading it might have been in a book I recently read about Candy Darling, another Warhol Factory superstar, that Lou's brother in law like got a kick out of these lyrics and he thought it was funny. So there might have been they might have had an understanding.

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Speaker 2: I don't know, but yes, you're gonna engage with me on the lyric claim.

00:13:24
Speaker 1: No I can't. He's big and he's fat and he doesn't even have a brain. I mean that that makes Joey Ramone seem like, you know, yeah, bottle.

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Speaker 2: Rhyming trained with brain like, I don't know, man, there's a blue Mask song I'm off.

00:13:39
Speaker 1: The Blue Mask, which is probably maybe my favorite.

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Speaker 2: Lou Reid solo album. Yeah, you like that, And it's called Underneath the Bottle, which is about recovery from alcoholism, and you know, there's this one line. I always cite this as the dichotomy of lou Reid. There's this one line that's like fell down the stairs and woke up underneath the bottle. And I was like, that's clever, that's a nice little turn of phrase. And then the next verse he starts with ooh, son of a bee, just like, you dumb ass, This so stupid.

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Speaker 1: And then then what's funny?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, the gun is horrifying, but what's so funny is that, like he uses son of a bee in more than one song, Like he was just prefer as awful as a human being as he was. He was like afraid of saying bitch on record. It was like use son of a bee, maybe just because it was easier to rhyme with. But yeah, I don't know, man. I love him to death, and I think he's a fascinating, fascinating artist, but I do not think of him as the lyrical genius that all of his hagiographists would would have him as I.

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Speaker 1: Don't know though, I mean, Heroin, Venus in Furs, I mean, I don't know. Those are pretty incredible. Yeah yeah, he had a lot of years to refine those, though, I guess, yeah yeah.

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Speaker 2: And I mean, like, I don't really think of Heroin as a particularly lyrics forward.

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Speaker 1: Song, really yeah, I mean, you know, oh I disagree, Okay, go on.

00:15:06
Speaker 2: I think it's more about the sonic side of it.

00:15:09
Speaker 1: But to me, it's up there with Tomorrow Never Knows in terms of being an incredibly evocative blend of the music and arrangement and the lyrics, and the fact that the lyrics are so eerily detached in almost like a you know, Hammingway journalistic sense of describing kind of one of the greater taboos out there. I know, Heroin. I mean, even now I think has this whatever the opposite of mystique is, go on, I don't think there's a lot of romance in Heroin. I think that it is just seen as kind of the last stop before going off the edge of the cliff in culture. So I think that there's a certain taboo around that particular drug, as opposed to I don't know, opium, cocaine.

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Speaker 2: You're right, I would draw my claim back Heroin and will instead draw your attention to the bulk of his solo work.

00:16:04
Speaker 1: Sure, I mean, I just because it makes me feel like I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein. Yeah, I'll tell you if things aren't quite the same.

00:16:16
Speaker 2: Don't read this whole song. Oh no, I'm not. I read it very well, though you did a lot of gravitas.

00:16:23
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I just think that there's something so an economy of words that I don't possess. There's something so chilling, something so simple, something so even though I've never done Heroin, something that's so understandable about Oh okay, I get how you arrived at that place, and I get what you get out of this in three lines. I don't know. Maybe that's just mean.

00:16:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean he's his economy is definitely something, especially in the age when everyone was even calling their bands incredibly stupid long run on sentences, you know, like Arthur Brown's Crazy World Book or whatever. All that nonsense was day glow garbage, and like Dylan to like, you know, trying to redefine like how many syllables you could cram into a rock song. So I do admire him as sort of the ernest Hemingway of sixties rock music for as much as Yeah, I don't know, man, there's just have you heard Possum Day? I haven't no off of Magic and Loss. It's an eighteen minute song. Oh it's off ecstasy. Pardon me, I picked the wrong late era Lou read. Yeah, it's eighteen minutes. It opens up with one of the coolest, like some of the best guitar sound I've ever heard captured. This is from two thousand. Oh yes, it's called like a Possum, not Possum Day. I confused it because the opening line is good morning, It's possum day. Feel like a possum in every way posso whiskers, possum face, powsome breath, and to possum taste, posso tails, possum eyes, posso bones, possum thighs. I mean, yeah, man, that's that's not you know, Yates.

00:18:15
Speaker 1: I have made the big decision. I'm going to try to nullify my life because when the blood begins to flow, when it shoots up the dropper's neck, when I'm closing in on death, I mean okay, I mean, yeah, you know what I think this suggests sometimes he tried.

00:18:33
Speaker 2: Sometimes didn't. Yeah, exactly.

00:18:35
Speaker 1: And you know what, who among us I was like.

00:18:38
Speaker 2: More, I almost like more when he's just like free associating like a Coney Island baby. When he's like I was just wanting to play football for a coach too small to play tackle or something. This one goes out to Lou and Rachel and all the kids at p s one two, which is where he went, I know, okay, okay, cool, Well neither of us won.

00:19:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's a good I think we both argued our point well.

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Speaker 2: And it is, after all, possum day, so in my heart every day anyway. Getting back to ECT, one of the most famous victims of it was Ernest Friggin Hemingway, who was treated with ECT as many as fifteen times in December nineteen sixty and he had a much shorter run of it than lou Reid did in terms of surviving. In January of the next year, he was released in ruins, according to one biographer, Jeffrey Myers. Another biographer and his close friend, Ae Hotchner, reported in his book Papa Hemingway that Hemingway's loss of memory caused by the ect made him even more depressed and hopeless, as Hemingway had stated, well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? In July nineteen sixty one, shortly before his sixty second birthday, and soon after Hemingway had been given still yet another series of shock treatments, he committed suicide with the shotgun.

00:19:59
Speaker 1: That's murder.

00:20:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm just going to research this right now.

00:20:05
Speaker 1: Do we think I mean, not to get totally off topic, that with Hemingway, almost like with Howard Hughes when he was testing out a lot of the planes he designed and they kept crashing, He kept repeatedly hitting his head, and they think that exacerbated latent mental health problems, but basically gave him, you know, traumatic hand injuries that made it infinitely worse. Do we think that with Hemingway, with his incredible alcohol Well, oh, I was going to say, just active life, during which time I think he was severely injured by bulls and boats and barracudas and other what else, other bees, son of a bees? Yeah, callback yeah, I do wonder how much you know, I mean, and as you said, the drinking as well.

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Speaker 2: Convulsive therapies, introduced nineteen thirty four by Hungarian neuropsychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna, who believing mistakenly that schizophrenia and epilepsy were antagonistic disorders, induced seizures first with camphor and then metrasol. There's a Talian guy Ugo Cerletti. Celetti had noted a shock to the head produced convulsions in dogs. The idea to use electroshock therapy on humans came to Cerletti when he saw how pigs were given an electric shock before being butchered to put them in an esthetized state. Just horrible from the ground up, This practice, I mean, now, Jesus. I also forgot its most famous portrayal in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where it destroys, you know, Jack Nicholson's character.

00:21:39
Speaker 1: I thought that was lobotomy. I thought the very end, they see these like scars up by.

00:21:44
Speaker 2: His, yeah, his temples, because that's where they have to put it, because that's where your skull is thinnest, and they have to put like an incredible amount of vaults through your brain and to even get across the skull barrier.

00:21:56
Speaker 1: Ah, well, I knew that. I always think maybe.

00:21:58
Speaker 2: They changed it for the movie, But it's in the novel.

00:22:01
Speaker 1: The bottomized in the film at least. Yeah. Wow, that is horrifine. So now let's get back to the happy world of Lou Reid in the Velvet Underground show.

00:22:13
Speaker 2: So much better than pigs being shocked.

00:22:15
Speaker 1: Looks like Teletubbies compared to compared to this, Okay. Lou Reid started performing music when he was a teenager in the mid fifties with a group called The Shades. Racist No, no, they were sunglasses. Oh okay, yeah, but probably also yes.

00:22:34
Speaker 2: From Long Island.

00:22:35
Speaker 1: Yeah we got we got some friendly complaints from some Long Island nights for our portrayal of Long Island and the Billy Joel episode, even though most of them were quoted directly from Billy Joel himself.

00:22:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, come on, man, your most favored son is saying that.

00:22:52
Speaker 1: Notice how I didn't call the Shades a band. Lou later said in an interview that The Shades wasn't a band. It was just one guitar and two other singing. They would play basically anywhere that would have them out on Long Island. They first played at a local talent show, then shopping malls, and then some really divy bars. And there are some great pictures of them in the fifties with shoestring cowboy bow ties and blazers singing Little Richard's songs.

00:23:17
Speaker 2: It's really referring to bolo ties.

00:23:19
Speaker 1: No, I thought bolo ties had like a like the two strings, but didn't have like a bow.

00:23:25
Speaker 2: Oh that's an interesting point if you were another difference between a string.

00:23:29
Speaker 1: Bow, a shoestring bow tie.

00:23:32
Speaker 2: A bolow just get in touch.

00:23:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, But like I said, because they were the Shades, they wore sunglasses all the time and Lou basically never stopped. They then changed their name to the Jades because I guess there was another band around called the Shades, And in nineteen fifty eight they made their recording debut with a song called So Blue in the B side leave Her for Me and It's straight doop with Lou Reid on backing vocals and King Curtis on sacks. That way legendary. Yeah, Oh my god.

00:24:05
Speaker 2: I wonder if it was in his like, No, this was in fifty eight. He probably he still had a career at that point. Yeah, he's playing with the coasters and stuff. Probably just flew into like do a solo and left. Yeah, man lose do wop affectations are so hilarious. There's like, you know, take of No. I would never listen to them, but I have no interest in them, respectfully because on the one loaded box set there's like an alternate version of rock and roll where he tries to put like do a douop intro into it and he's like, ooh, this is awful, but it's so hilarious.

00:24:44
Speaker 1: I think that's my favorite non John Cale centric Velvet Underground song rock and roll, Like Heroin and Vitus and Furs are like, I think my two favorite overall. But yeah, dude, people unloaded because it's like ghost Velvet Underground.

00:25:00
Speaker 2: But those people are wrong. There's so many amazing songs on there. Lonesome Cowboy Bill come on.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. So this early low Redoop band got picked up by a major label, Dot Records, and the release became a regional hit, and Lout later said that he made three dollars and fifty cents in royalties, and as he later observed, that was a hell of a lot more than I made in the Velvet Underground.

00:25:23
Speaker 2: Was that like fifty to seventy five dollars and money back then?

00:25:27
Speaker 1: Though? Yeah, I mean I know in the Spotify era that seems normal.

00:25:34
Speaker 2: But I was gonna say that sounds like my royalty payouts for my entire career.

00:25:39
Speaker 1: Oh, you have a new album a out? Tell the folks about your new album.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: Oh, I do have a new album out. Yeah, it's it's called The Good of the Scorpion, which, yes, is a It's always Sonny in Philadelphia reference. Jordan has Lighter Up. It's mostly instrumental guitar. There's a few vocal samples in there. There's some sinse on there. I played all of it. Check it out on band camp or if you want it for free on the streamers.

00:26:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, you should do like a Dark Side of the Moon? Was itard of all kind of thing? And like have the instrumentals playing as you want to a podcast, No, as you listen to our podcast. It's like a nice soundtrack.

00:26:15
Speaker 2: The album is not long enough for that. I have to listener like four times. Thank you, Jordan, that's very sweet.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: You should really check out some of Lou's do up stuff. He actually continued a few years later, in nineteen sixty two, he had some solo songs they released under Lewis Reed, which is hilarious. Is one called Your Love and my favorite called Mary Go Round. And these went unreleased for decades until the great Brooklyn based reissue labeled Norton put Out. I think it was an EP or something a few years ago, and it's great. The cover of it has this picture of young Lou Reed looking like I wanna be Ricky Nelson with his hair and a pompadoor. It is just tremendous. Uh wait, I'm gonna send this to you. It's like a good song. So this is Mary Ground on the EP is called All Tomorrow's Dance Parties, which is pretty funny.

00:27:14
Speaker 3: I want your homie, But do you treat me like I was go around?

00:27:22
Speaker 1: Whoa? You got me? That?

00:27:32
Speaker 2: It sucks? Oh come on, really, I don't, I don't. I don't like this.

00:27:38
Speaker 1: Blue likes it.

00:27:40
Speaker 2: This is such a miss. I'm sorry. His voice is so like nasal and grating. Even though on that, like I mean, he was very young, but even on this, No, no, I don't, I don't. I don't deal with I don't vibe with this rock and roll didn't get interesting until we started stealing from black people.

00:27:57
Speaker 1: I love how in the sort of like nebulous band that he had in college, nobody ever went in the back, so they just changed their name over and over again because that was the only way they could get repeat bookings. It's it's like the oldest trick in the book. But speaking of college, Lou Reed bad college roommate or the worst college roommate discuss.

00:28:19
Speaker 2: I mean, surely there are Charlie Whitman. We've that one for you, folks that pick up on the way home.

00:28:26
Speaker 1: Lou Reed did a semester and a half at NYU before opting the transfer to Syracuse, which maybe you know as a movement doesn't seem to make much sense to me considering his urbane pretensions.

00:28:39
Speaker 2: Go far up into the into the glaciers.

00:28:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't really. I thought he would have loved hanging out in Greenwich Village in like the late fifties early sixties, considering the budding beat that he sort of was. But yeah, but ended up working out for him because Syracuse is where he first became interested in a serious way in writing. He initially thought he was going to be a journalist, which is hilarious considering how much he would come to hate journalists. Uh. Probably his most connection during this period at Syracuse is with the poet, author, and professor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz became a mentor figure to Lou and helped him home as penchant for literature and cynicism, though not necessarily in that order. Reid told writer Bruce Pollock in nineteen seventy three, Delmore Schwartz was the unhappiest man I ever met in my life. I'm the smartest until I met Andy Warhol. Once drunken a Syracuse bar, he said, if you sell out, Lou, I'm gonna get you. I hadn't thought about doing anything, let alone selling out, and rock and roll counted as selling out in Schwartz's minds because he hated the genre, particularly the lyrics, and despite this, Low would salute his mentor by dedicating the Velvet Song European Son to Schwartz, simply because it was the track that both least resembled anything in the rock canon and also a scant ten lines contains the least amount of his hated lyrics. Sadly, Delmore Schwartz almost certainly never heard the song. Crippled by alcoholism and mental illness, he spent his final days as a recluse at the Chelsea Hotel, and he died there of a heart attack on July eleventh, nineteen sixty six, just three months after The Velvet Underground recorded European Son and nearly half a year before it was released. He had so isolated himself by this point in his life that Delmore Schwartz's body was in the.

00:30:30
Speaker 2: Morgue for two days before it was identified. But there's a happy ending to this story.

00:30:35
Speaker 1: I was there.

00:30:36
Speaker 2: Yes, lou Reid believed that Delmore Schwartz later came back to haunt him or visit a house that he shared with one of his I'm not sure if they were common law or truly married. Sylvia Silvia. I think that's Women off Blue Mask another just tremendous, silva awful stuff. No it's not, it's just there, ah man. That album just sounds so good as I'm of Robert Quine playing guitar, and he and loum make such a natural pairing. And then lou comes in just like trumpeting his this bullshit anyway on My House off the Blue mask. He professes that he believes his current home is haunted by Schwartz's ghost singing. Sylvia got out ourwigi bor to dial a spirit across the room. It's sword. We were happy and amazed at what we saw. Blazing stood the proud and regal name del Moore. Just dog, just bad writing. Also, it's one of his ones where he abandons any traditional notation of meter to like sound like I guess Billy Holiday when he's singing it, so he's like. The way he actually delivers it is something like blazing stood the proud and regal name del Moore, Like it's just such this. Ah, what a fascinating guy was.

00:32:03
Speaker 1: But we're getting far ahead of ourselves. Writing avant garde soundscapes like European Son was far off for Good Old Lou during his early sixties Syracuse days. This was a period when Bob Dylan was coming to the fore and Lou started playing acoustic guitar and writing early songs, supposedly because electroshock therapy made it difficult for him to concentrate on straight prose writing, so he kept it short with melodies to jog his memory. That's so sad. Yeah, he wanted to blend his beloved street music, do wop and rock with the gritty literature grit lit set a term that he was reasing. Now it is grit lit. That's great, tweeted us, hashtag grit litt.

00:32:45
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I wonder if the speed, if all the beats, because I don't know that he's has he talked about being influenced by any beat writers.

00:32:52
Speaker 1: Well, he really was into Hebert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn. And you know Burrows Naked Lunch. Bizarrely, we've had it requested from multiple people to do a naked Lunch episode. Okay, yeah, we've had some real as. We had a really sweet request on one of the Apple review comments, want us through Fried Green Tomatoes. Somebody else requested con Air. We see your request. We thank you, very very very very much. We're trying to get to them. We really appreciate it means a lot.

00:33:22
Speaker 2: Especially to see conn Air.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: I do you want to do conn Air? Well to Connor. Yeah, So basically, Lou wanted to write adult rock and roll, which is a term I genuinely forget if I made up or if I took from him. I think it's actually a quote from him. Venus and Furs, for example, is taken from the title of a book by Leopold von Sacher Massik, from whom we get the term masochism, and who also happens to be the great great uncle of mary Anne Faithful. Did you know that? Huh, the guy invented the term masochism is related to Marianne Faithful.

00:33:54
Speaker 2: Wonder if he was listening to her music at the time.

00:33:58
Speaker 1: Broken English is a great out. Do you know that album? I didn't. It was like after she'd been she spent much of the seventies. I think she was living on the streets quite literally after she and Mick Jagger broke up and she really struggled with heroin addictions. She made this album at the end of the seventies called Broken English. And like her voice, which you know in the mid sixties was this very like crystalline. Is at the term like very I mean she was literally just came from a convent and she sounds it now. Her voice is like grimy and it almost sounds like Nico in a lot of ways. It's very fascinating. I mean, she clearly hit the whiskey and cigarettes very hard. It's interesting it's a good album.

00:34:40
Speaker 2: Well, I do love a sad story behind a record. BDSM loomed large on Loo's mind.

00:34:49
Speaker 1: Thanks for reading that. That's a hard thing to say. BDSM loomed large on lose mind. That's like Seashell's Seashells level. When a friend started reading Lou's early lyrics, he eventually said, what's the deal with all this degradation? And Lou's indignant reply was, if it's not dark and not degrading, then it's not sex. And you don't understand that because you're becoming a Republican. That's from the Todd Haynes movie of one of his old friends. I forget his name. Incredible lous a quote machine. He really is inconsistent lyricist, quote machine.

00:35:22
Speaker 2: God.

00:35:22
Speaker 1: He would have had an amazing podcast. Was he like very active on Twitter?

00:35:27
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so. I don't think he was active doing anything until I mean he was putting out like his tai chi meditations. He was just really into tai chi and like Laurie Anderson.

00:35:36
Speaker 1: Wait no, no, Lulu No. The last thing he tweeted before he died was like a meme of Twilight Sparkle versus Metal machine music. Yes, yes, forgoning.

00:35:50
Speaker 2: I forgot if that was on Twitter or Facebook. Good for him. Read also hosted a radio program while at Syracuse, which was recounted at the twenty nineteen Syracuse Area Music Awards or SAMMA called Excursions on a Wobbly Rail. Reid's show and Reid were quote quickly fired for his esoteric playlist and on air arguments with listeners. I wish those tapes existed.

00:36:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know.

00:36:16
Speaker 2: He also launched an underground campus literary magazine called Lonely Women's Quarterly, named after the Ornette Coleman composition, a huge influence on him. He's really obsessed with Ornett and also some have claimed that Reid was dealing heroin while in college and even employed his first serious girlfriend, Shelley Albin, to whom Pale Blue Eyes is dedicated, to make deliveries around campus. Lou has this history of getting women to work for him. I think one of his wives later took over as manager. It's kind of weird.

00:36:50
Speaker 1: Was he married to Lori Anderson or were they like common law or whatever.

00:36:54
Speaker 2: She was the only one that he was like respected. Oh man, Well, I retract everything nice, I just about her said, Laurie Anderson's recent body of work involves writing collaboratively with an AI generator stocked with the words of lou Reed. Wow, moving on, you know, I mean if she wasn't who she was to him, I would it would be gross her, it would be grosser.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: Yes, there's a whole agency that is doing this thing where when somebody dies, their family members are invited to like feed I think you give them the late person's phone and any kind of information that like you have on them, and it supposedly generates, like effectively a hologram that address exact plot of a Black Mirror episode. Oh is it really well? He addresses everybody at their funeral, and it's I think it's more for the people left behind as a way to like, you know, help process and get to say goodbye and have the person there to say goodbye. Maybe, you know, I don't know. So it makes me wonder what she's doing that for. Maybe she's not doing it for, you know, any kind of exploitive reason, but maybe it's something that's therapeutic for her in a way to still continue to work with him. I don't know.

00:38:18
Speaker 2: It's fine as you meditate on that We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

00:38:39
Speaker 1: Well, Luke came out of college with a degree, a heroin habit and hepatitis. Two of those things are helpful for a career in the music industry. For all of his insecurities, Lou seemed to have tremendous belief in his music. As an unknown, he visited a music publisher who asked him the standard question, you know, what do you see for yourself? His answer, I want to be rich and i want to be a rock star, and I'm going to be rich and I'm going to be a rock star regardless of whether we handle my music or not. This is according to a friend who accompanied him to that meeting. No word on whether or not the publisher signed him in any event. Lou's professional songwriting career began in the wake of the Beatles boom in nineteen sixty four, when he was hired as a staff songwriter at Pickwick Records. Pickwick was a New York based budget label which specialized in basically writing sound alike versions of whatever was on the hit parade. While living at home with his parents, Lou earned the princely sum of twenty five dollars a week aping chart toppers. He remembered, in nineteen seventy two, we just churned out songs. That's all. Never a hit song. What we were doing was churning out these ripoff albums. Songs of that period like The Monkey and the Frug were pretty asinine, so it stands to reason that ripoff versions of those songs were even more asinine. For example, when tasked with writing a car copy of The Twist, Luke cast his mind to the latest ladies fashion trend, Ostrich Feathers, and thus he wrote the infectious dance track the Ostrich, featuring the absolutely unforgettable opening line, put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it, and you say he's a bad lyric.

00:40:20
Speaker 2: I mean, it's funny. Actually, what came to mind when you're describing this process, I was like, he was basically an AI bot generating, Yeah, both to flood the market and confuse people, just like what's happening on streamers everywhere now.

00:40:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean also, I mean saying the quiet part extremely loud. It taught him, Oh yeah, the fundamentals of a I mean, was that sorry about Hunter S Thompson before he was writing novels when he was in like high school in early college. He would sit at a typewriter and write out the Great Gatsby and Faulkner or something, just to feel what it felt like to type those words in that org and get the rhythm of that. I mean, as an act, that's pretty ridiculous, but in a way I can imagine that you do glean something from that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean you're humoring me a lot in this episode.

00:41:12
Speaker 2: No, I mean, I'm not compared. I mean, I am comparing lou Reed to Ai, but it is just a hilarious like mercenary practice that was very real back then, and that he's the more famous people that came out of it that we got, you know.

00:41:23
Speaker 1: But the song the Ostridge had some moments of subversive brilliance in there. To compose the song, he tuned all of his strings on his guitar to the same note, which basically created a drone effect. In a two thousand and four Louder Sound interview, he explained, I did that because I saw this guy called Jerry Vance, a Pickwick staffer. Do that not an advanced avant garde guy. He was just screwing around and he didn't realize what he had, but I did, and I took that and made it into the ostriche You're Ready in. Reid recorded the song with some studio musicians, and the marketing minds at Pickwick actually deemed it worthy of release. The single hit Shelves under the name of a fictitious band called the Primitives, and sold well enough that the label actually pressured Lou to put an actual band together and go out and promote the song at live gigs. And it was well searching for band notes for this Primitives project that Reid first grew close to John Cale. They met at a Lower east Side house party, where Cale's beatle haircut called Reed's eye, and so did his Welsh accent, which sounded close enough to the Beatles Liver Puddley and lilt to make him think, oh, this guy's probably a rock star. He was very, very, very.

00:42:58
Speaker 2: Mistaken funny he confused a Welsh and liverpoodleyan accent.

00:43:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:43:04
Speaker 2: Shouts to John kil as a style icon. Not only is consistently the weirdest looking guy in any VU promo, like he was a Cape at one I believe.

00:43:15
Speaker 1: Cape is Prince Valiant hair that like, even at a time when Prince Valiant haircuts were semi common, still looks super weird on him. And his soul patch these days is so strange. It's really strange. Man.

00:43:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yes, love him, love him so much.

00:43:31
Speaker 1: Yes. John kle In nineteen sixty four was not a rising rock star. He was a rising star of the classical and avant garde world. And he was new in town. The Welsh native came to America on a Leonard Bernsteins scholarship for musical composition, a position he earned after interviewing with Aaron Copeland. So he was a serious dude.

00:43:52
Speaker 2: The funniest part about his entire musical upbringing is that he learned to play viola solely because every other instrument had been taken at his little school.

00:44:00
Speaker 1: Oh, I didn't know that. All his upbringing is so sad. Like his dad moved in with his mother's family once they got married, I think, and they were all Welsh and his dad was English, so they forbade English being spoken in their households. And tell yah, Cale couldn't speak with his father because he didn't know English until he learned it in school as a seven year old, So until he was seven he couldn't communicate with his own dad. Yeah, and all said, yeah, and yet he's still better adjusted than lou Reed.

00:44:33
Speaker 2: Yeah right.

00:44:34
Speaker 1: John Calee moved to New York in late nineteen sixty three to pursue his musical studies and play viola with the avant garde composer Lamont Young's Theater of La monte Us. Oh was LaMonte Oh my god? I never knew that LaMonte Young's Theater of Eternal Music. He also knew the slightly more famous John Cage, and was even photographed on stage with him around this period in the early sixties, which would help earn him some notoriety. John Cage the uh ultra minimalist composer, to the point that he has a famous piece call four minutes thirty three seconds, which just consists of silence. That is correct. Doesn't get more minimalist than that, Yeah, I.

00:45:14
Speaker 2: Mean it's Cage is a fascinating guy. He was extremely racist. I was obsessed with the I ching uh and was like a big, big step in, a big guy in not just minimalism, but developing chance compositions. Because a lot of his later on he would just throw coins from the I ching and like E ching. I don't know, let let them determine, like the shape of his compositions. But yes, he's most famous for four three three Yeah, sorry, raging into my territory.

00:45:45
Speaker 1: Now it's coming up. I gotta go.

00:45:46
Speaker 2: I was watching you, watching you talk that and with baited breath.

00:45:52
Speaker 1: Read was very intrigued by John Kle's background and asked him to join this ad hoc band to plug his crappy sound like song, Hey wow, you've gotten co signed by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copeland or this virtuoso Do you want to play my crappy fake rock song.

00:46:11
Speaker 2: It's funny because I think he meant Kale. I mean he meant him at a party, but he probably knew him through Tony Conrad, who was another incredibly unoverlooked and groundbreaking I mean, the guy was a musician, he was a mathematician, He made experimental films. He picketed outside the Lincoln Center for decades, like he was a really wild guy. And he was actually played on the Primitives, He played on the Ostrich that's him on violin.

00:46:36
Speaker 1: Oh. I didn't realize that, but Kal he said yes, basically because he thought it would be fun and an easy way to earn some money. But once he started rehearsing and Lou taught him about this sort of tuning technique on his guitar while all the strings were tuned to the same note, he kind of was like a real light bulb moment for Kale because that was not that dissimilar to all the drone work that he was doing with Lamonty Young. So this was kind of taken us a sign that they were on the same musical wavelength, and they started to become very tight, with Lou moving into John's twenty five dollars a month apartment at fifty six Ludlow Street, one of the great crap holes of rock history, which I believe, according to a recent or at least ten year old Wall Street Journal article, still houses artists to this day. Wow. I think Lady Gaga lived near there too.

00:47:23
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah yeah. So I mean, now, is this segue to get into the Lamonty Young and his influence on the Velvet un Ground, especially the first two records, because he was so directly important to Kale. Lamonty is considered the father of minimalist music, but his work was more characterized by sustained drones rather than what we think of when we think about Philip Glass, Steve Wright or Terry Riley of like these repeating rhythmic figures or phasing experiments or small melodic cells that are being mix and match and overlapping. Monty was super into just extremely sustained tones and the theater of eternal music or the dream Syndicate known by both was a truly you had to be their thing that all of these different Downtown New York artists talk about as being basically an incubator for all of the minimalist composers that would come out of that and help define that movement. And it was him his wife Marian's Azila who designed the lighting for I believe the still in Operation dream House. Yeah, I went there, yeah, And is it in Soho or Tribeca Tribecca Yeah, and their vocal guru whose name is Pandit pran Nath and the feature Vu drummer Anglis maclice Kale was involved in that, and this guy Tony Conrad, and so they would basically just use they used like signal generators from the from like old military equipment, old radio equipment to create sine waves and then they would just sing like incredibly in tune, precisely tuned notes or and then have the have guitarists or I think Tony Conrad at one point was boeing a guitar. But like John Cale and Tony Conrad both amplified their instruments to compete with the sound of amplified voices, and they focused on they were intensely focused on pitch. LaMonte Young was really interested and it still is. He's still alive in this thing called just intonation, where in the Western tempered scale, we basically crunched the overtone series that occurs naturally when you hit a fundamental note into make make it fit into the twelve tone series that Western music is based off of. And what that did was force the ratios of those overtone series out of sync with each other, creating uneven ratios. And this goes back to Pythagorean tuning and all this stuff where there are three two or two to three and different at different points in the scale. And what just intonation does is it retunes any instrument. You have to retune an entire piano to this to a system in which the relationships between those overtones are back to being completely even with one another. And you can also do it on fretless instruments, because even though you can play Western tempered scale in tune on a fretless instrument, you can also play in just intonation and it sounds weird. I would recommend everyone check out LaMonte Jung's The Well Tuned Piano, which is apparently a still being refined six and a half hour piece where he just plays this enormous concert Bosendorff, which is like a German piano that has like a full extra octave range at its bottom, and he just kind of noodles around in this just intonation and it sounds like Martian music. It's really incredible. And Tony Conrad's part in that has actually been really overlooked. Because he was a mathematician, he was able to really define the frequency side of this in a way that Lemonty either didn't let on that he was able to or didn't know as much about as Conrad. And that's something John Kaal has said where he's like Tony because of his philosophical differences with LEMONTI was kind of written out of this narrative but the idea of figuring out all this math stuff was largely because of Tony Conrad, and they would do these happenings or whatever the Theater of Eternal Music, where they would just for hours just sit and focus on extremely in tune singing pitches and bode tones and these creating these drones, trying to tune their ears precisely to be able to stop what they call difference tones, like the oscillations that happen when two notes aren't quite exactly in tune with each other. They were trying to eliminate all of that, and they would go for hours on this. They drank hash milkshakes, which was a specialty of Lamonti's, and people would just come and go and just listen to this and it sounds. Lamonti was also a very accomplished saxophone player, which is interesting because you think about him being this father of these sustained static drones. But he was like, when you listen to Dream Syndicate stuff, or at least or sorry theaterre Eternal Music, there's a different band called dream Syndicate at least some of the stuff that's been bootlegged and released. He's playing these wild like Coltrane esque scales, like all up and down over these drones, and you can actually hear that influence on Terry Riley, like stuff like rainbow and curved air. All the little keyboard flourishes that Terry Riley bases his stuff on are very reminiscent of what LaMonte was playing in these settings. And the craziest part about it is that, aside from the fact that they played ungodly loud, lou Reid would later quip when people said that Metal Machine Music, which is his guitar drone record based mostly on feedback, when people said that was hard to listen to or too loud, Reid would say, you should have heard the Dream Syndicate. And it's wild that none of this stuff is in wide release. Part of the big difference that Lamonti, the big beef that he has between him John Klee and Tony Conrad Tony Conrad passed recently, is that Lamonti recorded all of this stuff, but he believes that it's his property, that he holds the right to the compositions, And Tony Conrad's whole thing was like, no, these were improvisations. You developed this tuning system and the whole point of this, based on my input, these should not be considered your copyrighted works, and so Lamonti won't officially release any of it while he's still alive because he's demanding that. Kale and I guess Conrad's a state or whoever relinquished their claims to these compositions. So you can only hear it in like the Todd Haynes documentary and some of these bootlegs, but it is really fascinating music and pretet.

00:53:41
Speaker 1: Dream house what's that? And then dream House.

00:53:44
Speaker 2: So you can hear it in the dream House. Yeah. So if you're ever in Tribeca, check that thing out. It's like one of those things where people talk about going into and being like huh, this is weird, and then like coming to four hours later and being like.

00:53:55
Speaker 1: My god, yeah, it was exactly my experience. So, I mean, just as some who kind of only dips his toe into this world, I feel like I can speak to people who are, you know, not super familiar sure from a I mean, it's basically this little walk up in Tribeca and you go, you know, up a couple of floors and it's like you're entering somebody's apartment and you walk in and it's just completely empty except for this very strange, almost purply vu light vu. The windows are all covered up and there's this very almost eerie ethereal light, and then there's this tone, and otherwise the room's completely empty. I think it's just like white carpet and white walls. And what I was able to take from it was it's just this tone playing constantly. But after a while, you really do start to pick out different frequencies in the tone after you're there long enough. It's almost like the oral equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber. You've ever done a float tank, for example, first your board and you're like, okay, I get it, and then you do sort of go away. And I don't know how much of it it is based on beta waves, theta waves, whatever, those those sonic sound waves are where that a certain vibration it's supposed to calm you or I don't know how much of it is that at play, or how much of it is your mind, you know, looking for shapes and clouds in the sonic sense, like how much you're just looking for other things. A lot of it's interesting. It was very interesting. I spent a lot longer there than I ever thought I would. I feel like we were in there for like an hour and a half two hours.

00:55:32
Speaker 2: That's what I find so interesting about minimalist music, and especially this this Velvet Underground record, which, as I mentioned, maybe it's not my favorite Velvet Undground record, but I think it's the most fascinating mix of Kale's avant garde stuff and Lou the do wop songwriter for Higher Guy. But yeah, man, it's all about like trying to interrogate your relationship with sound. Really, it's like if you distill things down to a single note or two or whatever and just hold it for as long as possible, Like it's almost psychoacoustic, like what is your ear gonna find in there? Because you know, you reach a point. It might have been John Cage who said something like if you do something and it's boring, try doing it again for ninety minutes, because like it really does affect the way that you are perceiving these sounds. It's just really fascinating stuff to me.

00:56:22
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's a slightly more drawn out version of like saying the same word over and over again until to sound weird and just kind of decompose.

00:56:29
Speaker 2: Man, have you ever heard I am sitting in a room?

00:56:32
Speaker 1: Wait, why do I know that? Why do I know that? Is that Steve Reich? It sounds for me.

00:56:36
Speaker 2: I know it's Alvin Lucier, but it is a piece of sound art from around the same era. It's in nineteen sixty nine, and he just is narrating a text in an empty room and re recording it over and over again. And because of the size of the room and its structure, the resonant frequencies end up changing with each subsequent overdub. Really fascinating stuff.

00:57:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there would be I mean speaking of you know you just said John Cage just quote about you know, you think something is boring, try doing it over and over and over again. There is a piece that John Cale played, I think it was John Cages where it was a fairly simple piano fragment that was to be played. It was written in the notation just repeated some phenomenal number of times until you're playing it for eighteen hours.

00:57:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm thinking of There's also La Monte composition that he would He made these sort of dotaist compositions where one is just like composition number six, like go draw a straight line and follow it. But like one of them is just a perfect fit. It's a be in an F sharp and it just says to be held for a long time. So people have taken that and run with it. I do it with guitars. I've done performances of it with guitars. People put like, we'll do it on piano, with trying to prolong the sound for as long as possible. It's just, I mean, it's just people ask me why. I Like, people are like, oh, this is boring, or like why you spend so much time listening to like one note or whatever, And I just think it's such a fascinating way to rewire your relationship with sound and then ultimately music.

00:58:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's you know, in a way, it's there's two ways of looking at it, I think. And I haven't given any forethought into this. This is straight off off the top of my head that there's either you'd be amazed what you can find in that one note, which is my experience going at dream House and just hearing this tone, or it's like an oral fast where once it's over and you go back and you you reintegrate into the world and the tone system that we know and the music that we're more accustomed to, it suddenly takes on a whole new flavor. You hear people who undergo fasts and it changes their relationship food and their taste buds change. So, I mean, I guess there's two ways of looking at it. I haven't really been involved with it enough to, you know, feel as though it changed my relationship to sound that much, but I'm sure that if I did it enough times, it might. That's how it works. By first, one's free. Well, this is very fascinate. Thank you. I always I like when, oh yeah, of course, when you teach me about the I mean, one of my favorite aspects of this show is when you teach me about things that you're really passionate about that I really know very little about. Because there's nothing more that I love than hearing somebody's passionate about something that I know nothing about, because I love that to hear. I mean, that's kind of the ethos of this show. Like, you know, I love to hear what people are into and why, because I feel like you know everything you could possibly think of. There's somebody who's obsessed with it.

00:59:36
Speaker 2: I think that's really cool. I love the frequency side of things. I'm not good enough, I mean, thank you. I'm not good enough at math to like understand that much of it other than the reader's digest version I just gave. But like Glenn Bronca Harrisburg, Pennsylvania native, like myself, was this no wave composer and minimalist guy, sort of minim minimalist because of course they drilled down into post minimalism afterwards. But he was doing this crazy with guitars where he was like basically mutilating them and creating these giant like double necked instruments or just kpoing them incorrectly at different harmonic points and then getting like twelve people to play them at once, just like these aggressive single note strums. That stuff's really wild. And then I mean, what got me into this stuff is actually a kid in college who shared with me. Risk Chatham's a Crimson Grail, which is not I don't maybe maybe on streamers, but the most famous recording of it is with like I want to say four hundred guitars, but it might actually it might be one one. He has staged performances of this piece with one to four hundred guitars electric guitars. And the thing I love about drum music, and particularly amplified drum music is that even if you are this goes into the thing about like hearing what's not there or like your ear finding stuff, is that when you start stacking up these overtones with intense volume, that is really when you start to hear like angels singing, and just being like, what am I actually hearing coming from these relatively simple sound sources. It's just I don't know, I'm getting chills talking about it because I just remember listening to that album for the first time, really stoned and being like.

01:01:18
Speaker 1: What is going on? This is the divine music. It's like musical magic eye. I mean it really all of a sudden exactly's out. Yeah, but then if you think about it too much, you lose it and you kind of have to like let it go. Yeah, No, I get it. I just I'm not. It's not something that I do with any level of frequency, but I yeah, no, I understand it anyway.

01:02:22
Speaker 2: Good luck editing around all that. Lou Reading John Klee's friendship Go Adorable.

01:02:29
Speaker 1: Cale would say that lou Read was his first real friend in America, teaching him about literature and how to survive in New York A tall order. In nineteen sixty four, John Cale repaid the favor by offering a crash course on avant garde music and more importantly, encouragement It's Like You and Me. Cale later said that Lou was low energy at the time he first got to know him. That's his quote. Because Lou was struggling with depression. Cale was somebody that Lou respected. It meant the world that Cale liked his work. Lew had started to play Kale some of the songs he was writing, and specifically ones that Pickwick executives had no interest in, and the first of these that he played Kale was Heroin, and though Kale wasn't particularly interested in the acoustic, folky vibe of the song's early incarnation, he was drawn to lose highly literary, almost novelistic lyrics. They injected a dose of street realism into a music scene that was at that time infatuated with the British invasion.

01:03:29
Speaker 2: And the California coast and the Greenwich Village folk scene.

01:03:34
Speaker 1: Lou's words had to do with stark, everyday reality in Cale's recollection Lou's lyrics rejected the notion of Bob Dylan and Joan Biaz's songs, which in his eyes had more to do with asking questions. Better to make a statement, Cale would say, Lou told Cale that Pickwick wouldn't let him record these songs like Heroin for obvious reasons, and Cale thought this was a tremendous shame. He would say, it kind of pissed me off. Said let's just do it ourselves. Let's put a band together and go out there and play them. And that's where an underground started. So they hold up in the Filthy apartment on the Lower east Side, which at that time was a neighborhood so rough that the landlord collected rent with a gun. The pair literally had no money, and they survived by finding wood in the street to burn for heat and throwing all the food they found into a communal bowl in the kitchen. That that fat breaks my heart.

01:04:33
Speaker 2: Is gross, Well, yeah, but it's kind.

01:04:35
Speaker 1: Of Tokensie and John Kle felt safe with Lou, who was a local and more importantly, a survivor. They spent a year rehearsing and developing their material, with Kle serving as an arranger, adding an experimental touch to lose more pop centric or at least melodic songs. Well sure, both Lou and John Kle had a s gifts for improvisation and jams that their shared apartment would go on all the time. Surprisingly, they had a lot of success as buskers performing louse songs in Harlem, but otherwise they made money by checks notes selling drugs.

01:05:16
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, time honored tradition. Also, they were on welfare. It's important to note that most of your favorite mid century art was made while all of these people were benefiting from a robust public endowment that was systematically gutted after they were able to do all this. And what was the rent again?

01:05:34
Speaker 1: Twenty five dollars a month, which was what Lou made a week at Pickwick.

01:05:39
Speaker 2: So yeah, sitting pretty well sixty was nineteen sixty six sixty seven.

01:05:46
Speaker 1: This was sixty five four or five dollar infliction second three hundred dollars two hundred and forty five dollars and seventy nine cents.

01:05:55
Speaker 2: You might be lucky to pay that much for a toilet in New York that you could use all by your lonesome.

01:06:01
Speaker 1: That's like half a parking spot.

01:06:03
Speaker 2: That's true, that is yeah, yeah, good lord.

01:06:07
Speaker 1: Anyway, moving on, John Cale and Lou Reid brought guitarist Sterling Morrison into the mix after a chance meeting on the subway. Morrison and Reid had been classmates together at Syracuse, and after reconnecting on the public transit system, they decided to get together and jam. The trio rehearsed and recorded demos in the famous Ludlow Street apartment throughout the summer of nineteen sixty five. And the name for this loose collective morphed from the Primitives, which is the band put together to promote the Ostrich single, to the Warlocks, which was also The Grateful Dead's early name, and then the following Spikes, which kind of rules and I have to assume as a heroin euphemism. Oh yeah, yeah, it's gotta be okay. Until they finally took their soon to be iconic moniker from a paperback expose. And you have a fact about that that I didn't know.

01:06:55
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Supposedly this was written by journalist named Michael Lay. I didn't look into the rest of his work, but as I mentioned, we alluded to earlier in another rant that Jordan will have extreme difficulty editing around. Tony Conrad had just found a copy of this book lying on the sidewalk, and it was this drummer, Angus McLeese, who is in the Theater of Eternal Music and would become The Velvet's actual first drummer, suggested that they go with the name Good. Then it's good, It's good.

01:07:26
Speaker 1: Well, this Angus mclea's guy. Once he helped them choose the name for the band, it was kind of a last good call he had. He departed the scene very quickly once the group got their first gig at a New Jersey high school, because he was very uh we'll say, bohemian, and he resented at having to show up at a specific time and place to play, and when he discovered that they be receiving money for their performance, he apparently quit on the spot, grumbling that the band had sold out.

01:07:54
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, it is really hilarious how people were so hardline about that stuff back then. If only they knew yes.

01:08:01
Speaker 1: So now, the proto Velvet Underground had no drummer and they were desperate to fill the spot because they had a gig on the horizon. So Sterling Morrison asked his friend Jim Tucker if his sister Maureen known to the world as Mo was available. She was, and thus the classic Velvet Underground lineup was in place.

01:08:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, Moe Tucker's fascinating drummer. She played all of her drums just on their sides. She taught herself how to drum. Apparently she was really like many drummers, Like many drummers by Babatunde Olatunji's Drums of Passion, which comes up all the game time if you ever read anything about drummers from the sixties. She didn't use a high hat, she didn't use symbols. She used a mallet and a stick and just sort of rolled over these upturned drums. She was apparently inspired as well by Bo Diddley, and in particularly the Bo Diddley beat Damp Dam d dun, which you can kind of hear that darning pattern in her work with the velvets.

01:09:06
Speaker 1: Her lack of symbols or high hats, how much of that was just like an economic necessity? Was that a choice or was it? Like? Yeah, I mean, I gotta say it was.

01:09:15
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know anything about her early life, but like you know, most kids, if they start playing in band, they start like just learning fundamentals on like snare or auxiliary percussion before they graduated to a full kit. And she maybe just assembled an ad hoc kit and just always played it the way that she wanted.

01:09:31
Speaker 1: It's cool, it is. Meanwhile, things did not go well for the Velvets first drummer, Angus mcleae. Per his Wikipedia page, a heavy drug user who was never particularly mindful of his physical health, McLeese died of hypoglycemia and pulmonary tuberculosis at the Shanta Baton Hospital and kafman Do on June twenty first, nineteen seventy nine, aged forty one. The cause of death has been attributed to malnutrition. He was cremated to the tradition of the Tibetan Buddhists in a funeral pyre. Sounds like a lot of easily avoidable things. Yeah, it does, doesn't it. It sure does. That's what happens when you refuse to accept money.

01:10:15
Speaker 2: Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable.

01:10:19
Speaker 1: Well, we tried to get out of it. He went all over to kathman Do, But you can't escape the West, Thank You.

01:10:27
Speaker 2: Velvets performed soundtracks for screenings of experimental films. Yeah, they would perform live soundtracks for stuff by Piero Helixer and Barbara Rubin, and they in fact appear in Helixer's nineteen sixty five short film Venus in Furs. Rubin, most known for her nineteen sixty three underground film Christmas on Earth, became a devoted fan of the band through this connection and introduced them to their first manager, music critic Al Aronowitz, most famous for being the person who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles.

01:10:59
Speaker 1: The year prior that was the famous occasion, according to the legend, at least that Bob Dillan introduced the Beatles to pot which has been disputed, but it's still famous.

01:11:09
Speaker 2: Occurrence indeed, and the rest. Aronowitz was a New York Post columnist by day and a manager at night, and he agreed to manage the Velvets. He paired them with the New Jersey garage rock band Middle Class with a Y, whom he also managed, for a gig at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey on December eleventh, nineteen sixty five. It won't come to anyone surprise that suburban high school auditoriums, particularly in Jersey, were less than ideal venue for a band with song titles like Heroin. As John Klee says in the American Master's documentary, we were so loud and horrifying to the high school audience that the majority of them, teachers, students, and parents fled screaming. Eventually, the Velvets wrangled a residency at Greenwich Village cub called the Cafe Bizarre. Its name was somewhat optimistic, considering neither the owners nor the patrons enjoyed the sounds of the house band. Kel would say. The joke was, we knew how good we were by how many people we drove out. Velvnondgund attempted to compromise by adding some standard issue rock covers to the repertoire. As guitarist Sturley Morrison, who whips described in a nineteen ninety interview, we got six nights a week at the Cafe bizaar some ungodly number of sets, forty minutes on, twenty minutes off. We played some covers like Little Queenie, Big Bright Lights, Big City, the Black R and B songs Lou and I liked and as many of our own songs as we had. Sterling Morrison is just again lightning in a bottle with this lineup, you know, because he was obsessed with like Steve Cropper and Stacks R and B volt and you hear that in his soloing and his playing. There's one moment there's like a bend he does in Pale Blue Eyes that just like never fails to give me goosebumps. Yeah, man, And it's just he adds just that another wow factor to the band of this like sixties R and B stuff. So anyway, after a few weeks they could not stand this grueling set schedule, and Morrison later told Slugo Magazine one night we played the Black Angel's Death song and the owner came up and said, if you play that song one more time, you're fired. So they opened their next set with it. You've also heard that it was maybe a prolonged version of Sister Ray, which equally disquieting. Your mileage may vary. Whatever the case was. The band were relieved of their post, but not before catching the attention of one Andy Warhol.

01:13:24
Speaker 1: Yes, the pride of Pittsburgh, PA.

01:13:27
Speaker 2: Baby.

01:13:27
Speaker 1: He was never referred to as that. You know, his name was actually Andy Warhola. And when his name was printed once early in his career, they just dropped the A. I think it was like a printing error, and he's liked it. Do you know that, No, I didn't Warhola.

01:13:41
Speaker 2: Is that Polish?

01:13:42
Speaker 1: I think it is.

01:13:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. What did they say when Ted Kaczynski died the Polish lost their last literary icon.

01:13:55
Speaker 1: I've never heard that. Yeah, who's they? You?

01:13:59
Speaker 2: No? No, something I saw equipping Twitter quip.

01:14:04
Speaker 1: Already a prolific painters, sculptor, and filmmaker by nineteen sixty five, Andy Warhol sought to expand his famous factory empire into rock and roll on the advice of factory confidante Paul Morrissey, the thirty seven year old star of the art world. He is one year older than us. When he discovered the Velvet Underground, that's okay, moving on.

01:14:24
Speaker 2: Things were easier back then. There were fewer people, fewer people, there were.

01:14:33
Speaker 1: More money, fewer people. Yes, he decided to drop into the Cafe Bazaar and catch the Velvet Underground set, and he was so taken by what he heard that he impulsively extended an offer to act as the band's manager, imagined being the Velvet Undercraft Andy Warhol, But what would the equivalent now be.

01:14:52
Speaker 2: I mean Big.

01:14:52
Speaker 1: Banksy dropping in in like a hoodie and a screen mask or something and being like, hey, you're really good.

01:15:00
Speaker 2: He comes to the gutter at eleven thirty on a Wednesday and he's like, you guys are all right. I'll give you some money and amps and a place to work, and.

01:15:09
Speaker 1: I'll co sign you whenever you want to do. Yeah, we need to bring.

01:15:12
Speaker 2: Back patrons to the arts.

01:15:14
Speaker 1: Man.

01:15:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's such a it's such a lost leader. Like, right off, everything you could give to a band. Seriously, just fund a band for like two years, complete tax right off. You'll never make your money back from it. Lounder your money that way, starting with me and then a lot of other people. If anyone in the in the SF Bay area knows any you know, cryptodorcs or any of these losers, I will kiss their ass if they give me money, only to turn on them.

01:15:44
Speaker 1: Immediately, Sayandy Warhol agreed to be The Veiled Underground's manager, but this title would have rather loose connotations. He was basically their executive producer, financing their recordings and giving them spots that is, exploding plastic and inevitable multimedia art shows, which will touch more on later, and using his clout to get them deals. As far as shaping the Velvet Underground sound. However, the most he'd do was hector Low to write more, tossing dozens of potential song titles at him as bait I love this. Lou would later say, I'd come into the factory and Andy would ask me how many songs I'd written. I'd say I've written ten songs. He'd say, that's one of my favorite things is all the interviews of the people in the Velvet Underground would do these withering impressions of Andy Warhol. Oh yeah, every scout, he'd say, it's like Lauren Michael's talking to all like Sam. I'd come in and say I'd written ten songs, and Andy would say, oh, You're so lazy. Why didn't you write fifteen? Clothes? I could work on that.

01:16:46
Speaker 2: Do you like Crispin Glover in the Oliver Stone Doors movie or do you like Bowie Bowie Warhol in the bask Yacht movie.

01:16:56
Speaker 1: I mean, there's this guy that I went to college with who basically sounded like a mix of like if you crossed Andy Warhol with Chris from Family Guy, and so he's who I'm He's who I'm doing. Now you're so weird. It's all so weird. You're so weird. Everything was always so weird to him. So that's that's like, who I hear? Now that's pretty good. I can't do it.

01:17:20
Speaker 2: I'll think it's more effeminine than that.

01:17:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Andy Warhol did make one significant alteration to the band's sound, fearing that the Velvets lack the requisite glamour to become stars. Glamour was obviously very important to Warhol. He suggested the addition of a striking German model known as Nico, perhaps most famous.

01:17:43
Speaker 2: I love I mean, yeah, okay, sorry, I don't.

01:17:47
Speaker 1: I don't much care for her.

01:17:49
Speaker 2: Oh really, I think she's incredible. Have you listened to her solo stuff? Not Chelsea Girls, but like the goth Ones. Yeah, yeah, they're so dark incredible that just yeah, I mean imagine her, Imagine that woman striding into a room. Sure, she's like six foot tall. The New Yorker once described her quote improbable bone structure, and then she just LEDs out with that voice, Like, what an incredible presence that must have been.

01:18:19
Speaker 1: Yes, do you have it? You have an interpretation of her voice for me the day. Nika around this time was probably most famous for having a small role in the nineteen sixty Fellini film La Dulce Vita, and she was also did you know this I did until researching this. She was the cover model on the nineteen sixty two Bill Evans album Moonbeams.

01:18:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the first album right after his musical soulmate Scot LaFaro died. And so Chuck Israel's is playing on that Who is actually the guy who tutored Paul Simon in jazz theory and inspired him to come up with the court changes to fifty Ways to Leave your lover?

01:18:58
Speaker 1: That wasn't an invitation. I was not giving you an opening there. That was very you know, actually funny story, as I mentioned, or plug you could say on every episode we've done lately. I uh. One of the other shows that I heard has me working on is the Paul Anka talk show Our Way, and his co host is this guy Skip Bronson, and Skip Bronson's wife is Edie Baskin, who is the photographer on SNL for like forty years throughout the show's beginning, Like all those incredible photos that they're like tinted in the weird ways of like you know how cut the commercial break and all those pictures of the guests, those are all her, Like she's super instrumental in like the look of SNL. She's like kind of a legend. She was dating Paul Simon and that's who that song is about.

01:19:48
Speaker 2: And yeah, oh wow, yeah, fifty.

01:19:50
Speaker 1: Ways Leave Your Lover is about leaving Edie Baskin. Wow. Yeah, I just learned that from her husband the other day. I don't know, I don't know out there that is, but that's apparently I hope I'm allowed to share that. Sorry skip. Uh So. Andy Warhol tries to persuade the Velvet Underground to welcome Nico into their midst, and this proposal was not met with complete enthusiasm. Apparently Lou was especially displeased, but she was eventually accepted, i'll say, into their ranks as a featured vocalist. Well, sure, well we'll get there. Despite releasing versions of Gordon Lightfoot's I'm Not Saying in nineteen sixty five, which features a young Jimmy Page on acoustic twelve string Monk Tucker would say that Nico quote couldn't hold a pitch and she.

01:20:45
Speaker 2: Was half yeah, she had a perforated ear drum.

01:20:48
Speaker 1: I'm half deaf. I can sing great.

01:20:52
Speaker 2: You Nico, I don't.

01:20:53
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear it. In nineteen sixty six War Orphans. In nineteen sixty six, critic Richard Goldstein described Nico's vocal sound as this is I love this, like a cello getting up in the morning. People.

01:21:09
Speaker 2: Really, writers really went ham on those on discussing her voice. I mean Andy Warhol said it was like an IBM computer with a German accent.

01:21:18
Speaker 1: That's also very good. Yes, God, can you imagine if Kubrick had that as the voice of Hal in two thousand and one.

01:21:25
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, David, I cannot allow that.

01:21:30
Speaker 1: I'm sure I could get some kind of like voice cloone thing to do that now, Oh that's so good. John Klee, for his part, would describe Nico as quote, a blonde Iceberg in the middle of the stage, surrounded by all of us in black. This is quite an image. Andy Warhol was so taken by her remote aloof beauty that he initially pitched having her perform on stage with the band while in a plexiglass box. Gross but also kind of great, Yeah, but also growth to Yeah, that's true. Lou Reid, for all of his resentment of Nico, would admit that they probably wouldn't have gotten the record contract if she wasn't so beautiful. Yeah, Nico's appearance on the debut album was basically a non negotiable clause in the otherwise very generous management deal that Andy Warhol was offering the group, So Lou saw it as a very bitter pill that he simply had the swallow, hence attempts to minimize her appearance on their debut album the second the ink was dry on their contract. For example, when Andy demanded that Lou write a more poppy song for Nico to sing, who complied with Sunday Morning, only to sing the song himself in what was I take to be an impression of Nico that I'm fairly certain was mean spirited, and ultimately Nico only sang three tracks on the album.

01:22:49
Speaker 2: But man, I think All Tomorrow's Parties was one of the first Velvet songs that I heard, and I was just like that was mind blowing.

01:22:57
Speaker 1: Well as a Wes Anderson, wasn't that in or a ton of bombs? I feel like I was definitely in.

01:23:03
Speaker 2: No, that's these days. Oh, I've been out walks.

01:23:10
Speaker 1: It's very good. That's very good. Yeah, there was a time I could do a really good shine it Shine, and now it just goes in the bowie and I can't It's I can't do it. Who else talk about was a is a.

01:23:23
Speaker 2: It's tough, a very you know, he's got a.

01:23:25
Speaker 1: Well lou in this ero when he's trying to do the affected euro Yeah, and he's basically doing Nico well in more wayted one. Interestingly, both Lou Reed and John Klee would have affairs with Nico while she was in the band, apparently at the same time. When I say same time, I mean never.

01:23:44
Speaker 2: Mind, they were perhaps overlapping weeks. Actually, interestingly enough, John kel shacked up with Edie Sedgwick. Speaking of Factory Girls, they were together for like six weeks as these things happened.

01:23:57
Speaker 1: Oh wow, fem Fatale and I'll Be Your were both written in Nico's.

01:24:01
Speaker 2: Honor are me? It was really off key but just like her.

01:24:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I can't imagine that. Considering how stormy lou and John's relationship would be in it within eighteen months of recording these songs. I can't imagine that this helped their relationship. Yeah.

01:24:20
Speaker 2: I have two minds about Nico. On one hand, Nico innocent, like totally constantly her whole life defined by her relationships with men, which we are about to do. Yeah yeah, and like obviously tormented by her past and not being taken seriously. Yeah. Yeah, her appearance was such a huge thing, and yeah, I mean I really feel for her for that, but also by all accounts, a racist and an awful mother. But you know, in effort to correct the thumbnail sketching that she often gets because I just remember everyone being like she was like a figurehead and the band did their best work when they got her out of the way, and just her beingmpletely short shrifted. But she was a fascinating woman under her own right and did a lot of interesting work. So yeah, But she also had an incredibly tragic life that also reads like a who's who of nineteen sixties cool. She was kind of like a sexy forest gump traversing the landscape. She was born in Cologne in Germany, but moved to Spreeworld forest outside of Berlin to escape the World War II bombings of Cologne. Her father was conscripted into the weh Maacht and literally no one knows how he died. Various stories have him being put out of his misery by a commanding officer after he was shot by French sniper, dyeing concentration camp, being hospitalized for shell shock, and later dying in a psychosis. But when she moved back to Berlin, she was pretty immediately hired for work as a model thanks to her striking height I think she was five point ten five eleven and again what the New Yorker called her improbable bone structure. Unfortunately, around this time she was also allegedly raped by a black US serviceman in Lynn, which people have mentioned as an excuse for some of her awful racism, but one biographer of hers kind of disputes the entire incident, saying that he went looking for records of this because the guy was supposedly hanged, and could not find anything about the execution or indeed even the trial. Anyway, Nico parlayed her feliny cameo ladoce vita into a bigger role opposite French new wave star Alene Delon, although she showed up months after shooting had begun and she had already been replaced. She then had an affair with Delon that supposedly resulted in the birth of her son, Christian Ari Boulon, though Alaine denied the praternity for his entire life. As I mentioned, Nico was not a wonderful mother. She pretty quickly abandoned the kid and he was left to fend for it himself at one point completely and Delon's mother and stepfather found him like alone an apartment in like horrifyingly squalid conditions. Nico's contribution to his upbringing was, for example, to allegedly rub heroin onto his gums to calm him down when he was crying.

01:27:04
Speaker 1: That's a waste of heroin.

01:27:06
Speaker 2: And then later she just took it up to the next step and straight up injected him with heroin. They did heroin together, and then he overdosed on that in twenty twenty three. After a successful moderately successful career as a photographer, she met Bob Dylan in nineteen sixty four and had a short affair with him that produced the song I'll Keep it with mine, and then the year after, thanks to Rolling Stone, Brian Jones, with whom she had an affair and got pregnant by, though she terminated the pregnancy, recorded the aforementioned Gordon Lightfoot cover.

01:27:36
Speaker 1: Brian Jones man, he was like one of the most notorious sixties womanizers, an era that really fostered quite a few womanizers. He had five children with five different women, all of whom he abandoned. Ultimately, he had so many children with so many different women that he thought of was perfectly fine to recycle names, naming two of his sons Julian God.

01:27:57
Speaker 2: Brian Jones sucks. It is hilarious how much first of all for the Brian Jonestown massacre and all of their sins, and second of all as a human. Oh, he was scared of her. That was the funniest thing that Cale, Yeah, that Cale and all of these other people mentioned about her, was that like, because he was a tiny man, he was barely five foot five, and so people would say she would like come into parties and swinging London, and Brian Jones would be like, we'd better leave. So Nico next landed in New York, where she collided with Warhol in The Velvets, also having affair post Velvets with Jim Morrison, and this is mostly worth mentioning because Warhol was deeply in love with Jim Morrison and once gave him an ostentatious telephone good band name made of gold, according to the Oliver Stone movie The Doors, so that he could talk to God.

01:28:50
Speaker 1: He would later talk to God for real two years later in a bathtub in Paris. Yeah, she wasn't, she said. She maintained that she saw him the last day he was alive.

01:29:00
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, she saw him in like driving by in a Parisian taxi and like waved Tim, but they didn't. They didn't. Then he overdosed later, Oh, I didn't know.

01:29:08
Speaker 1: Wow.

01:29:08
Speaker 2: Leonard Cohen fell in love with her around that time and wrote Joan of Arc the closer to nineteen seventy one's Songs of Love and Hate about her, but their relationship is unrequited.

01:29:17
Speaker 1: Which one was That song was a lover Hey.

01:29:21
Speaker 2: It was a love song. He was struck by her and she did not reciprocate, astonishing considering Leonard Cohen's reputation as a later man and the fact that she slept with so many other men. Leonard did not make the list. She also broke a young Jackson Brown's heart. He had just moved to New York and was one of a succession of guitarists he backed her, including Tim Buckley like Tim Harden too right.

01:29:43
Speaker 1: Tim Harden was another one.

01:29:44
Speaker 2: I didn't find his name, but their brief affair did end up with These Days, which Jackson Brown wrote at like seventeen as one of the most incredible songs ever written, and which Nico recorded her indelible version of for her record Chelsea Girls. Although she hated the produceuction on all of that. She was so pissed off when that was done afterwards. But her first introduction to Warhol was hilarious. She called him from a Mexican restaurant where she was fishing out the fruit from a picture of sangria and explained to him on the phone, I only liked the food that floats in the wine. And they talked for hours. They talked for hours after that.

01:30:25
Speaker 1: We're all so weird. He's so weird. He really is, though. God. I wonder if that was the Mexican restaurant in the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel, which I think has been there forever. I actually went on their website earlier today and tried to check this, and within ten seconds I saw prominent photos of Andy Warhol in nineteen sixty six at that restaurant, and also a prominent photo of a picture of Sancria with lots of fruit. So maybe I choose to be he was there. Yeah.

01:30:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm fully aware that I'm doing exactly what I said was unfair to Nico, but it is hilarious. Among her other paramours at various times, French actress Jean Moreau, and apocryphally Coco Chanel.

01:31:05
Speaker 1: Oh wow.

01:31:07
Speaker 2: Although she didn't make a habit out of sleeping with women, one person who knew her said she just thought it was briefly trendy to be a lesbian.

01:31:16
Speaker 1: Coco Chanel would have been I mean, Chanelle died in I think seventy one.

01:31:20
Speaker 2: Well, this would have been in the or late forties or early fifties when she was modeling. Uh oh, okay, al Ronowitz, who had some just awful things to say about her, and I think Please Kill Me, possibly Jimmy Hendrix, definitely, Iggy Pop, who claimed in Please Kill Me to have gotten his first sed from Nico, also probably Serge Gainesborg, Oh my God, Yeah, and of course most pertinent to this discussion Lou Reid and John kel Sterling Morrison recalled in Please Kill Me, which is the oral history of the early days of Punk by collected by Lakes McNeil, Nico would try and do little sexual politics things in the band. Whoever seemed to be having undue influence on the core events, you'd find Nico close to them, So she went from Lou to Kale, but neither of those affairs lasted very long. There's also the famous incident in which she strolled into a Velvets rehearsal very late, and after being greeted by Lou, I think it's Kale who recalls this, Nico simply stood there. You could see she was waiting to reply in her own time. Ages later, out of the blue came her first words, I cannot make love to Jews anymore.

01:32:27
Speaker 1: That's gonna be my text notification from you from two at.

01:32:34
Speaker 2: Nico's prejudices ultimately forced her exit from New York post Velvets. There was a famous nineteen seventy one incident recounted by Danny Fields, among others, who was a friend of hers and the Ramones manager.

01:32:46
Speaker 1: Right.

01:32:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:32:47
Speaker 1: He was like a big punk scene stir he was. I think he was a pr guy. I think that was his thing. Like he introduced Bowie to Iggy Pop during Bowie's first New York trip.

01:32:58
Speaker 2: That wasn't an invitation. I just sad. The Ramones have a song called Danny says it might be about a different danger.

01:33:06
Speaker 1: No, he is the one that is involved. I don't know, okay what his title was, but he was involved with the Ramones. Yeah.

01:33:12
Speaker 2: So, at a dinner in nineteen seventy one, Nico struck a black singer and activist named Emmearetta Marx in the face with a glass or bottle. The wound needed multiple stitches, and Nico said, doing so, I hate black people. One of her biographers suggested that she preface the attack by saying, you don't know about suffering, and that she had become incensed by the suggestion that a black American could compare their experience with oppression and so forth to hers in wartime Germany. Just going to leave that one right there.

01:33:45
Speaker 1: That's a fun minefield.

01:33:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Supposedly, fearing retribution by the black panthers. Nico fled to France, where she fell heavily into heroin addiction while dating French new wave director Philippe Gerrel in the nineteen seventies. The incident did not make her more enlightened. Island Records dropped her after learning of racist comments that she made an interview, which she summed up as charmingly, I said to some interviewer that I didn't like negroes, that's all. I don't like the features. They're so much like animals, awful stuff. Nico did release a stretch of solo albums. Her post Chelsea Girls record, The Marble Index, was produced by Kale and the oppressive icy atmosphere by this, which is you know, that voice accompanied by a droning harmonium. But she was supposedly Jim Morrison was like a booster of hers. He was like, you know, go record your own stuff, like do this, blah blah blah. There's this hilarious picture of her in Sant Trepez with like these two people out on like a che chez lounges out in the sun, and then her all in black under an umbrella. I think he also told her to stop dyeing her hair blonde, and people have called these records like early goth music. Essentially they are a hard listen but pretty powerful stuff. By the eighties, she was living in Manchester, basically penniless, just doing a bunch of at tour dates wherever she could. I believe the famous quote about her time in Manchester is that she only owned her drug paraphernalia, a pair of leather boots, and like her clothes at any given time, and so she was sort of considered an elder stateswoman of the Manchester scene actually, which is kind of funny.

01:35:28
Speaker 1: So this would have been early ages, so this would have been like, yeah, right around Manchester. Wow, that's so weird.

01:35:35
Speaker 2: But yeah, she was. There's a documentary about her from this time that or or there's a dramatization about her at this time that I forget the name of, but I that I watched, and there's a very interesting part in it where she talks about and I think from a real life interview where she's like guzzling lemonchello at breakfast and just like shoveling in pasta because she was trying to destroy her looks, because she was so desperate to be taken soon seriously as a composer. At one point she said as a musician. At one point she said, men wrote the songs and I sang them. So she was trying to get out from under that that she just wanted her appearance to be a complete non issue, and she just like fully stopped taking care of herself. She was obviously on speed throughout the sixties, as everyone was, but she just drank a lot ate, a lot of food, and did a bunch of heroin. Eventually, she did get clean and took up cycling as a way to stay healthy after getting clean in the eighties, and then she took her bike to go buy weed while vacationing with her son Ali in Ibitha when she fell and hit her head. She was unconscious and rejected from four different hospitals, The last one misdiagnosed her condition as heat exhaustion since it was the hottest day of the year, and she died of a cerebral hemorrhage stemming from that accident in nineteen eighty eight, at the age of forty nine. No one from her New York life attended her funeral or even replied to her manager when informed of her death.

01:37:00
Speaker 1: That's cold.

01:37:01
Speaker 2: I you just find her such a fascinating woman, man, I mean, she's, yeah, a tremendous artist, fraught by all this male coated but also a manifestly awful woman in certain ways. But back to nineteen sixty six, spinning newspaper smash back Nico the headline of the headline of the New York Times. Nico still young and heroin free, and.

01:37:27
Speaker 1: Lou Reid probably has a fully functional liver, and John Keo was in his modal enemy and still had weird hair. I call this section ring Ring Ring, Ring, Ring, Ring, Ring Ring Banana Gramophone because it's the Banana album and a Grand Funds Gramma fuz the record. Yeah, well that was really good. That That was the best I had in this sweat my damn tits off out here, up and down the court night after night, carrying your ass. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Wow. Back to nineteen sixty six, Now builled as the Velvet Underground with Nico, Andy Warhol incorporated the band into his series of multimedia performances dubbed a truly incredible name the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. I love that a marriage of underground music, film, dance, and lights. Also assisting with these performances was the twenty seven year old Norman Dolph, an account representative at Columbia Records who moonlit as a DJ in sound man. He would say, I operated a mobile discotheque, if not the first and at least the second one in New York. I was an art buff, and my thing was that I'd provide the music at art galleries for shows and openings, but it asked for a piece of art as payment instead of cash. That's smart. That's how I met Andy Warhol. By the spring of nineteen sixty six, Warhol decided it was time to take his charges into the recording studio, but knowing little about such matters, he sought out Dolph for advice. As Dolph recalled and Sound on Sound. When Warhol told me he wanted to make a record with those guys, I said, oh, I can take care of that, no problem. I'll do it in exchange for a picture. I could have said I'd do it in exchange for some kind of finder's fee, but I asked for some artwork and he was agreeable to that. Dolf was tasked with booking a studio, covering a portion of the costs himself, co producing, and leading on his colleagues at Columbia to ultimately release the product. For his trouble, he was given one of Warhol's silver Death and Disaster series canvases. He would say, a beautiful painting. Really regrettably, I sold it around seventy five when I was going through a divorce for seventeen thousand dollars. Ooh. I remember thinking at the time, geez, I bet Lou Reed hasn't made seventeen thousand dollars on the Velvet Underground album yet. If I had it today, it'd be worth a round two million. I'm not quite sure when this interview was done, but I would say that figure is probably doubled.

01:40:07
Speaker 2: Wouldn't you be a little like I would be kind of pissed if I got an Andy Warhol original, because wasn't he just into his like at this point where he could have been made by someone else's hands entirely just and he's like here here, thank you, Hey, I can't do it. But I'd be tissed. I'd be like, what did you have an intern do this like thanks, man, I.

01:40:29
Speaker 1: Mean yeah, but I mean you know what, A it's how it looks, and if he liked how it looked, great, and b that the stuff retains its value, so in a way, it doesn't really matter. Man. There was this There was this vintage store up the street from me on Mantrose called Ollioxen Free and it closed and for years they had a original Warhol print. It was a poster that he had done for some event in the early seventies or might even been late sixties. And I got the whole rundown on it, and they offered to put me in touch with the old you know, Greenwich village who gave it to them to sell, and their acting as the broker far and I always went in and I always thought about getting it. It was always a little more money than I had at the time. And now I really wish i'd gotten it because it was so cool looking and it was just, you know, have a Warhol. And they were like, you know, very happy to put me in touch with like the guy who obtained it from Warhol personally. Oh I still think about that. So yes. Unfortunately, the co producer will say of the Velvet Underground Debut, passed up his chance for points on the album for a Warhol painting that he sold in the seventies way too early for a minuscule fraction of what it's worth today. That is not the only financially questionable decision this guy made regarding memorabilia acquired during this period. Norman Dolph apparently gave away his original assetate recording of the Velvet Underground Debut. It resurfaced decades later at New York's Chelsea Flea Market, where was purchased by a collector in two thousand and two for seventy five cents. The collector sold on eBay in December two thousand and six for twenty five grand and I can only imagine what it's worth now, and thus concludes our belongs in a museum segment for this episode. Norman Dolph's big contribution to the Velvet Underground sessions was that he found the studio to record the album. His day job at Columbia meant that he worked with a lot of smaller label imprints, including Scepter Records, who released records by people like the Cherelles and Dial Warwick. Their small Midtown offices boasted their own recording facility. Hilariously. This same building at two fifty four or West fifty fourth Street would later house Studio fifty four, So a lot of history of that bill. This is like the Ramones recording upstairs at Radio City.

01:42:49
Speaker 2: Hilarious.

01:42:50
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, the Velvets might not have known a lot about recording studios at this phase. They were very much novices, but they knew enough to know that this place was kind of a In the liner notes to the Peel Slowly in Sea Box Set, lou Red describes the facilities as quote somewhere between reconstruction and demolition. The walls were falling over, there were gaping holes on the floor, and carpentry equipment littered the place. John Klee recalls being similarly underwhelmed. It is nineteen ninety nine autobiography. The building was on the verge of being condemned. We went in there and found that the floorboards were torn up, the walls were out, and there were only four mics working. But it was here over the course of just four days in mid April. The exact dates are disputed, that they recorded the bulk of their debut.

01:43:37
Speaker 2: One of the funnier things that I was reading was I was like, oh, mic policeman, trying to get real nerdy about it, and they were like, we set up the microphones where there weren't holes in the floor.

01:43:45
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, yipped up. It's the record of the majority of their debut here, Heroin, I'm Waiting for the Man, and Venus and Furs were re recorded.

01:43:53
Speaker 2: In Hollywood at a studio frequented by Frank Zappa, which is, oh, we'll talk about that, their mortal enemy, Frank Zappa.

01:44:02
Speaker 1: And Sunday Morning was tackled at New York's Atlantic Record Studio that November, when the release date for the album got pushed back, So that was a late addition. The cost for this album isn't known definitively. Estimates vary from fifteen hundred to three grand, or fifteen thousand to thirty thousand in today's dollars. That's hilarious. So this Norman Dolph guy was the co producer, engineer, Let's say he was actually the guy who knew how to use recording equipment. But Andy Warhol was, at least on paper, the producer. Let's talk about Andy Warhol.

01:44:39
Speaker 2: Producer wandering into the studio looking at shiny things.

01:44:43
Speaker 1: Wow.

01:44:43
Speaker 2: Oh no, that's that's that's walking. Yeah, I know, I know. Andy may have returned to the building a lot a decade later when it housed Studio fifty four, but he was somewhat scarce during the recording of the album that he was nominally co producing. In reality, he approached his role more like that of a producer a film, raising the money and hiring a crew to do the actual work. On the rare occasions he did attend the sessions, Reid recalled him sitting behind the board, gazing with wrapped fascination at all the blinking lights. Of course, he didn't know anything about record production. He just sat there and said, ooh, that's fantastic. The band would later part company with Warhol on less than friendly terms. Reid would fire him as their manager after the album's release because he was sick of being overshadowed. The Warhole's other lasting contribution was securing equipment for the band, including the Vox amps that were known as the super Beetle Amp. Imagine a weirder pairing than the Beatles Velvet Underground. Actually, I'm sure, I'm sure the Beatles would have fronted and been like, well, this is such interesting events stuff that you're doing.

01:45:43
Speaker 1: You know, I've never heard them talk about the Velvet underground of all like the Beatles minute even for clout chasing purposes. Yeah, and Paul would have been the one because he was so into like John Cage and yeah, like I don't recall ever hearing them talk about him.

01:46:00
Speaker 2: Anyway. At the time, the Velvets were more or less content with his role as manager producer. As Reid reflected in nineteen eighty six on an episode of The South Bank Show, the advantage of having Andy Warhol as a producer was that because it was Andy Warhol, engineers would lead everything in its pure state. They'd say, is that alright, mister Warhol, And he'd say, oh yeah, so right at the beginning, we experienced what it was like to be in the studio and record things our way and have essentially total freedom. They would say that Tom Wilson, who produced Bob Dylan in about one hundred other things at this time period that you love, was more of a producer than Warhol ever was. While Cale acted as the arranger, the Velvets and Tom Wilson would re team for White Light, White Heat, and Cal later said of Wilson's work, the band never again had as good a producer as Tom Wilson. There was the Andy Kaufman esque suggestion that Warhol made for the Delegate, I'll be your Mirror, that was never implemented. Reed recalled, we would have the record fixed with a built in so it would go, I'll be your mirror, I'll be your mirror. I'll be your mirror, so.

01:47:04
Speaker 1: That you got it. You gotta do it like you, gotta do it like her uh miror uh berd mir.

01:47:12
Speaker 2: That's so that it would never reset. It would just play and play until you came over and took the arm off. Hilarious. The band were also huge dicks to Nico while recording this track, which is sad considering the title. Was something that she reportedly said to Lou Reed again, just imagine that woman, like six feet in heels coming up to you and saying, I'll be your mirror.

01:47:36
Speaker 1: So that's us a little like Arnold there.

01:47:37
Speaker 2: It was just diffing into it.

01:47:41
Speaker 1: Arnold.

01:47:41
Speaker 2: As as singing Nico songs is pretty hilarious with costume to all Tomorrow's potties and Sterling. Morrison would later explain, Nico kept singing I'll Be Your Mirror in her strident voice, dissatisfied. We kept making her do it over and over again until she broke down and burst into tears. At that point we said, oh, try it just one more time, and then if it doesn't work this time, we're not going to do the song. Nico then sat down and did it exactly right.

01:48:10
Speaker 1: Eh, exactly right, like the and Please Kill Me.

01:48:14
Speaker 2: Warhol would recount the whole time the album was being made, no one seemed happy with it, especially Nico. I went to sound like Bob Dylan. She wailed so upset because she didn't.

01:48:28
Speaker 1: Get it. So that's a little background on I'll Be Your Mirror, one of Lou's best poppy tracks on the record, and you know we touched on this earlier. It's easy to forget that for all of Lou's lyrical taboos and fascinations with drones and punky four on the floor rhythms, his time at Pickwick and the Velvets early apprenticeship as a cover band made him preternaturally good at writing pop songs. The album opens with Sunday Morning, with Lou taking over Nico's planned vocal lead, and there was a basslide there that pays tribute to the Mamas and the Papa's recent hit Money Day, Monday, Sunday Morning, Monday, Monday, It's all really there are layers here.

01:49:08
Speaker 2: Sunday Morning was a name.

01:49:12
Speaker 1: Sunday Morning was written about dropping in on their friend at three am after a night of boozing. John Cale told me when I actually interviewed him for a track by track commentary piece I did for people for the fiftieth anniversary of this album in twenty seventeen, which there it is is still one of the coolest things that people ever let me do. Props to my editor, Sarah Mishaud. The guy they dropped in on happened to have a guitar and a harmonium. It was kind of manic, Cale added to me. I like saying that to me. John Cale told this to me. Anywhere you'd go at that time, if you saw an instrument, you'd just pick it up and start playing. Lou saw the guitar, I saw harmonium, and off we went. Writing Sunday Morning. There she goes again. Also draws from the top forty well, borrowing a guitar part from Motown, which I never noticed until I read this. As Cale admitted to Uncut in twenty twelve, the rip is a soul thing Marvin Gaye's Hitchhike with a nod to the impressions I'm want to splice that in here the leaftlace thiss she's not on the streets, there she goes again would earn the distinction of becoming one of the first Velvet Underground tracks to ever be covered. Half a whirl away in Vietnam. Do you know the story? This is insane? I did not know. So. A group of US servicemen performing under the name The Electrical Banana during their off hours, were sent a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico by a friend who thought they would appreciate the fruit on the cover. Electrical Banana Banana album. Electrical Banana was I assume taken from a line from Donovan's Mellow Yellow. You know, Electrical Banana gonna be a sudden graze, which is I believe to be a reference to the brief urban legend from the mid sixties that you can speak as Yeah, zero truth to that whatsoever. So anyway, these gis in Vietnam in the jungle here the Velvet Underground and Nico and really.

01:51:37
Speaker 2: Like it and think this is what we're fighting for.

01:51:40
Speaker 1: Yes, And they resolved to record a version of There she Goes again. Right there in the jungle. They build a makeshift studio by tossing down wooden palettes and pitching a tent and fashioning mic stands from bamboo branches and plugging their amps into a gas generator. And it used to be on YouTube. I'm gonna check and see if it is. I want to plug it in. She Goes again. She's walking down the street again, So that's weird. And from Vietnam vets it's a quick jump.

01:52:29
Speaker 2: To appropriately Heroin. It's one of the oldest compositions on the record, dates back to Lose time at Syracuse. Lou had actually attempted to record this song during his days on the pap assembly line at Pickwick. A demo from nineteen sixty five was rediscovered in twenty twenty two by Lo's widow, Laurie Anderson. There's another home demo made with Caleen Morrison and reads Ludlow Street Loft later that summer, which sounds more similar to the final version. But I actually quite like his the Country the Country Blues talking kind of version.

01:53:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm gonna splice that in here. You should I know just.

01:53:21
Speaker 3: Where I'm going. I'm gonna try for the Kingdom if I can't, because you know, it makes me feel that I'm man when I'm put to spike into my vay. Then you know what, things aren't quite the same when I'm rushing from my run and I feel like Jesus' son, and I guess that I just don't know.

01:53:51
Speaker 1: And I guess that I just don't know.

01:53:57
Speaker 2: They'd lock me in a room and they'd say, write ten surfing songs. Read told WLR in nineteen seventy two, and I wrote Heroin And I said, hey, I got something for you. They said, Monni. They said, never going to happen, Never going to happen. With Warhol now bankrolling lose artistic endeavors, they were free to do whatever they wanted, which included the taboo subject matter and the chaotic breakneck ending. The end of the track actually got so Cacoffin is in studio that Marien Tucker actually stopped playing because she thought they were finished. She says in the two thousand and six veelvel Underground under Review documentary. No one ever even notices this, but right in the middle the drums stop. No one ever thinks about the drummer. They're all worried about the guitar sound and stuff. Nobody's thinking about the drummer. Well, as soon as it got loud fast, I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't hear anybody, so I stopped, assuming, Oh, they'll stop too and say what's the matter mo, And nobody stopped, so I came back in. Many people have misinterpreted Lou's chillingly neutral, clear eyed depiction of drug use as an endorsement, and in later years, fans would approach the band of gigs tell them that they too shot up Heroin. This deeply disturbed Lou and made him somewhat hesitant to play the song with the band through much of the band's later career. Cal would later say, these songs aren't about drugs, They're about guys who are sick. Wow, that's a pretty stark stunning was.

01:55:15
Speaker 1: Cale eburnea Heroin. I don't think so. He seems too weird. Yeah, I can't imagine the guy who did Paris nineteen nineteen could ever.

01:55:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, coke, Well that makes sense. Oh, Cale no, No, I was wrong. Cale Cal did use heroin in the early days, but later switched to cocin cocin booze.

01:55:37
Speaker 1: A true.

01:55:38
Speaker 2: Well do you say speaking of heroin? Now we have to segue into I'm Waiting for the Man, a song about scoring twenty six dollars worth of heroin in Harlem. Reid would later say of it, everything about that song holds true except the price. It's not working. It's too it's too record executive. I don't have the Brooklyn thing down. It's like my panel friend Donald says.

01:56:07
Speaker 1: Let's stick a fork in the mass.

01:56:09
Speaker 2: They're done. That has some very stupid lyrics on it. That record, New York, New York just an incredible record, but also has a song about killing the last great American whale with a rocket launcher.

01:56:22
Speaker 1: Yes, and Beginning of a Great Adventure is a beautiful song. Godfather, I forgot how much that song sucks. What That's what?

01:56:30
Speaker 2: Where he talks about raising an army of of of weird kids to combat how boring like everything else is, and training them like a sleeper cell. And it also has one of my favorite lou prompts where he goes take it Lou and then plays a really blue solo.

01:56:47
Speaker 1: Wait, so he calls to himself. He does, that's that's great. I told you my dad did a whole illustration series on there is no Time. One's over my bed right now. Now, we got to talk about European Son and got another quote from John Kale when I interviewed him in twenty seventeen, he had this very hilarious anecdote about that song. European Son, in my mind, was purely for inspiration. Whenever we played anywhere, we couldn't wait to get to the point where we'd improvise and do European Son. It was always different. That was the fun part for us doing those improvisations, and those improvisations would really get the best out of us in the end because they go on and on and on and on. We'll be up there for an hour just improvising before we'd even get done a song. In San Diego, we did that. That's the kind of rep we had. When we got to San Francisco. In La Bill Graham didn't appreciate all the songs and improvisations that were going on. He thought we were invading the San Francisco Group's territory. There wasn't much love loss between us on the West coast. Lou was always talking about, never mind the flower children, give us the hard trucks. We were happy that woodstock ended up in mud. That kind of resentment was very healthy, I thought, yeah, yeah. John also talked to me about All Tomorrow's Parties, which is a song that Lou would describe as quote a very act description of certain people at the factory at the time. The factory being Andy Warhol's studio, not the tire factory. No, no, not the wasn't our club the factory, Oh yeah.

01:58:21
Speaker 2: That was the or you think of factory records, the hacienda. Oh no, there was a factory that was like a dance. I think there was a dance queer, yes, okay, straight way, guys killing it.

01:58:34
Speaker 1: Lou would say, All Tomorrow's Parties was a quote very apt description of certain people the factory at the time. I watched Andy, I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things. So it's a song about observation. John Klee in particular, was proud of the treated piano on All Tomorrow's Parties, a move that I want to assume so back from Brian Wilson. Absolutely that soundstrack you still believe in me.

01:59:05
Speaker 2: It was not one hundred percent not prepared. Piano dates far further back than Brian Wilson. If you can believe it.

01:59:13
Speaker 1: Oh Cale said. Kale told me, I'm gonna get my cred back. Kale told me. We made the arrangement for All Tomorrow's parties before Nico came along. That was the result of a year of weekend work, sitting around on the weekend and just playing and playing and playing and playing until you slowly gradually moved out of the folk music side of things. The Velvet Underground debut record was all done with just us playing. There were no effects involved in that. We tried a version where Nico doubles her vocal, but the vocal just became too heavy too. Nico's is too much a lot, but the noise of putting paper clips in between the strings of the piano gave it a ring that made it a little more orchestral. We were trying to make orchestral stuff. This is very interesting to me. We were trying to be phil spect Phil Spector with mixed Bagnerian orchestrations with R and B. That was a really unique combination. We had the drone, the viola wasn't used, so the piano became the drone. Whenever we try to do something, we'd always try to find something that would be the drone.

02:00:15
Speaker 2: I'd love the piano part on that. It was just such an otherworldly sound, like the first time I'd really heard the instrument played like that, you know, Yeah, just hearing that at like fourteen or whatever. Kel's viola at this time was deeply bizarre. When he was in the Theater of Eternal Music, Tony Conrad showed him how to install a pickup on it so it could be amplified to keep up with the noise of the rest of these sessions, and Kale explained that to Rolling Stone it was very ambrasive. I wish I could do an accent for him, but all I can think of is Waldo Jeffers had reached his limit just him doing the gift. He said it was very abrasive, and the pickups we had them were really not terrific. They had a lot of noise. It was a good racket. I've also heard him compared to the sound of an airplane taking off, and then cal gradually messed with it even further. He used guitar, banjo or mandolin strings because he was trying to get it deep and as deep as possible. And he also filed down the bridge so that he could play drones using three strings on the viola. Like you know, normally on a string instrument, the bridge is arched so that at the most you can play what they call double stops or two notes at once with the bow, because that's then that the strings don't sit flat so and same way on a guitar they're they're slightly arched when you look at the tail pieces of electric guitar. So he essentially broke his instrument so that he could play drones on three strings, and later said that it was ruined. You can't do very much after that with the instrument, but it's a great noise. And by the time he was done using in the velvet underground, I think it had gotten so unwieldy with all of these other instrument strings and the dtuning and all this that he was using a cello bow to play it at that point.

02:01:58
Speaker 1: Did he describe the sound of the viola drone as like a B fifty two coming in for landing or something. Yeah, yeah, I love that and he's not wrong. Nope, it could be a tough listen at some point.

02:02:09
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean again, you should have heard the dream syndicate. Yes, you know?

02:02:14
Speaker 1: All right? Sorry, one more John Cale anecdote. I'm just I'm so thinking he told you to him that He told me that. He told me Jordan run Todg for People magazine in twenty seventeen for the fiftieth anniversary of the Banana Album, speaking about Feen Fetale, John Cale told me Andy Warhol saw that Lou was moping around the factory and he gave him a list of words. He said, I wish I could do a Warhol voice. Here fourteen words. Go write songs with these words. And Lou was never happier. He had a task in hand and he sat down. That was a lot of fun for him. We had our own thing going before Warhol, but he showed up and was more of a guy helping us not forget who we were. Andy would always say things like, tell Lu don't forget to put little swear words in that song. He was reminding us of who we really were. I like that and then that really is, like we said. Warhol's biggest gift to this production. Apparently the title fem Fatale came from Andy asking lou about Factory superstar Edie Sedgwick, who, as you mentioned, John Kale had a six week relationship with. Andy said, oh, don't you think she's a fem fatale? Lou I thought that song was written about Nico, but hmm, it's not.

02:03:24
Speaker 2: She's a fetal.

02:03:27
Speaker 1: She was always really pissed off about how, you know American they pronounced that word because she, you know, French was a language she spoke. It wasn't her native language, but close to it. And there's a some quote from Lewerre He's like, yeah, I wrote this one. I'm gonna say it how I want. Sorry, Nica, what.

02:03:47
Speaker 2: An as all, Warhole's involvement with the band's music was iffy, but the visual art was naturally his purview and bored by the static images that al mart had been relegated to a peel away sticker of a pop art banana illustration, under which would be a peeled pink and notably phallic banana. Aside from the fine print above the sticker, helpfully urging buyers to peel slowly and see the only text on the stark white cover was Warhol's own name gracing the lower right corner in stately cornet bold, a literal co sign of the velvet underground. The fact that each cover was essentially a Warhol original print was a big selling point to Verve, the MGM's subsidiary that had purchased the distribution rights, Columbia, decline. So did Atlantic and Electra, citing reasons ranging from loose lyrics to the sound of Kel's viola. Verve, meanwhile, had no such objections and spent a fortune on a special machine capable of manufacturing the sticker. Most reissued vinyl editions of the album do not feature the peel off stickers, and original copies of the record with the peel sticker feature with the sticker on or not on, as I understand, are rare collectors items. Hilariously, it was the relatively standard back cover that would cause far more headaches for the Velvets. The photo depicted the band in the midst of an exploding plastic and everal performance at Norfolk, Virginia's Chrysler Art Museum.

02:05:09
Speaker 1: I think John Waters was at that gig. He at least he was in the Ta Hayes documentary and I think he said he was. So that's kind of nuts that.

02:05:17
Speaker 2: That's about right, I think. I mean, Baltimore is not that far of a drive.

02:05:21
Speaker 1: True. Oh no, it's weird that John Waters is like presumably in the background of that photo in the back of the Velvet Underground debut. I think it's cool. That's neat, a neat little fact. And you know that that's kind of what we do here.

02:05:33
Speaker 2: Kind of our old thing. That's just listening to you, let you try and fill dead air. There was a slide montage that was projected onto the stage during that gig, and there was the whole point of the multimedia shows, and the upside down image of actor and factory associate Eric Emerson from Warhol's Chelsea Girls film could be seen. Emerson had been recently busted for drug possession and was badly in need of money, which probably explains why he threatened to sue the label for the unauthorized use of his image. To the tune of half a mil in nineteen sixty seven dollars. Rather than pay Emerson his claim, mg simply stopped production to remove the offending image. Copies of the record were called in June after being released in March sixty seven, which doomed its commercial potential. Sterling Morrison would later say, the whole Eric business was a tragic fiasco for us and proves what idiots they were at MGM. They responded by pulling the album off the shelves immediately and kept it off for a couple of months while they fold around with stickers over Eric's picture and then finally the airbrush. The album thus vanished from the charts almost immediately in June, just when it was about to enter the top one hundred. It never returned to the charts. Narrator voice, it never became close to entering the Billboard top one hundred. He let Him, Let Him Live, Man, Sterling Morrison. It peaked at one seventy one, and the front cover also eventually yielded a lawsuit of its own, per Wikipedia. In January twenty twelve, So Dumb the Velvet Underground business partnership of which John Cale and Lou Reid were general partners, sued the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. In the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, after the Foundation licensed the covers banana designs for use on a line of iPhone and iPad cases. The court dismissed without prejudiced the partnership's request. That's kind of like nice try but no.

02:07:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like game respects game, but no. Oh, I just saw Friend of the Pod. Dora is in the middle of reading Chaos, the CIA's connection to Charles Manson. Hell yeah, I just want to plug that book and our friend Dora. Thanks Dora. It's also worth noting that the album flopped due to its being banned from both radio and record stores because of its racy lyrics. That's the word I'll use, racy. I'm sure Lee would love that I called his lyrics racy, and also many magazines refused to carry advertisements for it as well for similar reasons. But this all leads to a bigger question just how much of a bomb was Velvet Underground's debut. Brian Eno famously said the Musician magazine in nineteen eighty two that while the album only sold approximately thirty thousand copies in its first years. Quote. Everyone knows this quote. Everyone who bought one of those thirty thousand copies started a band. Over the years, writers, researchers, journalists off him.

02:08:19
Speaker 2: WHOA, Okay, you've got something to say here, right, No, No, I'm just being passive aggressive, like we.

02:08:24
Speaker 1: Talk about it, totally aggressive.

02:08:26
Speaker 2: Well, okay, that's fair. I'm just saying, like, you know, a quote I've had to read ten million times. Couldn't have just sat on that one, could you, Brian? You know, maybe not say something that I then have to hear for the rest of my life. Go back to me in the piano.

02:08:44
Speaker 1: You know, how many times have you heard I had a dream? Ooh? This is a matter how many times you have to hear it. Sometimes it's good. It's a good thought, good parry, good, very nice thought. Okay. Many journalists over the years assumed that thirty thousand copies was an actual figure for how many units this album moved, and while the album certainly sold less than Warhol In the band would have hoped, according to an MGM Royalty statement dated in February nineteen sixty nine, the album's actually sold fifty eight, four hundred and seventy six copies through that period, which is a respectable figure for a late sixties LP. A music writer and filmmaker named Grant Nickfee also conducted investigation in the twenty twenties, and he determines that the Velvet Underground debut sold as many as two hundred thousand copies by nineteen seventy one alone, and then according to Nielsen Soundscam, which tracks sales, Velvet Underground and Nico has sold five hundred and sixty thousand copies since nineteen ninety one. So there's a twenty year period in the middle that's not accounted far, but already we have almost three quarters of a million. So will you put all the stuff that was sold between nineteen seventy one and nineteen ninety one, This is certainly a million seller by this point. So got him? You know? You know it? No? Uh no, I don't. The tracks for The Velvet Underground and Nico were largely complete by May of nineteen sixty six, but it took nearly a year for the album to hit shelves the following spring. This wasn't just because of the cover logistics that we just talked about. The sticker and lawsuit and all that. There were also promotional concerns. The exact circumstances aren't totally clear, but the band blame their MGM VERB label mate Frank Zappa. They fostered a somewhat irrational belief that Zappa used his clout, which I kind of can't imagine he really had at this point to hold back their release in favor of his own with the Mothers of Invention Freak Out groundbreaking album. In a different sort of way, Sterling Morrison would say the problem was Frank Zappa and his manager Herb Cohen. They sabotaged us in a number of ways because they wanted to be the first with a freak release and we were totally naive. We didn't have a manager who would go to the record company every day and just drag the whole thing through production. John Kale claimed that the Velvet's wealthy patron affected the label's judgment as well. He would say, verbs promotional department took the attitude zero bucks for Velvet Underground because they've got Andy Warhol. Let's give all the bucks to Zappa. Whatever the truth may be, Sterling Morrison held a serious grudge against Zappa for the rest of his life. His interviews uh reveal this. He told Fusion magazine in nineteen seventy, Zappa is incapable of writing lyrics. He's shielding his musical deficiencies by prophetizing all these sundry groups that he appeals to. He just throws enough dribble into those songs. I don't know. I don't like their music. I think their album freak Out was such a shuck.

02:11:55
Speaker 2: That's a great derogatory term.

02:11:57
Speaker 1: Yes, And he was even more blunt a decade later when speaking to Slugo magazine in the eighties. Oh, I hate Frank Zappa. He's really horrible, but he's a good guitar player. If you told if you told Frank Zappa to eat in public, he'd do it if he thought it'd sold records. Sterling Morrison, ladies and gentlemen.

02:12:16
Speaker 2: He's just jealous because Frank's a way better guitarist than him.

02:12:21
Speaker 1: To quote my dear friend Alex Heigel, there's nothing wrong with a little Frank Zappa. There's a lot wrong with a lot of Frank Zappa. Lou Reid also had some choice words for Zappa over the years. In Nigel Trevno's nineteen seventy three biography Bookleat of the Band, Reid refers to Zappa as quote, probably the single most untalented person I've heard in my life. Ah. He's two bit pretentious academic and he can't play his way out of anything. He can't play rock and roll because he's a loser. He's not happy with himself. And I think he's right. That's there's some savagely incisive comments in there. Yeah.

02:12:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's by far not the I mean, Lou, He's not the least talented musician you've ever seen in your life.

02:13:08
Speaker 1: But I don't fully understand this. The pair must have buried the hatchet in later years, because after Zappa died a prostate cancer in nineteen ninety three, Lou posthumously inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I haven't actually listened to the speech, no.

02:13:21
Speaker 2: Neither of I, but I found some message board posting that as of recording the Gift, it was supposedly Frank Zappa, who is like, oh, you should stab a melon at the end of that song and put that sound effect in there. That is probably apocryphal, but one thing that I did hear or read that was Zampa confined his bile, at least publicly to Nico once after she got done with performance a solo performance, he walked on stage immediately afterwards and started pounding a keyboard and reciting deadpan German esque gibberish into the mic in a grotesque parody of her whole thing, which is pretty cruel.

02:14:04
Speaker 3: Uh.

02:14:05
Speaker 2: He was supposedly disdainful of Velvet Underground's overall drugy vibe, but I couldn't find anything of him like dragging them the same way that they did to him.

02:14:13
Speaker 1: I wonder what was behind there at their posthumous makeup. I don't actually know.

02:14:18
Speaker 2: Oh deuezl some guy in our Zappa seven years ago said that Deuesel Zappa on stage said that the feud between Zappa and Lou was very real interesting and then in the name oh here we go, Wane, we're only in it for the money. The Frank Zappa albums, there's a snippet where Zappa quips I get to work with the Velvet Underground, which is as a group is Frank Zappa's group, but that was cut from the album. I don't know, that's wild I'll be your tweezl ah okay, so from Lou Reid biographer Kevin Courrier, who died in twenty eighteen but wrote a book about Frank Zappa called Danger Kitchen. A week before the induction ceremony, guitarist Eddie Van Halen was asked by Zappa's son Dweezl to induct his father. Eddie supposedly turned down the offer, saying he didn't give out awards. Zapa's widow, Gail, suggested the fifties R and B legend Johnny guitar Watson, who not only inspired Zappa as a teenager but also played with his group in the seventies. The hall refused, which, given their attitude towards black people, is not surprising. So as a last ditch effort, they came up with Lou Reed and Zapa's kids, Dweezl and presumably Moon Unit two were well aware of this rivalry between Reid and Zappa, and so they were dead set against it. But then Gail, his widow, phoned Reid to discuss this whole thing, and you know, he apologized, I guess, and then agreed.

02:15:50
Speaker 1: To do it. We kind of touched on this earlier, but the whole Zappa Vu feud is indicative of a weird East Coast West Coast freaks feud. In the mid sixties, the Velvets did not go down well in California, as one kind of might expect. The Warhol crew felt the whole hippie thing was anathma to their brand of New York nihilism. This love piece crap. We hated that, moth Tucker said in the town Age documentary Get Real, you cannot change minds by handing flowers to people who want to shoot you. Cher found herself at the band's first ever live show on the West Coast, when they played The Trip on the Sunset Strip in nineteen sixty six, accompanied of course by Sonny and amidst a star studded audience that included members of The Birds and Ryan O'Neil. Cher reportedly left the show early, offering this SoundBite for the Ages, The Velvet Underground won't replace anything except maybe suicide. Bill Graham, the famed San France then the godfather of not just San Francisco rock, I mean live rock in the sixties and early seventies, I should say ye ran the film are also hated them both because he thought they're long winded experimental jams and their Warhol sponsored multimedia show was treading a little close to the San Francisco scene, which trafficked in long winded experimental jams and multimedia light shows. Moo Tucker recalls him hissing, I hope you bomb before taking the stage at the Filmore, which is not kind. The Velvet Underground were much better received than the UK, However, David Bowie was passed an advanced pressing of the album after his early manager Ken Pitt, took a trip to the States in nineteen sixty six, making Bowie arguably one of the first people in Britain to hear The Velvet Underground and almost certainly one of the first Brits to cover stuff like Waiting for the Man in White Light, White Heat. Bowie would contrast The Velvet's debut with the standard feel good pop of the era, saying their music was savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn't care if I liked it or not, and honestly, that feels like a really good line to end on. Hell yeah, that's not artistic purity and confidence in your own vision. Then I don't know what it is?

02:18:09
Speaker 2: Who are you? Jordan? Let him know. My name's Jordan run Tug, and I'm Alex Heigel. Thank you for listening.

02:18:22
Speaker 1: Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

02:18:25
Speaker 2: The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

02:18:28
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

02:18:31
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel.

02:18:36
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Four