1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (38 page)

A year later, Nico hooked up with the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones. The Stones’ manager, Andrew Oldham, took her on as a client and decided to give her the same treatment that had launched Marianne Faithfull’s career. In late May he produced her cover of folk singer Gordon Lightfoot’s “I’m Not Sayin’,” with Jones and Jimmy Page on guitar. Oldham and Page wrote the atmospheric B side “The Last Mile,” which mourns lost childhood like the singles by Oldham’s other chanteuses Faithfull and Vashti.

That month, when Nico was in Paris, she met Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, at the nightclub Chez Castel, where
What’s New, Pussycat?
had been filmed. The film’s stars, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Ursula Andress, were hanging out that night as well. Malanga gave Nico the number of the Factory and told her to visit the next time she was in New York.
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Around that time, Dylan’s (and Lightfoot’s) manager, Albert Grossman, heard Nico’s single, along with a demo she’d made with Dylan, singing “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” and offered to manage her if she came to the States. So she flew to New York and went to the Factory with Brian Jones. Morrissey thought she was “the most beautiful creature that ever lived.”
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He and Warhol wanted to use her in movies and maybe something musical.

According to Morrissey, “Grossman would come to the Factory to listen to Nico practice, but he got more interested in Edie.”
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Grossman began to speculate that Sedgwick might have a future as a Hollywood star, so he, Dylan, and Bobby Neuwirth began discouraging her from making more films with Warhol. Sedgwick began to resent that Warhol had never paid her for her appearances. His films didn’t make any money—he had to sell paintings to fund them—but that didn’t appease her.
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By the end of the year, their relationship had grown tense. Warhol superstar Viva said, “When Edie left with Grossman and Dylan, that was betrayal, and he was furious.”
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One of her last Warhol films was shot in December and released in 1966. In
Lupe
, Sedgwick plays the real-life Mexican actress Lupe Vélez, who was found dead with her head in the toilet after overdosing on barbiturates. After the shoot, she hung out with Dylan at the Kettle of Fish. When Warhol showed up later, he mused to one of his Factory acolytes, “I wonder if Edie will commit suicide. I hope she lets me know so I can film it.”
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Shortly thereafter, Dylan came by the Factory for a “screen test,” allowing Warhol to film him for fifteen minutes while he sat completely still. As payment, Dylan took one of Warhol’s silk screens of Elvis Presley, driving off with it tied to the top of his station wagon. Warhol wrote in his memoirs, “Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I’d ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I’d invariably get hearsay answers like ‘I hear he feels you destroyed Edie,’ or ‘Listen to “Like a Rolling Stone”—I think you’re the “diplomat on the chrome horse,” man.’ I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that—I never listened much to the words of songs—but I got the tenor of what people were saying—that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.”
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Dylan eventually traded the Elvis painting to Grossman for a couch. But the joke was on Dylan: in 2012, Warhol’s
Double Elvis (Ferus Type)
sold for more than thirty-seven million dollars.
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*   *   *

When Brooklyn native Lou Reed
was seventeen, his folks were alarmed by his bisexual tendencies. A psychiatrist recommended shock therapy three times a week at Rockland State Hospital. Reed said later, “I resent it. It was a very big drag. From 12 on I could have been having a ball and not even thought about this shit. What a waste of time. If the forbidden thing is love, then you spend most of your time playing with hate. Who needs that? I feel I was gypped.”
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At twenty-three, the future poet laureate of depravity got a job as a staff songwriter at budget label Pickwick Records, which put out imitation surf-rock and Merseybeat (the pop/rock style of bands from cities along England’s River Mersey such as Liverpool). “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs. They would say ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’ then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio.”
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Reed needed a band to play his dance-craze spoof “The Ostrich,” which actually didn’t sound that far removed from later Velvet Underground classics like “Sweet Jane.” To back him he found the Primitives. Their bassist, John Cale, also played atonal viola for the composer La Monte Young, whose minimalist “drone music” was inspired by Indian and Japanese music—as well as the hum of the transformers on telephone poles. Cale did performance art, too, such as
Plant Piece
, in which he tried to kill a plant by screaming at it.

Throughout the spring and summer of his twelfth year, Cale was molested by his organ tutor at church. “Like so many boys who lack a close relationship with their fathers, I was extremely insecure and susceptible to this kind of predator. There was a second guy I became involved with around the same time who was also into molestation,” he writes in his memoir. “I’d stop and visit this man. It happened a couple of times, then I quit out of self-disgust. I remember feeling there was something wrong somewhere, and I remember consequently being cruel to a cat, strangling it with a fascination to see how far I could go without killing. Obviously I saw myself in the cat, and I had to come to terms with male relationships, to calm that aspect down … Anyway, I never came to terms with the problem. It always haunted me … It was there when I fought the school bully during lunch break. It was there when I laid my first sweetheart in the mud and grass behind the stones.”
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Reed and Cale formed their own group, the Warlocks, the same name the Grateful Dead were using that year. They rechristened themselves the Velvet Underground after a paperback that sensationally reported on all the sexual activity secretly going on beyond the bounds of heterosexual intercourse.

Lou Reed got Sterling Morrison, a friend from Syracuse University, to play guitar or bass, depending on whether Cale was playing the bass, viola, or keyboards. A friend of Morrison’s had a sister who was a drummer—Maureen Tucker. She was influenced by African drummer Olatunji and Bo Diddley. She didn’t play the bass drum with her foot, as most drummers did, but instead tipped the drum up like a tom-tom, and she rarely used cymbals. She was one of the first female rock drummers.

In July, at their loft on Ludlow Street in Manhattan, they recorded six demos of songs that they would rerecord a year later for their debut album. The demo of Reed’s ode to “Heroin” was close to the final version. Perhaps Reed had been encouraged to write the groundbreaking song after
Life
ran one of its most controversial photo spreads in February, on New York’s “Needle Park,” actually named Sherman Square, where heroin addicts congregated. The article follows a real-life couple, Karen and John, as John gets locked up and then overdoses. “To get money, Karen prostitutes [herself] and pushes, John loots cabs.”
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The
Life
portrait inspired the 1971 feature film
Panic in Needle Park.
Junkies figure as characters also in the play
Balm in Gilead
, which premiered in January, the first full-length Off-Off-Broadway production.

Reed’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” relays in journalistic detail his protocol for going into Harlem and scoring heroin. “Run Run Run” is another song about addicts selling their soul for a fix, overdosing, and turning blue. “There She Goes Again” lifts the hook of Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike.” In the song, Reed’s ex has left him, and when he sees her on the street back down on her knees, he decides he’d better hit her.

“Venus in Furs” was inspired by the 1870 novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name the term
masochism
is derived. Sacher-Masoch was the great-great-uncle of folk-pop star Marianne Faithfull, so John Cale managed to get the Velvet Underground’s demo to her. Faithfull never responded when the group tried to follow up.
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In 1967, Faithfull’s friends the Beatles would win raves for an innovation that echoed that demo. “Heroin” features guitar and viola rising to a shrieking crescendo, imitating a drug rush. On “A Day in the Life,” the Beatles instructed an orchestra to play their instruments from the lowest to highest notes in a cacophony before Lennon sings of “four thousand holes,” which some Beatle fans believed to be an allusion to the mark left by a needle. Certainly the Beatles always had their ear to the ground, but whether the Velvets truly influenced them is unknown.

Al Aronowitz, the journalist who introduced the Beatles to Dylan, started managing the band in November and got the Velvets a gig opening for the Myddle Class, the group he managed with Carole King and Gerry Goffin, at Summit High School in New Jersey. On December 11, they played “There She Goes Again,” “Heroin,” and “Venus in Furs,” and promptly drove all the kids out of the auditorium.

On December 15, Morrissey saw the Velvets playing at New York City’s Café Bizarre and convinced Andy Warhol to manage them. Aronowitz was a pretty well-connected manager himself; he brought Brian Jones to Lou Reed’s pad to score some acid for Jones and Dylan the night of the Great Northeast Blackout (November 9). But the Velvets jumped ship for Warhol, and within two weeks were spotlighted on the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
, in a piece called “The Making of an Underground Film.” The segment focused on Morrissey making a short film about the Velvets’ song “Venus in Furs.”

Part of the group’s appeal to the Warhol crowd was their androgynous female drummer—and Warhol and Reed would become good friends. Reed wrote “All Tomorrow’s Parties” about the Factory scene, and it became Warhol’s favorite song. Warhol loved to annoy his audience, so tracks such as “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” with screeching viola and feedback, was just his cup of meat. He even wanted the Velvet Underground’s album to have a skip built into “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” so it would repeat the title infinitely.

Still, at the time, Warhol and Morrissey did not find Reed a completely compelling front man, and paired the band with Nico to alternate with Reed as lead singer. Reed was annoyed at sharing the spotlight, though Nico would hook up with both him and Cale. Morrissey projected film onto the Velvets while they played, accompanied by a series of multimedia events (whip-twirling dancers, Edie Sedgwick frugging, and strobe lights) called the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” thus creating the East Coast version of the Acid Tests. The Doors caught their show at the Trip in LA, and seeing dancer Gerard Malanga’s black leather pants, Jim Morrison was inspired to get his own. “He stole my look!” Malanga later screamed.
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Their first album would be produced by Dylan’s old producer Tom Wilson, who must surely rank as one of the hippest producers of all time, with a resume that includes Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Dion, the Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention (he was convinced to handle Zappa after hearing his song about the Watts riots, “Trouble Every Day”). Wilson pushed Lou Reed to write “Sunday Morning” for Nico for the single.

Warhol asked Reed to write “Femme Fatale” for Sedgwick, just before she left his scene altogether. After her tragic OD in 1971, her legacy consists of numerous photographs, a few hours of celluloid, and a few Dylan songs that may or may not be about her on
Highway 61
and
Blonde on Blonde.
But she continues to fascinate later generations as the archetypal party girl raging past the edge of decorum in a futile effort to forget her troubled past, in the tradition of Zelda Fitzgerald, Brett Ashley, and Holly Golightly.

Though their commercial success in the ’60s was limited, the Velvet Underground went on to become one of the most groundbreaking and influential bands of all time. And as Warhol’s movies grew (relatively) more sophisticated and were co-opted by mainstream films like
Midnight Cowboy
, he became, with Ginsberg, the premier outlaw of gay liberation. In an era when gay men like the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein were blackmailed by hustlers who demanded exorbitant amounts to keep their secrets, Warhol took everything he’d been told to hide and shoved it back in society’s face.

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Acid Oz

LSD permeates both coasts thanks to the CIA and Timothy Leary. In the San Francisco Bay area, Hunter Thompson introduces Merry Prankster Ken Kesey to the Hells Angels. The Angels attack anti-war protestors on October 16, prompting Allen Ginsberg to invent Flower Power. The same evening, the Jefferson Airplane play
The Tribute to Dr. Strange
and the Haight-Ashbury begins to percolate. The Grateful Dead play their first Acid Test on December 4.

Dr. Albert Hofmann
was a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. He was experimenting with ergot, a fungus that grows on rye bread, to see if it could improve blood circulation. He synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) on November 16, 1938, but put it on a shelf and forgot about it until he accidentally touched some on April 19, 1943, and had his first accidental acid trip while riding home on his bike.

He wrote in
LSD, My Problem Child,
“This condition of cosmic consciousness, which under favorable conditions can be evoked by LSD or by another hallucinogen from the group of Mexican sacred drugs, is analogous to spontaneous religious enlightenment, with the
unio mystica
. In both conditions, which often last only for a timeless moment, a reality is experienced that exposes a gleam of the transcendental reality, in which universe and self, sender and receiver, are one.”
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