When Andy Warhol and his entourage – his superstars – walked into a New York nightspot, they were the center of attention: a loud, cross-dressing, wired, aloof collection of freaks.
“We weren’t at the show,” Warhol liked to say. “We were the show.”
But in December 1965, at an ominous tourist trap in Greenwich Village called Cafe Bizarre, the script was flipped.
What the white-haired pop artist, his muse Edie Sedgwick and their glamor gang witnessed blew their minds: an art rock band called the Velvet Underground.
What followed were five years of sexual excesses, wild drug excesses and a sensational succession of songs that inspired everything from glamor to punk.
The Velvet Underground became the ultimate in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
Members of the US group The Velvet Underground in 1969. From left: Lou Reed (bottom), Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, Nico, Doug Yule
Nico was a German singer, songwriter, musician, model and actress. Not everyone who saw her perform liked her singing, with one critic describing her voice as “like a cello getting up in the morning.”
Paul Morrissey, Nico, Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga attend a “Freakout” party with a performance by Velvet Underground and Nico at Action House, Long Island, New York
After that first performance, film director and Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey recalled that neither he nor Andy could tell whether the drummer was a boy or a girl (they liked that).
All the songs seemed to be about drugs (they liked that even more), and they all wore sunglasses – giving the impression they were auditioning for Warhol’s 24-hour art studio, The Factory.
None of the Velvets had heard of The Factory. But they were about to become fully paid members… Warhol’s chosen court musicians. When their performance ended, Warhol turned to his gang and said, “Gee, do you think we should, uh, buy them?”
The quartet had played their first paid gig less than a week earlier and secured a residency at Bizarre as a result. Their music was extraordinary – ranging from atonal screams to exquisite melodies, with lyrics about addiction and transgressive, sadomasochistic sex.
A song that escalated from a slow throb to a manic improvised thrash recreated the high of a heroin injection and could last 20 minutes or more.
They were led by Lou Reed, a self-made malcontent from Long Island, New York, who had recently recovered from electroshock treatment because his parents believed he had homosexual tendencies. The bassist was avant-garde visionary John Cale, an incredibly gifted classical player from Wales.
Androgynous Moe Tucker of Levittown stood up to beat her drums, never used cymbals, and had the most idiosyncratic style of any ’60s rock band percussionist.
Then there was rhythm guitarist Sterling Morrison, a gentle man from Poughkeepsie, New York, who exuded a strange sense of normality.
Edie Sedgwick (right), frontwoman of The Velvet Underground that never existed, pictured with Andy Warhol. They met in March 1965 at a birthday party for playwright Tennessee Williams
Archival footage of the band was captured in a documentary on Apple TV+
They had everything, Warhol decided, except conventional sex appeal. And he had the solution: his homeless model and it-girl Edie. He had met her nine months earlier, in March 1965, at a birthday party for playwright Tennessee Williams. When he saw her, he took a deep breath and said, “Oh, she’s so beautiful!”
Warhol decided to make Sedgwick his best superstar, his very own Marilyn. She showed up barefoot to fancy social parties or to dinner dates in little more than a leotard, accessorized with huge Greenwich Village bangles, multi-strand necklaces and dangling chandelier earrings.
Maybe she would just wear a white mink coat and nothing else.
But most of all, she had her trademarks: delicate alabaster skin, soot-rimmed teacup eyes, her Liz Taylor brows and, shockingly for 1965, her silver Gamine-like hair, dyed to match her mentor’s.
But she was already deeply involved in drugs, both fast and slow. As Vogue editor Diana Vreeland said, “Edie was chasing life and sometimes life doesn’t come fast enough.” Her childhood had been extremely privileged and yet terrible.
Christa Paffgen (right), known as Nico, replaced Lou Reed as front and center of the band
When she was seven years old, her father tried to sleep with her. “Nobody told me incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn’t feel aroused by incest,” she said.
Edie was admitted to Silver Hill Psychiatric Hospital in 1962 with acute anorexia and had to have an abortion after becoming pregnant during a hospital stay.
A few months later, her brother Minty hanged himself after recently telling his father he was gay.
Edie desperately wanted to lead the band, but Warhol, fearful of her increasing addiction, changed his mind. Instead, he chose a model and actress known for their affairs with music and film stars such as Bob Dylan and Alain Delon. Her name was Christa Paffgen, her stage name was Nico.
First, Warhol had to convince the Velvets’ singer and chief songwriter, Reed, to stand down for them.
Lewis Allen Reed was born in 1942 into a middle-class Jewish family on Long Island.
When he was 17, his father (an accountant) and mother (a former beauty queen) were afraid of his mood swings and, even worse, what they believed to be gay preferences.
At this time, the homosexual was, next to the communist, the most threatening and subversive figure in American culture.
Musician Lou Reed (pictured) was a self-made malcontent from Long Island, New York. He was subjected to electric shock treatment because his parents believed he had homosexual tendencies
Reed was sent to Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens three times a week for eight weeks for non-convulsive electroshock therapy.
“They stick something down your throat,” Reed said, “so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head.” This was recommended to counteract homosexual feelings. The result is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable.”
A natural songwriter, he took a job at Pickwick Records, where he released identical pop: surf songs, hot rod songs, motorcycle songs, romantic ballads. Inspired by a fashion revival for ostrich feathers, he wrote a funny song called “The Ostrich” and invented a silly dance to go with it.
Pickwick released it under the name The Primitives and put together a band for a Vogue photo shoot. One of the successful Primitives applicants, chosen because of his long hair, was 22-year-old musician John Cale. Cale was born in 1942 in the Amman Valley between Swansea and Carmarthen, the son of an English-speaking miner and a Welsh teacher.
His grandmother forbade speaking English in the house. “It left me unable to really talk to my father,” he said.
Reed and Cale began working together, constantly socializing and moving together to New York’s Lower East Side – Cale resisted Reed’s amorous advances.
Calling themselves The Warlocks, they recruited Morrison (a friend from Reed’s college days), changed their name to The Falling Spikes, and eventually settled on The Velvet Underground, inspired by journalist Michael Leigh’s infamous 1963 paperback of that name about “deviant” sexual behavior.
When Reed hired Maureen (Moe) Tucker, the younger sister of one of Morrison’s friends, she was working as a key cutter at IBM.
John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed pictured rocking out
In March 1967, The Velvet Underground’s first album was released with a cover designed by Warhol
“The factory was crazy,” Moe said of her first visit to Warhol’s lair. ‘I was very shy. I’ll be blunt: I’ve never heard anyone say the word “f**k.” I swear to God, that’s the truth. Nobody I knew talked like that.’
The factory was located on East 47th Street, just a five-minute walk from the United Nations.
Everything was decorated with aluminum foil and broken mirrors and painted silver, even the elevator and the toilet bowl. “Silver is narcissism,” said Warhol. “Mirrors are backed with silver.”
It was home to Warhol’s ever-growing circle of assistants, hangers-on, hustlers, speed freaks, drag queens, on-off boyfriends, and random uptown and inner-city celebrities. Because the artist called them superstars, they all believed that they were. Warhol gave Nico an ultimatum to the band.
He would manage them, give them a place to rehearse, finance their equipment, support them, get them a record deal, produce them and make them famous… as long as they gave him 25 percent of their income, he would do whatever they were informed and put Nico at the microphone.
She may have looked extraordinary, but not everyone who saw Nico perform was as impressed with her vocal prowess. One critic described her voice as “like a cello getting up in the morning.” But when Mick Jagger first heard her, he told anyone who cared that he thought she would be the next Joan Baez. She was part goddess, part icicle, a female mirror for Warhol.
She was blonde, had a shyness that manifested itself in arrogance, and seemed strange to those outside the set.
He liked her because her talents were limited and she posed no threat to him.
Doug Yule, Lou Reed, Maureen “Moe” Tucker and Sterling Morrison of the rock and roll band pose for a portrait in 1970
The band capitalized on the strangeness of her voice with live numbers like “Melody Laughter,” 25 minutes of minimal Moe Tucker percussion, guitar/viola drones and Nico screams.
In March 1967, The Velvet Underground’s first album was released with a cover designed by Warhol: a banana with a sticker reading “Peel slow and see.” The fruit underneath was pink.
Critics hated it. Reed’s favorite review of the album, which he repeated to anyone who would listen, was: “The flowers of evil are blooming. Someone has to stamp them out before they spread.”
But lovers quickly caught on. David Bowie played it all the time: “In December of that year my band Buzz broke up, but not without my request that we play I’m Waiting For The Man as one of the encore songs at our last gig.” It was the first time in the world that a Velvet song has been covered by anyone. Lucky me.’
A band is always a drama in itself and each member of The Velvet Underground had problems with the others. Reed became suspicious of Cale, Cale became increasingly frustrated with Reed, and both now had their problems with Nico (both sexual and creative).
She increasingly suffered from drug and alcohol abuse. When she arrived more than two hours late to a concert in Boston, Reed refused to let her on stage and fired her shortly thereafter. (She died in 1988 after a bicycle accident in Ibiza.)
Touring put even more strain on the group. In New York they may have been the epitome of downtown cool, but in more conservative states they were just a bunch of black-clad yokels with wraparound sunglasses and European shoes. “Those were primitive times,” says John Cale, “driving around in a van, going at enormous speeds and getting stopped by the police.”
One night in the middle of Ohio they were turned away by traffic cops and accused of kidnapping children: the girls who rode with them were young and couldn’t produce any notes from their parents.
A band is always a drama in itself and each member of The Velvet Underground had problems with the others
Drug use increased tensions. Before he met Reed, Cale said, he snorted, smoked and took the best drugs in New York, but never injected anything. When he joined The Velvet Underground, he discovered heroin. Reed helped him overcome his squeamishness about needles.
The experience “was magical for two guys as tense and detached from their surroundings as Lou and I were.” There was already a strong drug culture at The Factory – Warhol, for example, was constantly taking Obetrol, a pink diet pill. Amphetamines were commonplace every day and night, creating an atmosphere of almost constant paranoia and building tension between Reed and Cale.
By September 1968, after a second album that included an 18-minute ear-splitting composition about a transvestite drug dealer named Sister Ray, Reed had had enough of the avant-garde noise.
After two performances at the Boston Tea Party, he called Morrison and Tucker to a meeting at the Riviera Cafe in the West Village without Cale’s knowledge and told them that Cale was not in the band.
In his place, they hired bassist and organist Doug Yule, who was chosen because his birthday fell in late February. “The band was Pisces, Pisces, Virgo, Virgo,” Yule said, “and astrology was all the rage.” When John was fired, they wanted a Pisces like John, but someone more manageable than John Cale, because John was a had a strong personality, which I think is part of the conflict between him and Lou.”
A third, self-titled album followed, full of quiet and sometimes heartbreaking songs. By the time the fourth album, Loaded, was released – featuring Sweet Jane, perhaps the most famous of all Velvet Underground songs – Reed was both physically and mentally exhausted.
He left the band in 1970 and left Manhattan, moving to his parents’ home in Freeport, Long Island. A year later, Sterling also gave up.
By this point, Edie Sedgwick, the frontwoman of The Velvet Underground who never was, was well past her superstar days. Her drug addiction became so debilitating that in her final film with Warhol in 1969, the artist gave a chilling instruction: “I want something where Edie commits suicide at the end.”
The Velvet Underground became the ultimate in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll
Later, while thinking out loud, he said, “Do you think Edie will let us film her committing suicide?”
Her favorite cocktail was a speedball or a shot of heroin in one arm and amphetamines in the other. She set fire to her Chelsea Hotel apartment, underwent electroshock therapy, and was repeatedly detained and hospitalized.
In July 1971, she married a fellow hospital patient and tied the knot at the Sedgwick family ranch in Laguna, California.
Four months later, she suffocated in her sleep, face down in her pillow, aged 28.
The medical examiner classified the death as “undetermined/accidental/suicide” and the cause of death as “probable acute barbiturate poisoning.” As one obituary said, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth… and died with a ladle of barbiturates in her body.
Adapted from Loaded: The Life (And Afterlife) Of The Velvet Underground by Dylan Jones (White Rabbit, £25). © Dylan Jones 2023.
To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid until 16/09/2023; free UK delivery on orders over £25), go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.