Half goddess, half icicle, Nico was the Warhol muse who inspired the ‘sexcess’ of rock’s most outrageous band – The Velvet Underground, writes DYLAN JONES

When Andy Warhol and his entourage – his Superstars – hit a New York nightspot, they took centre stage: a raucous, cross-dressing, wired up, spaced out assortment of freaks.

‘We weren’t on the present,’ Warhol favored to say. ‘We had been the present.’

However at an insalubrious Greenwich Village vacationer lure referred to as the Cafe Weird in December 1965, the script was flipped.

What the white-haired pop artist, his muse Edie Sedgwick and their glamour gang witnessed blew their minds: an artwork rock band referred to as the Velvet Underground.

What adopted was 5 years of sexual extra, wild drug binges and a sensational succession of songs that impressed every part from glam to punk.

The Velvet Underground grew to become the last word in Intercourse, Medicine and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

After that first gig, movie director and Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey recalled that neither he nor Andy might inform if the drummer was a boy or a lady (they favored that).

All of the songs gave the impression to be about medicine (they favored that much more) and so they all wore sun shades – which made them seem as if they had been auditioning for Warhol’s 24-hour artwork studio, The Manufacturing unit.

Not one of the Velvets had heard of The Manufacturing unit. However they had been about to change into totally paid-up members … Warhol’s chosen courtroom musicians. Instantly their set was over, Warhol turned to his gang and mentioned: ‘Gee, do you assume we must always, uh, purchase them?’

The four-piece had performed their first paid gig lower than per week earlier and on the energy of that landed a residency on the Weird. Their music was extraordinary – veering from atonal shrieking to beautiful melodies, with lyrics about habit and transgressive, sado-masochistic intercourse.

One music, constructing from a sluggish throb to a manic improvised thrash, recreated the push of capturing up with heroin and will final 20 minutes or extra.

They had been led by Lou Reed, a self-created malcontent from Lengthy Island, New York, who had solely not too long ago recovered from electroshock therapy for what his dad and mom believed had been gay tendencies. The bass participant was avant-garde visionary John Cale, a ridiculously gifted classical participant from Wales.

Standing as much as batter her drumkit with mallets, the androgynous Moe Tucker from Levittown by no means used cymbals and had essentially the most idiosyncratic type of 60s rock band percussionists. 

Then there was the rhythm guitarist, Sterling Morrison, a mild-mannered man from Poughkeepsie, New York, who projected a bizarre sense of normality.

That they had every part, Warhol determined, besides typical intercourse enchantment. And for that, he had the answer: his waif-like mannequin and It Woman, Edie. He’d met her 9 months earlier, in March 1965, at a party for playwright Tennessee Williams. When he noticed her, he sucked in his breath, and mentioned: ‘Oh, she’s so lovely!’

Warhol resolved to make Sedgwick his greatest Famous person, his very personal Marilyn. She would flip as much as fancy society events barefoot, or for dinner dates in little greater than a leotard accessorised with large Greenwich Village bangles, multi-strand necklaces and dangling chandelier earrings.

Perhaps she’d be sporting only a white mink coat and nothing else.

Above all else, she had her signatures: delicate, alabaster pores and skin, sootily rimmed teacup eyes, her Liz Taylor brows and her — completely surprising for 1965 — silver shock of gamine-like hair, dyed to match her mentor’s.

However she was already deep into medicine, each quick and sluggish. Because the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland mentioned: ‘Edie was after life and generally life would not come quick sufficient.’ Her childhood had been ultra-privileged, but terrible.

Her father tried to sleep along with her when she was seven. ‘No person informed me that incest was a foul factor or something, however I simply did not really feel turned on by incest,’ she mentioned.

Edie was despatched to the Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in 1962 affected by acute anorexia and had an abortion after changing into pregnant whereas on a hospital go.

A couple of months later her brother Minty hanged himself, having not too long ago informed his father he was homosexual.

Edie was wanting to entrance the band however, alarmed by her worsening addictions, Warhol modified his thoughts. As a substitute, he picked a mannequin and actress recognized for her affairs with music and movie stars together with Bob Dylan and Alain Delon. Her title was Christa Paffgen however her stage title was Nico.

First, Warhol needed to persuade the Velvets’ vocalist and chief songwriter, Reed, to step again for her.

Lewis Allen Reed was born in 1942 right into a strong middle-class Jewish household in Lengthy Island.

By the point he was 17, his father (an accountant) and mom (a former magnificence queen) had change into terrified of his temper swings and, worse but, what they suspected had been homosexual predilections.

On the time, the gay was, together with the communist, essentially the most threatening, subversive character in American tradition.

Reed was despatched to Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, for nonconvulsive electrical shock remedy, 3 times per week for eight weeks. 

‘They put a factor down your throat,’ Reed mentioned, ‘so you do not swallow your tongue and so they put electrodes in your head. That is what was advisable to discourage gay emotions. The impact is that you just lose your reminiscence and change into a vegetable.’

A pure songwriter, he took a job with Pickwick Data, bashing out identikit pop: browsing songs, hot-rod songs, bike songs, romantic ballads. Impressed by a style revival for ostrich feathers, he wrote a gimmicky music referred to as The Ostrich and invented a foolish dance to go along with it.

Pickwick launched it underneath the title The Primitives and assembled a band for a Vogue photoshoot. One profitable Primitives applicant, picked for his lengthy hair, was 22-year-old musician John Cale. Born in 1942 within the Amman Valley, between Swansea and Carmarthen, Cale was the son of an English-speaking coal miner and a Welsh instructor.

His grandmother forbade the talking of English in the home. ‘It left me unable to essentially discuss to my father,’ he mentioned.

Reed and Cale began collaborating, socialising always, and moved in collectively on New York’s Decrease East Aspect – Cale resisting Reed’s amorous advances.

They referred to as themselves The Warlocks, recruited Morrison (a pal from Reed’s school days), modified their title to The Falling Spikes, and eventually selected The Velvet Underground, impressed by journalist Michael Leigh’s notorious 1963 paperback of that title about ‘aberrant’ sexual behaviour.

When Reed employed Maureen (Moe) Tucker, the youthful sister of one in every of Morrison’s associates, she was working as an IBM keypunch operator.

‘The Manufacturing unit was completely nuts,’ mentioned Moe of her first go to to Warhol’s lair. ‘I used to be very shy. I will be blunt: I had by no means heard anybody say the phrase “f**ok”. I swear to God, that is the reality. That simply was not the best way anyone I knew talked.’ 

The Manufacturing unit was on East forty seventh Avenue, only a five-minute stroll from the United Nations.

Adorned with tin foil and fractured mirrors, every part was painted silver, even the elevator and the bathroom bowl. ‘Silver is narcissism,’ mentioned Warhol. ‘Mirrors are backed with silver.’

It was residence to Warhol’s ever-growing coterie of assistants, hangers-on, hustlers, pace freaks, drag queens, on–off boyfriends and random uptown/downtown socialites. As a result of the artist referred to as them Superstars, all of them believed they had been. Warhol offered Nico as an ultimatum to the band.

He would handle them, give them a spot to rehearse, finance their tools, help them, discover them a document deal, produce them and make them well-known … so long as they gave him 25 per cent of their earnings, did what they had been informed and put Nico on the microphone.

She could have appeared extraordinary, however not everybody who noticed Nico carry out was so enamoured of her vocal prowess. One critic described her voice as ‘like a cello getting up within the morning’. However when Mick Jagger first heard her, he began telling anybody who cared that he thought she was going to be the subsequent Joan Baez. She was half goddess, half icicle, a feminine mirror to Warhol.

She was blonde, possessed a shyness that manifested itself as conceitedness and – to these exterior the set – bizarre.

He favored her as a result of her abilities had been finite, making her no menace to him.

The band capitalised on the strangeness of her voice with dwell numbers akin to Melody Laughter, 25 minutes of minimal Moe Tucker percussion, guitar/viola drones and Nico wails.

In March 1967, The Velvet Underground’s first album was launched with a canopy designed by Warhol: a banana with a sticker that learn ‘peel slowly and see’. Beneath, the fruit was pink.

Critics hated it. Reed’s favorite evaluate of the album, which he used to repeat to anybody who would pay attention, was: ‘The flowers of evil are in bloom. Somebody has to stamp them out earlier than they unfold.’

However aficionados picked up on it shortly. David Bowie performed it always: ‘That December, my band Buzz broke up, however not with out my demanding we play I am Ready For The Man as one of many encore songs at our final gig. It was the primary time a Velvet music had been coated by anybody, wherever on this planet. Fortunate me.’

A band is at all times a drama in itself, and every member of The Velvet Underground had points with the others. Reed was changing into cautious of Cale, Cale was changing into annoyed with Reed and each now had their points with Nico (sexual, in addition to inventive).

She was more and more consumed by drug and alcohol abuse. When she arrived greater than two hours late for a live performance in Boston, Reed refused to let her on stage and fired her quickly afterwards. (She died in 1988 following a biking accident in Ibiza.)

Touring positioned nonetheless extra pressure on the group. They may have been the very apex of downtown cool in New York, however in additional conservative states they had been only a bunch of black-clad ne’er-do-wells in wraparound sun shades and European footwear. ‘These had been primitive occasions,’ says John Cale, ‘driving round in a van, taking huge quantities of pace, being stopped by the police.’

One evening, in the course of Ohio, they had been waved down by visitors cops and accused of kidnapping kids: the ladies driving with them had been younger and could not produce notes from their dad and mom.

Drug use heightened the tensions. Earlier than assembly Reed, Cale mentioned, he had snorted, smoked and swallowed one of the best medicine in New York, however he had by no means injected something. When he joined The Velvet Underground, he found heroin. Reed helped him overcome his squeamishness with needles.

The expertise ‘was magic for 2 guys as uptight and distanced from their environment as Lou and me’. A profound drug tradition already existed at The Manufacturing unit — Warhol, for example, was always taking Obetrol, a pink food plan tablet. Amphetamines had been the order of each day and evening, creating an environment of virtually everlasting paranoia, and increase tensions between Reed and Cale.

By September 1968, after a second album that included an 18-minute ear-shattering squall of a composition a couple of transvestite drug supplier referred to as Sister Ray, Reed had had sufficient of avant-garde noise.

Following two gigs on the Boston Tea Get together, he referred to as Morrison and Tucker to a gathering on the Riviera Cafe within the West Village with out Cale’s data and informed them that Cale was out of the band.

In his place, they employed bassist and organist Doug Xmas, picked as a result of his birthday fell in late February. ‘The band was Pisces, Pisces, Virgo, Virgo,’ Xmas mentioned, ‘and astrology was all the fad. When John was fired, they needed a Pisces like John however somebody who was extra manageable than John Cale, as a result of John had a powerful persona, which I suppose is a part of the battle between him and Lou.’

A 3rd, self-titled album full of quiet and generally heartbreaking songs adopted. By the point the fourth album, Loaded, was launched – that includes Candy Jane, maybe one of the best recognized of all Velvet Underground’s songs – Reed was exhausted, each bodily and psychologically.

He left the band in 1970, leaving Manhattan for his dad and mom’ residence in Freeport, Lengthy Island. A 12 months later, Sterling give up, too.

By then, Edie Sedgwick, The Velvet Underground frontwoman who by no means was, had drifted a good distance from her Famous person days. Her drug addictions grew to become so debilitating that in her closing film with Warhol, in 1969, the artist gave one chilling course: ‘I need one thing the place Edie commits suicide on the finish.’

Later, pondering aloud, he mentioned: ‘Do you assume Edie will allow us to movie her when she commits suicide?’

Her favorite cocktail was a speedball, or a shot of heroin in a single arm and amphetamines within the different. She set hearth to her residence within the Chelsea Lodge, underwent electroshock remedy and was incarcerated and hospitalised time and time once more.

In July 1971 she married a fellow affected person from the hospital, tying the knot on the Sedgwick household ranch, Laguna in California.

4 months later, she suffocated in her sleep, face down in her pillow, aged 28.

The coroner categorized the demise as ‘Undetermined/Accident/Suicide’ and the reason for demise as ‘possible acute barbiturate intoxication’. As one obituarist mentioned, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth … and died with a ladle of barbiturates in her system.

Tailored from Loaded: The Life (And Afterlife) Of The Velvet Underground by Dylan Jones (White Rabbit, £25). © Dylan Jones 2023. 

To order a duplicate for £22.50 (supply legitimate to 16/09/2023; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or name 020 3176 2937.