POPism (25 page)

People in the crowd would come over and introduce themselves and it was all unreal. You wouldn't think about it at the time, but the strobe would freeze the moments in your brain and you'd pull them out months or years later. Like “This is Karen Black,” and that second would somehow flash back the next year when you saw the same face in
You're a Big Boy Now
.

The kids at the Dom looked really great, glittering and reflecting in vinyl, suede, and feathers, in skirts and boots and bright-colored mesh tights, and patent leather shoes, and silver and gold hip-riding miniskirts, and the Paco Rabanne thin plastic look with the linked plastic disks in the dresses, and lots of bell-bottoms and poor-boy sweaters, and short, short dresses that flared out at the shoulders and ended way above the knee.

Some of the kids at the Dom looked so young that I wondered where they got the money for all those fashionable clothes. I guess they were doing a lot of shoplifting: I'd hear little girls with bangs say things like “Why should I
pay
for it—I mean, it's going to fall apart tomorrow.” By the end of the sixties shoplifting detection was a major industry, but in '
66
, it was still a fairly primitive operation, usually just guards at the store doors—and meanwhile the kids could be in the dressing rooms stuffing their bags full, or else their pocketbooks, since the new clothes were all so skimpy.

Boutiques started opening up around St. Mark's Place, and
used fur coat places and, of course, Limbo. Limbo was the most popular place in the area, because it was basically army-navy surplus (at first) and all the kids had started wearing military clothes. I recall an item in Howard Smith's
Voice
column about Limbo's selling strategy/psychology—it said a lot about the way the kids were thinking: the store couldn't sell a bunch of funny-looking black hats, so one morning they made a sign that said, “Polish Rabbis' Hats” and they were sold out by that afternoon.

One night at the Dom, Paul and I were in our usual spot, standing on the balcony watching all the kids dancing when we saw a small, muscular blond kid make a ballet leap that practically spanned the dance floor. We went downstairs to talk to him. His name was Eric Emerson and it turned out he was a friend of Ronnie Cutrone's and Gerard's.

A few days later, Paul and I stopped by to see him at a storefront down on Avenue A or B on the Lower East Side, right around the corner from where the
East Village Other
had its offices then. Eric had built the wall divisions and done all the carpentry in the place himself and after finishing the he-man construction work, he'd brought in his little sewing machine and started sewing dresses—that was the kind of person Eric was, you couldn't hold him down in any category.

“Where did you learn how to build things?” Paul asked him.

“My father's a construction worker in Jersey, and he always made me cut pieces of wood to fit.” He gestured self-consciously. “I would look at things and then go after my image, so now I always know about how things are built.” He shrugged and smiled.

“But where did you learn how to ballet dance?” Paul asked him.

“My mother, she was sending me to ballet school constantly, you know, and then I danced with the Music Mountain Group up in North Jersey, and then with the New Jersey Ballet Company in Orange—we did
Brigadoon, Kismet, Most Happy Fella
, things like that.”

“But where did you learn how to
sew
?”

“I was in California last year and I met a wonderful woman who told me, ‘Just do something that you love doing, and then, no matter what it is, you'll be able to sell it.' She was the mother of one of my friends; her husband made, you know, the headlights on Thunderbirds. She really knew a lot and we were very close. She taught me how to sew, and she also showed me how to keep a journal and write my thoughts down in it.” Eric showed us his “trip book,” filled with the poetry and drawings he'd made while he was on LSD.

“How old was she?” Paul said.

“Fifty-five, maybe.”

“And you were having sex with her?”

Eric wouldn't answer that. “She was very beautiful to me,” he said simply, and sincerely.

Toward the end of April, a club called the Cheetah opened on Broadway and 53rd Street. It was a big operation, with a fifteen-hundred capacity, done up very slick with colored lights and vinyl strips hanging off the ceiling, and movies and slides and closed circuit TV, and spin-offs like a television room and a boutique.

And bands—the Velvets played at the opening; I saw Monti Rock III dash by in a glittering gold outfit, looking, he said, for Joan Crawford.

The Cheetah was the brainchild of Olivier Coquelin, and when it was in the planning stages, Olivier had asked me and
Edie to be the host and hostess there—Andy & Edie's Up, he wanted to call it. But he and his backers were good business people and in those days we weren't—we were so loose when it came to things like schedules and contracts, and also, we never wanted to commit ourselves to anything; all we wanted was to run around and have a good time. So the next thing I knew, their beautiful slick club was opening—without me—and it was a sensation.

The clothes the guys wore at Cheetah showed that they were catching up with the girls, discoing in the new styles—polkadot shirts and bell-bottoms and boots and little caps.

But the most remarkable thing was that there was not one drop of liquor on the premises (they figured it would be impossible to check I.D.'s for thousands of kids who would all be right around the legal age limit), and nobody missed it. The kids weren't really drinking much anymore anyway—drugs were the new thing on their minds; liquor seemed old-fashioned.

We put up the front money ourselves to produce the Velvets' first album, hoping that some record company would come along later and buy our tapes. We rented time for a couple of days in one of those small recording studios on Broadway, and it was just Paul and me in the control booth, and Little Joey, and Tom Wilson, who'd produced Bob Dylan and who happened to be a friend of ours, just there helping informally.

The image the Velvets had of themselves as a rock group hadn't included Nico originally—they didn't want to turn into a backup band for a chanteuse. But ironically, Lou wrote the greatest songs for her to sing—like “Femme Fatale” and “I'll Be Your Mirror” and “All Tomorrow's Parties”—her voice, the words, and the sounds the Velvets made all were so magical together.

The album came out great, a classic, yet the whole time it was being made, nobody seemed happy with it, especially Nico. “I want to sound like Bawwwhhhh Deee-lahhn,” she wailed, so upset because she didn't.

Since we had a date to play the Trip in L.A. when our subleased month at the Dom was up, we only had time to record half the album in that Broadway studio—“All Tomorrow's Parties,” “There She Goes Again,” and “I'm Waiting for My Man.” (We didn't finish till we got out to the coast; we did some more taping there, and then MGM decided to back us the rest of the way.) I was worried that it would all come out sounding too professional. But with the Velvets, I should have known I didn't have to worry—one of the things that was so great about them was they always sounded raw and crude.

Raw and crude was the way I liked our movies to look, and there's a similarity between the sound in that album and the texture of
Chelsea Girls
, which came out of the same time.

The Trip was a club on Sunset Strip that Donovan had told us about the last time he'd been up to the Factory, and right after that, a manager named Charlie Rothchild had mentioned to Paul that he could get a booking for the Velvets there from May 3 to 29. So Paul went out ahead of us to scout things and wound up renting the Castle from Jack Simmons, an actor with real estate savvy, for the Velvets to stay in. Back at the Factory, we packed up the whips and chains and strobes and mirrored ball and followed.

After the Velvets opened, a lot of people wondered if they could last the full three weeks, and critics wrote things like “The Velvet Underground should go back underground and practice.” But the Velvets in their wraparound shades and tight striped
pants went right on playing their demented New York music, even though the easygoing L.A. people just didn't appreciate it; some of them said it was the most destructive thing they'd ever heard. On opening night, a couple of the Byrds were in the audience, and Jim Morrison, who looked really intrigued, and Ryan O'Neal and Mama Cass were there, kicking up their heels. We read a great comment by Cher Bono the next day in one of the newspapers, and we picked it up for our ads—“It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.” But Sonny seemed to like it all—he stayed on after she left.

The Velvets had been playing the Trip less than a week when the sheriff's office closed it down—suddenly there was this sign on the door telling people to go see Johnny Rivers at the Whiskey A Go-Go down the street instead, which was owned by the same two guys who owned the Trip. It said in the papers that the estranged wife of one of the owners had filed suit for some money she claimed her husband owed her. We all got ready to leave town when somebody advised us that if we stayed in L.A. we would get paid for the whole run, but that if we left town, we'd forfeit it—there was some rule that the musicians' union can make them pay, so we stuck around and sent Local 47 out there after the money for us. (It took three years, but they collected it.) So we had till the end of May to sit it out in L.A.

The Velvets were at the Castle, and some of us were staying at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard. The Castle was a big medieval stone structure in the Hollywood Hills—with dungeon rooms downstairs and beautiful grounds. It had views of Griffith Park and of all of L.A. and across the way you could see the Frank Lloyd Wright mansion that Bela Lugosi had lived in. Lots of rock groups had stayed at the Castle—Dylan had just been there—and lots more would be staying there all
during the sixties. We were shuttling back and forth between the Castle and our motel. There didn't seem to be as much to do out there as in New York, so we were anxious to get home. Meanwhile, Bill Graham was calling us to come up to San Francisco to play the Fillmore on the bill with the Jefferson Airplane, whom he was managing then (Grace Slick wasn't with them yet, there was another girl singer named Signe), but Lou said he hated the Airplane and would never, never be on a bill with them. (The month before at the Dom, whenever Danny Fields would put an early recording of the Airplane over the sound system while the Velvets took their break, it would drive Lou crazy. Danny accused Lou of being jealous, and Lou said no, that wasn't it, that he just could not stand their music.)

We kept telling Bill Graham we didn't want to go up to San Francisco, that all we were interested in was getting back to New York, which was so true: there were big magazine articles out about the new music scene featuring the Velvets, and we felt it was foolish to be away just at the time we could be rolling in all that publicity.

While we were waiting it out at the Castle, a show of my Silver Pillows was going at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega—a whole room of the helium-filled silver pillows drifting at different altitudes between the floor and the ceiling, with a green tank of the gas in a corner of the space. I preferred to have all the pillows float scattered—exactly halfway to the ceiling—but instead they were bunching up and there were even some fizzled ones on the floor that the helium had leaked out of. We spent all one afternoon tying lead fishing weights to them to get them moving, floating in between, bumping into each other, but it was impossible to make them sit still in the middle of the air, because one
of them would always drift away and start a chain reaction. There was a big silver and black photograph of me on one wall and on another wall a black and white one of the pillows floating out of the Factory window back in New York.

Bill Graham was still after us to go up to San Francisco at the end of the month—he even came down to L.A. to try to persuade us.

“I can't pay you much money, but I believe in the same beautiful things that you do,” he said intensely, looking around at all of us.

Paul finally broke down and said okay, that we'd go there, but after Graham left, everyone dished the West Coast rhetoric—we weren't used to that kind of approach. “Was he
serious?”
Paul laughed. “Does he think we actually
believe
in this?
What
‘beautiful things'?”

That's what so many people never understood about us. They expected us to take the things we believed in seriously, which we never did—we weren't intellectuals.

Paul blamed LSD for the decline of humor in the sixties. He said the only person on LSD who had a sense of humor left was Timothy Leary.

In a way he was right, because when we went up to San Francisco, whenever we tried to have fun with somebody, they would act like “How dare you make a joke!” Everybody seemed to be taking the Cosmic Joke so seriously they didn't want you to make little uncosmic jokes. But on the other hand, the kids on acid did seem happy, enjoying all the simple things like hugs and kisses and nature.

The San Francisco scene was bands and audiences grooving
together, sharing the experience, whereas the Velvets' style was to alienate people—they would actually play with their backs to the audience!

Anyhow, we were out of our element, for sure.

“They call this a
light show?”
Paul said, looking at the stage during the Airplane's act, where they had projections from the glass with fluid on it. “I'd rather sit and watch a clothes dryer in the laundromat.”

A lot of friction developed between Bill Graham and us. It was just the difference between New York and San Francisco attitudes. What was funny was that Graham's business style was New York—the fast, loud-mouth operator kind of thing—but then what he was saying were San Francisco flower child things. The end came when we were all standing around in the back of the Fillmore watching some local band onstage. Paul was continuing the same type of LSD put-down commentary that he'd been making all day—comments that I could see were really rubbing Graham the wrong way.