Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story Read Free Page A

part silent. As soon as The Velvet Underground started to play however, Andy became quite animated, because he immediately recognized he could work with this band. The music was so loud it was impossible to talk while they were playing, but in a break between songs he asked Edie what she thought about having the band play in front of the movies during her upcoming retrospective. She was understandably unenthusiastic about a suggestion that would clearly have drawn a good deal of attention away from her starring role and got uptight. But when Gerard got up and danced in black leather pants with his whip, eerily mirroring The Velvets’ style with his sinuous, mesmeric movements, which resembled a cross between the Frug and an Egyptian belly dance, Andy saw Gerard become a part of The Velvets and had even more reason to feel that here was a rock band with whom he could really connect. The Velvet Underground was little known outside their small circle but active on the same level of the underground movie scene that Andy was championing. Working more in tune with his own artistic approach than any other rock group he’d seen, they refused to accept any form of pre-conditioned order or restraint.
    LOU REED: “That was a very funny period with a very funny group of people. Everybody in a certain section was doing almost exactly the same thing without anyone knowing anybody else.”
    After the set Barbara brought The Velvets over to Andy’s table. They were all in their early twenties and dressed from head to foot in black. John Cale’s sonorous accent anddreamy deportment bespoke his Welsh background and classical music training. Curly haired Lou Reed’s shy gum-chewing smile identified him most closely with Andy, with whom he shared a similar temperament. They sat next to each other and immediately hit it off. Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker were quiet at this first meeting, but the vibes were good. They were all aware of who Andy was and gratified by his interest and compliments.
    MORRISSEY: “On the night Andy came to the Bizarre Gerard had invited Nico, who had just come to town, and that’s when I met her. I think Gerard had already brought the record ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’ up to the Factory. I felt that the one thing The Velvets didn’t have was a solo singer, because I just didn’t think that Lou had the personality to standin front of the group and sing. The group needed something beautiful to counteract the kind of screeching ugliness they were trying to sell, and the combination of a really beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed. That very night, right away I said, ‘Nico, you’re a singer. You need somebody to play in back of you. You can maybe sing with this group, if they want to work with us and go in this club and be managed.’”
    ANDY WARHOL: “The Pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all. Nobody wanted to stay in one category, we all wanted to branch out into every creative thing we could. That’s why when we met The Velvet Underground at the end of ’65, we were all for getting into the music scene, too.”
    Before leaving Andy invited The Velvets and Nico to come up to the Factory whenever they felt like it. He left before the second set, but at dinner afterwards kept saying to his friends, “We have to think of something to do with The Velvets. What can we do? What could it be? WE HAVE TO THINK OF SOMETHING!” He had always been interested inrock music. The great ‘Sally Goes Round The Roses’ by The Jaynettes was his favourite song, he played it non-stop. He was excited about the possibilities of combining The Velvets’ musical with his visual sensibility.

WHAT WAS THE MUSICAL SENSIBILITY OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND?
    JOHN CALE : “I had a classical education in classical music playing the viola in youth orchestras. I heard rock’n’roll on the radio in the Alan Freed days, and it