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Please Kill Me Book Chapter 1Thru4
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Prologue
• All Tomorrow's Parties
1965-
Lou REED: All by myself. No one to talk to. Come over here so I can talk to you... We were playing together a long time ago, in a thirty-dollar-a-month apartment and we really didn't have any money, and we used to eat oatmeal all day and all night and give blood, among other things, or pose for these nickel or fifteen cent tabloids they had every week. And when I posed for them, my picture came out and it said I was a sex maniac killer that had killed fourteen children and tape-recorded it and played it in a barn in Kansas at midnight. And when John Cale's picture came out in the paper, it said he killed his lover because his lover was going to marry his sister, and he didn't want his sister to marry a fag.
STERLING MORRISON: Lou Reed's parents hated the fact that Lou was making music and hanging around with undesirables. I was always afraid of Lou's parents- the only dealings I'd had with them was that there was this constant threat of them seizing Lou and having him thrown in the nut house. That was always over our heads. Every time Lou got hepatitis his parents were waiting to seize him and lock him up.
JoHN CALE: That's where all Lou's best work carne from. His mother was some sort of ex-beauty queen and I think his father was a wealthy accoun tant. Anyway, they put him in a hospital where he received shock treatment as a kid. Apparently he was at Syracuse University and was given this compulsory choice to either do gym or the Reserve Officers Training Corps. He claimed he couldn't do gym because he'd break his neck and when he did ROTC he threatened to kill the instructor. Then he put his fist through a window or something, and so he was put in a mental hospital. I don't know the full story. Every time Lou told me about it he'd change it slightly.
Lou REED: They put the thing down your throat so you don't swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That's what was
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recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual feel ings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can't read a book because you get to page seventeen and have to go right back to page one again.
JoHN CALE: By 1965 Lou Reed had already written "Heroin" and "Waiting for the Man." I first met Lou at a party and he played his songs with an acoustic guitar, so I really d idn't pay any attention because I couldn't give a shit about folk music. I hated Joan Baez and Dylan -every song was a fucking question! But Lou kept shoving these lyrics in front of rne. I read them, and they weren't what Joan Baez and all those other people were singing. At the time, I was playing with La Monte Young in the Dream Syndicate and the concept of the group was to sustain notes for two hours at a time.
BILLY NAME: La Monte Young was the best drug connection in New York. He had the best drugs- the best! Great big acid pills , and opium, and grass too. When you went over to La Monte and Marian's place, you were there for a m inimum of seven hours -probably end up to be two or three days. It was a very Turkish type scene. It was a pad with everything on the floor and beads and great hashish and street people corning and scoring-and this droning music going on. La Monte had this whole thing where he would do a performance that would go on for days and he would have people droning with him. Droning is holding a single note for a whole long time. People would j ust come in and then be assigned to drone. That's when John Cale was around.
LA MoNTE YouNG: I was -so to speak- the darling of the avant-garde. Yoko Ono was always saying to me , "If only I could be as famous as you." So I had an affair with Yoko and did a music series at her loft, and I put a warning on the very first flyer: THE PURPOSE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT ENTERTAIN· MENT. I was one of the first people to destroy an instrument onstage. I burned a violin at the YMHA, and people were shouting things like "Burn the composer!" John Cale started playing with my group, the Dream Syndicate, wh ich literally rehearsed seven days a week, six hours a day. John played specific drone pitches on the viola- until the end of 1965 , when he started rehears ing with the Velvet Underground.
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What happened then was that Barbara Rubin asked Gerard Malanga if he would come down to the Cafe Bizarre to take some pictures of this band, the Velvet Underground. There were all these beatnik coffee shops in the West Village that were going out of business, so they were trying to make a transition from beatniks and folk singing to some sort of rock & roll. So I went over to the Cafe Bizarre. I think it was the Velvets' first night and they had the electric viola, which was the thing that distinguished them the most. And they had the drummer who was totally androgynous, there was absolutely no way of telling if Maureen Tucker was a boy or a girl. So those were the big attractions. And John Cale, the viola player, looked wonderful with his Richard III hairstyle, and he was wearing a huge rhinestone necklace. It's hard to believe but that was really weird then.
RosEBUD: When Andy Warhol swanned into the Cafe Bizarre with his crew you could tell he was hypnotized right off the bat. Image was all, and the Velvet Underground certainly had it. I could not believe all these tourists were sitting there drinking their bubbly and listening to the Velvets going on about heroin and S &M. I'm sure the audience didn't have a clue because the lyrics were fairly indecipherable. But I thought , This is great!
Lou REED: Music's never loud enough. You should stick your head in a speaker. Louder, louder, louder. Do it, Frankie, do it. Oh , how. Oh do it, do it.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: I knew I'd found the right group. I spoke to the Velvets that night and I said, "Are you managed?" And cagey little Lou Reed said, "Well , urn, sort of, maybe , urn, not really, but, urn, yes, no ." You know, both answers. I said, "Well , I'm looking to manage somebody and produce some albums. You'll have a definite job at a nightclub and you'll be managed nominally by Andy Warhol." They said, "We don't have amplifiers ." I said, "Well, we'll have to get you amplifiers ." They said, "Well, that would be okay, but we don't have a place to live... " I said, "Okay, okay, okay. Well, we'll be back tomorrow to talk about that." So I told Andy that I had found the group that we were going to manage. Andy said , "Oh uu-uu-uuuu ohouuuuuuuuuuuuu!"
Prologue.. • 7
Andy was always frightened of doing anything, but once he felt some body had confidence in what they were doing, especially in my case, he just said, "Oh, oh , oh, oh , oh, oh, oh, oh... okay."
STERLING MoRRISON: I didn't make any effort to impress Andy War hol. What did I care? He was just someone from the art crowd who was interested enough in our songs to come down and hear them - but it wasn't like a visit from some big record producer. He was just an artist whom I knew little about-except in terms of notoriety. My taste in art at the time wasn't Pop art, it was probably Flemish, I don't know. Impressionist... No, Pre-Raphaelites. I think I was keen on the Pre-Raphaelites, which maybe is a precursor to Pop.
AL ARONOWITZ: I got the Velvet Underground into the Cafe Bizarre, and the next thing I knew they were leaving with Andy Warhol. They never said a word to me, Warhol never said a word to me, it was highly unethical , there's a law against that really. It was a handshake deal, but what's a handshake deal to Lou Reed-he was nothing but an opportunist fucking junkie. If I had a signed contract with the Velvets I could have sued the shit out of Warhol.
Lou REED: Andy Warhol told me that what we were doing with the music was the same thing he was doing with painting and movies and writing- i. e., not kidding around. To my mind nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us. We were doing a specific thing that was very, very real. It wasn't slick or a lie in any conceivable way, which was the only way we could work with him. Because the very first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: The first thing I realized about the Velvet Under ground was that they had no lead singer, because Lou Reed was just such an uncomfortable performer. I think he forced himself to do it because he was so ambitious, but Lou was not a natural performer. So I said to Andy, "They need a singer." I said, "Remember that girl that came up here? Nico? She left her little record, a cute little record she made in London with Andrew Loog Oldham?"
GERARD MALANGA: Nico latched on to Andy and myself when we went to Paris. I just put two and two together that Nico had slept with Dylan. It was kind of obvious. She got a song out of Bob, "I'll Keep It with Mine," so he probably got something in return , quid pro quo.
Prologue ••• 9
When a woman says, "Let's stop at a motel," what does that mean to a guy? But it didn't mean anything to her - I don't know why she wanted to stop at a motel. We spent the night under the covers next to each other but nothing happened because she said she liked her lovers half-dead- like Lou Reed. Everybody had had a piece of Nico, except me, ha ha ha. Bob Dylan didn't have an affair with Nico, just a piece. I mean they all had had a piece. They didn't care, they just wanted to get rid of her, not be bothered by her. I brought Nico to see the Velvet Underground- Nice never had any taste and she had the immediate hots for Lou Reed- because she had visions of being a pop star herself. And then even Nico started hanging out with Warhol , who had been collecting this freak show. That's all Andy Warhol had- a freak show-and that's what attracted everybody. He had this place called the Factory and it was like a sideshow- "Come look at the freaks!" And all the uptown jet setters would come down and look. But I'd always get a bad feeling going over to the Factory because all these arrogant freaks disgusted me, with their arrogance and their put-ons, the way they walked, strutting around. lt was all a pose. Nico became one of them- she was doing the same thing- bu t she got away with it because she was so beautiful, j ust the way a lot of people used to forgive a lot of things about me because I could write.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: Of course Lou Reed almost gagged when I said we need a girl singing with the group so we could get some extra publicity. I didn't want to say they needed somebody who had some sort of talent, but that's what I meant. Lou was very reluctant to go with Nico, but I think John Cale prevailed on him to accept that as part of the deal. And Nico hung out with Lou because she hoped he would write another song for her, but he never did. He gave her two to three little songs and didn't let her do anything else. jOHN CALE: Lou was very full of himself and faggy in those days. We called him Lulu, and I was Black Jack. Lou wanted to be the queen bitch and spit out the sharpest rebukes of anyone around. Lou always ran with the pack and the Factory was full of queens to run with. But Lou was dazzled by Andy and Nico. He was completely spooked by Andy because he could not believe that someone could have so much goodwill, and yet be so mischievous- in the same transvestite way that Lou was, all that bubbling gay humor. Lou tried to compete. Unfortunately for him, Nico could do it better Nice and Andy had a slightly different approach, but they outd id Lou time
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and time again. Andy was never less than considerate to us. Lou couldn't fully understand this, he couldn't grasp this amity that Andy had. Even worse, Lou would say something b itchy , but Andy would say something even bitchier- and nicer. This would irritate Lou. Nico had the same effect. She would say things so Lou couldn't answer back. You see , Lou and Nico had some kind of affair, both consummated and constipated, during the time he wrote these psychological love songs for her like "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "Femme Fatale ." When it fell apart, we really learnt how Nico could be the mistress of the destructive one-liner. I remember one morning we had gathered at the Factory for a rehearsal. Nico came in late, as usual. Lou said hello to her in a rather cold way. Nico simply stood there. You could see she was waiting to reply , in her own time. Ages later, out of the blue, came her first words: "I cannot make love to Jews anymore."
N1co: Lou liked to manipulate women, you know, like program them. He wanted to do that with me. He told me so. Like computerize me.
DANNY FIELDS: Everybody was in love with everybody. We were all kids , and it was like high school. I mean it was like when I was sixteen, this one likes this one this week, and this one doesn't like that one this week, but likes this one, and there are all these triangles, I mean it wasn't terribly serious. It just happened to be people who later on became very famous because they were so sexy and beautiful, but we didn't realize it at the time, �e just all were falling in and out of love-who could even fucking keep track? Everybody was in and out of love with Andy, of course, and Andy was in and out of love with everybody. But people that were most "in-loved with" were the people, I think, who fucked the least-l ike Andy. I mean the people who you really know went to bed with Andy , you could count on the fingers of one hand. The people who really went to bed with Edie or Lou or Nico were very, very few. There really wasn't that much sex, there were more crushes than sex. Sex was so messy. It still is.
JoNAS MEKAS: I considered Andy Warhol and the Factory in the sixties to be like Sigmund Freud. Andy was Freud. He was the psychoanalyst, there was that big couch in the Factory and Andy was there, he didn't say anything, you could project anything on him, put anything in, unload yourself, give him this , and he wouldn't put you down. Andy was your father and mother and brother, all of them. So that's why those people felt so good around him- they could be in those films, they could just say and do
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GERARD MALANGA: Right after that the Velvets played a week at the Cinematheque. Jonas Mekas had proposed to Andy that he do a film retrospective there. Andy came up with the idea of an Edie Sedgwick retrospective, but then when he met the Velvets at the Cafe Bizarre, the idea turned into something bigger.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: The week at the Cinematheque was supposed to be an Edie Sedgwick film retrospective? Bullshit. That's absurd. We were probably still trying to help Edie, probably had some footage of her wander ing around doing nothing. Jonas Mekas didn't offer the Cinematheque to Andy. He offered it to me. He said, "Do you have anything you can put in this theater I rent?" And I said, "Why don't you show some movies and we'll launch our group?" We showed double-screen movies for an hour, and then the Velvet Underground played in front of some more movies for an hour. That's all it was. It was alright. Just a job.
Lou REED: Andy would show his movies on us. We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wearing black anyway.
BILLY NAME: It was called "Uptight with Andy Warhol ," and it wasn't j ust a Warhol film festival, it was like a happening with Andy Warhol's films- the films were projected on the people who were in the films, while they were dancing to the music onstage. We actually made a film of the Velvet Underground and Nico so that we could project it on them while they were playing at the Cinematheque. The entire thing was first called "Uptight" because when Andy would do something, everybody would get uptight. Andy was sort of the antithesis to what the avant-garde romantic artists were at that time. Filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek were still bohe mian avant-garde hero artists, whereas Andy was not even an antihero, he was a zero. And it just made them grit their teeth to have Warhol becoming recognized as the core of this thing that they had built. So everybody was always uptight whenever we showed up. All the other underground filmmakers would cringe l ike someone was scraping chalk along a blackboard-"Oh no, not Andy Warhol again!"
N ICO: My name was somewhere near the bottom of the program and I cried. Andy told me not to care, it was only a rehearsal. They played the record of Bob Dylan's song "I'll Keep It with Mine" because I didn't have enough to sing otherwise. Lou wanted to sing everything. I had to stand
Prologue ... 13
there and sing along with it. I had to do this every night for a week. It is the most stupid concert I have ever done. Edie Sedgwick tried to sing along, but she couldn't do it. We never saw her onstage again. It was Edie's farewell and my premiere at the same time.
BILLY NAME: Edie wasn't happy with the way her career was progress ing with Andy, but, of course, she had gotten into amphetamine-crystal stuff, with me and Ondine and Brigid Polk, and that really devastated any possible career, because, you know, you would have to stay in your place and get ready for six hours.
N1co: Some things you are hom to, and Edie was born to die from her pleasures. She would have to die from drugs whoever gave them to her.
STERLING MoRRISON: When we first showed up, we were downer people-pill people who took Thorazine and all the barbiturates. Seconals and Thorazine were a big favorite. You could get Thorazine from doctors-some body always had a prescription. It was good, pharmaceutical, drugstore stuff. They used to give Thorazine to dangerous psychotics- it definitely subdues you. It puts you in kind of a catatonic-like state, ha ha ha. I'd wash it down with alcohol and see if I was al ive the next morning.
RoNNIE CuTRONE: When you walked out of the elevator at the Factory, Paul Morrissey had a s ign up on the door that said ABSOLUTELY NO DRUGS ALLOWED. Meanwhile, everybody was shooting up on the stair case. Nobody actually took drugs in the Factory, except Andy, who took Obetrols, those l ittle orange speed pills. He took one a day i:o paint, because he was a workahol ic. That was really his thing. Everybody else shot up on the staircase. B u t only Methedrine. We were purists. The other groups were taking acid. By this time I was basically off of acid, I was into Methedrine, because you had to get uptight. "Uptight" used to have a good connotation-you know, like Stevie Wonder's song "Uptight," but we changed it to mean rigid and paranoid. Hence Methedrine.
Eo SANDERS: I knew Andy Warhol before he surrounded himself with those switchblade types. That's why I wouldn't hang out, I just didn't feel comfortable there anymore. It got a little vicious. I was really sick of those people. We called them A-heads, short for "amphetamine heads," because they were all into speed. In fact, I got into making underground movies specifically to do a documentary on amphetamine heads. So I rented this old loft on Allen
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would close at four o'clock, so Lou and I would still be up , on Methedrine, and still be wanting to do something. So we'd go to after-hours places, where you could still dance. Then when it would get to be daylight, Lou and I would just mosey over to the Factory and do a number. We weren't having an affair or anything, we were just pals hanging around. I don't think we really did blow jobs. I hate blow jobs. They're just so awkward. I hate having my head so occupied- it's too close and claustro phobic. Lou would just jerk off, get off, and then get up to leave, so I had to say, "Hey, wait a minute. I didn't come yet." So Lou would sit on my face while I jerked off. It was like smoking com silk behind the bam, it was just kid stuff. There was no rapture or romance involved. It was just about getting your rocks off at that moment, because going out with girls was still about getting involved, and all that shit. With guys it was just easier.
DANNY FIELDS: I was so in love with Lou Reed. I thought he was the hottest , sexiest thing I had ever seen. I guess he just assumed everybody loved him, you know, he was so cool, and those sunglasses. Oh my god , the emotional energy I expended on that person-what was I thinking?
RoNNIE CuTRONE: S&M sex fascinated me even though I knew nothing about it. I had a natural curiosity, so I asked Lou, "What's Venus in Furs about?" Lou said, "Ah, you know, it's some trash novel ." I said, "Where can I get a copy?" Lou said, "Ah, yeah, just down the block there's a store." So I went and bought the book. I was still in high school, so I'd go to class with my Venus in Furs and Story of 0, and ]us tine, and sit there reading this stuff. That's why I instantly loved the Velvets' music. It was about urban street stuff, it was about kink, it was about sex-some of it was about sex that I didn't even know about, but I was learning. Gradually Gerard, Mary, and I formed a great routine for the song "Venus in Furs," because "Venus in Furs" has three basic characters the Dominatrix , the slave Severin, and the Black Russian Prince, who kills the slave. I wasn't going to be no slave, and I just didn't have what it takes to be a good dominatrix, so now we had it set-Mary and I dancing with bullwhips, crucifying Gerard. We basically played only for our own enjoyment- no crowd participa tion, we didn't say a word to the audience, I mean, an hour and forty-five minute set without a word to the crowd, not "Thank you," not "Glad you could come ," not "We're gonna have a real good time tonight ."
- •. Please Kill Me
We'd just come out, shoot up, lift weights , put flashlights in their eyes , whip giant bullwhips across their faces, sort of simulate fucking each other onstage , have Andy's films blaring in the background, and the Velvets would have their backs to the audience.
GERARD MALANGA: After the Cinematheque, we saw the show as a whole serious entity - the bullwhip dance really went with "Venus in Furs." So I started inventing tableaus for some of the other songs because I wasn't gonna wield my whip for every song onstage, it would have looked ridiculous.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: Gerard liked to come along and dance. He would just stand onstage, gyrating next to them. And then he brought a whip and then Mary Woronov stood there and then different people would just get up and... let's call them go-go girls or something. It added a lot. Gerard was great. It added something to see people dancing like that. Because one thing you have to give a lot of credit to the Velvets for, they didn't move onstage. That's an homage. Then of course Nico walked out with this gorgeous face and voice and stood absolutely motionless. Oh , such class and dignity. So I had to come up with a name for the show- the lights and the dancers that went with the Velvet Underground and Nico, and I was looking at this stupid Dylan album that had always intrigued me a bit, I don't know which one it was, but I seem to recall there's a picture of Barbara Rubin on the back. So I was looking at the gibberish that was typed on the back, and I said, "Look, use the word 'exploding,' something plastic, and whatever that means, inevitable."
ANDY WARHOL: We all knew something revolutionary was happening. We just felt it. Things couldn't look this strange and new without some barrier being broken. "It's like the Red Seeea," Nico said, standing next to me one night on the Dom balcony that looked out over all the action, "paaaaarting ."
PAUL MoRRISSEY: We performed at the Dom on St. Marks Place for about a month, then I went out to L. to set up this gig at a n ight club on Sunset Boulevard called the Trip, if you can imagine. Pathetic hippie crap. So we vacated the Dom because there was no air conditioning and summer was coming up , and they all wanted to go to L. And it sounded fun. Then Bill Graham came from San Francisco, begging me to book the Velvet Underground into his toilet, the Fillmore- the Swillmore Vom itorium. Boy, was he a creep. They always talk about him as a saint. Ucch! I
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shocking, in giving people a jolt and not letting them talk us into making compromises. He said, "Oh you've got to make sure you leave the dirty words in." He was adamant about that. He didn't want it to be cleaned up and, because he was there , it wasn't. And, as a consequence of that, we always knew what it was like to have your way. IGGY PoP: The first time I heard the Velvet Underground and Nico record was at a party on the University of Michigan campus. I just hated the sound. You know, "HOW COULD ANYBODY MAKE A RECORD THAT SOUNDS LIKE SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT? THIS IS DISGUSTING! ALL THESE PEOPLE MAKE ME FUCKING SICK! FUCKING DISGUSTING HIPPIE VERMIN! FUCKING BEATNIKS , I WANNA KILL THEM ALL! THIS JUST SOUNDS LIKE TRASH !" Then about six months later it hit me. "Oh my god! wow! This is just a fucking great record!" That record became very key for me, not just for what it said, and for how great it was, but also because I heard other people who could make good music-without being any good at music. It gave me hope. I t was the same thing the first time I heard Mick Jagger sing. He can only sing one note, there's no tone, and he just goes, "Hey, well baby , baby, I can be oeweowww... " Every song is the same monotone, and it's just this kid rapping. It was the same with the Velvets. The sound was so cheap and yet so good.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: Verve/MGM didn't know what to do with the Velvet Underground and Nico album because it was so peculiar. They didn't release it for almost a year, and I think during that time it was generating in Lou's m ind that the album's going to come out and maybe make a lot of money , "So let's get out of this management contract we have with Andy and Paul." Tom Wilson at Verve/MGM only bought the album from me because of Nico. He saw no talent in Lou. STERLING MoRRISON: There were problems with Nico from the very beginning, because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for her, and she wanted to sing them all-"I'm Waiting for the Man," "Heroin," all of them. And she would try and do little sexual-politics things in the band. Whoever seemed to be having undue influence on the course of events, you'd find Nico close to them. So she went from Lou to Cale, but neither of those affairs lasted very long. RoNNIE CuTRONE: Nico was too odd to have any kind of a relationship with. She wasn't one of those women who you stay with or you love or you play with or you hang out with. Nico was really odd. She was very icy and reserved on one level , and then annoyingly insecure on another.
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Nico was totally uncool because she couldn't leave the house with out looking in the mirror for a hundred hours. "Ronnie, how does this look?" and she'd do a little dance step and I was like, "Fucking Nico, just go out and dance ." Yet she was the lee Princess, she was gorgeous, you know, a killer blonde. But Nico was a strange one. She was a weirdo. Nico was a fucking weirdo, I mean that's all there is to it. Beautiful, but a weirdo. You didn't have a relationship with Nico. And Lou didn't really want Nico around because Lou wanted to be the Velvet Underground and play rock & roll. Lou didn't want to be arty anymore. He wanted to be pure rock & roll. You know, enough was enough. The Velvets weren't getting any radio airplay. There .were no big record deals. But that wasn't all Andy's fault, I mean, look what they were writing about: heroin, and naked sailors dead on the floor. I mean, they were not going to get radio airplay with "Venus in Furs"!
Ntco: Everybody in the Velvet Underground was so egomaniac. Every body wanted to be the star. I mean like Lou wanted to be the star- of course he always was- but all the newspapers came to me all the time. I always wanted to sing "I'm Waiting for the Man," but Lou wouldn't let me. Lou was the boss and was very bossy. Have you met Lou? What do you think of him- sarcastic? It's because he takes so many pills - the combination of all the pills he takes... He's real quick, incredibly quick. I'm very slow. RoNNIE CuTRONE: You also have to realize we were on Methedrine nine days a week. So even now, I don't know what the truth was, because when you stay up for nine days straight, anything can happen, the paranoia is so thick you can cut it with an ax. And all the resentments would stay swallowed up for months, even years. I'll never forget one night we got bad speed, but we went out onstage, and we found out later that everybody thought that the other person was out to get them. During "Venus in Furs" I would throw down my bullwhip and wiggle it on the floor and Mary would dance toward it, but on this night when I threw down my bullwhip, Mary stepped on it, and I couldn't pull it back. Gerard was doing the same thing, and everybody was thinking that the other one was out to get them. That was not untypical. There would be "I know so and so's talking behind my back" or "He's trying to do this" or "He's trying to get there." Everybody was vying for Andy's attention. There was always this subliminal, and sometimes not so subliminal, level of rivalry and deep, deep, deep paranoia. I mean, you're up for nine days, your peripheral
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Andy would say, "Oh that Lou is coming around , you got to get rid of him. Say I'm not here ." Andy just didn't want to deal with people like that. And I can't blame him. I dealt with Lou all the time, on Andy's behalf, and Lou always had a little agenda of his own.
JoHN CALE: Lou was starting to act funny. He brought in this real snake, Steve Sesnick, to be our manager, and all this intrigue started to take place. Lou was calling us his band, and Sesnick was trying to get him to go solo. Maybe it was the drugs Lou was doing at that time. They certainly didn't help.
RONNIE CuTRONE: I remember when we broke up as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. We were playing the Scene. In those days, nobody could dance, so if you were dancing onstage, people watched you, like, "Wooow, cool ." But after fifty to a hundred performances of the EPI , people caught on. The stage at the Scene was really low, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, five or ten people came up and joined us. Mary and I just looked at each other: "Like, it's over, isn't it?" I was actually relieved. I had a girlfriend and I just couldn't lead the groupie l ife-style anymore. I used to wear eight rings, and I always had a bullwhip around my waist, so I went backstage, took off all the rings and threw them out the window, untied my bullwhip and threw it out the window, too. I turned to my girlfriend and said , "I love you. I'm not doing this anymore ." She probably said to herself, Oh goody, he:s all mine. Now we can go home and shoot up alone.
En SANDERS: There's a problem with opening your act to the gutter. I mean, it's like dabbling in Satanism , or experimenting in certain life-styles, or certain types of drugs, that open you up - 1 mean, I'm not a religious person, but you open up that crack, it can get you. So you have to be careful. The problem with the hippies was that there developed a hostility within the counterculture itself, between those who had, like, the equiva lent of a trust fund versus those who had to live by their wits. It's true, for instance , that blacks were somewhat resentful of the hippies by the Sum mer of Love , 1967, because their perception was that these kids were drawing paisley swirls on their Sam Flax writing pads, burning incense , and taking acid , but those kids could get out of there any time they wanted to. They could go back home. They could call their mom and say, "Get me outta here. " Whereas someone who was raised in a project on Columbia Street and was hanging out on the edge of Tompkins Square Park can't
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escape. Those kids don't have anyplace to go. They can't go back to Great Neck, they can't go back to Connecticut. They can't go back to boarding school in Baltimore. They're trapped. So there developed another kind of lumpen hippie, who really came from an abused childhood-from parents that hated them, from parents that threw them out. Maybe they came from a religious family that would call them sluts or say "You had an abortion, get out of here" or "I found birth control pills in your purse, get out of here , go away." And those kids fermented into a kind of hostile street person. Punk types.
Lou REED: There is a lot to be said for not being in the limelight. In other words, Andy didn't have to wear the sunglasses and the black leather jacket, the two things that drew attention to him. Anybody knows if you go out and do that, you're going to attract a certain bunch of people, both on the negative and positive side.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: Andy Warhol gave Valerie Solan is handouts because he was a nice guy. Then Andy said to her, "Why don't you earn the money once, Valerie. You can appear in a movie ." So instead of giving her twenty five dollars-just to get rid of her- he was trying to rehabilitate her, as he was always trying to do with everybody , trying to make them useful. He said, "Well , say something in front of the camera, and then when we give you twenty-five dollars it'll look like you earned it." I, a Man was done in one night. The whole movie was made in two to three hours , and Valerie showed up and did a five- or ten-minute scene and that was it.
ULTRA VIOLET: Valerie Solan is was a bit scary, but I l iked her, because I think she was brilliant. If you read her manifesto, SCUM -for "The Society for Cutting Up Men"- it's mad but brilliant and witty. I was not born a feminist, but when I read her manifesto I thought it had a lot of good points - that men have been controlling the world ever since Adam and it's about time it stopped.
PAUL MoRRISSEY: I tried to get rid of Valerie Solanis three times. And then one day she came in with Andy and when nobody was looking, she just took out a gun and started shooting. Stupid idiot. She wanted to shoot somebody else that day and he wasn't home, so she j ust decided to shoot Andy. What do you make of someone like that? You can't analyze that. There were no deeper meanings in there. It had nothing to do with Andy.
BILLY NAME: I heard the shots from inside the darkroom. I heard an unrecognized sound, but I was working on something, and I knew
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Course: Organization (MGMT333)
University: American Jewish University
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