The Velvet Underground Popularity Myth Pt.28 -June 1968

June 1968

A slow month for the VU but a monumental and life changing time for Andy Warhol.

2nd June. San Francisco Chronicle. Live preview.

4th June. The Hamilton Spectator. Andy Warhol shot. Of course, this story was repeated and made front pages throughout the world. (see I Shot Andy Warhol clippings Substack)

7th June. San Fransisco Chronicle.

7th June. San Fransisco Examiner.

8th June. Record Mirror (UK). Review of White Light / White Heat. A great one. First reviews since the UK release in May

8th June. Disc (UK). White Light / White Heat reviewed.

13th June. New Society (UK). Geoffrey Cannon on the VU.

A Mirror Of American Death

Violence – not always political – haunts America. The pop world of Andy Warhol is symptomatic.

A SPECTRE IS alive, and is stalking America: the spectre of Mike Hammer. In One Lonely Night, Mickey Spillane, whose books don’t sell by the hundred million for nothing, says it all.

Mike Hammer is talking to himself: “Go after the big boys… do the same thing to them that they’d do to you. Treat ‘em to the unglorious taste of sudden death… Get the big boys and show them the long road to nowhere and then none of those stinking little people with little minds will want to get big. Death is funny, people are afraid of it. Kill ‘em left and right, show ‘em that we aren’t so soft after all. Kill, kill, kill, kill! They’ll keep away from us then’. (my italics).

Edward Kennedy said, in the funeral oration for his brother: ‘Some people see things as they are, and say why’. It is this quality that puts such men in danger of their lives in America now. (No one is going to kill Hubert Humphrey). The act of the assassin, borne up as he is by that part of America that senses itself to be menaced, intolerably, by men who stand for radical change, is the rage of Caliban seeing his face in a mirror.

Politicians are not the only mirrors to be smashed. Because they are now a matter of life and death, America’s crises are, naturally, not expressed merely by political means. This article was begun not last Wednesday, when Robert Kennedy’s death was reported, but the day before, when the headlined recorded the overshadowed but at least equally significant shooting of Andy Warhol. Warhol was, or is (the extent of his injuries has not been definitely reported), the exemplary mirror of America’s horror; and his work delineates this horror with a precision, candour and incandescence beyond any politician.

The Red Indian genocide, slavery, race hatred, the shelving of the poor, the old and the sick, and now Vietnam – the whole thing – could no doubt be borne by an averagely cynical society But Americans are taught that their country’s ideals cannot be compromised: that America is the emblem of justice, of fair-dealing and of freedom, or else is nothing. So America is struck numb.

In these circumstances, Warhol has found the only means to speak. Although all his work is relevant, I only want to refer to his two most relentlessly accurate achievements here: his Death and Disaster series of paintings, and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable rock music circus, featuring the Velvet Underground group with Nico as singer.

Warhol is incomparably the most potent modern American artist, through expunging all aesthetic and moral content from his images. He has seen that the rhetoric or commentary conventionally assumed to be the defining characteristic of any art, the interposition of the artist between his subject and the spectator, would eliminate the meaning of his work. Warhol has nothing to say about what he sees. He just sees them: his power is in his ability to make us see them pure too. His images are elementally disturbing.

In being a mirror, a politician is a vehicle of the public events of his time; of history. Warhol is more than this. His images are his own; which is what makes him an artist. And he can, by himself, get behind them, make them public events, demonstrate them, and rivet them into our perceptual framework; which is what gives him magnetic star quality.

Warhol the artist and Warhol the star are inextricable. The photographs of Belsen, of Hiroshima, of Sharpeville reverberated against our consciousness that the events being recorded were singular and tremendous, and in this way they became icons: unqualifiable signs of the times. Bur car smashes and the electric chair are commonplace knowledge. Warhol paints them impersonally, in the manner of the police photographs used in True Detective magazine. He uses a silk-screen technique and flat tones, and repeats the image again and again, with slight variations, emphasising that they are two a penny. Devoid of artistic quality, the scenes feel like objets trouvés. A big, low car, a Lincoln perhaps, folded and overlapped upon itself. Two legs upside down, wrapped over the top of a half-detached door. Or a large square bare concrete room, evidently underground. Pipes running round the ceiling skirt, SILENCE printed on the wall. high up, right. The Chair placed where no chair would be: dead centre. Nothing else in the room.

The images feel very familiar. We seem to have seen them countless times already. Their mechanical detachment, their lean detail, make them distillations of every bit of our mental mash of thoughts, recollections and received ideas on their subject. This reverberates against our consciousness that the images are art. Warhol repeats the trick of Marcel Duchamp, who first claimed the right to present objets trouvés as art, with greater perceptual daring. The images become archetypes, their effect as strong and unequivocal as the Sharpeville photographs.

Like a greater speech-maker, Warhol obliges us to concentrate. We see the meaning of the images he provides for the first time. We register the fact of a car smash, of the electric chair, with the force of a report of tremendous, singular public event.

And then, the Velvet Underground…

The total environment of a rock music concert using every electric technique, particularly at a venue like New York’s Fillmore East, also obliges its audience to concentrate. The beat, the sound volume, and stroboscopic light shows, all at once turned up to the limit of physical tolerance, press in on the senses and eliminate the possibility of reacting to anything except the music.

Warhol lit on the Velvet Underground as a rock group quite unlike any other, notorious for atonal discords which refused any aesthetic context, and for their delineation of a purgatory of mainline imagery. (They can be heard alone on White Light/White Heat, Verve V6-5046). Nico was already a feature of Warhol’s movies. She had the aura of a satanic Marianne Faithfull, which has been enhanced by Tom Wilson on her later solo record (Chelsea Girl, Verve V6-5032) with a mastery of the recording studio equal to that of Mike Leander in creating Marianne Faithfull as a singer.

In bringing the Velvet Underground and Nico together, and in being their impresario, Warhol surpassed himself. (The record, the one of the three issued in Britain, is Verve V6-5008). Anyone inclined to believe that rock music can only be entertaining should get the record. Lou Reed, singer and composer for the Velvet Underground, sings with the candour of a dying man.

Alone, both the Velvet Underground, and Nico, are not much more than whimsically sinister, Their sound is full of self-referential loops of personal despair. ‘Chelsea Girls’ is the most haunting track on Nico’s LP, and ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ on White Light/White Heat; in both cases the flat tones of the singers’ recitative and the abstract sounds, removed as far as any could be from soul music, disturb and swirl into the sensorium, and remain remembered. The achievement is singular but, to compare unlike with unlike, attenuated and inarticulate beside say, Moby Grape (on, for example, ‘Murder In My Heart For The Judge’ on Wow, CEBS 63271, issued in Britain this week). Andy Warhol in an impresario role gave depth and thought to the Velvet Underground, and Nico’s macabre untouchable quality, so that they became examplars of America’s curse.

Norman Mailer is right. It is only by descent into psychosis, by accepting that the speaker too is brutalised, that statements which touch the condition of America can be made. The Velvet Underground and Nico are voices from this necessary abyss. They speak for James (Groovy) Hutchinson, battered to death in a New York environment where the envy of beauty is so fierce that it can murder. Speed, indeed, kills. When Nico sings ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and Lou Reed sings ‘Sunday Morning’, they both delineate the death of peace, and inevitable refuge in a distant and androgynous twilight where there is no question of promise; where the individual must stay mewed up in himself like Sam Spade in a town where every one is bad and mad, in order to preserve a sense of personal integrity which then shrivels through the elimination of fellowship. Even to say these things is terrible. It is only because Lou Reed, Nico and Andy Warhol have lost all emotion that they can hold the mirror up.

His world is on drugs: it’s the quintessence of an entirely urban horror, and of withdrawal from the horror into another which is more bearable because only personal. He sings ‘I wish I was born a thousand years ago, I wish that I’d sailed the darkened seas’; but as it is ‘I’m going to try to nullify my life. ‘Cos the blood begins to flow, when it shoots up the dropper’s neck, then I’m closing in on death And I feel like Jesus’ son, then thank God I’m as good as dead’.

The words don’t do by themselves. In ‘European Son: To Delmore Schwartz’, the music, twisting the beat into atonal thrusts, swoops of modulated harmonies, growls, patters, howls, destroying the last chance of memory of any other world, creates a coherent and articulated vision of the modern hell. Lou Reed sings, with flat and self-pitiless accuracy, that the evils of life have crowded him too hard.

‘Waiting For The Man’ places Lou Reed in the flat wastes of Junk City, trying anywhere for a connection. ‘I’m waiting for my man, 26 dollars in my hand’.

The double meanings of drug argot are used meticulously throughout the record. And the elimination of individual personality, whatever the girl who shot Warhol claims as her immediate motive, shines out of and through Nico in ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’.

Warhol has made the Velvet Underground the emblem of the real horror of modern America. In this, and in his other work, he has proved as vulnerable to Caliban as the truthful politician. Who is left to tell the truth? There seem immediately to be only three men: Stokely Carmichael, Bob Dylan, and, more than any other politician, John Lindsay. May they be spared.

14th June. UK’s Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle. John Peel plays the VU.