The Blues Muse: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781518621147: Books
New York
I love New York. There is danger in those concrete canyons, muggings, gang shoot-outs, racial tensions, and even the police can be brutal. A girl friend of mine was raped three times in the three years she lived in the Big Apple. On one occasion the rapist took several minutes battering her door down to get to her. Various doors opened and quickly closed but not one of her neighbours came to her rescue. If you got stabbed on the street people would step over you.
So it must be strange for me to say I love it, but I do. For all its violence and indifference there is an energy to it and it draws the creative and different into a weird alliance.
When Andy Warhol wanted some help setting up the sound in his night-club I listened to what he wanted and jumped at the chance to get involved. It was a concept that was just too interesting to miss out on.
A club, an event, an experience. It was all of these and more.
Andy Warhol wasn’t just the leading light in Pop Art. He was creating something completely different. His studios were anarchic areas where anything could happen. I walked around with Andy as he enthused about it all. I walked downtown through the markets as he browsed the second-hand stalls and selected items out of the junk, items that others saw as tawdry rubbish but he’d picked out as pieces to be introduced into his installations. In his studios there were films being made, interviews, things being cut up, silk-prints, photographs, drama and paint. Anything was possible. All life was art. He made no distinction.
I wouldn’t say he was weird. Some saw him as pretentious. Some saw him as a genius. For me he was someone who seemed to live in another world. He looked at things from a different perspective. He was a ball of energy that was wanting to fuse art into everything.
The Exploding Plastic Inevitable started as a one off event but developed a life of its own. Warhol wanted to create an environment with music, light and film. The set, the sound, the lights all had to meld into an experience that was total and immersive.
To that end the Velvet Underground were ideal. The band took their name from a sado-masochistic novel about the underground sex scene. Lou Reed was a Garage Punk, Moe Tucker was a female drummer, John Cale – a classically trained avant-garde violinist, and Sterling Morrison a guitarist and bass player. Andy Warhol added Nico, a iconic German model with no history of singing, to the line-up. Their material represented the hard drugs, masochism, transvestism and violence of street culture in New York.
The first time I stood in that club and saw it all happening I was knocked out. They had created something totally new.
This was a million miles away from the Peace and Love going down on the opposite coast. This was harsh, violent and then incredibly delicate and melodic. It pulled you one way and then another.
The light-shows were nothing like those of the Jefferson Airplane. These were hard with stroboscopic effects, sometimes so harsh that the band had taken to wearing shades to protect their eyes. It all added to the image.
I stood in the front and soaked up the music.
Lou, Sterling and Moe produced the core of the sound. Moe was a brilliant drummer and could lay down a Bo Diddley beat as good as any I’d heard. Lou’s voice was great and his guitar had all the riffs and drive that came out of that ‘garage’ scene. His songs were the basis of their sound but it was Nico and John who drove the music into a different dimension.
They had two styles; the power-driver Punk songs that were ruthless and stark, building up to great crescendos of noise, epitomised by ‘Heroin’ or ‘Run, Run, Run,’. Then on the softer songs Nico would come into her own, her voice with its strong German accent like some kind of chanteuse, on the ethereal ‘Sunday Morning’ or sad ‘I’ll be your mirror’.
It shouldn’t have worked. The material was too extreme, too graphic, too perverse, too varied. There was nothing subtle about it.
Yet it did work.
Something magical came out of that setting, something powerful and new. The lexicon of music had a new expression. There was nothing I liked better than a new creation. I revelled in it.