All tomorrow's parties: reading Andy Warhol's diaries and the search for the downtown beat
So, dear friends, I've just read Andy Warhol's diaries, and here I am to tell the tale. More than ten years (1976-87) inside the Pop Art maestro's head, hearing his voice tonelessly reel off thousands of names, exhaustively listing brain-numbing personal expenditure on newspapers, taxis and phone calls, describing nights out party-hopping and signature-signing, making pithy remarks about films ("movies") seen, TV talk shows watched and other artists' shows attended (jealousy never far below the surface), and, of course, plenty of camp gossip (often insightful and amusing) about the post-Factory scene at his own Midtown New York mini-art empire - now simply called the "office". All hail Andy Warhol. Anyway, I embarked on the Warhol diaries for two main reasons. I like diaries in general (I've enjoyed George Orwell's, Kenneth Williams', Derek Jarman's and numerous others over the years). And also, I must admit, I thought I'd be able to mine Warhol's 1,100 pages for some juicy reminiscences on the Velvet Underground and contemporary references to punk given the diaries span 1976-87. Yeah, well, it didn't quite work out like that, but it was worth the weeks and weeks I've spent reading this brick of a book anyway. Worth it mostly because of how interesting Warhol is. He's neurotic, obsessive, unemotional, insecure, open-minded, hard-working, modest and observant. Also: he's funny, slightly (but not overly) bitchy, generally (but not always) unsnobbish, and, I think it's fair to say, very talented and - eventually - very likeable (sort of). But to get back to the music. The diaries aren't exactly awash with it and it's fairly clear that Warhol is not massively into music per se. Or he is, but more for the spectacle, the celebrity, the sensation. It's not dissimilar to Malcolm McLaren and his attitude to music: more a means to an end than a way of life. Anyway, here are some of what I found to be the most interesting music bits painstakingly filleted from the diaries:
*On Mick and Bianca Jagger's new New York house (18 December 1976): "the people had just had it all redone and it was all painted and with new furniture and I'd like to see it after the Jaggers have it for a year".
*Famous for his million and one appearances at New York disco hotspots like Studio 54, it seems Warhol hadn't ever danced in public until 16 March 1977: "Esther took me on the floor and taught me how to disco, she thought it was funny and I did, too".
*And on nightclubs, he says: "It's usually one person who stands around screaming that makes a success out of a club". "Screaming" is a key Warholian word. People at the office are "screaming" if there's some sort of argument. Even Warhol himself, pretty imperturbable in public, screams a few times when it all gets too much.
*On 30 June 1977 he was at a party (for "the Star Wars people") hosted by the record executive Earl McGrath when he was shown a "videotape of the Sex Pistols". What was it? Dunno.
*Staying with punk, he notes (16 September 1977) how his film Bad was getting talked of as "the first 'punk' movie". "They're calling me the Queen of Punk".
*By 3 January 1978, the Queen of Punk was noting that the Sex Pistols had arrived in the U.S. today". He reckoned punk was going to be "so big", and that starting their tour in Pittsburgh (his hometown) was a "smart" move because "the kids have nothing to do, so they'll go really crazy".
*Warhol also meets the Clash ("cute but they all have bad teeth, sticks and stumps") on 17 February 1979, who are apparently looking to be taken out in New York by Warhol. "One of them said he didn't want to go anywhere downtown - that he wanted to be shown uptown". So much for their "street" credentials.
*Warhol reckons Salvador Dali "said something great" about punk (19 March 1978), that "punks are the 'Shit Children', because they're the descendents of the beatniks and the hippies".
*On 20 June 1981, after Chris Stein shows Warhol some photos from the 1950s crime photographer Weegee, Warhol remarks on how the images were very contemporary: "Most of the pictures Chris brought were of a Greenwich village party, and you would think you were looking at pictures of a 1980s party - it looks just the same! It's funny that things don't really change. I mean, people think they change, but they don't. There were people wearing clothes with safety pins in them [really?] and two boys kissing in a window ...".
*A few years later (October 1986) Warhol has just been to see Sid And Nancy and punk no longer seems very alluring: "the movie was sick, real - nobody would ever want to be a punk after they saw it".
*"One of the B-52s came to the office ... and he always thinks I'm so abstract because I never know who he is. His name's Fred". Abstract, you realise reading the diaries, is a favourite word for Warhol, meaning something like "puzzling and hard to fathom, possibly in a vaguely amusing way".
*John Lennon once refused to give one of Warhol's entourage an autograph because "he said he just read that Robert Redford doesn't give autographs, so he wouldn't either".
*On 21 October 1980, six weeks before Lennon's murder, Warhol notes how he "ran into the boy whose job is to go shopping for John and and Yoko". Evidently this person was instructed to buy them bundles of new stuff which they barely wore because they hardly ever left their Dakota lair on the Upper West Side.
*Warhol apparently "ran into" people quite often. On 16 June 1981 he "ran into Gene Simmons of Kiss".
*On the Velvet Underground, Warhol says Lou Reed and John Cale "really had a style", but as a solo artist Reed had copied people like Mick Jagger.
*On 3 August 1981, Warhol has a nice VU moment when he walked into a record shop on Fifth Avenue and "they had on 'Heroin' ... I don't know if they saw me coming and then put it on quickly or if it was already on. It was so strange to hear Lou singing those songs and the music still sounds so good. It brought me back". But, you also realise after spending some time in Warhol World, he doesn't "go back" very often and instead frequently disparages Sixties nostalgia and people who live in the past (William Burroughs gets put down in this regard).
*It clearly bugs Warhol that he'd never "gotten a penny" from the Velvet Underground & Nico album - he refers to this more than once. "That record really sells and I was the producer! Shouldn't I get something? I mean, shouldn't I?" Is it the money itself or the feeling of being exploited? Probably both, I reckon. He cares about money (and is insecure about it), but also seems conscious - almost to the point of paranoia - of how he's sometimes exploited.
*By the late-70s and 80s, Warhol is perplexed and hurt that Lou Reed is distant with him. In April 1985 he says, "and what I can't figure out is when Lou stopped liking me. I mean, he even went out and got himself two dachshunds like I had and then after that he started not liking me, but I don't know exactly why or when". If this was a tougher figure than Warhol I'd probably be jumping in to mock this as puppy-ish comedy, but actually Warhol is often quite vulnerable and open about his feelings in the diaries. He really was hurt about Lou Reed. In another entry (not Lou Reed-related) he talks about being depressed and going home "lonely and despondent because nobody loves me and it's Easter, and I cried".
*Debbie Harry "isn't really interesting to talk to".
*Filming a video with the Cars (29 March 1984) placed Warhol in a social quandary: "that meant being face to face with the Cars for a while, and it was hard to talk to them, I didn't know what to say to them".
*Frank Zappa: "I hated him then [in the 1960s, when the Mothers of Invention were involved with the VU on the West Coast] and I still don't like him now" (16 June 1983).
*He sees David Bowie at Madison Square Garden on 8 May 1978 and says only, "the music was too loud". Bowie at any volume is too loud for me, but there you go.
*Back at Madison Square Garden on 23 August 1978, Warhol sees Bruce Springsteen playing to 30,000 people and says, "my head must not be in the same place because they were all jumping up and screaming for Bruce and I was the only one who wasn't". This, I think, wasn't a form of bragging - Warhol regularly questions (and even agonises over) why he's a sort of natural outsider.
*At a lunch with Raquel Welch, the publicist Susan Blond asked Welch if she'd like to go to "the New Wave clubs", to which Welch apparently replied, "No, I'm trying to get the Old Wave back, because the Old Wave represents quality not these kids running around doing things". Warhol in the diary is incredulous: "I mean, can you believe it?"
*David Geffen tells Warhol one day in August 1982 that the recently released Donna Summer album on Geffen Records was going to "make him $2.5 million by the end of the week".
*And staying with money ... on 11 July 1983 Warhol "walked the Village and then went to Tower Records and bought the Talking Heads album that Rauschenberg did the cover for [Speaking in Tongues]. He was upset because he only got $2,000. And I told him he was right, he should've got $25,000".
*A falsetto singer giving an impromptu performance at Warhol's office one day in November 1984 is compared to "the old days at the Factory when once in a while somebody with real actual talent would shock everyone with it".
*On 10 April 1984, after one of the office crowd - Benjamin (and "his roomate Rags") - hear about a party for Julian Lennon, they "decided to crash" it. It's not the only time Warhol does stuff like this. He also occasionally steals things. Though he regularly hangs out with some extremely unsavoury rich people, he also seems to strongly dislike "grand" people (or people he knows quite well "acting grand"). This appears to be Warhol keeping it real. Hanging out with a lot of young people is a big thing for him - "the kids" from the office, younger artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
*At a Hall & Oates concert in 1985, Warhol sees how Boy George and Marilyn (who had been in the audience) were mobbed by fans and even the police on their way out: "the cops were just crazy for Boy George. I've never seen anything like it".
*A week after the cop-mobbing incident, Warhol is out at a dinner with Boy George and Marilyn, with the pair apparently being "horrible brats". I'm not sure I would have enjoyed this particular evening in Warhol's life. Warhol says: "And Boy George and Marilyn like me I think because they can say means things and then I'm not quick enough to think of a comeback, so I'm not a threat to them". (Meanwhile, on another occasion he complains about a cousin who drives him up the wall because "she talks so slow". I guess he needed a happy medium).
*Bob Dylan was "never really real - he was just mimicking real people and the amphetamine made it come out magic ... that boy never felt a thing".
*After going to see Dylan at a Madison Square Garden show in July 1986, Warhol recounts a story about how Dylan had been grouchy (surprise!) because "he had just had a big fight with his girlfriend". At the end of their row Dylan's girlfriend is said to have said, "Oh go out and play your 'Mr Tambourine Man' or whatever'. "And that would kill your mood", says Warhol, "when your lover calls all your work you've done in your life (laughs) 'whatever'. So I guess he was left without an ego with a show to do". Oh dear - poor Bob.
*On seeing BB King and Miles Davis on 6 April 1986: "BB King played first and he's just great. And then Miles Davis came out, blond in gold lamé, and he plays really terrific music. High heels".
*And ... Warhol's very last diary entry (17 February 1987) before his death happens to also include Miles Davis, as they were both doing a rather strange sounding fashion shoot for a Japanese TV programme.
Well, there you have it. Warhol on music. It's a super boiled-down selection because, well, a 1,100-word diary isn't that easy to sum up with a few choice extracts. There's something decidedly Proustian about Warhol. The diary, edited by the longstanding - and presumably extremely hard-working - assistant-cum-collaborator-cum-amanuensis Pat Hackett, is actually only a selection from the original 20,000 pages of the full diaries. Gulp. A few final things on Warhol. One is that it's quite endearing to hear him say things about being anxious about other artists. "I got so nervous thinking about all those new kids painting away and me going to parties". Yeah, he was worried about losing his edge to the kids coming up from behind. And also you can't really do justice to Warhol without mentioning his humour. A few examples:
*9 April 1977: "Brigid called and started screaming because she found out that Bad was X-rated for violence just because a baby gets thrown out of a window! You don't even see it land!"
*4 September 1977: "Taxi to YSL's for lunch. Fred had to lie and say that I was a cripple so that the driver would take us such a short distance. The driver looked me over and said, 'Yes, I can see that'".
*5 July 1983: "There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I'd already read the publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already".
*11 January 1984: recounting what the not-exactly-straitlaced Basquiat had said on the phone during a trip to Hawaii, "he said he met these hippies out there and mentioned my name and they said, 'Oh you mean that death-warmed over person on drugs?' And I mean, it's him they should be talking about".
*6 November 1984: recalling how he'd given a quote to the showbiz publication Entertainment News: "I said, 'The winner is the winner'. I don't even know what I meant. If they ever put all the clips they've ever gotten off me together they'd see that I'm a moron and finally stop asking me questions".
*11 December 1985: "Bought the newspaper and saw that the eyeglass place had given an item to the newspapers that I buy my glasses there and that they're bullet-proofed like the president of Nicaragua. I mean, I'm not going to go there anymore. Why would they make that up? I mean, what are bulletproof eyeglasses? What could they do for you?"
No, Andy, I see your point. They would only protect you if they were shooting at your eyes. Though then they could be useful ...
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