POPism: Andy at full blast

As regular readers of this blog will know (all one of them, me), one of the people whose stuff I draw on from time to time for these must-read musings on music is everyone's favourite pop art maestro, Andy Warhol. Not a musician or in any way properly "musical" (did he even really like music?), his ideas and reminiscences are - in my opinion - invariably interesting. They even, sometimes, offer up little nuggets you could consider "inspirational" (or whatever). In POPism: The Warhol Sixties, the subject of this blog, he mentions how for him the ladder of success was always "much more sideways than vertical". "My style", he says, "was always to spread out ... rather than move up". Yeah, I can dig this philosophy. Anyway, after ploughing through the super-massive diaries (blog here) and before that - quite a few years ago - The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol, here are a few thoughts on POPism, his rather brilliant account - with his ever-present secretary Pat Hackett - of journeying (tripping?) through the weird and wonderful art world of 1960s New York, armed only with an open - and very gossipy -  mind and lots of ideas about how to do art. Yeah, man, it really is a trip. Anyway, I ain't here to talk about the "swinging sixties" or any of that nonsense. No, this is about music, a music-filtered account of Warhol's Pop memoir. So these were the music-related things in POPism I found interesting:

Andy listens to another fabulous Edie Sedgwick story

*Warhol says he liked to paint/create (circa the early '60s) "with rock and roll blasting the same song, a 45 rpm, over and over all day long ... The music blasting cleared my head out and left me working by instinct alone". 

*Rock and roll - and opera - played at loud volume is something he mentions a few times in POPism. At the Factory, Billy Name evidently began the practice of playing opera, and Warhol recalls that opera records would be "all mixed in with the 45s I did my painting to, and most times I'd have the radio on while the opera was going". A typical scene, he says, would be him arriving in the afternoon to do some art stuff and "the radio and the record player would both be blasting - Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying mixed with Turandot, Where Did Our Love Go? with Donizetti or Bellini, or the Stones doing Not Fade Away while Maria Callas did Norma". Sounds pretty good to me. 

*Not to be outdone by the Factory's constant blaring music, toward the end of the sixties Lou Reed was living in a loft on Seventh Avenue and 28th Street, then the centre of the fur business district. Evidently it was deserted at nightime, and Reed and an after-Max's nightclub crowd would repair to his loft in the early hours to belt out records "with all the amps up".  

*Loud R&R crops up again when in October 1963 Warhol goes on a big East-to-West cross-country drive with a couple of his art associate mates and, a nervous non-driver, Warhol insisted that the car radio is kept on "the whole time - full blast", so the driver wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel. Again, it's music as function rather than er, music as music. 

*By the end of 1965, says Warhol, New York boutique shops selling high-fashion gear were becoming groovy "Pop" places in their own right. He says of one store, Paraphernalia, that it would sometimes stay open till 2am, and the sales assistants would "sit around, read magazines, watch TV, smoke dope". "You'd go in", he says, "try on things and Get Off My Cloud would be playing - and you'd be buying the clothes in the same atmosphere you'd probably be wearing them in".  

*Speaking of the lovely Rolling Stones, Warhol recalls first meeting a pre-fame Mick Jagger in the spring of 1963 via the designer Nicky Haslam, who also seems to have introduced Warhol to David Bailey. Warhol, an inveterate people-watcher, reckons both Bailey and Jagger had a "distinctive" way of dressing - "Bailey all in black, and Mick in light-coloured, unlined suits with very tight hip trousers and striped t-shirts". 

*And more Stones: a year-and-a-half later, Jagger and the band were in town trying hard to make it in the States. Warhol recounts a "Mods v Rockers" publicity party thrown for them at the photographer Jerry Schatzberg's studio. Evidently the band were "so shy" they hardly dared venture into the party preferring to stay secreted in an upstairs flat.

*And on the "British Invasion" of 1964: the bands, says Warhol - the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Dave Clark Five and so on - "changed everybody's idea of what was hip from the last vestiges of the tough, big-city teenage look into mod and Edwardian. American boys would fake Cockney accents to pick up girls, and whenever they found a real person from London, they'd try to keep him talking and talking so they could get his accent down".

*The stuff Warhol has to say about Bob Dylan, a part-time Factory habitué it seems, is interesting, including remarks about his "anti-act" and - in characteristic Warhol mode - admiration for Dylan's "brilliant new style" and how he wouldn't "spend his career doing homage to the past". However, the funniest bit is Warhol's near-paranoia about rumours that Dylan didn't like him, and how he'd "given away" a silver Elvis painting that Warhol had, early on, gifted to Dylan. Years later Warhol found out that this wasn't quite true: Dylan had swapped the Elvis - for a humble sofa - with his manager Albert Grossman. The art/celeb world, eh?

*During an acid-fuelled weekend film shoot (for My Hustler) on Fire Island in 1965, Warhol recalls that they had the Crystals' He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) "playing over and over day and night, which everyone loved because the lyrics were so sick".

*Nico, says Warhol, was "a new type of female superstar". Instead of the chatty, outgoing American style (eg Edie Sedgwick), Nico was "weird and untalkative". "You'd ask her something, and she'd maybe answer you five minutes later."

*Nico's "weirdness" seems to have been more than perceptual/cultural (something also borne out by James Young's book on her vampish heroin queen ways in the 1980s). Warhol mentions an occasion when his manager Fred Hughes came back to his 16th Street apartment at which Nico was crashing, having just been mugged in the street: "'It happened right outside your building?', I said. 'Was Nico watching?' 'No', Fred sighed, 'When I finally staggered into the apartment, she was in the bathtub as usual with all her clothes on singing'." Er, yes, obviously.

*Warhol says he and the Factory crew first became aware of the Velvet Underground's "fabulous and demented" sound in early 1966, upon checking out their act at Café Bizarre on West 3rd Street. "People would leave looking dazed and damaged", he says.

*John Cale's early look in the Velvets is described as "more parochial" than the jeans-and-t-shirts style of the others: "white shirts and black pants and rhinestone jewelry (a dog collar-type necklace and bracelet) and long black spiky hair". Doesn't sound too parochial (whatever that is) to me. 

*Warhol describes VU as "audio-sadists" at some of their early shows with Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable film projections, where they'd apparently play faster and faster until the dancers couldn't cope with the frenetic sound. The band's approach, says Warhol, was to "alienate" people. 

*With the Velvet Underground's debut LP, Warhol says he was worried MGM/Verve were going to make it sound "too professional", but - pleasingly for Warhol - it still sounded "raw and crude". He reckons raw and crude was how he wanted the Factory films to look, and he says Chelsea Girls - which came out at around the same time as the album - had a similar "texture".  

*On Lou Reed's ousting of Nico, Warhol says this revolved around the tension inherent in the question: was Nico singing with the band, or were the VU essentially her backing band? Either way, she was out and Reed apears to have been reasonably generous about it, going to the trouble of recording the band's music onto a cassette which - rather incredibly - Nico would use as her backing tape while she did what Warhol calls little "chanteuse" sets in the downstairs bar at The Dom in St Mark's Square.

Freaks or family? Some of the Factory crowd, including Nico's son Ari

And that, more or less, is the music stuff from POPism, crudely filleted out and unceremoniously dropped on the Niluccio on noise plate. Er, tasty. But the 378-page POPism clearly has a lot more in it than these succulent (or otherwise) music morsels. After all, Warhol's ducking and diving in the New York art world plays no small part in this story. How he exaggerated his "swish" (for which read camp/effeminate, I think) mannerisms when in the company of a macho set of top-dog Abstract Expressionists - Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and others - who ruled the roost at places like the Cedar Tavern. How he saw, after some early faltering missteps, Pop as a way of dissolving the traditional divide between the "commercial art" world and the supposedly more rarefied "real art" world (art-art, so to speak). And how, during his early-sixties road trip out West, he and his entourage saw Pop everywhere around them in the futuristic design of the roads, the motels and the diners. Of this he says:

"The moment you label something you take a step - I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabelled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure. We saw people walking around in it without knowing it, because they were still thinking in the past, in the references of the past. But all you had to do was know you were in the future, and that's what put you there."

Observations like this are what make Warhol worth reading, in my opinion. His sideways-on approach to music - seemingly not caring too much about its actual qualities but enjoying its effects or how it fitted into a wider culture - are part of the same mindset. Indirect or tangential, but original and sort of "weightless". Places and lifestyles are also viewed this way. The back room of Max's Kansas City, probably no more than a seedy dive bar to most people, was to Warhol "like going home, only better". Warhol says he was drawn to people like the speed-freak dancer Freddy Herko, a super-talented but undisciplined performer - one of "the leftovers of showbusiness, turned down at auditions all over town". People "too gifted to lead regular lives". Yeah, maybe, though the impression you get reading POPism is that while Warhol thrived on the energy and inventiveness of people like Herko and the Factory crowd, he was never going to fully commit himself to its wildness and anarchy. At one point he marvels that his art curator friend Henry Geldzahler could give some of the Factory people the run of his house, saying "the Factory was a different thing to where I lived - I wouldn't want to go home to that kind of insanity, ever". It's a sort of shuttle life - bouncing back and forth between the business-orientated art dealers and gallery owners, and the amphetamine/acid-soaked world of underground "superstars", junkies and assorted hangers-on. Warhol seems to get a buzz from both scenes. At one point he mentions how he'd developed a reputation for turning up at parties with around 20 people in tow - "It was like one party walking into another one whenever we arrived". The hum of constant minor scandal seems to suit him, even if it sometimes discomfited his socially awkward side as well. After Chelsea Girls has become a film-world mini-sensation he recounts how he once had an encounter with a "very nice" older woman at a party at the UN who told him how she very much wanted to see the then-hard-to-see Chelsea Girls because her daughter had "jumped in front of a train right after seeing it". In typical Warhol style - a mix of épater la bourgeoisie and personal abashment - he says, "I didn't know what to say to her". No, I guess not.

So there you have it: Warhol in a nutshell. This laconic uber-chronicler - Polaroid-taker, dictaphone-carrier, Screen Test-maker, telephone-diary gossiper - had a foot in both camps. He didn't eat the acid-spiked eggs at the Fire Island film parties, but he was there to see the effects on other people. He didn't tell the Velvet Underground to fashion a mix of abrasive drone-rock and stone-cold folk-ballads sung by a haunted German goth-woman, but he was on hand to encourage them in it. At one point in this excellent sideways-on view of the sixties, Warhol talks about feeling the "acceleration" of things during 1965-67, and how, by 1969, people were already nostalgic for that time. Taking weight-control pills and driven by a burning work ethic, Warhol reckons he only slept "two or three hours a night from '65 through '67", which he says was common among his circle. I guess if that's how you're living you might need the energy of a rock and roll record continually blasting out at the Factory or in the backroom of Max's to keep you awake. It's Andy at full blast, man.