Chapter 17 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

In May 1966, a young record executive by the name of Tom Wilson announced a big move in Billboard magazine, the bible of the recording industry. He would be swapping his former home of Columbia Records, where he had worked to make the first elec­tric recordings of folk heroes Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, for Verve, a subsidiary of MGM. At the time, Wilson was quoted as saying his mission was to ‘build up an LP operation and estab­lish artists with consistent LP value’ at his new place of work. He was already producing the Mothers of Invention’s debut and saw the Velvets as perfect for the unconventional roster he was trying to assemble. According to Sterling Morrison, Wilson offered the Velvets the freedom that had been lacking at other possible record companies. ‘[Wilson] told us to wait and come and sign with him when he moved to Verve [because he swore] that at Verve we could do anything we wanted,’ Morrison said. ‘And he was right.’

Paul Morrissey, however, offered up another view on why the band signed to the label: it was their only choice. ‘I sent it [the demo] to all the record companies, they all said no,’ he said. ‘Finally this guy from Verve contacted me, Tom Wilson. He was a very nice guy, Harvard-educated.’ But it was not the band as a whole that enticed Wilson; it was their beguiling blonde. ‘He said, “I’m inter­ested in recording them, I went to see them. I can’t put any of this on the radio.”’ However, this did not dissuade the Verve employee. ‘That girl is fantastic,’ Wilson told Morrissey. ‘She could be a big star, and I’ll sign the whole group just to have Nico.’

This was not the news that Reed wanted to receive, and it did nothing to ease the already palpable tension between the foursome and the German addition. ‘When I went back, I made the mistake of telling that to Lou, and he really froze,’ said Morrissey. ‘The last thing in the world that he wanted to hear was this album was only being taken on because of beautiful Nico with the beautiful voice, and that Tom Wilson really wanted her, not them.’

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On the last day of April 1966, the fourteen-strong Exploding Plastic Inevitable flew to California. On 2 May, just two days after touching down in Los Angeles, all four members of the Velvet Underground and Nico signed two contracts with MGM Records.17 The band would receive a grand advance of $3,000 to split between them and a royalty payment of 7 per cent of the suggested retail price of every album sold.

Besides signing a record deal, a series of shows had been planned. The first was a residency at Los Angeles venue the Trip, scheduled to last from 3 to 18 May. Before that, the entourage checked in at the Castle, a large medieval-style mansion. Popular with the rock set, the entire party was housed there, atop the Hollywood Hills, at a cost of $500 a week. Lou Reed and Nico got the best rooms in the dilapidated abode and used any down time to rehearse on a third-floor balcony. Mary Woronov was part of the cast of the EPI and had travelled with the rest of the act to Los Angeles. In her biography, she illustrates the lack of any sort of support system for Nico, underscoring how lonely and judged the singer must have felt: ‘On tour, Nico was the one I had to avoid. She was so beauti­ful she expected everyone to want to fuck her, even the furniture, which groaned out loud when she walked into the room. I had seen chairs creep across the carpet in the hopes that she might sit down on them. Naturally I treated her like the plague, bunking instead with Maureen, the drummer, who was so frightened of me she wore her entire wardrobe to bed every night.’

Warhol, however, was excited about showing off his newest project to the sunny West Coast, proclaiming, ‘I love LA. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.’ He was especially looking forward to debuting his new Superstar and felt that she would be an immediate hit in Tinseltown, saying, ‘Nico could probably make it here tomorrow. She has that ability to be 5 and 50 at the same time.’ Despite the artist’s optimism, things started to fall apart almost immediately after touchdown in the City of Angels. John Cale later said, ‘From the moment we landed in Los Angeles … we sensed something was wrong.’ The psychedelic free love movement had taken root and was evident everywhere, from the radio waves being filled with dreamy bands like the Mamas and the Papas to the drugs of choice being LSD and marijuana. Everything seemed upbeat and hopeful, in contrast to the Velvets’ jaded, speed-influenced minimalism.

With tickets selling at $3, the Trip was set to be close to capacity on opening night. The crowd was packed auspiciously with various members of Laurel Canyon royalty, including several of the Byrds and Mama Cass. Hollywood elite in the form of Ryan O’Neal, as well as Sonny and Cher Bono, rounded out the star-studded audi­ence. Also among the attendees was a young film student from UCLA named Jim Morrison.18 Though he would later play a big part in Nico’s life, the two did not formally meet on this occasion, the aspiring frontman just one punter in a sea of many.

Things quickly went downhill. The first blow was when the Velvets found out that the opening act was their soon-to-be Verve labelmates the Mothers of Invention. The home-town crowd of hippies and peaceniks cheered the Frank Zappa-led band and booed the slick, black-clad Velvets. This immediately caused a rivalry between the East and West Coast rock acts, a face-off between flower-power free love and amphetamine-fuelled energy. Reed took an instant dislike to Zappa, referring to him as ‘probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life’. Cher was equally unimpressed with the New Yorkers, telling the press that the EPI ‘depressed’ her and that it ‘will replace nothing, except maybe suicide’. Warhol picked up the quote and began using it for the group’s own ads. The second night at the Trip proved equally problematic. At the end of their set, the frustrated Velvets turned all of their amplifiers to full power and placed their instruments on them, creating loud, abrasive feedback, then walked off the stage, making them even more unpopular with the club owner.

Any news outlet brave enough to contend with the East Coasters had differing opinions of the entire troupe, but they almost univer­sally singled Nico out, giving her mixed reviews. Los Angeles Times journalist Kevin Thomas described the singer as ‘the long-haired, deep-voiced German model [who] sing[s] songs as beautifully banal as herself’, and the Velvets as ‘a rock group that goes beyond rock … It was like a searing sound from another planet.’ An equally provocative description was supplied by the Los Angeles Free Press, reporter Paul Jay Robbins writing, ‘Nico, the chanteuse, mitigates the impending collapse of sanity primarily because of her inepti­tude as a singer. Her heavy and diffident voice seems to suggest that perhaps this is all a put-on – and by the time you realize it isn’t, you’ve grown accustomed to the mace.’

The most damning critique came from the weekly magazine Hitline, which was put out by local radio station KFBW. ‘It’s nice that the Trip wanted to try something new, but this is a tasteless, vulgar review that should never have opened,’ an author going by the singular handle of Burton wrote. ‘The show consisted of questionable “underground movies” shown on four screens plus music by the Velvet Underground (very uninteresting) and singing by Nico (fantastic beauty, but no voice).’ In another Los Angeles newspaper, the EPI was accused of offering ‘neither art nor order but contempt, contempt, which is death by negation’, with Nico singled out as ‘a blonde Nordic standing like a three-way lamp, turned on dim’.

Any fear that the negative reviews would scare people from coming to the rest of the EPI’s month-long residency was quelled when, on the third night, the club was suddenly shut down by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Decades later, Maureen Tucker spoke of the ill-fated gigs, commenting, ‘The audience was fine, but the critics and the club owners and music people didn’t like us at all.’ Reed echoed this sentiment, reflecting, ‘They saw this as this terrible, terrible influence of the virus and disease of New York City into the beautiful new counterculture of the West Coast.’

Though feeling like personae non gratae, the Factory group could not leave Los Angeles immediately. In order to fulfil the rules of their Musicians’ Union contract and collect their $3,000 perform­ance fee, the entire troupe had to stay in town, regardless of whether the Trip reopened or not. The unexpected down time was used to record the debut album, with Tom Wilson producing.19 The process was very hard for the chanteuse, who was aware of her various diffi­culties in providing the performances that the band expected of her. ‘We used to tape our rehearsals, to check. Nico was very vulnerable to this,’ remembered Cale. ‘We’d listen and hear her go off-key or hit the wrong pitch at the start. We would sit there and snigger, “There she goes again!”, which might seem a little cruel now … This made for interesting times. Every now and again she went “weeergh” and lost control of the pitch; she was very sensitive to all this and when I produced her albums later on I would have her sing and the musicians play in separate sessions.’

Throughout the recording, Wilson pushed for Nico to be included on more tracks. ‘Listen. The only thing I don’t like about the record is, there’s not enough Nico,’ Paul Morrissey recalled the Verve executive saying. ‘You’ve got to get another song from Nico. And there’s nothing here we can use on the radio, so why don’t we get Nico to sing another song that would be right for radio play?’ The result is the Reed-penned ‘Sunday Morning’, a track that Morrissey described as ‘terribly insipid’ and ‘dopey’, although first run-throughs of the cut ‘sounded alright’, he said, because Nico ‘brought something weird to everything’.

However, upon hearing that the song was a possible radio sin­gle, Reed insisted at the last minute on recording himself on lead vocals. As Morrissey recalled, ‘He sang it! The little creep. He said, “I wanna sing it ’cause it’s gonna be the single.” Tom Wilson couldn’t deal with Lou, he just took what came. Then later, he got Nico back into the studio and gave her a verse or put her with Lou’s voice or something, I can’t quite remember. Tom Wilson had to force Nico to take this option, you can imagine. We were always fighting tooth and nail to get poor Nico on. She didn’t fight this sort of thing herself, she was very shy and self-effacing. She would make a little remark. Or then she would giggle a lot. She’d giggle like a girl.’

Still clinging on to the hope that some positivity might result from their trip out west, the EPI headed up to San Francisco. Prior to the gigs scheduled to take place at the Fillmore Auditorium from 27 to 29 May, Warhol, Malanga and Nico did a flurry of interviews, including one filmed press conference for public tele­vision station KQED. All of the questions fired at Warhol were instead answered by the other two Superstars. Nico’s presence at the various junkets underscores the continued effort to position her as the star of the show.

However, similar to their experience down south, the Velvets found themselves out of step with their northern Californian con­temporaries. The two big psychedelic bands coming up at the time were the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, whose beards, beads and bohemianism did not gel with the Velvets’ aesthetic. There was also an almost immediate animosity between promoter Bill Graham and the Factory contingent, the two parties clashing on everything from light shows to drugs, with the Velvets’ show coming to an abrupt end. Writer Bruno Blum summed up the conflict between the two coasts, claiming, ‘Everyone [from New York] was on drugs. Nico was on amphetamines, she wasn’t going to sleep for 25 hours … simple as that. They got kicked out of the Fillmore because they had a giant plastic cock on the stage and the sheriff saw it and closed down the club.’

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Though having issues with her bandmates in the Velvet Underground throughout the first months of their union, Nico was still held in high regard by other members of the Factory’s inner circle. In his book Uptight, Gerard Malanga shares a recorded chat with his fel­low Superstar Ingrid, as well as his own essay, originally written for a magazine in early 1967. By this time, both Ingrid and Malanga had been on the road with Nico as part of the EPI. Yet in both pieces, Nico seems two-dimensional: it is her appearance, once again, which is fundamentally the basis of their admiration, not her personality. When her singing is mentioned, it is not very com­plimentary, the one area she is trying to become known for being negatively critiqued and brushed aside. Ingrid describes Nico’s voice as ‘very bland and low and smooth … some people mistake it for a boy’s voice. And she sings sort of like in one tone mostly. She doesn’t have too much modulation.’ Malanga is equally unsympathetic, lik­ening her voice to ‘the sound of an amplified moose’.

Her appearance, however, is ‘impeccable’, writes Malanga. ‘If there exists a beauty so universal as to be unquestionable, Nico pos­sessed it,’ he gushes. And though Nico is twenty-seven years old at the time of the recording, Ingrid refers to her as ‘just a very, very beautiful girl – a cool Dietrich for a cool generation’. Any interest in engaging with the singer as anything but the most vapid simu­lacrum is dashed, the essay going on to argue that ‘Nico would be most effectively represented in sculpture’ – making her mute as well as impassive.

The emphasis on her lifelessness is repeated throughout numerous press pieces and reviews. An article in the June edition of ArtNews substantiates this theme of Nico being present but absent, a spectre of sorts on the stage. Writer David Antin portrays her as ‘perfect as a cadaver’ and having a ‘macabre face’, as well as a ‘marvellous death­like voice’. While these details may evoke the stage persona of the singer, they also dehumanize her. The more the trope of wooden, unemotional performances was repeated, both among friends and in the press, the more it seemed acceptable, normal and correct to categorize Nico in these incredibly simplistic of terms, without bothering to look beyond them.

David Croland offers a completely different portrait of Nico, one that points to the public and personal sides of the singer – the latter one that she rarely revealed, and then only to those she trusted. ‘Nico was not a phoney,’ he asserts. ‘If she didn’t like somebody, she wouldn’t go out and say something nasty; she just didn’t respond. If she liked someone, she very quietly let you know she liked you or even loved you.’

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Warhol’s support for Nico continued into June. Having left for Ibiza, she did not appear at the Velvet Underground’s week-long residency at Poor Richard’s in Chicago. However, the posters none­theless advertised ‘the new sound of the Velvet Underground and Nico – Pop girl of ’66’. Warhol also set her up to feature as a host­ess in a series he consulted for on local station WNAC-TV.20 In August, Warhol and Nico did a photo shoot for Esquire magazine, dressed as Batman and Robin. The text called for ‘an end to the sixties’, begging that ‘the next four years be a vacation’. In POPism, Warhol asserts this is because ‘everyone was feeling the acceleration’ of events around them – or else it was simply the omnipresent uppers. ‘Amphetamine was the big drug in New York in the sixties because there was so much to do that everybody was living double-­time or they’d miss half of what was going on,’ he later reflected. ‘There was never a minute around the clock where you couldn’t be at some kind of a party. It’s amazing how little you want to sleep when there’s something to do.’

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July 1966 marked six months since Nico had officially become a part of the Velvet Underground, at least on stage. However, various relationship issues, jealousies and pettiness within both the band and the Factory as a whole were beginning to frustrate her. She found that the reality of her daily circumstances did not match up to what she read about herself and the EPI in the media. Needing a break away from Warhol and New York, Nico once again escaped to Ibiza. On the way back, she decided to swing by Paris and pick up Ari. He was about to celebrate his fourth birthday and was staying with Pauledith Soubrier – his aunt Didi. Nico made her presence known by ‘knocking unannounced’ at Didi’s house. ‘Even the way she arrived at the house was exceptional,’ Soubrier remembered. ‘She would just turn up, hello, as though you had seen her last one hour before. There was never a warning, an arrangement. She arrived, and after she had exhausted your hospitality, she left.’

However, Nico’s love for Ari and disappointment in the non-­existent bond with Delon were evident to many who met her. ‘She was a Francophile and the only time I ever saw her show a little bit of some vulnerability was when she mentioned Alain Delon in her song. You could see a little twinge of it there,’ recounted Iggy Pop, who first saw Nico at the Velvet Underground show in Ann Arbor. Though she was by no means a traditional mother, Pop remembered seeing ‘pride that she’d had a son … That was important to her, even though I don’t think she was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich type. She was not one to say, “Hey kids! How was school today?”’