Chapter 19 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Though Nico originally had to embark on her solo shows accom­panied by a tape, at the urging of Paul Morrissey her former band­mates eventually took turns backing her up, though none of them was overly thrilled to help out, seeing it more as an obligation than anything else. To alleviate the problem, Morrissey began to bring in a revolving cast of other performers to play with her. The first was a young singer named Tim Buckley.

Some biographers say Buckley was introduced to Nico by Jackson Browne, while Browne himself has said in interviews that Buckley brought him into Nico’s fold. Morrissey, acting as Nico’s manager, claims it was none other than Danny Fields who suggested pairing Buckley and Nico together. ‘Tim would back up Nico and play a set of his own and not take it very seriously,’ recalled Browne in 2014’s Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture. ‘He didn’t like this place or any of the people in it. He would sing a lot of Johnny Cash songs or whatever he felt like doing, and after a week … he was out of there.’ After just two shows, Buckley left, passing his opening slot on to Browne.

On a whim, the eighteen-year-old Browne, from Orange County, California, had driven with two other friends to New York at the start of 1967. The singer-songwriter was already beginning to make a name for himself, having signed a publishing deal with Elektra Records, when Buckley got him the gig playing with Nico. ‘He was doing this gig with Nico,’ Browne recalled. ‘The night I went, Sterling Morrison of the Velvets was playing guitar and accompanying her. And another night, it would be Lou Reed … But she needed her own accompanist. And they were all trying to get her squared away so she could have her own career, because she wasn’t going to stay in the Velvets. Tim called me a couple of days after I saw the show and said, “Do you think you would want a job as an accompanist?” … I had just gotten to New York and everybody knew I was out of money. I mean, we spent my 50 bucks getting there. I was just living on Mrs. Paul’s fish cakes and mooching off my friends … there was snow on the ground, and I was wearing penny loafers – I’m from Orange County! So I started being her accompanist. And it was really an interesting thing, for the first time, to try to make up an arrangement in a key and to figure out how best to represent a song for somebody else who didn’t play an instrument.’

Part of the deal with Browne backing Nico included him switch­ing from his acoustic guitar to an electric one, as Morrissey was worried that the former would see the singer classed as a folk act. Not owning the desired equipment, Browne had to borrow the appropriate instrument from a friend in Long Island. ‘We didn’t play every night. They’d put this sign up saying, “Andy Warhol’s Mod Dom” (apparently he liked the name Dom because it was Mod backwards). I went in there one night when we weren’t on and it was a different place entirely, just ordinary people drinking, old songs on a jukebox. But on Nico’s nights, it was kind of like a freak show,’ Browne recalled. This was even more apparent on the occa­sional nights when Warhol would show up at the Dom and provide visual accompaniment. ‘On the nights that Andy had the bar, there were these films being projected,’ Browne said. ‘There were loops. So there was a skydiver that was just sort of falling through the air eternally. I mean, if you looked really carefully, you could see where the loop jumped. Another loop was a loop of Lou Reed sort of glowering at the camera, eating a candy bar … Playing these sets was for people who were in there sort of to observe that scene. They were sort of voyeuristic … it would be a bunch of people from uptown, hoping to catch a glimpse of Andy Warhol and his wild entourage of freaks. You know, a bunch of lawyers or society people or whatever.’

Though it was a hangout for those wanting to catch a glimpse of the Factory crowd, the Dom may not have been the most nur­turing environment for Nico to launch her solo career. Rock writer Richard Meltzer claimed in a 1971 article for Screw Magazine that Nico ‘never noticed the crowd at the Dom … all those cats sit­ting around at ringside drawing unflattering pictures of her on their napkins in ballpoint. Pictures of Nico with a bony face with tears streaming down her face and fragile wings at her shoulders. And spiders crawling across her forehead and they used to pass the draw­ings around and giggle. But she never noticed, because the people talking at other tables were even louder than the laughter. Nobody ever used to listen but once in a while they used to yell out requests. “Ruby Tuesday” and “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and stuff like that … once somebody even asked for some raga-rock. Jackson usually protected her from such swill and he once said, “We know it but we’re not gonna do it.”’

Jonathan Talbot played on the same nights as Nico, and described a similarly unfriendly atmosphere at the Dom, saying it was ‘smoky [and] noisy, [with] the bar to the immediate left of the stage from the performer’s point of view. This was not a house that particularly respected art … the Dom was a hard house to work. You just didn’t expect much attention, and you didn’t get it. I don’t think she was playing for the people there. She was just doing her thing and leav­ing.’ Regardless of the challenging circumstances, Nico, Talbot said, ‘certainly got more attention than I did. And I believe she got more attention than Jackson Browne did. It varied from night to night. I think sometimes they paid good attention and they liked her, and sometimes she couldn’t get that audience’s attention for anything. It was real hard with all the audio-visuals going on around.’

But it wasn’t just the special effects that were off-putting to Talbot and other audience members not entrenched in the Factory scene; there was not much of a musical community at the venue, which was obvious to anyone not already established in the peculiar social hierarchy of the Warhol crowd. ‘The camaraderie which had been part of many different musical situations for me did not exist at the Dom,’ said Talbot. ‘I found Nico to be standoffish … The Warhol scene and the scene that surrounded Nico … from my experience there, a lot of it was built on pretension, or on posturing, or some­thing like that. It didn’t make for a whole bunch of interchange.’

The lack of authentic artistic collaboration was not lost on Nico, who was finding the expectations of Morrissey and Warhol limiting. She felt their ideas were not positioning her to be taken seriously as a credible artist in her own right. ‘They originally wanted Nico to sing inside a plexiglass box,’ said Browne. ‘She flatly refused; she often grumbled about this novelty stuff they tried to make her do. We would sit up on the bar and play the same set twice nightly. She would do the Lou Reed songs, which sounded so hypnotic the way she sang them, a Tim Hardin song, a Bob Dylan song – all of them unreleased; it was an exceptional repertoire to hear, basically the songs we later recorded on Chelsea Girl. They were all simple songs to play, and none of us guitarists saw it as demanding work.’

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One Nico convert was a young writer who first stumbled upon Nico at the EPI shows and who religiously attended her solo gigs. Warhol noticed his constant presence, writing in POPism, ‘Leonard Cohen the Canadian poet was there [at the Dom] quite a few nights in the audience down at the bar, just staring at her [Nico].’ Cohen recounted his first meeting with the vocalist, saying, ‘I didn’t know any of these people. I saw this girl singing behind the bar. She was a sight to behold. I suppose the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up to that moment. I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside. I started writing songs for her then.’ Cohen was besotted from the moment he met Nico, though he reflected, ‘[W]ithin five minutes of our conversation, she told me to forget it, because she was only interested in young men. But she said, I’d love to be a friend of yours – and we became friends.’

This did not stop the thirty-three-year-old from pursuing the intimidating blonde. ‘I was madly in love with her. I was light­ing candles and praying and performing incantations and wearing amulets, anything to have her fall in love with me, but she never did …’ Cohen confessed ruefully. ‘The years went by and we became quite tender with each other, but nothing romantic ever came of it.’ Nico, however, was less than bowled over by the singer’s attentions, saying of their initial meeting, ‘He came to see me at La Dom every night. And we both ate the same kind of food – well, he turned me on to that kind of food at the time, macrobiotic things.’25

Cohen was not the only one lusting after the tall, stunning blonde. ‘She was physically like a goddess,’ Browne said. ‘There were men sitting there utterly infatuated with her. At the time there were these twenty-foot-high posters of Nico all over Manhattan, I forget quite why. It was impossible to work around the Village and not see these gigantic images of her. She didn’t exploit it herself. At the Dom she sat on a straight-backed chair and crossed her long legs … She did not tout her sexuality. She didn’t need to trade on it. She was dignified in her seduction. I had this gigantic crush on her, too.’

Despite the ten-year age difference, romance quickly blossomed between the ex-model and the West Coast transplant, with Browne telling a friend, ‘Gee, I’m barely eighteen and here I am sleeping with the most beautiful girl in the world.’ He would often stay over at Nico’s, the two artists drinking wine and watching Ari together. ‘She had a very childish laugh and she smiled a lot. She could be icy and distant with certain people – this is a woman bringing up a kid, you know? Of course, in real life she had her defences … I did notice that she was always friendly with people who supported her, like doormen and the personnel who’d help her get cabs and folk like that; she was very sweet to them and I think they adored Nico in return.’

Sadly, the romance was short-lived, but the Dom partnership lasted for over a month, even though Browne began bad-mouthing Nico privately. Meanwhile, Nico had begun to make her scorn for him public, during one performance accusing Browne of being the creep who was harassing her with obscene calls. Their relationship had been deteriorating, but this final blow made him so upset that he walked off mid-performance, to be replaced by a Bob Dylan associate, a willing Bobby Neuwirth, who just happened to be sit­ting right at the front.

Before his departure, Browne had played Nico some of his songs, several of which she began to include in her repertoire. She was the first to sing ‘These Days’ and ‘The Fairest of the Seasons’, which he’d written with Greg Copeland, as well as another tune called ‘Somewhere There’s a Feather’. As he left New York, Browne wrote a last song about Nico. He never gave it to anyone, and she never saw it.

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In the midst of Nico’s residency at the Dom, the long-awaited full-length The Velvet Underground & Nico LP was finally released. The exact date it arrived on the streets is uncertain, with various biog­raphies placing it sometime between 28 January and 4 March 1967.26 While initial sales were disappointing, the cover art was striking. The front featured a bright-yellow-and-black-outlined banana against a stark white background. The silk-screened image, illustrated by Warhol, includes the instruction to ‘Peel Slowly and See’ in tiny letters. When peeled back, the fluorescent pink flesh of the fruit is revealed. Warhol’s signature is prominently scribbled across the bottom right-hand side, making each copy a piece of art in itself. Flipping over the album, the back features a large photo­graph, captured by Paul Morrissey, of the band playing live, accom­panied by smaller head shots of each member of the group.

The particular image Morrissey selected as his contribution to the LP shows the Velvet Underground performing at an EPI gig at the Chrysler Art Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with a still from Warhol’s Chelsea Girls projected behind them. The still is an upside-down image of Eric Emerson, Nico’s co-star in the film. Morrissey had picked the image and produced the cover art without obtaining the actor’s permission to include his likeness. Emerson, though having no malice towards the Velvets or his Factory cohort, was broke and thought that asking the band’s label Verve for a fee for using the picture would result in a painless payout. He asked for an exorbitant $500,000 for the supposed distress the inclusion of his picture had caused him. ‘It wasn’t done in any kind of malicious way. It was to get money out of the record company, basically, from my understanding of it,’ Factory intimate Gregg Barrios later said. Sterling Morrison, however, claimed that Emerson needed the dosh to fight an acid-possession charge, while artist Ronnie Cutrone said the actor wanted it in order to go to the UK. Whatever the reason, Verve/MGM immediately pulled all copies of The Velvet Underground & Nico until Emerson could be blurred out of the cover.

Emerson also asked Warhol for a further $750,000, claiming he was never asked if his likeness could be featured in Chelsea Girls. The entire circus resulted in the album losing any momentum or excite­ment that the year of touring and press had generated. The updated sleeves were free of Emerson but had either a strange, smudgy spot where his face once was or a black-and-white sticker slapped over the offending image.27 It was not the record release anyone involved had hoped for, and it did nothing other than underscore the feeling shared by Warhol, Morrissey and Verve label man Tom Wilson that it was Nico, not the Velvets, who was destined to be a star.

Despite the setbacks with the LP, the Velvets soldiered on, still try­ing to drum up support for their live show and sustain any momen­tum they had from the previous year. Several gigs were booked on the East Coast. Nico did not appear at many of them, though she was still advertised as the star attraction, her name featuring in a larger, bolder, more predominant typeface than that of the Velvets. Her absence was felt by those attending the non-Nico shows. A gig in New York at the start of April featured Warhol visuals of a John Cale screen test, but the tall blonde ‘focal point’ was nowhere to be seen. One audience member recalled the Nico-less performance was ‘much to my and many other people’s disappointment. Even those who’d never heard the band were familiar with her iconic beauty.’

She was billed as the ‘unbelievable Nico’ in the advertisement for the show that appeared in the Michigan Daily, as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable returned, almost a year to the day, to Ann Arbor, Michigan. In another attempt to provide visibility for the group, a residency of several nights was booked at the Gymnasium on East 71st Street in New York. Again, adverts for the shows completely omitted the band:

A NEW HAPPENING DISCOTHEQUE THE GYMNASIUM

NATIONAL SWINGER’S NITE with ANDY, NICO, LIVE BAND and FREAK OUT LIGHTS making the wildest swing-in the EAST SIDE’S ever seen. SUNDAY, APRIL 30, at 6PM