Chapter 20 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Nico now had several months of solo performances under her belt and a well-practised repertoire of songs ready to go. Verve record producer Tom Wilson and manager Paul Morrissey decided it was time to cut her debut album. Though performing several times a week, Nico’s set list was made up entirely of other people’s songs. The idea of writing her own had not even crossed her mind, as it seemed far beyond anything she could possibly do. Regardless of any inner doubts, she was still receiving a lot of press attention, from both the sporadic Velvets/EPI shows and the continued inter­est in Chelsea Girls. Wilson may have wanted to take this visibility and mould Nico into his label’s very own Judy Collins. Collins was riding high on a fleeting trend referred to in the press as ‘baroque folk’ – a mishmash of folk music combined with classical arrangements. This may be why he later added various woodwind instruments to the final mix of Nico’s debut record. However, such intentions were not made clear to any of the musicians during the sessions. ‘I didn’t go for the arrangements on that album too much, all the strings and all that. I didn’t think they were particularly tasteful. I played guitar on two or three tracks, but none of us had any say about anything,’ Lou Reed later confided. Though rela­tions with her fellow Velvets were tenuous at best, Reed, Sterling Morrison and John Cale all contributed to the record, even gift­ing Nico several songs they had written but which were deemed unsuitable for the next Velvets release. These included ‘Little Sister’, ‘Winter Song’, ‘It Was a Pleasure Then’, ‘Chelsea Girls’ and ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams’. Jackson Browne also provided three songs for the album: ‘These Days’,28 ‘Fairest of the Season’ and ‘Somewhere There’s a Feather’. Nico finally got to include her coveted Bob Dylan song, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’, as well as Tim Hardin’s ‘Eulogy for Lenny Bruce’. In Jackson Browne: The Story of a Hold Out, Browne is quoted as saying that the album was ‘loosely put together’, claiming that Tom Wilson ‘seemed to be on the phone most of the time. I don’t think he was too interested in that particular project … he was off on a lark … he didn’t take it too seriously. Nico didn’t like the album much.’

The entire recording process took place at breakneck speed. In a 2005 interview, Browne recalled, ‘This record was basically made [in] … probably two sessions … The day I went in and played the songs of mine that she sang, Lou Reed also came in and accompanied her on the songs that he had written.’ In another article, Browne said that it could have taken no more than three days in total for the backing tracks for the entire album to be completed. Even though the process was so short, frustrations still ran high within the studio. ‘None of us had any patience so it was very sloppy. We didn’t have anybody telling us how to do things,’ John Cale claimed in a 2002 interview. Reed also bemoaned the final product, saying, ‘If they’d just have allowed Cale to arrange it and let me do more stuff on it.’

Though possibly still smarting from the Chelsea Girl sessions, in May Nico had something to look forward to. Warhol had decided to bring his top Superstars with him to the Cannes Film Festival, where a screening of Chelsea Girls was planned in order to launch the film into the international market. However, upon landing in Saint-Tropez, the entourage was disappointed to discover that the movie would not be shown at the prestigious event, having been deemed too risqué. Things did not get better for Warhol when he returned to New York. Upon arrival, he found Reed waiting to break the news: the Velvets were leaving the pop artist. Nico, mean­while, had made a quick trip to see Ari in Paris.

Album recorded, residency done, film premiere aborted, Nico was unsure about what to do next. Since childhood, when she had lived in freezing conditions, she had been dealing with a perforated eardrum. It was getting worse, and the singer was experiencing increased deafness. With time on her hands, she decided to go to London to seek medical attention. However, she needed a place to stay. According to one claim, the singer originally had her sights set on staying with renowned celebrity photographer David Bailey. She showed up, bags in tow, at Bailey’s Regent’s Park residence. ‘She just turned up on the doorstep with her suitcases,’ Bailey supposedly said. ‘She wanted to move in with me. I got a bit panicky – I was having too good a time to cope with Nico as well. I think I said, “I’m very fond of you, Nico, but not that fond.”’ He suggested that Paul McCartney might be willing to house the singer. With this in mind, Nico swiftly adjourned to the Beatle’s house. McCartney’s girlfriend at the time, actress Jane Asher, was conveniently away in the US. However, his new crush, photographer Linda Eastman, had just arrived in London and wanted to spend some time with the bass player. McCartney didn’t know what to do.

After several weeks with Nico ensconced in his house, McCartney was starting to worry, wondering how to possibly juggle the vari­ous women. Before any drama could ensue, Warhol and Morrissey arrived in London, looking to have a meeting with McCartney and Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Epstein was familiar with the Velvet Underground, and Warhol was hoping he might be able to take on some management duties and arrange a European tour for the group.29 Most likely to the relief of McCartney, Warhol and Morrissey took Nico back to the East Coast with them, telling her there was a Velvets show scheduled in Boston that she had to per­form at.

However, the homecoming gig proved to be disastrous for Nico. The 26 and 27 May shows were billed as ‘Andy Warhol’s Nico & the Velvet Underground’. However, upon arriving at the gig, Warhol was surprised to find himself replaced by club owner Steve Sesnick, who refused to let Nico join the rest of the group on stage. The press later tried to spin it that Nico’s ‘arrival on short notice from London didn’t give her enough time to ready herself’. However, the message was loud and clear: the band was done working with Warhol, and over trying to accommodate Nico. She never sang with them again as an official member.

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In later interviews, it is clear that the Velvets never, ever consid­ered Nico to be a crucial element nor accepted her as part of the group. ‘Nico really was never a member of the band, and she didn’t consider herself one. It was just something to do for fun on the first album, and because it worked,’ Maureen Tucker says in the Lou Reed documentary Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart.30 Snapping his fingers for emphasis, in a 1968 interview Reed asserts that the songs that Nico performed with the Velvets were dropped ‘just like that’ after her departure. ‘It was time for her to leave … I mean, it’s just obvious. When things are supposed to happen, they always do.’ In another article, from 1971, Reed further talks down any meaningful contribution by Nico, claiming, ‘What she was doing was just a part. You could always take a lot of different parts. I think we always knew that she would leave so no one was surprised. It wasn’t that major a point, so it didn’t matter. It was fun that she was there and it was fun that she wasn’t.’ More than twenty years later, he added, ‘It was never meant to be an ongoing thing, and it wasn’t.’ Only John Cale seemed to have any regret about things not working out with Nico in the Velvets, while also explaining why the band helped so much with her Dom shows and in the recording of Chelsea Girl. In a 2008 Uncut interview, he confided, ‘Her leaving was … tinged by disappointment, we felt we had failed her in some way … She had that ability – to make you feel you had failed her but no matter: she would survive all the stronger for it.’ Regardless of who left whom, Nico’s impact on the band is incontrovertible. Former manager Paul Morrissey commented on her contributions to the Velvets, noting, ‘Nico set the tone for the group with her ele­gance and her presence. She stood on stage and nobody could take their eyes off her, no matter what the song was. Unfortunately, this didn’t make Lou Reed very happy. He didn’t like the attention that Nico got. He seemed to be jealous.’

It would have been easy, even expected, for Nico to be outwardly bitter and disappointed by the way the relationship with the Velvets had publicly broken down. ‘I was never totally a part of the group,’ she confided in a 1971 interview. ‘I was the contrast, the gentler side. But I admired them because they weren’t afraid to be bad. I thought they were very honest, and I wasn’t doing anything at the time. So I just thought it’d be a good idea to travel around with them, play colleges and universities. But I never considered myself a member of the group because I never felt close enough to what they were doing.’

It is easy to see how she would have found it difficult to feel truly integrated into the band’s inner workings, as from the start there were inherent tensions, jealousies and miscommunications thanks to her being thrust upon the Velvets. After all, it is unlikely that Warhol would have associated himself with the group without the addition of the German model. She made the band noteworthy and helped gain them a vast amount of publicity.

Guitarist and modern rock icon Dave Navarro agrees. He points out how unique Warhol’s choice of Nico to front the Velvets was, especially during the 1960s. ‘At the time there weren’t a lot of women doing experimental music on an underground level like that. I would say that had it not been for her presence on that record [The Velvet Underground & Nico], it wouldn’t be as seminal as it is today. It was absolutely mandatory [to have Nico on the LP].’

Though Nico ‘was so unhappy’ when she ‘heard the result of that flute taking over’, Chelsea Girl also ended up becoming an important record for a later audience, influencing an entire new generation of musicians who were too young to appreciate it upon its release, or not even born in 1967. ‘When I was a teenager, twelve years old … I was pretty young, there was this bookshop in our town where this guy had a lot of records which nobody would have bought had I not found them,’ says Mark Lanegan. Lanegan is a living legend himself, having fronted grunge band the Screaming Trees before embarking on a very successful solo career that has included col­laborations with some of the greatest artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Queens of the Stone Age, Kurt Cobain and Moby. ‘It was pretty much a redneck town; nobody knew who these bands were. I bought all these records and started listening to them and got really into it. Later, I listened to Chelsea Girl, which I think is one of the greatest records of all time.’

Navarro also holds Chelsea Girl in especially high esteem. He continues, ‘It’s kinda hard to be a fan of Nico and not fall in love with her. You hear this voice and you see her image, the cheekbones, the whole package, it’s strong, unapologetic, haunting, melancholy. As soon as I heard that voice I fell in love with her – I’d marry this girl today.’ Peter Hook, the iconic bass player for groundbreak­ing bands Joy Division and New Order, calls the LP ‘my favourite female album of all time … If I’m feeling a bit blue and a bit melan­cholic and need to wallow – we all need to wallow at times – I’ll stick Chelsea Girl on and have a proper fucking one.’

Nico’s subsequent solo albums after Chelsea Girl are arguably more avant-garde, weird and uncommercial than most, if not all, of the Velvet Underground’s total output. Paul Morrissey cites Chelsea Girl as the pinnacle of Nico’s career, publicly declaring his dislike for the records that followed. ‘The material she sang [after Chelsea Girl] was atrocious,’ he later decried. ‘She imagined herself a songwriter, and at the same time she just made mournful sounds with her voice and played a child’s toy organ to make the sounds even worse. That’s what she thought was some sort of art. The real singing, which she did on Chelsea Girl … she hadn’t the vaguest idea as to how good it was. Performers, they’re almost always wrong about what the hell they were doing, and she certainly was. Once she became a drug addict, she never sang a real song again.’

The impact and trailblazing of Nico have often been forgotten or omitted from history, placing Reed as an iconic musician and Nico as simply a fringe figure. Una Baines was the keyboardist for the Blue Orchids, who played with Nico during the 1980s. She points out the contrast between the way that history has treated Nico and her male Velvets contemporaries. ‘People more want to talk about who she slept with and how many drugs she took. All the men around her at the same time were doing exactly the same thing. They were all taking drugs, all sleeping with loads of people, but that doesn’t matter if it’s Lou Reed or John Cale. Because they’re blokes. I think that’s the truth. She knew that and I think that must have been the frustration, really. She knew that she would never be treated on the same footing. I think in the future she will be rec­ognized as the tremendous artist that she was.’ Long-time Nico fan and musician Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev agrees, telling me, ‘That’s all she faced in her life it seems – male perspectives. Breaking through the male dominance in the Velvets and breaking through all the producers she had and all the men in her life. She was more than human, even beyond a woman.’

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Having now been officially ousted from the Velvets, Nico needed something to do while she waited for Chelsea Girl to be released. A new event in central California, the Monterey Pop Festival, seemed the perfect distraction. She packed her bags and headed west. Once in Monterey, she found herself reconnecting with her past flame Brian Jones, as well as former Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. ‘I was not in good nick. I came out of a place where I was having shock treatment, and then I went to Monterey,’ Oldham says. ‘But the shock treatment was good for me. And then I had to share a house in Monterey with my first wife [Sheila Oldham], Brian Jones and Nico.’ In a 2007 interview for Mojo magazine, Oldham confided that the festival marked the ‘last time I saw Brian Jones truly happy, carefree, as free and high as a bird’. It was also the last time that he saw Nico. Her attendance at the festival is captured indelibly in a series of images from the event, as well as in a fleet­ing shot of the singer walking with Jones through the crowds that appeared in a documentary released later to celebrate the festival.31 Nico is dressed head to toe in black; Jones is resplendent with his fringe, fur and paisley.

It was at Monterey Pop that Nico first saw Jimi Hendrix per­form. Some biographers have claimed that Nico ‘bragged of her fling with Hendrix’, that ‘her attraction to Hendrix was obvious’. While this makes for tantalizing reading, no one interviewed – friend, past lover, family member or colleague – could ever recall Nico mentioning any sort of liaison with the guitar genius. This is in contrast to her well-documented and oft-repeated tales of relationships with other iconic musicians with whom she crossed paths. It seems unlikely that anything actually happened between Nico and Hendrix. His untimely passing in 1970, just three years after his spectacular performance at Monterey Pop, makes it doubtful that this rumour will ever be properly substantiated or resolved, though Nico having relations with three members of the so-called 27 Club – Jones, Hendrix and Morrison – conjures up some ­enticing theories.