Chapter 22 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Morrison had persuaded Nico that she could play an instrument; she just needed to find one that suited her. Following his advice, she bought a harmonium in San Francisco, when she went up there from Los Angeles to join Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey and Ultra Violet on a promotional junket for Chelsea Girls. The instrument was acoustic, portable and, most importantly, allowed Nico to not be reliant on anyone but herself.

This time, San Francisco embraced Nico and the East Coast crew, flocking to see the film and covering all of the quartet’s moves. Ultra Violet recounted, ‘In San Francisco, we’re a smash. The stu­dents, who are already in an uproar over Vietnam and civil rights, slaps us to their bosom. They can’t get enough of Chelsea Girls and us. The press, on cue, heats up the furor. When they’ve written all they can, praising and damning the film, the papers turn to feature stories about the Warhol entourage.’ One press piece she may be referencing is an article featuring Paul Morrissey, Nico, Warhol and Ultra Violet that ran in The Berkeley Barb. Its content is closer to a stream of consciousness than an insightful profile, the cool New York chic clashing with the laid-back, flower-power Bay Area. Ultra Violet later summed up the experience, describing a conversation with Warhol: ‘I say to Andy, “You’ve had publicity, fame, headlines. Now what?” “More fame.”’

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Now singularly focused on mastering her instrument, Nico was making up for what she saw as the many lost years of not being proficient at anything musical. She practised endlessly, attempting to become not just adequate, but excellent – at playing, composing and writing lyrics. Needing a place to stay, she moved in with new Factory Superstar Viva. ‘She would practise it [the harmonium] for hours, simple things, chords – really annoying stuff,’ the Superstar recalled. ‘She was very serious about it, dreadfully serious, like a Nazi organist. She’d pull the curtains across and light candles around her and do this funereal singing all day long. It was like I was living in a funeral parlour.’ Though having ‘invited herself’ to room with Viva at her ‘garden apartment on 83rd Street, between Madison and Park Avenues’, Nico quickly became the dominant personality and rule-maker in the house. Viva recounted how Nico ‘thought she was the Queen of Sheba. Nico was a spicy combin­ation of arrogance and insecurity. She tried to take over the house, take it over completely, you have no idea how she lorded herself about. She would get very angry if I had any boyfriends round that she didn’t like. She would say, “You can’t invite him round anymore.” Can you imagine?! You are in your place and you get a house guest that turns into your mother.’

Nico did not care about her new companion’s complaints. She had left New York an uncertain chanteuse and returned a focused, serious artist, determined to master her craft. Yet despite having an extensive network of talented musicians around her, she did not trust any of them with her emerging skill, still feeling too unsure of herself to openly display a lack of knowledge. She turned instead to Ornette Coleman, a young and well-respected African American improvisational jazz musician, for guidance and help. Coleman proved imperative in helping Nico master the harmonium. It was he who explained to Nico the convention of the left hand on the keyboard being used as the bass, playing the supporting harmony, while the right hand was the treble, providing the melody. With her low register, Nico flipped the practice around, playing harmony in the treble and melody in the bass.

By October, she felt ready to make a public appearance as a solo artist performing on her own. Seven nights were booked for her at New York club the Scene, a venue she had graced before with the Velvets. Chelsea Girl was about to come out, and the Village Voice featured ads for the gigs and the new album. A picture of a blonde, glum Nico accompanied the album ad, with the text, ‘The moon goddess Nico will conduct services nightly at Steve Paul’s The Scene leading you in all your splendor with her liturgical chants,’ and going on to promise ‘dancing for the body and soul also available before and after the services’. The opening act was a folk-rock band from California called Kaleidoscope.

The attendees anxiously awaited Nico’s return to the stage. ‘Chic crowds turned up at Nico’s opening, and there was only an organ onstage, and she sat down at it and there was one spotlight on her,’ Danny Fields recalled. ‘It was like a child discovering a musical instrument for the first time. She would just press one note and bend her ear toward the keyboard and listen to it, and press it again and again, and then another note, and she’d listen to that. And this was in front of this reverent opening-night audience, which didn’t know what to make of it, not at all. She did this for half an hour, then she tried a few combinations of notes and got into that.’ Yet the moon goddess’s noodling around was not appreciated by a majority of the crowd, as ‘people were starting to file out quietly, except for about twelve of us who were just mesmerized, transfixed by the whole performance. She finally performed two chants and it was over. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. Not the kind of thing you could do at the Fillmore East, but there was a quality of magic in it, in everything she did.’

Chris Darrow was a member of Kaleidoscope, and he remembered it being a similarly notable debut in the book The Age of Rock 2:

Opening night was very crowded and [Frank] Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention showed up to show their support. Warhol and his minions showed up. Our first set went fine and then it was time for Nico. Nico’s delivery of her material was very flat, deadpan, and expressionless, and she played as though all of her songs were dirges. Her icy, Nordic image also added to the detachment of her delivery. She was certainly beautiful – Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich certainly come to mind. The audience was on her side, as she was in her element and the Warhol contingent was very prominent that night. However, what happened next is what sticks in my mind the most from that night. In between sets, Frank Zappa got up from his seat and walked up on the stage and sat behind the keyboard of Nico’s B-3 organ. He proceeded to place his hands indiscriminately on the keyboard in an atonal fashion and screamed at the top of his lungs, doing a caricature of Nico’s set, the one he had just seen. The words to his impromptu song were the names of vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, asparagus … This ‘song’ kept going for about a minute or so and then suddenly stopped. He walked off the stage and the show moved on. It was one of the greatest pieces of rock’n’roll theater that I have ever seen!

While this must have been a sight to behold, it is hard to imagine Zappa pulling the same stunt on Lou Reed, John Cale or one of his other male counterparts.

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Though back in New York, Nico was now more focused on her music than on her standing in the Factory. Warhol, however, still wanted to work with the singer, proclaiming in POPism that he and Morrissey were ‘always trying to get [Nico] to do a feature-length movie with us’. Nico agreed to star in a new Factory vehicle, but only on the condition that Jim Morrison would be cast as her co-star. ‘She had a big crush on him then. When she asked him, he said sure; he said he knew all about underground movies, that he’d been a film student and all that,’ Warhol recalled.34 However, there was a huge issue: instead of Morrison, Nico arrived for the shoot with Tom Baker, Morrison’s best friend. Having been convinced by his manager that the Warhol film would be a bad career move, Morrison had talked his friend into taking his place. The main story line of I, a Man was, as Warhol summarized, ‘a series of scenes of this guy, Tom, seeing six different women in one day in New York, having sex with some, talking with some, fighting with some’.

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When Chelsea Girl came out in October of  1967, it was a com­mercial flop,35 even more so than The Velvet Underground & Nico, though Nico mentioned in later interviews that it was the only one of her solo albums to bring her any income. She hated even talking about the record, saying, ‘Most pop music to me is noise, alright?’ When asked about her solo debut by a journalist in 1985, her phys­ical response was as powerful as her actual words in illustrating her distaste for the album: ‘[smoking a cigarette, starts playing with her hand and acting disengaged after mention of Chelsea Girl, shakes her head, then looks at interviewer and smiles] Why don’t you just leave that out? I can’t relate to it at all, so … [trails off]. They weren’t my own songs and it doesn’t interest me to talk about it.’

The cover art for the LP is gorgeous. Shot by Paul Morrissey, it features Nico superimposed over herself in one shot. The main image is a black-and-white portrait of the singer, blonde bangs, heavy eyelashes, looking out forlornly into the distance. The smaller image is in colour and is of her looking down. These were the only elements of her solo debut that Nico confirmed approving of. ‘I like the [cover] picture, even if it looks sad,’ she told journalist Kurt Lassen in a November 1967 interview. ‘Sometimes I’m sad and mostly I like sad songs … when I sing I try to imagine I’m all alone, there’s nobody out there listening. I play with the notes, with the feeling. People tell me that the album is good and that it is selling well. I honestly don’t think it is the best I can do. That’s why I’m working on another one, a better one.’

The ads that accompanied the album seemed farcical by com­parison to the sombre cover art. ‘You’ve seen her in Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Underground [and] starring in his Chelsea Girls,’ screamed one, while another said, ‘They call her the Dietrich of the Velvet Underground. Nonsense. She’s Nico. And you can hear her making the scene as NICO: CHELSEA GIRL.’ Nor did other pro­motional efforts help move Nico in the direction of a serious artist, once again focusing mainly on her looks. On a radio advertisement, sent by MGM/Verve to FM stations (and later included on a pro­mo-only edition of the record), a voice booms, ‘Nico is beautiful, and in a world where so much can be so easily possessed on a whim, over a promise, she’s unpossessable,’ as ‘The Fairest of the Seasons’ plays in the background.

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Nico rounded out 1967 with a cameo in yet another Warhol pro­ject. Warhol and Morrissey wanted to do a second film, similar in format to Chelsea Girls, this one lasting an entire day and to be shown across two screens. The working title they gave the new undertaking was ‘the 24-hour-movie’ then ‘FUCK’, before finally settling on ****, or Four Star for simplicity while doing press. Four Star was first released on 15 and 16 December, as part of a twenty-five-hour marathon showcasing all thirty sections of the film, with the longest part – The Imitation of Christ, starring Nico – clocking in at an eye-watering eight hours. A 100-minute version was also eventually cut and released for those who were not as dedicated.36 Imitation had been shot as a stand-alone piece in May/June of the same year, before being folded into the full Four Star project. In it, Patrick Tilden plays the cross-dressing son of Factory insiders Brigid Berlin and Ondine, sitting with rapt attention as he listens to Nico reading aloud from the fifteenth-century work of the same title by Thomas à Kempis. Other segments of Four Star are just as esoteric and reflect the time spent on the West Coast by Warhol and company. One part has Ondine, Nico and Ultra Violet in San Francisco’s notorious Haight-Ashbury district, capturing the hazy, spinning, flower-power vibe of the Summer of Love. Another por­tion features shots of the docks and streets of Sausalito, a town just north of San Francisco. As flickering images play across the screen, Nico provides a dreamy, whimsical narration:

A man is walking on the sea. The sea is walking. The sea is after me. The night grows into the sky. The light grows back into the earth.

At the time of its production, Four Star was just another film being pumped out of the Warhol Factory for fun, art for art’s sake. Future films embarked upon by Warhol and Morrissey were geared to make a profit, not simply push the bounds of possibility.

Besides a shift in creative focus, other changes were afoot within the Warhol clique. Just as Nico had replaced Edie Sedgwick, Warhol crowned Viva, Nico’s roommate, as the new Superstar to feature in his future endeavours. Nico did not seem to mind or even notice; she had a new focus, a new instrument and a new path ahead. In a 1979 interview with Kristine McKenna, she admitted to her discomfort working with Warhol on his movies, saying, ‘I’ve never much cared for [the Warhol films] because I’ve always been in opposition to his ideas … The way he’d always come around and want to film me, whether I felt like it or not – he was a rapist. Plus, he used so many people in films that they were ultimately quite distracting.’37

The last event of 1967 to include the Velvet Underground and Nico working in some capacity together dropped just before the end of the year, with the launch party of Velvet Underground Untitled or Index taking place on Thursday 14 December at 457 Madison Avenue in New York. The project consisted of an oversized book, packed with irreverent and unexpected formatting, that perfectly showcases Warhol’s multimedia aesthetic.38 Part of the package is an ‘unrecorded song’, comprising almost five minutes of conversation taped at the Factory between Nico, Reed and others as they look at copies of Index while The Velvet Underground & Nico plays in the background. One person can be heard asking what will be included on the record that still needs to be added in order to complete Index; the gathered crowd is told it will be what they are taping at that moment. Unfazed, the conversation carries on, mostly focused on the various black-and-white images of the Superstars and Factory events that are featured throughout the publication. Nico can be heard randomly singing the chorus of the Beatles’ ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’, indicating Sgt. Pepper had already been released when the recording took place. She sounds zoned out and not com­pletely present. This is one of Nico’s few documented appearances during December. Though Chelsea Girl had been out for only a short time, she was visibly absent during the promotional rounds. An article from the 2 December issue of Cashbox magazine declared, ‘Elektra’s Danny Fields is in something of a quandary at the moment as he’s been trying to get in touch with Nico and meeting with no success,’ and adding, ‘Danny says that she’s not at her old castle any longer. Danny’s problem is that he’s running out of castles.’

Nico’s spaced-out audio on Index, combined with her apparent disappearance, were symptoms of an ever-increasing problem: her dependency on heroin.