Chapter 25 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico
By Jennifer Otter Bickerdike
It took three sessions in May of 1968 to produce The Marble Index. Elektra Studios at 962 North La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles (now West Hollywood) was the primary location where the tracks were recorded and mixed, with Frazier Mohawk noted as producer.40 Mohawk had already worked on several albums, including LPs by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Kaleidoscope (the band who had opened for Nico at the Scene). But Danny Fields gives Nico’s former bandmate John Cale, who was brought in to help proceedings, credit for being the one who made the songs work. ‘Frazier Mohawk is the producer of the record simply because Jac wanted somebody connected with the record company there. He didn’t want it to be completely up to the artistic eccentricity of this duo. But in fact, that’s what happened,’ said Fields in a 2002 interview. ‘I don’t think there was literally one creative input from Frazier Mohawk. Not to denigrate him as a producer, I’m sure he did good work elsewhere, but he couldn’t move into that partnership speaking any language that they understood. Frazier Mohawk had nothing to do … he just sat there. John [Cale] just created those arrangements on the spot.’
Though an unknown quantity in the producer role, Cale shaped Index into its other-worldly form. ‘The songs were already in Nico’s head,’ he said later. Yet his contribution as collaborator, arranger and uncredited co-producer was indelible. ‘Before I did Index I didn’t know I could arrange,’ he said, ‘but then I got lucky and found a very strong personality like Nico who threw me against the wall and I had to come and bounce back.’
The process wasn’t easy because, according to Cale, when they worked together the two could be counted on to fight at ‘every opportunity’. Each song presented a separate challenge, as the harmonium was not an instrument that was ever truly in tune. Cale, being a multi-instrumentalist, added a variety of different elements to the mix, including glockenspiel, bells, mouth organ and bosun’s pipe, as well as the expected electric viola, piano, bass and guitar.
After recording finished, Cale kicked the singer out of the studio, locking the door behind her. Two days later, he let Nico back in to hear the final results. ‘You’ve got to remember that on those solo albums she was really in pain,’ he reflected. ‘Afterwards she’d burst into tears of gratitude. It’s that whole thing of self-loathing and the discovery of her personality.’ These qualities infected the music itself, as fan Steven Morrissey, lead singer of the iconic Mancunian band the Smiths, mused: ‘I was enormously comforted by her isolation and depression.’41
The final album clocked in at just thirty minutes. Producer Mohawk later said that both he and Nico were heavily stoned on heroin during the fast-paced sessions, making Cale even more indispensable, and claimed that the LP’s length was intentional, as ‘that’s all I could listen to. Fifteen minutes a side seemed about right. Myself and [engineer] John Haeny spent maybe a day or two mixing it. We couldn’t listen to it all the way through. It kind of made us want to slit our wrists … After it was finished, we genuinely thought people might kill themselves. The Marble Index isn’t a record you listen to. It’s a hole you fall into.’