Chapter 30 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

At the start of February 1970, Nico received some horrible news: after several years dealing with debilitating Parkinson’s disease, Grete had passed away in Germany. Nico was no longer subsidizing her mother and had rarely been in touch during the last several years of Grete’s life. Without money or other relatives, Grete had even­tually been shipped to the town of Bürgerhaus, where, according to Helma, she was placed in an ‘old people’s home for the nervous and seriously ill’ and told that she would stay there until her death. ‘From then on, the social welfare office took over everything. Isn’t that terrible?’ said Helma. ‘There she died at the age of sixty … in great solitude,’ adds Ari.5

Though Nico had ignored her mother the entire time her health was deteriorating, she rushed to attend the funeral. ‘She never visited her mother at the clinic,’ said Helma. ‘She only came to bury her. She was all in black, in deepest mourning for her mother, kneeling at her bed with the biggest crocodile tears and complain­ing, “Mother, Mother! I didn’t want it like this!” Then she was really done. But, as I said, she had never had time for her mother [once she became ill], she never cared for her.’

Margarete Päffgen was buried in Grunewald Forest Cemetery, located in Berlin. Nico eventually wrote a song, ‘Mütterlein’, about her, which ended up on Desertshore. One reason that Nico may not have attended to Grete at the end was the probably all-consuming nature of her own addiction. Recovered former users often recall that during the throes of their sickness, life would revolve entirely between scoring and using, with little to no regard paid to any other part of their existence. Nico was likely no exception. Another pos­sibility could be that seeing Grete would have thrown her further into her downward spiral of angst, originally fuelled by her separ­ation from Ari. Whatever the reason for her disregard, Nico must have been shaken by the loss of her mother. Grete’s passing officially made her an orphan, and with the exception of her cousin, Aunt Helma and Ari, she was now entirely alone in the world.

Between shooting The Inner Scar and playing random shows, Nico lived with Garrel in the Montparnasse Hotel, located in Paris. Eventually, Garrel’s father offered his son a luxury top-floor apartment, located on the narrow rue de Richelieu, near the stock exchange. Upon moving in, the younger Garrel stripped the space of all modern ‘necessities’. Out went the electricity, gas, hot water, carpets, furniture, stove, heater, lighting and any sort of formal dec­oration. The only nod to aesthetics were the walls: Nico and Garrel had decided to give every surface two thick layers of black enamel paint. A large overcoat of Garrel’s doubled as both mattress and bedding. This morbidly depressing atmosphere was aided by the few things that did make their way into the home. ‘There were dead pigeons by the window, grime on the floor and the ledges, bird shit, stale grease, rubble, debris, dust,’ said a friend in Richard Witts’s biography. ‘The most sensational feature was the fireplace. It had not been used in years, just a big black hole in the wall. But cas­cading from the grate was the most magnificent heap of cigarette packets I had ever seen. It was like a ski slope made of tiny card­board boxes. Scattered amongst the packs were thousands of dog ends, crumbling cigarette tips flung from the four corners of the room. It took your breath away.’ Sometimes Ari joined the pair in the squalor, the limited entertainment on offer based around what was free. He recounted, ‘All three of us went to visit the museums, or we went for long walks on the docks. We walked a lot because we were really very poor. Then, invariably, we returned to Philippe’s apartment, which was neglected in the extreme, butts spilled on the ground and a chimney torn off, most often without electricity. We did not even have cutlery and we ate with our fingers the cheese and the rice – the eternal vegetarian diet of my mother … The atmos­phere of this apartment, entirely painted in black … was strange … pathological.’

Despite living in a horrifyingly grim abode, Nico had no plans to leave Paris. She had been dropped by Elektra and, while she had written a few songs, did not have a label or any infrastructure to help her.

*

Back in New York, a young producer named Joe Boyd was making a name for himself. He had already discovered singer Nick Drake and was producing the Incredible String Band, who were signed to Elektra. It was there that he came across Nico. ‘I would go in their [Elektra’s] office all the time and grab promo copies of new releases,’ he tells me. ‘On one of those visits, I got a hold of The Marble Index. When I played it, I was stunned. I just thought, “Wow, this is really out there and wonderful.” It’s unlike anything else, and I just thought it was astonishing.’ The haunting album stayed with Boyd long after his first listen. ‘Some months later, I happened to run into Jac Holzman and told him how much I loved the record. He basically said, “Yeah, it’s a great record, but it didn’t sell, so we’ve dropped her.” And I said, “You’ve dropped her?!” And he said, “Well, yeah, what can you do …”’

At the time, Boyd was starting a new venture with Warner Brothers. Working with Mo Ostin and Joe Smith, the label was called Reprise, and Boyd was keen to get Nico on the roster. ‘I still hadn’t met either John [Cale] or Nico, I just had this enthusiasm,’ he says. Boyd struck a deal with Ostin: a new Nico record could be done if Cale did the arrangements and the cost was low.

Though he did not know Cale personally, the two men ran in the same circles, and Boyd was able to track down a phone num­ber for the ex-Velvet. ‘When Moe gave me a cautious green light, I just picked up the phone to John and introduced myself. I said, “Would you be up for doing another record with Nico? You and I can co-produce it, you can do all the arrangements.” I think I men­tioned a figure of what I could carve out of the budget for him. He said he’d be delighted to.’

Though Nico would have been deep into her drug use and co-­dependent relationship with Garrel, it was the creative process of making the album that Boyd focused on throughout our conver­sation. When asked if Cale brought any of the baggage from the Velvet Underground days into the project, Boyd says, ‘Whatever had gone on between them with the Velvet Underground, he had gone ahead and done The Marble Index. I think he liked the idea of having projects that were independent of Lou [Reed].’

Once Boyd and Cale had come to an agreement, things moved very fast. ‘We met in New York, and he called Nico. We recorded Desertshore in three days or something.’ Nico ‘was very self-contained’, says Boyd. ‘It’s not like she sat down and said to John, “Oh, I have this idea – what do you think?” I think she said, “This is the song,” and then John figured out what to do with it in terms of the ar­ran­ging and overdubs and things like that. The core of everything on that record was Nico seated at the harmonium with the vocal mic.’

The Cale/Nico relationship ‘wasn’t super-friendly’, says Boyd, though he recalls that ‘they teased each other a bit. John would roll his eyes periodically at things that she would do or say, but I think that he was intrigued by her as a performer and as a singer, as a foil for his artistic sensibility.’ The one track that stuck with Boyd in particular, even decades on, was ‘Afraid’, with its desolate lyrics ‘You are beautiful / and you are alone.’ The song was purely autobio­graphical for Nico; as Boyd says, ‘I don’t think she had the ability to write things that weren’t about her.’

While the last bits of overdubbing and engineering took place, Boyd found himself with a gap before the project could be com­pleted. During this time, he was introduced not only to Ari, who was with Nico at the time, but to some of the New York under­ground, whom he had never come into contact with before. ‘I’d gotten to know Nico in the course of making the record, and we had some strange friends in common, like Amanda Lear.6 I’d never seen the Velvets live and I’d never met John until that point.’ He found Nico ‘curiously funny. She had a bit of a sense of humour, although it was hard to find sometimes.’

In retrospect, Boyd says Nico ‘was a kind of naive painter … a character with no training who had something unique in her per­sonality that was striking and original. I don’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t met John, and whether or not anybody would have noticed her, but there is something absolutely com­pelling about her singing and her songs. It’s not complex music, but she was a tortured person and she put it all out there – that’s what you ask from art. I think she’s a very interesting character. In America, there is Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi, all this stuff. In the middle of this, you have these two weird Europeans: John Cale and Nico. They bring a completely alien sensibility right into downtown New York and create something startling, stir people up. They make people look at things a little differently.’

The cover of Desertshore was a still from Garrel’s movie The Inner Scar. Showing Nico sitting atop a white horse that is being led by a little boy through a barren landscape, it cemented her dedication to her personal and professional collaboration with the film-maker. Like The Marble Index, Desertshore met with mixed reviews from the press and Nico’s inner circle alike. Cale did all the arrangements on the album, as well as playing all the instruments, with the excep­tion of trumpet and Nico’s harmonium. He also provided harmony vocals on ‘My Only Child’. He was impressed by Nico’s progress as a musician, commenting how on Desertshore ‘Her singing was more confident, and I was surprised to hear how her songs had become more musically coherent. The melodies became more adventurous, beautifully constructed, too. She focused much better on having subtle, simple lines and shorter phrases. And she started writing changes – contrasting sections, even.’ This may be because many of the songs were incredibly personal, including ‘The Falconer’ (inspired by Warhol after his 1968 shooting), ‘Janitor of Lunacy’ (inspired by the death of Brian Jones), ‘Mütterlein’ (inspired by her mother) and ‘My Only Child’ (inspired by her son). Ari also made a guest appearance on the LP, speaking in French on the seventy-two-second interlude ‘Le Petit Chevalier’. Rolling Stone later branded the track ‘a chilling little chanson reminiscent of The Village of the Damned’.

Paul Morrissey for one liked the new Cale/Nico collaboration even less than its predecessor. ‘She’d play me her new records with her songs on, and I had to say, “Oh, Nico, these songs are so hard to listen to! I don’t think anyone else can sing these songs, and I don’t know that you can either,”’ he said. Iggy Pop, on the other hand, was blown away upon first listen. ‘A favourite New York memory, which was a big one for me, happened while she was working on Desertshore. She had a room at the Chelsea, and we bumped into each other. She invited me to come up and play some of her new songs for me. It was just a very bare hotel room, and she had her harmonium in there. I sat down and she played “Janitor of Lunacy” for me. For an audience of one. That was really “Wow!” For me, that was one of the very few times in my life I’ve been witness to what I would call “complete” music. Here was someone making the music and the melody and the ambience and the literature all at once for me without benefit of a stage, proscenium or lighting or a ticket or any of that shit. It was complete and the quality was so high. I thought, “Wow. Wow.”’ Cosey Fanni Tutti is equally com­plimentary about Desertshore, saying, ‘What’s so strong about Nico is that she comes across as this kind of androgynous person with her voice, but she has this wonderful warmth about her and vulnerabil­ity – but also honesty – when she sings. She brings something to it that I don’t think a male voice could have done.’

When the record was commercially released in December 1970, Desertshore received little commercial recognition. Like The Marble Index, the album obtained a small cult following upon first hitting the shelves but was overlooked by most large magazines and the public in general.

*

‘I met Nico in 1970. She lived at Paul Morrisey’s house on East 81st Street for a while. That’s where I was staying, so we kinda “lived” together for a couple of months,’ recalls Vincent Fremont, the for­mer executive manager of Andy Warhol’s studio. He had begun working with Warhol at the Factory and was already staying with Morrissey when Nico appeared in New York, around the time of Desertshore’s appearance in the stores. It is likely that she was back on the East Coast for its release. ‘She would cry almost every night; she was very depressed,’ Fremont tells me. He already knew who Nico was before meeting her. However, he was surprised at how different she looked by the time they began sharing an apartment. ‘I had a big crush on her while I was in high school, when she did the Velvet Underground & Nico album. But when I met her, she had already changed her hair to red.’

Underneath the beauty, Fremont quickly discovered that ‘there were a lot of facets to her. She would tell me about her life. I never had sex with her or anything, but I would sit on her bed and lis­ten to her stories. It wasn’t walking down a rosy path. She was a ­troubled soul. She was raped as a young woman by a GI. She was just complicated. She was on drugs by that time. She would show me photographs. We became fairly close. I was a good listener. I just remember her crying a lot. I’d stay up with her.’

Like she had while living with Viva, Nico constantly practised her harmonium, much to the dismay of her new roommates. ‘She used to play that harmonium and she would sing. Paul Morrissey would start pulling his hair out, saying, “Nico, can’t you write something more commercial?” I mean, it would literally make you want to slit your wrists, it was so depressing. She’d be singing along and driving us crazy.’