“The great thing about the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was that it left nothing to the imagination. We were on stage with bullwhips, giant flashlights, hypodermic needles, barbells, big wooden crosses…. You were shocked because sometimes your imagination wasn’t strong enough to imagine people shooting up, being crucified, and licking boots.” —Ronnie Curtone, dancer

Our journey through the history of the Velvet Underground has now arrived at April 1966, which will be a momentous month for them. Toward the end of it they will be at Scepter Studios recording their debut album. We will get to that soon enough — hopefully before this blog turns five years old. (At this rate I will get to Lulu sometime in the 24th century. Well, I’m in pretty good health, who knows?)

But meanwhile, throughout the month, the Velvets performed almost every day at the Dom in New York City as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It was the Beatles’ Hamburg period crammed into a month1I wonder, as a purely academic question: Who did more speed, the VU or the Beatles? We know the Fabs took pep pills to keep up with their punishing schedule, so they’re probably the smart bet; the Velvets, given their drug-drenched milieu, had the entire cornucopia of pharmaceuticals at their disposal and may have relied less on amphetamines. But I wouldn’t put money on it,— long sets played over and over for audiences that hadn’t necessarily come there to see a band.

In February 1966 the Velvet Underground was part of a happening called “Andy Warhol: Up-Tight,” which Richie Unterberger describes this way:

The shows open with Lupe, the last Warhol film to star Edie Sedgwick, which is projected onto a split screen from two separate reels and is based on the last night of the Mexican film star Lupe Velez. The Velvets then take the stage to perform in front of more films and slides by Warhol and Paul Morrissey. Gerard Malanga and Sedgwick writhe around in front of the band while Danny Williams, a film editor noted for his work on What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, projects lights and colored slides over the musicians.

And John Cale describes it this way:

It was this really tiny theater. The show really scared the shit out of a lot of people. Gerard Malanga started dancing with whips, and there were lights flashing, and six movies going simultaneously, and we were playing as loud as we could. It was really an assault on the senses. For the time. Now it would be nothing.

Soon after participating in these shows, Edie Sedgwick had a falling-out with the Warhol camp, apparently feeling eclipsed by Nico — who would end up singing lead on the song Lou Reed wrote about Edie, “Femme Fatale.” (The sad tale of Edie Sedgwick, who still had a few years to live at this point, is a topic for another time.)

It was around this time that Lou Reed and Nico had their brief and tempestuous affair, which supposedly ended with Nico declaring in public, “I can no longer make love to Jews.” According to one version of history, it was Nico who said to Lou “I’ll be your mirror,” inspiring one of his greatest songs. However, longtime paramour Shelley Albin claims that the song dates back to Lou’s college years, and another old girlfriend claimed it was really about “the sign Pisces, and its liquidity and duality.”

Pretty much all the documentation of the Velvet Underground during this early period captures them as part of the Andy Warhol traveling circus. For instance they turn up in an interview Warhol filmed for New York public TV Station WNET on February 7, 1966.

In this video, you’ll have to sit through 13 minutes of Warhol being his fascinating and infuriating self — drawling in monotone and grinding his jaw behind dark glasses, at one point asking the interviewer if he could provide the answers as well as the questions — to get to one minute of the nascent VU playing “Venus in Furs” as Andy fills and releases silver mylar balloons:

Or you can cut right to the chase with this clip, which begins near the end of the other one and continues on with a snippet of “Heroin,” possibly from a filmed rehearsal at the Factory. There’s Gerard Malanga doing his whip dance, there’s Edie Sedgwick casually frugging to the cacophony:

I bet about 96% of the PBS audience fled their TVs in terror at this point. Those who stuck around probably came away thinking Cale was the star; he looks dashing and his buzzsaw viola is the lead instrument. Lou is seen briefly but not really heard.

If you made it to the end, you knew you had just seen something. You didn’t know what, exactly. But you would have been curious.

This recording, the third and final extant song from the Velvets’ Film-Makers Cinematheque gigs, is an oddity: Musically it is “European Son,” sounding much as it would on the band’s debut album. But the words (what few there are) — presumably because Lou had not written his lyrics yet — are those of “Suzie Q,” the rockabilly standard first recorded in 1957.

There is some confusion as to who actually wrote “Suzie Q.” Says Wikipedia:

(Dale) Hawkins wrote the song with bandmate Robert Chaisson, but when (it was) released, Stan Lewis, the owner of Jewel/Paula Records and whose daughter Susan was the inspiration for the song, and Eleanor Broadwater, the wife of Nashville DJ Gene Nobles, were credited as co-writers to give them shares of the royalties.

Hawkins cut “Susie Q” at the KWKH Radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana. “Susie Q” was a late rockabilly song which captured the spirit of Louisiana and featured guitar work by James Burton, who later worked with Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley, among others. Burton has stated on multiple occasions… that he composed the music to “Susie Q,” initially as an instrumental, but was not given a co-writing credit or share of the publishing.

Which is neither here nor there, really, but I’m always fascinated by the baroque machinations of the Long Plastic Hallway.

A few weeks after the psychiatrists’ convention, the Velvets played a few gigs at the Film-Makers Cinematheque in New York City as part of a “multimedia happening” billed as “Andy Warhol, Up-Tight.” Three songs were recorded, of which you can hear two here:

This rendition of “Heroin” features a particularly lethal version of John Cale’s jet-engine squall; if the PA was powerful enough, some in the venue may have suffered ear damage. It gives way to a somewhat surprising cover of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” which Nico always claimed Zimmy had written specifically for and about her. (Dylan never said anything about it, but then he wouldn’t.) The VU’s version chugs along nicely, but after this the non-Nico members — keen to put some distance between themselves and Bob’s gargantuan shadow — would eliminate it from the repertoire.