Read Online Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga - Free Book Online

appear: something was ‘exploding’, something was ‘plastic’, something was ‘inevitable’.
    “I said, ‘Why not call it “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” The Velvet Underground and Nico?’ We moved in on Friday afternoon at 3 o’clock and at 8 o’clock that night allthese people showed up. It was packed. It was an enormous success from its very first night.”
    Gerard’s new dancing partners were Mary Woronov, a tall, beautiful art student he discovered at Cornell University and brought to the Factory, Ingrid Superstar, and Ronnie Cutrone, a 17-year-old super bopper, who hung out on the fast scene.
    RONNIE CUTRONE: “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. In a sense it controlled your imagination. That’s what you saw. Before that when you heard music you drifted off and you associated the music with what you thought about. This time make no mistake about it there was a clear image of what the group was conveying, and so it left nothing to the imagination. You were shocked because sometimes your imagination wasn’t strong enough to imagine people shooting up on stage, being crucified and licking boots.”
    WARHOL: “The Velvets played so loud and crazy I couldn’t even begin to guess the decibels, and there were images projected every where, one on top of the other. I’d usually watch from the balcony or take my turn at the projectors, slipping different coloured gelatin slides over the lenses and turning movies like
Harlot, The Shoplifter, Couch, Banana, Blow Job, Sleep, Empire, Kiss, Whips, Face, Camp, Eat
into all different colours.”
    WALTER DE MARIA: “There was a serious tone to the music and the movies and the people, as well as all the craziness and the speed. There was also the feeling of desperate living, of being on the edge. The present was blazing and every day was incredible, and you knew every day wasn’t always going to be that way.”
    RICHARD GOLDSTEIN: “The sound is a savage series of atonal thrusts and electronic feedback. The lyrics combine sado-masochistic frenzy with free association imagery. Thewhole sound seems to be the product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade.”
    WARHOL: “We all knew something revolutionary was happening. We just felt it. Things couldn’t look this strange and new without some barrier being broken. ‘It’s like the Red Seeea,’ Nico said, standing next to me one night on the Dom balcony that looked out over all the action, ‘paaaaarting’.”
    DANNY FIELDS: “It was an audience event to me, but it was also a musical event, because I preferred many times to close my eyes rather than see this psychedelic light-show travesty flashing on the group. To me it was the music. The great credit due Andy is that he recognized it. He heard music when he first saw The Velvets. He thought that they were great. So, they were great before Andy. So, they were great during Andy, and afterwards, too. Andy may have created The EPI but he didn’t create the sound of the band. That was always there long before Andy found them. Lou’s song-concepts were avant-garde and his lyrics were avant-garde, but I don’t know if his melodies without John at that point would have been avant-garde. John really put a psychedelic air to it. I thought The Velvets were ahead of everybody. It’s the only thing that ever, ever, ever swept me off my feet as music since early Mahler. They were a revolution.”
    Ed Sanders, the lead singer for The Fugs, another New York band that thrived on the Lower East Side in the same period, and with whom Gerard Malanga had originally danced before he met The Velvets, was taken by Barbara Rubin to see them at the Bizarre and remembers going to the Dom.
    ED SANDERS: “I liked that tune that started out real slow -‘Heroin’. I liked the drummer. I