The famous Lou Reed songs born from the wacky words of Andy Warhol
Although it was perhaps not directly intentional, Lou Reed and John Cale of The Velvet Underground served up the perfect antidote to the hippie movement when they began jamming in the mid-1960s. While Jefferson Airplane and The Beach Boys spread love and flowers up and down the West Coast, The Velvet Underground reflected the grittiness of New York in stark contrast, with songs of salacious activity and self-destructive drug use.
Reed and Cale’s uncensored artistic study of the vulgar would eventually serve up some vital DNA for the punk movement, but at the time, their style was too bitter a pill for some to swallow. Crucially, however, they did attract the attention of pop artist Andy Warhol at the end of 1965. Impressed with the edginess of this unique band, Warhol welcomed the Velvets into his bohemian art troupe, The Factory, and took the reins as their manager.
“The pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all,” Warhol wrote in his memoir POPism: The Warhol Sixties. “Nobody wanted to stay in one category; we all wanted to branch out into every creative thing we could — that’s why when we met The Velvet Underground at the end of ’65, we were all for getting into the music scene, too.”
Warhol and Reed became the two dominant egos guiding the group, with the former hosting audio-visual events for the band and designing the famed artwork for the 1967 debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico. Despite the symbiosis of this early relationship, the two creatives didn’t always pull in the same direction.
“He was this catalyst, always putting jarring elements together. Which was something I wasn’t always happy about,” Lou Reed recalled to Rolling Stone. “So when he put Nico in the band, we said, ‘Hmmm.’ Because Andy said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have a chanteuse.’ I said, ‘Oh, Andy, give us a break.’”
Warhol’s insistence that Nico handled some of the vocal duties was just one of the wedges that gradually forced him and Reed apart. By the end of 1967, The Velvet Underground were preparing for their second LP, White Light/White Heat; sadly, Warhol would be sidelined for this effort. The relationship had become so strained that Reed fired Warhol as manager without consulting his bandmates.
“Andy passes through things, but so do we,” Reed told Rolling Stone in 1989. “He sat down and had a talk with me. ‘You gotta decide what you want to do. Do you want to keep just playing museums from now on and the art festivals? Or do you want to start moving into other areas? Lou, don’t you think you should think about it?’ So I thought about it, and I fired him”.
Adding: “Because I thought that was one of the things to do if we were going to move away from that. He was furious. I’d never seen Andy angry, but I did that day. He was really mad. Called me a rat. That was the worst thing he could think of”
“It was getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between the PR and the actuality because we ended up in the middle of a storm of publicity that we didn’t know was coming,” multi-instrumentalist Cale told the Red Bull Music Academy. “We got a lot of notoriety very quickly, attached to Andy. I guess Lou didn’t like that.”
“The way [Reed] handled it and the way he did it was really destructive. I mean, he just like blew up the band and fired Andy without telling anybody, and it was like, ‘What?’” Cale added.
Reed was notoriously very difficult to work with at times; his insecurities led him to bouts of cantankerousness and petty jealousy. In spite of his rollercoaster relationship with Warhol, the pair remained keen admirers of one another over the years, with each frequently citing the other for their talents.
In his 1989 conversation with Rolling Stone, Reed discussed the influence of the recently deceased Warhol and revealed that he had even conceived some of his most cherished lyrics. “He said, ‘Why don’t you write a song called ‘Vicious’?’ And I said, ‘Well, Andy, what kind of vicious?’ ‘Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower.’ And I wrote it down, literally… I went back and wrote a song [ appeared on Reed’s 1972 David Bowie-produced solo album, Transformer] ‘Vicious/ You hit me with a flower/ You do it every hour/ Oh baby you’re so vicious.’ Then people would come up and say, ‘What do you mean by that?’ I didn’t want to say, ‘Well, ask Andy.’
“Or he said, ‘Oh, you should write a song, so-and-so is such a femme fatale. Write a song for her. Go write a song called ‘Femme Fatale’.’ No other reason than that. Or ‘Sister Ray’ – when we were making the second record [White Light/White Heat], he said, ‘Now you gotta make sure that you do the “sucking on my ding-dong” song.’ ‘Okay, Andy!’ He was a lot of fun, he really was.”
Listen to The Velvet Underground’s 1968 epic, ‘Sister Ray’, below.
