The Perfect Muses: When Nico ranked her greatest collaborators
Any artist ranking their collaborators tends to feel like ranking their musical soulmates. Sure, there may be some that play better than the rest and others that turn your ideas into gold, but it’s all about how well you relate to them without saying anything that often makes the magic happen. Although Nico was already on the cusp of art-rock brilliance when she worked with The Velvet Underground, she thought there was a major difference between working with them and working with Jim Morrison.
Granted, Nico would always be tied to The Velvet Underground for her entire life. They might not have been the best musicians in the world on a technical level, but hearing Lou Reed talk about the dark side of living underneath instruments that sounded like they were duelling with each other was often what kept people invested.
While most people saw their music as if it were a car crash in auditory form, their songs sounded majestic when Nico laid her vocals on top of everything. Regardless of how simple the chords were behind her, a track like ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ or ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ set the standard for what alternative music was going to sound like.
Nico wasn’t necessarily tied down to just a bunch of gutter rats from New York. She was about making songs that could light off epiphanies in people’s heads, and few lit as many fires as Morrison. Although Nico first met him in a drug-fuelled stupor, Morrison was far from the wasted buffoon that everybody thought he was going to be.
If anything, he was a poet who just happened to be fronting a rock band for a while. Looking back on The Doors’ greatest live moments, Morrison was the main draw because you never knew what the hell he was going to do, either letting the audience get incredibly quiet at one moment or screaming his brains out to the point where people got nervous about him starting a riot.
When talking about her creative muse, Nico felt that both The Velvets and Morrison helped on both sides of her musical upbringing, saying, “Musically the Velvet Underground and lyrically Jim Morrison, and Dylan also, but I think I prefer Jim Morrison’s poetry.” It might seem treasonous to claim that Morrison was better than Dylan, but it’s important to understand the context.
Dylan was a humble songwriter looking to shake people up, but what Morrison was doing was a lot more visceral. There were a lot of abstract images throughout his songs that didn’t make a lot of sense, but when you heard them spoken at a live show, you realised this was a man looking to tear down the confines of rock and roll.
And The Velvet Underground may as well have been the musical version of what Morrison was trying to translate lyrically. Lou Reed already had his own approach to rock and roll, but the instrumentation behind him was written with the intent of sounding as abrasive as possible, usually relying on caustic noise to get his point across half the time. That kind of music doesn’t feel like it should work with Nico’s soft alto voice, but somehow the idea of rock and roll combined with sonic sheen is one of the most brilliant moves in rock history.
