Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga

and girls flipped out gawking at Nico while Barbara Rubin filmed their reactions and Nat Finkelstein took photographs. When campus guards toldhim he couldn’t, Nat punched one of them in the nose and the next thing he knew sixteen cops arrived. They asked Andy for his cafeteria pass (which he never had). Gerard and Paul started screaming, and everyone got thrown out.
    MORRlSON: “Ondine, who played the Pope in Warhol’s
Chelsea Girls
, was part of the ensemble at Rutgers. He insists that Paul Morrissey forced him out of the show from then on, to his grief. He had always been our close friend, in or out of the show. We had no hand in, or knowledge of, the machinations that removed him.”
    The show, which hadn’t been selling too well prior to their arrival, sold out in the next two hours and 650 students packed the auditorium to see what would happen next. It was a perfect example of the effectiveness of making everyone uptight. Uptight meant interesting. Uptight meant something, as opposed to the perennial nothing, would happen.
    Apart from The Velvets, Nico, Andy, Gerard, Barbara and Paul, the other integral members of the team were Danny Williams, a friend of Chuck Wein who had come down from Cambridge and worked at the Factory as an expert electrician – if it could be done with wires, Danny would do it; Nat Finkelstein, a freelance photographer, connected with Black Star Photo Agency, who had come to the Factory in the Fall of ’65 to take pictures for a week and stayed for a year; Dave Faison, the Velvet’s trusted equipment manager, who stayed with them throughout the Warhol period, driving the van that carried their equipment which he single-handedly cared for and set up. Faison was very important to the show.
    MORRISON: “At Rutger’s we were all dressed entirely in white. The effect, with all the films and lights projected on us, was invisibility.”
    A few days later the same entourage, including Ingrid Superstar, the new girl at the Factory who had replaced Edie Sedgwick, jammed into a mobile van and headed out to Ann Arbor where another performance was booked at the University of Michigan Film Festival.
    MORRISON: “We rode to Ann Arbor in some kind of ‘recreational vehicle’. The thing was big! It had a 120 volt AC generator on the back that supplied power to the inside. We could play our amps as we rolled along.”
    Andy remembers the drive in
POPism:
“Nico drove, and that was an experience. I still don’t know if she had a licence. She’d only been in this country a little while and she’d keep forgetting and drive on the British side of the road.”
    NICO: “Oh my God! He was the only one who wasn’t scared. He just couldn’t care less. He figured that if I could take charge of 15 people on the bus I have to be a good driver not to land in a ditch.”
    WARHOL: “Nico’s driving really was insane when we hit Ann Arbor. She was shooting across sidewalks and over people’s lawns. We finally pulled up in front of a nice big comfortable-looking house and everyone started unloading the van.
    “Ann Arbor went crazy. At last The Velvets were a smash. We had a strobe light with us for the first time. The strobes were magical, they went perfectly with the chaos music The Velvets played. I’d sit on the steps in the lobby during intermission and people from the local papers and school papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. ‘If they can take it for ten minutes, then play it for fifteen,’ I’d explain. ‘That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.’”
    INGRID SUPERSTAR: “I remember in Ann Arbor part of the audience went a little berserk, and there were a few hecklers. They’re all a bunch of immature punks. Like we have these problems with a very enthusiastic audience that yells and screams and throws fits and tantrums and rolls on the floor, usually at colleges and benefits like that for the younger people. So, anyway, the effect of the