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

music on the audience is like the audience is just too stunned to think or say anything or give any kind of opinion. But then later I asked a few people in Ann Arbor, who had come to see theshow a couple of nights in a row, what they thought, and they formed an opinion slowly. They said that they thought the music was very way out and supersonic and fast and intensified, and the effect of the sound it produced vibrated all through the audience, and when they walked out onto the street they still had these vibrations in their ears for about 15 minutes, especially from that last piece ‘Nothing Song’, which was just noise and feedback and screeches and groans from the amplifiers.”
    The overall effect created by this bombardment of images and sound, with The Velvets often turning their backs on the audience throughout the entire performance, was the opposite of the accepted rock mores of the time. This may have had something to do with the fact that a number of the people involved in the production were on amphetamine, a drug which, among other effects, influences consumers to respond to everything with its mirror, or exactly opposite, image.
    JOHN WILCOCK: “I was on the bus with Nico and everybody. What do you remember most about that?”
    MALANGA: “That we became a gypsy band.”
    WILCOCK: “The eleven member Warhol group (supplemented by accompanying cars) had rented a microbus for the 1, 500 mile round-trip to Ann Arbor ($50 per day plus 100 per mile) and although it offered some of the comforts of home – including a toilet that, like the one in the 47th Street Factory, didn’t work – it proved to be far from the most reliable mode of transportation. The most chaotic moments came on the way back when a stop was made in the parking lot of a pop art monstrosity called the White Hut Superking for everybody to order hamburgers. Even before Nico, blonde locks falling about the shoulders of her black leather jacket, had brought the bus to a halt, a police patrol car came snooping around to see what else it contained.”
    MORRISON: “The AC power came in handy, because we blew the alternator on the engine outside of Toledo on theway back to NY. The police so despised us that they insisted we get out of city limits at once. It was night, and we had no lights, but Danny cranked up the generator on the back, and ran extension cords from inside to photo floodlamps clamped to the bumper. The police followed us all the way to the line. I began to think that it was dangerous to cross the Hudson. I was a full-time student at City College at the time, but I was seldom seen, and ended up six credits shy of graduating. Good grades, in spite of all. I picked those up in the summer we played Max’s.”

THE DOM
    Back in New York the group played at Paraphernalia, the ultra hip clothes store featuring the fashion designs of Betsey Johnson, who would later marry John Cale. The models could hardly gyrate through the mob which glutted both floors of the chic boutique. As Nico danced with Gerard, Andy’s films bounced off the walls and Brian Jones, among others, looked on. Actually the best view was from outside, as bopping spotlights illuminated the models on the platform in the huge second storey glass front. It drew a crowd and eventually the police. “Wow!” said Andy. “A policeman.”
    Paul Morrissey was trying to close the deal on Andy Warhol’s UP so The Velvets and Nico could have their own place to play every night and become famous.
    MORRISSEY: “I kept trying to press Myerberg, through our lawyer Sy Litvinoff, to sign an agreement that Andy’s group would open and be paid a certain amount of money. What happened is there was … let’s say an Italian influence in this club and I think they had their own plans for the opening. Somehow, even Myerberg lost control of it a little bit. About a week before they were scheduled to open, this lawyer said, ‘They’ve changed their minds, they’re going to open this