to nothing more than “ritual dances devised by dope fiends with nothing better to do.” But as the photographer Nat Finkelstein, who was working on a photo documentary of the Factory, remembered, “From the first time I saw them I said, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow! They’re going to kick these guys out on their ass for the next ten years!’ Everybody hated them. The whole macho East Village group really hated the Velvets—just put-down after put-down—the hatred had nothing to do with their music; a lot of it had to do with the gay image. Also, Lou and John were really good musicians, whereas Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg [of the Fugs] wouldn’t have known music if it bit them on the ass.”
The engagement was a hit on every level. Warhol successfully launched his multimedia show, and the group managed to make some money while sending shock waves through the city. “They made twelve thousand dollars, I think,” recalled Morrison. “A lot of people would come to see any kind of Warhol endeavor. The first time we played ‘Heroin,’ two people fainted. I didn’t know if they OD’d or fainted. So that was our real debut—playing in Manhattan.” Reed characterized the band’s performance at the Cinémathèque as “a dog whistle for all the freaks in the city.”
Outside of a small coterie who recognized him, Lou was not seen as the leader of the group. Nico became the Mick Jagger of the Velvet Underground, while Lou took the more humble Keith Richards role. This initially caused some tension, but Lou may not have minded being left out of the spotlight since he often felt uncomfortable onstage. “At the age when identity is a problem some people join rock and roll bands and perform for other people who share the same difficulties,” he later wrote in a revealing essay on the pitfalls of pop stardom. “The age difference between performer and beholder in rock is not large. But unfortunately, those in the fourth tier assume those on stage know something they don’t. Which is true. It simply requires a very secure ego to allow yourself to be loved for what you do rather than for what you are, and an even larger one to realize you are what you do. The singer had a soul but he feels he isn’t loved off-stage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only on stage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia.” Also, by this time Lou was so taken by Andy and his world that he would probably have done anything Andy suggested. The same month Andy signaled Lou’s acceptance into his domain by making him the subject of one of his Screen Tests—three-minute films focusing on the frozen gaze of a Factory citizen.
Film frame enlargement from Screen Tests by Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. (Archives Malanga)
Warhol’s studio, a large, floor-through single room in a factory building on West 47th Street in Manhattan, was called the Factory. Here Warhol painted his pop pictures, made his movies, and held court as the hippest, hardest bellwether of his times. The famous room was painted and tinfoiled silver. The people who worked with him and hung around him were the most hard-core group in New York at the time. They all dressed in black jeans and black T-shirts. Their drug of choice was amphetamine. The majority of them were gay. They were exotic, talented people, young, full of energy and ideas, satellites.
When Lou Reed joined Andy Warhol, Warhol was thirty-six, wealthy, and the successful driving force behind a devout cult of artistic collaborators. Reed was twenty-three, strong as stainless steel, confident, and as ambitious as his new mentor. Lou Reed had been described by friends and enemies over the years as “a control freak,” “a schizophrenic,” “an asshole.” Not one of those descriptions was “fun.” Andy Warhol had been described as “a mad queen,” “a Zen warrior,” “a creep.” None of them was “fun,” either. And yet, essentially, over the next four months, from January to April 1966, fun was exactly what Lou and Andy had together. Their relationship was exemplified by a photograph at the Factory that year in which they stood eyeballing each other with face-splitting grins in front of a life-size, full-figure Warhol painting of Elvis Presley with a drawn six-gun. Andy, the Lionhearted Leo—his head, with its strong, high cheekbones and muscular jaw, cocked slightly to one side—revealed the Draculian character he possessed in the pencil-thin, sinewy body beneath his trademark black outfit. He looked, one observer later noted, like Sylvester staring at Tweety Pie. Lou, the uncharacteristically shark-hearted Pisces, stared in turn at Andy with all the gaminlike love he had been withholding from his father since he was twelve, with the adoration of a disciple who has just met the master who will open the gates of heaven and hell.
Andy seduced Lou by showering his prodigious ego with the highest compliments. “Andy told me that what we were doing with music was the same thing he was doing with movies and painting, i.e., not kidding around,” Lou recalled. “To my mind, nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us. The first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real. His ideas would stun me. His way of looking at things would stop me dead in my tracks. Sometimes, I would go for days thinking about something he said.”
Lou seduced Andy into spending the next five months trying to make Lou into a marketable persona that would make the most money in the shortest time—in short, a rock-and-roll star. “If Andy had been able to achieve the Walt Disney Hollywood status, Lou would have been able to change his persona to be like an Elvis,” pointed out Factory manager Billy Name. “Andy would have put out Lou Reed movies: Lou in Hawaii, Lou in the army, Lou as a half-breed trying to decide whether he should like the Comanches and stay with the family that raised him.”
Lou would make a career out of finding mentors. In Warhol, Reed found the all-permissive father-mother-protector-catalyst-collaborator he had always craved. In turn, Warhol saw his younger self in Reed and wanted to recapture that vitality. They were both isolated people who kept their innermost thoughts to themselves, and each could empathize with the other’s masked vulnerability. Each had had nervous breakdowns. For Lou a whole new world of possibilities opened up.
He made himself completely available to Warhol—just as he had done with Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse—without selling him his soul. For a time he was able to drop his need to be the only genius in the room. Warhol taught Reed that an artist was a person who had to work hard and not waste time. Whenever Andy asked Lou how many songs he’d written that day, whatever the answer, he would urge, “You should do more.” He taught Lou that work was everything, and that Lou came to believe that his music was so beautiful that people should be willing to die for it. It was the kind of effect Andy Warhol often had on his followers.
Lou’s position at the Factory was significantly different from that of the other members of the band. “When the Velvets came over to the Factory, Lou was the only one I talked to,” recalled Factory manager and photographer Billy Name. “Sterling rarely talked much. John would talk occasionally, and Moe was fun—she would talk—but Lou and I always had the bond thing.” Of all the Velvets, Lou spent the most time at the Factory and was the closest thing to Warhol.
Warhol was not, however, an easy man to work with. Despite taking great joy in his success, he had, like Reed, a resentment of the conditions of his life that never stopped bugging him. “He was an artist who was neither understood nor accepted at the time but who, having been ridiculed and laughed at, had perseverance and ambition for success and “la gloire,” as strong as that of any king in Shakespeare’s history plays,” wrote Gerard Malanga in an introduction to his Secret Diaries. “It was a desire that neither his coterie nor his celebrity could satisfy. Warhol was a man of parts, most of them contradictory, which accounts for his nickname, “Drella,” composed equally of Dracula and Cinderella. He was a person of much generosity and kindness—yet he could slice a person at a glance. Warhol would try to organize other people’s emotions in the same way he drew up shopping lists. He had the unique power of playing people off one another. He could be kind, cruel, friendly, catty, humane, overriding, passionately wild for “la gloire.” And he was also all that was truly vulnerable. Warhol was painfully shy, which accounted for the group of young people he surrounded himself with. He was possessed by the people he had gathered around him, yet he was habitually exploiting, betraying, or otherwise mistreating those who were close, or seemed close to him.”
In an essay, “From the Bandstand,” he wrote about music that year, Lou drew attention to one of