The Westport Library Resource Guides: Factory Years: Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground: Rock Special Topic

About The Velvet Underground

Lou Reed, who was the son of an accountant, made his first recording as a teenager (as a member of the Shades) and studied literature at Syracuse (New York) University, where he came under the influence of poet Delmore Schwartz. Trained as a classical musician in London, Welshman Cale came to the United States in 1963 on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study composition but soon joined the Dream Syndicate, a pioneering minimalist ensemble founded in New York City by La Monte Young. In 1965, while working as Brill Building-style staff songwriter for Pickwick Music, Reed formed a group, the Primitives (including Cale), for live performances of a single he had recorded called “The Ostrich.” He also had written songs, such as “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs,” that reflected his interest in the graphic, narrative realism of novelists Raymond Chandler and Hubert Selby, Jr. With guitarist Morrison (a Syracuse classmate of Reed’s) and percussionist MacLise, Reed on guitar and vocals and Cale on piano, viola, and bass formed a more permanent band to play these songs, ultimately settling on the name the Velvet Underground, taken from the title of a paperback book about deviant sex.

The band performed live soundtracks for experimental films before making their formal debut, with new drummer Tucker, at a high school dance in December 1965. After seeing the group play in a Greenwich Village club, pop artist Andy Warhol became the Velvet Underground’s manager and patron—introducing them to the exotic German actress, model, and chanteuse Nico; putting the group on tour with his performance art discotheque, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable; and financing and producing the Velvets’ first album. Recorded in 1966 but not released until the following year, The Velvet Underground and Nico was one of rock’s most important debuts, a pioneering work that applied the disruptive aesthetics of avant-garde music and free jazz (drones, distortion, atonal feedback) to rock guitar. It also presented frank examinations of drug use, sadomasochism, and numbing despair. At a time when the San Francisco scene represented the euphoric apex of 1960s counterculture, the Velvets’ harsh dose of New York City-framed reality was scorned by the music industry and ignored by mainstream audiences. Continue reading from Encyclopedia Britannica

Andy Warhol : A Factory

Perhaps the best-known artist of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol delved into every means of cultural production, leaving behind a colossal artistic legacy. Most widely recognized for his 1960s Pop, silkscreened images of objects lifted from quotidian American life and those of Hollywood icons appropriated from the media, Warhol also made benchmark contributions in a multitude of other areas. He explored the realms of film, photography, video, and television, as well as publishing his own books and Interview magazine. Warhol’s multifaceted output challenged the traditional hierarchy between artistic disciplines, presciently incorporating the mainstream into high art and vice-versa-a strategy practiced routinely in today’s culture.

Warhol produced his silkscreened works in a studio dubbed “The Factory.” His first Factory was born in 1963 and located on East 47th Street in New York. Painted silver and covered in tin foil by Factory regular Billy Name, this space became a mecca for artists, socialites, celebrities, and members of the New York avant-garde. At this time, Warhol purchased a 16mm movie camera, and, between 1963 and 1967, the Silver Factory was turned into a movie studio where Warhol and his collaborators made more than five hundred films. Many of these transcended traditional methods of filmmaking and consisted of unstructured, unscripted action. Personalities as diverse as model Edie Sedgwick, poet Taylor Mead, and actor Viva (Susan Hoffman) were featured in the films and became known as “Superstars.”

Warhol’s cultural endeavors extended beyond the visual arts and cinema. In 1965 he publicly declared his abandonment of painting and went on to seek new ways to blur the conventional boundaries of fine art. The next year he began to manage the rock band The Velvet Underground, and to produce multimedia “happenings,” called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which were an amalgamation of performance, film, dance, and music. While The Velvet Underground played, films and colored lights were projected onto and behind the band. Concurrently, Superstars Gerard Malanga (a poet and Warhol’s studio assistant) and Mary Woronov would perform the “Whip Dance,” in response to the sadomasochistic lyrics of some Velvet Underground songs. Continue reading from The Guggenheim

Peel Slowly and See : Warhol's Infamous Banana Album Cover Design

Released in March 1967 the album was recorded in 1966 while the band was featured on Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, which gained attention for its experimental performance sensibilities and controversial lyrical topics, including drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism and sexual deviancy. Aside from Velvet Underground, there were screenings of Warhol’s films, and dancing and performances by regulars of Warhol’s Factory, especially Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga.

The banana itself is, of course, the handiwork of Andy Warhol, who crafted the image and slapped it on the cover of his pet band’s first record. The original album cover allowed fans to peel back the banana skin as a sticker, revealing the fruit of a nude-colored banana underneath. The sexually-charged effect was difficult for manufacturers to pull off (the time it took to perfect the peel was part of the reason behind the album’s delayed release), but MGM deemed it warranted, since Warhol’s stamp of approval was bound to go far in the 1960s. With drug songs like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting For The Man,” some have interpreted the album’s cover as a reference to the old schoolyard rumor that smoking a banana peel will get you high. Whether or not that was Warhol’s intent, the cover remains one of his most famous works.

What was Warhol’s inspiration? As always, the real life. Recently, D Generation and Danzig member Howie Pyro has finally revealed the true origin of the famous Warhol-created banana. Pyro reveals in an op-ed that he accidentally stumbled upon the original banana in a junk shop “in the mid-80s” in the Lower East Side of New York City, only realizing recently what it meant in punk and NYC history. Continue reading from Daily Art Magazine