Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell the Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop,And Lou Reed
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PF00fr(i-viii;vibl) 9/3/09 4:01 PM Page iii YOUR PRETTY FACE IS GOING TO HELL THE DANGEROUS GLITTER OF DAVID BOWIE, IGGY POP,AND LOU REED Dave Thompson An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation New York PF00fr(i-viii;vibl) 9/16/09 3:34 PM Page iv Frontispiece: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed (with MainMan boss Tony Defries laughing in the background) at the Dorchester Hotel, 1972. Copyright © 2009 by Dave Thompson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, with- out written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review. Published in 2009 by Backbeat Books An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation 7777 West Bluemound Road Milwaukee, WI 53213 Trade Book Division Editorial Offices 19 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10010 Printed in the United States of America Book design by David Ursone Typography by UB Communications Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thompson, Dave, 1960 Jan. 3- Your pretty face is going to hell : the dangerous glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed / Dave Thompson. — 1st paperback ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and discography. ISBN 978-0-87930-985-5 (alk. paper) 1. Bowie, David. 2. Pop, Iggy, 1947-3. Reed, Lou. 4. Rock musicians— England—Biography. 5. Punk rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title. ML400.T47 2009 782.42166092'2—dc22 2009036966 www.backbeatbooks.com PF00fr(i-viii;vibl) 9/3/09 4:01 PM Page vi PF00fr(i-viii;vibl) 9/3/09 4:01 PM Page vii CONTENTS Prologue . 1 Part I Performance 1 A Ghost Blooded Country All Covered with Sleep . 11 2 They Wore the Clothes, They Said the Things . 19 3 Soul Radiation in the Dead of Night . 35 4 A Dentured Ocelot on a Leash . 49 5 I Love You in Your Fuck-Me Pumps . 61 6 Smokestacks Belching, Breasts Turn Brown . 73 7 Beat Narrow Heart, the Song Lots of People Know . 87 8 Strangers Were All That Were Left Alive . 103 Part II Inserts 9 If I Have to Die Here, First I’m Gonna Make Some Noise . 121 10 You’re Still Doing Things I Gave Up Years Ago . 131 11 Things Seem Good, Someone Cares About You . 145 12 My Voodoo Master, My Machine . 163 13 For Screeching and Yelling and Various Offenses . 175 14 A Nation Hides Its Organic Minds in the Cellar . 193 PF00fr(i-viii;vibl) 9/3/09 4:01 PM Page viii viii Contents 15 Caged Like a Wild Rat by Fools . 207 16 You Can Hit Me All You Want To . 219 Part III Cabaret 17 Down Below with the Rest of Her Toys . 239 18 A Dirty Sky Full of Youths and Liquors . 255 19 The Plays Have Gone Down and the Crowds Have Scattered . 271 Epilogue . 291 Acknowledgments . 295 Selected Discography . 297 Bibliography . 305 Index . 309 PF00pro(1-8;8bl) 8/29/09 3:43 PM Page 1 PROLOGUE Nico was in Paris, France, when she first met Andy Warhol. It was May 1965, and Warhol—spindly, blotchy, awkward, and shy— was visiting the city for the second time in little more than a year, tri- umphantly returning to the gallery where his electric chair portraits had introduced him to Europe. Under the banner of Pop Art Américaine, a series of screen prints depicting the establishment’s preferred method of execution had excited nothing but controversy back home, where Warhol was still best regarded as the weirdo pop artist who painted Campbell’s soup cans. France, too, was uncertain, but American poet John Ashbery and French writer Jean-Jacques Lebel praised his work in the exhibition brochure, and gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend (who had once been married to Warhol’s agent, Leo Castelli) knew that her countrymen were fascinated despite themselves. She had barely waved the artist off one chilly morning in February 1964 before she was scheming his return. This time Warhol was exhibiting his screen-printed poppies, gaudy and vivid, primary colors pregnant with childish exuberance, and alive with the promise of the spring that was just breaking over Paris. May 1965 was as warm as the season could ever be: the sidewalk cafés were alive with the sound of the city breaking its hibernation, and the night- clubs were bubbling their own intoxicating brew. Nico was there with Willy Maywald, the German-born photographer who was her constant escort during her visits to France. Old enough to be her father, a role that she gratefully placed upon him, Maywald had tire- lessly pushed Nico forward in her first role as a fashion model, sat back somewhat when she moved into movies, and watched indulgently as a brief fling with Bob Dylan pinballed her toward a musical career. The pair holidayed in Greece together, Nico and Dylan; it was there that he wrote PF00pro(1-8;8bl) 8/29/09 3:43 PM Page 2 2 Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell a song for her, the timelessly charming “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” but she frowned when she was asked if they ever sang it together. “He didn’t like it when I tried to sing along with him,” she told her biographer, Richard Witts. “I thought he was . a little annoyed that I could sing properly, at least in tune, so he made me more determined to sing to other people.” Since that time, she had visited New York and performed at the Blue Angel; flown to England and seduced Brian Jones; encountered Andrew Loog Oldham, and hatched plans to make a record with him. Now she was in Paris, and she met Andy Warhol. As Maywald understated in his memoir, “She had the gift of ferreting out interesting people.” Warhol’s table at the Chez Castel nightclub, on rue Princesse, glit- tered as only his inner sanctum could. The movie What’s New Pussycat had just wrapped shooting at the club, and the place, Warhol told his diary, was popping with stars—Terence Stamp, Ursula Andress, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Romy Schneider. Warhol was a star too, and he caught people’s eye, if only because it was so hard not to stare at him. But it was his companion Edie Sedgwick who conquered their hearts, elfin and boyish, wide-eyed but not yet the legless tragedy of future legend, bubbling with charm and the innocent beauty that so enraptured Warhol that he wound up destroying it. The previous evening, dining with Salvador Dalí at the Crazy Horse Saloon, it was Edie who broke the ice between the artists when she leaned over to the grandfather of surrealism and asked, “How does it feel to be such a famous writer?” Edie was irresistible. “Twenty-two, white-haired with anthracite-black eyes and legs to swoon over,” mooned Vogue magazine, and that was when she was in New York. “In Paris,” the article continued, “Warhol’s gang startled the dancers at Chez Castel by appearing with fifteen rabbits and Edie Sedgwick in a black leotard and a white mink coat.” “It’s all I have to wear,” she sighed softly. Nico watched her like a hawk. “She was so lovely,” she recalled twenty years later. “Like a little bird that you wanted to hold in your hand.” She barely noticed the rest of the entourage, Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga, all whiplash grace and tousled hair; Edie’s friend Chuck Wein, bearded and bulky, and so eager to please (but please whom? That was the sting in his tail); but then her gaze fell on a familiar face and an old friend, Denis Deegan, an American in Paris in true Gene Kelly style. PF00pro(1-8;8bl) 8/29/09 3:43 PM Page 3 Prologue 3 Nico caught Deegan’s eye, joined the group and, when Warhol’s curiosity could stand no more tension (but only then—like Edie, Nico not only knew how but when to make an entrance), introduced herself by discussing her friends. Some were real, some were assumed, a few were probably imaginary—Nico never allowed reality to stand on the toes of her self-mythology. But the names William Burroughs, Lee Strasberg, Marilyn Monroe, Federico Fellini, Coco Chanel, Bob Dylan, and Brian Jones fell from her lips, and she knew she had her audience’s attention. Edie, she recalled, was “too preoccupied with her lipstick” to pay the newcomer much mind, except to ask Nico how she kept her hair so blonde. But Malanga told her about the silver-enshrined studio where the master did his work, and suggested that she visit someday; Warhol’s mind worked more methodically, and he quietly grilled her about her movie career, second-guessing her interest in the Rolling Stones. “Is it true that Mick Jagger has a huge cock?” He never let on that pasted in his scrapbook was one of the advertise- ments Nico had shot for London Fog raincoats. They parted that evening with promises to meet again. Nico returned to London and her assignation with Andrew Oldham, as he kick-started his Immediate record label. They toyed with recording her Dylan song and, because its author was in town as well, the pair of them wound up in a little demo studio in central London, Dylan pounding drunken piano while Nico sang “I’ll Keep It with Mine.” But Oldham shrugged away their one-take acetate and suggested Nico go with Gordon Lightfoot’s “I’m Not Saying” instead.