Ready to Blow Your Mind: Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable Alycia Faith Lentz University of Iowa

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Spring 2016 Ready to blow your mind: Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable Alycia Faith Lentz University of Iowa

This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/3128

Recommended Citation Lentz, Alycia Faith. "Ready to blow your mind: Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2016. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/3128.

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READY TO BLOW YOUR MIND: ANDY WARHOL’S EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE

Alycia Faith Lentz

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

May 2016

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Craig Adcock

ALYCIA FAITH LENTZ

2016

Graduate College The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

______

PH.D. THESIS

______

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Alycia Faith Lentz has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art History at the May 2016 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ______Craig Adcock, Thesis Supervisor

______Dorothy Johnson

______Christopher D. Roy

______Julie Berger Hochstrasser

______Trevor Harvey

For my father, my husband, and Andy Warhol – the men in my life.

It was all luck and it was all fabulous.

Andy Warhol Popism: The Warhol Sixties

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank my advisor, Professor Craig Adcock, for his enthusiasm, constructive criticism, and support. I also thank my committee, Professor Dorothy Johnson, Professor

Christopher D. Roy, Professor Julie Berger Hochstrasser, and Professor Trevor Harvey, for their guidance over the course of my time at the University of Iowa. Sufficient superlatives do not exist to describe the wonderful instructors with whom I have had the good fortune to work. Thanks, too, to Laura Jorgensen, for her calm demeanor and bottomless well of knowledge.

Many thanks to the numerous people who provided insight and rare documents for this project, including: Peter Werbe, legendary underground Detroit DJ and long-time staff member at the Fifth Estate; Julie Herrada, curator at the University of Michigan

Special Collections Library; and Alfredo García, compiler of The Inevitable World of the

Velvet Underground, who took pity on a poor graduate student and gave her a wealth of information.

Thanks to William and Paulette Reed, Jason L. Reed, Robert and Joan Lentz,

Katherine Kunau, Devin Miller, and Amber Skoglund for encouragement and keen observations.

I also thank those who cannot be here to see this project completed: L. Graydon and Burnita Reed, J. Ivan and Florence Reed, June Boies Benz, Joseph and Wilma

Hanson, and Earlene Diamond Rosauer.

And thanks to my husband, Timothy, for coming along with me.

ABSTRACT

Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) (1966-1967) was a drug-fueled rock concert-cum-multimedia postmodern art event where layers of mediation mixed with immediate experience: The Velvet Underground performed their innovative music in front of films of themselves performing, Factory Superstars danced and performed poetry, various Warhol films projected on the walls, flashing lights flickered on mirrored surfaces, and a crowd of spectators – both famous and unknown – packed in to see and be seen, to dance and trip into the early hours of the morning in New York City, Los

Angeles, San Francisco, and a variety of other cities in the United States. The EPI’s unabashed emphasis on marketing, packaging, consumer goods, and empty celebrity are all manifestations of Guy Debord’s fears of late capitalist excess, but beneath the veneer of vapidity was an undercurrent of counterculture political activism and social awareness.

The EPI was a promotional vehicle for Warhol, Warhol’s Factory crew, and the

Velvet Underground, but is also a complex example of spectacle that has been under- analyzed in recent scholarship. Original contributions include Debordian cultural analysis, interpretation of contemporary reviews and reports, examination of the event’s lack of art historical presence, and incorporation of music scholarship into the Warhol historical canon. Key sources include reviews, interviews with participants and attendees, rare documents and photographs, Aspen magazine, and advertisements from underground publications. In creating a more complete picture of the EPI through surviving ephemera and varied scholarly assessment, the EPI comes into clearer focus as a counterculture underground event and an influential art/music collaboration of some of the central cultural figures of the mid-twentieth century: Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

PUBLIC ABSTRACT

Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) was a drug-fueled rock concert- cum-multimedia art event where layers of mediation mixed with immediate experience:

The Velvet Underground performed their innovative music in front of films of themselves performing, Factory Superstars danced and performed poetry, various Warhol films projected on the walls, flashing lights flickered on mirrored surfaces, and a crowd of spectators – both famous and unknown – packed in to see and be seen, to dance and trip into the early hours of the morning. The experience of the EPI was a potent combination of alienation, mediation, and commercialization.

The EPI was a promotional vehicle for Warhol, Warhol’s Factory crew, and the

Velvet Underground, but is also a complex example of spectacle that has been under- analyzed in recent scholarship. The EPI’s unabashed emphasis on marketing, packaging, consumer goods, and empty celebrity are all manifestations of fears of late capitalist excess, but beneath the veneer of vapidity was an undercurrent of counterculture political activism and social awareness. Original contributions include cultural analysis, interpretation of contemporary reviews and reports, examination of the event’s lack of art historical presence, and incorporation of music scholarship into the Warhol historical canon.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES viii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER

I. “I’M SO EMPTY TODAY”: THE BIRTH OF ANDY WARHOL’S STYLE AND PERSONA 9

II. “WE WERE ALL FOR GETTING INTO THE MUSIC SCENE”: ANDY WARHOL AND THE VELVET UNDERGROUND GETTING UP TIGHT 43

III. “SOMETHING REVOLUTIONARY WAS HAPPENING”: THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE IN NEW YORK CITY 73

IV. “WE HAD A HORRIBLE REPUTATION”: THE LAST DAYS OF THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE 101

V. “YOU’D BETTER TAKE DRUGS AND LEARN TO LOVE PLASTIC”: THE AFTERMATH OF THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE 137

CONCLUSION 165

BIBLIOGRAPHY 171

APPENDIX

FIGURES 181

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure A1. Billy Name, photograph of the Velvet Underground on stage at the Dom, April 1966. 181

Figure A2. Andy Warhol with lettering by Julia Warhola, Martini & Rossi advertisement, c. 1958. 182

Figure A3. Andy Warhol with lettering by Julia Warhola, Happy Bug Day, c. 1954 . 183

Figure A4. Andy Warhol, advertisment for I. Miller Shoes, 1955-1956. 184

Figure A5. Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning, 1953. 185

Figure A6. Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55. 186

Figure A7. Andy Warhol, window display at Bonwit Teller, New York City, 1961. 187

Figure A8. Andy Warhol Superman, 1961. 188

Figure A9. Andy Warhol, 32 Campbell Soup Cans, 1962, at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. 189

Figure A10. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. 190

Figure A11. Andy Warhol, Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964. 191

Figure A12. Campbell’s soup advertisement, c. 1941. 192

Figure A13. Campbell’s soup advertisement, 1965. 193

Figure A14. Campbell’s soup advertisement, 1968. 194

Figure A15. Campbell’s soup advertisement, 1969. 195

Figure A16. Campbell’s beach towel advertisement, 1969. 196

Figure A17. Campbell’s record album advertisement, 1969. 197

Figure A18. Tony Ray Jones, photograph of Andy Warhol at a Beatles press conference, October 1964. 198

Figure A19. Book cover to Michael Leigh’s The Velvet Underground, 1963. 199

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Figure A20. Poster for the Velvet Underground’s performance at Summit High School, 1965. 200

Figure A21. Adam Ritchie, photograph of the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, and Gerard Mangala performing at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966. 201

Figure A22. Adam Ritchie, photograph of Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Mangala, and Nico at a reserved table at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966. 202

Figure A23. Adam Ritchie, photograph of the Velvet Underground and Nico performing at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966. 203

Figure A24. Adam Ritchie, photograph of the Velvet Underground and Gerard Malanga performing at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966. 204

Figure A25. Advertisement published in the Village Voice for Andy Warhol, Up-Tight, New York City, 1966. 205

Figure A26. Advertisement published in the Village Voice for Andy Warhol, Up-Tight, New York City, 1966. 206

Figure A27. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Underground New York, Rutgers University, 1966. 207

Figure A28. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Underground New York, Rutgers University, 1966. 208

Figure A29. Advertisement published in the Michigan Daily for Up-Tight with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground at the Fourth Ann Arbor Film Festival, University of Michigan, 1966. 209

Figure A30. Advertisement published in the Michigan Daily for Up-Tight with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground at the Fourth Ann Arbor Film Festival, University of Michigan, 1966. 210

Figure A31. Advertisement Andy Warhol’s Erupting Plastic Inevitable, published in the Village Voice, March 30, 1966. 211

Figure A32. Fred W. McDarrah, photograph of the Dom’s entrance and banner, April 1966. 212

Figure A33. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, April 7, 1966. 213

Figure A34. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, April 14, 1966. 214

Figure A35. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, April 21, 1966. 215

Figure A36. Billy Name, photograph of the EPI at the Dom, April 1966. 216

Figure A37. Marilyn Bender, “Black Jeans to Go Dancing at the Movies: It’s Inevitable,” New York Times, April 11, 1966, photographs by Larry Morris. 217

Figure A38. Ian MacEachern, photograph of Gerard Malanga dancing with a whip in front of a strobe light to the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” at the Dom, April 1966. 218

Figure A39. Nat Finkelstein, photograph of the Velvet Underground performing onstage at the Dom, April 1966. 219

Figure A40. Nat Finkelstein, photograph of the Velvet Underground performing onstage at the Dom, April 1966. 220

Figure A41. Photograph unknown, photograph of Warhol in the lighting booth of the Dom at the EPI, April 1966. 221

Figure A42. Colored slide used in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1966-67. 222

Figure A43. Striped slide used in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1966-67. 223

Figure A44. John Wilcock, “A ‘High’ School of Music and Art,” East Village Other, March-April 1966, and advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground and Nico. 224

Figure A45. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Plastic Inevitable Show, published in the Los Angeles Free Press, May 6 and 13, 1966. 225

Figure A46. Advertisement for the Plastic Inevitable Show, published in the KRLA Beat May 14, 1966. 226

Figure A47. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Plastic Inevitable Show, published in the KRLA Beat May 21, 1966. 227

Figure A48. Poster for Andy Warhol and His Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, California, 1966. 228

Figure A49. Photograph of John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Gerard Malanga in Playboy’s VIP Magazine, Fall 1966. 229

Figure A50. Ronald Nameth, still from the film Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1967. 230

Figure A51. Ronald Nameth, still of Gerard Malanga dancing from the film Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1967. 231

Figure A52. Ronald Nameth, still of Ingrid Superstar dancing from the film Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1967. 232

Figure A53. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, September 22, 1966. 233

Figure A54. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, published in the Philadelphia Enquirer, December 4, 1966. 234

Figure A55. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, box and some of the contents of Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966). 235

Figure A56. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, cover of Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966). 236

Figure A57. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, interior of box cover of Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966). 237

Figure A58. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, “Music, Man, That’s Where It’s At” folder and contents, Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966). 238

Figure A59. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, “The Plastic Exploding Inevitable,” Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966). 239

Figure A60. Pioneer Electronics advertisement, 1975. 240

Figure A61. Converse Chuck Taylor shoes, released in 2015, based on Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can, 1962. 241

Figure A62. The Velvet Underground & Nico album cover, designed by Andy Warhol and released March 1967. 242

Figure A63. Advertisement for The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967. 243

Figure A64. Advertisement for The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967. 244

Figure A65. The Dandy Warhols, Welcome to the Monkey House album cover, Capitol Records, 2003. 245

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INTRODUCTION

“Andy walking, Andy tired / Andy take a little snooze / Tie him up when he’s fast asleep / Send him on a pleasant cruise / When he wake up on the sea / He sure to think of me and you / He’ll think about paint and he’ll think about glue / What a jolly boring thing to do / Andy Warhol looks a scream / Hang him on my wall / Andy Warhol, Silver Screen / Can’t tell them apart at all.” Davie Bowie, “Andy Warhol”1

Every square inch of the studio walls is covered in flashing silver and the fashionable crowd sways and chatters amid blaring rock music, including the Velvet

Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.” Outside, a long banner reading “The Factory:

Live music, Live dancing, Films, Party Event NOW” beckons to passersby, who follow the sign up a flight of stairs to encounter a pompadour-bearing doorman asking for the password (“Janis Joplin”).2 Inside, women in short mod dresses and heavy graphic eye makeup pose with perfect model pouts. A runway show of bizarre metallic clothing – all silver, of course – goes on in one corner of the room. Hairstyles are sky high, earrings are as large as fists, and nearly every person mingles with a cocktail in hand. Documenting the scene from behind a camera is Andy Warhol, white-wigged and clad in his trademark black ensemble. Two men in sharp suits unsuccessfully approach Warhol before manhandling the artist into a backroom hidden behind a silver curtain. There, Warhol tears off his wig and opaque sunglasses and berates the men for nearly ruining his cover.

Warhol is not Andy Warhol but Agent W, a covert government operative hiding in plain sight disguised as the famous Pop artist while monitoring alien life on Earth. The

1 David Bowie, “Andy Warhol,” Hunky Dory, performed by David Bowie, RCA Victor SF 8244, 1971, vinyl record. After the song’s instrumental opening, Bowie can be heard on the record correcting the pronunciation of Warhol’s name. “It’s, it’s War-hole, actually.”

2 The banner is modeled after the original banner for the April 1966 Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances at the Dom in New York. See Fig. A32.

2 swinging party scene is from the 2012 movie Men in Black 3, starring Will Smith,

Tommy Lee Jones, and Josh Brolin; “Andy Warhol” is in fact Saturday Night Live alumnus Bill Hader in heavy costume and prosthetics.3 In the twenty-first century, Andy

Warhol is such a ubiquitous pop culture icon that he figures just as prominently in blockbuster Hollywood alien movies as on the walls of New York City’s Museum of

Modern Art. That any aspect of Warhol’s life or work has gone under-developed in scholarship or cultural representation seems preposterous in light of the hundreds of books, articles, and documentaries dedicated to the artist. And yet, that is precisely the case with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), the dazzling light and music spectacle that was performed from April 1966 to May 1967 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and many other cities across the United States. Used for decades as either an anecdote or a backdrop for Warhol’s filmic pursuits, the EPI was its own entity: a Debordian spectacle, a precursor for theatrical rock performance, a stepping-stone for the Velvet

Underground, an experimental artistic format, a cultural phenomenon, and a haven for the bourgeoning counter-culture of the 1960s.

Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable was, for one month in 1966, the premiere event in New York City. A multimedia extravaganza of film, live music, light shows, and dance, the EPI was a launching pad for the Velvet Underground, a showcase for Warhol’s special brand of vacant celebrity, and an important milestone in intermedia art performance. Articles reviewing or documenting the EPI popped up both in mainstream papers like the New York Times and in underground publications like the

East Village Other, beckoning the youths of New York to dance and carouse into the

3 Men in Black 3, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 2012), DVD. The movie is partly set in 1969.

3 early hours of the morning.4 For a time, Warhol’s party was the party for fashionably counterculture New Yorkers and those who wanted to get close to them. After its tenure in New York, the EPI toured the country and eventually closed up shop for good in 1967 amid controversy, poor reviews, and increasing artistic tensions. As the years passed, the

Velvet Underground disbanded, Warhol took up his place as elder statesman in the art world, and the EPI became another amusing experimental anecdote used to pepper the large market for Warholian biographies. Now, decades later, the EPI’s place within the larger pictures of 1960s counterculture, drug culture, underground politics, experimental music, and postmodern art still remains to be investigated and established. Here, I apply a more critical eye to the EPI in order to incorporate it into Warhol’s career trajectory, scholarship on music and rock and roll culture, and discussions of contemporary society to produce a more complete picture of the EPI as an event and as a phenomenon.

“Why have I never heard about the Exploding Plastic Inevitable?” is the most common question posed to me when asked about this project. Why not, indeed! The EPI was helmed by Warhol and the Velvet Underground, one of the most famous artists to emerge from the United States and one of the most influential bands of the twentieth- century. Performances were attended by poets, actors, singers, and public figures.

Articles and advertisements ran in the New York Times and the Village Voice. The show toured from coast to coast and funded The Velvet Underground & Nico album. Where are the anniversary concerts? Where are plaques proclaiming “The Exploding Plastic

Inevitable Played Here”? Where is the coffee table book, or the fictionalized film version,

4 For example, “Black Jeans to Go Dancing at the Movies: It’s Inevitable,” New York Times, April 11, 1966, reproduced in Alfredo García, The Inevitable World of the Velvet Underground, ed. Carlos López (Madrid: Alfredo García, 2012), 22.

4 or the full-sized posters for college students to tack up on dorm walls? Where is the symposium inviting scholars to analyze its music, atmosphere, and influence? These things, in short, do not exist. In spite of Warhol, in spite of the Velvet Underground, and in spite of its fascinating duration, the EPI still lacks a comprehensive art historical treatment. In attempting to fill this scholarly gap, I look to the accounts of those who were there, including Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story, a collection of candid interviews with the musicians and people associated with them, edited by EPI dancer and

Factory assistant Gerard Malanga and Warhol biographer Victor Bockris. Biographies of

Warhol also provide context, including: David Bourdon’s Warhol, Victor Bockris’s

Warhol: A Biography, and Tony Scherman and David Dalton’s Pop: The Genius of Andy

Warhol. Alongside interviews and firsthand accounts, ephemera from the shows (posters, advertisements, notes, newspaper clippings, etc.) provide context for the performances and for the EPI’s design. Books instrumental in that endeavor include Johann

Kugelberg’s The Velvet Underground: New York Art, Jim DeRogatis’s The Velvet

Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side, Alfredo García’s The

Inevitable World of the Velvet Underground, and Stéphane Aquin’s Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work. By its very nature as an underground event, the EPI was not documented with particular care by either its participants or by other publications, but various Velvet Underground fans and scholars have collected incredible amounts of surviving documents that flesh out study of the performances.

Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable was not so much Andy Warhol’s as much as it was an artistic collaboration with a variety of participants. Originally billed as

“Andy Warhol: Up-Tight,” the EPI burned brightly as groundbreaking performance

5 before fading away in its last unsuccessful days. In early 1966, “Up-Tight” was hired to provide a fashionable backdrop of film screenings and musical performances. Warhol’s troupe instead produced an awkward and uncomfortable atmosphere capped with filmmaker Barbara Rubin asking attendees intimate and aggressive questions.5 In

Delmonico’s sophisticated Grand Ballroom, the biggest names in New York psychiatry were confronted with what most of them considered a display of outrageous decadence and, at times, outright torture. This was just the beginning. Throughout April of 1966, the newly-christened EPI took up residence at the Polish National Home (colloquially called

“the Dom”) situated in New York’s East Village and established the once-rundown dance hall/community center as a psychedelic art and music performance space. The EPI traveled after its lease at the Dom expired, most notably to Poor Richard’s in Chicago where young filmmaker Ronald Nameth recorded the show over several nights, but the volatile nature of the show and its participants led to its disbanding seventeen months after the fateful show at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry’s annual banquet.

By then, Nico, a throaty German singer that Warhol suggested join the Velvet

Underground as their “femme fatale,” had already left the group, and lighting designer and operator Danny Williams, who kept a strobe light filled with amphetamines always within sight, had committed suicide.6 The EPI quickly began its descent into underground legend. The Velvet Underground’s debut album was released in March of 1967 and caused a minor stir with the suggestive Warhol-designed banana and textual invitation to

5 Jim DeRogatis, The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side (Minneapolis: Voyager Press, 2009), 86.

6 See A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, directed by Esther B. Robinson (New York and Los Angeles: Arthouse Films, 2007), DVD.

“peel slowly and see,” but many record stores refused to carry the album and their record label did little to promote it.7 The critical and financial failure of this now renowned album sowed discord among its already tense members and sent the band back into relative obscurity for the next decade, by which time the band had long since disbanded.

In 1968, disgruntled writer Valerie Solanas shot and nearly killed Warhol in his studio for losing a screenplay, signaling the end of the swinging Factory days and the beginning of a more controlled and even more distant Warhol, who spent the next decade spending more time with famous patrons and movie stars and less time with his ragtag group of poets, dancers, artists, and writers.8 The cohesive, irreverent, and aggressive spirit that inspired the EPI faded away.

In the years that followed its dissolution, the EPI received surprisingly little art historical attention. Where it is mentioned, it is often an aside, a supplementary example, or a fun bit of extra information. Even those who dedicate their analysis to the EPI, like

Branden W. Joseph, leave plenty of room for development and specificity.9 The more complete picture of the EPI attempted here incorporates discussion of the pre-Pop art world in the United States and the overall cultural setting of the 1960s to provide a deeper understanding of Warhol’s rise to fame, his interest in collaborating with a rock and roll band, the EPI’s success in New York, its ultimate failure when taken to the West Coast, and its subsequent lack of visibility in current popular culture. The specific events leading

7 Joe Harvard, The Velvet Underground and Nico (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 139-141.

8 Solanas has been the subject of a fictionalized account. See I Shot Andy Warhol, directed by Mary Harron (Los Angeles: Samuel Goldwyn, 1996), DVD.

9 Branden W. Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 80-107.

7 up to the establishment of the EPI are also analyzed, including the beginning of Warhol’s involvement with the Velvet Underground and “Andy Warhol Up-Tight,” the touring show that was born out of Warhol’s collaboration with the Velvet Underground, Factory regulars, and other artists. Discussion includes the evolution of the event that would become the EPI, the mechanics of and response to the event organized for the New York

Society for Clinical Psychiatry’s black tie dinner, the reception at various universities, the reactions of those within the group, and the implications of the show for art, music, and popular culture.

As for the EPI in its fully-formed incarnation at the Dom, I attempt to bring together information that is often only available piecemeal throughout a variety of sources into one discussion that expands into cultural theory and criticism and paints the event in a clearer picture: the specifics of the venue, the redesign of the interior space, the decoration of the exterior space, the choreography of the dancers, the set list of the Velvet

Underground, the films projected, the lights used, the various programs and contests offered, the advertisements run, the reviews published, the famous and unknown people who attended, the food offered, etc. From the Dom, I chart the EPI’s descent from the nights of packed dance floors and critical attention (if not critical enthusiasm) to deserted venues, police raids, and eventual obscurity. Following the fast-paced excitement of the triumphant Dom days, I look at the EPI from May 1966 to its last show in May 1967.

Ronald Nameth’s film, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, is also a key record of the EPI. Filmed over several days in June of 1966 at Poor Richard’s in Chicago,

Nameth’s glimpse into the world of the EPI is perhaps our best surviving document of the show. Unlike still photographs that emphasize light and shadow, Andy Warhol’s

Exploding Plastic Inevitable showcases the Velvet Underground’s music and the hypnotic, hallucinatory effect it had on the already psychedelic dancing and lighting.

With firsthand accounts, Nameth’s film, newspaper reviews, and photographs, experience of the EPI and its various attractions comes into clearer, more vivid focus.

In dealing with the critical uninterest in the EPI, I argue that art historians have been discouraged by a lack of careful documentation, Warhol’s frustration with the failing project, and the EPI’s inadequate influence on Warhol’s late work. Historians, too, have foregrounded Warhol’s films in analyzing the EPI while disregarding the rest of the show. I seek to unite the elements in a more complete reading of the EPI’s rise and fall, while also incorporating some of music scholarship’s recent contributions. By bringing together music scholarship, art historical scholarship, extant EPI ephemera, and rare write-ups about the EPI’s performances, I hope to shine some light into long forgotten corners and to draw attention to a fruitful topic that has spent too long in the dark.

CHAPTER I

“I’M SO EMPTY TODAY”: THE BIRTH OF ANDY WARHOL’S STYLE AND PERSONA

David [Bourdon] tells me that I used to be generally much friendlier, more open and ingenuous – right through to ’64. “You didn’t have that cool, eyeball-through-the-wall, spaced look that you developed later on.” But I didn’t need it then like I would later on.

Andy Warhol, Popism: The Warhol Sixties1

Andy Warhol was at his most unaccommodating. The interviewer had long since lost his patience, releasing his frustration by swiveling his chair back and forth, back and forth. His series of probing and serious questions had been met with disinterest, awkward pauses, and superficial answers. In a filmed 1966 interview for National Educational

Television’s (NET) nine-part series about American artists, Warhol hemmed and hawed, seemingly more interested in playing with his bottom lip and posing stiffly in front of a large silver Elvis silkscreen than in answering the interviewer’s questions about his processes, subjects, and content.2 The interview was a master class in Warholian tedium.

Warhol treated the exchange like a game, avoiding questions and feigning an inability to understand. The interviewer’s vexation at Warhol’s manner was shared by the majority of the fine art establishment of the 1960s, who saw not only Warhol’s commercial aesthetic but also his refusal to engage seriously with his media and subject matter as affronts to

1 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 25.

2 “Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein,” in USA Artists, directed by Lane Slate (New York: National Educational Television and Radio Center, 1966), 16mm film. This interview has not been commercially released in its entirety, but is currently available at https://vimeo.com/27373410.

10 their sensibilities.3 Where the art world wanted rigor, Warhol gave them carelessness; where the art world wanted seriousness, Warhol gave them irreverence; where the art world wanted depth, Warhol gave them superficiality. At every turn, Warhol was the inverse of a highbrow fine artist. At odds with critics and historians, Warhol was still somehow maddeningly successful, mounting well-attended exhibition openings, securing interviews, forging relationships with glamorous celebrities, and attracting public attention while the establishment scrambled to understand just what this Pop phenomenon was.4 Warhol refused to make their already difficult job any easier, giving amorphous answers to serious queries and providing no justification for his subjects or production methods. Rather than courting art world acclaim, Warhol was following the lessons he had learned through his tumultuous (at that point) almost twenty-year career in the arts. Instead of trying to please an art world he was ill-suited for, Warhol courted the good opinion of America’s growing counterculture movement, who rejected high art standards as they were rejecting the mores of the generation that raised them in favor of mass produced, consumable culture – something Warhol understood not only from years as a successful commercial artist, but from his own personal love of glamour, celebrity,

3 Alan R. Pratt, introduction to The Critical Response to Andy Warhol, ed. Alan R. Pratt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), xxiii-xxiv. “As the criticism makes clear, Warhol appalled the art establishment because he represented a complete transvaluation of the aesthetic principles that had dominated for several generations. . . . Both Warhol’s subject matter and his flippant attitudes toward the conventions of the art world were the antithesis of the high-seriousness of modernism.”

4 In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art held a symposium on Pop art, including such participants as Leo Steinberg and Henry Geldzahler, to try to come to grips with Pop Art. The symposium was tape recorded and transcribed, excepting the end discussion. See Henry Geldzahler, Hilton Kramer, Dore Ashton, Leon Steinberg, and Stanley Kunitz, “Pop Art Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, December 13, 1962,” Arts Magazine 37 (April 1963): 35-45. Reprinted in Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 65-81.

11 and money.5 When, at the end of the NET interview, Warhol mentioned in his dreamy monotone that his next project was a “very glamorous” multimedia discothèque enterprise, he was not just referencing the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) (Fig. A1), a multimedia experience involving light shows, projections of Warhol’s films, dancers performing sadomasochistic avant-garde creations with whips and black leather, and the

Velvet Underground performing songs and stream-of-consciousness musical compositions in front of a thronging crowd of dancing attendees.. He was also demonstrating the particular, successful formula he had honed over his career and which had taken him from a borderline failure in art school in Pittsburgh to a renowned commercial illustrator in New York City to a powerhouse artist on the cusp of his next great escapade. At its best, behind the glitz and glamour, the EPI was a cog in the wheel of 1960s American political change. At its worst, the EPI was a critical and artistic failure that fizzled out amid creative differences and poor reception. Certainly, the road to the

EPI was tumultuous. The success, and ultimate failure, of the EPI was dependent not just on Warhol’s persona, however; it was also the result of a combination of social interest, cultural upheaval, marketing strategies, artistic collaborations, and pure luck throughout the course of his career.

By 1966, the year the EPI debuted in its full form at St. Mark’s Place, New York

City, Warhol had already weathered a series of scandals and scathing critical reviews that might have crushed the spirit and ended the career of another artist. The opacity, shallowness, and impudence of Warhol’s art and public persona had first started causing waves in the realms of high art in the early 1960s, and, by the time Warhol sat for the

5 Christin Mamiya, “Corporations and the Imperative to Consume,” in Pop Art and Consumer Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 14-71.

NET’s less than revealing interview, he had faced a series of great disappointments and remarkable successes on the long road to stardom.6 Standing firmly in the way of

Warhol’s ambitions was the art establishment itself. Indeed, if the art world had had its way, Warhol would not have survived professionally long enough to warrant a televised interview. Much of the discomfort surrounding Warhol’s induction into the hallowed halls of fine art came from Warhol’s less than ideal background as a prolific and profitable commercial illustrator. Serious artists were not supposed to degrade the noble pursuit of art by engaging in commercial endeavors, and those who did were keen to hide those ties. Abstract Expressionism, the major post-World War II American art movement that helped cement New York City as the new world art center, promoted deep ideological contemplation, artistic introspection, and hostile masculinity.7 Something as frivolous and insipid as Warhol’s commercial illustrations (Fig. A2) had no place among real art ripped from the very soul of real artists; one may need to lower oneself to advertising or product design to make a living, but he was certainly not supposed to derive any pleasure, satisfaction, or fame from it.8 Warhol’s unabashed commercial

6 Warhol exhibited as a fine artist as early as 1952 with fifteen drawings based on the works of Truman capote, but he received no appreciable attention. See Pratt, xviii. Between 1952 and 1959, Warhol had put up seven exhibitions without making any real headway. His work was casually dismissed when it was noticed at all, and in the meantime Warhol kept working as a successful commercial artist.

7 Warhol and Hackett, 15-16. “The world of the Abstract Expressionists was very macho. The painters . . . were all hard-driving, two-fisted types who’d grab each other and say things like ‘I’ll knock your fucking teeth out and ‘I’ll steal your girl.’ . . . The toughness was part of a tradition, it went with their agonized, anguished art. They were always exploding and having fist fights about their work and their love lives.”

8 Warhol’s famously appropriated Brillo Boxes were in fact originally designed in 1961 by Jim Harvey, an abstract painter, who was baffled by Warhol’s use of the design and its

13 success and desire for financial profitability, which he shared to varying degrees with other Pop artists, would be major hurtles in his quest for high art validation but would also serve him well later as he devised his plans for the EPI.9

Warhol moved to New York in 1949 after graduating from the Carnegie

Technical Institute with a degree in pictorial design, and he quickly threw himself into the pursuit of a commercial career.10 Ambitious, if diffident and peculiar, Warhol doggedly chased success and learned his first lessons in designing a public face that would attract attention. Chief among these lessons was finding a way to assimilate himself into a world with which, at first blush, he seemed completely at odds. Unlike the coiffed and beautiful denizens of the fashion world, Warhol was conventionally unattractive, suffering from early onset balding, a bulbous red nose, and discolored skin.11 He attended meetings with directors of sleek fashion magazines dressed in tattered

value to collectors. Grace Glueck, “Art Notes: Boom?” New York Times, May 10, 1964, reprinted in Pratt, 6-7.

9 Hal Foster, survey in Pop, ed. Mark Francis (London: Phaidon, 2010), 18. “Warhol was an acclaimed illustrator, Rosenquist a billboard painter, Ruscha a graphic designer and so on. As might be expected, then, Warhol and company faced some resistance from an art world dedicated to the lofty principles of Abstract Expressionism.” Warhol was by far the most successful of those who started in commercial art and became Pop artists.

10 David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 20-21. Warhol was a poor student, flunking his freshman year and attending summer classes to stay in attendance. He had difficulty completing assignments, understanding requirements, communicating with others, and was repeatedly near expulsion for his inability to follow instructions. By his senior year, he had gained some positive attention for his distinctive style.

11 Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 6-8. “It must have been hard not to stare at twenty-year-old Andy’s nose. In a 1948 profile, his nose gives his entire face a relentless frontward thrust. ‘You have to understand,’ said Warhol’s fifties friend and printer, Seymour Berlin, with kindly understatement, ‘Andy wasn’t the handsomest-looking guy.’” Although not relevant here,

14 clothes and ill-fitting wigs, earning him the nickname “Raggedy Andy.” If Warhol couldn’t be one of the beautiful people, he could be conspicuously inelegant and untidy, even stealing fellow Carnegie Tech graduate and roommate Philip Pearlstein’s anecdote about an embarrassing meeting with an art director in which a live roach crawled out of his portfolio.12 The approach worked, and Warhol cultivated fruitful relationships with fashion industry bigwigs. He set people at ease with disarming insecurity, heaping breathless compliments and admiration onto those around him. According to David

Dalton (with whom Warhol would later work on one issue of an EPI magazine) and Tony

Scherman, he was adept at a melancholy whimsy that came across as charming eccentricity.

“He’d call me up sometimes,” said art director Diana Klemin, “and say, ‘Please talk to my cat, she’s very lonely.’” He could be endearingly whimsical. . . . It was great for flattery: “Always these exclamations,” said [George] Klauber – “‘Ohhh!’ – as if you were so brilliant to have revealed something he’d never imagined.” . . . The artist Edward Plunkett met Andy at an early-fifties party. “Andy got there late,” Plunkett remembered, “and the first thing he said was, ‘Oh, I was going to bring my butterfly on a string but I couldn’t find him.’ I thought, ‘What a funny little fruity guy!’”13

Warhol’s childhood has been a subject of great debate and inquiry. See Scherman and Dalton, 1-45 for a good discussion of Warhol’s childhood. Like so many other parts of Warhol’s life, descriptions of his childhood tend to vary in degrees from biographer to biographer.

12 Fred Lawrence Guiles, Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol (London: Bantam Press, 1989), 36. “While Andy admired ‘chic and glamorous people,’ he emphasized in himself a kind of gaucherie, a sort of grown-up ‘Raggedy Andy’ thing.” Coincidentally, Pearlstein and Warhol rented an apartment on St. Mark’s Place, where the EPI would later find a home.

13 Diana Klemin, George Klauber, and Edward Plunkett quoted in Scherman and Dalton, 20. Klauber was another Carnegie Tech graduate.

Warhol was learning the art of tailoring his personality to his desired audience, and it was a lesson that he would return to often throughout his career. Even if he did not leave a great impression, Warhol left an impression nonetheless.

As an illustrator, Warhol was a dream collaborator. He was more interested in admiring the brilliance of others than promoting his own, and he was much more interested in listening to a conversation than engaging in one.14 According to Pearlstein,

Warhol’s illustrative artistic style was already drawing considerable attention by the end of their first week in New York. Warhol did exactly as he was told without arguing for artistic control, and made variations on his assignments not to stretch himself creatively but to give his art directors different versions from which to choose.15 His first big job was at Glamour magazine – Warhol later claimed to have known nothing about the magazine but was attracted to the word “glamour” – with art director Tina Fredericks, who loved Warhol’s timeliness and agreeability.16 Warhol drew dozens upon dozens of shoes, cats, desserts, butterflies and whatever else his bosses required. For the

14 The voyeurism that was borne out of Warhol’s insecurities would later become one of his defining characteristics. Mediation in general was one of Warhol’s trademarks: “You should have contact with your closest friends through the most intimate and exclusive of all media – the telephone.” Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again ((New York: Harcourt, 1975), 147.

15 Bourdon, 26-28. See also Gary Indiana, Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 33: “Andy Warhol flourished in his early career in advertising. He was a favorite of magazine editors, for whom he always produced an array of illustrations to choose from, delivered in paper bags – ‘Andy Paperbag’ was his bedraggled persona of the period.”

16 Scherman and Dalton, 15-16. Tina Fredericks later wrote the introduction to a volume on Warhol’s years as a commercial artist. See Tina Fredericks, “Remembering Andy: An Introduction,” in Pre-Pop Warhol, written by Jesse Kornbluth (New York: Random House, 1988), 9-23.

16 commercial world, Warhol’s abilities far outweighed his shortcomings.17 Graphic designer Milton Glaser thought that Warhol was a poor draftsman with little sense of control or beauty, but he noted that Warhol treated his distinctive illustrations as though they were high art. Warhol’s friend, Joseph Groell, remembered Warhol as the first person in his acquaintance who viewed commercial art in the same terms as fine art.18

From the beginning, Warhol rejected divisions between high art subjects and kitsch in his own work as easily as if they had never existed.

Not only did Warhol embrace commercial subjects, but he also utilized drawing techniques that would produce mechanical-looking art without incorporating mechanical technology. The “blotted line” technique (Fig. A3) that Warhol favored in his illustrations rejected the Abstract Expressionist emphases on immediacy and the uniqueness of individual artistic involvement, and made even brand new drawings look like previously published, reproduced work.19 Attaching a fresh sheet of Strathmore paper to a sketch,

17 Some of Warhol’s shortcomings. however, were very difficult for potential employers to look past. Before Warhol found the right balance of peculiarity, shyness, and talent that would establish him as one of New York’s premier commercial artists, he reportedly fumbled his way through a number of uncomfortable and strange interactions with potential employers. See Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (London: Da Capo Press, 1997), 83: “Another friend from Tech, Joseph Groell, overheard [Warhol] telephoning around to magazines one day. He introduced himself by saying, ‘Hello. This is Andy Warhol. I planted some bird seeds in the park today. Would you like to order a bird?’ Continuing in a whimsical, whining voice, he announced that it was raining, ‘and I have a hole in my shoe do you have any work for me?’ When, as most often happened, whoever he was talking to said no, Andy would reply, ‘Well, I’m not coming out today.’ Hanging up after one of these calls, he turned to Groell and said in his normal voice, ‘Isn’t this ridiculous? I don’t want to behave like this.’”

18 Scherman and Dalton, 16. “He very early saw through the long-established notion that commercial and fine art were qualitatively different, and that the former was inferior.”

19 His dotted-line technique was almost suredly lifted from the oeuvre of Ben Shahn (1898-1969), a leftist artist who attracted the derision of Ab Ex champion Clement

Warhol would repeatedly trace in ink over small sections of his preliminary drawing and bring the clean sheet down to absorb the ink before it dried. Different applications of ink could create blotchy lines, thin lines, sketchy lines, irregular lines, dotted lines, or broken lines. The result was an ink drawing that art directors considered charming, childlike, and unlike anything they’d seen before.20 Warhol loved the blotted line technique because it appeared mechanized and reproduced; in pressing the ink onto his final drawings, his hand was a degree removed from the final product. One of his later trademarks, the conceptual distance that denied the importance of an artist's immediate physical involvement in a work was born for Warhol in those early creative years. As his workload increased and his reputation grew through the first half of the 1950s, Warhol quickly passed over creative duties to the assistants he hired but kept hidden from the art directors for whom he worked; some of Warhol’s assistants could complete projects that looked identical to Warhol’s works without his involvement.21 By 1955, Warhol was a major commercial artist and was the sole illustrator for I. Miller Shoes (Fig. A4), who ran advertisements in national newspapers including the Sunday New York Times. Through

Greenberg and the United States Government – Shahn was questioned by the F.B.I. and the House Un-American Activities Committee. See David Cohen, “Art for the Workers’ Sake,” New York Times, January 17, 1999, www.nytimes.com. Jack Wilson, one of Warhol’s Carnegie Tech classmates and later a Chicago art director, said “[Warhol] actually mentioned Ben Shahn with much admiration. I had no idea that Ben Shahn ‘s drawings were so much like Andy’s [later commercial illustrations.]” Jack Wilson quoted in Patrick S. Stewart, Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1998), 11.

20 Bourdon, 29.

21 See Smith, “Commercial Art Assistants” in Warhol: Conversations, 49-97. Smith interviewed three of Warhol’s assistants from this period: Vitto Giallo, Nathan Gluck, and Ted Carey. Of Gluck, Smith wrote “it is almost impossible to separate Nathan Gluck’s ‘Warhols’ from Warhol’s ‘Warhols.’”

18 his delightful and inventive shoe drawings, Warhol’s aesthetic wielded a powerful influence throughout the advertising world and his style was widely aped in other ad campaigns.22

Warhol’s success as a commercial illustrator, however, was ultimately not enough to sate his grand ambitions, and he had gone about as far as a successful career in advertising and fashion could take him at that time.23 He had money, sure – enough to own a four-story house on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan – and he had won awards and acclaim enough to make him among the most important commercial figures in the New

York advertising scene. But Warhol wanted money and fame, and even a well-regarded commercial illustrator could never hope to match the kind of extraordinary hero-worship that big name fine artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning received.24 These artists had the kind of fame that turned heads, attracted adulation, and made the national papers. As far as famous commercial artists were concerned, Warhol was the biggest star

22 Guiles, 86. “It was chiefly through his work for [I. Miller Shoes] that [Warhol] turned on the advertising world to the fine drawing that began dominating the ads in magazines and newspapers from then on.” In 1957, Warhol formed Andy Warhol Enterprises, an early example of his union of money and art. See the exhibition book for the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s “Andy Warhol Enterprises” show: Sarah Urist Green and Allison Unruh, eds. Andy Warhol Enterprises (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010).

23 Friend, early champion, and Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler held that becoming a famous fine artist had been Warhol’s plan from the start, pointing to Warhol’s impoverished childhood as the impetus for his lifelong pursuit of financial gains. “I think his ambition always was – from the time before he went to Carnegie Tech – to start off by beginning to support his mother and himself, but the ambition was always to be world-famous, very secure, and have a lot of money coming in.” Henry Geldzahler interviewed in “Associates and Friends After 1960,” in Smith, Warhol: Conversations, 185.

24 Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde (New York: Free press, 2001), 239. Warhol’s townhouse, located at 1342 Lexington Avenue, had thirteen rooms and would later become home to Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola.

New York advertisers had ever seen, but he was far from a household name.25 No one was interested in stopping Andy Warhol on the street for an autograph, or following him around to see in what interesting antics he’d find himself involved, or analyzing what he’d worn to an event. In contrast, the most famous Ab Ex painters had pockets of ardent fans who followed their every move. Artist Larry Rivers, quoted in Warhol’s memoir

Popism, said that Pollock’s regular presence at the Cedar Tavern in New York City was cause for much excitement among some patrons who would treat his every move as though it were a notable act of genius.26 That type of attention was a social and financial goldmine, driving up the cost of artworks and attracting the interest of newspapers and society columns. For the Ab Ex painters who sought to eschew the vapidity of commodity culture in favor of profound artistic expression, money and attention were distractions at best and an undermining of the art’s necessarily difficult content at worst.27

For Warhol, whose friends and collaborators have often emphasized his affection for money and media acclaim, achieving major art world stardom meant new, vast

25 Scherman and Dalton, 22. “In those days, according to [fabric designer Leon] Hecht, ‘there were star art directors, but not artists. Except for Andy.”

26 Larry Rivers quoted in Warhol and Hackett, 16-18. Rivers had no time for Pollock, seeing him as an aggressive and “stupid” bully to black people, homosexuals, and artists he thought were no good. Rivers stated that he went to the Cedar to enjoy the company of his friends more than to see celebrity artists, even if being in their aura was enjoyable.

27 David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, “Introduction: A Brief History,” in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18. “By definition [avant-garde art] is difficult. It should be difficult. Its difficulty guarantees that the masses will shun it and the elite support it. Thus, the reaction of the audience becomes a litmus test for the art.” Emphasis from original.

20 opportunities to earn more money and attract more devotees than even the most successful commercial artist could imagine.28

Both feeding and discouraging Warhol’s ambitions were the successes of artists like neo-Dada virtuosos Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg – artists who shared his sexuality, commercial background, and interest in found objects and imagery, but who seemed to avoid any overt connection to their advertising years and preferred a more traditional masculine quality in both their public faces and their artworks. The duo worked together in New York as “Matson Jones,” a pseudonym used to hide their true identities, at the same time that Warhol was climbing the ladder of commercial success.29

Their rise in success seemed to herald new openings for art that interacted with the world around it instead of ignoring the world like the Abstract Expressionists had. Warhol saw a fantastic opportunity for kinship and professional networking with two artists who seemed to speak his language and share his interests. The reality was the opposite.30

While Warhol half-worshipped the two more established fine artists, Johns and

Rauschenberg preferred to maintain a demonstrable distance. Yes, they had worked commercially, but they had also developed strong, serious artistic connections. They were tied to the dynamic arts scene at Black Mountain College, including John Cage, Cy

Twombly, and Merce Cunningham, and had been involved with these artists in various

28 Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 64. “‘Andy,’ said [Corkie] Ward, ‘did everything for money.’”

29 Guiles, 125. In calling themselves “Matson Jones,” Johns and Rauschenberg were free to use their actual names when making art. The two were considered effective commercial artists, but were never as highly sought, paid, or regarded as Warhol.

30 Bockris, Warhol, 129. “When Andy approached them at openings, they cut him dead.”

21 avant-garde projects.31 They had also been signed to Leo Castelli’s new gallery in the late

1950s; Castelli himself had no interest in Warhol’s first high art works, preferring to sell

Warhol the work of other artists than to represent Warhol himself.32 Warhol was, simply, everything they wanted to avoid: too homosexual, too effeminate, and too comfortably commercial.33 To associate with Warhol would be to put all of their serious artistic efforts at risk.

Not only did Warhol’s status as a flourishing, award-winning advertising illustrator prevent him from making inroads with those he most wanted to impress, but his undisguised homosexuality, too, was a black mark against his ambitions. In the 1950s, being gay was enough to end a bourgeoning career, especially following a chauvinistically masculine movement like Abstract Expressionism.34 His fey, whimsical brand of homosexuality had found a relatively safe home in the fashion world, but high art had no place for it yet. On a professional level, Johns and Rauschenberg preferred to maintain a more stereotypically heterosexual persona, even though they were romantically involved, to keep criticism aimed at their work and not at their personal

31 Catherine Craft, Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Phaidon, 2013), 7-18.

32 Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 337-340. Cohen-Solal offers up Warhol’s flamboyant sexuality, the possibility that Warhol’s early work looked unpolished next to those by artists like Johns, or Castelli’s own insistence that he did not want to represent both Lichtenstein and Warhol as reasons why Castelli chose not to sign Warhol in the early 1960s. Cohen-Solal does not argue that any one answer is more correct than the others.

33 Warhol and Hackett, 14. Filmmaker Emile de Antonio, a friend to Johns and Rauschenberg as well as Warhol, frankly enumerated these reasons why Johns and Rauschenberg avoided Warhol at all costs.

34 Bockris, Warhol, 128-129.

22 lives.35 This translated to their art, which could be aggressive and masculine even as it critiqued their Ab Ex forebears. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg approached Willem de

Kooning, arguably the most influential Abstract Expressionist and a towering figure in the art world, and asked for one his drawings to erase. De Kooning complied after some deliberation, giving Rauschenberg a work he believed would prove challenging to completely remove. Several weeks and several methods of elimination later,

Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (Fig. A5) was finished and a work by one of the world’s most sought-after artists was gone. Only faint traces of de Kooning’s original composition remained. Perhaps, as Catherine Craft has argued, the aggression of the gesture was tempered by de Kooning’s consent in giving Rauschenberg the drawing and in Rauschenberg’s own admiration for the senior artist (he owned two de Kooning sketches already).36 Still, in spite of their agreement and perhaps even mutual understanding, the destruction of de Kooning’s artwork and its replacement by

Rauschenberg’s gesture has, if not malice, at least a kind of masculine artistic antagonism that Warhol did not attempt to achieve – at least not in his first post-advertising works.

Rauschenberg and Johns were playing a game to which Warhol barely understood the rules.

Early attempts at getting his work seen and managed in New York were met with profound distaste and discouragement from the art elite. Even as other Pop artists like

35 Scherman and Dalton, 23-25. Hostility toward homosexuals still ran deep in New York in the 1950s, and homosexual communities sprang up to provide a sense of security and fraternity.

36 Craft, 44. Craft argues that Rauschenberg was paying tribute to de Kooning in erasing the drawing because de Kooning’s creative processes involved a large amount of erasing. She does acknowledge that most analyses of Erased de Kooning Drawing emphasize its subversion and appropriation.

Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Robert

Indiana, and Jim Dine were being courted and exhibited by art galleries, Warhol’s work was dismissed and insulted. Some up-and-coming figures took note of his attempts; art dealer Ivan Karp and Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler saw potential in Warhol’s work and took him under their wings in 1960, but even their attempts at promotion were met with harsh resistance:

When Karp and Geldzahler showed Warhol’s work around they were rudely dismissed by the gallery owners Sidney Janis, Richard Bellamy, Robert Elkron, and Martha Jackson, who offered him a show then cancelled the exhibition after the introduction of his paintings had bad repercussions for her gallery. Just as he had feared, a lot of people in the art world despised Andy Warhol. Not only did they think of him as “something that crawled out from under a rock,” but they considered his work ridiculous. They laughed cruelly and predicted that he would soon return to the commercial world where they felt he belonged.37

The insular world of New York art was yet not prepared to embrace or promote Warhol as a serious artist of creative or intellectual merit. His eccentric and fey “Raggedy Andy” performances that had so endeared him to many in the fashion world were now actively standing in the way of his advancement. Gallery owners dismissed Warhol’s work, but they were also dismissing Warhol; the fine arts preferred artists who could (and would) speak intelligently about their art, give insight into their thought processes, and saw themselves as part of a larger dialogue on the concept of art. Warhol would not do that; in fact, he would rarely if ever do that, even decades later he was one of the biggest names in American art.38 According to Warhol biographer Victor Bockris, the elite at the helm

37 Bockris, Warhol, 140.

38 See the collected interviews in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004),

24 of New York art interpreted Warhol’s persona far differently than did art directors like

Tina Fredericks. Socialite, photographer, and writer Frederick Eberstadt said this of

Warhol during his first attempts at a career in the fine arts:

You couldn’t miss him, a skinny creep with his silver wig. . . . Andy asked me if I ever thought about being famous. Andy would start off conversations like that. It often made me vaguely uncomfortable. . . . Here was this weird cooley little faggot with his impossible wig and his jeans and his sneakers and he was sitting there telling me that he wanted to be as famous as the Queen of England! It was embarrassing. Didn’t he know that he was a creep? In fact he was about the most colossal creep I had ever seen in my life. I thought that Andy was lucky that anybody would talk to him.39

Warhol had been attempting to slide onto the fine art radar in the same guise that he’d used to forge a career in commercial illustrating. High art was generally repelled, and he was forced to reevaluate and find a new path to acceptance.

which span from 1962 to 1987, the year of Warhol’s death. Warhol is consistently vague, dreamy, and vapid in these interviews, although he was less difficult when interviewed by close friends and colleagues. A major outlier in these interviews is “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” 85-96, a 1966 question and answer session held by then 23-year-old student Gretchen Berg. The interview is often considered the most important in Warhol’s career, unusually candid and charming. Berg’s half of the conversation is edited out of the final interview, instead allowing the reader what seems to be a long stream of Warhol’s opinions and insights on art and culture; many of Warhol’s most famous quotations and witticisms are drawn from this interview, including “I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap-dancer.” The reality of this interview, however, was far different from its final form. In transcripts of the actual interaction between Berg and Warhol, the artist is as monosyllabic as ever; most of his responses consist of “yeah” or “no” or “um,” and the substantive bulk of the interview is drawn from Berg’s phrasing. For an unedited selection of the interview, see Matt Wrbican, “The True Story of ‘My True Story,’” in Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items in 2 Hours 56 Minutes, ed. Eva Meyer-Hermann (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007), 56-57. Warhol liked the result of Berg’s interview so much that he used her editing method in his own books, like The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

39 Bockris, Warhol, 140. Warhol began wearing wigs in 1953 to hide his premature hair loss. See also Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol: A Biography (New York: Open Road Media, 2001), 38.

His problems did not begin and end with his untidy wardrobe and fey behavior.

Warhol’s work was as derided by the art elite as his personality had been by Eberstadt.

Throughout the 1950s, Warhol attempted to get his illustrations into fine arts galleries and exhibitions; gold-embellished, ornate shoe drawings that set the advertising world on fire barely raised an eyebrow in a gallery setting of serious collectors and critics. In 1959,

Warhol’s cookbook illustrations, Wild Raspberries, received just one remark: “clever frivolity in excelsis.”40 While floundering in his own attempts and enviously attending the shows of rising artists like his idols Rauschenberg and Johns, Warhol came to the conclusion that he needed to abandon his drawings, but not his commercial interests. In jettisoning his style but maintaining his content, Warhol could produce art closer in spirit to Johns’s Flag (Fig. A6) and Rauschenberg’s combines. He kept to his maxim that anything could be art, even the subjects he’d drawn by the hundreds for advertisements, but decided to move on from the drawing approach he had been using. While still working in commercial design, Warhol began experimenting with other methods of mass- media commercial reproduction and utilizing new low art sources.

While still window dressing for the Bonwit Teller department store in 1961,

Warhol began making large-scale paintings of appropriated kitsch images; these works were incorporated into one of his best-remembered window designs (Fig. A7). Behind mannequins sporting ready-to-wear hats, gloves, and dresses, blown up frames from popular comics like Superman and Popeye were placed beside monumental versions of dubious advertisements promising miraculous transformations through nose jobs and

40 Stuart Preston quoted in Pratt, xviii. The full article is Stuart Preston, “Art: North of the Border; Canada House Displays Work of 26 Young Abstractionists from Montreal,” New York Times, December 5, 1959, www.nytimes.com.

26 other surgical procedures taken from the back of magazines and newspapers. On a stretch of Fifth Avenue tread by thousands of people, Warhol made his grand Pop Art debut with some of the first comic-book style paintings of the Pop period.41 In these early works, the mechanical style characteristic of Warhol’s most famous images was not fully formed and he had not begun utilizing the silkscreen method to achieve machine-like precision in his reproductions. Believing that an artist had to maintain some visual connection to the gestural, drippy aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism to gain traction, Warhol’s first Pop paintings were deliberately disorderly and smudged. In Superman (Fig. A8), the painting at the center of Warhol’s window display, paint is inconsistently applied; Superman’s thought bubble at the top of the composition is nearly unreadable in sections, and canvas peeks through fields of unmixed paint across the work. Rivulets of pigment run unchecked and careless crayon marks call attention to the artist’s involvement in the work’s creation just as Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes and drips announced the personal nature of a painting’s creation. Warhol was torn between juxtaposing mass- produced advertisements with artsy indexical trace and clean, impersonal appropriation.

Documentarian and friend Emile de Antonio, invited to Warhol’s studio to critique two paintings in Warhol’s competing styles, proved a key influence in Warhol’s artistic direction:

One of them was a Coke bottle with Abstract Expressionist hashmarks halfway up the side. The second one was just a stark, outlined Coke bottle in black and white. I didn’t say a thing to De. I didn’t have to – he knew what I wanted to know. “Well, look, Andy,” he said after staring at them for a couple of minutes. “One of these is a piece of shit, simply a little bit of everything. The other is remarkable – it’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely

41 Mark Francis, “Consumer Culture,” in Pop, ed. Mark Francis (London: Phaidon, 2010), 84-85.

beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.”42

From then on, Warhol’s machine aesthetic became his primary stylistic mode, aided by his decision to produce paintings of the same objects ad nauseum and exhibit them together. Warhol abandoned comic book imagery – he discovered that Lichtenstein was already doing it, and doing it better – and began painting hard-edged reproductions of advertisements and consumable objects.43 Like his shoes and cats, Warhol made them by the dozens.

In July of 1962, just four years before the EPI debuted, Warhol had his first taste of national attention in Los Angeles at Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery with his exhibition of

32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (Fig. A9). Warhol was making little headway with art dealers in New York and still had not found a dealer willing to represent him.44 Blum could not offer the prestige or the high prices of an east coast show, but he could provide a gallery space in which Warhol’s new work could be shown seriously. The exhibition, consisting of thirty-two portraits of different Campbell soup varieties hung in a line around the gallery atop a thin shelf, was far from the glamorous galas enjoyed by established artists and dealers in New York: Warhol sent the paintings but did not attend, no opening night party was organized, the paintings went largely unsold, and visitors to the gallery were at

42 Warhol and Hackett, 6.

43 Ibid., 22. “Right then I decided that since Roy was doing comics so well, that I would just stop comics altogether and go in other directions where I could come out first – like quantity and repetition.”

44 Warhol had been featured in a May 1962 Time magazine article about Pop art alongside Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Wayne Thiebaud, but still had not had a solo show. A photo of Warhol eating soup was included in the article. See “Art: The Slice-of- Cake School,” Time, May 11, 1962, 52.

28 first more perplexed than offended or excited by this unusual display.45 Luckily for

Warhol, his exhibition drew extra attention when a competing gallery mocked the soup paintings with a display of real soup cans on sale in its window. The playful, if scornful, spectacle drew added awareness to Warhol’s paintings and provided viewers with opposing sides to choose from: Warhol’s works were either trenchant indications of new critical directions in American art and culture, or they were bizarre and ridiculous examples of Warhol’s lack of artistic refinement. A less flattering opposition was presented in an article in the Los Angeles Times that put Warhol’s status as an artist in sarcastic quotation marks and claimed Warhol was “either a soft-headed fool or a hard- headed charlatan.”46 Whichever side one took in any of the debates, Warhol had finally found a footing in high art discourse as a pioneering punching bag.

1962 was a turning point in his career. After his first Ferus exhibition, Warhol enjoyed a steadily increasing stream of interest from galleries, newspapers, and artists.

Curator and co-founder of the Ferus Gallery Walter Hopps exhibited Warhol’s work at the Pasadena Art Museum’s “New Painting of Common Objects” in September of 1962.

In that year alone, articles about or including Warhol were published in the New York

Times, the New Yorker, and the newly founded Artforum, whose office occupied the space above the Ferus Gallery. The articles came to no agreement about Warhol or Pop.

Warhol’s work was funny or discomforting, critical or complacent; Pop was superficially

45 Bockris, Warhol, 148-149. Irving Blum said: “People walking into the gallery were extremely mystified. The artists in California were provoked by these paintings but they tended to shrug, not really condemn.” A few of the paintings sold, one to actor and photographer Dennis Hopper, but Blum decided he wanted to keep the paintings together as a unit and bought back those he had sold.

46 Henry J. Seldis, “In the Galleries: Canadian Impressive in Debut,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1962, D6.

29 commercial or surreptitiously anti-commercial. The condemnation Warhol had experienced at the hands of New York gallery owners, too, gave way to inclusion in shows mounted by the Sidney Janis Gallery and the Stable Gallery in New York and the

Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in Paris.47 Wider exhibition invited wider criticism from more serious art critics. Michael Fried said that Warhol was the “probably the most single- minded and the most spectacular” of the emerging Pop artists and found himself unexpectedly touched by Warhol’s Marilyn works (Fig. A10), but thought that Warhol would likely be forgotten when his subjects lost cultural traction.48 Artist and writer

Donald Judd was less impressed, comparing Warhol unfavorably to Lichtenstein, judging

Warhol’s format and treatment of subjects too inconsistent to be truly effective, and finding the so-called “novelty” and “absurdity” of Warhol’s repetitive images “not

47 See Rebecca Lowery, “The Warhol Effect: A Timeline,” in Mark Rosenthal, Marla Prather, Ian Alteveer, and Rebecca Lowery, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 250-251. Memories of Warhol’s Paris exhibition are recorded in Cohen-Solal, 343-344. The show was Death in America, one of Warhol’s better-received subjects art historically but a less popular series overall. Sonnabend used Warhol’s macabre images to entice the Parisian intellectual elite, who had not been impressed by American Pop’s outpouring of commercial-style art. The French interpreted these works as Warhol finally engaging politically in his work, and tended to interpret these morbid works as indications that the glossy commercial face of American culture hid unsavory characters and broken communities. Gérard Gassiot- Talbot, “Lettre de Paris,” Art International 8 (March 1964): 78: “Before, Warhol showed us popular merchandise symbolizing America’s mythical abundance. Now he inventories that society’s horrors and malaise, but couched in the same way.”

48 Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 6 (December 1962): 57. Reproduced in Madoff, 267. Warhol began producing his Marilyns shortly after her death. Fried believed that the Marilyns were more effective than Warhol’s silkscreens of Troy Donahue, and his assessment has largely proved apt. Warhol’s Marilyns are iconic Pop works, his Troy Donahues much less so.

30 great.”49 Whether they lauded, derided, or withheld ultimate judgment on his paintings, critics could no longer deny that Warhol was a figure they needed to address as the 1960s progressed.

Status as an unequivocally serious artist still eluded him, but the biting criticism aimed at his work and public image seemed to slide off of Warhol easily. Not only was

Warhol publicly unfazed by censure, but he often agreed with or exaggerated the objections put forth by critical assessments. Any severe disparagement of his Pop projects was matched in kind by statements Warhol gave about his own work. An interview with Radio KPFK Arts Director Ruth Hirschman (now Ruth Seymour) in the fall of 1963 provides ample demonstration of Warhol’s bland, self-effacing descriptions of his work and his tendency to pass the onus of providing answers to the expanding team of outgoing and outrageous characters with whom he socialized; in this interview, it was actor Taylor Mead. Warhol began the interview with lies about his upbringing and spent the rest of it giving flippant or obtuse answers before allowing Mead to take the lead in responding to Hirschman’s queries.50 When Hirschman asked how Warhol chose his subjects, he claimed they were “the only things [he knew].” When she asked if he was

49 Donald Judd, “Andy Warhol,” Arts Magazine 37 (January 1963): 49. Reprinted in Pratt, 2-3.

50 Warhol claimed that he was born in Ohio and spent most of his life in Philadelphia, although, of course, he was actually born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Although his biography has been thoroughly demystified in the decades following his death, Warhol consistently fed the public false information about his life; his age, his education, his hometown, etc., were all fertile ground for Warhol’s fabrications over the course of his career. Warhol, Philosophy, 79: “People used to say that I tried to ‘put on’ the media when I would give one autobiography to one newspaper and another autobiography to another newspaper. I used to like to give different information to different magazines because it was like putting a tracer on where people get their information.” Warhol once even asked if he had lied enough during an interview. See

“satirical” (branching from a statement Mead made about Warhol being “complex and satirical”), Warhol said he was “simple.” When asked how long he had worked to produced the Elvis paintings at another Ferus Gallery exhibition, Warhol first said that “it took [him] five minutes to do,” before amending that to an hour. When asked if he spent most of his time painting, Warhol said that he did not, and that he did not know what else he did but he did not want to call it living. Hirschman invited Warhol to quality the statement “I don’t live,” but Warhol declined. When asked about the relationship between his commercial illustrations and his Pop works, Warhol said that he just liked what he’d done in advertising and he liked what he was working on then, too. When asked why he repeated his images, Warhol responded simply, “I don’t know.” When asked about his eight-hour film Sleep, Warhol said “well, nothing really happens. Just somebody sleeping for eight hours.” When asked if he related differently to each of his Campbell Soup Cans,

Warhol claimed they were all the same to him. Without finesse or subtlety, Warhol avoided Hirschman’s serious questions by opting out of participation in the dialogue.

Around the halfway point of the interview, Mead took the reins from Warhol and started answering Hirschman’s questions and incorporating his own thoughts in Warhol’s processes, subjects, and commentary on American culture. Warhol did not always agree with Mead, but Mead was undeterred in spouting meandering answers that often were more about Mead’s opinions and career than Warhol.51

Kelly M. Cresap, Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 22.

51 Ruth Hirschman, Andy Warhol, and Taylor Mead, “Pop Goes the Artist,” reprinted in Goldsmith, 27-46.

Thus, while Warhol was reinventing his approach to art, he was also rebuilding his persona to better suit a career away from advertising. In place of moth-eaten, ill- fitting clothes, Warhol wore dark sunglasses, fitted jeans, and leather jackets.52 In The

End of the American Avant-Garde, Stuart D. Hobbs points to Truman Capote’s hairstyle in his Other Voices, Other Rooms jacket photograph and Marlon Brando’s wardrobe from

The Wild One as key influences for his new, cool identity. To be a celebrity, Warhol looked to other celebrities in hopes that stealing elements of their style would translate some of their star quality to him.53 Gone were the days of a quixotic naïf chasing imaginary butterflies and assailing employers with pushy, whimsical monologues. In its place was a new Warhol, cold and withdrawn with an arrogant edge in his voice and tendency to talk in circles or avoid speaking altogether.54 The change proved to be seminal; according to Bockris, Allen Ginsberg thought Andy Warhol created the sixties by willing his own particular vision into existence.55

His vapid performance for the NET interviewer in 1966 is arguably a high water mark for what has become Warhol’s famous persona; he was difficult, vapid, cavalier,

52 Bradford R. Collins, Pop Art (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 130.

53 Stuart D. Hobbs, The End of the American Avant Garde (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 153-154.

54 Bockris, Warhol, 195. Bockris’s description of the new, hard Warhol takes place after the establishment of the Silver Factory in 1964, but Warhol had already started changing his look before then.

55 Victor Bockris quoted in Catherine O’Sullivan Shorr, Andy Warhol’s Factory People: Inside the Silver Factory. . . an Oral History Book II: Speeding Into the Future (Paris: Planet Group Entertainment, 2013), 13. Bockris also noted that the Factory’s influence spread throughout various artsy communities in the 1960s; Warhol’s uniform of black jeans, tee shirts, boots, and leather jackets became a kind of uniform for many people involved in magazines, fashion, and music.

33 aloof, and terribly fashionable. Clad in all black, his eyes hidden behind dark-tinted sunglasses, Warhol was at his most uncooperative and distant. Did he care about his reputation? Did he have any comments on his sculpture? Could he discuss his approach to film? If Warhol had serious answers to these questions, he was not sharing them.

Instead, he began nearly every of his meandering responses with drawn out “ums” and

“uhs,” or claimed not to understand. “I’m so empty today,” Warhol said in a detached, monotonous voice. “I can’t think of anything. Why don’t you just tell me the words and they’ll just come out of my mouth?”56 As Warhol stopped answering the questions at all and began simply repeating everything said to him, the interviewer let out a burst of air and turned to the camera in exasperation. In stark contrast to Warhol’s eccentric dialogue is fellow Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s NET interview, which occupies the other half of

Warhol’s installment. For almost eleven full minutes, Lichtenstein’s charming, mellifluous baritone voice speaks confidently and intelligently about his artistic approach; indeed, no other person was filmed and no other voiceover was recorded for

Lichtenstein’s segment. The enthusiastic and fluid Lichtenstein interview is even more engaging when compared with Warhol’s stiffly-posed, mumbled discussion. Warhol’s interview was salvaged by editing in footage of the artist and his assistants at work in his

56 A transcript of Warhol’s interview is available in Kenneth Goldsmith’s volume of Warhol interviews. See “USA Artists: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror, ed. Goldsmith, 79-84. Goldsmith’s opening commentary to the transcript refers to the interviewer as “aggressive and skeptical,” but I find that too harsh. The interviewer maintained a level of professionalism throughout the somewhat disastrous interview. Hints of Warhol’s hidden intelligence can be found throughout accounts of the artist given by close friends and associates, but he rarely betrayed that intelligence publicly. Society figure, art collector, designer, and political activist Christophe de Menil said that Warhol was capable of having keen, clever political conversation about whatever issues were important at the time, although he tended to speak quietly. Cohen- Solal, 343.

34 studio, accompanied by a serious voiceover offering the type of introspective and intellectual commentary that Warhol declined to give and which Lichtenstein freely provided. Warhol was an oddity even among other Pop artists, and his refusal to inhabit a profound, traditional relationship to his process and subjects confounded critics and captivated audiences.

Warhol’s fine art career was in full swing by the mid-1960s and he was, by then, a star of some note. His coolly fashionable exterior and seemingly vacuous interior were a winning combination, and he became as hot a commodity as the objects and celebrities he incorporated into his work. In late April of 1964, Warhol’s exhibition of plywood sculptures painted like grocery store boxes full of Brillo pads, Campbell’s soup, Heinz ketchup, and other consumables at the Stable Gallery had attracted huge lines of people clamoring to get a look at what the artist had come up with now.57 In a 1964 article in

Newsweek about a party held in honor of Warhol’s November Flower Paintings exhibition at the Castelli Gallery, Robert Rosenblum described the scene:

“Terrific!” said the smiling young man, backed up against the wall by a mounting crush of people. The young man was artist Andy Warhol, and the crush was a tidal wave of guests at a party given to celebrate the opening of his latest show in New York last week. The wave grew to fantastic proportions. The dancing guests, jammed together in the big West Side apartment, frugged in place, like a mob of bears back- scratching against the trees of a thick forest. . . . There in the midst of the Beatle-rocking bedlam was the 32-year-old artist, listening to the twanging anthems of triumph with his elfin smile, dancing only with his pale blue

57 Joseph Tirella, Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World’s Fair and the Transformation of America (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014), 158. Collectors quickly bought up the boxes, priced at $200 to $400 each. Grace Glueck’s review of the Stable exhibition notes that one collector bought $6,000 worth of Warhol boxes, while the real thing was produced for ten to fifteen cents a box. Glueck, 19.

eyes, looking with this mysterious white hair and happy nose, like the offspring of a union between Peter Pan and W. C. Fields.58

Rosenblum’s summation of the event indicates that Warhol’s attempts at creating his own brand of artistic aura were successful. Far from the puzzled and tepid reception he’d received just two and a half years before at the Ferus Gallery, Warhol was now a celebrity capable of commanding high profile, star-studded openings.59 Apparent, too, is the voyeurism that fueled so much of Warhol’s work and so many artistic critiques.

Rosenblum describes the party’s horde of people dancing in place, rubbing up against one another in tightly packed quarters. Apart from the crowd, as he so often would be, was

Warhol – not dancing but watching, and just oddly attired enough to set him apart from those around him. 60

Far from being satisfied with achieving status in the art world, Warhol wanted the stardom of a teen idol. In the mid-sixties, Warhol was also keenly attuned to a cultural shift in the United States that favored youth, frivolity, and fun over stodgy conventions.

In Popsim, Warhol pointed to 1964 as the birth of this new, young way of life; according to Warhol, even parents were trying to wear the youthful clothing styles favored by their children. Art openings were filled with women whose high-fashion haircuts and bright, short dresses pulled attention away from the art.61 1964 was key for Warhol in other

58 Robert Rosenblum, “Saint Andrew,” Newsweek, December 7, 1964, 100. Warhol was actually thirty-six years old at the time of this exhibition. Warhol’s “mysterious white hair” became one of his trademarks, and he wore a shocking, unkempt “fright wig” in many of his most famous photographs.

59 Ibid. Norman Mailer reportedly attended the party, but arrived late.

60 “Frugging” was a term used for enthusiastic, vigorous dancing set to 1960s pop music.

61 Warhol, Popism, 87.

36 ways, too. In January, he moved into the Factory’s first location, known as the Silver

Factory for its shiny surfaces covered in silver paint and aluminum foil, in an abandoned one-hundred-by-fifty-foot hat factory on East 47th Street. This would be the most famous and glamorous iteration of the Factory, full of Warhol’s gang of assistants and counterculture figures who desperately clamored for the now famous artist’s approval and attention. The relationship between Warhol and the Factory regulars, however, may have been more complicated than Warholian literature often allows. Cultural historian and documentarian Steven Watson:

The group associated with the Silver Factory is often dispensed with in cursory lists: as speed freaks and drag queens, poets and Superstars, fashion beauties and avant-garde artists. Although many observers saw them as satellites revolving around a sun, dependent on Warhol’s attention for their existence, Warhol himself never saw it that way. To dismiss Warhol’s Silver Factory associates as fame-driven hangers-on, the Silver sleaze, is to spectacularly misconstrue his modus operandi. “I just don’t really feel all these people with me every day at the Factory are just hanging around me,” he said. “I’m more hanging around them.”62

Perhaps both sides of the argument are right, and Warhol drew energy and ideas from

Factory insiders just as the Factory insiders gained visibility and notoriety from Warhol.

Even if they were opportunistically exploiting Warhol’s rising star, the crowd at the

Factory would be key developers and participants in Warhol’s multimedia EPI in the coming years.

Warhol’s rise continued throughout 1964 and in that year came his biggest scandal to date: controversy surrounding the work commissioned from Warhol for the

New York World’s Fair. Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg,

Rauschenberg, and Robert Indiana, too, were among the artists included at the Fair, but

62 Steven Watson, introduction to Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), xii.

37 none attempted anything as shocking as Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men (Fig.

A11).63 These artists, among others considered on the artistic cutting edge, had been charged with producing work to adorn the exterior of the New York State Pavilion. Fair officials hoped to stir up some good-natured debate with a bold and very public display of avant-garde art but got more than they bargained for with Warhol’s massive mural, which ended up obscured from view before the Fair opened.64 The enormous Thirteen

Most Wanted Men, a black and white silkscreen on canvas measuring twenty feet wide by twenty feet high. was filled with mug shots from the state of New York’s most wanted list of 1962. With crime on the rise and the world turning its gaze to New York, Thirteen

Most Wanted Men put the most unsavory elements of the city’s culture on display.

Complaints were submitted to the Fair’s organizers and to then-Governor Nelson

Rockefeller. In the end the mural was covered over with silver paint – enough to cover the images, but not quite enough to blot them out completely.65 The blinding silver paint, contrary to its intended purpose, called even more attention to Warhol’s mural and the contention surrounding it. Ultimately, the censoring of Thirteen Most Wanted Men was a stroke of good luck for Warhol, adding extra media attention to his upcoming projects

63 See Bradford R. Collins, “Jokes and Their Relation to Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men,” Notes in the History of Art 17 (Winter 1998): 41-48, for an in-depth discussion of this mural.

64 Lawrence R. Samuel, 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 134-135.

65 Tirella, 152-159. Rockefeller reportedly demanded that the mural come down. Many of the wanted criminals on display were of Italian descent, and he did not want to alienate Italian voters in an election year. Warhol claimed that the mural was covered up because one of the depicted men had been exonerated.

38 and greatly expanding the number of average Americans who could identify Warhol by sight, name, or art.66

Meanwhile in his old stomping grounds, advertisers continued to find Warhol a profitable figure. Warhol may have traded the world of advertising for a career in fine art, but advertising continued to find him a source of inspiration. One high profile example is the Campbell Soup Company itself, which completely overhauled its decades-long advertising campaign that emphasized family, convenience, and wholesome goodness in favor of young women, soup can merchandizing, and a complete departure from the homey kitchen scenes that dominated the 1940s and 1950s. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup

Cans may have seemed to many in the art world like some sort of punch line, but they captured the attention of the public and the Campbell Company did not shy away from its new associations with Warhol.67 From the 1940s to the early 1960s, Campbell soup ads had remained largely the same. Focus was on family values, generally depicting happy,

66 Please see Larissa Harris and Media Farzin, eds., 13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair: Conversations (New York: Queens Museum, 2015) for a discussion of the politics surrounding Thirteen Most Wanted Men and its censorship. Among those interviewed in this volume are Douglas Crimp, Jonas Mekas, Gerard Malanga, and Billy Name.

67 I wrote more extensively about the relationship between Warhol and the Campbell Soup Company in Alycia Faith Reed, “Fifteen Minutes and Then Some: An Examination of Andy Warhol’s Extraordinary Commercial Success,” (master’s thesis, University of Iowa, 2012). The discussion that follows here is based on the research completed for this thesis. Campbell president W. B. Murphy was originally concerned about the effect any association with Warhol would have on the reputation of his company, but the company eventually decided to embrace the use of their label in Warhol’s paintings. Douglas Collins, America’s Favorite Food: The Story of the Campbell Soup Company (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 164. Collins claims that the Campbell company’s concerns were assuaged by indications that Warhol had no impact on the sales of their products, but the company’s advertising upheaval indicates that Warhol’s popularity with American youth changed their demographic and influenced a change in commercial tactics.

39 well-dressed mothers in spotless kitchens (Fig. A12). Mothers were often accompanied by rosy-cheeked children and loving husbands, all thankful for the healthful content of

Campbell’s delicious, home-style soup – as good as homemade, many of the advertisements claimed, and in more varieties than could be easily whipped up at home.68

Campbell’s had a clear audience in mind when organizing its advertising campaigns: married women, generally mothers, who stayed at home and took care of their families.

Most ads emphasized the wholesome, nourishing goodness in each of Campbell’s convenient flavors and seemed to give wives permission to serve their families pre-made meals. Besides family values, many Campbell Soup advertisements appealed to patriotic sentiments. Ads run during World War II emphatically proclaimed the Americanness of

Campbell Soup and its sincere efforts to help those soldiers overseas. It was a company that cultivated a reputation for good old-fashioned family friendly American values, right up until Warhol decided to appropriate their soup labels into the new Pop art.69

Warhol’s influence now extended beyond galleries and museums. He was becoming a pop culture figure, not just playing with kitschy images but contributing to their mass production and advertising. Warhol’s high art impact on Campbell’s commercial illustrations became clear in 1965, when Campbell overhauled its decades-

68 For more about the history of the Campbell Soup Company, please see Martha Esposito Shea, Campbell Soup Company (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2002).

69 Many of the Campbell advertisements run between 1930 and 1990 can be found in advertising compilations edited by Jim Heimann, an instructor at the Art Center College of Design in California. See Jim Heimann, ed., 30s: All-American Ads (Cologne: Taschen, 2003); Jim Heimann, ed., 40s: All American Ads (Cologne: Taschen, 2001); Jim Heimann, ed., 50s: All-American Ads (Cologne: Taschen, 2001); Jim Heimann, ed., 60s: All-American Ads (Cologne: Taschen, 2002); Jim Heimann, ed. 70s: All-American Ads (Cologne: Taschen, 2004); and Jim Heimann, ed., 80s: All-American Ads (Cologne: Taschen, 2005).

40 long advertising style for a sleeker, more modern look that cut down on text, blew up the size of the soup can (images of the soup can’s label had previously been quite small, usually tucked into a corner), and traded in the kitchen-bound housewife for a new type of woman: young, unmarried, fashionable, and looking for fun. Campbell’s first ad to reference Pop Art ran in 1965 (Fig. A13). Illustrated are ten Pop-style paintings mounted on a white peg board above the subtitle “Mom Art.” Among dinners plated on trays, steaming in bowls, and heating up in pots and pans is one clean, crisp painting of a front- facing Campbell Soup can label, nearly identical in format to Warhol’s Campbell Soup

Cans except for its vivid green background. The advertising copy underneath “Mom Art” is full of references to fine art, calling a mother’s cooking “creative masterpieces” and saying: “However Mom does it, it’s an art. Ask Pop.” While the ad borrows the look of

Pop Art, its message was consistent with its previous advertisements that stressed home and a mother’s duty to feed her family. Soon, that message would be replaced.

The Campbell Soup Company was now inextricably linked with Andy Warhol.

As early as 1962, just months after his first exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, Artforum’s

John Coplans had declared the soup cans Pop Art icons.70 With the 1965 “Mom Art” ad,

Campbell very publicly acknowledged their acceptance of the connection; following ads would continue to reflect Warhol’s influence. Hand paintings of flawless mothers and large bowls of hot soup were replaced with repetitive label imagery, photographs of unattached young women, and hip new Campbell’s merchandise buyers could send away

70 John Coplans, “The New Paintings of Common Objects,” Artforum 1 (November 1962): 28.

41 for.71 A 1968 Campbell’s soup ad (Fig. A14) offered The Can Bag, the “vinyl tote bag that holds everything you need for fun. Swimsuit, lunch, transistor, whatever.” A young woman photographed from the waist down stands next to her own Can Bag, which overflows with a towel, suntan lotion, and other necessities for a day out at the beach.

1968 was also the year of The Souper Dress (Fig. A15), a paper dress with Warhol-style label repetition in four horizontal rows. The advertisement featured an attractive young woman chatting into a white princess phone while lounging around red, white, and gold pillows in her very own Souper Dress.72 A Campbell’s Soup Can beach towel promoted in 1969 (Fig. A16) promised to be “a guaranteed conversation-starter, sure to attract crowds and crowds of devastatingly attractive males!”; the “M’m! M’m! Good!” record album (Fig. A17) that featured songs from Johnny Mathis, Robert Goulet, and the Ray

71 Campbell’s had long offered merchandise to their customers, but the target audience had been parents. The Campbell’s Kids, chubby-cheeked children popular in Campbell’s ads, were featured in buyable fabrics, pretend cooking sets, toy vacuums, napkins and placemats, wall decorations, pajamas, and other items. See David Young and Micki Young, Campbell’s Soup Collectibles from A to Z: A Price and Identification Guide (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1998) for list of items Campbell’s released over the years. John J. Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 128-131, claims that the repetition of soup label imagery in Warhol’s works contains charged and frightening connections to the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. Super hydrogen bombs were sometimes nicknamed “Campbells” (super/soup-er), and a can of soup features in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (Curley grants that Warhol was probably not aware of either of these connections). “A Campbell’s soup can was, therefore, a complex and highly charged object circa 1962 in terms of nuclear dread, as it could simultaneously reference and repress Cold War anxiety – call attention to and distract from fear. As such, Warhol’s paintings of this ubiquitous commodity are emblems of Cold War visuality: conspiratorial objects whose meaning shifts depending on context.” This interpretation is all but nonexistent in mainstream discussion of Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans. Generally discussion of the Campbell Soup Cans centers on Warhol’s habit of eating soup and its status as an iconic American product.

72 The “unidentified Campbell’s Soup Can dress” illustrated in Mark Francis and Margery King, eds., The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion (Boston: Little Brown, 1997), 6, is actually a paper Souper Dress by the Campbell Company.

Coniff Singers, among others, was also for sale that year.73 While emphasis would shift back to families in the 1970s, Warhol’s cool influence was all the rage in the mid- to late-

1960s and early 1970s.74

Working as a commercial artist and in the early years of his fine art career,

Warhol had learned a variety of lessons that would make the EPI not only possible but also a financially viable enterprise. Warhol knew to identify his audience and to give them what they wanted. He knew that success in one arena did not guarantee success in another. He knew to alter his public face enough to attract attention and deflect harsh, damning criticism. He knew how to target the young Baby Boomer generation who flocked to get a taste of his cool, blasé attitude. He knew that scandal and bad press could attract as much attention and money as rave reviews. He knew that proclaiming his own weaknesses would nullify the power of critics to denigrate his projects. He knew to capitalize on professional relationships that could lead to new enterprises. He had learned that New York City could open incredible doors, but that he could not expect them to open for him without some work and invention. And he knew that, if he wanted to keep the attention of the American public, his next big venture would have to be something spectacular.

73 Another Campbell’s Soup beach towel advertisement was released in the 1970s, although that advertisement included a leggy brunette sprawled out across the towel, obscuring the words “M’m! M’m! Good!” printed on it. The “M’m! M’m! Good!” record was aimed at families, bearing a photograph of a mother and her young song with what one assumes is a mug of Campbell’s soup. The advertisement includes a plated sandwich and tomato soup in a labeled mug.

74 Campbell’s emphasis on the can label, however, did not fade. The label continued to play a more prominent role in Campbell’s advertising than it had before Warhol’s Ferus show.

CHAPTER II

“WE WERE ALL FOR GETTING INTO THE MUSIC SCENE”: ANDY WARHOL AND THE VELVET UNDERGROUND GETTING UP TIGHT

I belong to the generation for whom The Velvet Underground was our Beatles and Dylan combined.

1 Lester Bangs, quoted in Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story

In 1964, few people could claim greater fame, appeal, and success than the

Beatles, who launched their first stateside visit in February of that year. The heady anticipation felt by droves of ardent fans was whipped into a further frenzy by radio disc jockeys, who encouraged listeners to meet the band at the airport, and by the prospect of the Beatles’ first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show.2 When their plane finally arrived, Kennedy International Airport became host to over three thousand screaming teenaged fans who sang and whistled and chanted and shook their welcome banners in a frantic greeting to their young British pop music idols, none of whom was over the age of twenty-three. An unnamed airport official told the New York Times that such a reception was completely unprecedented. This musical foursome had by far outstripped previous spectacles accompanying other famous international visitors, and extra police were brought in to maintain order in case the enormous crowds got out of hand.3 Of course, the

1 Lester Bangs quoted in Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (New York: Quill, 1983), 126.

2 Laurel Sercombe, “‘Ladies and Gentlemen . . . ’ The Beatles: The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS TV, February 9, 1964,” in Performance and Popular Music: History, Place, and Time, ed. Ian Inglis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 1-15. Sixty to seventy percent of Americans with televisions watched the Beatles perform.

3 Paul Gardner, “The Beatles Invade, Complete with Long Hair and Screaming Fans,” New York Times, February 8, 1964, www.nytimes.com. The official was quoted, “We’ve never seen anything like this here before. Never. Not even for kings and queens.” This

Beatles were not the only commodities to land in the U.S. that day. Co-existing with the

Beatles themselves was the retail industry that followed wherever they went and fed fans’ intense cravings to own some piece of their musical gods. Wigs, shoes, shirts, pillows, scarves, records, and even Beatles-style suits were sold by shrewd vendors who capitalized on the band’s fervid appeal. By the time they set foot in the United States, the

Beatles had already sold six million records, commanded up to $10,000 per week to perform and make appearances, and had sold an astounding twenty thousand Beatles wigs to British fans.4 The Beatles were a commercial goldmine, and they regularly made direct and unabashed reference to their monetary interests. When speaking to the press immediately after landing at Kennedy, the Beatles were determinedly and humorously dense, glibly claiming they wouldn’t sing without being paid, crediting their press agent for their success, calling upon fans to buy more albums, and even, in the case of Ringo

Starr, claiming to love the poetry of Ludwig van Beethoven.5 From behind their microphones, the Beatles performed the same style of blunt and witless banter with the press that Warhol had adopted and would later perfect. At one such press conference in

October 1964, during the Beatles’ second visit to the United States, was Andy Warhol, tucked amid the reporters with his camera in hand (Fig. A18). The money, the press, the attention, the style, and the success shared by the four Liverpudlian musicians were the

was the first article published in the New York Times after the Beatles arrived in the United States. Throughout February and into March of 1964, the Beatles were either mentioned in or were the subjects of their own articles in the Times almost every day.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., and Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 2-3.

45 real-life manifestations of Warhol’s career ideals.6 The Beatles were young, attractive, wealthy, popular, and glamorous – where the Beatles went, money and press followed. In the next two years, Warhol would move from observing someone else’s musical ventures from the press section to engaging with musicians himself: managing the Velvet

Underground, booking gigs, and establishing a new and exciting form of rock concert spectacle. Just a year after watching the Beatles court attention and success, Warhol and his associates would set the wheels in motion for the show that became the Exploding

Plastic Inevitable.7

By the time Warhol met the Velvet Underground in December of 1965 at Café

Bizarre on West 3rd Street in New York City, the band’s members – Lou Reed, John

Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen (Moe) Tucker – had only been unified under the name “Velvet Underground” for about a month. The band’s members had bounced around in different groups before finally forming into the ensemble with whom Warhol

6 Gould, 2. “They were their own show and their own audience. Having attracted the sort of attention for which most people in their line of work would be willing to sell their souls, here they were, cracking dumb jokes for their own amusement, calling attention to the mercenary motives of their visit, and generally acting as if it really didn’t matter what the newspapers and television stations reported about them after all.”

7 Warhol’s relationship with and interest in music does not, of course, begin and end with the Velvet Underground. For more about Warhol and music (including associations with Bob Dylan, David Bowie, John Cage, and even opera), see Stéphane Aquin, ed., Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work (New York: Prestel, 2008). Warhol does not mention his late-1964 brush with the Beatles in his account of the 1960s, Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Books, 1980), but he does discuss the impact of the British invasion on New York’s culture. According to Warhol, everybody wanted to be British and many young music fans would fake accents. See 88-89. For all of the Beatles’ references, see 36, 75-76, 88-89, 101, 112, 168, 175, 258, 262, 286, and 299-300.

46 would work.8 Reed and Cale first joined forces in 1965 in a band called The Primitives, which included artist Walter de Maria on drums. The troupe was assembled with the help of Terry Phillips, an executive at record company Pickwick International where Reed was employed as a writer and musician after graduating from Syracuse University. Phillips was intrigued by one of Reed’s songs “The Ostrich,” which aped the style of dance-craze tunes and, in a truly Warholian gesture, required a guitar with all strings tuned to the same note. Originally, the Primitives had been Reed’s invention, but Phillips decided that

“The Ostrich” had radio-friendly potential and should be recorded with a real band. Cale, who had been inspired by Fluxus, John Cage, and radical experimental composer

Cornelius Cardew, found Reed’s “Ostrich guitar” a fascinating and like-minded musical venture; he signed on with fellow musician Tony Conrad. The Primitives were short- lived, performing only a few less-than-stellar weekend performances, but the union of

Reed on guitar and Cale on amplified viola/electric bass flourished beyond the group’s disbandment. Reed and Cale formed a new band and were quickly joined by Reed’s friend Morrison on second guitar and Angus MacLise on drums. They had a line-up, and now they needed a name.9

The group decided to call themselves “the Velvet Underground” (after being, briefly, the Falling Spikes and then the Warlocks) after stumbling upon Michael Leigh’s

8 Before joining forces, Lou Reed was in a variety of garage-style bands, and John Cale was heavily involved in New York’s avant-garde music scene, even playing piano in “Vexations,” one of John Cage’s projects. For more pre-Velvet information, please see Richie Unterberger, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day (London: Jawbone Press, 2009), 11-37.

9 Jim DeRogatis, The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side (Minneapolis: Voyager Press, 2009), 25-28. DeRogatis refers to the record company as “cheap” and “exploitative,” producing “quickie British Invasion and Motown knock- offs.”

1963 The Velvet Underground (Fig. A19), a book dedicated to exposing the sexual depravity of the sixties in all of its forms: prostitution, sexual deviancy, sadomasochism, partner swapping, cross-dressing, child and animal pornography, etc. The term “velvet underground” was Leigh’s invention to refer to this hidden corruption in society, and the book’s tagline was meant to inspire sheer panic in anyone raising children: “Here is an incredible book. It will shock and amaze you. But as a documentary on the sexual corruption of our age, it is a must for every thinking adult.”10 Lou Reed thought that the title was too delicious and its source too funny and dirty to pass up; Sterling Morrison dismissed the sexual connotations and embraced the title because of the word

“underground” and its connotations to the growing counterculture art scene.11 Whatever their intentions, the Velvet Underground band had a name that would evoke images of aberrant sexual practices and a world of alternative art and film. The sadomasochistic imagery was further advanced in the music produced by the Velvet Underground, specifically “Venus in Furs,” a song written by Reed and inspired by the scandalous nineteenth-century novella Venus in Furs, written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

(whose name is the source for the word “masochism”). Reed’s “Venus in Furs” is a hypnotic, thumping song filled with bondage imagery: “Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather / Shiny leather in the dark / Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you /

10 Michael Leigh, The Velvet Underground (New York: Macfadden, 1963). This tagline was placed prominently on the book’s cover under the title. The cover also includes images of a whip, a pair of impossibly high black leather lace-up boots, a shiny black mask, and a key, all meant to evoke images of BDSM.

11 Lou Reed quoted in DeRogatis, 29; and Sterling Morrison quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 21.

Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart.”12 MacLise left the band quickly due to creative differences and was replaced by Moe Tucker, the younger sister of a college friend of

Reed and Morrison.13 With Tucker now on drums, the foursome was complete and booking small gigs and working on their sound.

Before meeting Warhol, the Velvets endured several poorly-received shows. One of the worst was a gig paying $75 at Summer High School in Summit, New Jersey (Fig.

A20), opening for the popular local band The Myddle Class to a small crowd of confused teens too young and too sheltered to understand the songs “Heroin” or “Venus in Furs.”

The band members took the stage, two of them wearing sunglasses and most of them wearing black, and unleashed the fury of their loud, radical, pulsing sound. The Summit

High students, who had each paid $2.50 to attend the concert, reportedly gasped and made vocal their disapproval during the Velvets’ three song set of “There She Goes

Again,” “Venus in Furs,” and “Heroin.” Many students were so upset or angry that they left while the Velvet Underground performed and returned when the Myddle Class took the stage.14 The Myddle Class, too, was incensed that the Velvet Underground had

12 Philip Milstein, “Notes from the Velvet Underground,” What Goes On, no. 3 (1983), reprinted in The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Albin Zak III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 9: “One needn’t even hear ‘Venus in Furs’ to envision the scenes depicted therein. Underground . . . dungeons, chains, stockades, whips, furs, sensuous velvets. Beauty in the ugliness, velvet in the underground.”

13 DeRogatis, 29. MacLise objected to performing music for pay and to adhering to a schedule.

14 Some of the details regarding this performance are debated. Steven Watson claims that Angus MacLise was still the Velvets’ drummer at this gig and that the song order was “There She Goes Again,” “Venus in Furs,” and “Heroin.” Jim DeRogatis, however, writes that Maureen Tucker had already replaced MacLise by this performance and that “Heroin” was the second song in the set. Waton writes that the concert was on November

49 terrified and driven away their audience; Cale was seen attempting to apologize to the band backstage.15 The Velvets’ original manager, Al Aronowitz, noting that his band seemed to polarize audiences with its strange and unfriendly sound, arranged a short musical residency at Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village. The pay was low, the hours grueling, and the audience showed little to no interest in the musical performances.16

The audience had little exposure to a band like the Velvet Underground and had difficulty connecting to its sound. The Velvets’ music was not agreeable, or hummable, or even pleasant to experience. Rob Norris, who was in the audience at the Summit High concert, said that the teens in the audience had never seen a band like the Velvet

Underground; Cale, with his long hair, black outfit, and sunglasses, looked otherworldly with his viola, and tomboyish Tucker was not immediately discernable as male or female.

If their appearance was strange, the sound that swiftly followed their onstage reveal was mind-blowing:

Before we could take it all in, everyone was hit by a screeching surge of sound, with a pounding beat louder than anything we had ever heard.

11, 1965, and DeRogatis writes that it was on December 11, 1965. Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 249, and DeRogatis, 29. According to Bockris and Mangala, 22, MacLise left the group right before the Velvet Underground played at Summit High (which they claim was on November 11), and Tucker joined the group in a pinch to fill out the foursome. Bandmember Sterling Morrison remembered the set list as Watson’s order. Bockris and Mangala also note that this is the band’s first performance as the “Velvet Underground.” Posters advertising the event are dated December 11, 1965, at 8 p.m.

15 Victor Bockris and John Cale, What’s Welsh for Zen: The Autobiography of John Cale (New York: Bloomsbury, 1999), 80-81. “The Myddle Class were really pissed off when we came off stage. I tried to apologize to the lead singer, but secretly I was exhilarated. Once we had started I was sure nobody could stop us because we knew exactly what we were doing, and we were very good at it. About that I had no doubt.” Cale remembers MacLise leaving the band before performing at Summit High.

16 Unterberger, 61.

About a minute into the second song, which the singer had introduced as “Heroin,” the music began to get even more intense. It swelled and accelerated like a giant tidal wave which was threatening to engulf us all. At this point, most of the audience retreated in horror for the safety of their homes, thoroughly convinced of the dangers of rock and roll music.17

The Velvet Underground offered the opposite of bouncy, radio-friendly pop music replete with catchy choruses about innocent young romance. Their sound was full of discord, feedback, miscellaneous noise, uneven rhythm, and disdainful lyrics sneered through monotonous vocals. Atop the Velvet Underground’s surging instrumentals, Reed’s vaguely nasal singing voice ranged from a provocative whisper to a piercing projection vacillating between boredom and indignation. Minutes of post-tonal riffing could begin or end their rambling, somewhat sinister-sounding songs. Rather than appreciating the

Velvets’ musical experimentation and invention, audiences were affronted or left cold.

While the Velvets were playing for unappreciative audiences night after night,

Warhol and his associates were experiencing their own difficulties. Warhol began dabbling in avant-garde film in 1963 (finally declaring that he was retiring from painting in favor of filmmaking in 1965), making banal films, sometimes three or four times longer than a regular movie, in which very little or nothing occurred. Sleep (1963) is an hours-long shot of Warhol’s friend and sometime lover John Giorno sleeping; Blow Job

(1964) is a thirty-five minute film that shows only a young man’s face, ostensibly during the act for which the film is named; Empire (1964) contains an incredible eight hours of

17 Rob Norris, “I Was a Velveteen, Part 1, 1965,” Kicks 1 (1979), reprinted in Johan Kugelberg, ed., The Velvet Underground: New York Art (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 43. Parts 2 and 3 are included on 195 and 316-317. Norris, whose friend was the babysitter for the Velvets’ manager, had heard that the Velvet Underground had been fired from a gig at Café Wha?, a club in Greenwich Village, because their music was “undanceable.” Norris writes that the fee for the evening was $80, not $75, and that Cale was playing a violin.

51 the Empire State Building without any sound at all.18 Warhol’s ideas for new films grew, leading to dozens of different experiments: shooting screen tests as filmic portraits, playing with film speeds, and using tedious activities like eating or sleeping as the basis for entire films.19 The creative ground for filmmaking may have been fertile, but the money to continue this artistic endeavor was difficult to come by. Friend and filmmaker

Paul Morrissey, with whom Warhol had been collaborating on new films, took up the role of Warhol’s manager and was keen to find new avenues of generating capital to finance their various projects. Morrissey:

The opportunities for getting money from experimental movies were obviously non-existent. And therefore the possibilities in 1965, in the era of the Beatles just coming to America, the Rolling Stones, and everybody supposedly making a lot of money, seemed like a good idea.20

At a time when rock bands seemed to bear the Midas touch, the union between the already-famous Andy Warhol and the unknown Velvet Underground seemed a mutually beneficial arrangement for the underground filmmaker and the underground rock and roll band. In exchange for twenty-five percent of their revenue, the Velvets had access to

Warhol’s name, notoriety, media attention, and connections.21

18 Please see Steven Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World, and Films of Andy Warhol (London: Marion Boyars, 2002); Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); and Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), for more discussion of Warhol’s films.

19 Callie Angell, considered one of the foremost experts on Warhol’s filmography, has written an invaluable volume on Warhol’s movie-making attempts. See Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006), for in-depth analysis of many of Warhol’s films from the 1960s.

20 Paul Morrissey quoted in Unterberger, 64.

21 Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (London: Da Capo Press, 1997), 241.

The origination of Warhol’s association with the Velvet Underground is a topic for debate among those who moved in Warhol’s circle. In Factory Days: Paul Morrissey

Remembers the Sixties, Morrissey claimed that he had been on the lookout for a band that

Warhol could manage, an idea that Morrissey said Warhol was reluctant to pursue, even going so far as to say that he is the one who discovered the Velvets for Warhol.22 In interviews, Morrissey was thoroughly and almost comically adamant that he deserved credit:

Andy Warhol did not want to get into rock & roll; I wanted to get into rock & roll to make money. Andy didn’t want to do it, he never would have thought of it. Even after I thought of it, I had to bludgeon him into doing it.23

Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s handsome Factory assistant, told a different tale that began with filmmaker Barbara Rubin, who personally knew Reed, Cale, and Morrison, encouraging Malanga to come see the Velvet Underground perform at the Café Bizarre.24

As for the artist himself, Warhol claimed that he was eager to get involved in the music scene, saying in Popism that his interest in music was an extension of Pop:

The Pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all. Nobody wanted to stay in one category; we all wanted to branch out into every creative thing we

22 Factory Days: Paul Morrissey Remembers the Sixties, directed by Brian Chamberlain (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2005), DVD. Morrissey says he approached the Velvet Underground before showing them to Warhol, and that Warhol was uninterested in managing the band even after meeting them.

23 Paul Morrissey quoted in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 5.

24 Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 300-302.

could – that’s why when we met the Velvet Underground at the end of ’65, we were all for getting into the music scene, too. 25

Warhol wove both Gerard and Morrissey neatly into discovering the Velvet Underground without giving anyone special credit for bringing the band to his attention. According to

Warhol, Rubin asked Malanga to film the Velvets, Malanga asked Morrissey for assistance, and Morrissey asked Warhol to come, too.26 As for who originally had the idea of pursuing rock music connections, Tony Scherman and David Dalton argue that neither Morrissey nor Malanga gave Warhol the idea. In the months before meeting the

Velvet Underground, Warhol had met with both Bob Dylan and singer-songwriter Eric

Andersen, which Scherman and Dalton assert indicates a preexisting interest in utilizing music for monetary ends.27 However Warhol and the Velvet Underground met, by the end of 1965 Café Bizarre fired the Velvets, the Velvets fired their manager, and the band found themselves under the creatively liberal management of Warhol and his crew.28

25 Warhol and Hackett, 169 and 180. In Factory Days, Morrissey claimed that Malanga knew nothing about filmmaking at all, and asked Morrissey to accompany him to see the Velvet Underground play because he needed Morrissey to do the actual filming of the band’s performance.

26 Ibid.

27 Scherman and Dalton, 303. Seemingly as likely as Scherman and Dalton’s argument, however, is that Warhol may have been drawn to musicians not because he, too, wanted involvement in music but because those artists were successful. In 1965, Bob Dylan released his fourth studio album and was already well known as a protest singer, so Warhol’s association with Dylan may indicate that Warhol wanted to work with stars rather than find a way to integrate himself into the profits derived from Dylan’s success. See Donald Brown, Bob Dylan: American Troubadour (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) for more on Dylan’s rise to fame.

28 The firing of the Velvet Underground occurred in classic confrontational rock and roll style. The Café Bizarre management, already annoyed with the band’s sound, found the sound of their song “Black Angel’s Death” the most egregious example of their objectionable song catalogue (screeches over a maddening guitar rhythm). The manager

The artistic collaboration had an immediate impact on both the lives of the Velvet

Underground members and of Warhol’s circle. One of the first was the inclusion of Nico

(born Christa Päffgen), a strikingly beautiful German blonde with a strange, throaty sound.29 As a young woman, Nico’s natural presence and good looks had landed her a small role in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita – the legend says that Fellini dreamt of

Nico’s face before he saw her, and declared immediately that she must be in his film – and now Warhol wanted her to add some charisma and glamour to the Velvet

Underground.30 Reed had been thrust into the position of lead singer for the Velvet

Underground, but Morrissey thought that Reed lacked the onstage personality of an effective front man. Nico, who had recorded a demo and a record in Europe, could inject much-needed stage presence and magnetism into the band as their femme fatale chanteuse.31 Warhol remembered her as a kind of mod Viking, clad in white suits and speaking in slow, laborious sentences due to her limited grasp of English. Nico’s cool

informed the Velvets that they would be fired if they played the song again, so they poured their hearts into playing the song one last time and were fired. Bockris and Malanga, 23.

29 Factory regular and EPI member Mary Woronov remembered Nico’s beauty: “She was so beautiful, she expected everyone to want to fuck her, even the furniture, which groaned out loud when she walked into the room. I had seen chairs creep across the carpet in the hopes that she might sit down on them.” Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (Boston: Journey Editions, 1995), 38.

30 Watson, 34-35.

31 Unterberger, 72. Nico may not have been Warhol’s first choice for a female lead. Cabaret singer Tally Brown may have been in contention, although Morrissey later dismissed that idea as one of Warhol’s odd fancies that was never seriously considered. For more about Nico’s background, see Richard Witts, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon (London: Virgin, 1993). Witts also wrote a volume on the Velvet Underground. See Richard Witts, The Velvet Underground (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006.

55 demeanor was a decided departure from the chatty, warm American girls in Warhol’s cadre, like Baby Jane Holzer and Edie Sedgwick: “She was mysterious and European, a real moon goddess type.”32 Less enthused were the Velvets themselves, who did not want to function as a glorified backup band for Nico; she reportedly wanted to be the star of the musical troupe and take up most of the singing duties. Their catalog of songs, too, was better suited to Reed’s voice than Nico’s and the band had little for their new chanteuse to sing.33 In pursuit of Warhol’s approval and in consideration of Warhol’s substantial talent for drumming up media attention, the Velvet Underground agreed to

Nico’s limited involvement (singing a few songs and otherwise standing around onstage looking magnificent) and The Velvet Underground and Nico began rehearsing at the

Factory.34

The conceptual train that would lead to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was now charging full speed ahead. Warhol’s interest in multimedia and dimensionality had sown the first seeds; Warhol had experimented with projecting multiple films on multiple walls of the same room to create an immersive experience and give his audience more to observe. Now, with the Velvet Underground, Warhol’s experiments in expanded cinema could fill both an audience’s visual and auditory senses. The sixties were a heyday of experimental film, championed by filmmaker and Village Voice columnist Jonas Mekas, who also co-founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Film-Maker’s

32 Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 181-183. Nico was especially glamorous because she had a son with French actor Alain Delon.

33 Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 24-25. “[Nico] really wanted a backing band so she could sing all the songs.”

34 Unterberger, 72. Warhol received a noise warning from his landlord.

Cinematheque.35 Mekas was vocal about elevating film to the same ranks as other

Modern art forms, and he encouraged the avant-garde filmmakers in the 1960s, including

Warhol, to form an artistic community to experiment with the boundaries of filmmaking.36 While Warhol may have played the empty-headed halfwit when questioned about his films (he said that Sleep was the sort of film an audience could begin watching at any point, and he encouraged the audience to move and dance and make noise during its duration), more serious figures like Mekas and film critic James

Stoller defended Warhol’s work, in part or in whole, as deconstructing the elements of film and questioning how a film could or should affect its audience.37 In this creative

35 Scherman and Dalton, 311. “Expanded cinema” as a concept dates back to the 1920s, and many other filmmakers and artists, such as Abel Gance and the Eames brothers, had investigated the possibilities of film beyond simple projections of one film on one screen. Please see J. J. Murphy, “Expanded Cinema: Come Blow Your Mind,” in The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 152-190, for a discussion of Warhol and expanded cinema (the EPI is briefly discussed).

36 Jeffrey K. Ruoff, “Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World,” Cinema Journal 30 (Spring 1991): 6-28. Warhol and the Velvet Underground appeared in Mekas’s Diaries, Notes, and Sketches. Where Warhol was experimenting with long shots, Mekas played with incredibly short shots of film.

37 Ruth Hirschman, Andy Warhol, and Taylor Mead, “Pop Goes the Artist,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 41, and James Stoller, “Beyond Cinema: Notes on Some Films by Andy Warhol,” Film Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1966): 35-38. Some other underground filmmakers found Warhol’s work an affront to their community and wished desperately for his involvement to end. Billy Name said, “Andy was not even an antihero, he was a zero. And it just made them grit their teeth to have Warhol becoming recognized as the core of this thing that they had built. . . . All the other underground filmmakers would cringe like somebody was scraping chalk along a blackboard – ‘Oh no, not Andy Warhol again!’” Billy Name quoted in McNeil and McCain, 12. Other critics would find expanded cinema in general ridiculous in the extreme. Watson, 250: “Critic Parker Tyler disagreed [with Mekas’s belief that expanded cinema created a dynamic environment]. He regarded the mixed media phenomenon as a Barnum-and-Bailey trick sold under the rubric of art. ‘Mixed media, as practiced, means not only film plus TV plus live actors

57 atmosphere, Warhol’s fascination with film and other forms of mediation snowballed as he and his collaborators tried to develop their next big multimedia project.

The Velvets did not have to wait long for their debut under Warhol’s management. The first performance of Warhol’s artistic assembly occurred on January

13, 1966, at the Grand Ballroom in Delmonico’s Hotel at the New York Society for

Clinical Psychiatry’s annual dinner, where Warhol and his entourage of counterculture characters descended upon the solemn occasion and wrought chaos (Fig. A21-A24).38

Hired to give a speech to the assembled psychiatrists, Warhol first requested to host a viewing of his films and then asked if he might bring his new band to provide a live soundtrack. The Society’s director, Dr. Robert Campbell, agreed, perhaps anticipating a fashionable backdrop of film screenings and musical performances for the dignified gala.

No one was prepared for the arrival of Warhol’s coterie of musicians, dancers, and artists.

Warhol’s appearance at the banquet had been billed as a “lecture” called “The Chic

Mystique of Andy Warhol” in which Warhol’s films would be shown with accompanying music by the Velvet Underground.39 The actual performance was much less straightforward than advertised. The Velvets were even more mismatched with this audience than they had been with the flummoxed students at Summit High School. In front of ornate, glowing candelabra sconces, the Velvets were clad in varying levels of

plus sculpture plus electronics plus whatnot, it also means a tour-de-force of subjugating audiences with wow devices, participation flattery, and snob ideologies (i.e., no-art and Pop Art cant).’” Emphasis from the original.

38 Stephen Watson claims that the Society’s dinner took place on January 10, but newspaper articles reviewing the event point to the actual date being January 13. Watson, 259.

39 The films shown at Delmonico’s were “Harlet” and “Henry Geldzahler.”

58 formality. Nico wore her signature white suit, Cale wore a black suit adorned with rhinestones, Reed wore a brown jacket, and Tucker wore sunglasses and a jean jacket while she played a tambourine. Malanga wore a black suit jacket and bow tie for his role as S&M dancer and camera operator. Warhol’s current glamour girl Edie Sedgwick jumped up onstage alongside Malanga and joined his dance. Barbara Rubin, responsible for setting events in motion that led to Warhol meeting the Velvet Underground in the first place, brought along her camera and tape recorder to aim aggressive and intimate questions at the flabbergasted audience: “What does her vagina feel like?” “Is his penis big enough?” “Do you eat her out? Why are you getting embarrassed? You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed!”40 According to Victor Bockris,

Warhol’s objective in breaking into the music world was to use the Velvet

Underground’s edgy subject matter and rock and roll attitude alongside projected films, lights, and dancers to elicit an uncomfortable response from his audience.41 If discomfort was the goal, Warhol succeeded spectacularly, much to the shock of the gala’s two to three hundred guests, all of whom were wearing tuxedos and full-length evening gowns in anticipation of an elegant night of professional socialization.

The formal crowd of psychiatrists and their wives may have had no idea why

Warhol was involved in their posh gala, but the Velvets were just as unsure why they were there as well. Guitarist Sterling Morrison thought the band could play a much better venue than this assembly of buttoned-up doctors, and drummer Moe Tucker wondered why “these freaks from the Factory” had been invited in the first place, noting that the

40 Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 183-185. Jonas Mekas also came to the event with Warhol and seems to have assisted Rubin with cameras and lights.

41 Bockris, Warhol, 241.

59 audience looked “flabbergasted.”42 Dr. Campbell reasoned that art and creativity were closely related to “genius and madness”; who better than the strange yet somehow clever

Andy Warhol to get the psychiatrists of New York pondering experimental art?43

Unfortunately for Dr. Campbell, few of the psychiatrists in attendance left that evening feeling that the night had been successful. While the psychiatrists in attendance may have felt subjected to an exemplary performance of mental illness, Warhol was delighted, remembering groups of attendees leaving the show early, unsettled by the bizarre music of the Velvets and the feedback of their equipment, the stunning lights, and the series of questions put to them by Rubin and others.44 In the elegant white and gold ballroom filled with the biggest names in New York psychiatry, this group of young kooks and avant- garde artists worked diligently to assault their audience with sound and light and combative vulgarity.

Once the press caught wind of the event, Warhol’s burgeoning performance troupe received even more attention. By January 24, articles about the pandemonium at

Delmonico’s were published in the New York Times (in two forms, one edited down to a shorter length), the New York Herald Tribune, and Newsweek. The day after the performance, Grace Glueck of the Times and Seymour Krim of the Herald Tribune had

42 MacNeil and McCain, 11. Discussion of this show is conspicuously absent from Bockris and Malanga’s Up-Tight, which skips over the show at Delmonico’s entirely in favor of discussing a show Warhol put up at Mekas’s Cinematheque and their subsequent tour. Kugelberg’s The Velvet Underground: New York Art includes a variety of high- quality images from the event, but contains no discussion of it.

43 Dr. Robert Campbell, quoted in Watson, 259: “How can you be immune to art and the creative process? Surely you’re aware of the barely visible line between genius and madness.”

44 Warhol and Hackett, 184-185.

60 written sizeable articles about Warhol’s “Chic Mystique,” which Glueck noted nobody had actually defined. Krim compared Warhol’s antics to shock treatment and quoted one psychiatrist who said, “I’m ready to vomit.”45 Glueck called the ordeal an “invasion” and noted that the madness really kicked off when dinner was served (roast beef, string beans, small potatoes) and the Velvet Underground’s sound roared into high-volume life.

Psychiatrists were quoted in varying degrees of civility. One called the evening “a spontaneous eruption of the id,” another compared it to experiencing LSD, and yet another said it was decadent Dada. The next year’s chairman, Dr. Arthur Zitrin, worried that he would not be able to plan an event that could follow up Warhol’s performance.

Several others were less sympathetic, saying “It seemed like a whole prison ward had escaped,” and asking “Why are they exposing us to these nuts?” 46 A brief write-up in

Newsweek likewise ended on the “nuts” quotation, leaving the reader with the impression that Warhol and company were some kind of maddening nuisance.47 No matter the

45 Seymour Krim, “Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists,” New York Herald Tribune, January 14, 1966, reprinted in Alfredo García, The Inevitable World of the Velvet Underground, ed. Carlos López (Madrid: Alfredo García, 2012), 9. This article also makes reference to a Chic Ciccarelli singing with Nico, but such a singer goes unmentioned by members of the band in interviews and documentaries. Jane Odin is also mentioned, although Krim’s original article seems to run Nico and Jane Odin together as “Nico Jane Odin” with no punctuation to indicate that he refers to two different people. Richie Unterberger surmises that Jane Odin and Chic Ciccarelli were likely spontaneous additions to the performance, as they are mentioned no where else. Unterberger, 75.

46 Grace Glueck, “Syndromes Pop At Delmonico’s,” New York Times, January 14, 1966, reprinted in García, 8.

47 “Shock Treatment,” Newsweek, January 24, 1966, reprinted in García, 10.

61 published criticism, veiled or otherwise, Warhol was pleased with the media attention: “It couldn’t have happened to a better group of people.”48

Not everyone agreed that the reviews accurately reflected the audience’s reception. Billy Name, a photographer who captured many of the famous photos of

Warhol’s factory and the EPI, dismissed the reviews as so much hyperbole. As far as

Name was concerned, the night started out as a great confidence trick, with Warhol and his gang pretending to be a part of the social sphere that socialites like Edie Sedgwick

(soon to depart the Factory’s inner circle) frequented, discussing lofty people and topics.

The psychiatrists were never as shocked as the press wanted everyone to believe:

The press played it like it was ironic confrontation, which it wasn’t at all. We didn’t shock anybody. Psychiatrists may be stiff, but they all have a sense of humor, and they’re all intelligent. It was more playful than confrontational. Barbara Rubin would do these things like set off light flashes in their eyes, or stick a mike in their faces, you know that confrontational technique that basically started with the Living Theater. To me it was old. I already knew that number, so I wasn’t taken by her.49

The truth likely lies somewhere between these two perspectives, with those who were most scandalized finding their opinions reprinted in the newspapers and those were least offended staying throughout the evening to see what else would happen. Whether exaggerated or not, the press attention redoubled the efforts of the ensemble to continue their new project. In his later discussion of Edie Sedgwick, however, Name was unquestionably correct: the arrival of glamour girl Nico signaled the end of Sedgwick’s reign as Warhol’s muse and golden girl. Sedgwick was out of step with Warhol’s new project and the Velvet Underground, which Mangala noted to Warhol after the show. As

48 Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 185. This quotation is in direct reference to the newspaper articles published on January 14.

49 Billy Name quoted in McNeil and McCain, 11.

62 the Velvets grew in importance in Warhol’s life, Sedgwick floundered about wondering what her place was in the new order before fading entirely from the Factory. Sedgwick deserted Warhol in favor of working with Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, and requested that Warhol cease screening any films in which she appeared because she feared the publicity would hurt her new projects. When Warhol’s evolving “Chic

Mystique” went on tour, Sedgwick did not accompany the troupe.50

1966 continued at a clipping pace for the multimedia ensemble Warhol now promoted under a new name: “Andy Warhol, Up-Tight,” so named for the show’s goal of flustering and disorienting its audience. The Velvets’ music, intentionally unpleasant and often contemptuous, contributed to the goal as they droned on repitiously for long musical stretches of incoherent singing and grating instrumentals. Nico, although cutting a sensational figure up on stage with her long blonde hair and heavily lidded eyes, added little musical flair to the performances with her broad voice that just begged for comparisons. Warhol:

50 Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 184, and Bockris and Mangala, 26. Mangala told Warhol that Sedgwick seemed lost. Sedgwick was already out of favor with Warhol for her drugs addictions and demanding behavior. When Sedgwick abandoned Warhol’s Factory, Donald Lyons and Bob Neuwirth also left the project. Sedgwick likely had romantic feelings for Dylan, which Warhol reportedly took callous pleasure in crushing once the rumors of Dylan’s secret 1965 marriage to Sara Lownds came out months later. Unfortunately, Sedgwick’s life continued to spiral after she fell out of favor with Warhol, and she died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971. Although Sedgwick is not a major figure in the story of the EPI, she is one of the most important of Warhol’s self-styled superstars. For more on the life of Edie Sedgwick, see David Dalton and Nat Finkelstein, Edie Factory Girl (New York: VH1 Press, 2006), Melissa Painter and David Weisman, Edie: Girl on Fire (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006), and Jean Stein and George Plimpton, eds., Edie: American Girl (New York: Grove Press, 1982). Sedgwick was the subject of the biopic Factory Girl in 2006 with actress Sienna Miller as Sedgwick and Guy Pearce as Warhol. The film is particularly sympathetic to Sedgwick and paints an unflattering portrait of Warhol, who is often blamed for Sedgwick’s demise. See Factory Girl, directed by George Hickenlooper (New York: Weinstein Company, 2006), DVD.

People described her voice as everything from eery [sic], to bland and smooth, to slow and hollow, to a “wind in a drainpipe,” to an “IBM computer with a Garbo accent.” She sounded the same strange way when she sang, too.51

The group would also change tempos to upset the rhythm for any audience members who attempted to dance along. Malanga, on the other hand, was a capable dancer·(as a young man, he’d been a regular dancer on Alan Freed’s pop music “Big Beat” television show) and, according to Warhol’s friend David Bourdon, “easily upstaged the band” with enthusiastic physicality, whips, leather, and strips of phosphorescent tape.52 As Warhol and the members of the “Up-Tight” project worked on their individual elements, the structure of the show began to solidify and develop into its eventual form. Cameras rolled in the Factory while light effects were tested, new gigs were booked, and the Velvet

Underground improvised and rehearsed.

In February, “Andy Warhol, Up-Tight” was scheduled to appear at Mekas’s Film-

Makers’ Cinematheque at the 41st Street Theater from February eighth to the thirteenth.

The show was performed twice on weekday evenings and three times on Saturday and

Sunday. Advertisements (Fig. A25-A26) run in the Village Voice displayed Warhol’s name in bold print underneath brief quotations about the show from the East Village

Other and the New York Times. The rest of the “Up-Tight” troupe were listed under

Warhol’s name, as though their celebrity status were already established enough to draw a crowd through name recognition. The Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard

51 Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 182.

52 David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 222. Bourdon adds several other amusing descriptions of Nico’s voice: “Writers delighted in finding analogies for her unmelodious voice, which sounded like ‘an amplified moose’ . . . Perhaps the most amusing critique was: ‘She sounded like a Bedouin woman singing a funeral dirge in Arabic while accompanied by an off-key air raid siren.’”

Malanga, Mary Piffath (likely a pseudonym for Factory favorite Mary Woronov) Donald

Lyons (a writer), Barbara Rubin, Bob Neuwirth (musician and artist), Paul Morrissey,

Nico, Daniel Williams (lighting designer), Nat Finkelstein (photographer), and Billy

Linich (later Billy Name) were all mentioned by name in various advertisements as confidently as though they were the Beatles themselves. Salvador Dalí also featured prominently on the bill of at least two separate advertisements, although he only appeared in films onscreen.53 With these names were lists of show elements: “Up-tight Rock ‘n’

Roll, Whip Dancers, Film-maker Freaks, Tapers, Anchovie Filming live episodes of the

‘Up-tight’ series.” Unlike the unsuspecting psychiatrists, people who went to the

Cinematheque would know exactly what they were about to experience.

Or would they? The exact nature of the show was still somewhat unclear even as word-of-mouth spread about it. The show was a work in progress, each day ending with a dinner in which the members of “Up-Tight” would brainstorm new ideas to make the show even more dynamic.54 For reviewers in major papers, “Andy Warhol, Up-Tight” was something of an enigma that they were unsure should be solved. New York Post reviewer Archer Winsten deliberately noted that his summation of the proceedings was

“for the record, not as recommendation.” He dutifully recorded the various elements that made up previous night’s events at the Cinematheque: multiple screens showing

53 Angell, 58. Dalí sat for two of Warhol’s filmic screen tests in 1966, one of which was projected during performances.

54 Bockris and Malanga, 25. Malanga quoted: “Everybody involved with the week at the Cinematheque was very excited about what we were doing together, although it was still more of an art than a rock event, and there were a number of kinks to be ironed out before ‘Andy Warhol, Up Tight’ would bloom into the ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable.’ We all went out to dinner after each show. Andy’s question to everybody was always the same, ‘How can we make it more interesting?’”

Warhol’s films (which Winsten found of dubious quality), banal scenes that could benefit from added suggestion, recorded conversations not quite intelligible, the Velvet

Underground playing in such a way as to negate all of their tuning efforts, and the frenetic dancers inspiring one of Winsten’s primmer, more humorous quips: “There is, of course, much ado with whips.” Winsten found the event bizarre and even off-putting, but could not deny the effectiveness of Warhol’s allure in drawing a packed house of viewers:

Andy Warhol, king of the put-on, bring-down, nothing movie, has here thrown together some meaningless stuff well calculated to reflect not only a meaningless world but an audience so mindless that it can sit still and take it and come back for more. It is even possible that the more Andy kicks his audience in its teeth, the more he shovels nonsense into its hanging-open mouth, the more they like it.55

In the end, Winsten seemed to throw his hands up in defeat, as the seemingly arbitrary and unpleasant “Up-Tight” show was somehow still popular despite its best efforts at being repellant. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther aimed his ire first at the new film

Warhol screened at the Cinematheque (the hour-long More Milk, Yvette, starring transvestite Mario Montez drinking milk in costume with a companion), and then at the

Velvet Underground, whom he describes as “bang[ing] away at their electronic equipment, while random movies are thrown on the screen in back of them.”56

Mainstream critics may not have enjoyed the show, but the “Up-Tight” players thought the whole thing was a great success, and found that film departments, confused about the

55 Archer Winsten, “Andy Warhol at Cinematheque,” New York Post, February 9, 1966, reprinted in García, 12.

56 Bosley Crowther, “Andy Warhol’s ‘More Milk, Yvette’ Bows,” New York Times, February 9, 1966, reprinted in García, 12.

66 exact nature of the show, wanted to book what they thought was a presentation of

Warhol’s films.57 With invitations in hand, “Up-Tight” was ready to hit the road.

The first stop in the brief “Up-Tight” tour – the name was slowly evolving, as some advertisements (Fig. 27-28) called the show “Andy Warhol’s Underground New

York” and “Rutgers Uptight” – was Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

A new arrival named Ingrid Superstar (really twenty year-old New Jersey native Ingrid von Scheven, a part-time prostitute) had joined the crew as a new dancer, taking the place of Sedgwick.58 On Wednesday, March 9, 1966, the “Up-Tight” show was performed twice to sizable crowds. The trip had not, however, begun successfully. In John

Wilcock’s Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, a highly detailed account of the visit begins with an indifferent atmosphere on campus to the famous artist’s impending

57 Bockris and Malanga, 26, and Unterberger, 78. Unterberger notes that Nico was perhaps the only member of “Up Tight” to find the Cinematheque series disappointing. She was not able to sing as many songs as she wanted, and she was not billed with the Velvets, a trend that continued throughout their entire association; Nico’s initiation into the band was never absolute. Even on the Velvets’ debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Nico was tacked on separately, an appendage on the group but not officially one of them.

58 Scherman and Dalton, 319. Scherman and Dalton note that Ingrid was referred to “diplomatically” as an “office temp” in Bourdon, 222. Ingrid was well liked by most of the “Up Tight” performers, but not by fellow dancer Mary Woronov, who found her a poor substitute for Edie Sedgwick. Woronov, 32-33: “Everybody loved Ingrid. But I didn’t. I hated her. She was so eager to act stupid, like it was her job; actually she was Andy’s invention to get back at Edie. Both girls had the same thin body with short dyed- blonde hair and big earrings, but Ingrid was Edie’s opposite: ugly, low class, and stupid. It was as if Edie was Dorian Gray, and Ingrid was her portrait. After Edie’s banishment, for reasons that I never understood, Ingrid remained as a sad reminder of who wins in this game. Her last name was Superstar because without that label, you wouldn’t know she was one – and also, I thought, as a warning. She was what Andy thought superstars were – ugly, cheap, and annoying.” Woronov paints an unflattering portrait not only of Ingrid Superstar, but also of Warhol as a manipulative and spiteful man.

67 arrival.59 One thousand tickets at $2 apiece were on sale for the event, but only two hundred had been purchased in advance, and many of the posters advertising the show had been torn down by parties unknown. Once the three vehicles carrying the “Up-Tight” members arrived, photographer Nat Finkelstein, Rubin, and an associate named Susanna went about drumming up excitement by flirting with co-eds, stealing food off of other people’s plates, and getting into a fight with a cafeteria worker. News of the scuffle inspired interest in the event, and the first show at eight that evening was completely sold out (the second, held at ten, sold fewer tickets). The show followed the schedule of the

Cinematheque, beginning with two film screenings (Vinyl first, and then Lupe) before the

Velvet Underground, wearing all white to act as human screens for the projections, took the stage amid more films and a sea of colored slides while Malanga gyrated madly to the violently loud music with flashlights in his hands and Rubin ran about with her camera.60

The second show’s audience was more hostile. One audience member called out for Nico to try to speak English, and others left the performance in a huff. At the end of the night, a fire alarm sounded and no one knew if the smoke from various cigarettes and joints had triggered it, or if disgruntled attendees had set off the alarm to disturb the show. In either case, the tumultuous “Up-Tight” show was perfectly situated to incorporate a fire alarm into its activities. The extra light and sound simply became a part of the show.61

59 Wilcock conducted interviews with many of Warhol’s friends and colleagues, and went on to found Interview magazine with the artist in 1989.

60 Sterling Morrison quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 28: “At Rutger’s [sic] we were all dressed entirely in white. The effect, with all the films and lights projected on us, was invisibility.”

61 John Wilcock, “On the Road with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” in The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, ed. Christopher Trela (New York: Other

The next stop was Ann Arbor, Michigan for the University of Michigan’s Fourth

Film Festival presented by the Cinema Guild and Dramatic Arts Center (Fig. A29-A30).62

Nico, an unexpectedly aggressive and wild driver, manned the large rental van hired for the 1,500-mile journey to Michigan and back.63 The van came with a number of useful features: a generator in the van that allowed the Velvets to play their blaring rock and roll while on the road, a toilet that did not work (just like the toilet at the Factory, Wilcock noted), and enough room for eleven “Up-Tight” players to pack inside.64 Once at Ann

Arbor, three days after their Rutgers performances, Warhol felt that the act had finally achieved success and polish. A few careful tweaks had been made to strobe lights, colors, and projector positions, resulting in a more cohesive experience. John Wilcock remembered the changes:

Gerard [Mangala] was dancing, swathed in lengths of luminous plastic tape that lights up when plugged in; one of the slide machines was sweeping the walls and ceiling with a gigantic eye that never blinked; and Andy had made Vinyl a hothouse red by inserting a gelatin strip into the projector. The strobe lights, too, had been adjusted and were winking at the audience with computer-like precision every second.65

Scenes, 1971), 163-165. Wilcock was in attendance at the Rutgers performances and saw a girl leave the “Up Tight” performance to dance barefoot on the campus. The organizers of the event earned $1,300 from ticket sales, of which two thirds were paid to Warhol. See also Bourdon, 223.

62 Edie Sedgwick was still featured on advertisements as a star of the film Lupe, but she was no longer a part of Warhol’s troupe.

63 Ibid., 165. The van cost $50 per day and $.10 per mile.

64 Bockris and Malanga, 28-29, and Scherman and Dalton, 321. Sterling Morrison remembered the generator as a 120-volt generator, while Scherman and Dalton write that it was 140 volts. The van attracted a lot of attention from the police, who searched the van several times and even followed it for long stretches of road.

65 Wilcock, 165.

Warhol was pleased, and saw that success reflected in the responses of the audience, who paid $.75 to attend. “Ann Arbor went crazy. At last the Velvets were a smash.” Ingrid

Superstar remembered the audience as “a little berserk” with “a few hecklers” who were

“all a bunch of immature punks.” The effect of the show upon the responsive audience, however, was profound. The young attendees would shout and scream and flail about on the floor. Ingrid Superstar:

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 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 the show 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 fifteen minutes.66

Even if they did not quite know what to think about what they had seen, “Up-Tight” audiences were affected by the visual and auditory rush provided by Warhol’s show.

The press was still unsure of the project. Ellen Goodman of the Detroit Free Press found the screenings of Warhol’s Vinyl (based on Anthony Burgress’s A Clockwork

Orange) and Lupe (based on the life and death of Mexican actress Lupe Vélez), “about as interesting in technique and dialog as home movies of a trip down the Grand Canyon,” noting that “the only unforgettable impressions of these two films were of the strong undercurrents of homosexuality and sado-masochism.” In the end, Goodman found the final portion of “Up-Tight” in which Warhol’s films were united with the Velvet

66 Warhol and Ingrid Superstar quoted in Bockris and Mangala, 29. According to Ingrid Superstar, the song “Nothing Song” led to most of the ringing in attendees’ ears, as it was made up entirely of “noise and feedback and screeches and groans from the amplifiers.”

Underground’s music to be the most compelling, especially the enduring image of the beautiful Nico surrounded by and covered with projections of her own face while she sang in her distinctive style.67 Like Seymour Krim, Bosley Crowther, Arthur Winsten, and other reviewers who braved “Up-Tight” and its confrontational content and format,

Goodman was sure that something had happened that night but she could not quite figure it out. The show was effective in that it produced some sort of effect upon the audience, but qualifying that effect was another task altogether.

Warhol’s creative union of dance, film, music, and light sent conflicting signals to those who attended its performances. One the one hand, the show seemed to announce its importance and effectiveness through bold advertisements that confidently publicized largely unknown musicians, dancers, and filmmakers with the confidence of established celebrities. Alongside these largely unknown performers was Warhol’s name in big, bold print, proclaiming that the art world’s prince of controversy and confusion was about to stir up some new, if nebulous, thrills. Wilcock on Warhol’s appeal:

What the Warhol mystique provides, in fact, is excitement in its purest form. Although the result of its presence raises temperatures all around and a mysterious hint of anarchy hangs over the proceedings, it is very difficult, once it is over, to explain what exactly has taken place, which is a pretty close assessment of Andy’s own achievements as an artist.68

67 Ellen Goodman, “Festivals, and Films by Warhol,” Detroit Free Press, March 15, 1966, reprinted in García, 17. Goodman referred to Lupe as a film about Hedy Lamarr’s shoplifting scandal in 1965; Goodman was likely confusing Lupe with Hedy, Warhol’s 1966 film in which transvestite Mario Montez starred as Lamarr. Wilcock’s memory of the Rutgers performances mirrored Goodman’s of the Ann Arbor set: “Nico’s face, Nico’s mouth, Nico sideways, backwards, superimposed on the walls and the ceiling, on Nico herself as she stands onstage impassively singing.”Wilcock, 164.

68 Wilcock, 163-164.

Warhol’s involvement lent the project media visibility, a sense of allure, and the prospect of a memorable night, a counterintuitive series of qualities for an artist who had become famous for utilizing banal, repetitive imagery in his paintings, sculptures, and films.

Everything about “Up-Tight” advertised excitement but delivered confusion and even emptiness to its audience. In fact, Warhol’s modus operandi was to overstay his artistic welcome and provide his audience with more of his art than they wanted:

I’d sit on the steps in the lobby during intermissions and people from the local papers and the school papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. “If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen,” I’d explain. “That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”69

Thus, performances of “Up-Tight” could both be stimulating and intensely dull. The sensory overload of lights and deafening sound indicated that something electrifying was occurring, but the music, films, and dancing were often without narrative, direction, or a clear artistic objective. Reviewer Goodman summed up the experience: “The result was a vision of something simultaneously larger and smaller than life-size . . . of a super- reality.”70 On the surface, the scene was monumental, but underneath it was nearly devoid of traditional content.

Once the group returned to New York, the next stage of Warhol’s extravaganza was yet to be determined. In late 1965, Morrissey had been negotiating a project with

Broadway producer Michael Myerberg to have Warhol appear at a new discothèque in

Long Island in the unused airplane hangar where Charles Lindbergh had begun his historic transatlantic flight. In exchange for $40,000 and naming the club “Andy

69 Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 193.

70 Goodman reprinted in García, 17.

Warhol’s Up,” Warhol would provide his glamorous presence, the celebrities and socialites in his inner circle, and a band.71 Discussions opened to add performances by

Velvet Underground, but that conversation ended quickly after Myerberg saw the Velvets perform at the Cinematheque in February – considered a trial run by Warhol and the

Velvet Underground to try out what they would perform at Myerberg’s discothèque – and found their sound displeasing. The Velvet Underground were replaced by the Young

Rascals, whose music and reputation were more palatable to Myerberg’s intended audience, and Warhol was replaced by a radio disc jockey called Murray the K. “Andy

Warhol’s Up” was now “Murray the K’s World” and Warhol’s team went back to the drawing board.72 Luckily, a chance meeting in late March would provide the impetus for the next, more long-term stage of Warhol’s project – The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

71 Scherman and Dalton, 301-302, and Bockris, Warhol, 240. Myerberg hoped to cash in on Warhol’s fame and establish a new line of income.

72 Watson, 270.

CHAPTER III

“SOMETHING REVOLUTIONARY WAS HAPPENING”: THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE IN NEW YORK CITY

There was a serious tone to the music and the movies and the people, as well as all the craziness and the speed. There was also the feeling of desperate living, of being on the edge. The preset was blazing and every day was incredible, and you knew every day wasn’t always going to be that way.

Walter De Maria, quoted in Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story1

The electric energy inside 23 St. Mark's Place pulsed and pounded with light, music, and movement. Mirrored surfaces danced, bodies undulated, and The Velvet

Underground and Nico’s groundbreaking brand of rock and roll music alternatively droned and screeched into the early hours of the morning. Finally, back in New York

City, the project that began as Warhol’s “Chic Mystique” and toured as “Andy Warhol,

Up-Tight” had become “Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Installed at the

Polish National Home (the Dom) in New York throughout April of 1966, the Dom EPI was a violent multimedia onslaught of visual and auditory effects available to anyone who had two dollars to spend (two dollars and fifty cents on Fridays and Saturdays) and arrived before occupancy limits were reached. In this iteration of the Warhol/Velvet

Underground project, the art exhibition cum rock concert nature of the EPI became a sign of shifting political and social powers, the kind of far-out spectacle that critical contemporary Guy Debord feared in his 1967 volume Society of the Spectacle: mediation over interaction, fetishism over concrete value, and vapid celebrities selling impossible

1 Walter De Maria quoted in Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (New York: Quill, 1983), 31.

74 dreams to empty consumers.2 Warhol, a year before Society of the Spectacle was published, seemingly reveled in what subsequently could be defined as virtuosic

Debordian-style spectacule, relishing in meaningless mediation and consumerism. For that one month in 1966, the EPI achieved its greatest success. In the Dom’s ballroom, the

EPI found its most effective format and most receptive audience in nearly perfect performances of Debordian spectacle and Warholian debauchery and superficiality.3

Following the disappointing conclusion of their dealings with Michael Myerberg and the death of the reportedly $40,000 pipedream that was “Andy Warhol’s Up” club,

Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and the rest of the troupe needed a new direction and a new name.4 Luckily for Warhol, neither would take long to find; both new elements were found in chance meetings with the right people and the right inspirations. Now aimless without the prospect of the club enterprise and the money it promised before them,

Warhol and Morrissey were serendipitously lamenting their situation at the Café Figaro in New York City near two diners who could change their fortunes. Sitting at a nearby table were Jackie Cassen, a light artist who experimented with slides and gels to recreate

2 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014), 2, 14, 25.

3 Although Society of the Spectacle was not published until 1967, the year the EPI disbanded, Debord’s treatise on the nature of contemporary spectacle and its detrimental effect on society at large would have made a fine how-to guide for Warhol and his compatriots as they designed the EPI. Debord’s fourth thesis could arguably be used as a description of the EPI: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Ibid., 2.

4 Sterling Morrison and other members of the Velvet Underground visited the club after it became “Murray the K’s World” and had the impression that it was a hub for gangster- types. According to Morrison, the club was shut down for violation of a liquor license and later burned down “under the usual mysterious circumstances.” Bockris and Malanga, 30.

75 the visual experience of LSD use, and fellow light artist Rudi Stern. According to

Morrissey, Cassen and Stern overheard Warhol’s predicament and mentioned that the

Dom at St. Mark’s Place, a rundown community facility often used as a dance hall, had a space perfect for promoting a musical act.5 Warhol, on the contrary, remembered

Morrissey listening in on Cassen and Stern’s conversation about how to use the Dom before introducing himself to the pair while he and Warhol met with the Velvets at the

Figaro to break the news about Myerberg jettisoning their club project. In either case,

Cassen and Stern had leased the second floor dancehall at the Dom and were either unsure what to do with it or were willing to negotiate their use of the space, which included a balcony and an enormous dance floor ideal for the type of raucous party

Warhol planned. A quick chat, a visit to the Dom, and a sublet agreement later, Warhol and his entourage had a space to transform into their sensational vision. According to

Warhol,

[W]e signed a few papers, and the very next day we were down there painting the place white so we could project movies and slides on the walls. We started dragging prop-type odds and ends over from the Factory – five movie projectors, five carousel-type projectors where the image changes every ten seconds and where, if you put two images together, they bounce. These colored things would go on top of the five movies, and sometimes we’d let the sound tracks come through.6

Warhol’s description is slapdash (“odds and ends”) and offhand (“these colored things”), reflecting the ephemeral nature of the EPI and the outwardly careless attitude of those involved. Even the show’s new name, too, purportedly came out of hurried brainstorming. The name “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” was chosen, as Morrissey

5 Ibid.

6 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 196.

76 remembered, by picking out words at random while reading through the borderline nonsensical liner-notes of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited during a planning session with Barbara Rubin and Gerard Malanga to better reflect the scope of their ever-growing and ever-evolving project. The words “exploding” and “plastic” do not actually appear in

Dylan’s stream-of-consciousness style writings, but the dynamic name was nonetheless somehow sparked by what Morrissey called “amphetamine Bob Dylan gibberish liner- notes.”7 Initially billed in March 1966 as the “Erupting Plastic Inevitable,” (Fig. A31) the

“Exploding Plastic Inevitable” was the show’s official name by the time the Dom incarnation of the EPI debuted.8 The name communicated a sense of aggressive expansion (“exploding”), artificiality and superficiality (“plastic”), and unavoidability

(“inevitable”). Now, with a performance location acquired, equipment ready to move,

9 and a bold new name under which to unite, the project was once again progressing.

The New York EPI came together at break-neck speed, barreling through every obstacle that presented itself. At first glance, the Dom was a miserable place for a hip event. According to John Cale, the dance hall was dirty, poorly lit, charmless, and reeked

7 Paul Morrissey quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 31.

8 Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 322. According to Scherman and Dalton, Warhol’s Up-Tight had been offered $40,000 for four weekends’ involvement in Myerberg’s club. Continued involvement in the project would have meant even more money. Guitarist Sterling Morrison likewise remembered being offered $40,000 in Bockris and Malanga, 30. Morrissey attributed the EPI name inaccurately to Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home album. The word “erupting” does appear in Dylan’s liner-notes for Highway 61 Revisited. In Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 16, Morrissey could not remember which Dylan album inspired the name.

9 Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 263-264, refers to early performances at Rutgers and the University of Michigan as Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances, but the group was billed “Up-Tight” until they came back to New York and began advertising for the show at the Dom.

77 of urine.10 The ballroom was in desperate need of decorative rehabilitation, but the group was not allowed to enter the space until a mere five hours before their opening performance on April 1, 1966. In a mad dash to ready the Dom for customers, Malanga frantically painted the walls white to create a pristine canvas on which to project

Warhol’s films and Cassen’s gels while others set up equipment and organized the space.

In addition to the projectors and props Warhol remembered hauling in, the Dom also became the home of various strobe lights, spotlights, and a mirrored disco ball (whose stylistic revival in the disco age, according to Warhol, followed its use in the EPI).11

Cassen’s hallucinogen-inspired slides (she worked in conjunction with Timothy Leary, psychologist and proponent of the benefits of LSD and other psychedelic drugs) were likewise incorporated into the pandemonium of the EPI.12 According to David Bourdon, an art critic and longtime friend of Warhol, Warhol did not like Cassen’s work, but recruited her anyway to design a light show for the EPI.13 Cassen and Stern helped run the lights during the first Dom performances, and Cassen rented her Kodak Carousel projectors to Warhol for the duration of their residency. According to Cassen, slide

10 John Cale quoted in Scherman and Dalton, 323.

11 Warhol and Hackett, 196.

12 For more about Timothy Leary’s groundbreaking work on hallucinogenic drugs, see Timothy Leary, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: University Books, 1964); Peter H. Connors, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010); and Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Gunther M. Weil, eds., The Psychedelic Reader: The Revolutionary 1960s Forum of Psychopharmacological Substances (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1965).

13 David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 223. This may have been a political move, as Warhol and Morrissey wanted to sublet the Dom immediately once they had seen the space.

78 projectors were set up in the Dom’s balcony, while film projectors were situated at or slightly above floor level. Blinking strobe lights were placed onstage to heighten the sadomasochistic dance performances.14 Outside, a large hand-painted banner (Fig. A32) stretched and waved across the Dom’s faç ade; the homemade quality of the banner emphasized the unpolished underground bent of the EPI and its music and film, and the words “live” and “now” underscored the event’s immediacy and drew the attention of passersby to the happenings inside the Dom. A series of text-heavy advertisements (Fig.

A33-A35) in politically engaged, counterculture magazines and newspapers like The

Village Voice and The East Village Other still confidently advertised “Superstars” from the Factory’s cadre and communicated Warhol’s pied piper tune to the rest New York’s social scene: “Do you want to dance and blow your mind with The Exploding Plastic

Inevitable?”

Once renovated, the Dom may have been a perfect performing space, but its location was less optimal. Located in the East Village before it became a fashionable hub for artistic types, heading to the Dom required a pilgrimage for anyone wishing to attend.

“We had no idea if people would come all the way down to St. Mark’s Place for night life,” Warhol remembered. “All the downtown action had always been in the West

Village – the East Village was Babushkaville.”15 Sterling Morrison recalled similar reservations. In music writer Rob Jovanovic’s Seeing the Light: Inside the Velvet

Underground, Morrison is quoted:

14 Scherman and Dalton, 323. Cassen was paid for letting Warhol use her projectors, but she and Stern were not paid for running the slideshows.

15 Warhol and Hackett, 196. St. Mark’s Place has subsequently become a legendary location and has its own biography. See Ada Calhoun, St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

“This was before there was an ‘East Village,’” explains Sterling Morrison. “Then, it was just where old people and poor people lived. The Dom can be credited for making St. Mark’s Place a sleaze hole.”16

Warhol and the Velvets need not have worried, as the unfashionability of the East Village made it all the more exciting to potential attendees. On Friday, April 1, 1966, the EPI’s opening night, Dom was filled to its maximum occupancy of 750 writhing bodies (Fig.

A36) and many hopeful but tardy visitors were refused entry.17 The appeal of Warhol’s blasé persona and the prospect of attending a real multimedia happening transformed St.

Mark’s Place from socially dead to dynamic and vibrant.18 The youth of New York flocked to the Dom in droves to dance and mingle. In one night, the EPI had become the party scene in New York, and, little more than a week later, the New York Times ran a large article on the experience and fashions of the EPI (Fig. A37). Beside photographs of dancers caught mid-step was a full-length shot of Nico in her trademark white jacket descending a staircase captioned, “‘Just me cuts my hair,’ says Nico, the fashion model

16 Sterling Morrison quoted in Rob Jovanovic, Seeing the Light: Inside the Velvet Underground (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 72.

17 Watson, 271. The first advertisement for the “Erupting Plastic Inevitable,” squeezed into the March 31, 1966, edition of the Village Voice advertises April 1 as the EPI’s first show. Watson writes that the first show was on April 8, a claim that is also found in Dalton and Scherman, 323. Other writers, including Bourdon, 225, make general reference to early April as the EPI’s beginning. As for firsthand accounts, in Bockris and Malanga, 31, Morrissey recalls that the show opened on a Friday night, but both April 1 and April 8 were Friday nights. Vivan Gornick, “Pop Goes Homosexual,” Village Voice, April 7, 1966, reprinted in García, 20, includes a photograph (taken by Fred W. McDarrah) of the Velvets performing at the EPI with a blurb underneath reading “Apotheosis of Pop was Andy Warhol’s weekend which began upstairs at the Dom on Friday evening.” Because this article was published a day before the supposed April 8 premiere, I am using the April 1, 1966, date here, despite the specific references in subsequent literature to April 8. Warhol and Hackett, 203-204, also seems to indicate that April 1 was the opening night. A surviving sketch of the EPI’s layout at the Dom is also dated April 1, 1966.

18 Watson, 271.

80 turned chanteuse and underground movie star in Andy Warhol’s new cinema- discotheque.” In the article’s text, journalist Marilyn Bender threw herself into the details of the event – especially the attendees – with a slyly flippant tone, but without the bald censure of previous reviewers who made clear mention of their own dubiousness;

Bender’s article subtly revels in the bizarreness of an event in which a tuxedo-clad fashion designer might dance wildly beside nameless teenagers in tee shirts and denim.

Bender recorded that the night was enjoyed by men in black-tie, ladies in evening gowns, and dancers in dirty jeans and sweaters; none, the writer noted, was out of place.

Enticements to attend the EPI at the Dom included “the privilege of sitting on” folding chairs and tables covered by red-checkered tablecloths amid a sea of swirling, disorienting lights and film projections for the price of $2.00 on week nights and $2.50 on Fridays and Saturdays.19 Nico, a major feature of the article, was mentioned as a possible replacement for Edie Sedgwick, whose absence in the EPI was duly noted.20 As an event and a source of gossip, the EPI was a hit. Over the next three weeks such characters as Allen Ginsberg (who chanted Hare Krishna onstage with Nico), poet John

19 Jim DeRogatis, The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side (Minneapolis: Voyager Press, 2009), 51, claims that the show had a $6.00 cover charge, but every surviving advertisement lists these prices. Jovanovic, 72, describes the tablecloths as blue and white checked rather than red and white, and also places the film projectors up in the balcony instead of on the floor. Descriptions of the equipment set up vary from source to source.

20 Marilyn Bender, “Black Jeans to Go Dancing at the Movies: It’s Inevitable,” New York Times, April 11, 1966, reproduced in Alfredo García, The Inevitable World of the Velvet Underground, ed. Carlos López (Madrid: Alfredo García, 2012), 22. Another piece of evidence that counters the April 8 premiere date favored by Watson and Scherman and Dalton, Bender writes that, by April 11, the EPI had been performed the previous ten nights. However, even this is likely not the case, either. Even if the EPI’s first show was the originally advertised April 1, the EPI was not performed every night. No show, for example, was performed April 2 due to Warhol’s art opening at the Castelli gallery (he showed his Cow wallpaper and Silver Clouds).

Ashbery (who cried), and Walter Cronkite and Jackie Kennedy (who wanted to see what the younger population were doing) stopped by the Dom.21

The atmosphere inside the Dom during performances was chaotic and overwhelming as soon as the doors opened at nine in the evening (an hour and a half before the bar opened) and maintained its steady and ceaseless rhythm until the doors closed at two in the morning.22 With the advantages of a more permanent space, the EPI became an even grander experience than the shows performed at Rutgers and the

University of Michigan. The chaos of “Andy Warhol Up-Tight” transformed into a fully hallucinogenic experience amid the lights and music filling the Dom; the staccato rhythm of the strobe lights freezing moments and movements in space, the abandon of dancers

Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov creating momentary tableaus in the blinking lights

(Fig. A38), and the sounds of Nico’s guttural, cacophonous singing all lured the EPI’s audience into a trance-like atmosphere.23 Layers of mediation blurred the lines between real and projected, as strobe lights shone on top of spotlights on top of colored slides on top of films on top of The Velvet Underground who played while the dancers gyrated

(Fig. A39-A40).24 Alcohol (beer for seventy-five cents) and drugs (widely available but

21 Watson, 275. Ashbery had been in Europe while the intermedia movement had exploded in the U.S., leaving him aghast when he returned.

22 Afternoon performances for teenagers were advertised as dance marathon matinees with $1.00 entrance fees. The text advertising these matinees said that the program was “for teenage tot and Tillie dropout dance marathon matinee.”

23 Warhol and Hackett, 205. Warhol makes direct reference to the lasting tableaus created by the strobe light effects: “You wouldn’t think about it at the time, but the strobe would freeze moments in your brain and you’d pull them out months or years later.”

24 A surviving list from the Chicago EPI separates the Velvet Underground’s set into three parts with notes and changes by different members. This indicates that the set

82 not officially sold – marijuana, amphetamines, heroin, or whatever else attendees brought with them) fueled these effects, and sandwiches were provided for anyone who found himself hungry throughout the night (salami, bologna, or Swiss cheese on paper plates for fifty cents).25 While the party around them raged on, the Velvet Underground wore sunglasses and often faced away from the audience, which communicated an attitude of cool indifference but instead shielded the band’s eyes from the mayhem of the light show and projections.26 Warhol, ever the voyeur, spent his April evenings watching the pandemonium of the EPI from the Dom’s balcony or from the light booth (Fig. A41), surveying the highly mediated scene like a proto-postmodern king looking from atop his raised podium – among but not of the chaos he had orchestrated and provided.27 Debord’s assertion that spectacle is “a social relation among people, mediated by images” was embodied in the EPI: attendees related to each other and to Warhol as their host through

changed from venue to venue, and perhaps from performance to performance. The changes were mostly in song order and not in adding or removing songs, so the sets were probably similar in content. See Johan Kugelberg, ed., The Velvet Underground: New York Art (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 114, for a high quality scan of the original paper.

25 John Wilcock, “A ‘High’ School of Music and Art,” East Village Other, April 15, 1966, reprinted in All Yesterdays’ Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print 1966-1971, ed. Clinton Heylin (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005) 263. The title of this collection of articles is a reference to the Velvet Underground song, “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”

26 Sterling Morrison quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 36. “It was at this time that the Velvets started wearing dark glasses on stage, not through trying to be cool but because the light-show could be blinding at times. Anyone in the audience could come up and work the lights. We never had things like ‘When we do this ten second break, then hit me with the blue spot.’ That’s why I hate about modern rock & roll shows. They’re so regimented. We just played while everything raged around us without any control on our part.” In fact, the band often faded into the dark walls during performances, placing visual emphasis on the dancers instead of the band.

27 Wilcock in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 8. Warhol very rarely left the secluded balcony.

83 the chaotic imagery surrounding them rather than immediate interaction, isolating each individual within the enveloping sea of sensory input.28

The EPI’s execution was a structured yet variable process with an organization that could change with the whims of the performers. Light operators Stephen Shore and

Danny Williams had creative control of the lights, improvising light patterns, changing colors, pointing at patrons, or showering the room in shards of light by aiming at the mirrored disco ball hanging from the ceiling.29 Warhol usually stayed in the Dom’s balcony, but would also participate by using colored gels (Fig. A42-A43) to change the colors and patterns of his various films. Besides his underground films, footage of the

Velvet Underground rehearsing in the Factory (recorded throughout the months since

Warhol took over their management) was also projected around the Dom and on top of the Velvets themselves.30 Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga, Ingrid Superstar, and Ronnie

28 Debord, 2. Ed Sanders, singer for sixties New York band The Fugs, compared the experience to an Allan Kaprow-style happening in Bockris and Malanga, 33.

29 Scherman and Dalton, 323. According to Victor Bockris’s biography, young Harvard graduate Danny Williams was briefly in a sexual relationship with Warhol. Fresh out of college, Williams met Warhol through a friend of Edie Sedgwick, Chuck Wein, who reportedly introduced Warhol to handsome and available young men. Like Sedgwick, Williams began adopting Warhol’s signature fashions and regularly accompanied the artist to events. Their romantic association ended acrimoniously after two months, although Williams was still involved in the Factory scene due to his ability to work lights and cameras. See Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (London: Da Capo Press, 1997), 237-238.

30 Paul Morrissey quoted in Richie Unterberger, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day (London: Jawbone Press, 2009), 83. According to Morrissey, the EPI involved five movie projectors and five slide projectors. In Callie Angell, “Background Reels: EPI Background, Screen Test Poems, and Others” in Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné by Callie Angell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006), 265-287, Angell lists the feature films specifically filmed for the EPI as The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground, and The

Cutrone would dance onstage, sometimes choreographed together and sometimes moving solo, using whips and shining flashlights into the audience (Woronov and Malanga performed together consistently throughout the EPI’s run; other dancers came and went).31 Photographers Nat Finkelstein and Billy Name captured slices of performances with their cameras.32 The Velvet Underground and Nico played two sets throughout the night, reveling in finally playing on a large stage in front of a large audience, although they struggled with the predicament of playing a rock concert when they often could not really see or hear. The pandemonium of the EPI made coherent performance difficult, and drummer Moe Tucker took to reading Lou Reed’s lips to find her place in the music.

When not supplying live music, the EPI piped in recorded rock music from other musicians.33 The show’s performance was not only limited to those affiliated with the

EPI; Sterling Morrison’s future wife, Martha, recalled that anyone in the audience could make his or her way up to the balcony and use food coloring to alter colored slides.34

Even bolder patrons could approach Warhol and make their introductions to the famous artist, but the flashing lights made prolonged conversation virtually impossible.35

Velvet Underground Tarot Cards. Other background film, referred to in this volume as EPI Background, was also shot.

31 Warhol and Hackett, 204, and Watson 272.

32 Finkelstein published a collection of photographs from his years in Warhol’s circle. See Nat Finkelstein, Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

33 Wilcock in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 8, Unterberger, 83, and Watson, 272.

34 Martha Morrison quoted in Unterberger, 83: “Anyone could do it and it was fun.”

35 Warhol and Hackett, 205. “People in the crowd would come over and introduce themselves and it was all unreal.”

Throughout April, this organization of performative elements determined the experience of those who attended the EPI.

Warhol, already famous for his banal art world antics, opaque manner, and emphasis on superficiality and fashion, had taken his relationship with the public to a new level in which anyone, so it seemed, could get a slice of his alternative-culture scene, even if directly interacting with him or his entourage was still fairly unlikely. In early

1966, Warhol had placed advertisement in the Village Voice stating that he would

endorse with [his] name any of the following: clothing AC-DC, cigarettes small, tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N’ ROLL RECORDS, anything film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!! love and kisses ANDY WARHOL, EL 5-9941.36

In the design and execution of the fully-formed EPI, Warhol’s seemingly flippant advertisement detailing the trappings of underground culture came to fruition; music, sound equipment, fashion, film, whips, and money were all elements of the EPI. And yet, while the advertisements seemed to welcome anyone with the cover fee, the tone, location, and content of the show communicated very different signals to different groups. Experience of the EPI depended upon one’s relationship to the “underground,” a word that in 1960s New York meant underground cinema, alternative artists, open homosexuality, and the well-heeled patrons who made that artistic life possible.37 The emphasis on the underground quality of the event and the inclusion of advertisements in underground publications separated Warhol’s desired audience from his undesired audience. The type of person who read the Village Voice, the East Village Other, or the

36 Advertisement published in the Village Voice, February 10, 1966, reprinted in García, 15. Punctuation and capitalization reflects that of the original advertisement.

37 Sterling Morrison quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 20.

86 anarchist Fifth Estate was more likely to enjoy the EPI and keep up with Warhol’s endeavors than the type of person who read the Wall Street Journal.

Not only was the EPI promoted in underground publications, the advertisements for the EPI had also developed a more enticing underground flair since the “Up-Tight” series. Less emphasis was placed on a laundry list of Warholian celebrities and more emphasis was placed on the Velvet Underground, the compelling title of the show, and its many and sundry creative elements. Doing away with the checklist of participants, new ads favored a run-on sentence style that contributed to a sense of urgency and relied more on the elements of the show than the people involved. The reader’s eye flies across the long, capitalized list of EPI features, which ranged from individual people to activities that attendees could join. In an advertisement run in the Village Voice on April 7, 1966

(Fig. A33), the descriptive text reads:

Superstars Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov On Film On Stage On Vinyl LIVE MUSIC, DANCING, ULTRA SOUNDS, VISIONS, LIGHTWORKS BY DANIEL WILLIAMS, COLOR SLIDES BY JACKIE CASSEN, DISCOTHEQUE, REFRESHMENTS, INGRID SUPERSTAR, FOOD, CELEBRITIES, AND MOVIES INCLUDING: VINYL, SLEEP, EAT, KISS, EMPIRE, WHIPS, FACES, HARLOT, HEDY, COUCH, BANANA, ETC., ETC., ETC., ALL IN THE SAME PLACE AT THE SAME TIME.

Subsequent promotions followed the same marketing model, publicizing not just those involved in the show but the many entertaining exploits Warhol and his ensemble had thrown together in one event. The EPI was a rock concert, a light show, a fashion show, an art show, multiple film screenings, a discotheque, a dance performance, and an opportunity to spot celebrities all at once in one place. Like the hand-lettered banner swaying outside the Dom, advertisements for the EPI proclaimed the importance of the show that was happening live every night at the Dom and the significance of the elements

87 that were occurring all at the same time; the concurrent nature of the EPI, arguably more important to the experience of the show than any individual element, was promoted heavily.38 A firm definition of the show was also in flux during the month at the Dom; ads (Fig. 34-35) referred to the show as Warhol’s discotheque and “Andy Warhol’s New

Disco-Flicka-Theque.” Exclusivity, too, was another key component of the EPI at the

Dom; advertisements often included a warning that the party was first come, first served and limited strictly to 750 arrivals. The various marketing approaches worked, and the

Dom was regularly hosting the EPI at full capacity. In the first week, the EPI made

$18,000.39

Soon after its premiere, reviews began surfacing in a variety of publications. John

Wilcock, co-founder of the Village Voice and editor at the East Village Other, thought that the show was a game-changing and welcome invasion of the art world. He described his firsthand experience of the EPI’s opening night in an April 15 article in the East

Village Other:

Colored floodlights stabbed out from the corners, caressing the dancers with beams of green, orange, purple. At one point three loudspeakers were pouring out a cacophony of different sounds; three records played simultaneously. Oddly it all seemed to fit . . . . Twice during the evening were sets by The Velvet Underground, a group whose howling, throbbing beat is amplified and extended by electronic dial-twiddling . . . . From upfront, by the stage, the hall was a frantic fandango of action: the lights flashing on and off, the fragmented pieces of movies, the colored patterns and slides sweeping the mirrored walls, the steady white beams of balcony

38 In terms of the EPI’s importance, the combination of film, lights, music, and nightclub is paramount. Warhol’s films had already been screened to little success. The Velvet Underground had endured poorly received concerts in front of hostile audiences. The union of art and music in a discotheque atmosphere made even more electrifying by deafening sound and blinding lights elevated the sum of the EPI’s parts.

39 Bockris and Mangala, 35. Adjusted to 2016 inflation, the EPI earned approximately $131,700.

projectors, the Sylvania strip lighting writhing on the floor, flashing on and off like a demented snake who’s swallowed phosphorus, the foot-long flashlights of Gerard Malanga randomly stabbing the darkened hall as he danced frenetically in front of the group.40

Wilcock’s description paints a picture of chaos reigning inside the Dom. At least one wall was still in the process of being painted after the doors opened – not, Wilcock noted, that anyone amid the overall confusion would have been able to follow the plot of the film projected on the wall even if the view had not been obstructed. Sudden bursts of music filled the room. Lights swam around the walls and bounced off of surfaces. Many of the people who attended the first night were reluctant to throw themselves fully into the event, preferring instead to grab a drink and hurry back to their table to watch the scene and listen to the Velvet Underground sets from a distance instead of dancing alongside

Malanga, Woronov, and others. Overall, Wilcock found the EPI a success likely to shake up the music and art scenes: “Art has come to the discotheque and it will never be the same again.”41 Underneath Wilcock’s article was a sizable advertisement for the EPI

(Fig. A44), containing much of the same text as the April 7 ad in the Village Voice

(without the title Exploding Plastic Inevitable), and a big picture of Warhol, the Velvet

Underground, Nico, Malanga, Morrissey, and light operator Danny Williams in a casual pose of effortless cool. Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, and Warhol all wore black sunglasses, and the rest of the crew looked into the camera with unsmiling detachment.

As a whole, the assembled EPI players were impossibly cool and, through their photograph, beckoned carelessly for others to join the party.

40 Wilcock in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 9-10.

41 Ibid.

Other articles about the EPI followed. Mitch Susskind and Leslie Gottesman for the Columbia Daily-Spectator noted that Warhol had “talent for finding the good bad,” describing Nico as a poor singer who nonetheless elicited a real response from listeners.

Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga, who danced and shimmied and sometimes acted out the violent or drug-addled scenes from Velvet Underground lyrics, were described as clearly having fun onstage. Warhol, Susskind and Gottesman concluded, “still has the best entertainment in New York.”42 A Newsweek article from April 25, 1966, suggested that Warhol had the potential to incorporate happenings fully into Pop Art with the EPI.43

Striking among reviews is the dramatic language used to illustrate the EPI to readers. In the Fire Island News, George English’s description of the EPI is itself a rhythmic, powerfully urgent piece of writing that emphasizes the simultaneity of the show’s moving parts:

The rock & roll music gets louder, the dancers get more frantic, and the lights start going on and off like crazy. And there are spotlights blinking in our eyes, and car horns beeping, and Gerard Malanga and the dancers are shaking like mad, and you don’t think the noise can get any louder, and then it does, until there is one big rhythmic tidal wave of sound, pressing down around you, just impure enough so you can still get the best; the audience, the dancers, the music and the movies, all of it fused together into one magnificent moment of hysteria.44

42 Mitch Susskind and Leslie Gottesman, “Keep Your Cool: An Exploding World,” Columbia Daily-Spectator, April 27, 1966, reprinted in García 27. The title of this article perhaps points to a sentiment that wild spectacle like the EPI was growing in popularity and influence.

43 “The Story of Pop: What It Is and How It Came To Be,” Newsweek, April 25, 1966, reprinted in García, 27.

44 George English, “The Worst Is Yet To Come,” Fire Island News, June 4, 1966, quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 34. Also quoted in Barry Miles, Hippie (London: Octopus, 2003), 254.

Far from the disdainful reviews that followed the Andy Warhol/Velvet Underground project from the outset, reviews of the New York EPI were far more receptive and positive. If reviewers like Seymour Krim, Archer Winsten, and Bosley Crowther had remained deliberately apart from the early performances of what became the Exploding

Plastic Inevitable to cast disparaging eyes over what they deemed inane, oddball proceedings, Dom EPI reviewers were more willing to embrace the show and its visual and aural bedlam as an adventure more important to experience than to define or qualify.

The performers, too, found their new audience more agreeable than the types who pulled fire alarms or abandoned their “Up-Tight” performances, although sometimes the wildness of the show was still too much for some attendees. Visitors were occasionally so upset by what they saw that they struck out at the performers. Ronnie Cutrone, a teenager who joined the EPI as a dancer:

If you could get somebody to see the show, nine times out of ten they would love it, simply because they’d be shocked and the look of the group was great. It was very severe. It scared a lot of people, too. Gerard [Malanga] and I got attacked by guys with beer bottles. They didn’t know what the fuck we were. And when people don’t know, sometimes they get frightened, and they react.45

Drummer Maureen Tucker also found that audiences finally seemed to enjoy their savage sound, even if reviewers were still content to dismiss the Velvets’ catalog as “garbage music.”46 For some, however, the Velvet Underground performances were the best parts of the EPI, while Warhol’s multimedia display was a mere distraction. Journalist and

45 Ronnie Cutrone quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 37.

46 Ibid. Tucker does not cite any specific review, but says “I remember one of the reviewers called it ‘garbage music.’ The reviewers didn’t like it at all.”

91 music executive Danny Fields thought that the spectacle of the EPI served only to hurt the musical impact of the band.

I was a big critic of not showing the band. I always thought that was retarding their popularity. You had to watch a fucking psychedelic light show! All these fucking plaids and watercolors and drippings. I thought the Velvets were fabulous-looking people and there they were drowned out by this god-damned psychedelic mediocrity. I complained all the time about that. I said this may be art or a happening but I love the band.47

In Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of

Punk, Fields expanded on his distaste for the EPI:

I thought the visual effects of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable were stupid and corny, I thought the whip dancing was stupid and corny, and I thought that Barbara Rubin’s slide projections were stupid and corny. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was just like kindergarten, it had nowhere near the power of the music. The music was the real stuff. Had the lights been as good as the music, maybe, but they weren’t – I mean polka dots and films? 48

Still, even if he despised the milieu in which the Velvet Underground performed, Fields admitted that Warhol’s appeal provided the opportunity for the Velvets to play for steady audiences.49 Many others had no such qualms about the band performing amid the mayhem of the EPI. Rather than separating the performances into good elements and bad elements, reviewers often found the show a wholly-realized performance of irreducible parts; whether the show soared or sank, it necessarily contained the music, lights, films, and dances. For writers like Wilcock, Susskind, and Gottesman, the sights and lights of

47 Danny Fields quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 35. Fields also cites the enduring legacy of the Velvet Underground’s music, but not the enduring legacy of rock bands performing with EPI-style light shows.

48 Danny Fields quoted in McNeil and McCain, 20.

49 Ibid.

92 the EPI were just as important as the music in creating a total, ground breaking, all- encompassing multimedia experience.

Not everyone was convinced that the EPI had any artistic merit at all, whether in its art or its music. In April 14, 1966, Sally Kempton’s review of the EPI in the Village

Voice referred to the EPI as “an attempt to instill permanence into a private joke.”

Kempton described the Velvets as “comparatively unskilled” and wrote that Malanga

“shimmer[ed] as if he were in a St. Vitus attack.”50 Kempton’s review opens and closes with descriptions and anecdotes that, in essence, called the EPI a den of iniquity capable of inspiring wayward sinners to repent and mend their ways.51 Writer Stephen Koch remained nonplussed by the juxtaposition of Warhol’s films playing in a “merely barnlike, faintly tacky discotheque” and what he considered the “cacophony and the hideous ‘acid’ maundering of the Velvet Underground’s insufferable navel-gazing guitars.” Koch, who has written extensively on Warhol’s films, first saw Vinyl (1965) at the EPI and felt about the film the way Danny Fields did the Velvets’ music.

I saw Vinyl for the first time at Warhol’s discotheque, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, over the old Dom at Saint Mark’s Place in 1966. Part of the environment, the film was projected on a screen high above the stage amid five or six other films, light shows, and bursting and sliding abstract

50 Warhol’s childhood illness is often identified as St. Vitus Dance.

51 Sally Kempton, “Notebook for Night Owls: Velvet Nineveh,” Village Voice, April 14, 1966, reprinted in García, 23. “It was at this point [halfway through a dance performance], on the night I was there, that a thin, dark girl in a blue pants suit seized her escort and announced to him that she was going immediately to church. Her partner, who was dressed like Lord Byron in a flowing ruffled shirt, pointed out quite sensibly that since it was past midnight she might be better off going to bed, but the girl said that the weight of her sins had grown so heavy upon her that she could not rest another minute without confessing them. Several people in her vicinity nodded approvingly.” One could indeed sin enough during the EPI to prompt a trip to church; besides drugs and evocative music, dancer Eric Emerson used a room off of the main Dom floor as a sex den during the shows. Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 270.

images all over the walls. Silently running up there on the wall, Vinyl seemed to drown in the rampagant [sic] sound and overwhelming, blaring fantasy of that first light-blasted multimedia discotheque. And yet, in that ear-splitting, wall-shaking music box, as deafening recorded rock alternated with the utterly deadening music of the Velvet Underground, the Warhol rock group, Vinyl’s remote, silenced vision of sexual violence assumed a strange admonitory authority over the hall. The silent spectacle of Malanga at his most preening and indulgent, dancing, beating up an “intellectual,” having his shirt ripped off before he is strapped into a chair to endure the torture of his “reconditioning,” all of it seemed to silently beat like the heart of that vast, jangling room laid bare. 52

Although he did not appreciate the EPI, Koch did record an evocative description of the layout of the films on the Dom’s walls. In the end, Koch found the experience unpleasant: “It became virtually impossible even to dance, or for that matter do anything else but sit and be bombarded – ‘stoned,’ as it were – until that bludgeoning made weariness set in and one left.”53 Even with its detractors confused or offended by the show, the EPI enjoyed an overall more positive reception at the Dom than the group had received while banded together under the “Up-Tight” label.54

The boundary between the audience who loved the EPI and the audience who hated it could often be drawn between the coming-of-age Baby Boomer generation and their parents, a division indicative not only of the New York culture scene but of a major shift in the American cultural dynamic. A post-WWII boom in corporate, mass-produced

52 Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World, and Films of Andy Warhol (London: Marion Boyars, 2002), 71. Koch’s description of the EPI is taken from a discussion of the film Vinyl. Koch, like DeRogatis, 51, mentions a $6 cover charge, which would be approximately $44 when adjusted for inflation. The origin of the discrepancy between the $2 to $2.50 fee found in advertisements from the period and the $6 fee mentioned in Koch and DeRogatis remains to be found.

53 Koch, 71.

54 Artist Walter De Maria attended the EPI and thought that the elements together, rather than being corny or distracting, evoked real visceral reactions. Bockris and Malanga, 31.

94 consumer culture led to a perfect storm in the late-1950s and 1960s when the Baby

Boomers, raised in a world full of advertisements and constructed material needs, grew up and stormed the United States with their desire for consumable counterculture.55 By

1965, almost half of the U.S. population was twenty- five years old or younger. American advertisers scrambled to change their communication models by turning advertising into entertainment, humor, or a false cord of connection with celebrities.56 Warhol’s 1966 statement that he would readily and happily endorse anything was both a sign of the times and a flippant way of further establishing himself as an artist who sold out and therefore did not fit the unyielding standard of tortured, introspective, masculine artists.57

Celebrity endorsements meant big business because the buying public felt an irrational affinity for familiar faces; movie stars and rock gods were the new models of behavior, the new kings and queens of American culture. Warhol’s familiar face and associations

55 Christin Mamiya, “Corporations and the Imperative to Consume,” in Pop Art and Consumer Culture (Austin: University of Texas, 1992), 14-71.

56 See Larry Dobrow, When Advertising Tried Harder: The Sixties, the Golden Age of American Advertising (New York: Friendly Press, 1994), for more about this exciting and unpredictable time in American advertising and advertising theory.

57 As discussed in chapter I, before the rise of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism was the main mode of American artistic expression, and it came with a host of masculine tropes, hostility, and homophobia. Warhol and Hackett, 15-16. “The world of the Abstract Expressionists was very macho. The painters who used to hang around the Cedar bar on University Place were all hard-driving, two-fisted types who’d grab each other and say things like ‘I’ll knock your fucking teeth out’ and ‘I’ll steal your girl.’ In a way, Jackson Pollock had to die the way he did, crashing his car up.” While Warhol worked in advertising during the 1950s, this virile posturing was a necessity for anyone wanting to make it in fine art. “The toughness was part of a tradition, it went with their agonized, anguished art.”

drew crowds to the East Village because he was an alternative culture king.58 For a younger generation looking for counterculture, Andy Warhol and his misfit band of delinquents and artists were the perfect endorsers of the underground experience and the cool detachment so fashionable in avant-garde artistic circles. Even as the EPI grew in success and media attention, Warhol was still the primary draw for those who made the trek to St. Mark’s Place to see the EPI; in a sea of “superstars,” Warhol remained the most important celebrity fixture.59 Warhol’s reputation as a king among dwellers of the underground was cemented with the success of the EPI. He had, in his isolated space looming above the unrestrained function beneath him, become the embodiment of

Debord’s celebrity:

Stars – spectacular representations of living human beings – project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles of sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.60

58 Vance Packard’s eye-opening and disturbing discussion of irrational, emotional consumer behavior was published in 1957 and marked a new kind of consumer targeting. In this slim and important volume, Packard details the various ways consumers find reassurance and the ability to alter their identities through the products they purchase; Packard argues that advertising is aimed at needs - emotional security, reassurance of worth, ego-gratification, creative outlets, love objects, sense of power, sense of roots, and immortality – that consumers are not even aware they have. Of celebrity endorsements, Packard wrote, “The third strategy that merchandisers found effective in selling products as status symbols was to persuade personages of indisputably high status to invite the rest of us to join them in enjoying the product . . . . This is particularly true where the celebrity has some plausible ground for being interested in the product.” Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957), 133.

59 Bockris and Malanga, 37. Maureen Tucker quoted: “[D]uring this time [at the Dom] the audience wasn’t primarily there to see us. Andy was pretty much the focus of the whole thing, and they were there more to see what he was up to.”

60 Debord, 24. Emphasis from the original.

Warhol was not only all of these things, but he was so unabashedly and proudly, irreverently delighting in fame and money for their own sakes and encouraging social isolation in favor of meaningful interaction.61 Warhol and his Technicolor drug den filled with distasteful denizens were the stuff of nightmares for many parents in the mid-1960s.

Of course, Warhol was not the sole purveyor of superficial dreams and parental horrors. Even for the period, the Velvet Underground’s sound and vibe were ahead of their time. Their subjects were darker and more violent than radio-friendly pop music, and they cultivated an agonizing sound built around unusual elements like feedback, screeches, and, for a time during the New York EPI, a drum kit made of garbage cans.62

But all of this was good in terms of attracting an avant-garde crowd. Even if the youth culture did not yet understand the Velvet Underground, they knew they wanted to understand and appreciate it. Writer Phil Morris for Circus magazine in 1970:

Their three albums have all received praise in reviews and the first one, which hit the charts twice, has sold 220,000 copies and is still selling . . . . So why aren’t they considered a major group? Why have so many people never heard of them? Why the Velvet Underground mystique? Well, there are all of the “too weird, too far ahead of their time” kind of explanations. The Velvets really were too weird for everyone except the most avant of

61 See Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), (New York: Harcourt, 1975). Perhaps Warhol’s most famous publication, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is filled with vapid and humorous Warholian quotations on everything from love, sex, and death to buying socks and talking on the phone for hours. Take, for example, this quotation from 155: “Everything is more glamorous when you do it in bed, anyway. Even peeling potatoes.” Warhol routinely waxed poetic about voyeurism, isolation, mediated interaction, and consumerism.

62 Moe Tucker’s $50 drum set was stolen and the band replaced it with mikes set up under trashcans. Maureen Tucker quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 37.

the avant-garde in 1966. And it’s doubtful that even those who accepted the strangeness of the band really knew what their music was about.63

While Phil Morris may have lamented and sought to explain the Velvet Underground’s lack of presence in mainstream society, the band was exactly where it needed to be in order to communicate effectively with its intended audience: easy to find if you were looking for counterculture, but difficult to find if you were not.64 The innovative music, provocative lyrics, inaccessible aloofness, and deliberate connection to Michael Leigh’s fear-mongering The Velvet Underground created a recipe for revolutionary musical advancements but would result in little critical or financial success during the band’s lifetime, despite Warhol’s involvement. Serious consideration eluded the band until well after the musicians went their separate ways.65

Warhol’s own decadent description of the EPI seems to validate the fears expressed in Leigh’s The Velvet Underground. Glamorous limousines, drugs, skimpy clothes, and sadomasochistic imagery were all elements of the EPI.66 Warhol said that

“you could close your eyes and hear cymbals and boots stomping and whips cracking and tambourines sounding like chains rattling.” Some of the wilder crowd would shoot drugs into the veins of whomever they recognized, at least once squirting blood across the

63 Phil Morris, “The Velvet Underground: Musique and Mystique Unveiled,” Circus, June, 1970, reprinted in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 166. Circus was a rock music magazine that ceased production in 2006.

64 Warhol and Hackett, 204. Warhol claims to reach people all over the city, but his description of the various groups – “dance, music, art, fashion, movies” – seems to include the groups most likely to engage with the avant-garde scene. For example, he does not list businessmen, religious officials, lawyers, or housewives as people who attended the EPI.

65 Unterberger, 6.

66 Warhol and Hackett, 204. “All that month the limosines pulled up outside the Dom.”

98 floor.67 Danny Williams, the young man in charge of operating the lights during performances, rarely let his strobe light out of his sight because it contained a hidden stash of amphetamines.68 Along with innocuous works like Empire and Sleep, some of

Warhol’s more suggestive films like Blow Job and Kiss were projected on an enormous scale on the walls. Ronnie Cutrone said of the experience:

The great thing about the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was that it left nothing to the imagination. We were onstage with bullwhips, giant flashlights, hypodermic needles, barbells, big wooden crosses. . . . There was a clear image of what the group was conveying, and so it left nothing to the imagination. You were shocked because sometimes your imagination wasn’t strong enough to imagine people shooting up on stage, being crucified, and licking boots.69

The unrestrained, graphic nature of the EPI’s content had tongues wagging and huge numbers of people clamoring to see the spectacle. The popularity of the EPI among the young was especially evident in its enthusiastic and scantily-clad crowd. In Warhol’s words:

The kids at the Dom looked really great, glittering and reflecting in vinyl, suede, and feathers, in skirts and boots and bright-colored mesh tights, and patent leather shoes, and silver and gold hip-riding miniskirts, and the Paco Rabanne thin plastic look with the linked plastic disks in the dresses, and lots of bell-bottoms and poor-boy sweats, and short, short dresses that flared out at the shoulders and ended way above the knee.70

67 Ibid., Warhol wrote that some of his friends (Ondine, an actor in Warhol’s films and an active drug user, and Brigid Berlin, one of Warhol’s superstars also known as Brigid Polk – as in poke with a drug needle – and called “the Duchess” by Warhol here) sent blood shooting right across fashion designer Pauline de Rothschild and designer/photographer Cecil Beaton.

68 John Cale quoted in Rob Jovanovic, Seeing the Light: Inside the Velvet Underground (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 88.

69 Ronnie Cutrone quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 31.

70 Warhol and Hackett, 205.

Shops sprang up to accommodate the flourishing local economy. In Marilyn Bender’s

April 7 review of the EPI, she described the new East Village developing during the period of the EPI, once called Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as a home for “dress shops and curious vagabonds.”71 Business flourished, and so did petty crime. The young customers began shoplifting edgy fashions while advances in shoplifting detection remained several years in the future.72 The underground disregard for conventional tastes could, as in this example, expand into a disregard for conventional laws and mores. Still, the EPI’s major emphasis was not on upsetting the entire bedrock of American culture, but rather on counterculture music, art, drug use, fashion and combinations thereof.73

In the midst of success, trouble brewed. Even in the early days of the EPI, the egos of those involved in the design and performance of the EPI were threatening its existence. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Warhol, undeniably the EPI’s biggest celebrity and media attractor, was not the major source of unrest. Rather, Warhol’s presence provided the EPI’s best means of uniting disparate and opposing personalities and artistic ideas.74 Even so, Warhol was not enough to quell every quarrel. The Velvets’ resistance

71 Bender, Black Jeans Go Dancing, reprinted in García 22.

72 Warhol and Hackett, 205. Warhol’s discussion of shoplifting immediately follows his dissection of the youth fashions. Warhol emphasizes the young people at the EPI, but Tucker noted many older attendees, as well. Maureen Tucker in Bockris and Malanga, 37: “We were getting an older artist-type of crowd.”

73 Other, more radical revolutionaries probably called for such upheaval, but the EPI was not explicitly involved in such an overthrow.

74 Bockris and Malanga, 35. “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Dom provides a perfect example of how Andy Warhol works so successfully with so many different people’s talents and ideas. He has always been a conduit through which multi-talented people who didn’t know quite how to use their talents could find a way to express

100 to Nico’s prominent place in their band was still a bone of contention even as the show at the Dom succeeded; Nico reportedly wanted to sing every song, and would use her feminine wiles in an attack of sexual politics on the male members of the band

(specifically Reed and Cale) to expand her singing role.75 Malanga was concerned about losing his status as star dancer. Mary Woronov, most often Malanga’s onstage dance partner, despised Ingrid Superstar’s attempts to join the dancers and believed that

Superstar’s dancing ruined the choreography.76 Paul Morrissey disliked Barbara Rubin’s involvement and artistic approach, and Rubin disliked Morrissey’s insistent criticism so much that she eventually abandoned the project altogether. Amid the growing tension,

Warhol’s month-long lease at the Dom expired and the last Dom show was performed on

April 30, 1966. As the group prepared to head to the West Coast for the next phase of the

EPI, the project closed its most successful chapter.77

themselves succinctly . . . . None of the ideas being used were Andy’s more than anybody else’s, but it was undoubtedly his presence that gave the discordant production cohesion.”

75 Bockris and Malanga, 36: “As far as relations between the Velvets were concerned there was some friction between the group and Nico because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for her and she wanted to sing them all. Whoever seemed to be having more influence, whether it be Lou or John, you’d find her involved as she went from one to the other, manipulating one or the other with sexual politics, but neither of these affairs lasted very long.”

76 Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (Boston: Journey Editions, 1995), 32-33. “[E]verything was shattered by Ingrid who started frugging next to us like a giraffe.”

77 Bockris and Malanga, 36-37.

101

CHAPTER IV

“WE HAD A HORRIBLE REPUTATION”: THE LAST DAYS OF THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE

It is underground, all right, only not far enough.

Art Seidenbaum, Los Angeles Times, May 15, 19661

Los Angeles Times columnist Art Seidenbaum was ruthless: Andy Warhol’s

Exploding Plastic Inevitable was a cultural blight, and he was going to expose it.

Referring to the poorly complected Warhol as “Andy Peacepimple” (“his name has been changed to protect the guilty,” wrote Seidenbaum), the EPI as “the Ever-Imploding Lead

Balloon,” and the Velvet Underground as “the Peltdown Men,” the writer launched a cheekily contemptuous attack on the show in a May 1966 article. The venue was terrible, band was terrible, the music was terrible, the films were terrible, the dancers were terrible: “The word, darling Andy, is terrible. I can make my own boredom, thank you.”2

A mere two weeks after closing out their month at St. Mark’s Place, the EPI was already suffering through the distinct drop in success that would continue to follow the group for the rest of its existence. The New York underground may have understood and appreciated the nature of the EPI, but attendees and reviewers in other parts of the United

States were not so receptive to Warhol’s spectacular Debordian style. By the time Andy

Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable played its last performance in 1967, the troupe had traveled from coast to coast, recorded an album, attracted myriad celebrities, and been the subject of a film. In spite of such successes, however, the EPI ended its run amid scathing

1 Art Seidenbaum, “Andy Peacepimple Puts a New Complexion on Night Life,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1966, B3.

2 Ibid. Available online through the Los Angeles Times digital archive. The dancers were redubbed “Herm ’n Aphrodite” and Nico was called “Nona Sensuoso.”

102 reviews, intense artistic differences, and poor attendance. The show disbanded not in the exultant spirit of a job well done, but rather with frustrated sighs and dissatisfied acceptance.

In April 1966, even while the EPI reigned at the Dom during the high point of the

EPI’s existence, the West Coast beckoned. A Sunset Strip club called the Trip offered to further raise their star with another extended residency for the now fourteen-person company to perform, alongside tantalizing promises of potential record deals and more money should the show prove a hit in Los Angeles as well as New York City.3 The rush of success and celebrity that fueled the EPI’s New York performances cultivated high hopes among the performers, as remembered by John Cale: “Our expectations rose daily throughout the month of April, when it seemed that everything was perfect.”4 A young agent named Charlie Rothchild took up Paul Morrissey’s duties of seeking out and booking gigs and initiated the change in venue during the third week of performances at the Dom. Rothchild, who worked for music manager Albert Grossman and represented the Fugs and Allen Ginsberg, initially joined up with the EPI during its first performances, telling Morrissey that the show was great but needed a professional manager to handle bookings and box office takings. The Dom was unable to extend their lease of the space into May – a Polish heritage celebration had prior claim to the month – so Rothchild threw himself into finding the EPI a new gig that would expand their circle

3 In Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 283, the EPI is described as a “twelve-person troupe,” but Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga write that the California contingent of the EPI was made up of fourteen people. Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (New York: Quill, 1983), 42.

4 Victor Bockris and John Cale, What’s Welsh for Zen: The Autobiography of John Cale (New York: Bloomsbury, 1999), 93.

103 of influence beyond the New York underground to forge a larger network of artists, poets, and performers interested in underground pursuits.

I wanted to see if I could make this into a bigger-than-New York scene . . . So I contacted the people that ran the Trip at the time about bringing Warhol to LA. I managed to talk them into it, ‘cause they thought it would be a scene, and that all the movie stars would come down and hang out and be with it.5

By the third week of performances in New York, Rothchild booked the EPI for performances at the Trip from May 3-18, primarily on the expectation that Warhol’s fame would draw celebrities to the club. The New York EPI came to a close, and on April 30,

1966, the EPI officially set foot on the West Coast.6

The excitement that propelled the troupe to California began to die as soon as the

EPI arrived.7 California culture was a far cry from the underground antics of New York

City, and the group quickly felt how ill-suited they were to West Coast sensibilities.

5 Richie Unterberger, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day (London: Jawbone Press, 2009), 93-94. Rothchild is spelled “Rothschild” here.

6 A variety of elements, including the number of people involved in the show mentioned above, differ from source to source. Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 42, records that the Trip booking was from May 3-29, but the ads from the period advertise the show from May 3-18. Here, Bockris and Malanga also note that the EPI landed in California on May 1, but John Cale is quoted in Watson, 283, that they arrived on the last day in April. Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (London: Da Capo Press, 1997), 250, states that Morrissey was glad to have the “genial” Rothchild onboard to take up the difficult tasks of booking and box-office organization, but Morrissey is quoted in Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 33: “Even at the first weekend, this horrible Charlie Rothchild came down. . . He said, ‘You have a really great thing going here. You need somebody professional to manage it for you, and who’s going to book the Velvet Underground?’ He said, ‘I did the bookings for Grossman, I could run the box office here with a friend.’ . . . I stupidly let them do it.” Bockris and Cale, What’s Welsh for Zen, 93, also mentions that Morrissey was only too happy to pass those duties to Rothchild, although Rothchild is not mentioned by name.

7 See Domenic Priore, Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock’n’Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood (London: Jawbone Press, 2015), for a detailed history of West Coast rock. The Velvet Underground is mentioned in 124, 178, 180, 232, and 336.

104

Warhol expressed admiration for the beautiful plastic nature of Los Angeles and

Hollywood, but he may have been the only one.8 The rest of the EPI found Los Angeles odious. John Cale:

From the moment we landed in Los Angeles on the last day of April, we sensed something was wrong. Driving in from the airport we were assaulted by the Mamas and the Papas singing “Monday Monday” on the radio. The mentality of the West Coast was so vapid and directionless. Our attitude was one of hate and derision. They were into being flower children and beautiful and all that – they were pansying around. It was some kind of airy-fairy Puritanism that was based on the suppression of adult feelings about what was out there in the world. They were being evangelistic about it but they didn’t really care. As far as we were concerned, we were just getting on with it.9

According to dancer Mary Woronov, the distaste the EPI felt for California was returned in equal measure. Los Angeles did not just dislike the show in general; they disliked every element of the show in particular. Woronov:

California was really strange. We weren’t like them at all. They hated us. For one thing, we dressed in black leather, they dressed in wild colors. They were like, “Oh wow man, a happening!” We were reading Jean Genet. We were S&M and they were free love. We really liked gay people, and the West Coast was totally homophobic. So they thought we were evil and we thought they were stupid. 10

Or, as Maureen Tucker concisely put it: “I didn’t like that love-peace shit.”11 The cultural animosity immediately felt by the crew was only amplified by the time they took the

8 Andy Warhol quoted in Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 42. “I love L.A. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic – but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

9 Bockris and Cale, What’s Welsh for Zen, 96.

10 Mary Woronov quoted in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 17.

11 Ibid.

105 stage to perform; the EPI did not even get one night of unmitigated success at their late night shows at the Trip.12 Things started poorly and became worse.

The EPI’s opening night at the Trip on May 3, 1966, was a sad inversion of their booming premiere at the EPI.13 The Trip booked the Mothers of Invention, a California rock band headed up by Frank Zappa, to open the night. Artistic tensions flared up at once. The Trip’s California crowd loved the local Mothers of Invention, who used their time onstage to mock the Velvets. Lou Reed despised Zappa and called him “the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s a two-bit, pretentious academic, and he can’t play rock & roll, because he’s a loser.”14 John Cale appreciated the music of the

Mothers, but thought Zappa was “silly and offensive” because “he really didn’t know how to be any other way.”15 The Velvets were not alone in loathing Zappa and his band.

Woronov called Zappa “L.A.’s false rock ‘n’ roll god . . . who mocked us, and whom we hated.” The audience took Zappa’s side, whether due to his jeering or not, and the tide was turned against the New York troupe. The EPI was booed by their opening night crowd and never recovered a positive reception from California audiences. Still,

Rothchild’s promise that Warhol would attract celebrity proved true. Members of the

Byrds, Sonny and Cher, Ryan O’Neal, Mama Cass Elliot, and a young Jim Morrison of

12 Advertisements list the performance time as 2-4 A.M.

13 See Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Angel, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 108-109, for an image of the Velvet Underground performing the EPI at the Trip. The photograph is accompanied by a quotation from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order.”

14 Bockris and Mangala, Up-Tight, 42.

15 Bockris and Cale, What’s Welsh for Zen, 96.

106 the Doors were all reportedly in attendance on opening night.16 After its star-studded premiere, the EPI’s next performances were for miniscule audiences. Unlike New York,

Los Angeles demonstrated no interest in continuing the EPI party.17 On their second night, the Velvets finished their set and then turned their amplifiers all the way up to fill the Trip with agonizing feedback. On their third night, the club was closed down by the sheriff’s office due to a well-timed owner’s dispute and the rest of their booking was suspended.18 Trapped in California trying to acquire their agreed-upon fee from the Trip

(the Musicians’ Union told them that they could only claim their entire fee if they stayed in California), tensions continued to grow among the EPI members. The EPI was beginning to break apart, and Lou Reed was looking for a way out of his contractual

16 Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 42. Gerard Malanga quoted in McNeil and McCain, 17: “Jim Morrison came to see us at the Trip, because he was a film student in L.A. at the time. That’s when, as the theory goes, Jim Morrison adopted my look – the black leather pants – from seeing me dancing onstage at the Trip.” According to Victor Bockris, Cher was afraid of Warhol. Bockris, Warhol, 250. In September of 1966, Mama Cass was quoted in Datebook magazine: “[W]e went to the Trip in LA every night to see Warhol and the Velvet Underground . . . hey I dug it all.” “Megamama with the Papas,” Datebook, September 1966, reprinted in Alfredo García, The Inevitable World of the Velvet Underground, ed. Carlos López (Madrid: Alfredo García, 2012), 64.

17 Unterberger, 95. According to Unterberger, who quotes Doors keyboardist Ray Mazarek, the Trip was in negotiations to have the Doors open for the EPI in place of the Mothers of Invention, whose feud with the Velvets made the atmosphere at the Trip uncomfortable. Mazarek: “We were very excited. New York and L.A. underground go head to head, so to speak. It would have been momentous. What a double bill! But the cops closed the club. Too much weirdness, you know.”

18 Ibid., and Fred Lawrences Guiles, Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol (London: Bantam Press, 1989), 251. A discussion of he owner dispute was published in “Strip’s Trip Hit by 3G Pay Claim As Club Shutters, Variety, May 17, 1966, reprinted in García, 42. “The Trip, Sunset Strip rock-roll nitery, has suspended operations. The wife of one of the operators has sued in L.A. Superior Court to obtain $21,000 allegedly overdue on a promissory note, resulting in a sheriff’s office rep being posted to enforce a writ of attachment. . . . Caught in the middle was an act called Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground . . . Claim filed by the Velvet Underground with Local 47 is for balance of tract. Exact amount of claim is understood to be in excess of $3,000.”

107 association with Warhol.19 While in L.A., Warhol had a show of Silver Pillows at the

Ferus Gallery, where he had first stormed onto the art scene. Warhol wrote that he wanted his gas-filled silver balloons to float in mid-air, but they instead bunched up or fell sadly to the floor.20 Mary Woronov saw the show as a reflection of the EPI’s misery in California: “For weeks we floated in a dreamy nightmare, bumping into each other like the silver helium balloons Andy showed at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega. They were

Andy’s good-bye to art, and at the opening he stood in the corner moaning, ‘Oh, aren’t they beautiful? Gerard, why can’t we get to them to hover in the middle?’ But I thought they were sad, trapped in that hot little room, and I began to hate L.A. for the swamp that it was.”21 Even a gallery show by their successful benefactor could not bolster the spirits of the miserable EPI.

With few better options, the EPI reluctantly agreed to go up to San Francisco to play at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium against their better judgment. Since the Trip closed, the band had bummed around the Castle, a rentable faux-medieval stone building in poor repair that rock and roll bands rented to house their crews for $500 a week (hotels were loath to let rockers stay in their establishments). At the Castle, the group was fairly isolated from the rest of Los Angeles, as few people wanted to associate with the EPI. As

Sterling Morrison said, “We had a horrible reputation. Everybody figured we were gay.

19 Bockris, Warhol, 251.

20 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 211.

21 Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (Boston: Journey Editions, 1995), 39.

108

They figured we must be, running around with Warhol and all those whips and stuff.”22

In such close quarters at the Castle, arguments brewed. John Cale:

Lou and Nico had the best room in the Castle. While we sat out the date, tension began to build in the Warhol entourage. Perhaps this was largely due to our being made to feel like aliens on the West Coast. We all missed New York.23

The Velvet Underground used this down time to record their songs, a project begun using money earned in the Dom shows while still in New York at Scepter Records Studios, so that they could shop around for a record deal.24 While working in L.A., the Velvets met

Steve Sesnick, a club owner who took up the role as the Velvets’ manager in 1967.

Sesnick jumped on the EPI train in L.A. as a free-lance manager and got involved with moving the EPI up to San Francisco.25 Graham had been pestering Warhol for weeks to

22 Sterling Morrison quoted in Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 43. The Castle was rundown, but still frequented by big name artists like Bob Dylan. According to Sterling Morrison, quoted in Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 333, little partying went on at the Castle because of the EPI’s reputation. Other members of the troupe were staying at the Tropicana Motel, another run-down establishment. During this time, Nat Finkelstein left the EPI due to a monetary dispute.

23 Bockris and Cale, 96.

24 Ibid. According to Cale, the recording process in Los Angeles contributed to band unrest. Producer Tom Wilson wanted to make the Velvets’ songs more palatable, and Cale and Lou Reed argued over lyrical changes.

25 In Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 44-46, Sesnick claims that the entire Exploding Plastic Inevitable was his idea. “The entire idea was mine. . . . To start the whole Exploding Plastic Inevitable. . . . My room-mate at the time was Tim Hauser who was the founder of Manhattan Transfer. I told him I had come up with this space idea. All that was was an idea of film and dancing and music – space music – and he was working at the time on doing 30s and 40s so we were very diametrically opposed in our personal interests. I mentioned it to Andy at a party at the Factory and he said, ‘Oh gee, Steve, that sounds great. Do you think we can do it?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and we had a series of meetings with Brian Epstein on the telephone through Nat Weiss. Danny Williams was the only one I remember, besides Andy and Edie Sedgwick, who was in the original meetings for

109 bring the EPI north on a bill with Jefferson Airplane, an odious suggestion to the EPI crew who had no interest in San Francisco or Jefferson Airplane. Everyone wanted to be back in New York, and back to a culture that they understood and which understood their project. Lou Reed:

We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It’s just tedious, a lie and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write. I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things.26

Warhol’s description of the objections is more diplomatic.

We kept telling Bill Graham we didn’t want to go up to San Francisco, which was so true: there were big magazine articles out about the new music scene featuring the Velvets, and we felt it would be foolish to be away just at the time we could be rolling all that publicity.27

For whatever reason, the EPI eventually capitulated to Graham’s pleading and packed up to head to the Fillmore.

If their expectations were low, the EPI members were still disappointed in their experience of San Francisco. Promised a pre-existing light show, the EPI arrived to find that Graham had only a projector shining through a slide of the moon and a camera obscura rigged to create a gooey cast on the walls. Light designer Danny Williams was

this whole idea.” No one else involved with the EPI, however, mentions that Sesnick had the initial idea for the project.

26 Ibid., 47. Here, Bockris and Malanga note that Sesnick took credit for booking the Fillmore, but that Warhol gave the credit to Bill Graham, who wore them down with continual requests.

27 Warhol and Hackett, 211. Warhol does not mention specifically which magazines were mentioning the Velvet Underground, but one, perhaps, that caught his attention was “Night Life: The Roar of the Cheetah, The Look of the Crowd,” Time, May 6, 1966, reprinted in García, 38. Cheetah was a wild nightclub in the spirit of the EPI, and articles about Cheetah regularly mentioned the Velvet Underground and Warhol as other discotheque darlings.

110 forced to pull together a new light show to go along with the performance.28 Whatever minor goodwill may have existed between Graham and the EPI dissolved. Sterling

Morrison felt a special kind of hatred for Graham:

I’d never heard of Bill Graham. In fact, I’ve never heard of him since. I don’t know who he is. I just thought he was an insane slob, totally beneath my abilities to observe. He just didn’t exist as far as I was concerned. An absolute nonentity. He knew what we thought of him. The day I arrived at his club, I was thrown out. I just walked in with my guitar and he said, “You, get out of here.” They told him, “You’ve lost your mind, he’s playing here tonight.” He said, “Get out, you s.o.b.” I wish I had.29

Paul Morrissey used his hatred of California to bolster the spirits of the Velvets and the dancers; Mary Woronov remembered him as their L.A. hero. Morrissey yelled out the windows at Californians, dubbed Graham’s club the “Swillmore Vomitorium,” mocked

West Coast music and art, baited Graham’s West Coast sensibilities by dismissing LSD

(the en vogue drug of choice in the California underground), and generally tried to annoy

Graham as much as possible.30 In the midst of the battle between Morrissey and Graham,

28 Bockris and Malanga, 47, lists only the slide projector. Sterling Morrison said that their derision at his idea of a light show contributed to Graham’s dislike of the EPI. Watson, 285, includes a description of “a camera obscura with a glass in a bowl that created an amorphous goo floating across the wall. That was all. The EPI informed him that they did not consider this a light show, and Danny Williams organized a new one.”

29 Bockris and Malanga, 47.

30 Watson, 285. Eventually, Morrissey was rewarded with a spectacular outburst by Graham. Graham thought the EPI was made up of East Coast slobs, and the tangerine peels that Morrissey left strewn on the Fillmore’s floor were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Bockris and Malanga, 48: “Graham stared down at the peels, and he got livid. I don’t remember his exact words, but started yelling – things like ‘you disgusting germs from New York! Here we are, trying to clean up everything, and you come out here with your disgusting minds and whips!’” Unexpectedly, Warhol and Hackett, Popism, 214, quoted Morrissey speaking in a very Warholian fashion about Los Angeles and San Francisco in a couple of paragraphs laden with backhanded compliments. In the end, Morrissey gave thanks for New York degenerates and hoped “for a great resurgence of good old alcoholism.”

111 the Velvets played at nine in the evening on May 27 and May 28 on a bill with the

Mothers of Invention and Jefferson Airplane: the show was called Pop-Op Rock and banked heavily on Warhol’s name to bring in a big audience. The Fillmore packed full of people, and Graham reportedly made a hefty sum. The EPI played on two nights at the

Fillmore before filing into an airplane to return to their beloved New York, as Mary

Woronov wrote, “like Napoleon from Russia, in utter defeat.”31

If the EPI felt utterly out of its depth on the West Coast, the feeling is reflected in the strange design of advertisements used to promote their California gigs.

Advertisements for the Trip performances were shared with promotions for acts like

Johnny Rivers and the Gentrys at Whisky a Go Go, another local club; in some ads, space was split horizontally, on others diagonally. Ads in the Los Angeles Free Press (Fig.

A45) featured fussy typefaces more at home on a supper club menu than an advertisement for an edgy show like the EPI. Warhol’s name was still prominently placed at the top of the ad, but most of the heavy text from early advertisements was cut. In place of dancing and blowing one’s mind, the Trip invited readers to conveniently “Flip out! Skip out! Trip out!” and described Warhol’s films as “curious movies.” “Exploding” was dropped from the title; Advertisements (Fig. A46-A47) run in KRLA Beat, a music newsletter, also shared space with Whisky a Go Go acts, but favored a clean, sans-serif

31 Woronov, 45. Gerard Malanga was arrested and spend a night in jail after their last Fillmore performance for taking his whip to an all-night cafeteria, which caused a complication in their flights back to New York. Warhol apparently attempted to use the complication as a power play. Bockris and Malanga, 48, where the arrest is discussed, makes no mention of a power struggle, but Watson, 286, and Woronov, 45-46, both reference Warhol tormenting Malanga by telling him that he would not pay to have Malanga flown back to New York.

112 typeface in black and red ink – one even omits Warhol’s name entirely.32 Playful images like a can labeled “Cream of Trip,” a reproduction of the April 25, 1966, edition of

Newsweek featuring a Lichtenstein-style comic book explosion, and Batman in profile adorned these advertisements. Around one advertisement, a series of exclamations slammed together form a bold red border: “krunch,” “klang,” “zocko,” zap,” “bang,”

“powk,” “krash,” “zowie,” and “snap.” Still, the ads lack the Warholian kitchen-sink element of the New York ads that listed the many and sundry parts of the EPI.

Photographs of the bands playing at Whisky a Go Go are also a far cry from the cool aloofness of Velvet Underground photographs, in which the members often looked desperately hungover or as though they were coming down from a terrific drug high and could not be bothered to smile for the camera. The Gentrys, in contrast, are caught in a shot both candid and posed; the members are dressed in suits and arranged like a boys’ choir, with neatly combed hair and matching ties, but two members of the group look as though they are talking and not everyone is looking right at the camera. Johnny Rivers, tauted as the King of the Go-Go sixties, was photographed performing in a sea captain’s hat. Compared to the sullen Velvets, these acts looked downright wholesome. Posters for the Fillmore show (Fig. A48) lost even more of Warhol’s neat advertising aesthetic, favoring undulating, bulbous orange or pink letters in place of the sharp letters and word dense design of the early advertisements. The EPI may have headlined the show, but their style was not reflected in these marketing images.

Besides the look of the musicians advertised alongside the EPI, the music produced by the acts was markedly different from the Velvets’ sound. Johnny Rivers’

32 The advertisements reprinted in García, 41 and 43, are incorrectly labeled KLRA instead of KRLA.

113 smooth vocals, catchy songs, charisma, affection for the venue, and playful interactive rapport with his audience – all evident in the various live albums recorded at Whisky a

Go Go – is as removed from the Velvet Underground’s style as Roy Lichtenstein’s public person was from Warhol’s.33 The Gentrys likewise produced radio-friendly, inoffensive songs to which a crowd could easily dance. Their big hit, “Keep On Dancing,” even encourages it, mentioning a couple of popular dances of the 1960s that the singer wants to see from his girl. The Velvet Underground’s music, already otherworldly and off- putting to many audiences, is even more difficult when compared with easily consumed

Pop music that invited people nearer with their approachable looks and danceable tunes.

Even the Mothers of Invention, who regrettably kept getting thrown together with the

Velvets in California, had a less offensive sound than the Velvet Underground and benefitted from playing to a home crowd. The EPI was entirely out of its comfort zone.

Reviewers of the brief residence at the Trip and the even briefer residence at the

Fillmore had little appreciation for the show and made their displeasure known; reviews harkened back to the first dreadful reviews when the show had been ‘Andy Warhol, Up-

Tight.’ Art Seidenbaum’s Los Angeles Times review was among the most savage, launching an attack on the EPI that did not just criticize the show and its design but also the individuals involved on a personal level. Even those who attended the show could not escape Seidenbaum’s style of keen and sarcastic dissection:

Up come the Rolls-Royces filled with hairy animals dressed in human clothing. Out on the sidewalk, people congratulate other people for having

33 Rivers recorded multiple live albums at the club, including At the Whisky à Go Go, Here We à Go Go Again!, and Meanwhile Back at the Whisky à Go Go.

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the exquisite taste and fortunate connections to attend this historic opening.34

Celebrities, models, art collectors, writers, and artists were mentioned as those among the

“ordinary furry lemmings who fork the mother tongue, yeah, yeah.” The EPI itself was, as far as Seidenbaum was concerned, blatantly atrocious, but just as bad were those who pretended to enjoy or understand the performance. The EPI was a classic case of the emperor’s new clothes:

And so we are the butt of every new Andy that comes along with a tinfoil gimmick and a bag of abstruse tricks. The joke, nightly, is on us because so much of the underground lives by our lack of wits. Afraid of our own faults, we are afraid to condemn the faults of the far out – even when they go nowhere. What Peacepimple offers is neither art nor order, but contempt, contempt which is death by negation.35

The show had, in Seidenbaum’s opinion, no redeeming qualities and was certainly not worth the $3 entrance fee or the $1.25 cost per drink, “which is reasonably dear lip service. And we still congratulate ourselves for being here, believing the joke is on them.” The entire underground scene was devoid of value and survived only because others were afraid of looking unsophisticated by condemning it. The best way to deal with the EPI was to dismiss it wholesale and not make the mistake of believing that hidden depth existed under the EPI’s surface.36 KFWB/98 Hitline Magazine published a review that contained much the same sentiment:

The crowd was usually silent after each number with maybe a few slow claps, and many people walked out. The problem here is that most people are probably afraid to criticize this – which it really deserves – possibly

34 Seidenbaum, B3. A cartoon by Eddie Ronan of a crowd, a band, and photographers accompanied the article.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

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because they are afraid of being thought of us “un-hip,” . . . certainly the biggest sin in today’s society. In reality, the truly hip person is intelligent, aware, and has the ability to discern between real art and just plain bad taste.37

On a similar note, Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle organized his article around the phrase “all sizzle and no steak.” Gleason thought Warhol was selling nothing in the guise of something. While the New York audiences and reviewers may have been more receptive to the EPI’s Warholian emptiness dressed up as substance, Gleason found not one redeeming quality in the event; he even described Nico, whose beauty was almost universally celebrated by reviewers, as “Mick Jagger in drag.” The dancing was “crude,” the music “was really pretty lame,” and the whole event was “very campy and very

Greenwich Village sick.”

But the worst thing is that it was non-creative and hence non-artistic. It was not new at all, everything but the whips bit has been done better here. In fact, it was one of the dullest light shows I’ve seen at the rock dances. Light projections that ordinarily are seen at the Fillmore, at the Avalon and at other dances such as the ones in Berkeley at the Veteran’s Hall and Harmon Gym, were all more interesting because they were creative.38

Gleason’s summation of the EPI’s sins is among the harshest criticisms they received, stripping the EPI of any redeeming qualities, artistic or otherwise. In his estimation, the show was not even new.

Not every reviewer hated the EPI. Paul Jay Robbins, a contributor to the Los

Angeles Free Press (which is billed on its website today as “The True Alternative to

37 Burton, “Trip Blows One,” KFWB/98 Hitline Magazine, May 1966, reprinted in García, 54.

38 Ralph J. Gleason, “The Sizzle that Fizzled,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 1966, reprinted in The Velvet Underground: New York Art, ed. Johan Kugelberg (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 110, and García, 51, labeled unknown publication. Another article from an unknown publication is “Unsafe At Any Speed,” a brief criticism of the EPI that quotes Cher, Tony Clive, and Gus Tassell. See García, 52.

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Corporate-Controlled Media”), thought the EPI was as vile as Gleason argued, but found the show successful from a perspective connected to Debord’s view of contemporary spectacle:

Warhol’s show [The Exploding Plastic Inevitable] is decadence, clean as a gnawed skull and as honest as a crap in the can. It is only an extrusion of our national disease, our social insensitivity. We are a dying creature, and Warhol is holding our failing hand and sketching the carcinoma in our soul.39

Whether it were new or not, Robbins thought the EPI was a triumph because it was wholly repulsive in its perfect representation of consumerism and materialistic superficiality: “[E]verything Western culture has formented [sic] and eked out is plastic: sterile, mechanistic, anti-human, and transparent. We are synthetic and tasteless.”40 For

Robbins, both the show and Warhol as an artist should not be accepted at face value, but rather appreciated as a sobering and all too accurate representation of society.41 Some reviewers, like the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas, even let slip some positive language – “For once, a Happening really happened, and it took Warhol to come out from

New York to show how it’s done” – before falling back upon the frequent criticism that

Warhol was “the biggest put-on of them all.”42

39 Paul Jay Robbins, “ Andy Warhol and the Night on Fire,” Los Angeles Free Press, May 13, 1966, reprinted in García, 40, and All Yesterdays’ Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print 1966-1971, ed. Clinton Heylin (London: Da Capo Press, 2005), 15-19. The Los Angeles Free Press’s website is available at www.losangelesfreepress.com.

40 Ibid.

41 Watson, 284, notes that Robbins does not use a humorous slant, as Seidenbaum and so many others before and after him did, to criticize and dismiss the EPI.

42 Kevin Thomas, “A Far-Out Night with Andy Warhol,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1966, reprinted in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 12-14.

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In San Francisco, skeptical reviews continued to plague the EPI. Philip Elwood in the San Francisco Examiner wrote that Warhol’s rock show was less than groundbreaking to San Francisco, but he praised the Velvet Underground for effective use of amplifier feedback and appreciated the “fierce urgency about the production.”43 KRLA

Beat opted for blending positive and negative, publishing a collage of photographs from the Trip that, while including quotations like “The Velvet Underground should go back underground and practice,” also bore photographs of Ryan O’Neal and John Phillips from the Mamas and the Papas dancing alongside quotations from Sonny Bono (“Out of sight”) and Tony Hicks from the Hollies (“It doesn’t leave anything for the imagination”).44 As for Warhol, he was publicly unfazed by censure. The San Francisco

Chronicle published Warhol’s answer to the critics:

“The show is so simple there’s nothing to explain or understand,” Warhol said here Friday. “People want to explain everything. We took a tour of Universal Studios in Los Angeles and inside or outside the place, it was difficult to tell what was real. They’re like not-real people trying to say something, and we’re real people not trying to say anything. They always want to analyze things instead of just taking them as they are.”45

Behind the scenes, the EPI players were less serene. Poor reception, legal battles, and cultural clash left the troupe feeling battered and longing to return to New York. At the end of May, everyone but Danny Williams, who flew to Chicago to prepare for another

43 Philip Elwood, “Gimmicky ‘Explosion,’” San Francisco Examiner, May 30, 1966, reprinted in García, 52. Elwood wrote about the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention as though they both were associated with Warhol, but the Mothers only benefitted from Warhol’s association with the Velvets.

44 “A Happening!” KLRA Beat, May 28, 1966, 13, reproduced in García, 50. Photographs by Howard L. Bingham.

45 John L. Wasserman, “Conjuror’s Dream From Pop World,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 23, 1966, reprinted in García, 45.

118 set of performances at Poor Richard’s club, boarded a flight back to New York City’s familiar ground and the comforts of home.46

The EPI continued its downward spiral as they arrived in Chicago to play shows from June 28 to July 3 at Poor Richard’s, a former church without proper ventilation to help with the oppressive summer heat. Nico was away in Ibiza, Lou Reed was unable to perform due to a bout of hepatitis, and even Warhol did not attend the Chicago performances, though his name his held a place of honor on posters promoting the event.

Former Velvet Angus MacLise was enlisted to fill in while Reed was in treatment;

MacLise took over drumming duties, Tucker played bass, and Cale and Morrison shared the duties of lead singer. Mary Woronov opted to stay in New York, and Ingrid Superstar filled in as Malanga’s primary dance partner onstage.47 Tensions within the group were at an all-time high. Reed was unhappy at being replaced; when MacLise visited Reed in the hospital, Reed summoned the strength to remind MacLise that he was not going to become a permanent Velvet again. Williams and Morrissey were locked in battle for control over the technical aspects of the EPI. In Chicago, their antagonistic relationship

46 Remarkably, Victor Bockris, whose Up-Tight collaboration with Gerard Mangala remains one of the key resources on both the Velvet Underground the EPI, largely ends his discussion of the EPI at this point in Bockris, Warhol, 253. Bockris makes one brief reference Chicago EPI shows, but only just in passing. Instead, Bockris returns to Warhol’s ventures in filmmaking, perhaps an indication that Warhol’s interest in the EPI project was dead after California.

47 Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 49, and Unterberger, 103. According to Unterberger, Cale played the keyboard while Reed was out of commission. Warhol was supposed to give interviews while in Chicago but sent Brigid Polk instead, much to the chagrin of the press.

119 became so heated that the two physically fought over a single extension cord.48 In spite of the in-fighting and absences of Warhol, Nico, and Reed, the Chicago performances were fairly successful. Set lists were shuffled and songs were rearranged into three performance sets at ten in the evening, midnight, and two in the morning, but the Velvet

Underground demonstrated a remarkable musical flexibility; Morrison remembered,

“Everybody thought we’d be a flop without Lou but we were great. We just had to work a lot harder. In fact, we were held over for a second week, which was at least as successful as the first.” Less pleased were the local press and writers from Playboy, who were disappointed to experience Warhol’s show without Warhol and without both of the

Velvet Underground’s primary singers. Still, the Playboy contingent was impressed enough to hire the assembled Velvets and Malanga to play at a midday fashion show and to include a photograph of the group in the fall issue of Playboy’s VIP (Fig. A49).49

While in Chicago, young filmmaker Ronald Nameth came to the EPI and attempted to capture the experience of the event with an inexpensive 16mm portable

48 Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 49-50. Gerard Malanga: “I distinctly remember Lou telling Angus ‘Just remember you’re only coming back for two weeks. You’re on a temporary basis. I don’t want you to get any idea that you’re coming back into the group again.” MacLise’s anti-establishment sentiments toward the music business also surfaced when he arrived half an hour late to a performance, and continued to drum a half hour after it ended to make up for his tardiness. Sterling Morrison remembered the fight between Williams and Morrissey: “Danny was involved in a Factory power struggle with Paul Morrissey, and Paul won. At issue was who was going to be Andy’s ‘technical’ advisor. The struggle was so intense by Chicago that Danny and Paul actually came to blows over an extension cord – Danny wanted it for the lights and Paul wanted it for the projectors. The only way I could deal with that was to laugh at the absurdity of it all.”

49 Ibid., and Unterberger 107. Unterberger says of the Playboy show: “As with so many seemingly ludicrous and improbable VU anecdotes, this turns out to be totally accurate, as verified by a photograph in the fall 1966 issue of Playboy’s VIP magazine showing Morrison, Cale, and Gerard Malanga on stage with several dancers, some of whom are Playboy bunnies.”

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Bolex film camera, resulting in one of the best representations of experiencing the EPI ever created and demonstrating the dynamic nature of the show better than a still photograph: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable With The Velvet Underground

(Fig. A50).50 The Bolex was a cumbersome camera, only capable of capturing three minutes of film at a time but taking five to ten minutes to reload. For the entire first week of performances at Poor Richard’s, Nameth filmed as much as possible in order to edit together not a documentary film to commemorate the event, but rather a filmic experience of the EPI. Colored lights flash in the video – red, green, blue, pink, yellow – amid frenetic white strobe lights and projected films. Malanga’s handsome face and leonine mane feature heavily as he gyrates in a close-up shot, head thrown back (Fig.

A51). Ingrid Superstar sways and smiles and dances with a whip (Fig. A52). The dancers dominate the screen, but the multi-layered media of the EPI confuse the scene - which figures are real, and which are projected? As the images flicker at breakneck speed, the music of the Velvet Underground screams and screeches at an ever-increasing tempo.

The result is intense and overwhelming – the viewer’s eye has no steady place to rest in the film, and the listener’s ear often has no coherent tune to hear – and underscores how fierce and energetic firsthand experience of the EPI must have been. Also notable are the live recordings of several Velvet Underground songs, like “Heroin” and a long

50 See Unterberger, 104-106, for a detailed discussion of Nameth’s filming process. According to Nameth, the film is unlikely to be made widely available. The film is available in bootleg DVDs and on a variety of video streaming sites. Nameth seems unconcerned with unlicensed reproduction of his film. To watch the film, please go to https://vimeo.com/14888508.

121 improvised instrumental piece, that sound unlike any other recorded performances.51

Altogether, the union of sound and moving images create a compelling slice of the EPI experience.52

Reviews of the Chicago EPI mirrored the criticisms of Los Angeles. Susan

Nelson in the Chicago Tribune came away with the impression that the show was really quite dull underneath its spectacular surface:

Concerts are usually attended for their entertainment value. But after the novelty of the lights and the big amp shocks of the group wore off, it seemed that most of the audience in the loft of Poor Richard’s was bored – and on the verge of heat prostration. To feign comprehension – some tried valiantly – is letting a group which admits its farcicality put you on. 53

A sense of disbelief permeates the Chicago reviews, which tend toward a verbal throwing up of hands. The show was spectacular to see, even if only at first, and futile to analyze.

Warhol flatly insisted that the show had no content worth scrutiny, and yet some

51 Ibid. Not all of the songs were recorded live. The absent Nico can be heard singing, “It Was a Pleasure Then.”

52 The Velvet Underground shows up very little in the film, which is a bone of contention for Velvets fans. Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 50, only says this of the film: “Ron Nemeth [sic] filmed one of the shows. The Velvets hardly appear in it, but the film does have an unreleased live sound-track.” Unterberger, 104, says: “To the grave disappoint of many VU fans, the group can only be glimpsed for a mere ten seconds of this first [22 minute] edit. There are no shots whatsoever of Angus MacLise, while the images of the other band members are brief and impressionistic.” Quite often, Warhol’s films of the band are more visible than the band members themselves. A review of Nameth’s film can be found in Richard Whitehall, “Review of Ronald Nameth’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Los Angeles Free Press, May 1, 1968, reprinted in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 55-56. The film, however, was lauded in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970).

53 Susan Nelson, “Movies, Light, Noise,” Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1966, reprinted in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 21-23. A scan of this article, reprinted in García, 58, is titled “Pop Revue – Way Out? Very In?” The film Eat is not named explicitly, but is described as Robert Indiana masticating a mushroom. The article also makes a brief reference to the EPI heading to London, but such a performance never occurred.

122 attendees, as noted by Nelson, insisted upon arguing that they saw the event’s meaning.54

Michaela Williams for the Chicago Daily News wrote that the EPI was not a total environment but an assemblage and treated the event like a garden weed: “The Flowers of Evil are in full bloom with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable; let’s hope it’s killed before it spreads.”55 Larry McCombs’s review in the Boston Broadside is even more frustrated, his writing style reflecting the confusion of the EPI:

There’s a man strapped to a chair, stripped to the waist, being whipped. Are those his screams? No, they aren’t in time. The man goes on eating. The girl smokes. Is she part of the whipping scene, or has she somehow slipped over from the eating movie? The music is very loud now, with a driving rock and roll beat. The muscular blonde is moving slowly about with a whip which he curls about his body. 56

The review continues in this incredulous and skeptical manner, emphasizing the bizarre event and its various parts. Unlike energetic New York EPI reviews that used long run-on sentences to convey a sense of speed and urgency, McCombs’s review feels tired and limp; he ends with a verbal sigh and shrug:

The musicians and dancers wearily leave, looking wilted. You sit there for a while, finally find your waitress, pay your check, leave. It’s hot. What can you say?57

An article in Variety, on the other hand, was more flattering, complimenting the lighting design, lauding Poor Richard’s for providing a venue for experimental acts, and arguing

54 Ibid.

55 Michaela Williams, “Non-Stop Horror Show,” Chicago Daily News, June 22, 1966, reprinted in García, 57. García inaccurately labeled the article June 21, 1966.

56 Larry McCombs, “Chicago Happenings,” Boston Broadside, July 1966, reprinted in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 24-27. The muscular blonde is most likely Gerard Mangala.

57 Ibid.

123 that the Velvets’ “throbbing cadences prove to be extremely interesting.” Variety brought up comparison to Dada and emphasized the influence of hallucinogenic drugs:

There are those who will say that this is anti-entertainment, in the same way that Dadaism was anti-art art. What the total environmental show attempts, of course, is to reproduce the psychodelic [sic] effect of LSD and poyote [sic] via external stimuli.58

Here, Variety frankly points out the major influence of recreational drugs on the event that other reviewers merely obliquely referenced.

“Heroin” was more than just a Velvet Underground song about shooting up.

Heroin and a multitude of other drugs can be counted major elements of the EPI alongside music, lights, film, and dance.59 For Stephen Koch, drug use was at the center of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable:

[T]hat environment was very much about the drug culture. The word is the clue: Trying to simulate being “stoned,” the environment became a chamber of sensual assault, its aesthetic a battering.60

That the show was disorienting in a way reminiscent of LSD use is unsurprising; Jackie

Cassen’s early involvement in the development of the EPI’s light show likely contributed to that aesthetic from the outset. However, drugs were more than just subjects for songs or inspiration for an aesthetic. Drugs were a way of life for the underground troupe.

Sterling Morrison:

58 “Warhol’s ‘Exploding Show’ Stirs Psychosis in Chi’s Offbeat Poor Richard’s,” Variety, June 29, 1966, reprinted in García, 59.

59 Heroin was the specific drug with which Morrissey taunted Bill Graham, asking why Californians took LSD when heroin could cure the common cold. Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 47.

60 Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Marion Boyars, 2002), 71.

124

When we first showed up [at the Factory], we were downer people – pill people who took Thorazine and all the barbiturates. Seconals and Thorazine were a big favorite. You could get Thorazine from doctors – somebody always had a prescription. It was good, pharmaceutical, drugstore stuff. . . . I’d wash it down with alcohol and see if I was alive the next morning. 61

Dancer Ronnie Cutrone remembered the drug culture at the Factory and at the EPI:

When you walked out of the elevator at the Factory, Paul Morrissey had a sign up on the door that said ABSOLUTELY NO DRUGS ALLOWED. Meanwhile, everybody was shooting up on the staircase. Nobody actually took drugs in the Factory, except Andy, who took Obetrol, those little orange speed pills. He took one a day to paint, because he was a workaholic. That was really his thing. Everybody else shot up on the staircase. . . . You also have to realize we were on Methedrine nine days a week. So even now, I don’t know what the truth was, because when you stay up for nine days straight, anything can happen, the paranoia is so thick you can cut it with an ax. And all the resentments would stay swallowed up for months, even years. . . . everybody was thinking that the other one was out to get them. That was not untypical. There would be “I know so and so’s talking behind my back” or “He’s trying to do this” or “He’s trying to get there.”62

Drug use was rampant throughout the EPI, contributing to both its creative expression and its eventual destruction. The strong personalities that had long threatened the EPI –

The Velvets’ objection to Nico’s presence, Morrissey asserting his dominance, sexual politics among the performers – were made even more paranoid by their drug use. Add in poor reviews, hostile or, worse, bored audiences, and a Warhol frustrated with the overall lack of monetary success, and the EPI was a ticking time bomb.63

61 Sterling Morrison quoted in McNeil and McCain, 13. Mary Woronov’s Swimming Underground likewise contains much discussion of her drug use.

62 Ronnie Cutrone, quoted in Ibid., 13-19.

63 Bockris, Warhol, 253. “In June 1966, as soon as Warhol got back from San Francisco, he returned to his original goal – to make a big movie that would be a huge hit. The only problem was money. Six months’ work with the Velvet Underground had rather than

125

But the bomb did not explode. Instead, the show continued with ever-ebbing enthusiasm and critical attention. Even more devastating, Danny Williams disappeared soon after the Chicago shows, and is now believed to have committed suicide by drowning himself at Cape Ann in Massachusetts.64 The EPI (with new members Susan

Bottomly, better known as International Velvet, and her fashion illustrator boyfriend

David Croland) marched on, performing at the Chrysler Art Museum in Provincetown,

Massachusetts, from August 31 to September 4 in a gig organized by future Velvets manager Steve Sesnick. Difficulties continued the plague the EPI even in Massachusetts.

One of the shows was raided by police, who had received a tip that that S&M gear used by the dancers was stolen. The plumbing of the toilets in their rented housing clogged up and various EPI participants took to throwing feces out the windows. Things were made even worse when dancer Eric Emerson stole a costly painting from the Chrysler, saved from imprisonment by Morrissey who returned the work and smoothed out the situation with the museum.65 Amid the new crises that seemed to crop up daily, the EPI somehow kept going, returning that fall to New York and the Dom, at that time renamed the

Balloon Farm by new management: Charlie Rothchild and Albert Grossman.

filling his coffers depleted them. . . . Andy bewailed the lack of success of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, throwing up his hands in dismay and professing not to understand why they were not making as much money as the Rolling Stones.”

64 Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 84-85. Reed thought Williams killed himself due to adverse effects from the chaotic lighting at the EPI. Morrison was unconvinced it was suicide, believing that Williams may have gone for a swim and gotten injured. A suicide note apparently existed, requesting that Warhol be given two doorknobs that Williams believed he would appreciate. See A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, directed by Esther B. Robinson (New York and Los Angeles: Arthouse Films, 2007), DVD, for a documentary about Williams produced by his niece.

65 Ibid., 52-54. Sections of Mangala’s diary from the Provincetown performances are printed here, detailing a few sexual exploits and drug use.

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Back in New York, the EPI began performing every weekend at the new Balloon

Farm that was the scene of their former glory. The EPI had no other gigs lined up when they returned to New York, and Morrissey felt it was a cheek when Rothchild called to ask if the Velvet Underground would open a new club when it was functioning just like it had during the EPI’s early days. Still, the EPI had no other prospects in sight. From mid-

September to mid-October, the EPI played long shows each weekend from nine in the evening to three in the morning.66 Ads placed in the Village Voice (Fig. A53), the East

Village Other, and the New York Times all announced the return of the EPI to St. Mark’s

Place. Reviews from the New York Magazine, the New York World Journal Tribune, and

In-Beat magazine all recounted the events in familiar terms and with familiar sentiments

– general descriptions of the event, a brief survey of the Velvet Underground’s sound, perhaps a few flippant comments from Warhol, and a conclusion that neither condemned nor championed the EPI.67 Even reviewers seemed to have lost their passion for loving or hating the EPI, no longer weaving together dramatic reenactments or incendiary

66 Unterberger, 114-115, argues that the weekend of October 14-15 was the last that the EPI was performed at the Dom, even though the Village Voice still advertised for shows on October 21, 22, 28, and 29. Sterling Morrison said that they were tired of working for the Dom’s management; speculation about the Balloon Farm stealing aspects of the EPI’s design is also mentioned. Nico also began performing a light version of the EPI, or, as Unterberger calls it, “a very poor man’s version of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Nico running her own backing tracks was too humiliating for Morrissey to witness, so he claims that Morrison accompanied her through a few very uncomfortable performances.

67 An article by Richard Goldstein for the New York World Journal Tribune from October 1966 is reprinted in its entirety in Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 56-58. A similar article, sans author, is reproduced in García, 70-72 but is from New York Magazine. The New York Magazine version of the article omits drug references, so these two articles may be two different versions that Goldstein wrote for different audiences. “Andy Warhol: Plastic Inevitable,” In-Beat, November 1966, is reproduced in García, 80-81, complete with photographs.

127 statements.68 The most passionately supportive and most passionately critical reviews had already been written.

The EPI marched on, first with a Halloween show in a former airplane hangar, then to Ohio (Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland) and West Virginia in early November before playing Ontario on November 12. The EPI then headed to Michigan to play with

Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars and, strangely even for the EPI, performed traditional numbers at a “mod wedding” on the Michigan State Fairgrounds on November 20

(Warhol gave away the bride and then presented the couple with an enormous five-foot tall Baby Ruth bar).69 In December, the EPI traveled back up to New York to play in a

Long Island show called Freak-Out ’66 before going down to Philadelphia to play 8:30

P.M. shows on December 10-11 at the YMHA Auditorium. An advertisement (Fig. A54)

68 Richard Goldstein’s article quoted in Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 56. Goldstein’s article is one of the few to include quotations from the band about drug use and their reluctance to make the event explicitly about drugs: “No one at the Balloon Farm seems anxious to comment on the relation of the drug experience to the creation of the new music. Sterling says, ‘The whole thing is probably easier to understand under LSD because you lose your inhibitions. You stop thinking of this as a series of lights and movies and music and you start seeing it as one abstract whole. The whole thing is twice as heady when you can really let yourself go, but I’m not sure you have to use LSD to let yourself go.’ Lou is more frenetic. ‘The whole LSD scene on campus is foreign to our sound. The universities are dead; the live music is coming out of people like us. And it’s not because we’re on the Lower East Side, and it’s not because of junk. It’s because we’re us.’”

69 The mod wedding was mentioned in “Warhol Here for Mod Wedding,” Fifth Estate, November 15-30, 1966, reproduced in García, 74; Van Sauter, “A Mod Pair Joined in Holy Matrimony,” Detroit Free Press, November 21, 1966, reproduced in García, 75; and “Mod Wedding in Detroit Wierd [sic] Affair,” New Castle News, November 21, 1966, reproduced in García, 77. Another article can be found in Linda LaMarre, “Mother’s Mod Lament,” Detroit News, November 21, 1966, in Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 34-36: “The couple volunteered for the Mod wedding, which concluded the three-day Carnaby Street Fun Festival. Their reward, a free honeymoon in New York and screen test with Warhol.” This article is also available in The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Albin Zak III (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 5.

128 in the Philadelphia Enquirer read that “the critics aren’t wild about this but only the Arts

Council has the nerve to do it.” The ad was correct. Reviewers were ruthless, putting the event down as a curious performance to live through once but not enough to warrant a second viewing. Early shows had shocked or amazed, but the EPI was now just odd – or worse, boring. Crowds filed out early, not because they were so appalled at the EPI but because they were bored, or the venue was too warm, or because the show gave them headaches. The unhip crowd who wanted see the EPI tended leave early, the cool kids who were supposed to “get it” did not dance, and some attendees were more apt to take a painkiller than a hallucinogenic drug. John Lombardi for the Courier Post wrote: “And all his flashing lights, dancing colors, electric noises, whips, boots, tight pants, shades and leather. And it still didn’t work.” Tammy Hitchcock for KRLA Beat noted that “the curious flocked to see the light shows and underground movies and having satisfied their curiosity never returned.” 70 Judy Altman, in an article for the Philadelphia Daily News, painted the scene as a “noisy bomb” that caused less outrage and more disapproving tutting.

They came in droves – the washed, the unwashed, the over-dressed, the underdressed, the beat, the neat, the elite. . . . The thing – whatever it was – went on and on. People drifted in and out, pressing their hands to their heads. . . . “This is the best argument against taking LSD I’ve ever seen, if this is what it’s supposed to be like,” said a man under his breath. . . . It was very hot in the auditorium at Broad and Pine. The Happening had been happening for about three hours now. The lights were still flashing

70 John Lombardi, “Andy Warhol: Pop Goes Fizzle,” Courier Post, December 12, 1966, reproduced in García, 85; “Handy Andy,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 13, 1966, reproduced in García, 87; and Tammy Hitchcock, “Americans Regain Pop Throne!” KLRA Beat, December 17, 1966, reproduced in García, 87.

129

and the noises were still reverberating, but a lot of people were leaving by now. Practically in droves.71

The articles often closed with the well-tread sentiment that the EPI was something to be loved or hated, but the underlying message was that the “hates” outnumbered the “loves,” and that a growing number of “boreds” were plaguing the show.

While the EPI floundered in Philadelphia, Warhol briefly reentered the world of commercial design. The interest in multimedia and avant-garde approaches followed the

EPI into its one- issue newspaper, The Plastic Exploding Inevitable published by Aspen magazine in conjunction with its third issue (Fig. A55). A ten-issue magazine that ran from 1965 to 1971, Aspen was a multimedia journalistic venture invented by Phyllis

Johnson, a former magazine editor, to break the conventions of magazine publishing.72

Warhol, along with writer David Dalton (one of the founding editors of Rolling Stone magazine), designed Aspen no. 3, the Pop Art issue, released in December of 1966.73 The

71 Judy Altman, “Warhol ‘Happening’ Hits Like a Noisy Bomb,” Philadelphia Daily News, December 12, 1966, reproduced in García, 86, and Heylin, All Yesterdays’ Parties, 37-39.

72 Like many underground publications, existing Aspen editions are very rare and valuable. Digital images from Aspen are currently available at www.ubu.com, a website begun in the mid- 1990s to serve as a repository for various types of poetry and later expanded to include other avant-garde forms of expression. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, the website only has access to images and is not capable of producing facsimiles. Please see www.ubu.com/aspen to view all of Aspen’s various editions. Aspen is mentioned in Kristen Alfaro, “Access and Experimental Film: New Technologies and Anthology Film Archives’ Institutionalization of the Avant-Garde,” Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 12 (Spring 2012): 50: “According to [Phyllis] Johnson, the typical bound paper format was limiting; Aspen sought to change the magazine by creating a multimedia, sensory experience and offering its subscribers LPs, paper, and film.”

73 Information regarding the circulation or the audience of Aspen is difficult to come by, but one can assume that the close relationship between the publication and the Village Voice and the East Village Other indicates that they probably advertised each other’s magazines and reached a similar group of patrons. An advertisement for Aspen in the

130 entire issue was devoted to Pop, underground films, music, and drug references; the spirit of the EPI was present throughout, even if the contents were not dedicated solely to that event series. Unlike traditional magazines, Aspen was published in a box and its contents were placed loosely inside. The multimedia and counterculture of the EPI continued in the multimedia and counterculture of Aspen, no. 3, which was full of music, drugs, and writing from underground celebrities like Lou Reed and Allen Ginsberg. The Pop Art issue was encased in a hinged detergent-style box (Fig. A56-57) reading “Now Aspen in an all new Fab issue.” The design of the outer case reflected Warhol’s Pop aesthetic and emphasis on consumerism, while also appealing to the underground scene that reveled ironically in the banal celebrity and commercialism Debord derided. The contents inside were irreverent, covered in quotations from underground characters and distorted photographs of dancers reminiscent of stills from Nameth’s film. In its execution, the Pop

Art issue was much like the EPI: designed by Warhol, but not directly touching him.

While Warhol is discussed and illustrated inside (just as he could be seen or discussed at the EPI while perched in his balcony), he wrote none of the articles included in the magazine (just as he did not dance or perform onstage during the EPI). Even in this document promoting Warhol and his event, interaction with Warhol was mediated.

Inside the box, a number of articles, photographs, booklets, and advertisements swam freely. A press kit-style folder entitled “Music, Man, That’s Where It’s At” (Fig.

A58) held three articles on rock music from the perspectives of the performer (the Velvet

Underground’s Lou Reed), the critic (Robert Shelton of the New York Times), and the audience (photographer Bob Chamberlain), the types of underground who attended or

Village Voice is reproduced in García, 96, reading: “From the research laboratories of Andy Warhol comes this issue of Aspen Magazine.”

131 would have been involved in planning the EPI. The folder also contained a two-sided phonograph with meandering atonal contributions, much like those performed at the Dom during the EPI, from Peter Walker and John Cale.74 Chamberlain provided text and photographs for a 28- page booklet entitled “Homeward Bound: The Rand House,” dedicated to the construction and owners of a home built by hand. Postcard-sized reproductions of twelve Pop and Op paintings from Thomas Powers’s art collection were tucked into another small folder and reinforced the connections among music, art, and film.75 One of the funnier additions to the collections was a reversible underground movie flip book that played a scene from Jack Smith’s Buzzards Over Bagdad on one side, and on the other a scene from Warhol’s Kiss, in which every plate is identical to those on either side and gives no illusion of movement at all; the flip books moved jerkily like objects in a strobe light. These elements, while often witty and entertaining, tended to stay geared toward the arts scene.

The avant-garde’s interest in hallucinogenic drugs emerged in the Ten Trip Ticket

Book, a play on the term “drug trip.” The ticket book included twelve multicolored pages designed like train or bus tickets, but bearing selections from lectures given at UC

Berkeley’s LSD conference in the summer of 1966. Topics ranged from drug myths and

74 Walker served as the musical director for Timothy Leary’s touring LSD events.

75 Each card included an image on one side and commentary by Powers or the artist on the other. The paintings included were: Lanai by James Rosenquist, Intake by Bridget Riley, AA-D by Gerald Laing, Varoom by Roy Lichtenstein, Mach II by Kenneth Noland, 200 Campbell Soup Cans by Warhol, Ghost Telephone by Claes Oldenberg, Reuben (As the Mississippi Flows Down to the Sea) by Larry Poons, Black Map by Jasper Johns, Woman by Willem de Kooning, Vertical Waves by Charles Hinman, and Wheel Man by Ernest Trova.

132 the future of police enforcement to LSD therapy for alcoholics and terminal patients.76

One of the most interesting tickets includes a paraphrased section of a carefully documented LSD experiment conducted by and on Rolf von Eckartsberg, a psychologist from Duquesne University. The ticket book reads as follows:

(Outside on a street corner) . . . leaping, hurtling machines, buses, and trucks . . . barely under control, swerving in and out of their paths, barely avoiding collision with the buildings and each other . . . shock waves of heat and noise . . . galloping monsters now suddenly inexplicably at rest . . . growling . . . what is this . . . why? . . . what is this light glowing suddenly red? . . . why? . . . What does it mean? . . . what unexplainable message is it sending, causing this sudden change? . . . click click click . . . from inside this metal box . . . wires leading overhead to the light, back to the box, then where . . . wherefrom these messages, these commands . . . why? . . . why? . . . what is their purpose? . . .77

This description of the effects of LSD is comparable to watching Ronald Nameth’s Andy

Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable film. Chaotic sensory input overwhelmed the faculties: depth perception blurred in the layers of projections and concrete objects, the loud music numbed the ears, the strobe lights froze time for fractions of seconds, and spotlights shone and reflected and spun with no reason or rhythm. The EPI opened a variety of questions to its viewers and provided few, if any, answers. Unsurprisingly, the

76 The parties quoted in the Ten Trip Ticket book were: Richard Blum from Stanford University; USCO, a group of artists focused on multimedia; William Frosch from the New York University School of Medicine; Rolf von Eckartsberg from Duquesne University; Frank Barron from UC Berkeley; Joseph D. Lohman of UC Berkeley; Michael Harner of UC Berkeley; Richard Alpert from the Castalia Foundation; Eric Kast from the Chicago Medical School; Abram Hoffer from the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine; Huston Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Claudio Naranjo from the University of Chile; Paul Lee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Timothy Leary of the Castalia Foundation.

77 Rolf von Eckartsberg’s “A Descriptive Approach to the Psychedelic Experience,” paraphrased in “Ten Trip Ticket Book,” in Aspen, no 3 (December 1966). The ticket has no page number.

133 counterculture youth of the mid-1960s were drawn to both drugs and the EPI for a mind-

78 bending experience, more interested in exploring than reaching a definite destination.

The last section of Aspen’s Pop issue was Warhol’s Plastic Exploding Inevitable, a one-time eight-page tabloid-style newspaper (Fig. A59) full of articles from underground characters like Gerard Malanga, Allen Ginsberg, John Wilcock, Jonas

Mekas, and articles borrowed from the East Village Other, the Village Voice, and the Los

Angeles Free Press. The first page of the newspaper was undeniably Warhol’s Pop Art aesthetic, but transformed through the disorder of the EPI’s design; advertisements for coffee and other products overlapped with headlines hinting at the paper’s contents.

Peppering the design were funny phrases with little connection to the actual articles, but a general tie to underground interests and senses of humor: “Does LSD in sugar cubes spoil the taste of coffee?” and “The sky is black with chickens.” Ron Tavel and Mekas discussed underground cinema, while Malanga discussed contemporary poetry. Ginsberg, too, weighed in on poetry and the need for political revolution, but said that he was too busy writing poetry to run for office himself. Wilcock contributed what is tantamount to an underground manifesto, separating the Underground from the Establishment, lionizing revolutionary poets, discussing the maintenance of an authentic self, and championing the underground spirit: “It is my belief that nothing is holy; nothing is above challenge and examination, and that the most firmly entrenched ideas, institutions, and individuals are most in need of it.”79 Although Warhol was notoriously uncommunicative and apathetic

78 The theme of drug use continued in Aspen’s run, and the Velvets’ own Angus MacLise was involved in the design and content of its drug issue. Hetty MacLise and Angus MacLise, Aspen, no. 9 (Winter/Spring 1971) is billed as The Psychedelic Issue.

79 John Wilcock, “EVO Freakout: Wilcock on Underground Establishment,” Aspen, no. 3 (December 1966): np.

134 about most subjects, let alone cerebral topics like politics and revolution, he surrounded himself with outspoken personalities who took the name and facial recognition Warhol brought to the EPI and the related Aspen publication and used it to expound on the values of questioning standards, uprooting conventions, and exploring in whatever way possible.

The last EPI show was New York City in May of 1967 according to dancer

Ronnie Cutrone, but the name “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” had in late 1966 begun appearing less frequently in the show’s promotional material, blurring the lines between full EPI shows and gigs played by the Velvets as “Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground and Nico.”80 Even Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story ends its detailed recounting of the EPI around the end of the Balloon Farm performances and skips to the end, as though the intervening performances were not worth discussing. Cutrone describes one of the last EPI shows at Steve Paul’s Scene:

I remember Gerard, Mary and I were dancing and the audience came on stage with us and totally took over. Mary and I looked at each other and had this look on our faces. It was half desperation-half relief that finally everybody was part of it. I looked at her as if to say, “Okay, Mary, looks like this is it.” And she looked at me like, “Yeah, this is it.” Everybody became part of the EPI. It was a bit sad, because we couldn’t keep our glory on stage, but we were happy because what the EPI intended to do had worked – everybody was liberated to be as sick as were acting! From that standpoint it was interesting socially that it happened that way. All of a sudden there were no dancers, there was no show; the music had just taken everybody at that point. That was that time I danced, and I think the last time Mary and Gerard danced.81

80 Unterberger, 130: “It’s unclear whether all of The Velvet Underground’s concerts during their time with Andy Warhol are played under the Exploding Plastic Inevitable umbrella, or whether some simply feature the band on their own. What is certain is that posters for these first concerts of the year make no mention of the EPI, even if the group are still billed as Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground & Nico, with a much smaller line of type identifying them as ‘Verve Recording Artists.’”

81 Ronnie Cutrone quoted in Bockris and Malanga, Up-Tight, 78.

135

While Cutrone’s summary of the EPI’s demise may be overly simple and romantic, the sentiment that the EPI had run its course is apt.82 The seemingly bottomless well of EPI energy was finally fully drained and Warhol’s great traveling multimedia extravaganza disbanded. Warhol handed over the management reins of the Velvet Underground to

Steve Sesnick, the Velvets went on to perform concerts without Nico, and Nico struck out on her own. The EPI dissolved into the history of intermedia experimentation and

Warhol’s other scandalous exploits and celebrity friends soon superseded its groundbreaking status. The same powerful and marketable persona that made the EPI possible has subsequently overwhelmed scholarship on the EPI; assimilated into the canon of Warhol’s mythos, the EPI has largely been stripped of its profound political engagement and influence because Warhol’s larger-than-life presence absorbs much that it touches. More than just a drug-fueled rock and roll concert, the EPI was both a symptom and a cause of revolutionary sentiment among the American youth of the

1960s. In spite of his success and marketability, the art world remained unsure of

Warhol’s contributions to the realm of high art for approximately twenty years following the EPI. Warhol’s status as either oddball or prophet was undecided until the 1980s, when the emerging generation of hot young avant-garde artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and

Keith Haring identified him as a major inspiration and carved his historical place in stone, and by that time the EPI had dissolved into the canon of Warholian exploits as just another superficial venue for superficial people to discuss superficial issues.83 While

82 See Unterberger 130-149, for a more complete rundown of the last days of the EPI.

83 Artist Keith Haring as quoted in Bockris, Warhol, 464: “Of all the people I’ve met, Andy made the greatest impression on me. He was the one who opened up the situation enough for my situation as an artist to be possible – the first artist to open the possibility

136

Warhol is an archetypal Debordian celebrity who existed in a highly-mediated life of observing but not engaging, to the underground pioneers who associated with him he was a force of potential social change for artists, psychedelic drug users, homosexuals, and other underground outcasts. His insipid demeanor and tabloid-worthy antics were viewed as some kind of performative protest. Warhol was a banal Debordian celebrity, but his banality was so explicit and exaggerated that he did not disappear into the mediated fabric of Debord’s highly mediated spectacle. In fact, the EPI was a deliberately

Debordian spectacle, taking the elements of contemporary society that worried Debord and hyperbolizing them in order to cause a scandal and attract the underground population. The EPI provided a location for the counterculture of 1960s New York to gather and played a key role in establishing the East Village as a Bohemian port of call.

Whether he intended it to be or not, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable was an act of underground political, social, and artistic rebellion.

of being a public or popular artist in the real sense of the word, a people’s artist, really. He was the validation and most active supporter of what I do.”

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CHAPTER V

“YOU’D BETTER TAKE DRUGS AND LEARN TO LOVE PLASTIC”: THE AFTERMATH OF THE EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE

I don’t believe anything Louis [Reed] says. He’s crazy. Like the rest of us. But, what would this world be if it weren’t for us crazy people?

Ingrid Superstar, quoted in Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story1

In a 2010 article for Art Journal, art historian Michel Oren sought to correct the lack of critical attention paid to the USCO group, a 1960s-1970s multimedia artistic collaboration close in spirit to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. In comparing the two,

Oren lamented, “Perhaps because of its association with Andy Warhol, the Exploding

Plastic Inevitable (or Velvet Underground) has received the light of critical attention, while USCO has slipped into relative obscurity.” The critical light to which Oren referred is Branden W. Joseph’s 2002 Grey Room article, “My Mind Split Open: Andy Warhol’s

Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” a pivotal article emphasizing the EPI’s importance for intermedia practices.2 Quickly after it was published, the article was reproduced in both

X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s and Summer of Love:

Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s. Joseph’s article also served as the foremost EPI resource in a 2006 article by Felicity D. Scott, again in 2009 in an article by architectural historian Sylvia Lavin, for English professor Jonathan

1 Ingrid Superstar quoted in Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (New York: Quill, 1983), 38.

2 Michel Oren, “USCO: ‘Getting Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head,’” Art Journal 69 (Winter 2010): 76, and Branden W. Joseph, “ ‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 80-107, reprinted in X- Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Matthias Michalka (Vienna: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 14-31, and Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Chrisoph Gunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 239-268.

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Flatley in 2010, and yet again in 2014 in articles by musician and educator Adam Cadell and design historian Catharine Rossi.3 While Oren seemed to indicate that the EPI has been a common subject of critical inquiry due to Warhol’s high profile, Joseph’s now fourteen-year-old article is the best and most actively-engaged historical and critical analysis of the EPI written in the fifty years since its inception. At under thirty pages, however, Joseph’s article raises more questions than it can answer and relegates major contemporary sources on the EPI and on mid-sixties culture, like Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Ronald Nameth’s film of the EPI’s Chicago incarnation, to perfunctory mentions in the endnotes. Despite the involvement of major cultural figures like Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground at the height of their artistic powers, the

EPI has often been an amusing but inessential side note in art historical scholarship; certainly fun to mention, but dispensible as a topic. Oren’s so-called “light of critical attention” would perhaps be better deemed a thin ray of criticism. The reasons for this inattention are myriad, and range from the personal to the practical: lack of lasting imagery, easily separated creative elements, poor timing, loss of interest by the parties involved, a surfeit of dismissive critics, and overshadowing by more successful endeavors.

For an event that would seemingly make an edgy and thrilling Hollywood feature, the EPI is accompanied by a marked shortage of interest; where the EPI does appear, it

3 See Felicity D. Scott, “Acid Vision,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 22-39; Sylvia Lavin, “Andy Architect™ – Or, a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Disco,” Log 15 (Winter 2009): 99-110; Jonathan Flatley, “Like: Collecting and Collectivity,” October 132 (Spring 2010): 71-98; Dr. Adam Cadell, “Subterranean Blues: World Revolution and the Underground Violinists,” Perspectives of New Music 52 (Fall 2014): 111-140; and Catharine Rossi, “Architecture Goes Disco,” AA Files 69 (2014): 138-145. In many of these articles, the EPI is mentioned in passing and Joseph’s article is proffered as an excellent resource for those seeking more information on the event.

139 often acts as a diverting offshoot to other, bigger conversations of expanded cinema,

Warhol’s overall oeuvre, or filmmaking. No books or documentaries are dedicated to the

EPI; few articles address it and even fewer analyze it with a critical eye. The EPI is a minor story included in most if not all popular biographies of Warhol’s life. Many of those biographies were written by close friends or colleagues who were present during the EPI or had contact with those who were. Like Warhol’s own tendency to change his life story each time he told it, each biography tends to paint a slightly different picture of events or emphasize the recollections of different attendees. The end result is often only nominally different, and rarely involves more than relaying the scandalous or shocking shenanigans of the EPI in an amusing fashion. In more academic scholarship, the trend of touching on the EPI in one of a hundred contexts and then quickly moving on is another frustrating element in the search for EPI analysis. For example, J. J. Murphy’s The Black

Hole of the Camera deals briefly with the EPI as an influence on Warhol’s later filmmaking, but cannot dedicate much time to the organization or to the implications of the EPI in a broader sense.4 Matthew Wilson Smith briefly touches on the EPI and its relationship to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in his book The Total Work of Art:

From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, but, like Murphy’s volume on Warhol and filmmaking, the scope of the book is too broad to allow for any extensive investigation into the EPI itself.5 As such, critical engagement of the EPI exists across Warholian scholarship in tantalizing, undeveloped, and unconnected segments.

4 J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 138, 140, 154-156, 172, 189.

5 Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007) 136-140.

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The EPI is also included in many books whose topics encompass the event, but do little to advance its study. Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work, an exhibition catalogue accompanying a show by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, seems the perfect opportunity to commission an article about the EPI; instead, the EPI received a single page of dedicated but general text followed by pages of images ranging in rarity and relevance to the actual EPI. Photographs of performances, scans of posters, reproductions of slides, sheet music, and stills from the films projected at the EPI fill the pages, but nothing of critical import is applied to them.6 The Velvet Years: Warhol’s

Factory 1965-67, with text by Lynne Tillman and photographs by EPI light operator

Stephen Shore, is another book that would seem a prime place to deal with the EPI. The book is instead a collection of brief and general interviews from frequent Factory figures, including the Velvet Underground, Jonas Mekas, Gerard Malanga, and others involved in the EPI. The interviewees spoke largely about their relationships to and impressions of

Warhol, but the EPI was mentioned mostly in passing.7 In Patrick S. Smith’s Andy

Warhol’s Art and Films, the EPI surfaces multiple times in quick, superficial references;

Smith does not critique or investigate the event beyond a few interviews in which the EPI

6 Greg Pierce, “All Here and Now and the Future . . . Then: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” in Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work, ed. Stéphane Aquin (Montreal: Prestel, 2008), 140. Branden W. Joseph also contributed an article to this volume, “No More Apologies: Pop Art and Pop Music, ca. 1963,” 122-129, about the Druds, a minor musical project Warhol undertook with other artists to start a band. As to the relevance of the images included in the EPI section of the book, some illustrations include scans of original sheet music and photographs not directly from the EPI.

7 Stephen Shore and Lynne Tillman, The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995).

141 is brought up.8 Alan R. Pratt’s The Critical Response to Andy Warhol contains not a single critical article about the EPI; the closest is a Museum of Modern Art retrospective review by Carter Ratcliff that says, in a brief digression, that the EPI was “implosive” instead of explosive but was indeed “inevitable” because of Warhol’s increasing presence in the art scene.9 Even Van M. Cagle’s Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and

Andy Warhol dedicates a mere seventeen pages to Warhol’s entire involvement with the

Velvet Underground, preferring instead to focus on Warhol’s later influence on the glam rock of the 1970s; only a handful of those pages deal with the actual Exploding Plastic

Inevitable and Cagle’s analytical interest is not in the EPI itself but on the Velvet

Underground’s prefiguring of “glitter rock.”10 The logic behind the many citations of

Branden W. Joseph’s dedicated EPI article becomes clear: his commentary is an oasis of

EPI analysis amid a desert of cursory, indefinite, and acritical mentions.

8 Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), 139, 142, 181, 220, 236, 237, 402, 403, 449-452. Of greatest interest for the EPI is an interview with Ondine, a Factory favorite, in which he describes Gerard Malanga shooing him offstage at Rutgers during an early Up-Tight performance and causing Ondine to leave Warhol’s inner circle temporarily. Ondine claimed that Warhol fired Malanga for two years when he discovered why Ondine had left, but this timeline does not match photographs and other remembrances of the EPI in which Malanga features very prominently during this period. 449-451.

9 Carter Ratcliff, “Master of Modern Paradox,” Art International 7 (Summer 1989): 74- 83, reprinted in The Critical Response to Andy Warhol, ed. Alan R. Pratt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 214-221. Carter Ratcliff later wrote Andy Warhol (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), an introductory book to Warhol’s life and works.

10 Van M. Cagle, Constructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol (London: Sage, 1995), 79-96. Like Cagle, Dave Thompson’s Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell discusses the glitter rock and the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed. Dave Thompson, Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed (New York: Backbeat Books, 2009).

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The EPI’s relatively meager historical discussion is even more curious and perplexing when the vast literature on Warhol is considered. David Bourdon, Wayne

Koestenbaum, Victor Bockris, Gary Indiana, Fred Lawrence Guiles, and Bob Colacello are among those who have published biographies of the Pop icon. More specific books delve into particular elements of the enigmatic artist. Besides the many hundreds of highly specific articles about the artist, books have been regularly released covering all manner of topics related to Warhol: Reva Wolf dedicated an entire book to Warhol, gossip, and poetry; Kelly M. Cresap’s Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete consists of a long dissection of Warhol’s naifish persona; the Warhol Museum produced a lavish volume about the relationship between Warhol and fashion designer Halston;

Deborah Davis’s recent The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country

Adventure chronicles a road trip undertaken by Warhol and friends in 1963; Blake

Stimson focused on Warhol’s religion, education, commercial background, and adoration of Shirley Temple in Citizen Warhol; an exhibition catalogue from a 2002 show at the

Warhol Museum details Warhol’s art and object collections; the list goes on.11 Warhol’s art also fills dozens of high quality monographs dedicated to just Warhol’s portraits, or just his self-portraits, or just his portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, or the Death and Disaster

Series, or his headline prints, or the last decade of his life, or his album covers, or his magazine design, or his poster design, or his films, or his nudes, among an abundance of

11 Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Kelly M. Cresap, Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), Abigail Franzen-Sheehan, ed., Halston and Warhol: Silver and Suede (Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum, 2014); Deborah Davis, The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure (New York: Atria Books, 2015); Blake Stimson, Citizen Warhol (London: Reaktion Books, 2014); and John W. Smith, ed., Possession/Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting (Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum, 2002).

143 others.12 Alongside these publications are memoirs and tell-alls either by or about

Warhol’s inner circle, like Edie Sedgwick and Ultra Violet, and even more books that use

Warhol’s famous to entice readers to their topics: Elizabeth Currid’s The Warhol

Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, Robert Hofler’s

Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange – How a Generation of Pop

Rebels Broke All the Taboos, Andreas Killen’s 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate,

Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America, and Claudia Kalb’s Andy Warhol Was a

Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities.13 And this does not include the essay collections, photographic memoirs, introductory volumes, and general Pop Art

12 See Tony Shafrazi, ed., Andy Warhol Portraits (New York: Phaidon, 2007); Dietmar Elger, ed., Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits, trans. Bernhard Geyer and John S. Southard (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2004); Emily Florido, ed., Warhol Liz (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011); Ingrid Mössinger, ed., Andy Warhol: Death and Disaster, trans. Pauline Cumbers (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2014); Molly Donovan, Warhol: Headlines (New York: Prestel, 2011); Joseph D. Ketnerr II, Andy Warhol: The Last Decade (New York: Prestel, 2009); Paul Maréchal, Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Record Covers (New York: Prestel, 2015); Paul Maréchal, Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Magazine Work 1948-1987 (New York: Prestel, 2014); Paul Maréchal, Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Posters 1964-1987 (New York: Prestel, 2014); Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006); and Linda Nochlin, Andy Warhol: Nudes (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1995).

13 Many of Warhol’s so-called “silver sleaze” have written books about their years with the artist or been the subject of biographies, like Ultra Violet [Isabella Collin Dufresne], Famous for Fifteen Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988) and Craig B. Highberger, Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (New York: Penguin Group, 2005). See also Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Robert Hofler, Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange – How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014); Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); and Claudia Kalb, Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2016). Warhol is often used as a cultural touchstone to ground readers in a particular time or topic.

144 analyses that exist in large numbers. Warhol’s life, friends, art, inspirations, and influences have been turned inside out and examined from dozens of perspectives.

Where, then, is the EPI book, and why has it taken so long to arrive?

The answer to the EPI’s conspicuous absence perhaps lies partly in Warhol himself: Andy Warhol’s highly effective public persona created a market for books, both for the casual fan and the art historian, that often follow a biographical model. Warhol’s most iconic subjects are regularly tied back to events in his life: he painted celebrities because he read fan magazines as a sick child, he painted soup cans because he ate soup for lunch every day, he hired the Velvet Underground because he wanted to make money, he desired financial success because he grew up in poverty, etc. The prospect of puzzling out one of America’s most inscrutable artists through his art is a tempting undertaking.

The inaccessible Warhol, whose interviews were often monosyllabic affairs and whose memoirs often ramble off in non sequiturs, is made approachable through biographical art analysis; through art we see Warhol, and through Warhol we see his art. The EPI, then, offers much less to those demystifying Warhol than his most iconic works. As a notably collaborative effort, the EPI may have born Andy Warhol’s name in bright lights on its figurative marquee, but the combination of films, dance, music, lights, and environment made the EPI a total experience. At first blush the EPI is an attractive Warholian subject

– rock and roll music, sex, drugs, money, commercialism, celebrities, scandal, in-fighting

– but analysis yields little illuminating information about Warhol himself. One could even think of the EPI as an artistic dead end, as Warhol lost interest in the project when it

145 stopped being profitable and never returned to the EPI’s particular creative format.14 The

EPI, then, is an appendage of Warhol’s oeuvre, branching out from his overall trajectory and contributing little to its advancement.

The EPI has survived in Warholian scholarship in discussions of film and expanded cinema, but even that analysis is not without its problems. J. J. Murphy points out that:

Andy Warhol’s major foray into expanded cinema, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), reflected a constellation of factors. It fit in with Warhol’s involvement with the Velvet Underground, as well as his insatiable interest in anything new and different, especially if it related to drugs, youth culture, or the club scene. It was also connected to Warhol’s desire to present his films within a different context. The intent was to provide audiences with a more immersive experience that resulted from bombarding the senses by combining a number of different art forms.15

Murphy, who emphasizes how the EPI fits into Warhol’s creative narrative, foregrounds

Warhol’s films and demotes the other elements of the EPI as “a different context” in which to show them. Critical emphasis on the expanded cinema nature of the EPI is unsurprising since expanded cinema giant Jonas Mekas championed both the concept and the EPI, but marrying the term and the event stifles analysis. Branden W. Joseph incorporated discussion of music into his ubiquitous EPI article, “‘My Mind Split Open’:

Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” but largely music as it pertained to Warhol

(previous musical endeavors with other Pop artists, for example, and involvement with

La Monte Young), not the music of the Velvet Underground. Joseph focused on

14 According to Victor Bockris, Warhol viewed the EPI as an overall failure but decided to use the new-found name recognition that he achieved through its tour to turn his film projects into successes. Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (London: Da Capo Press, 1997), 253-254.

15 Murphy, 154-155.

146 expanded cinema, the EPI as a multimedia event, and theories of modern media from

Walter Benjamin to Marshall McLuhan, but his discussion is almost solely about Warhol or the EPI in general as a Warhol production; the Velvets feature only as a piece of

Warhol’s vision.16 This is not to diminish the importance or value of Joseph’s article, but to point out its insufficiency for the role it has been made to play as a principal source on the EPI. One could argue that even the term “expanded cinema” privileges Warhol’s filmic contributions to the EPI above those of the Velvet Underground, the dancers, or the light operators – Velvet Underground fans could conceivably like to label it

“expanded musical performance.” If subsequent emphasis on expanded cinema diminishes the importance of the EPI’s other elements or participants, dismissing the music and other frippery of the show in favor of discussing Warhol’s films seems a valid option, as Stephen Koch did in his 1973 book on Warhol’s movies.17 If discussing

Warhol’s films is a more productive and serious enterprise than researching and analyzing the EPI, sidelining the EPI as an entertaining Warholian myth is perhaps inevitable.

In the favor of Warhol’s films, too, is that the films have lasted alongside his famous prints and sculptures while much of the ephemeral EPI has faded away. With or without the EPI, Warhol had an impact on pop culture and pop music, even promoting

Pioneer sound systems in several advertisements in the 1970s (Fig. A60). Warhol is mentioned in many musical memoirs, biographies, and compendia, including: Jim

16 Joseph, 80-107. Interestingly, the one person involved in the development of the EPI who gets a sizable mention is Barbara Rubin – another filmmaker.

17 Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World, and Films of Andy Warhol (London: Marion Boyars, 2002), 69-71. This book was originally published in 1973 as Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and Films.

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Morrison: Life, Death, Legend; I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen; Rolling Stone

Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll; Yé-Yé Girls of ‘60s French Pop; Bowie: A Biography;

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock; and In the Pleasure Groove:

Love, Death, and Duran Duran.18 Sometimes the focus is Warhol’s involvement with the

Velvet Underground, and sometimes Warhol is mentioned simply because he moved in the same circles as rock stars or provided inspiration through his art. R.E.M.’s Michael

Stipe cited “Warhol’s idea of the camera being a passive observer” as a major influence on the band’s music video style, and Warhol’s films are considered key predecessors for the birth of music videos in the 1970s.19 In Warholian scholarship, the EPI functions quite conveniently as a venue for Warhol’s films or as a launch pad for his relations with rock stars. Musical connections apart from the Velvet Underground abound in popular media: Crispin Glover played Warhol opposite Val Kilmer’s convincing Jim Morrison in director Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie The Doors; glam rock icon David Bowie portrayed

Warhol in Basquiat, a biopic about Warhol’s one-time mentee Jean-Michel Basquiat; and

18 Stephen Davis, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (New York: Penguin Group, 2004); Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013); Holly George-Warren, ed., Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll (New York: Fireside, 2001); Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe, Yé-Yé Girls of ‘60s French Pop (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2014); Marc Spitz, Bowie: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2009); Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock (London: Paladin Press, 1973); John Taylor, In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran (New York: Penguin Group, 2012). Often, Warhol is mentioned as being at a party populated with musicians, or musicians mention attending a Warhol gallery opening.

19 Michael Stipe quoted in Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (New York: Penguin Group, 2012), 320. In Tannenbaum and Marks, 6 and 12, Warhol is cited as an inspiration for new filmmakers experimenting with music, and Mark Mothersbaugh of the band Devo remembered being a young Kent State student following Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg’s models.

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Landall Goolsby made a cameo as Warhol in the television show American Dreams, a program set in the 1960s and featuring a fictionalized American Bandstand.20 Warhol makes for an easy cameo. His bright white wigs, tight jeans, leather jackets, dark sunglasses, and fey mannerisms immediately identify him as the artist, and his most famous works have become iconic through not only his own repetitive imagery but through endless reproduction on notebooks, posters, shirts, calendars, pencils, sticky pads, erasers, and even shoes (Fig. A61).21 Warhol was a master at producing (or, indeed, being) recognizable imagery, but the EPI resulted in very little lasting imagery of its own.

In 2002, art historian David Joselit asserted: “Little remains of these [EPI] events except for a few powerful photographs by Billy Name and others, a film by Ron Namuth

[sic] that exists in only one print, and the vivid accounts of those who were present.”22

Joselit painted a rather bleak picture for the art historian hoping to recreate a more complete picture of the EPI. The EPI was not just Warhol’s films, or the Velvets’ music, or the blinding lights, or the frenetic thrashing of the dancers, but the total that these elements came together to produce, and that kind of experience is difficult to document

20 The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone (Los Angeles: Bill Graham Films, 1991), DVD; Basquiat, directed by Julian Schnabel (Santa Monica: Miramax, 1996), DVD; and American Dreams, “A Clear and Present Danger,” directed by Lev L. Spiro (Los Angeles: Dick Clark Productions, 2004), DVD.

21 Repetition – Warhol’s hallmark – was also proffered in the late 1960s as the source rock music’s appeal. Robert Somma, “Rock Theatricality,” Drama Review 14 (Autumn 1969): 130: “Rock’s first appeal was gutward – direct if not incandescent, cogent if not complex. It made its point, and if it didn’t make it believable, it was sure to make it more than once. Rock’s success was a function of its repetition syndrome, its perennial power was the easy recognition.”

22 David Joselit, “Yippie Pop: Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Sixties Media Politics,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 71. Joselit and Joseph’s articles were published in the same edition of Grey Room.

149 or reproduce. The participants in the EPI are equally unlikely to have kept dutiful notes or scrapbooks – careful note taking is just not rock and roll. Thus, little remains of the exhilarating performances. To analyze and emphasize the pieces that endure, particularly

Warhol’s films, is the sensible path; through those films we can imagine the Exploding

Plastic Inevitable and the effect it had upon its audiences. Art historians may stress the importance of the films screened, but as one of the few reproducible elements of the EPI those films arguably are more important; the EPI cannot be influential if new artists cannot experience it and art historians cannot critique it. Luckily, Joselit was too rash in his dismissal of the EPI’s surviving pieces. In recent years, a batch of books filled with photographs, posters, advertisements, notes, drawings, documents, and reviews have been released not for art historians or Warhol fans, but for an equally zealous slice of the public: Velvet Underground fanatics.

The books are remarkable collections. Dozens of high quality photographs in color and black and white, scans of programs and permits, posters printed on a variety of colored paper, and rare newspaper reports fill page after page. Although they lack the critical engagement of Joseph’s article, they provide equally important documentation and visual aids for the analysis of the EPI. Jim DeRogatis’s The Velvet Underground: An

Illustrated History of a Walk On the Wild Side, Johan Kugelberg’s The Velvet

Underground: New York Art, and Alfredo García’s truly remarkable The Inevitable

World of the Velvet Underground – a five hundred page tome filled only with reproductions of original articles, reviews, posters, and advertisements – flesh out the musical side of the EPI and emphasize the Velvet Underground as art historians have

150 emphasized Warhol.23 The musical world offers fertile ground for discussion of the EPI, and the number of music history books that deal with the EPI vastly outstrip the number produced by art historians and often contain illuminating interviews with those who were there. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk dedicates its entire introduction to statements from the Velvet Underground and others involved in the EPI. The introduction promotes the Velvets as a proto-punk group that paved the way for punk acts like the Sex Pistols and the Clash.24 Clinton Heylin and

Albin Zak III have both released curated article collections, and Richie Unterberger’s

White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day attempts the herculean task of mapping out the entirety of the Velvet Underground’s existence, including extensive research into the exact dates, venues, and negotiations that took place during the EPI. Art historical work on the EPI pales in comparison to such passion and devotion.25

23 Jim DeRogatis, ed., The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side (Minneapolis: Voyager Press, 2009); Johan Kugelberg, ed., The Velvet Underground: New York Art (New York, Rizzoli, 2009); and Alfredo García, The Inevitable World of the Velvet Underground, ed. Carlos López (Madrid: Alfredo García, 2012).

24 Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, “Prologue: All Tomorrow’s Parties 1965-1968,” in Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 3- 24. Those quoted in this introduction include Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Ronnie Cutrone, Billy Name, and Andy Warhol.

25 Clinton Heylin, ed., All Yesterdays’ Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print 1966- 1971, (London: Da Capo Press, 2005); Albin Zak III, ed., The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); and Richie Unterberg, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day (London: Jawbone Press, 2009). Zak includes only four articles from the 1960s, and only two of them were written while the EPI was performing. Heylin contains far more articles

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Several factors can likely account for the sizable discrepancy between art and music in analyzing the EPI. Firstly, Warhol provides scholars with approximately forty years of professional work to study (not counting his formative Pittsburgh years that often figure in discussions of his artwork), while the Velvet Underground only played from 1964 to 1973. Comparing Warhol’s enormous catalogue raisonné, army of hangers- on, countless parties, sea of celebrity friends, and many notable controversies to the short-lived Velvet Underground and their four poorly-received studio albums makes evident that the EPI was a much smaller event in Warhol’s career than it was in the career of the Velvet Underground.26 Secondly, much of Warhol’s fame rests upon his repetitious art, covering canvases with Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Liz Taylor, the Mona Lisa, flowers, cows, and Campbell soup cans. Even his films are iconic, often with one frame capable of standing in for a multi-hour opus as in Sleep or Empire. The EPI generated no such enduring image. Which photograph by Billy Name or Nat Finkelstein could stand as the visual sum of the EPI? Which poster could be exhibited next to other works? And, of more Warholian interest, which could be printed on tee shirts? In fact, the most lasting image resulting from the EPI is not a photograph or a poster or an advertisement or anything to do with the EPI specifically, but is rather something that the EPI funded: The

Velvet Underground & Nico album.

from the EPI’s heyday, but still does not contain all of the reviews discussed in previous chapters.

26 Strictly speaking, the Velvet Underground released five studio albums from 1967 to 1973, but the last album Squeeze, was produced without any of the original members. Doug Yule, who replaced John Cale before the recording of the 1969 album The Velvet Underground, recorded Squeeze virtually on his own. The album is not included in the discography found in Bockris and Malanga, 128.

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While the glory days of April 1966 were winding down and the West Coast collapse had yet to occur, the Velvet Underground got down to the business of acquiring a record deal. Predicting that they would have a better change of getting signed with a record already made – and conveniently avoiding the interference of record labels – the

Velvets recorded the bulk of their song catalogue under Warhol’s laissez-faire production at Scepter Studios in New York before unsuccessfully shopping their debut album to

Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, then to Elektra, then to Columbia, before finally being signed by Verve Records, an offshoot of MGM. Several songs were re-recorded in

Los Angeles under Verve’s management before the record was ready to release, but various obstacles postponed the record’s release until March 1967.27 When it finally debuted, The Velvet Underground & Nico (Fig. A62), affectionately dubbed “the banana album,” was met with derision, disbelief, and disapproval. Author of the book The Velvet

Underground and Nico, Joe Harvard wrote:

Reflecting on the revolutionary album he co-produced in 1966, Norman Dolph found an analogy in the world of art: “90% of all the pictures that are viewed today as just awesome, the first time they were seen the reaction was ‘this isn’t art!’ . . . Well, there were people who thought the VU were a waste of oxide on the back of a piece of recording tape.” . . . Today, the kind of lives deemed permissible for art to reflect upon seem

27 Bockris and Malanga, 44 and 74. The Velvets got their deal through Tom Wilson, a producer at Columbia who told them to wait until he transferred to MGM to sign them. Wilson produced “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” and “Waiting for the Man.” John Cale called him the best producer the Velvets ever had. Unterberger, 135-6, notes that an exact release date is still debated, but it was likely released before March 9, 1967, because advertisements for the album began appearing in magazines on that date. The exact reasons behind the album’s postponed release are likely varied and, Underberger argues, unfortunately will never be fully understood because many of the parties involved are deceased. Some of the setbacks may have been caused by the album’s design, which featured color photographs, a gatefold sleeve, and Warhol’s detailed peel cover with sticker: “It’s certainly an audacious graphic – particularly in these pre-CD days, when the banana is actually full-size – but is devilishly complicated and expensive to mass-produce as part of a nationally distributed LP record.”

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more and more to resemble those that the Velvets expored in their songs. As Rolling Stone’s Robert Palmer states succinctly: “Activities that belonged to a marginalized subculture are now mass-culture concerns.” To which I might add, the ones who get there first have to take a boatload of shit for their trouble. Enter the VU.28

Like Warhol before them, the Velvet Underground faced harsh criticism for entering into a world in which their style was not yet the fashion. Advertisements (Fig. A63-A64) for the album banked heavily on Warhol’s influence to overcome their noncommercial sound, asking “What happens when the daddy of Pop Art goes Pop Music? The most underground album of all!” Warhol’s recognizable head and dark glasses peek from behind the unfolded album that proudly bears “Produced by Andy Warhol” on the back and Warhol’s suggestively phallic banana design on the front, accompanied by the sly invitation to “peel slowly and see” the flesh-colored banana hidden beneath the yellow peel sticker. “So far underground, you’ll get the bends!” the advertisements promised.

Unfortunately for the Velvet Underground, many critics found the experience of listening to the record as painful as the real bends.

Without the added theatrical drama of the EPI, The Velvet Underground & Nico foundered. In a review from the Village Voice, Richard Goldstein wrote that the band was

“not an easy group to like,” noting that some songs shamelessly stole Bob Dylan’s early style and that others, like “Black Angel’s Death Song” “are pretentious to the point of misery,” although Goldstein believed that other cuts from the album had potential.29

28 Joe Harvard, The Velvet Underground and Nico (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5-7. Dolph worked for Scepter Records in New York, but was not billed on the original issue of The Velvet Underground & Nico record.

29 Richard Goldstein, review of The Velvet Underground & Nico, Village Voice, April 13, 1967, reproduced in García, 129. Goldstein amusingly refers to Warhol’s design as “that erect banana on the cover.”

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Fanzine Electric Frog dismissed both the album and Warhol – “The album is generally as worthless as anything is that is connected with Warhol” – echoing Goldstein’s sentiment that a couple of the songs had potential, but ultimately deciding, in damning fashion, that the Velvet sound was “nice to dance to, but musically it has little value.”30 If any sentiment could constitute a grotesque caricature of the way the Velvets saw themselves,

Electric Frog achieved it. A brief write-up in Jazz magazine voiced concern that the

Velvet Underground caused a stir more because of their famous patron than their music; without the EPI, their music was “rather tedious.”31 Verve’s own press release for the

Velvet Underground in April 1968 proclaimed that the society at large had not been ready for the EPI: “The world that saw the show, indeed, was made nervous by its totality.

Understanding that the world wasn’t ready for that much yet, the ‘Plastic Inevitable’ was dropped.” However, Verve averred, the Velvet Underground was its own animal, with or without Warhol, and their dedication to music would only flourish under the Verve banner.32

The Velvet Underground did not flourish. The postponement of the debut album’s release likely contributed to the slow funeral march of the EPI’s final hours. Without steady income from a hit record, the Velvets were probably loath to sever ties with

Warhol’s high profile name and the national tour that had been continuing for almost a

30 “News and Comments: The Scene,” Electric Frog, April 1967, reproduced in García, 135. Perhaps even worse, the write-up refers to Lou Reed’s singing voice as “sort of Dylanish” and sums up the group as “a dance band that play lots of drug and sex songs but have very little imagination.”

31 Review of The Velvet Underground & Nico, Jazz, June 1967, reproduced in García, 151.

32 Verve Records press release on The Velvet Underground, April 1968, reprinted in Heylin, 57-58.

155 year by the time the album debuted.33 The increasingly poor and irritating gigs they played with the EPI paid better than no gigs at all. Perhaps this, too, has left an unfavorable impression on subsequent scholars who might have analyzed the EPI. The multimedia extravaganza that began so hopefully in New York’s East Village breathed its last amongst artistic feuds, dismal reception, and virtual abandonment by Warhol in what many in the EPI considered a tainted version of their triumphant venue. Watching their beloved Dom turn into The Balloon Farm and steal their hard-won artistic vision was too much to bear, as Sterling Morrison explained:

What we found “repellent” was not the “show,” but rather the fact that we were back in what we considered to be “our” ballroom, and even worse, were working for the very people who taken it from us. Given a choice between working for them or nothing, we chose nothing.34

They thought their EPI had been stolen and twisted, bastardized by music manager Al

Grossman and insultingly sold back to them at their lowest point – no money, no prospects, and no forward momentum. The EPI ended on a very low note, departing the scene not with a grand farewell performance at Madison Square Gardens, but in the bones of their former success.

The less-than-stellar trajectory of the EPI accounts for some measure of academic disinterest for those who research Warhol, whose career enjoyed much higher peaks than the EPI and whose later work reflected little of the style of the multimedia experimentation that the EPI project entailed. Warhol returned to filmmaking even before

33 Unterberger, 135, records the Velvets’ US chart peak at #171.

34 Sterling Morrison quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 58.

156 the EPI was cold in its grave.35 The performance on its own is a difficult fit into a

Warholian narrative of creative, social, and business development, so scholarly emphasis on the EPI as expanded cinema and expand cinema as an extension of Warhol’s filmmaking has a certain neatness. Biographies, which discuss the EPI in greater detail than scholarly articles due to their large scope, set the standard for using the Exploding

Plastic Inevitable increasingly as background noise to Warhol’s other pursuits. David

Bourdon’s biography of Warhol, for example, focuses mostly on the EPI’s performances at the Dom with a brief mention of the Trip in Los Angeles before seamlessly transitioning to Warhol’s filmmaking amid the ever-increasingly chaotic atmosphere in

Factory before Valerie Solanas attempted to murder the artist on June 3, 1968.36

Bourdon’s treatment of the EPI is mirrored in biographies by Victor Bockris, Wayne

35 Various elements of the EPI cropped up again in Warhol’s work, but never in such an explosive, immediate package. Warhol founded Interview magazine in 1969, which still runs today as a source of fashion, art, music, and celebrity articles – see the official website at www.interviewmagazine.com. Warhol turned his attention to television in the 1980s, producing Andy Warhol’s T.V. and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, which aired on MTV; London’s Hayward Gallery mounted a retrospective of Warhol’s television work in 2008 (see Benjamin Secher, “Andy Warhol TV: Maddening but Intoxicating,” Telegraph, September 30, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk).

36 David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 218-248, 283-290. Regarding Warhol’s psychological state after Solanas’s attack, the scars of which were immortalized by in a shoot by fashion photographer Richard Avedon, Ronnie Cutrone remembered: “After Andy got shot, he was very, very, very paranoid about the whole scene. I think he thought that maybe he had taken some wrong turns in his life and shouldn’t be around people who were that crazy. That’s when the new Factory came in, with the suits and ties. Andy was different after he got shot. I mean Andy would say hell to me and talk to me but he was really scared. He was scared about what the kind of insanity could bring – which was six bullets in the chest.” Ronnie Cutrone quoted in McNeil and McCain, 23. According to Victor Bockris’s biography, Warhol became paranoid after being shot. Bockris, 307: “‘After Andy got shot then he don’t trust nobody,’ said Paul Warhola. . . . When gifts of rich foods from the best restaurants, cakes and candies arrived, Andy insisted Paulie or George sample each dish first. He thought somebody might try to poison him.”

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Koestenbaum, and Tony Scherman and David Dalton. Bockris’s discussion of the EPI fades away into Warhol’s other projects, like Chelsea Girls (1966).37 Koestenbaum touches on the EPI in only a couple of pages. Scherman and Dalton chart the EPI more dutifully from New York to Los Angeles to Chicago, but even they succumb to diluting their discussion of the EPI with other projects so much that, by the time the EPI ends, the reader hardly notices.38 Warhol moved on from the EPI, and art historians and biographers moved with him.

If the argument could be made that the EPI as a whole, while thrilling and controversial and electric and fascinating, bears little consequence for the overall study of

Andy Warhol, such an argument could not be made for the Velvet Underground. Initial reviews for The Velvet Underground & Nico may have been largely negative – where they occurred at all – but the banana album has since carved out a solid place among the

37 Chelsea Girls was born out of the discontent of the late EPI. Bockris, Warhol, 254: “The feelings that had erupted around the disintegration of the EPI were perfect material for [Warhol’s] new idea. Rather than focusing his camera on one star in films like Poor Little Rich Girl and Beauty #2, he would take his growing stable – Ingrid Superstar, Mary Woronov, Nico (whom he held on to and promoted as his Girl of the Year), a newcomer called International Velvet, the stud Malanga, the prodigal Ondine, back at the factory and ripe for action, Brigid Polk, approaching the zenith of her role as the Doctor – and pitch them all against each other in films that would present the reverse side of the sixties, challenging the corny flower-power philosophy of the hippies and their messiah, Dylan, with the savage hardcore truths of Ondine as the Pope of Greenwich Village or Warhol’s own flat, negative statements like ‘I don’t really believe in love’ and ‘Life is nothing.’” Chelsea Girls is another example of expanded cinema, as it was projected on multiple surfaces at a time.

38 Bockris, Warhol, 246-248, 250-254, 257, 270, and 378; Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol: A Biography (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2001), 114-117; Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 322-325, 331-340, 346, 380.

158 most influential and most highly regarded records of all time.39 Musician and artist Brian

Eno famously quipped that the record may have sold poorly in its first five years, but everyone who bought a copy was inspired to start a band.40 The EPI is a major component of the album’s success – funding, recording, and design of the record were all born out of the EPI, and the introductory chapter to Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral

History of Punk is dedicated to discussion of the EPI and the performances that led to it.41

Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock places the Velvet Underground at the head of the punk movement from the very title; the first two chapters are also dedicated to appreciation of the band’s trailblazing work.

Included in the first chapter is an oft-reproduced quotation from critic and journalist

Lester Bangs, who said: “Modern music begins with the Velvets, and the implications and influence of what they did seem to go on forever.”42 A 2012 article for Britain’s

Independent, which likewise quoted Bangs, went further by proposing The Velvet

Underground & Nico as a candidate for most influential album of all time.43 In an

39 Unterberger, 135. “Over the years, The Velvet Underground & Nico will grow to enjoy unquestioned all-time classic status, but when it first goes on sale it’s considered to be something of an anti-climax even by followers and associates of the band. Furthermore, it’s virtually ignored by critics, and is nothing short of a dud commercially.”

40 Brian Eno quoted in Kristine McKenna, “Eno: Voyages in Time & Perception,” Musician 48 (October 1982): 64-65. Unterberger, 137, states that the interview took place in 1984, but it was published in 1982.

41 McNeil and McCain, 3-24.

42 Lester Bangs quoted in Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2005), 3.

43 Simmy Richman, “The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Revolution Rocks On,” Independent, October 13, 2012, www.independent.co.uk. “What is the most influential album of all time? Music lovers can (and do) argue about such things at length, but few

159 alternative world, musician and actor Paul Williams declared in 1993, the Velvets would outshine even the Beatles (their music, Williams consoled himself, was “quintessential” rock and roll and may eclipse other rock albums as the most significant of all).44 For a band whose existence was much maligned, the Velvet Underground has emerged as a powerfully influential musical standard-bearer.

The short lifespan of the Velvet Underground combined with the seminal banana album elevates the EPI in Velvet documentation and scholarship. More than that, the

Velvet Underground served as forerunners for generations of bands to follow, including

Sonic Youth and the Minutemen.45 The Dandy Warhols, a Portland-based group whose name is a clear pun on “Andy Warhol,” translated the Velvets’ album banana design onto their own Welcome to the Monkey House (Fig. A65), whose cover is adorned with a banana unzipped from its peel.46 So important, so cool, and so influential are the Velvet

would deny the first Velvet Underground album its right to be up there. It was number one when another British newspaper published its ’50 albums that changed music’ list back in 2006.”

44 Paul Williams, “Foggy Notion (1993),” in Zak, 68-69. Paul Williams wrote the theme song for The Love Boat, which featured Warhol in a cameo performance in 1985.

45 Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2001), 83, 236, and 255. The Minutemen’s “History Lesson (Part II)” took its cues from the Velvets’ “Here She Comes Now,” and Sonic Youth followed in the Velvet Underground’s stripped down, experimental footsteps. A similar sentiment is found in Jeremy Grimshaw, High, ‘Low,’ and Plastic Arts: Philip Glass and the Symphony in the Age of Postproduction,” Musical Quarterly 86 (Autumn 2002): 478: “The popular appropriation of the minimalist musical aesthetic was foreshadowed, for example, in the adaptation of La Monte Young’s cosmic drones by the founding members of the Velvet Underground, who in turn transmitted the style to an entire generation of early alternative rockers.”

46 Warhol superstar Candy Darling has a namesake band, as well. Called “the most fun you ever had whilst being told to go fuck yourself,” by Artrocker, Candy Darling is post-

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Underground that they are mentioned in not only the very first page of the preface to John

Leland’s Hip: The History, they are also offered as a prime example of that which embodies “hip”:

[E]verybody can name [hip] when they see it. For something that is by definition subjective, hip is astoundingly uniform across the population. It is the beatitude of Thelonious Monk at the piano, or the stoic brutality of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, performing songs of drugs and sadomasochism as a projector flashed Andy Warhol’s films on their black turtlenecks.47

Even when not mentioned explicitly, the EPI colors discussion of the Velvet

Underground. While the Velvet Underground’s stiff-lipped persona and darkly provocative lyrics pre-dated the EPI, the multimedia show brought their sound to more people, provided an opportunity to hone their sound, and funded their first foray into recording deals. True, the band suffered condemnation from their association with

Warhol, but without the EPI the Velvets’ disagreeable sound may have never blazed its trail.48

punk band that could also trace its roots to the Velvet Underground. See their website, www.candydarlingmusic.bandcamp.com, for more information.

47 John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), 1, 4-5. The cover art for this book features a photograph of Warhol and another of the Velvet Underground playing amid projections.

48 Remembering the Velvet Underground style and its impact, Ronnie Cutrone said: “Before the Velvet Underground almost without exception all groups came out and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have a good time, let’s get involved!,’ faced the audience and said, ‘This is a time of love, peace, happiness and sexual liberation and we’re gonna have a great time.’ The Velvets on the other hand came out and turned their backs to the audience. . . . Now, many years later we found out with the revolution of punk, new wave and permanent wave this was accurate. They were that far ahead of their time. And to some extent that couldn’t capture the nation.” Ronnie Cutrone quoted in Bockris and Malanga, 54.

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Now, fifty years since the Exploding Plastic Inevitable indeed exploded into being, the question of its afterlife and legacy remains. Its importance for contemporary popular music is clear, but its place in the history of performance art, modern cultural theories, and the vast scholarship on Andy Warhol is a murkier matter. For that, a return to Branden W. Joseph’s oft-cited 2002 EPI article may reveal its current state and potential avenues of inquiry.49 Even without its incisive analysis, Joseph’s article would be noteworthy because it stands as the EPI’s most far-reaching dedicated article. Still, the article is limited in scope and left the field open for subsequent scholars to expand.

Opening by discussing two 1968 articles by Wayne McGuire in Crawdaddy! magazine and Bob Stark in The Fifth Estate – the first reviewing the EPI and the second reviewing the Velvet Underground & Nico album – Joseph sets the scene for his discussion of the

EPI as a key intermedia experiment and an example of postmodern cultural and artistic exercise.50 From this introduction, which mentions reviewers’ tendency to emphasize the show’s S&M dancing and the Velvets’ music, Joseph proceeds to talk around the EPI rather than about the show itself, examining Warhol’s limited musical background more than the Velvet Underground’s direct musical contribution to the show and dedicating little to no ink to the dancers. Warhol dominates Joseph’s discussion, in spite of Joseph repeatedly acknowledging that the EPI was a collaborative effort. Placing the EPI in

49 Joseph, 80-107. Another article that refers to Joseph as a source is Homay King, “Stroboscopic: Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Criticism 56 (Summer 2014): 457-479. King discusses the use of light as trauma in the EPI. She also makes interesting reference to The Velvet Underground in Boston, a 1967 film that captures the EPI toward the end of its run.

50 Wayne McGuire, “The Boston Sound,” Crawdaddy!, August 1968, reprinted in Zak, 17-27; and Bob Stark, “The Velvet Underground,” Fifth Estate, November 14-27, 1968, reproduced in García, 292.

162 context of expanded cinema, too, pushes Warhol’s films into the forefront while downgrading the Velvet Underground and other EPI features to mere scenery. Cultural discussion is likewise limited: Joseph’s study, for all that it explores Marshall McLuhan,

Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other theorists of art culture, spends little time with the dozens of articles that specifically reviewed the EPI while it was performed or how different slices of the American public – audiences of different ages, different backgrounds, different coasts – responded to the EPI during its tour.

Even where cultural theory is the focus, Joseph is restricted. Guy Debord’s

Society of the Spectacle is mentioned as an aside in one endnote, saying, “Here and throughout, my discussion of ‘spectacle’ is, of course, made in reference to Guy Debord.”

While Joseph does use the term “spectacle” frequently, this is as far as his investigation into Debord’s concepts goes. Debord is so multifaceted and Warhol’s relationship to his concept of “spectacle” is so complicated that to say the term is used in reference to

Debord is to clarify very little. Warhol was, of course, a purveyor of (on the surface, at least) the most detestable of Debord’s spectacular theories; vapid, frivolous, materialistic, consumerist, superficial, isolating, and determinedly ignorant are all terms that could be applied to Warhol’s public persona. After all, in Warhol’s Philosophy of Andy Warhol:

From A to B and Back Again, a meandering book full of contradictions and non sequiturs, the artist wrote that he would like to open restaurants called “ANDY-MATS” in which patrons eat alone and watch television instead of interacting with others.51 On the other hand, the EPI provided the perfect meeting ground for homosexuals, drug users, artists, and activists involved in leftist politics to gather and share ideas in a context that some,

51 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 160.

163 like Paul Jay Robbins, interpreted as a perfected picture of the spectacle Debord reviled.52

The EPI was, to various writers of the period, more than mindless Debordian spectacle; rather, it was a horrifying funhouse mirror version of society meant to inspire thought rather than discourage it, or a safe place for the counterculture to flourish, or a hedonistic den of iniquity frequented by only the basest lowlifes. The EPI was indeed Debordian spectacle, but its relationship to Debord’s theories is more complicated than Joseph’s endnote allows. The end result is an article that engages in fine scholarly discourse with a number of important critics, but does a disservice to the EPI’s pop culture roots and the

Velvet Underground’s significance. Without that, Joseph’s article serves only to apply theories about Warhol’s work to the EPI. The subsequent heavy citation of this article as an authoritative source on the EPI keeps the boundaries around the scholarly discourse of the EPI very narrow.

The EPI’s legacy, then, is split into opposing camps. On one hand, the EPI is a

Warholian artistic experiment that began encouragingly but was ultimately a failure best used as a backdrop to other creative pursuits. On the other, the EPI is a key element in the study and increasingly meticulous documentation of the Velvet Underground’s active years. Uniting these two directions creates a more complete picture of the EPI that emphasizes its collaborative nature and avoids privileging either art or music above the other. Together, too, scholars may conceive of the EPI as a rousing success of great critical interest and influence, while also appreciating its utter failure to stave off the too- soon dissolution of the Velvet Underground and to provide a new financially viable

52 Paul Jay Robbins, “Andy Warhol and the Night on Fire,” Los Angeles Free Press, May 13, 1966, reprinted in García, 40, and All Yesterdays’ Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print 1966-1971, ed. Clinton Heylin (London: Da Capo Press, 2005), 15-19.

164 approach for Warhol to apply to artmaking. Perhaps, as investigation into the EPI continues and new books on Warhol, music, and the Velvet Underground are produced, the best scholarship on the EPI is yet to come. As Lou Reed said, “You’d better take drugs and learn to love plastic.”53 The show was deep and superficial and real and phony and a terrific success and a disheartening catastrophe and almost ignored and highly visible. If the direction of punk and 1960s musical scholarship combined with the bottomless cultural appetite for anything to do with Warhol is any indication, the world is ready for a second dose of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

53 Lou Reed quoted in McNeil and McCain, 14.

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CONCLUSION

People say that you always want the things you can’t have, that “the grass is greener” and all that, but in the mid-sixties I never, never, never felt that way for a single minute. I was so happy doing what I was doing, with the people I was doing it with. Certainly, at other times in my life I’d wanted lots of things I didn’t have and been envious of other people for having them. But right then I felt like I was finally the right type in the right place at the right time.

Andy Warhol, Popism: The Warhol Sixties1

Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable was different things to different people: shocking, frightening, outraging, inspiring, exciting, entertaining, boring. Amid a sea of events put on by flourishing rock bands – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who

– the EPI was its own brand of psychedelic rock show, art exhibition, and light display.

The show was a success and a failure, a starting point and a closing, a source of revelation and an ultimately forgettable episode. Nearly untouched by Pop Art scholarship, the EPI has gained traction in the music world for its pre-punk trailblazing and its dramatic format, but the work on the EPI has only just begun.2 Incorporating

Warhol into the EPI as an entity in the collaboration but not the monolithic star allows for analysis of the EPI that appreciates all artistic contributions without bowing overmuch to

Warhol’s dominant persona. The EPI sheds light on mid-1960s culture, the artistic divide

1 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 276.

2 As early as the 1960s, the EPI was called a precursor to the Doors and theatrical rock performance. Robert Somma, “Rock Theatricality,” Drama Review 14 (Fall 1969): 136- 137. “One group had demonstrated, even before the The Doors’ arrival, a sense of the theatre. In 1965 and 1966, the Velvet Underground toured the country with Andy Warhol’s happening, ‘The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.’ . . . The Inevitable’s rock theatre could have taken on many of the characteristics of the pop aesthetic, creating a tension between the acknowledged conventionality of the presentation and the unacknowledged perversity of the content. But while audiences could groove on [Jim] Morrison’s acid impostures, Reed’s ‘Heroin’ was still a down, smack being the gratification of the ghetto, not the middle class.”

166 between New York City and the West Coast, the reporting styles of conventional and underground publications, the development of psychedelic performance, utilization of expanded cinema, hallucinogenic drug use, and the evolution of modern culture. If

Warhol made the world ask what art should look like, the Velvet Underground made it ask what popular music should sound like. Together, the two asked how music and art could work together and what effect they could have over their audiences. A clear answer may not have appeared in the wake of the EPI, but the question still reverberates in art and music today.

The EPI is a study in complication, and it provides ample contradiction for scholars. Little remains from the show, but multitudes of ephemera survived. Warhol’s name headlined the event, but the performance was carried out by other participants. The

EPI was pure Debordian spectacle, but it was complicated by thoughtful involvement by those who used its style to communicate to others in the underground. The performance has been dealt with in art historical scholarship, but often very superficially and never enough to create a full picture of the event. Here, I have attempted to unite art historical scholarship with music scholarship to bring a more carefully documented account of the

EPI to art history, and to analyze and evaluate the reviews and criticisms of the event from those who attended. With careful analysis, the opposing views of the EPI come into agreement. I argue that the EPI’s lack of academic interest has its roots in Warhol’s independent success, the EPI’s underground nature, the dearth of lasting imagery, the failure of the EPI to attract consistently positive critical attention, and the EPI’s lack of overt influence on subsequent artists. Instead, the EPI surfaces as a major event in

167 popular twentieth-century music, promoting the Velvet Underground and funding one of the most critically lauded and influential record albums ever made.

Perhaps the EPI really was ahead of its time and scholarship is only now catching up to its innovation. Jason Hartley credits Lou Reed’s involvement with the Velvet

Underground as the impetus behind writing the book. Reed was coolly ahead of his time with the Velvets and Warhol, but looked ridiculous with a bad haircut and bad music in the 1980s and 1990s – could it be, Hartley asked, that Reed was still ahead of his time and no one had caught up to his new style yet? Hartley later described Warhol as a likewise advanced figure, “a combination of Picasso, Elvis, Brando, Liberace, James

Joyce, Ed Sullivan, Thomas Wolf, Sam Phillips, and Sam Walton.”3 If Hartley’s theory is accurate, the study of the EPI may be right on time, emerging just as enough time has passed between the show’s existence and today to provide the distance necessary to appreciate its format and cultural influence. Promising books with upcoming releases include Doyle Greene’s Rock, Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, 1966-1970: How the

Beatles, Frank Zappa, and the Velvet Underground Defined an Era and Steven Blush’s

New York Rock: From the Rise of the Velvet Underground to the Fall of CBGB.4 As the

3 James Hartley, The Advanced Genius Theory (New York: Scriber, 2010), 2 and 193. Warhol is also mentioned in Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 192-194, 196-197.

4 Doyle Greene, Rock, Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, 1966-1970: How the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and the Velvet Underground Defined an Era (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016), and Steven Blush, New York Rock: From the Rise of the Velvet Underground to the Fall of CBGB (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016). The tendency to use the Velvet Underground as a fixed point of influence and cultural transition appears to be a continuing trend in new scholarship.

168 study of the Velvet Underground continues, the far-reaching impact of the Velvets and the EPI continues its forward march.

While it may not have received yet the attention it deserves, the EPI nonetheless influenced or prefigures a variety of art/music collaborations. One realm in which the EPI could play an expanded role is in the study of happenings. Cultural historian Martha

Bayles even claimed that the EPI superseded other happening experiments in the 1960s to become the most iconic and well-known example of the art form:

Say the word happening today, and most people will not think of [Allan] Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, or any of the other visual artists who first staged this kind of event in New York. Instead, they will think of Andy Warhol, who hired a rock band called the Velvet Underground to perform in his 1966 happening, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.5

Even if Bayles exaggerated the reputation of the EPI, the event still played a key role as a forerunner to multimedia interactive performance events that developed in the decades following the EPI. Destroy All Monsters, a Detroit punk band/performance art troupe that performed from the 1970s to 1980s and included artists Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and

Carey Loren in its roster, performed Velvet Underground-style noise music with found instruments and objects.6 Artist Laurie Anderson, who was involved with the Velvets’

Lou Reed from 1992 to his death in 2013, likewise follows in the EPI’s footsteps with

5 Martha Bayles, Hole In Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (New York: Free Press, 1994), 290.

6 In a review for Kelly M. Cresap’s Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete, Michael Mosher describes the band as follows: “Michigan teenagers Destroy All Monsters lived as if they were superstars in [Warhol’s] underground films.” Michael R. (Mike) Mosher, review of Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete, in Leonardo 39 (2006): 259. The group also followed the EPI’s model in releasing magazines, but these magazines were likely intended more for an art audience than for fans. Susan E. Thomas, “Value and Validity of Art Zines as an Art Form,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 28 (Fall 2009): 31.

169 performance art and experimental music. In “Empty Spaces” (1989-1990), for example,

Anderson combined many of the elements of the EPI into her event; music, film, slides, simultaneous projections sounds, and stories came together in a political performance of found and original art.7

The EPI’s Debordian character may also situate the event as a proto-Relational

Aesthetics performance. Like Debord’s concept of “spectacle” as a mediated social relationship, Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” refers to artwork that results in a social relationship. Where Debord thought that spectacle interfered with immediate interaction, Bourriaud argued that art could form a social space that fosters interpersonal connection.8 Encompassing artists like Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique

Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Feliz Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, relational aesthetics was an artistic direction that encouraged artists to work beyond the boundaries of the art itself into participatory relationships with the public, other artists, and other artworks. The EPI prefigured relational aesthetics with its collaboration, total environment creation, cultural dialogue, encouragement of audience participation, and engagement with other artists and writers like Jonas Mekas and Allen Ginsberg.

For art historians, at least for now, the EPI matters because Andy Warhol matters.

Few artists are as consistently researched, referenced, and parodied as Warhol, who can pop up in movies or on the side of liquor bottles or in high-end cosmetics lines or in

7 See Laurie Anderson, Empty Places: A Performance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), for more on this performance.

8 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods, and Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 15. “Art (practices stemming from painting and sculpture which come across in the form of an exhibition) turns out to be particularly suitable when it comes to expressing this hands-on civilization, because it tightens the space of relations.” Emphasis from the original.

170 grand Sotheby’s auctions. The sheer wealth of information about the artist’s art and life provides a solid foundation on which to build an art historical picture of the EPI; together with the dogged fact-finding of Velvet Underground fanatics, current scholarship reveals a wealth of potential. Now, with previously unreleased images and long-lost reviews readily available, the EPI is ready to be fully dissected, labeled, and examined as a uniquely important performance and not just as an extension of Warhol’s filmmaking.

The show must go on.

171

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APPENDIX

Figure A1. Billy Name, photograph of the Velvet Underground on stage at the Dom, April 1966.

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Figure A2. Andy Warhol with lettering by Julia Warhola, Martini & Rossi advertisement, c. 1958.

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Figure A3. Andy Warhol with lettering by Julia Warhola, Happy Bug Day, c. 1954.

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Figure A4. Andy Warhol, advertisment for I. Miller Shoes, 1955-1956.

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Figure A5. Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning, 1953.

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Figure A6. Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55.

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Figure A7. Andy Warhol, window display at Bonwit Teller, New York City, 1961.

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Figure A8. Andy Warhol Superman, 1961.

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Figure A9. Andy Warhol, 32 Campbell Soup Cans, 1962, at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles.

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Figure A10. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962.

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Figure A11. Andy Warhol, Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964.

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Figure A12. Campbell’s soup advertisement, c. 1941.

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Figure A13. Campbell’s soup advertisement, 1965.

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Figure A14. Campbell’s soup advertisement, 1968.

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Figure A15. Campbell’s soup advertisement, 1969.

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Figure A16. Campbell’s beach towel advertisement, 1969.

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Figure A17. Campbell’s record album advertisement, 1969.

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Figure A18. Tony Ray Jones, photograph of Andy Warhol at a Beatles press conference, October 1964.

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Figure A19. Book cover to Michael Leigh’s The Velvet Underground, 1963.

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Figure A20. Poster for the Velvet Underground’s performance at Summit High School, 1965.

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Figure A21. Adam Ritchie, photograph of the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, and Gerard Mangala performing at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966.

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Figure A22. Adam Ritchie, photograph of Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Mangala, and Nico at a reserved table at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966.

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Figure A23. Adam Ritchie, photograph of the Velvet Underground and Nico performing at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966.

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Figure A24. Adam Ritchie, photograph of the Velvet Underground and Gerard Malanga performing at Delmonico’s Ballroom, New York City, 1966.

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Figure A25. Advertisement published in the Village Voice for Andy Warhol, Up-Tight, New York City, 1966.

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Figure A26. Advertisement published in the Village Voice for Andy Warhol, Up-Tight, New York City, 1966.

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Figure A27. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Underground New York, Rutgers University, 1966.

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Figure A28. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Underground New York, Rutgers University, 1966.

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Figure A29. Advertisement published in the Michigan Daily for Up-Tight with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground at the Fourth Ann Arbor Film Festival, University of Michigan, 1966.

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Figure A30. Advertisement published in the Michigan Daily for Up-Tight with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground at the Fourth Ann Arbor Film Festival, University of Michigan, 1966.

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Figure A31. Advertisement Andy Warhol’s Erupting Plastic Inevitable, published in the Village Voice, March 30, 1966.

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Figure A32. Fred W. McDarrah, photograph of the Dom’s entrance and banner, April 1966.

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Figure A33. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, April 7, 1966.

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Figure A34. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, April 14, 1966.

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Figure A35. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, April 21, 1966.

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Figure A36. Billy Name, photograph of the EPI at the Dom, April 1966.

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Figure A37. Marilyn Bender, “Black Jeans to Go Dancing at the Movies: It’s Inevitable,” New York Times, April 11, 1966, photographs by Larry Morris.

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Figure A38. Ian MacEachern, photograph of Gerard Malanga dancing with a whip in front of a strobe light to the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” at the Dom, April 1966.

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Figure A39. Nat Finkelstein, photograph of the Velvet Underground performing onstage at the Dom, April 1966.

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Figure A40. Nat Finkelstein, photograph of the Velvet Underground performing onstage at the Dom, April 1966.

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Figure A41. Photograph unknown, photograph of Warhol in the lighting booth of the Dom at the EPI, April 1966.

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Figure A42. Colored slide used in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1966-67.

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Figure A43. Striped slide used in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1966-67.

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Figure A44. John Wilcock, “A ‘High’ School of Music and Art,” East Village Other, March-April 1966, and advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground and Nico.

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Figure A45. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Plastic Inevitable Show, published in the Los Angeles Free Press, May 6 and 13, 1966.

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Figure A46. Advertisement for the Plastic Inevitable Show, published in the KRLA Beat May 14, 1966.

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Figure A47. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Plastic Inevitable Show, published in the KRLA Beat May 21, 1966.

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Figure A48. Poster for Andy Warhol and His Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, California, 1966.

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Figure A49. Photograph of John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Gerard Malanga in Playboy’s VIP Magazine, Fall 1966.

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Figure A50. Ronald Nameth, still from the film Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1967.

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Figure A51. Ronald Nameth, still of Gerard Malanga dancing from the film Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1967.

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Figure A52. Ronald Nameth, still of Ingrid Superstar dancing from the film Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1967.

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Figure A53. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground and Nico, published in the Village Voice, September 22, 1966.

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Figure A54. Advertisement for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, published in the Philadelphia Enquirer, December 4, 1966.

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Figure A55. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, box and some of the contents of Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966).

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Figure A56. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, cover of Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966).

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Figure A57. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, interior of box cover of Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966).

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Figure A58. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, “Music, Man, That’s Where It’s At” folder and contents, Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966).

! ! 239

Figure A59. Andy Warhol and David Dalton, “The Plastic Exploding Inevitable,” Aspen, no. 3 The Pop Art Issue (December 1966).!! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

! ! 240

Figure A60. Pioneer Electronics advertisement, 1975.

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Figure A61. Converse Chuck Taylor shoes, released in 2015, based on Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can, 1962.

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Figure A62. The Velvet Underground & Nico album cover, designed by Andy Warhol and released March 1967.

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Figure A63. Advertisement for The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967.

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Figure A64. Advertisement for The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967.

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Figure A65. The Dandy Warhols, Welcome to the Monkey House album cover, Capitol Records, 2003.