If you have ever seen any of those low-budget “Under Review” made for DVD rockumentaries, then you know that they follow a fairly tried and true formula: Almost no music by the group or performer the doc is about, approx 5 minutes of archival film clips in the course of 90 minutes and usually a bunch of crazed loner rock critics you’ve never heard of, yakking it up about their favorite rock groups. Often the interviewees are fairly tangential to the subjects, but not always. The range from awesome (the one on the early days of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention was excellent) to awful.
In The Velvet Underground: Under Review, they managed to nab TWO actual members of the Velvet Underground, Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule—both Reed and Cale, predictably sat this one out—which elevates this way above most of the others ones. Even longtime VU fans might learn something new here. For instance, I’ve listened to the VU for 36 years now and I didn’t know that Maureen Tucker didn’t play drums on Loaded because she was pregnant. Every copy of that album (and the CD) credits her on the back—your copy and mine—but it’s not her drumming, it’s Doug Yule, studio engineer Adrian Barber, a session drummer named Tommy Castanaro and Billy Yule, who was still a high school student (It doesn’t sound even remotely like Mo Tucker on Loaded as I found listening to it the day after I watched this doc). You also hear Mo talk about how she stripped down her drum kit to get a more primitive, less busy, sound. And Yule, who always gets short shrift in the VU saga, gets plenty of onscreen time to discuss his role in the band (How many of you reading this know it’s him singing “Candy Says” and not Lou Reed?). I’ve never seen an interview with him and I was very pleased to see his participation in this film. If you’re a VU fan, this film is absolutely worth your time.
In 1972, Velvet Underground alumni Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico reunited before the cameras of the Pop 2 TV program at Le Bataclan, a well-known—and very intimate—Paris venue. It was Cale’s gig originally and he invited Reed and Nico to join him. Reed, who hated rehearsing, spent two days with Cale working out what they were going to do. According to Victor Bockris’ Reed biography Transformer, rock critic Richard Robinson videotaped these rehearsals, which took place in London.
Both the videotape and just the audio from this show has been heavily bootlegged over the years. A legit CD release happened a few years ago, but it still sounds like a bootleg. A high quality video turned up on various torrent trackers and bootleg blogs after a rebroadcast on French TV a few years ago. It’s fairly easy to find. Now if only some of the outtakes from the Le Bataclan filming would slip out—they did “Black Angel’s Death Song” which I’d dearly love to see—not to mention what Richard Robinson has!
This is Reed coming off his first solo record and just a few months before he recorded “Walk on the Wild Side” with David Bowie and took on a totally different public—and we can presume, private—persona. This is “Long Island Lou” seen just before Reed’s druggy bisexual alter-ego showed up. Cale is heard doing “Ghost Story” from his Vintage Violence album and Nico looks stunning and happy here singing “Femme Fatale.” It’s before the damage of her drug addiction took its toll on her looks.
One thing worth pointing out here is that during “Berlin” you can see Nico’s face as Reed sings a song which he told her was about her. She might even be hearing it for the first time.
More from the Le Bataclan performance after the jump!
Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico and French avant-garde film director Philippe Garrel had a ten-year romantic relationship between 1969 and 1979. Garrel, acclaimed in his youth as being a sort of cinematic Rimbaud, was much admired by Jean-Luc Godard, but is almost completely unknown in the English speaking world. Nico appeared in seven of his films and sometimes gave him music for them that has not been heard elsewhere. Stills from his films appeared on the covers of her Desertshore and The End albums, which show how interested she was in promoting his work. Garrel made his own clothes at the time and began dressing Nico, encouraging her to dye her hair crimson and cut her bangs.
During their relationship, the pair became hardcore heroin addicts resorting to petty thievery from friends and acquaintances to support their habits. According to Richard Witts’ biography, Nico: The Life & Lies of an Icon, their Paris apartment was a “garret” that lacked gas, electricity, hot water, furniture and housed a gargantuan mountain of cigarette butts. The entire apartment was covered in two coats of glossy black enamel paint. Their bed, apparently, was Garrel’s overcoat.
To call Philippe Garrel’s films “tedious” and “self-indulgent” is a bit of an understatement. They’re preposterously tedious and self-indulgent—I believe the Monty Python “French Subtitled Film” sketch was directly inspired by Garrel’s work—but no more so than Matthew Barney’s movies, if you ask me. About half of her Desertshore album (and one otherwise unreleased song, the mind-blowing “König” see below) is used as the film’s soundtrack. (This again seems worth comparing to Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, a collaboration with his wife, Bjork, herself a big Nico fan.)
To some, Garrel, who is still making films today, is an under-rated, visionary genius, whose work must be seen in the cinema to be fully appreciated. To them he is revered as some cinemaphiles worship John Cassavetes. To others, his films (the ones made during his relationship with Nico at least) look like what two junkies with a camera might get up to…
Phillipe’s Garrel’s early films are very difficult to see and he refuses to release them on DVD. I’ve only ever seen one of them, La Cicatrice Intérieure (“The Inner Scar”) which I found a bootleg of at Exene Cervenka’s general store in Silverlake maybe fifteen years ago. It’s a bit hard to watch. The dialogue, mostly made up right before they’d shoot it by Nico, consists of existential bitching, basically, as the pair walk around in barren, yet gorgeous landscapes shot in Sinai, Death Valley and Iceland. Garrel uses LONG static and simple linear tracking shots with minimal editing during scenes. Visually, the film is quite stunning—again think Matthew Barney—but the director forbade subtitles so unless you speak French, German and English, you’re bound to be confused. (A bootleg DVD popped up in 2005 with Japanese subtitles).
Nico does most of the speaking in La Cicatrice Intérieure, moaning throughout the film in her humorless, stentorian voice, at times coming off like some sort of prophetess of doom. As the Time Out reviewer said of the film when it was released in 1972: “You need a bloody big spliff to enjoy this. A miserable couple who you would not wish to meet at a party [Garrel, Nico] are joined by a naked weirdo [Pierre Clémenti, best-known for his role as gangster lover of Catherine Deneuve’s prostitute in Buñuel’s Belle de jour] with a bow and arrow and a desire to set everything on fire. That’s about it, frankly, unless I fell asleep, which is likely.”
Nico described the film like so:
“[It’s] an important film, a great film. It concerns the fragility of life. The film treats the story of a lunatic who starts to kill all of his sheep. It is not clear if he is a shepherd or a prince. He has no identity until I show up [of course!]. I am a queen on a journey. A queen finds a kingdom wherever she goes. There are more songs than dialogue in the film which I think is a good idea [of course!].
In the case of La Cicatrice Intérieure, she’s probably right about that, although the film does have its perplexing, often gorgeous, merits. But don’t take my word for it, La Cicatrice Intérieure is now in the public domain and a kind soul has uploaded it as a gift for Nico fans to download and watch. Yet another absolutely M.I.A. film that you can see without getting up from your seat. La Cicatrice Intérieure was once the litmus test case for obscure, nearly impossible to see movies, but obscure no more, eh?
Below, Nico and Garrel walk across a barren landscape as she yells weird stuff at him in La Cicatrice Intérieure:
“My Only Child” and “All That Is My Own” are heard in the following two sequence. The child is Nico’s son, Ari Boulogne.
Nico has some sort of freak-out while Garrel herds some animals. Then we hear “Abschied.”
In the closing moments of Garrel’s La Cicatrice Intérieure we hear “König,” an amazing song Nico recorded during the sessions for Desertshore with John Cale. This version of “König” can only be heard in the film, although Nico re-recorded the number for her 1985 Camera Obscura album.
Bonus clip: Nico and Philippe Garrel met when she contributed this gorgeous (and heard only in the film) version of “The Falconer” to his 1969 film Le Lit de la vierge, which starred Pierre Clémenti as Jesus:
Yesterday was the anniversary of Nico’s death at 49 (October 16 1938 – July 18 1988) and I had planned to commemorate it in some way last night, but it took me awhile to find this documentary. Thanks to Jonathan Sprig, my search ended this afternoon.
Nico Icon directed by Susanne Ofteringer is a compelling, intimate, often sad, but never judgmental, look at the life of the mysterious, seductive and self-destructive pop icon who kept the world at a distance while drawing us into her alluring web.
The complete and original Andy Warhol footage of The Velvet Underground and Nico from 1966. Richard Metzger posted a shorter version of this last year, and wrote an insightful piece about it, check it out here.
More clips of Warhol’s The Velvet Underground & Nico after the jump…
The career of Nico, née Christa Päffgen, and what happened to her after she crossed paths with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, has certainly been well-documented (see at the bottom, Nico: Icon). Less well-documented, though, are Nico’s “model” years, starting out in Berlin when she was all of 14. The accompanying photos are just a few selected from the fine—and generous—set found here.
Ranging in date from ‘52-‘67, these shots certainly capture a more innocent time in Nico’s life. I particularly like the ones below where Nico looks like she just stepped into a Godard film. It’s somewhat incredible to think that the face in the above black-and-whites would later go on to sing this, and this, and especially this!
P.P. Arnold was one of the Ikettes, the backing singers for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in the 60s, but after a visit to London, Mick Jagger, impressed by her powerful voice and stunning beauty—who wouldn’t be???—connected her with Andrew Loog Oldham, who signed her to his Immediate Records label, alongside acts like the Small Faces, Chris Farlowe (recognize that one?) and pre-Velvet Underground Nico (who was then recording songs Dylan had written for her with session musicians like Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones). The Small Faces backed Arnold on several of her hits, including this one, If You Think You’re Groovy, which was written by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane:
P.P. Arnold appears alongside the Small Faces for an absolutely ass-kicking version of Tin Soldier on Flemish television from 1968:
P.P. Arnold has been firmly entrenched in my “rock goddess” pantheon for years and years. It was super annoying to see Roger Waters right up front at Madison Square Garden a few years ago, only to find out that PP Arnold was one of the back-up singers—she even had a featured number—and I didn’t even know it for a couple of days after the fact!
It used to pain me to think that the only footage in existence of the Velvet Underground performing was silent. Think about it: Have you ever seen any sync-sound film of the Velvets in any of the various documentaries made about them, Lou Reed, Nico, John Cale or Andy Warhol for that matter? I didn’t think so, but thanks to the rather enterprising employee of either the Museum of Modern Art or else the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh who liberated Symphony in Sound you can now see the Velvets in action and actually hear them too! That’s the good part.
The bad part is that this film, made to be screened behind the band onstage during The Exploding Plastic Inevitable “happenings” is pretty boring. It goes on for a LONG time with not much happening besides a drony primitive jam and a frenetic camera zooming in and out. Nico is there (with her young son Ari) but she’s not singing, just hitting a tambourine. Lou doesn’t sing either. At one point the camera droops on its tripod and no one readjusts it for a while. So it’s boring, most Warhol films were boring—Warhol himself always said his movies were better discussed than actually seen—but it is the freaking Velvet Underground playing live on camera for what is probably the ONLY time during their original incarnation, so it’s worth looking at for that reason alone. If you can get over how dull it is, it’s actually pretty cool. There are several versions of this online, this one, from Google Video is merely the longest. I don’t know if this is the whole thing but in the later moments of the bootleg DVD I have, it gets better when the cops show up due to a noise complaint and Warhol has to deal with them himself.
