Based on Paul Morrissey, “Andy was [saying], ‘There’s no cash right here. We’re not making any cash. What is occurring?’ He was at all times very uncomfortable if cash wasn’t coming in. Although they’d signed their administration contract earlier than the Dom had opened, it was not straightforward, and Andy needed to pay for the attorneys and all that. I mentioned, ‘We’ve got to do what all people else does. They need to make a recording, and we’ve got to attempt to promote it to a report firm.’ Once more, he needed to lay out the cash for the recording studio, but it surely was solely two or three thousand {dollars} for 2 or three nights.” (Different sources put the determine nearer to $1,500, Reed referring to it as “the earnings from like one week on the Dom” in a 1987 interview with Joe Smith.)
So someday round mid-to-late April, The Velvet Underground lastly entered a recording studio for the primary time, laying down the majority of their debut album in only a few days. Because the group didn’t but have a recording contract, the thought was to supply materials that would then be shopped round for one.The prices have been shared roughly equally between Andy Warhol and Norman Dolph, a Columbia Information gross sales government with a straighter background and character than a lot of the Manufacturing facility crowd. Dolph was additionally an artwork collector, nonetheless, who met Warhol by means of his aspect job supplying music for artwork gallery reveals and openings along with his cell disco – together with the EPI’s Dom reveals, the place the scheme to make a report rapidly took maintain.
On the primary or second evening of the Velvets’ Dom stint, remembers Dolph, Warhol advised him, “‘We’d love to do an album of them, a report.’ I mentioned, ‘I can assist you with that.’ He mentioned, ‘Oh actually? Okay, good. Do it.’ I believe he did that with lots of people; if he discovered any person that would do what he wished, he’d simply say, ‘Do it.’ And they might, whether or not it was seem on this film or exit for pizza. He by no means gave loads of orders that I ever noticed. He simply made sugges- tions and other people took him up on it. He had loads of individuals round to do something he wished. He didn’t ask me any questions on ‘have you learnt this studio or that engineer or this producer’ or any of that. It was: ‘We’d wish to make a report,’ and I mentioned, ‘I’ll maintain it.’”
By means of his day job in Columbia’s Customized Labels Division, which offered companies for smaller labels with out their very own urgent vegetation, Dolph was conscious that one among his accounts, Scepter Information, had its personal recording studios. He organized for the classes to happen at Scepter’s midtown Manhattan facility on West 54th Road, in the identical constructing that will later home the well-known Studio 54 discotheque. He requested to be paid in artwork as an alternative of money, receiving a silkscreen image from Warhol for his engineering companies; if he held onto it, it in all probability amounted to a a lot greater price as Andy’s work shot up in worth through the years.
Even within the absence of a report deal, the intention was at all times to make a releasable album, not only a assortment of demos. “At no time was what we have been doing ever referred to by anyone as a demo,” Dolph remembers. “They have been going for the jugular. They wished to make a report that gave the impression of they sounded.”
In Joe Harvard’s e book The Velvet Underground & Nico, a part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 collection on traditional albums, Dolph speculated the classes spanned someday between April 18 and April 23. He believes they amounted to a complete of 4 days: two for recording, a 3rd for listening to playback and a fourth for mixing. The Velvets later gave completely different estimates as to how a lot time was concerned, however the whole recording time in all probability added as much as round ten hours. Recording will need to have wrapped up by April 25, as acetates have been minimize on that day of the completed tracks.
“We did it rapidly, sure,” acknowledged Cale to Uncut in 2009. “However why ought to it have taken any longer? We’d been rehearsing these songs for a yr and a half. We knew precisely what we wished the report to sound like, which was how we sounded dwell, and simply as loud.” Solely Maureen Tucker had no expertise of something like a studio surroundings. Martha Morrison, a customer to the classes, remembers that “Moe’s drums have been wiggling round, so I needed to go in there and maintain them for her.”
John Licata, Scepter’s in-house engineer, was introduced in to lend the proceedings some approximation of professionalism. Neither he nor Dolph have been credited on the eventual The Velvet Underground & Nico LP, however each are listed as engineers of the Scepter classes on later CD reissues, even when Dolph’s function was way more like that of a producer. Licata, says Dolph, “was great, cooperative, straightforward to get together with… he was the whole antithesis of The Velvet Underground. At no time did any of the musicians ever inform him what to do. They went in and performed, and he received what they wished. After I heard the album [a year later], it didn’t sound appreciably completely different from what we did at Scepter.
“I used to be not the producer in any sense that Quincy Jones is a producer,” Dolph admits. “The one factor I’d say is as a result of they have been doing it on my cash, and we had restricted time sources fiscally – ’trigger we have been at all times bumping up towards commitments that Scepter had within the studio – I stored the factor on the rails. I believe a part of the best way the report sounds the best way it sounds is due to John [Licata] and I retaining the damned factor going and shifting – you already know, ‘Okay, subsequent take, let’s do it, blah blah.’ That’s my contribution as a producer.”
Though the Scepter label was recognized for pop and soul hits by the likes of The Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, its studios weren’t fairly as state-of-the-art as The Velvet Underground and their producers may need anticipated. The truth is, the studio was in all probability solely accessible to the VU as a result of the ability was in a state verging on the unusable. “We went in there and located that the floorboards have been torn up, the partitions have been out, there have been solely 4 mics working,” Cale recalled in his autobiography. “We arrange the drums the place there was sufficient flooring, turned all of it up, and went from there. Dolph ran the classes, however he didn’t perceive the very first thing about recording.”
Scepter’s studio may need had its limitations, but it surely nonetheless had tools the Velvets couldn’t have accessed simply in any other case. Its two-track machine and four-track machine, which have been in all probability used for overdubbing and alternate vocals, have been a giant step up from the Wollensak reel-to-reel at Ludlow Road. Dolph acknowledges the studio was “small, definitely by modern studio sound. However they typically recorded pretty giant ensembles. They recorded a giant orchestra behind Dionne Warwick, and so they recorded gospel choirs in there. However they have been at all times very crowded. When you had all people in there, they needed to fairly effectively keep put, as a result of there wasn’t loads of room to maneuver round. For a playback all people however John [Licata] and I needed to stand, there have been no actual seats within the place.”
Recording The Velvet Underground in such an surroundings offered its personal set of challenges. “It appeared to me that the devices, as heard dwell within the studio versus on the opposite aspect of the glass, have been being performed reasonably loudly,” Dolph remarks. “You’d ordinarily count on in the event that they have been gonna play that loud, they’d be in a a lot bigger room to get some isolation between one and the opposite. However there may have been little separation or isolation in any sort of fashionable sense in that room, contemplating how loud they have been taking part in.
“The adrenaline high quality of it was as a result of we knew we had eight hours,” he says, “and so they wished to get on with it, and I wished to get on with it. Anytime they’d break down, I’d cease the tape and we’d begin over. I don’t suppose there are two completely different full takes of a couple of or two songs, and I’m not even positive the breakdowns have been saved. As a result of we have been paying for the tape at in all probability $125 a roll, often the damaged takes have been backed up and recorded over. In any other case, there can be some fascinating scraps mendacity round.”
The function Andy Warhol performed within the recording studio throughout these classes has been a lot debated through the years. In a 1970 interview with Fusion journal, Sterling Morrison described Warhol as a producer “within the sense of manufacturing a movie,” serving to to finance the classes and usually retaining the band afloat and in ok musical and psychological form to enter the studio within the first place.
As Dolph remembers, “Licata was there 100 per cent of the time, I’m there 100 per cent of the time, and Morrissey was there a lot of the time. Warhol was there occasionally. He had his little tape recorder, which he carried on a regular basis. I appear to recollect him there in all probability for about two hours within the mixture over perhaps three events. However he was completely fascinated by what was occurring, and I don’t suppose he made any aesthetic judgment by any means. ‘Gee, that sounds good’ may need been it. He was a spectator.”
Not less than one Factoryite remembered Warhol doing greater than watching and paying the invoice. Joey Freeman, then a teenage assistant to Andy, advised Barbara Rubin documentarian Chuck Smith that “we might sit within the cab and go [to] The Manufacturing facility, and Andy would play the Velvet Underground takes from the recording studio the evening earlier than. And he would make ideas to Lou about what he had heard within the automobile.” Nevertheless, the Velvets have been within the studio so few precise calendar days it appears there would have been few alternatives for Andy to provide Reed such quick suggestions.
“Andy would at all times just like the extra gothic, operatic variations of those songs,” Freeman added. “He didn’t just like the rock’n’roll as a lot. He favored those that had loads of drama to them. ‘All Tomorrow’s Events’ was one among his favourites.” In his interview for the Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Coronary heart documentary Cale speculated, “I believe Andy’s love of ‘All Tomorrow’s Events’ is absolutely in regards to the matter itself, about somebody whose gown by no means lived as much as the event.”
Each Cale and Reed, nonetheless, have been later emphatic that Warhol’s contributions weren’t merely ornamental. Cale praised Warhol’s insist- ence that the band keep true to their dwell sound, and Reed appreciated Andy’s refusal to shrink back from controversial lyrics that would have endangered their industrial prospects. “What he did do is he made all of it attainable,” Reed identified within the Transformer documentary. “One by his backing. And two, earlier than we went within the studio he mentioned, ‘You’ve received to ensure – use all of the soiled phrases. And don’t allow them to clear issues.’ And so, when he was there, they – you already know – they didn’t dare attempt to say, ‘Hey, why don’t you don’t try this over,’ or, gee, any one among all the opposite issues they’d usually have executed by no means occurred.”
Do What You Concern Most: The Historical past of the Velvet Underground by Richie Unterberger is revealed by Omnibus Press
