My series of paintings of records covers continues. I’ve now done seven: The Ramones, UFO’s Strangers in the Night, Kraftwerks’s Die Mench Maschine, Ian Dury’s Juke Box Dury, Led Zeppelin I, The Clash, and most recently the Sex Pistol’s Never Mind the Bollocks and the Velvet Underground & Nico with its removeable banana.

While I was busy painting these, I was reading Andy Warhol’s & Pat Hackett’s Popism: The Warhol ’60s and I came to 1966 when Warhol describes his first meeting the Velvet Underground in late 1965 and his interest in “getting into the music scene”. Warhol and Paul Morrissey had planned a Velvet Underground concert in early 1965, but the locale turned out to have been previously booked, and desperate, Paul and Andy overheard a conversation that the Polish Dance Hall, the Dom, on St Mark’s Place, was free during April and so Warhol rented it to put on what he intitially called the Erupting Plastic Inevitable—it wouldn’t be called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable until later.

Warhol put a half-page ad in the Village Voice:

Come blow your Mind
The Silver Dream Factory Present
ERUPTING PLASTIC INEVITABLE
with
Andy Warhol
The Velvet Underground
and
Nico

It was at the Dom, at one of the Plastic Inevitables, that Warhol met Eric Emerson who would later come to influence the Velvet Underground & Nico’s album release. At the end of April ’65, the Velvets along with other bands played at the opening of The Cheetah Club on Broadway and 53rd Street.

Warhol describes how he put up the money to rent a couple of days’ studio time at “one of those little recording studios on Broadway”. He was, of course, referring to the Scepter Studio run by Norman Dolph. According to Popism, Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Tom Wilson and Little Joey (whom Warhol describes as “The Factory gofer) were the only people in the control room (though I would guess Dolph was there, too.)

I think “put up the money” is something of a euphemism. Rumour has it that he paid Dolph with a Campbell’s Soup Can painting! Another of Warhol’s ways of settling accounts without having to dip into his pockets. According to Blake Gopnik, author of the definitive Warhol biography, Warhol “paid ” Giuseppe Rossi, the surgeon whon saved his life after he was shot by Valerie Solanas in June 1968, with seven Soup Can prints—apparently Rossi wasn’t worth the full set of ten prints!

Warhol says that the Velvets hadn’t included Nico originally as they didn’t want to be seen as a “back-up band for a chanteuse.” Warhol says “ironically, Lou had written the greatest songs for her to sing. Her voice, the words, and the sounds the Velvets made all were so magical together.”

When the lease on the Dom lapsed at the end of April, Warhol says they “only had time to record half the album in that Broadway studio” — “All Tomorrow’s Parties, There She Goes Again and I’m Waiting for the Man“. However, thanks to the discovery of the Scepter acetate, we now know that almost the full album was recorded. Dolph, in aaddition to owning the studio, was a sales executive at Columbia Records and sent the tape to Columbia but they declined, as did Atlantic Records (objecting to the drug references) and Elektra Records.

In May ’65, Warhol & the Velvets went to Los Angeles where Tom Wilson rerecorded I’m Waiting for the man, Venus in Furs and Heroin. The final track, Sunday Morning was recorded in Mayfair Recording Studios in Manhatten, in November 1966. MGM’s subsidiary company Verve Records agreed to release the album.

In Popism, Warhol describes his initial ideas for the cover design were a series of plastic surgery images, and Warhol had “sent Little Joey (the gofer) and his friend Dennis to medical supply houses for photographs and illustrations of nose jobs, breast jobs, ass jobs etc.—they brought me back hundreds!” Luckily, Warhol ditched that idea in favour of the now famous banana.

Warhol goes on to tell how he watched “a tall guy with dark curly hair step out of the elevator carrying a big manila envelope under his arm. … The guy didn’t know who to talk to and he just started wandering around, looking at the canvases, the screens, the vunyl, the plastic, the crumbling walls. If anybody “received” people at the Factory, it was Gerard (Malanga), but he’d just gone out to mail invitations to one of his poetry readings. The guy walked three-quarters of the way through the Factory till he saw me sitting in my corner and almost jumped—it was so hot, I hadn’t moved for an hour. He handed me the envelope. It was the from the artwork department at M-G-M records.“

Warhol doesn’t say any more about the contents of that envelope. Did it have the famous rear cover picture with Eric Emerson’s head? When the album was eventually released in March 1967, Emerson demanded payment for the use of his picure, forcing Verve Records to recall as many albums as they could and sticking a black label over the back cover photo. They re-released the album with Emerson airbrushed out of the frame.