DISGRACELAND - The Velvet Underground: Heroin, S&M, and the Attempted Assassination of Andy Warhol

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

The Velvet Underground put a spike in the status quo. They sang candidly about heroin, speed, and S&M. Their members included drug dealers and junkies. Their stage show was so perverted that it offended even the most liberal of peacenik hippies. Their benefactor and so-called manager, Andy Warhol, was nearly killed in an assassination attempt that shocked the country. But their songwriter, Lou Reed, wanted more than shocking headlines and offensive stage shows. He wanted to be a rock ‘n roll star. He wanted to have big hits. And he’d do anything to get what he wanted – even if it meant pushing everyone else out of the way.For the full list of contributors, visit disgracelandpod.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

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Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about the Velvet Underground are insane. They sang candidly about heroin, speed, and S&M. And those subjects would be controversial even now, but at the time in the 1960s, they were completely taboo, unheard of in pop music. No one sang about drugs and sex like that, but no one was the Velvet Underground.

Their members included drug dealers and junkies, and their perverted stage show offended liberal hippies. Their first manager, Andy Warhol, nearly died during an assassination attempt that left him physically and mentally shattered for the rest of his life. Their songwriter Lou Reed was hell-bent on transcending the art scene to achieve major commercial success, no matter who stood in his way. Despite of him because of all of these things, the Velvet Underground made great music, some of the most cutting-edge music, music that predicted punk rock, music that launched a thousand bands. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music.

That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Union Square Dance MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Mrs. Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel. And why would I play you that specific slice of Gookooka cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on June 3, 1916. And that was the day that the Velvet Underground's former manager, Andy Warhol, was declared clinically dead. A moment that had ramifications on both the future of the band and the future of rock and roll. On this episode, Speed and Heroin, Sex Fetishers, and Assassination Attempt, Gook Goochoooo Chees in the Velvet Underground. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland.

Didn't know what the fuck she was looking at. The flowers and the hair, long flowing blouses, fringe and technicolor tie-dye. This one girl, she didn't even have shoes on. The girl stuck out two fingers like bunny ears. Peace and love. Peace and what? The hell was wrong with these people.

This was 1966. Look around. California, Vietnam, Mississippi, goddamn. There was no peace. Back home in New York, the only piece you got was the few minutes it took to give blood so that you could earn a couple bucks to make it through the rest of the week. And love, love was not free, and it was not easy. The L.A. hippies were equally confused by Mo. Was this a woman standing before them, or is this a man?

Why did she or he play the drums standing up? Black clothes, sunglasses, inside the club at night? Mole people. moles on speed and smack instead of grass and LSD. Didn't they know they're on the West Coast? They had permission to be happy here. Inner Bliss was just a California dream away. Mo knew it was useless to try to explain herself to these morons.

They didn't even get Nico, the most beautiful thing about the Velvet Underground. Nico was tall, exotic, magnetic. But she was a deadpan kind of knockout. Her deep voice was strange and her lack of affectation was even strange. stranger. She was a block of ice, way too cool to melt in the hot California sun. Mo would take the repressed Midwest over this fantasy any day. Because that's what this was, a fantasy. Jesus, they even had a band called Love. Love! It was the biggest pile of bullshit Mo had ever seen. It wasn't just Mo. Lou Reed, the singer and the songwriter in her band, The Velvet Underground.

He knew bullshit when he saw it. Lou Reed was fluent in bullshit. Lou Reed peddled bullshit. As a former staff songwriter for Pickwick Records, he made a living selling Fugazis to fucking Roobes. The songs were shit. The bands that recorded the songs didn't exist. It was just a cash grab. It was plastic.

But Lou's real songs, the songs he didn't write for the Pickwick Fugazi machine, those were real. Real is a spike in your vein, realer than anything anyone had ever heard before. While the Beatles were busy singing coated drug songs, like, got to get you into my life. The Velvet Underground weren't coding a damn thing.

I'm waiting for the man and heroin were metaphor-free songs about junkies and A-heads. Guys like Lou himself, coping a fix, shooting speed, shooting junk, popping secondals and Thorazine, anything that allowed you to see the white light and feel the white heat. And it wasn't just drug music.

Lou's song, Venus and Furs, was all about kinks and sexual taboos, about servants tasting the whip and mistresses with boots to worship. It was Venus and Furs they were playing now, on stage at a sunset strip club called The Trip. Lou Reed and fellow band members Sterling Morrison's guitars conjured a drone. The drone of a 60-cycle hum of a Westinghouse refrigerator. The drone of Western civilization.

The alpha rhythm of the sleeping brain. John Kale's amplified viola squealed eerily. Mo Tucker beat out a primitive rhythm on a drum kit as diminutive as she was. It was hypnotic. and it was loud, and the walls of the little club shook. But there was more to the show than just the sound. The exploding plastic inevitable. Andy Warhol's roving brainchild of New York freaks

was a multimedia assault on the senses. The intent of the exploding plastic inevitable wasn't merely to hypnotize, but to control the imagination of everyone in the room. This was done not just with sound, but with vision. Andy's experimental films were projected directly onto the band, like blowjob, a 35-minute single take of a man's face as he, well, you know, gets blown off camera. The strobe lights and the movie flickered while the Velvets kept playing that drone like a B-52 is coming

through the fucking roof, the kind of drone that John Kale had learned about at the feet of Lamont-Dyung. But the minimalist composer didn't just supply John Kale with music lessons. He supplied the dope, the good dope, the dope that John Kale dealt for Lamont-Dyong on the side. and the dope that got Lou Reed off, hardcore. The band sounded like nodding off, felt. Two dancers, Gerard and Mary, appeared on stage holding oversized plastic needles while the velvet song played on,

an audio-visual representation of Lamonte Young's teachings. They pressed the syringes into their arms and went through the motion of shooting heroin, and the music got louder. Mary cracked her cruel bullwit, and the sound of it brought poor Gerard to his knees. Mary motioned to him. Gerard began to crawl.

John Cale's viola sounded like corrosive liquid running down a rainbow mural. Lou Reed's guitar began to feed back like a cornered animal. And Gerard crawled on his hands and knees. That's a good little sub. Mary cracked her bullwhip again. Gerard hustled. Yes, yes, strike me, dear mistress. He made it to Mary's feet.

He could smell the sweat on her body. He could taste her in the back of his throat. He looked up. Mary looked down at him from on high. Gerard opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue, and licked her leather boots clean. When the show let out, the L.A. audience scratched their heads.

Lou Reed should have known better. You can't reprogram brains with sound and images. Not unlike Lou Reed's own brain couldn't be reprogrammed when his parents sent him to that place where he laid down on a wooden gurney and some quack and a white coat stuck a rubber block between his teeth. And that shit didn't work. You couldn't shock,

someone's brain into being uptight, just like you couldn't shock the gay out of them. I don't mean uptight as in anxious or tense. I meant it in the way Stevie Wonder meant it when he's saying that everything was all right, clean, out of sight, and was uptight. Interesting. Something instead of nothing. L.A. was nothing. San Francisco was even worse.

San Francisco's Bill Graham didn't just misunderstand the Velvets. He hated them. I hope he fuck his bomb, he said to Maureen Tucker as the group took the stage at the Fillmore. Graham was just jealous, jealous that these people were cooler than he was, jealous that he'd never get to fuck Nico, jealous when he realized that he, Bill Graham, the music man of the Hayd Ashbury, the guru of the Fillmore, that he was not the true originator of the trippy rock and roll light show,

as he so often claimed to be, and therefore was patently not uptight. It was Marshall McLuhan, the famous Twillan, the famous 20th century philosopher of mass media, who officially gave the Velvet's credit over Bill Graham for inventing the rock and roll light show. In his book, The Medium is the Massage. Yes, I said massage.

That's a pun on McLuhan's most indelible phrase, the medium is the message. In 1966, no rock band was more aware of the potential of their own medium than the Velvet Underground. And no band peddled a more transgressive message than the Velvet Underground. Speed, heroin, trash, novel. civil kink, solicitations in acts deemed lewd and indecent by local and federal law, sins of bad

taste and sins against quote-unquote nature. The Velvet Underground was the medium, and the message was crime. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck.

I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods

with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him. and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it, and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the

Exactly Right Network. Listen to wicked words on the I-Hart. Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie to Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the

Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay. That's another film grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes.

Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You are a rat. You're a fucking rat. Andy Warhol was pissed. His face was beat red.

Lou Reed had seen Andy in all his moods before. Shy, playful, combative, horny, but he'd never seen him so angry. Lou played it cool, more like ice cold. It wasn't personal. It was just, you know, business. Andy could feel hurt and betrayed all he wanted. Didn't bother Lou at all. What did bother Lou was what had become of his band. He was the songwriter. He was the brooding provocateur.

John Kale could argue with that all he wanted. John was there from the start, after all, not just copping nickel bags of junk with Lou, but providing a creative foil that juxtaposed experimentalism with Lou Street Tough Poetics. But Lou Reed wasn't in a rock band to be. experimental. He wasn't here to have some art film projected onto his body. Lou Reed wasn't a fucking soundtrack. He was a rock and roll animal. He was made to make people shake to that fine,

fine music. Lou Reed wanted to be a star. And the way he saw it now, in 1967, Andy Warhol was the star. And don't get him wrong, Lou was grateful for Andy's help, no doubt, without the patronage of one of the most commercially successful disruptors of the modern art. art world, the Velvet Underground wouldn't have a debut album out on Verve Records. Andy had the scene, Andy had the buzz, and most importantly, Andy, at the time anyway, had the dough. Andy's money paid for the Velvet's instruments, their equipment. It paid for the rehearsal space and their tour. But that money also gave Andy Warhol the right to pull rank. Like when he hired Krista Piffkin, a.k.a. Niko as the group's co-lead singer alongside Lou. Any artist knows that beauty is in the eye of the

beholder, but Andy Warhol wasn't just an artist. He was a businessman. He knew that you needed more than three irritated-looking dudes and one androgynous drummer to sell records, and an ex-fashioned model sold records. Lou, on the other hand, saw Nico as a femme fatal, a double cross, there to marginalize his involvement, there to sing his songs. Sunday morning, the lead track from the Velvet Underground's 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, was written by Lou for Nico. But when he found out it was also going to be the album's lead single, Lou took it back. He sang the damn thing. He wasn't having some 50-foot-tall blonde bombshell casting a shadow on his side of the fucking street. It wasn't paranoia. It wasn't jealousy. Okay, maybe it was,

but it was something else, too. It was self-preservation. Just look at the New York Times review of the Velvet's live show, the same one that baffled the hippies out west. The Times made sure they mentioned Nico, the quote, famous fashion model and now singer, unquote, as well as John Kale, who was dubbed the group's leader, but the article never mentioned Lou Reed, not once, and that can under Lou's skin. Now he had this album, this incredible album,

and his name was nowhere on it. Andy Warhol's name was on the cover. Twice, produced by Andy Warhol, was printed on the back of the LP jacket in the font just as large as the title of the record, which was rich because, you know, Andy knew fuck all about producing a rock and roll album. And there it was again on the front of the LP jacket.

Just below that giant dick. Okay, it wasn't actually a dick. It was Andy's print of a yellow banana that he stole off an ashtray from some promotional item printed a couple decades before. That banana was actually a sticker that he could peel off slowly to see this bright pink banana flesh beneath it. Okay, come on now, that was a dick. It's definitely a dick. Lou didn't even mind that it was a dick. Lou was fine with dicks.

The problem was that Andy was a dick. and it was Andy's R, Andy's name, and yes, Andy's Dick. And maybe Lou would have looked past all that if the album had just sold well, but no one was buying it. The Velvet Underground and Nico was roundly ignored when it was released in March of 1967. The record label didn't promote it. No disc jockey was risking their job to play songs about junkies and speed freaks and S&M on the air. Not even their own hometown.

The Velvet Underground, a band that was a mirror to the thriving, seedy underbelly of New York was effectively banned by that same city. Lou Reed didn't want excuses, though. He wanted success. He wanted fame. And more than just those 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol kept going on about. Andy could whine and moan all he wanted, but Lou was tougher. And Lou was more than tough.

In his mind, he was a fucking king, a king fueled by methamphetamine, wired on speed. Lou thought faster, talked faster, and acted faster. And if Andy wanted to call him a fucking rat, then fine. Lou could stand being a fucking rat. It was all this other bullshit he couldn't stand anymore.

The elevator made its way up to the sixth floor of the Decker building. When it arrived, the bell rang out and the doors of the elevator slid open. Andy Warhol, dressed all in black, with his shock of silver hair perched on top, stepped into the hallway and began to walk towards his office. A woman was waiting for him.

He knew her. she looked impatient. Andy assumed she was there to talk about her script, the script she wanted Andy to produce, but she wasn't holding a script today. Instead, her fingers were clenched tight around the handle of a 32 Beretta. After his professional relationship with the Velvet Underground came to an end, Andy Warhol relocated his studio, the factory to Union Square,

the kind of neighborhood in the late 60s that you'd find in a Lou Reed song. But Andy no longer had Lou Reed or his songs. In New York, no longer had the Velvet Underground. Andy's old band was busy creating a new family, 200 miles away, in Boston. No bullwhips, no light show, no film projections, just rock and roll. Andy couldn't help but take it personally, the snub, the relocation. But the Velvet's exile to another city was a self-imposed middle finger aimed at all of New York in general. Andy liked to think the band extended an olive branch to him when they had him create the cover art for their second album.

But the music had changed since the first record. White light, white heat was jittery, aggressive, and the sound of amphetamines and haste, fuzzy and distorted, and it had 100% less Nico. Getting Andy out of the picture was only the first step in Lou's plan. With Andy gone, Lou set his sights on the German model. Nico was a concept, a marketing ploy. She wasn't part of the band. Not really. Lou did his fast-talking pill-fueled King Rat Thing

and got John Kale to agree with him, so when the time came to fire Nico and that time came real fucking fast, John had Luceback. Plus, white light, white heat was a brand new sound. It was fast. It had nails and teeth. It was doggy dog, bitch-on-bitch.

It was survival. People who were gathered near Andy Warhol's office scattered when the first shot went off. The barrel of the burretto was smoking, in the woman's hands. She pulled the trigger again. Andy watched in horror as someone was hit. Andy went to take shelter behind a desk, but in his panic, he bumped into it and lost his balance. His head hit the corner of the desk on his way down, and his vision went blurry. And then, she was on him. The butt of her barretta pressed hard into his right side. He heard the pistol

fire again. Then, a burning sensation just under his armpit. Blood began to pool on the floor beneath him. The gunshot was so close, so loud. His ears were ringing, a drone, one long note. It rang out into infinity, smothering his head. Like the strings of a bow across a viola or feedback from an amplifier turned all the way up to 10 or an elevator bell cast down a hallway to hell, a soundtrack to his pain. He saw an array of colors made of tears. He spat up blood. It hurt to breathe. Jesus, fuck, he'd been shot in the fucking lung. He knew it. He could see his business manager Fred Hughes out of the corner of his eye. on his knees, hands raised, begging, Valerie, I'm innocent.

She walked over and aimed the gun at Fred's head. I'm going to shoot you. Fred whimpered. He knew the dear mistress was about to strike. Valerie, don't shoot. And she pushed the gun closer to Fred. I have to, she said. Andy closed his eyes and waited to hear the gun fire one more time. Before it did, the elevator bell rang out.

Andy opened his eyes. He struggled through double vision to look. But there was nothing to see. The elevator was empty. The room went dark. And Andy Warhol dreamt for a thousand years. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of The Girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the Girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien.

And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay. That's another film grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore.

It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over. From hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart radio app.

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a host of The Wicked Words Podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave St.

survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it, and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lou Reed was in Los Angeles when he heard that Andy Warhol was dead.

Technically, Andy had been pronounced clinically dead, but that was before the doctors at Columbus Hospital went to work. They cut his chest open, and they massaged his heart with their hands, and they brought Andy back to life. The bullet from Valerie Salinas' Beretta had ripped through Andy's stomach, his liver, his spleen, his esophagus, and both his lungs. He should have died. Instead, he had a new lease on life.

but it was a lease that came with a caveat. He developed an incisional hernia during the five-hour procedure, which meant he'd have to wear a corset for the rest of his life to keep his internal organs in place. Lou knew he should call, and that would be the right thing to do, express his shock for what had happened, his guilt for not being there,

his gratitude that all things considered, and he was okay. But Lou didn't call. Not right away. He was busy thinking about that girl, The one of the Boston Tea Party. Not the Tea Party, not that old ship docked off Boston Harbor

that runs tours at the top of the hour with kids making minimum wage dressed up like ye old sons of liberty. I'm talking about the legendary music venue called the Boston Tea Party, now defunct, that was once located on Berkeley Street in the south end and later relocated to Lansdowne Street next to Fenway Park.

That Boston Tea Party was where the Velvet Underground played regular gigs for a diehard faction of local Boston fans who embraced the band as their own. It was that place that Lou was thinking of now, specifically the girl who walked right up to him and said, You make me so crazy I want to kill you. She had that look in her eyes. He'd seen it before.

He wondered if Andy saw that same look in Valerie's eyes when she pulled the trigger. The Tea Party girl meant well. It meant it as a compliment, really, but it was unsettling all the same. At first, Lou thought he'd just misheard her. It was loud inside the venue, even if the Velvet's definition of a good turnout for a show was like four. people. Hippies held court in one corner, bikers and another, drug dealers skulked past the art teachers, local thugs sized up a couple of Harvard students. That goofy kid Jonathan Richmond was around here somewhere, probably bugging Sterling Morrison again to show him how to play those

chords on his guitar. Lou asked the girl to repeat her so, I said, you're making me so crazy, I want to kill you. Yeah, that's what he thought. Fucking weirdo. They're all freaks and weirdos. Some were lovable, the others just fucking crazy. Did girls walk up to Paul McCartney and say they wanted to kill him? What was going to stop someone like Valerie Salinas from walking right up to Lou, pulling a piece from her pocket and blowing his fucking brains out?

Andy should have had locks on the doors. Security men instead of yes men. He shouldn't let so many random people get that close to him. Candy darling, Duck and Sally, Edie Sedgwick, International Velvet, Ingrid's superstar, Sweet Jane, Ultraviolet, Teenage Mary, Margarita Passion, the cast of characters who were in and out of the factory were dreamers and artists and outcasts,

but some were also deviance and junkies and opportunists and criminals. And then there were people like Valerie Salinas, people who were obviously disturbed. You could laugh at Valerie's Scum Manifesto, that's S-C-U-M, a.k.a. the Society for Cutting Up Men, the one she sold copies of in Greenwich Village for a buck, two bucks if you had a swinging dick, that you could call it satire a big joke. but Valerie was dead fucking serious. She was dead serious when she wrote that women should, quote, overthrow the government, eliminate the money system,

institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex, unquote. Lou knew that being a man wasn't what got Andy shot. Andy let Valerie get too close. He accepted a copy of her script. He admitted that he didn't like the script and thus wasn't going to produce it. And then, and this is probably the kicker here, he lost the fucking thing. That was just Andy being Andy. In the eyes of Valerie Salinas, however, Andy was silencing her voice.

Or worse, Andy was stealing her voice. Later that evening, on June 3, 1968, while Andy Warhol was fighting for his life in the hospital, Valerie approached a cop in Times Square and gave herself up. She said that she shot Andy Warhol because he had too much control over her life. Days went by and Lou still didn't call. But that didn't mean he was. wasn't thinking about Andy, or that he wasn't thinking about what Valerie Salinas had said about

control. Control was the thing. Control was all you had. Andy lost it, and Valerie went looking for it. That got Lou thinking about John Cale, an integral part of the Velvet Underground before they adopted that name, since way back when they were the primitives, and then the warlocks and then the falling spikes. Where once Lou saw a partner, Lou now saw a rival, someone jockeying for position. someone jockeying for control. John Cale was no different than Nico. John Cale was in the way. John Cale was a hurdle,

and Lou Reed didn't fucking jump over other people. Lou was beginning to see the light. Not that Sterling Morrison or Mo Tucker could tell. It was impossible to tell if Lou was happy or sad, pissed off or excited. Sterling and Mo sat across the table from Lou and watched uncomfortably as he tried to smile. But he couldn't.

Like he literally could not make his face form a smile. He tried, and his cheeks and lips contorted into some painful monstrosity of confused emotion. The junkies smile. The smile of a man whose musculature has been altered by methamphetamine. Lou didn't need to smile. He just needed to talk. To remind Sterling and Moe that the Velvet Underground had two albums out, two albums on a major label, on Ella Fitzgerald's label, for God's sake,

and nobody was buying them. Nobody was playing them. No one outside of a couple weirdos at the Tea Party knew who the first of a lot of fuck the Velvet Underground was. The band needed to make a change if they were going to survive. And not just survive, but thrive. They had to make it. And to make it, they needed a hit.

No more noise. No more experimentation. Just songs. Lou had the songs. Lou just needed good players who could execute those songs the way Lou intended. John Kale was not one of those players. John Kale had his own ideas. And Lou didn't need those ideas.

Lou needed songs and Lou needed control. Sterling and Moe were shocked. John Kale, out of the band, it would be a crime. But any and all objections Sterling and Mo raised were quickly withdrawn. Because if John stayed, Lou was leaving. And Lou, being the primary songwriter, meant the band would cease to exist if he was gone. Which further meant Sterling and Moe would be out of a job.

They had no other choice but to agree with their leader. And Lou Reed did what leaders in control did. He delegated. He told Sterling Morrison to go find John Cale and telling me he was out of the band. Debbie Harry was stoned. She fumbled the plate in her hands on her way over to Table 5. She watched the cheeseburger go airborne. Fuck, Debbie thought.

Not again. This wasn't the first time Debbie Harry dropped a burger in a car, customer's lap. It was a miracle she hadn't been fired yet. Not like there was a line of girls dying to take her place waitressing in Max's Kansas City, which, despite its name, was a nightclub and restaurant not in Kansas City but on Park Avenue South in Manhattan. She knew she wasn't destined to sling burgers the rest of her life. She wanted to be off Max's dining room floor and up on Max's stage, just like this band she was watching now. She knew she'd get there, one way or another. Debbie Harry wasn't the only one. There's a quote attributed to Brian Eno, but who knows really,

that goes, the first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band. The erroneous sales figure aside, that quote gets to the heart of the Velvet Underground's appeal. They were rough around the edges. They were out of tune. They weren't pretty, and they didn't sell a ton of records. Few people actually knew about them, but you know about them, and you love them for all those reasons I just listed. It's easy to create an intensely intimate relationship with a bam like the Velvet Underground because they belong to you. In August 1970, the Velvet Underground once again belonged to New York City.

Three years had passed since they last played Manhattan. The hatchets were buried. Or at the very least, the hatchets were hidden. Like Andy's crowd was hiding in plain sight in the back room of Maxis, Kansas City. Debbie Harry wasn't part of any crowd, but she watched the back room with a waitress. eagle eye. She watched night after night of routine violations of local law and good taste. A couple fucking on the floor, a woman with a wine bottle in her hand standing on the table

screaming at showtime right before she spread her legs and shoved the wine bottle up deep inside of her. All of this decadence, churning, and there's Andy Warhol sitting still, like a man preparing himself to move on for mourning, holding court on the whole scene while that fucking girdle held his insides together, surrounded again by people, start. ranked in numbers. It was a brave face, but everyone knew he was forever changed. He would never be the same again. Ditto for the Velvet Underground. Mo Tucker saw the writing on the wall. Actually, she saw the other guy behind her drum kit and knew the jig was up, that Lou had gotten what he wanted. Mo watched her band along with the rest of the audience and felt glum. She was a new mother,

and maternity leave meant this. Watching from the wings, watching his Billy Ewell hammered away at the kit with a style that was far more flashy than she ever played. Billy's brother Doug was the new John Kale. Then the Yule brothers did what Lou wanted. They harmonized and made songs like, I'm Waiting for the man's sore like garage rock gems. They brought the kind of chops that Lou and John and Mo had always avoided. They were uptight in their own way, not in a factory kind of way, but in a meat and potatoes kind of way. No violas, no bells and whistles, no frills, just rock and roll. That was the whole idea behind the title of the Velvet Underground's fourth studio album, loaded. The record was loaded with hits.

Honest to God, FM radio-friendly go-down in the annals of history rock and roll hits. It was exactly what Lou Reed wanted and exactly what Lou Reed's scheme to make happen. And it worked. It is the most accessible record in the band's career. Two songs from that album in particular, Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll, remained staples of classic rock radio to this day. This being the Velvet Underground, however, the title had a dual meaning.

Loaded as in high as fuck. A state of mind and a message that the band knew all too well. The thing was Loaded wasn't even a Velvet Underground record. It had Lou and it had Sterling, but with her new baby, Mo sat this one out, despite the fact

that her name is on the album jacket. It took four session drummers to replace her. Lou Reed's War of Attrition, his process of elimination, had reached its inevitable climax. First, Andy, then Nico, then John, then Mo, and finally, himself. Lou walked away from one of those shows at Max's in the summer of 1970 and never went back.

When Loaded was finally released in November of 1970, just a few months after the band's now legendary residency at Maxis, Kansas City, the Velvet Underground as it began was over. Lou Reed was back living with his parents, working as a typist in his father's accounting firm for $40,000. week. His band had been all about degradation, anything to put a spike in the status quo. But the great Lou Reed working in a fucking accounting office, now that's a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com.

If you're listening as a Disgraceland All-Axist member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free. Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at Disgracelam pod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at disgraceland pod.

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or wherever you get your podcast. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

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