NICO - CHELSEA GIRL @ 55

 

Released in October of 1967, the debut solo LP by Nico, Chelsea Girl, is marking its 55th anniversary this month. Coming on after her involvement with the debut Velvet Underground album & Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, Chelsea Girl is a rather skewed representation of the chanteuse as an artist, offering her little creative input for the album while obscuring her presence with distracting and unwanted musical elements.

After recording and touring with the VU in 1966 and early 1967, Nico moved to New York City and took up residence in a coffeehouse as a solo folk performer, often accompanied by Jackson Brown or various rotating VU members on guitar. When the proposition of a solo album for the German native loomed, her accompanists set about contributing songs for her to sing, with Brown, Lou Reed, John Cale and even Bob Dylan offering material. Nico only got a single writing credit for It Was A Pleasure Then. Production was handled by Tom Wilson, who despite Nico’s assertions, refused to use any drums or bass on the album and, without her knowledge or consent, added overdubs of strings and flute, much to the singer’s dismay. She is quoted as saying,

“I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! ... They added strings and – I didn't like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute.”

Stylistically, the album ended up landing somewhere between chamber folk and baroque pop. Critics have, in turn, praised it as a “masterpiece”, on one hand, and as having been “sabotaged”, as Trouser Press would eventually decry. Personally, I find it mostly enjoyable and listenable, but not particularly representative of what she’d eventually create with such monolithic & somber albums as The Marble Index, Desertshore & The End.

THROBBING GRISTLE - THE DESERTSHORE INSTALLATION @ 15

 

Fifteen years ago today, on June 1st, 2007, Throbbing Gristle began a three day residency at the art gallery where they were first declared “wreckers of civilization” over three decades earlier. London’s ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts, became host to a 12 hour installation, conducted in two hour segments, twice a day, over the course of three consecutive days (Friday, Saturday & Sunday). The Desertshore Installation was intended to offer its rotating audience a glimpse into the creative process of TG while they began work on a complete cover version of Nico’s classic album, Desertshore.

 

The idea for the project originated with Peter Christopherson, who wanted to take TG into new territory and push the collective into processes outside their comfort zone. The idea to do this in front of an audience was both daring and risky as they put themselves on display during the must vulnerable parts of their creative process. This was particularly challenging for Genesis P-Orridge, who was tasked with interpreting Nico’s idiosyncratic vocal style, often in languages other than English. The other members were less on the spot as some elements, like basic rough rhythm tracks, were prepared in advance of the installation.

 

In practice, the bulk of the sessions seemed to revolve around trying to capture usable vocal takes, though the group would intersperse these with numerous improvisations completely separate from the Nico songs. A selection of these improves eventually became mixed and augmented to form The Third Mind Movements album, which was issued in 2009 to coincide with the group's US mini-tour. The entirety of the show was videotaped and recorded on binaural digital audio with the audio portion issued in a limited edition 12 disc CD-R bound wallet set of approximately 250 copies. The video documentation has never been published to date to my knowledge.

 

After the installation and before the group could complete the album, Genesis suddenly & mysteriously departed TG after the initial London gig for a scheduled short EU tour in December of 2010. Peter Christopherson then died suddenly soon after that and the project lay dormant for a couple of years. Eventually, Chris Carter & Cosey Fanni Tutti took up the task of completing it in 2012, salvaging the recordings and equipment Sleazy had collected and taking it to their Norfolk schoolhouse studio for completion.

 

With Genesis estranged from them and the recordings of he/r vocals from the ICA sessions deemed unusable, the duo decided to take a different approach to finish the project and invited a number of friends and associates to do guest vocals. The resulting album was then released under the X-TG banner along with a second disc of improvisations recorded at their studio by Chris, Cosey & Peter before his death. A third ambient remix CD was also issued in a limited edition for close friends.  The Desertshore project would ultimately serve as a capstone for TG as no further material has yet to surface from the surviving Industrial Records shareholders.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO @ 55

 

Celebrating its 55th anniversary today is the debut album by The Velvet Underground and Nico, which was released on March 12th, 1967. It was an album that had limited sales when it first left the gate, but as Brian Eno famously remarked, pretty much every person who bought it in those early days went out and started a band themselves, with often revolutionary results. After over five decades in the world, it is surely one of the most profoundly influential records ever produced within the realm of rock and popular music.

It’s an album that came about at a time when youth culture was intoxicated by the psychedelic swirl of groups like The Beatles and albums like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The summer of love was about to happen and flower power and hippy utopianism were all the rage. As such, even though the Velvets were honing their craft as part of Andy Warhol’s LSD freakout Exploding Plastic Inevitable “happenings”, the essence of their music was on another level entirely. Rather than singing songs about peace and love and togetherness, they were exploring drug addiction, sexual perversion, sadomasochism, prostitution and a generally darker, New York style street hustler vibe that was on a completely different wavelength than the hippies. They dressed in black and seemed like a bunch of dour, unsettling people. Musically, their sound was harder and sharper and had a strangeness to it that felt off center and, at times, distinctly dissonant. They were, quite literally, ahead of their time.

The kind of attitude that the VU fostered wouldn’t become in vogue until a decade later, when punk, new wave, post-punk and industrial music sprang up in the late 1970s. By that time, the VU’s first album, along with the the ones that followed it, had become musical touchstones for that next generation. The naiveté of the hippies had long since lost its sheen. The reality of the crumbling cities and the failure of the “love” revolution to influence any real change had fostered a deep sense of disillusionment and that zeitgeist became the perfect ground for the VU legend to take root and grow.

The album was recorded during the latter part of 1966 with Andy Warhol listed as the “producer”, though he actually had no direct hand in its sound. Rather, Warhol was the band’s facilitator. The credibility his name offered allowed the group to do basically whatever they wanted with the recordings. That “hands off” approach, however, is still considered by the band to have been a valid production technique as it allowed them to realize their music the way they wanted. However, Warhol did contribute the distinctive album art for the record, featuring the infamous “peel and see” banana, which resulted in some exorbitantly expensive and complex manufacturing in order to realize. It was hoped that Warhol’s name would help to bolster sales of the record, but even with his branding firmly affixed to the project, the sales didn’t materialize.

But it’s not always about the numbers in the bank accounts and The Velvet Underground and Nico proved that sometimes art requires a long game in order to realize its potential. One has to wonder if this kind of influence is still possible in today’s modern music industry. Is it possible for a group of outsiders like this to set anything in motion that can flow into so many sub-genres throughout the decades. How many touch points are there in contemporary music that can trace their roots back to this album? Are there any contemporary artists around today that have the potential to plant that kind of seed for the future?

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO

It was sometime in 1984 when The Velvet Underground first made a notable impression upon me. I had probably heard the odd song here and there before, but was mostly familiar with Lou Reed as a solo artist for his song, Walk On the Wild Side, which had featured in the "punk" movie soundtrack of the film, Times Square (1980). Other than that, I didn't know a hell of a lot about the group. I just recall one summer Sunday morning, after a long night of warehouse partying when the last dregs of us were lounging around the space that the song, Sunday Morning, came on and it was such a perfect expression of the moment that it burned the groups essence into my mind and I started to look more closely at them and what they had achieved.

I didn't actually get a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico album (on CD) until sometime in the early 1990s, but I would become very familiar with it from copies owned by various friends and acquaintances. I'd also become well aware of the scene around the group at the time of its creation; the Factory crowd, Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia live extravaganzas and the auteur of the scene, Andy Warhol. It was all a big influence on us in the mid 1980s as we were looking to create our own little version of it in Vancouver, occupying disused warehouse spaces and filling them with mind altered denizens of the night, dancing to strange electronic sounds amid whatever setting we could manage to concoct with no money and scraps of whatever.

It was another case where I understood that the revolution in music and art we were seeing in our times was inspired and influenced by something from the past and that it wasn't all happening in a vacuum. The sounds the VU managed to create became massively influential to the most extreme examples of new music we were seeing from our generation. When you understood the connections and heard the linkages, you could appreciate the continuity of culture being expressed through the decades that separated these artists.

Learning about the VU also put their era in a completely new light. Having lived through it, albeit as a child who was only impressed upon by virtue of the media of the day, namely the TV, my biggest sense of culture for the late 1960s was often the caricature of hippies which had managed to permeate the popular shows of the day. Even at that, the hippies were much more subversive in their core, and I'm talking about the Merry Prankster branch here, than what was seen on the small screen. But there was another, much darker tangent to those years which remained hidden and obscured until you took the time to brush away the detritus of popular representations and explore below the surface.

In this regard, The Velvet Underground represented the ultimate "hard core" of the most significant artistic influence to emerge from the decade. While groups like The Beatles would have admittedly massive influence on popular culture in the decades to follow, The Velvets would prove to be far more insidious, perverse and persistent in terms of providing a foothold for subversive evolution within the arts. Personally, I continue to consider them "ground zero" for the most original and alienating strands of artistic expression within the realm of experimental and alternative music.