Dylan and Andy Warhol
Andrew Russ
Just read the interesting book by Andy Warhol about the 60s, the
Factory & all the people involved, called POPism: The Warhol 60s. There
are a number of bits about Dylan, plus lots about the Velvet Underground.
Thought you might be interested. The first bit is from 1962 or 1963, the rest
is 65-66.
Taylor [Mead] talked about all the poets and performers who were
around in thoseVillage places, names I had scarcely heard of then--like a guy
with shoulder-length hair who played the ukelele named Tiny Tim, and a young
folk singer named Bob Dylan, who had one or two albums out by this time but
wasn't a big name yet.
"I gave Bob Dylan a book of my poems a couple of years ago," Taylor
said, "right after the first time I saw him perform. I thought he was a great
poet and I told him so." A Woody Guthrie song playing on the radio "So Long,
It's Been Good To Know You," had prompted Taylor's story. "And _now_," Taylor
started to laugh, "now when he's a biig sensatiion and everything, he asked me
for a free copy of my second book. I said, 'But you're _rich_ now--you can
afford to _buy_ it!' And he said, 'But I only get paid quarterly.'"
(Taylor confessed to me a couple of years later, "The minute I heard
Bob Dylan with his guitar, I thought, 'that's it, that's what's coming in, the
poets have _had_ it.'")
Dylan played his first electronic concerts this summer. ... He was out
of folk and into rock and he's switched from social protest songs to personal
protest songs, and the more private he got, the more popular he got, and it
seemed like the more he said "I'm only me," the more the kids said "We're
only you, too."
[At Sam Green's party in his new apartment, which he got furnished with
42,000 dolars worth of furs, for _free_...Everyone was lying around on minks and lynxes and foxes and seals, with hundreds of candles and a big fire blazing...]
There were a few boys in the latest velvets and silk shirts, but not too
many--the boys were still mostly in blue jeans and button-down shirts. Edie
[Sedgwick] brought Bob Dylan to the party and they huddled by themselves over
in a corner. Dylan was spending a lot of time then up at his manager Al
Grossman's place near Woodstock, and Edie was somehow involved with Grossman,
too--she said he was going to manage her career.
I'd met Dylan through the MacDougal Street/Kettle of Fish/Cafe Rienzi/
Hip Bagel/Cafe Figaro scene, which Danny Fields claims got started when he and
Donald Lyons saw Eric Anderson, the folk singer, on MacDougal and thought he
was so handsome they went up and asked him if he wanted to be in an Andy Warhol
movie. "How many times did we all use _that_ one?" Danny laughed. And after
that Eric got interested in Edie and suddenly we were just all around the
Village together. But I think Edie actually knew Dylan because of Bobby
Neuwirth. Bobby was a painter who originally started singing and guitar playing
up in Cambridge just to make money to paint with, he told me once. Then he
hooked up with Dylan and became part of that group--he was something like
Dylan's road manager-confidant. And Bobby was a friend of Edie's.
At Sam's party Dylan was in blue jeans and high-heeled boots and a
sports jacket, and his hair was sort of long. He had deep circles under his
eyes, and even when he was standing he was all hunched in. He was around
twenty-four then and the kids were all just starting to talk and act and
dress and swagger like he did. But not many people except Dylan could ever
pull that anti-act off--and if he wasn't in the right mood, he couldn't,
either. He was already slightly flashy when i met him, definitely not
folksy anymore--I mean, he was wearing satin polka-dot shirts. He'd released
_Bringing It All Back Home_, so he'd already started his rock sound at this
point, but he hadn't played at the Newport Folk Festival yet, or Forest Hills,
the places where the old-style folk people booed him for going electric, but
where the kids started going really crazy for him. This was just before "Like
a Rolling Stone" came out. I like Dylan, the way he'd created a brilliant ne
w style. He didn't spend his career doing homage to his past, he had to do
things his own way, and that wasjust what I respected. I even gave him one of
my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had use the Elvis as a dart board
up in the country. When I'd ask, "Why would he do that?" I'd invariably get
hearsay answers like "I hear he feels you destroyed Edie," or "Listen to 'Like
a Rolling Stone'--I think you're the 'diplomat on the chrome horse,' man." I
didn't know exactly what they meant by that--I never listened much to the
words of songs--but I got the tenor of what people were saying--that Dylan
didn't like me, that he blamed me for Edie's drugs.
Whatever anyone may have thought, the truth is I never gave Edie a drug,
ever. Not even one diet pill. Nothing. She certainly was taking a lot of
amphetamine and downs, but she certainly wasn't geting any of them from me.
She was getting them from that doctor who was shooting up every Society lady
in town [Dr. Roberts?]
Now and then someone would accuse me of being evil--of letting people
destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape record
them. But I don't think of myself as evil--just realistic. I learned when I
was little that whenever I got aggressive and tried to tell someone what to do,
nothing happened--I just couldn't carry it off. I learned that you actually
have more power when you shut up, because at least that way people will start to
maybe doubt themselves. When people are readddy to, they change. They never do
it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't
make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you
can't stop them.
(I did eventually find out what Dylan did with that Silver Elvis. More
that ten years later, at a time when some similar paintings of mine were
estimated for five or six figures, I ran into Dylan at a party in London. He
was really nice to me, he was a much friendlier person all around. He admitted
he'd given the painting away to his manager, Al Grossman, and then he shook his
head regretfully and said, "But if you ever gave me another one, Andy, I
wouldn't make that mistake again..." I thought the story was finished then, but
it wasn't. Shortly afterward I happened to be talking to Robbie Robertson,
guitarist in the Band, and he started to smile when I told him what Dylan had
just told me. "Yeah." Robbie laughed. "Only he didn't exactly _give_ Grossman
the painting--he _traded_ it. For a sofa.")
Another idea we had in mind when we went to check out the Velvets [the
Velvet Underground] was that they might be a good band to play behind Nico, an
incrediible German beauty who'd just arrived in New York from London. She
looked like she could have made the trip over right at the front of a Viking
ship, she had that kind of face and body. ...
During dinner, Nico told us that she'd been on TV in England in a rock
show called "Ready, Steady, Go!" and right there she pulled a demo 45rpm out
of her bag of a song called "I'll Keep It With Mine" that had been written for
her, she said, by Bob Dylan, who'd been over there touring. (It was one of
a few pressings that had Dylan playing the piano on it, and eventually Judy
Collins recorded it) [it was also on Nico's first LP, _Chelsea Girls_].
Nico said that Al Grossman had heard it and told her that if she came to the
United States, he'd manage her. When she said that, it didn't sound too
promising, because we'd heard Edie telling us so much that she was "under
contract" to Grossman and nothing much seemed to be happening for her--having
a well-known manager was never a guarantee that things would really happen for
you.
I remembered seeing Ronnie [Cutrone] for the first time at a sort of
folksy party the year before down around MacDougal Street. I was going out and
he was coming in and we'd collided, stepping over Bob Dylan, who happened to be
lying on the stairs looking smashed and having a great time, reaching up under
the girls' skirts when they walked over him up to the party (some of them
liked it and some of them didn't--whatever, he'd just laugh), and Ronnie and
I couldn't get past each other so he looked down at Dylan and told him, "I loved
that crazy rolling organ, man."
andrew russ