Going for the Jugular: On the Recording of the Velvet Underground & Nico

In an exclusive extract from his new book, Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground, author and music journalist Richie Unterberger re-assesses the role played by pop artist Andy Warhol in one of the seminal rock albums of the late 1960s

John Cale and Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground performs on stage at the Cafe Bizarre, New York, December 1965. (Photo by Adam Ritchie/Redferns)

According to Paul Morrissey, “Andy was [saying], ‘There’s no money here. We’re not making any money. What is happening?’ He was always very uncomfortable if money wasn’t coming in. Even though they had signed their management contract before the Dom had opened, it was not easy, and

Andy had to pay for the lawyers and all that. I said, ‘We have to do what everybody else does. They have to make a recording, and we have to try to sell it to a record company.’ Again, he had to lay out the money for the recording studio, but it was only two or three thousand dollars for two or three nights.” (Other sources put the figure closer to $1,500, Reed referring to it as “the profits from like one week at the Dom” in a 1987 interview with Joe Smith.)

So sometime around mid-to-late April, The Velvet Underground finally entered a recording studio for the first time, laying down the bulk of their debut album in just a few days. As the group didn’t yet have a recording contract, the idea was to produce material that could then be shopped around for one.The costs were shared roughly equally between Andy Warhol and Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records sales executive with a straighter background and character than most of the Factory crowd. Dolph was also an art collector, however, who met Warhol through his side job supplying music for art gallery shows and openings with his mobile disco – including the EPI’s Dom shows, where the scheme to make a record quickly took hold.

On the first or second night of the Velvets’ Dom stint, remembers Dolph, Warhol told him, “‘We’d like to do an album of them, a record.’ I said, ‘I can help you with that.’ He said, ‘Oh really? Okay, good. Do it.’ I think he did that with a lot of people; if he found somebody that could do what he wanted, he’d just say, ‘Do it.’ And they would, whether it was appear in this movie or go out for pizza. He never gave a lot of orders that I ever saw. He just made sugges- tions and people took him up on it. He had plenty of people around to do anything he wanted. He didn’t ask me any questions about ‘do you know this studio or that engineer or this producer’ or any of that. It was: ‘We’d like to make a record,’ and I said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’”

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