I’m Waiting for the Man

I guess I don’t have to tell you what man Lou is waiting for and why. I can only comment that $26 went a much longer way ’67. You couldn’t buy very much heroin for $26 today, and also I’m afraid that all the shady characters have been swept away from Lexington Avenue long ago. Nevertheless, the general intent hasn’t changed much over the years. I’m sure what Lou Reed put to paper in 1967 remains a universal experience, amirite? I mean, who hasn’t trekked to the bad side of town to buy drugs before? Whaddya mean not all of you have bought heroin!? In any case, if the jangle and feedback of the Velvets isn’t alienating and culty enough for ya, check out the cover Nico cut. She, more than anyone else, understood the true meaning of the song – most likely a lot better than Lou Reed himself ever did. Nico was neck deep in heroin by the time she recorded her 1981 album Drama of Exile, and her attitude was very much in keeping with the material:

[Aura label head Aaron] Sixx admitted that Nico “didn’t give a shit what happened to the LP, she just wanted the money for drugs.” Yet despite these unconventional circumstances, Drama of Exile would see Nico receive some of the best reviews of her career.

— Dave Thompson, Better to Burn Out: The Cult of Death in Rock ‘N’ Roll

Waiting for the Man was certainly a brilliant choice for her. She didn’t have very much contribution in the recording of The Velvet Underground & Nico, having been roped in by Andy Warhol for glamour purposes, but she lived that album for the rest of her life. Lou Reed never did as many degenarate things as his songs lead us to imagine and in no time at all he was living the high life with David Bowie. Speaking of whom, there he is with Lou, still having a real good time together. It’s great to see those two jamming together on a particularly rockin’ mid-90s David Bowie song – oh wait, that’s a cover of Waiting for the Man that mysteriously just sounds exactly like a mid-90′s David Bowie song.

I’m Not Sayin’

Somewhat of a rarity, a video of Nico’s first single, 1965. She had already made some recordings with Serge Gainsbourg, but that collaboration never went anywhere and she was still primarily working as a model. Her singing career didn’t really start until she was picked up by Andrew Loog Oldham, who besides managing The Rolling Stones, had recently transformed a 17 year old “angel with big tits” named Marianne Faithfull into a dreamy pop star. He was probably trying to repeat the trick with Nico, but she proved to be less pliable than the naive and sheltered Faithfull had been. Despite her stunning looks and modeling success, having a pretty image always rubbed Nico the wrong way. She never enjoyed modeling or acting, because she hated discipline and being groomed, posed and told what to do. What she did enjoy was the creative freedom of being a musician, although at first she faced the same problem of having powerful men trying to mold her to fit some image. Although she was signed to Oldham’s label and had the support of her friend Brian Jones and Jimmy Page in the studio with her, her single never took off. I can imagine the pushy impresario Andrew telling her to look wistful and sing pretty, and Nico, always as stubborn as an iceberg, just continuing to do things her own way. She just wasn’t a pop angel. She could sing in a lovely high register if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She had a naturally deep voice and she didn’t like being told to sing high. Other things she didn’t like were self-promotion, interviews, photo shoots and sucking up to people – all the things that make a pop star. Eventually she stomped out on every scene that wanted to embrace her, so she could make her defiantly uncommercial music on her own terms. I can’t say if she ever really found happiness, but she must have found some creative satisfaction at least.

I’ll Keep it With Mine

Well, I guess it’s official that Bob Dylan is a writer of Great American Standards. Like a grumpy, nasal, LSD-munching Cole Porter. Of course, he’s just as great a performer, but whether that’s first and foremost over songwriting is up for debate. Or maybe those two qualities are inexorably intertwined. Either way, besides providing us with his own musical persona, he’s also provided a brickload of songs other people like to sing. Singing Dylan is like a master class for aspiring rock stars. Everyone sings Dylan, it’s like a bylaw or something. You just have to do Dylan to prove your bonafides. This here is one of his many songs that have been interpreted by more singers than there are frogs in a swamp. Dylan tried to record this one for the Blonde on Blonde sessions, didn’t like any of it, and didn’t release a version until the Bootleg Series came out. What he did do was give to Judy Collins to song, and she released it as a single. Then there was a Bob-approved version by Nico, which is my personal favorite, because NICO. Actually, Nico’s version is kind of weird and terrible and not suited to her vocal style at all. But she’s Nico, so obviously it’s brilliant. I’m almost equally enamored or Marianne Faithfull’s recording. Or maybe even more, I can’t decide. Faithfull really surprised the universe by her metamorphosis from dreamy eye-candy folksinger into one of the greatest of torch singers. Any song she turns her mind to, she turns into something intensely personal and often painful. I almost always love what she does, but often I find it too depressing. As in this case. It’s practically the polar opposite of what Nico did. Nico played it all cool and detached, as befits her ice maiden image at the time. Faithfull played it her usual gut-wrenching way, as befits her image at the time, that of someone who’s traveled every circle of hell and has a lot of stories to tell about it. Next to those two, old Zimmy runs a very distant third. He was right to leave this track off his own albums. He may have written it, but it was never meant for him.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

I can’t think of a more inspiring song. I wish there was somebody that comforting around, and I wish I could be that comforting. I guess it’s for anybody who doesn’t see the goodness inside themselves. They need someone to offer them a mirror. Sometimes you wish they could see themselves the way you see them, and sometimes you wish they could see you that way, when they do neither. That’s sad, and you want to help, but don’t know how, don’t know if they’d let you. Which are all kind of depressing thoughts, but that doesn’t make it not a good aspiration, to be someone’s mirror, in case they don’t know. In that sense, yes, this is an inspiring song, in another sense a sad one. I find it very comforting to hear, but maybe that’s just my reaction to Nico’s voice.

Frozen Warnings

“Into numberless reflections
Rises a smile from your eyes into mine”

In the mood for desolation? What wasteland, what frozen borderlines Nico was thinking of when she wrote we can only guess. She was among a rare breed of crazy artists whose lives, though we may see the outlines, remain unknowable. There are artists who create to sell, ones who create for the dedicated, and the ones who do it just for themselves. Nico was the last type. She said what she had to say, cryptically and with no regard of whether anyone heard her or not. There’s a difference between listening to music that’s popular and music that’s obscure. Popular artists expect to be heard and we expect to hear them. From inception through purchase and consequent enjoyment, the process is essentially a public interaction. With someone like Nico, who was never truly famous even at the height of her success the relationship between artist and listener is profoundly different. It’s in some way a miracle that her voice and the words she wrote, somewhere in England or Germany, so many years ago has found its way to your ears and mine. It’s like a private message – an SOS – from her to us, across miles and decades. It’s like light from a long-dead star traveling eons through space, continuing to exist though its source is gone. Nico is that dead star and it’s amazing to think that her voice is still out there and making an impact on people, though she spent the end of her life singing into the void with no audience to speak of and no reward for her efforts. At least John Cale still loves her and carries a torch, though he’s barely better off in fame himself.

 

 

 

Femme Fatale

There’s songs you like and enjoy and songs you love, and there’s songs that get inside your head and affect your life. This is one of the latter kind, rare as they are. There are only a handful of songs that I heard as a child and internalized as life instructions. There may be more but the ones that come to mind are Bob Dylan’s She Belongs To Me, in which the subject clearly does no such thing as belong to anyone, and Joe Jackson’s Is She Really Going Out With Him? which has been the basis of my entire romantic life. And Femme Fatale, supposedly an ode to Warhol’s shooting star Edie Sedgwick. I guess I’ve always thought a femme fatale was the ultimate thing to be. Though I don’t want to be cruel like the woman in the song, Edie or whoever she may be. She sounds like a bitch. I don’t try to bring anyone down. But I’ve secretly always wanted to be that one woman who turns all the heads and makes the boys turn on each other and cuts a swath, so to speak. Which is a pretty universal desire, I think. Every woman wants to be wanted, and plenty go about creating as much drama as they can to reinforce that self-image. Now, I’m not one to make drama just to entertain myself, but I’ll confess I do relish those times when drama springs up with no bidding from me. But being a femme fatale is just a generic female fantasy that everyone indulges in every once in a while. What really got into my head was the line “You’re written in her book, you’re number 37, have a look.” Not only is Edie eating men for breakfast, she’s also keeping score in a book. Whether 37 refers to chronological position or is a performance-based score is unclear, but either way, the number’s not good. I decided, as a kid with no clear understanding of the implications, that I would grow up and keep tabs in a book of the lovers I had. And I do, only not in a book but the modern way, with photos on my hard drive. You can tell me that’s a very cavalier attitude to have towards romance. I know. That’s kind of the meaning of femme fatality. Then you can tell me I’m an idiot for having habits that are based on words I heard in a song. Maybe I’m crazy, but wait till I tell you the damage Joe Jackson has wrought. If it’s something Lou Reed thinks Edie Sedgwick would do, then it must be impeccably cool. Guide to life; one, make conquests; two, keep track of them. And isn’t it interesting the random and seemingly innocuous places that our adult neuroses and idiosyncrasies spring from? Who knows what will stick to a young mind and put roots there and keep driving them for the rest of their lives?

Falconer

Nico contributed a lot to Europe’s film avant garde both with music and personal appearances. This is a non-album arrangement of The Falconer made for the soundtrack of  Philippe Garrel’s «Le Lit de la vierge». The French and moody isn’t my field, so I don’t know much about it. All I can say is Nico was the soul of avant garde. It wasn’t a matter of having big ideas about the state of art. Her vision was just too idiosyncratic to be anything else. The Falconer is, perhaps, a reference to Warhol, who was in his quirky albino way a father figure for misfits of all stripes. There’s also an element of the fantastic that runs in Nico’s work – when she writes about a father figure, she makes him more than an earthbound Warholian; she envisions him as a lord of some desolate kingdom.

The Fairest of the Seasons

Lyrics by Jackson Browne, one of Nico’s many boyfriends. He was just an unknown then, ten years her junior and still a teenager. She really knew how to pick ‘em. And they repaid her in songs. If she’d been willing to carry on making pretty folky records singing the love songs a parade of the best of the best were ready to provide her with, she’d have had a shot at some pretty decent success. But of course it was in Nico’s nature to be principally opposed to the constrictions of the mainstream. Chelsea Girl was her most appealing, potentially sellable record, and she despised it. She was a difficult person, by all accounts. That could explain why none of her many boyfriends stuck around for very long. Though John Cale carries a torch for her to this day.

now that its time
now that the hour hand has landed at the end
now that its real
now that the dreams have given all they had to lend
i want to know
do i stay or do i go
and maybe try another time
and do i really have a hand in my forgetting?

now that i’ve tried
now that i’ve finally found that this is not the way
now that i’ve turned
now that i feel its time to spend the night away
i want to know
do i stay or do i go
and maybe finally split the rhyme
and do i really understand the undernetting?

yes, and the morning has me
looking in your eyes
and seeing mine warning me
to read the signs carefully

now that it’s light
now that candle’s falling smaller in my mind
now that its here
now that i’m almost not so very far behind
i want to know
do i stay or do i go
and maybe follow another sign
and do i really have a song that i can ride on?

now that i can
now that its easy, ever easy all around
now that i’m here
now that i’m falling to the sunlights and a song
i want to know
do i stay or do i go
and do i have to do just one
and can i choose again if i should lose the reason?

yes, and the morning has me
looking in your eyes
and seeing mine warning me
to read the signs more carefully

now that i smile
now that i’m laughing even deeper inside
now that i see
now that i finally found the one thing i denied
its now i know
do i stay or do i go
and it is finally i decide
that i’ll be leaving
in the fairest of the seasons

Facing the Wind

Nico was a bit of a nihilist, wasn’t she. She was so morbidly attracted to dark and destruction. There’s a scene in James Young’s memoir The End where Nico is found shooting heroin and watching a video of an open-heart surgery. Telling. As for this song, well, it appears to be about death and/or dying. I think she’s singing about dancing on her own grave, at least that’s the picture in my mind.

It’s holding me against my will
And doesn’t leave me still
Amazons are riding out
To find a meaning for
The name, my name
In the rain
My spinning on my Name
In the rain, in the rain

When did it begin?
When did it begin?
Why am I not facing the wind?

My mother and my brother
Are facing the wind.
Why are they facing the wind?
Why are they facing the wind?

There’s nothing more to sing about
Not now or when they carry me away
In the rain
My spinning on my name in the rain
My spinning on my name in the rain
In the rain.

When did it begin?
When did it begin?
Why are they facing the wind?

 

Evening Of Light

Nico, whadda lucky goil! She bagged Iggy Pop. That’s him in the video flapping his arms like a loony. The other guys are his faithful Stooges. And yes, they’re totally burning a cross. No weird implications there. Very rare clip, by the way. Taken from the documentary NicoIcon, and incomplete. I haven’t found a full version yet, though it’s probably floating around the internet somewhere, like everything else that ever existed. It’s enough to give you some idea, and you can imagine the rest. And of course, I’m assuming you’re with it and you own The Marble Index in one form or another.