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Filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek were still bohemian avant-garde hero artists, whereas Andy was not even an antihero, he was a zero. And it just made them grit their teeth to have Warhol becoming recognized as the core of this thing that they had built. So everybody was always uptight whenever we showed up.
So for me, there was a strong pull toward the dark side. Lou and Billy Name would go to this Vaseline bar called Ernie’s—there would be jars of Vaseline on the bar and there was a back room where the guys would go to fuck each other. While I was never gay, I was into sex, and when you’re thirteen or fourteen, sex is not that available from women. So I figured, Gee, wouldn’t it be great to be gay? So I tried it, but I was a miserable failure. I remember I was actually sucking this guy off once, and he said, “Man, you’re not into this.” I went, “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.” LOU REED: Honey, I’m a
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PAUL MORRISSEY: We performed at the Dom on St. Marks Place for about a month, then I went out to L.A. to set up this gig at a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard called the Trip, if you can imagine. Pathetic hippie crap. So we vacated the Dom because there was no air-conditioning and summer was coming up, and they all wanted to go to L.A. And it sounded fun. Then Bill Graham came from San Francisco, begging me to book the Velvet Underground into his toilet, the Fillmore—the Swillmore Vomitorium. Boy, was he a creep. They always talk about him as a saint. Ucch! I mean, he was really AWFUL! Just a
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MAUREEN TUCKER: I didn’t like that love-peace shit. GERARD MALANGA: Jim Morrison came to see us at the Trip, because he was a film student in L.A. at the time. That’s when, as the theory goes, Jim Morrison adopted my look—the black leather pants—from seeing me dancing onstage at the Trip.
DANNY FIELDS: I told Lou and John, repeatedly, “You know you guys are too good for this. Why don’t you try and make it as a band?” I thought the visual effects of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable were stupid and corny, I thought the whip dancing was stupid and corny, and I thought that Barbara Rubin’s slide projections were stupid and corny. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was just like kindergarten, it had nowhere near the power of the music. The music was the real stuff. Had the lights been as good as the music, maybe, but they weren’t—I mean polka dots and films?
The problem with the hippies was that there developed a hostility within the counterculture itself, between those who had, like, the equivalent of a trust fund versus those who had to live by their wits. It’s true, for instance, that blacks were somewhat resentful of the hippies by the Summer of Love, 1967, because their perception was that these kids were drawing paisley swirls on their Sam Flax writing pads, burning incense, and taking acid, but those kids could get out of there anytime they wanted to.
So there developed another kind, more of a lumpen hippie, who really came from an abused childhood—from parents that hated them, from parents that threw them out. Maybe they came from a religious family that would call them sluts or say, “You had an abortion, get out of here” or “I found birth control pills in your purse, get out of here, go away.” And those kids fermented into a kind of hostile street person. Punk types.