Free Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Page A

being drawn intothe Warhol world liberated them and allowed them to play harder, nastier, louder. 68
THE PRICE OF NO FAME
    John Cale: I remember that first album with so much hilarity. That the thing actually got done … 69
    Based on the agreement of all concerned parties, there are some general aspects of the album’s creation that we can confidently site as fact. However, exact details do change with each individual—and at each telling—to the point where “exact” isn’t a term you can apply when discussing the genesis of
The Velvet Underground and Nico
. Interviews looking for answers to simple questions like who paid for the album and how much it cost—even the studios used and how much time was spent—are contradictory. Many years elapsed before anyone became sufficiently interested in the Velvets’ history to start seeking precise details about that chaotic period, and naturally recollections got fuzzier as the years passed.
    One typically inaccurate statement in
Please Kill Me
quotes (or misquotes) Paul Morrissey as claiming theentire record was done in LA in two days for $3,000. 70 Biographer Victor Bockris cites no source but writes that in New York “the recording studio was rented for $2,500 for three nights, enough time to cut the whole album.” One Cale-attributed version has Warhol paying for the LA sessions at Cameo Parkway Studios, while the rest were “paid for by a businessman who came up with $1,500,” 71 while another Cale attribution places them at Cameo-Parkway in New York! 72 The businessman in question is undoubtedly Norman Dolph, who told me he thought his investment was closer to $600, but may have been a bit more. Maybe Cale just wasn’t wracking his brain to get the details right. Examining the conflicting dates, lengths and locations for the recording of the album turns up many such discrepancies.
    With careful sifting, the versions eventually average out to the same story: management paid for ten songs recorded at Scepter in New York, and the re-recording of three of those in Los Angeles—everything except the third and final session, which added “Sunday Morning” to the LP. David Fricke (a trusted source if ever there was one) writes that $700 of Warhol’s money (the remains of the EPI’s Dom earnings) was augmented by$800 from Norman Dolph to pay for the Scepter sessions. 73 That makes $1,500 for the original NY sessions, leaving another $1,500 for the Tom Wilson/LA sessions, if Morrissey’s $3,000 total is correct. Even if it’s not exact, the number sounds convincingly close. Paul Morrissey notes that MGM paid for the final “Sunday Morning” session back in New York.
    The Velvets were a cheap date for Morrissey’s $3,000. At that time the average cost of a studio LP was $5,000, and their despised label mates the Mothers of Invention had just spent $21,000 of MGM/Verve’s money on their first LP, the double-album
Freak Out!
74 Consider that in that same year Brian Wilson spent $16,000 and took six months just to complete one song 75 , and you start to get a sense of the true scale of the Velvets’ achievement on. their first record.
    One last interesting money fact: I asked Norman Dolph if he ever made anything off of his investment:
    My sole payment was the picture I got from Warhol, a beautiful painting really. Regrettably, I sold it around ‘75 when I was going through a divorce, for $17,000. I remember thinking at the time, “Geez, Ibet Lou Reed hasn’t made $17,000 from this album yet.” If I had it today, it would be worth around $2 million.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
    The first sessions for the record were done at the Scepter Records studios in Manhattan. An independent label founded by New Jersey housewife Florence Greenberg because she was bored at home when the kids were in school, Scepter’s catalogue included the Shirelles, Dionne Warwick (with a young arranger named Burt Bacharach), the Isley Brothers, and the Kingsmen’s single “Louie