Rubin, a friend, told me about the gig, right around the time she brought me to the Silver Factory, where Warhol shot two Screen Tests of me and put me in a “chapter” of Couch (1964), where I sat between two Superstars and very slowly ate a banana. They became the Velvet Underground and I first heard them play at a smoke-saturated Greenwich Village café. Cale eventually broke with Young and took his amplified viola, retooled to allow him to play four strings at once-he likened the resulting drone to a jet engine-to form an unlikely partnership with Lou Reed, an aspiring R&B-influenced pop star and poet of queer darkness.
These concerts shaped my aesthetic even more than the similarly aggressive, expanded time in movies by Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, and Barbara Rubin, among others. The sound produced was massive-tones sustained for impossible durations at impossible volumes, so that you felt as if you were inside the sound and that the connection between ear and brain was transformed. SOMETIME IN 1963, or perhaps it was late 1962, I found my way to a downtown loft where the Dream Syndicate-the configuration of La Monte Young, John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, and Marian Zazeela-was playing weekly concerts. From left: John Cale, Gerard Malanga, Nico, Andy Warhol. Todd Haynes, The Velvet Underground, 2021, 4K video, color and black-and-white, sound, 121 minutes.
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