Billy Name

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Billy Name

Postby Marsbar » Sun Aug 28, 2016 4:02 pm

Andy Warhol Wanted Lou Reed to Be His 'Mickey Mouse'

Billy Name died today in New York

Billy Name was a magical guy who had a profound affect on Andy Warhol, and therefore, the entire culture. Billy was the one who decorated Warhol's original Factory in silver. Billy was a fantastic photographer who captured those beautiful 60s moments seen on a US Post Office commemorative stamp of Andy Warhol, as well as the first two Velvet Underground album covers.

Billy was many things to many people, but everyone considered him a friend.

Billy was so much fun that when Gillian McCain and I went to interview him in Poughkeepsie, New York in the mid 1990s, we had to go to Friendly's to have an ice cream–eating contest. Billy and Gillian both gobbled down a "Reese's Peanut Butter & Cookie Dough Hot Fudge Sundae," of which the results of the contest are still being tallied.


What was even better was that Lou Reed and John Cale's magnificent album, Songs for Drella had just been released, and we listened to it on Billy's awesome stereo while he provided hysterical commentary. Gillian and I both agree this was one of the best interviews we ever did.

Billy Name: I first met Warhol when I was working as a waiter at Serendipity, the hip dessert restaurant on the Upper East Side. Serendipity was this real cool place; Kim Novak used to come in all the time because she was being kept by the young Aga Kahn in his apartment up the street, ha, ha, ha! And Andy Warhol used to come in all the time, so we were on a first name basis, you know, "Hi Andy, how're you doing?"

This is very important—I had also covered my new apartment on East 5th Street with tinfoil, painted everything silver, and installed theater lights. It was like walking into a diamond, this great gem of a place. So I would be trimming somebody's hair, and there would be like 125 people there—all the dancers, artists, and musicians. It was just a cool place to hang out. Andy Warhol came to one of the hair-cutting parties at my apartment, and he said, "I just got this new space, this loft on 47th street. Would you decorate it like you did with this apartment?"

And that's how the Factory started.

When Andy moved into the Factory, it was this huge loft space. It had been a hat factory, I think. It had three arching ceilings, with columns in between, and it was in a state of disrepair. There were electrical outlets in the ceilings, but there were no fixtures. When I first went up there, Andy was painting by the front windows because there were no lights. So being experienced with theater lighting, I knew about electricity, so I went to a hardware store and bought all these fixtures and got the wiring down. I installed lights all the way down the rows of the arched ceilings with these long pull strings and then put spotlights in. Then I covered the whole place in tinfoil and painted everything silver.

In those days, in the avant-garde world, there was still the habit where older artists kept younger artists. The hetero artists always had a chick, and the gay guys always had a young guy with them. So when I first started being with Andy, it ended up that I was "his boy." He was keeping me, even to the point where I moved into the Factory. When he started to become famous, we were doing so much work and were so busy. I mean, we really loved each other, and we got along great, but I wasn't just this beautiful boy who wanted to be kept just for sex. So it only lasted until after I moved in. Then Andy got written up in Time , and all the attention that came with it just switched us over to a complete work relationship.

It wasn't any less glamorous at the Factory after Edie left, because once she left the Velvet Underground came in. See, the idea for the multimedia thing happened because we were going to do an Andy Warhol Film Festival at Jonas Mekas's Cinemateque, and we decided we didn't wanna just show all of Andy's films; we wanted to have people who were in the films be on the stage... while their films were projected on them. And then we decided we should do more lighting things. After that, we said, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we added music, too? And then everyone could dance in front of their movies?"

La Monte would do these whole tortoise performances that would go on for days where he'd have people droning, which is the art of a holding a single tone for a long time. I would drone with La Monte's wife, Marian Zazeela, and people would be assigned to drone, and they would just come and go. John Cale was playing with La Monte then, plus Tony Conrad and Angus MacLise, who were the foundation of the original Velvet Underground. So I knew John, Angus, and Tony before the Factory scene, and before the Velvets were actually formed.


Rewind back to our idea to expand the multimedia thing to include music and dancing. That's when Gerard [Melanga] said he had seen this band that we should check out. I don't recall going to Cafe Bizarre to see the Velvets, but Andy and some others went. It turned out that we were going to do something with them. When the Velvets came up to the Factory, I recognized John Cale because I already knew him from La Monte Young's. So the Velvets fit right in because they were what Andy wanted—and it was like cementing the blocks right in place.


John Cale was cool. John is Mr. Cool. He's Mr. Welsh Ghost, who's into the mysticism of Wales—like coolness beyond life, beyond death. John's like the essence of coolness, so if you're a real cool person, you're automatically in tune with him. The most we would say to each other was, "Yeah," or "Uh huh," because you really didn't need to converse with John because he got it.


Lou Reed was like a guy who grew up on your block who played in a band in your garage. He was a real cool guy from down the street who was just like you. So Lou and I really got along as guys who, like, grew up together. It was almost like he was my brother. Lou was just so neat and charming and friendly and adorable. In a sense, he had a lot of what Edie Sedgwick had—that magic personality that was always poised and always right. He also had a little genius that came with these great ideas. But Lou was even more natural and more playful than Edie. I knew guys like Lou when I was a little kid, growing up in Poughkeepsie, but I never thought I woulda met them again. But I did with Lou. It was just like having a buddy again, you know?


[Velvet Underground drummer] Mo Tucker was very quiet, very rigid, and straight in her ways. She was a no-nonsense girl, but very easy to laugh. If something funny was going on, Mo was always willing to give you a little wisecrack—"Hey, what the fuck are you doing?" Because she knew what you were doing. Mo wasn't personable like Lou, or cool like John, but she had a knack for being attentive to everything around her and was able to give a funny little nudge to make you laugh.

Then Nico came over from Europe, and we were all very taken by her. She was just this fascinating creature, who was totally NOT flamboyant or pretentious, but absolutely, magnetically controlling—and this Nordic beauty, too. And she didn't wear all the hippie flowers, she just wore these black pantsuits or white pantsuits, you know? Nico was too much really, let me tell you, and we were just so taken with her. So anything that we could think of for her to play a role in our scene was what we were going to do.

I always felt that Andy wanted Lou Reed to be his Mickey Mouse. Andy's studio was like the old Renaissance studios, and all the art went out under the name of the master, Andy Warhol, just like the Walt Disney studio. Walt Disney didn't invent Donald Duck; the people who worked for him created those Disney characters. And all this stuff we did at the Factory was under the aegis of Andy Warhol. So I always felt that Andy really wanted Lou to be his Mickey Mouse, this really big thing that everybody could latch on to because Lou was so adorable, and he was a rock star and a lead singer in a rock group. It would've been so right and so workable for Lou to have been Andy's Mickey Mouse, and do for Andy what Mickey did for Walt Disney.

But it didn't happen.

The single biggest factor that fucked up [ The Velvet Underground and Nico] when it came out and started to climb the charts was that Eric Emerson sued Verve, the Velvet's record label, because his image was on part of the collage on the back of the album cover. Eric wanted money for that, and nobody was willing to give it to him. So Verve pulled the record from all the stores, and it fell of the charts because it was no longer available. And it couldn't be saved.

If that album had continued to go up the charts and was allowed to go as it had started to go, it might've changed the whole picture completely. The Velvets might have had a hit album, and Lou might've become Andy Warhol's Mickey Mouse.

So it wasn't Lou's fault that it didn't continue to work—it was Eric Emerson's.
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Re: Billy Name

Postby Contact » Tue Aug 30, 2016 12:06 pm

What a great read!
And, I'm pretty sure i never knew that The Velvet Underground could have gone mainstream if not for a frivolous lawsuit. That could have made this a different world.
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Re: Billy Name

Postby Xenon4U2C » Mon Sep 05, 2016 12:03 pm

Cool read David ... Greed always kills. :cry:
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