Morrison and Nico

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Nico The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts published in 1993

Christa Paffgen aka Nico Born in Cologne Germany October 16, 1938
–<br>Died on July 18, 1988 in Isbiza, Spain at the age of 49

Nico's fame rested on her face, her songs, her lovers, and her
drugs.
She was the alpine-fresh covergirl of the Fifties who pigged on
amphetamines to lose weight; the "Swedish princess' who
smoked joints
of cannabis on the film set of La Dolce Vita; the `most beautiful
woman in the world' who dined on magic mushrooms on the island of
Ibiza; the Andy Warhol Superstar who took acid to `find her
head'
(and then lose it); the blood sister of The Doors' Jim Morrison
who
chewed peyote buttons in his company to conjure bewitching visions in
the desert; the composer who smoked heroin `because I have too
many
thoughts'; the raddled junkie who smuggled her needles through
every
customs post in Europe, and finally the Moon Goddess of
methadone. `Everyone goes on about drugs, especially heroin,'
observed one of the musicians from the final years of her life,
`but
I remember her more as a terrible drinker. Beer and white wine,
especially beer. Pints of it, bottles of it. That's when
she'd start
beating people up. You hear the fans go on about the "Moon
Goddess"
stuff, but they should have seen her backstage hassling for money!
She was a real boozer, was Nico."
(page 3)

Nico was to search all her life for a phantom family; it's not
mere
affection that made her call both Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan "my
brothers."
(page 7)

A typical Nico conversation was captured by her final manager, Alan
Wise:

Alan: Are you saying that Jim Morrison was like Jesus?

Nico: I'd like a new car.

Alan: Oh. What kind of car would you like?

Nico: About 2,000 years old.

Alan: The car?

Nico: No, Jesus Christ.
(page 132)

The Velvet Underground at the Trip 1966

The Ad reads: "FLIP OUT! SKIP OUT! TRIP OUT!"

Gerard Malanga: "One night Jim Morrison of the Doors came to see
the
show; that must have been the first time he saw Nico. But a few days
in, the two managers are fighting each other and the place goes
bankrupt. Because of the union regulations we have to stay around the
entire contracted time in order to get our money.
You have to remember also that there wasn't this big, rock
industry
structure yet. A good example was accommodation. I went to LA a few
days in advance to check dumb things like whether the club had enough
sockets to plug the projectors in, and the toughest job I had was
finding somewhere for the band to stay. Hotels did not take bands. I
put Andy and the `respectable' folk in the Tropicana motel,
but they
wouldn't take the Velvets or Nico. They said that bands rent
houses,
and I got put on to this wonderful guy called Jack Simmons. He was
James Dean's best friend and now he ran this big place called The
Castle. It really is a castle surrounded by a park. Nico got to love
the place and later she stayed there for a time with Jim Morrison. So
you see, however straight you tried to run these operations in those
days, you still ended up with these crazy, exotic alternatives.
(page 144)

Nico: "Everything is a drug, words are a drug, Jim (Morrison)
said
that God is a drug – those are not such cliché. It is a
medicine,
something to cure you of disease.Coffee cures you of
tiredness….what
else did I say? Music? Well, music cures you of time. God cures you
of death, I suppose." Nico never admitted that drugs cured her of
melancholy, though she once told a reporter that "They were
called
mind-blowing, and I like the idea that I can blow away my memory,
which is imperfect." This was the one time she inferred that she
would prefer no memory to a perfect one.

In that imperfect memory of Nico's, 1967 seemed to be the least
fractured of the years she stored there, unless it was the one she
lied about the most. 1967 was a year the Californian hippies had
designated the Summer Of Love, a summer she spent with Jim Morrison,
and, when she wasn't with him, with Brian Jones, and when she
wasn't
with them, with Andy Warhol making films or with Tom Wilson making
records. "I was not a hippie. It was never true to say that, not
to
Jim Morrison either, nor Brian Jones. We are bohemians. Do you
understand the difference? Bohemians know they are not hippies, but
hipped don't know they are not bohemians. Shall I tell you
something
about hippies that I didn't like? Well, they were always selling
you
something. They would try to sell you dope, or patchouli oil, or
themselves, or whatever they were thinking. It was like a Black
Market, it was der Schwarzmarkt all over again."
(page 166)

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"AVOID PERSONS in black or lemon. You will have romantic
inclinations, so aim for people in cream. You'll feel like a
tiger,
but don't forget you're a lion." This was the impressive
advice given
to Nico by Madame Svetlana. Madame Svetlana wrote each month for a
New York magazine that foretold the horoscopes of celebrities. In
March 1967, it displayed a photographic collage of that month's
selection. Nico was prominent, with her date of birth clear for all
to see: 8 August 1942. She did not know that Nico was a liar than a
Leo. Pasted next to Nico was Peter Sellers (Virgo), Federico Fellini
(Capricorn) and the singer of The Doors, Jim Morrison
(Sagittarius; `Many Sagittarians will indulge in a taste for
forgery'.) Of all the sage projections Madame Svetlana made,
placing
Jim Morrison and Nico together was the most prescient. The Doors came
from Los Angeles and had played in New York just twice, firstly the
previous November and then in March. The common view at the Factory
was that The Doors were a rather pretentious band which relied
entirely on the carnal power of its sensual Greek god, Jim Morrison.
The Velvets most feared another California band entirely, the one led
by Frank Zappa and called the Mothers Of Invention. "Jim was
Brian
Jones and Mick Jagger put together. But he was really a cobra. Who
were the Mothers Of Invention? Anyway, who wants to hear a concert
given by some mothers?" declared Nico, forgetting she was a
mother.

When the Velvets and Nico played The Trip club in Los Angeles a year
before, Jim Morrison had been there. Warhol believed that Morrison
had then paid close attention to Gerard Malanga, who had performed
his whip dance in a suit of black leather. Morrison later gained much
publicity by wearing such a suit. It is often assumed that Morrison
and Nico first came together in the Summer of 1967, when Danny Fields
from the Elektra Record Company tried to engineer the perfect
partnership. Morrison and Nico would be Adam and Eve in the Summer Of
Love.

They actually met in March, when Morrison would have noticed
those `twenty-foot-high poster of Nico all over Manhattan'.
The
drummer of The Doors was John Densmore who remembered the March
encounter from a distinctly percussive perspective. "We were
staying
at the dumpy Great Northern Hotel on 57th Street. Convenient
location, but the place smelled of old people. I was rooming right
next to Jim, which turned out to be better than TC. Not that I was
the drinking glass to the wall type, but the racket that was coming
from next door one night was hard to miss. Jim brought Nico, the
Velvet Underground's famous German vamp, back to his hotel room,
and
I never heard such crashing around. It sounded as if they were
beating the shit out of each other. I was worried but never dare to
ask what happened. Nico looked okay the next day, so I let it
slide."

When so many people talk of Nico at this time in terms
of `elegance,' `shyness,' `dignity,'
`beauty,' `divine sensuality,'
and even as a `willowy flower,' it is surprising to read of
her
suddenly as a bruiser, a scrapper, a boxer of ears. It is less
surprising to learn that when she drank beer she turned violent.
Within two hours the Moon Goddess transformed herself into a lager
lout. Beer-drinking became a more common feature later in her life;
indeed, one drunken bout led later to her exile from America, but it
took someone as monstrously lush as Morrison to provoke the first
recorded instance. He called himself the Lizard King, but he was more
of a lounge lizard. John Cale observed that "Jim Morrison was
like a
spoily, clean-scrubbed schoolboy in his first day on drink."

Nico often talked of him as her `soul brother': "I think
he was the
first man I met who was not afraid of me in some way. We were very
similar, like brother and sistr. Our spirits are similar. We were the
same height and the same age, almost." In fact he was five years
younger, otherwise she was justified in stressing their similarities.
James Douglas Morrison was the son of an officer in the US Navy.
While his father fought, the boy was brought up by his mother and
grandparents in Clearwater, the Lubbenau of Florida. He later claimed
that the soul of a dead Native American entered his body when he was
but four years old. Morrison's Natives were Nicos Jews. But his
background was effortlessly bourgeois and cushioned. A butch
hostility to routine was marked this sulky young man jaded with the
clean comforts of Fifties America; Nico often strove for the life he
disowned. While she watched weepy movies he went to film school.
While she saw Ginsberg, in the street, he read Ginsberg. While she
learned Dylan's lyrics, he wrote his own. "He was well read
and he
introduced me to William Blake and also the English Romantic poets
who came after him. Jim liked Shelley. I preferred Coleridge. In
fact, he is my favoured poet of all time. Did you know they were all
drug addicts? Coleridge was addicted to opium. It is better to be
addicted to opium than to be addicted to money."

Nico: "I did not feel that Jim was a Californian (he wasn't).
He
lived in Los Angeles, which is a beautiful name – The Angels
– and it
was really a city for William Blake, not for Hollywood. But Los
Angeles was destroyed, like Jerusalem was destroyed in England (in
Blake's poem.) Jim could have built it again, if he had not been
surrounded by these tacky women."

Jim Morrison had as many women as Brian Jones ( it would have been
difficult to have had more.) His looks were brilliantly bohemian: a
sullen mouth that pouted more than smiled, barely containable
stubble, a childish button nose, puma eyes, tousled red-brown hair,
and a petulant demeanour set in a heavy frame, for both Morrison and
Nico, weight gain was a persistent problem. He retained a little baby
fat and looked pampered, but he was physically graceful, at least
when he was sober.

Jack Simmons, the owner of The Castle, claimed that "Jim Morrison
walked like a panther and swam like a dolphin." Nico never
walked,
she sashayed; and she never swam, never.

Danny Fields considered that Morrison "really was a terror –<br>he was
the epitome of the old-fashioned concept of a brat, a big, brilliant,
sexy brat." He must have known, when he put them together that
July
in Los Angeles, that Morrison and Nico were not Adam and Eve, but two
snakes. "I thought they would make a cute couple." he coyly
explained. "They were both icy and mysterious and charismatic and
poetic and deep and sensitive and wonderful."

Nico had a more direct view. "Jim Morrsison had the best sex I
ever
had inside me," she confided to a writer in the Eighties,
"but Brian
Jones have the best sex, when he could. Jim was more involved in his
dreams. He liked to sleep and to find visions, because there were
private things he showed me. I think Brian was more of a musician
than a composer, and Jim was more of a poet. You could say that Jim
took drugs because he wanted visions for his poetry. It is like
people in the office who drink coffee to help them work. It is really
the same."

Nico talked of Jim Morrison and Brian Jones in the same breath
because she moved from one to the other early that summer. She moved,
in fact, from Paul McCartney's house in London, which invaded for
several weeks, to the Velvet Underground in Boston with Andy Warhol
and then to Brian Jones in San Francisco and Jim Morrison in Los
Angeles, all in one grand sweep. "You say it like was like a
fairy
tale at the time; Andy would be the good fairy, and Jim would play
the giant, Brian would be the witch, Paul McCartney would be the frog
who turns into a prince, no, it would have to be the other way round.
Well, it didn't seem like a fairy tale at the time. It was a lot
of
hassle. But I learned a lot of things, and I began to compose my own
songs." As Morrison would often say, quoting Blake, "the road
to
excess leads to the palace of Wisdom!." He rarely added that it
was
one of the Proverbs of Hell.
(page 180-181)

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

July – December, 1967

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such deep delight `twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

(from `Kubla Khan', Samuel Taylor Colderidge, 1798)

One story about Nico and Jim Morrison has passed into rock legend:
Jim and Nico are staying at The Castle that summer. They are both
naked. They are both stoned on acid and drink and hashish. Jim takes
Nico up the tower. Jim jumps on to the parapet and looks down to the
deep drop below. Nude, he walks along the thin parapet, risking his
life. He shouts to Nico to follow him. She refuses. he begs her. She
declines. He commands her. She disobeys. He risks everything. She
risks nothing. That is how the story has been passed down from Doors
biography to Doors biography. It came first from the lips of Danny
Fields and Jack Simmons, who were on the spot, and today it is a
renowned image of rock mythology to set aside Jimi Hendrix igniting
his guitar and Jerry Lee Lewis smashing his piano: the heman, the
cave man, the strutting cock, disobeying death.

But nobody bothered to ask Nico for her side of the story:
"Everybody
says it is true and they saw this thing we did," she reflected in
1985, "but I remember something they never say. That I argued
with
Jim. He asked if I would walk along the edge. I said to him,
"Why?"
and he couldn't answer. It was not a positive act,a nd not a
destructive act; it didn't change anything. So why should I do
something that is so vain, just to follow him? It was not spiritual
or philosophical. It was a drunk man displaying himself. Did they
tell you that about the story? I don't think so."

Danny Fields once told a journalist that "Jim and Nico got into
this
fight, with him pulling her hair all over the place – it was just
this weird love making, between the two most adorable monsters, each
one trying to be more poetic than the other." Nico stressed,
again in
1985, "I like my relations to be physical and of the psyche. We
hit
each other because we were drunk and we enjoyed the sensation. We
made love in a gentle way, do you know? It was the opposite way of
Brian Jones. I thought of Jim Morrison as my brother. We exchanged
blood. I carry his blood inside me. When he died, and I told people
that he wasn't dead, this was my meaning. We had spiritual
journeys
together." When asked to clarify this, Nico declared, "We
went to the
desert and took drugs."

Nico wanted Jim Morrison to join her brotherhood, and he obliged.
They cut their thumbs in the desert with a knife and let their blood
mingle. Such a ritual form of devotion appealed to their shared sense
of theatre, but Nico wanted even more. She wanted Morrison to share
not just her blood but her son. One night she decided that they
should be married, to test if he was stringing her along or serious.
As the drunken boor in front of her had offered little more than
literary discourse and downright lust, she suggested to him that he
might like to propose marriage to her. He laughed himself off his
chair. She hit him, they fought and when they got tired, they made
up. That was the routine nature of their alliance, day after day
–<br>affection – argument – rancour –resolution: "I was in
love with him
and that is how love goes, isn't it? He was the first man I was
in
love with, because he was affectionate to my looks and my mind. But
we took too much drink and too many drugs to make it, that was our
difficulty. Everything was open to us, there were no rules. We had a
too big appetite."

During their time together in California, between the months July and
August 1967, they often drove out of Los Angeles and into the desert.
Morrison found the cactus buttons called peyote, which they picked
off and ate. "Peyote was a spiritual drug. We were in the middle
of
the desert and everything was natural, you know, in the open air,
nature all around, not a hotel room or a bar. And the cactus was
natural. You did not buy it from somebody on a street corner. We had
visions in the desert. It is like William Blake. Jim was like
William Blake; he would see visions like Blake did, angels in trees,
he would see these, and so would I. And Jim showed me that this is
what a poet does. A poet sees visions and records them. He said there
were more poets in the Comanches than there were in bookstores. The
Comanches took the cactus, too. We were like the Indians who live in
this way for thousands of years, before the Christians and as long as
the Jews."

Jim Morrison recorded his psycho-chemical visions and dreams. His
notes often comprised the raw material for his poems and songs. He
considered that this was how the opium-addicted Coleridge worked, a
model good enough for him; one Coleridge poem he read to Nico was
titled "Kubla Khan, or a vision in a Dream," Nico just once
offered
an example of the peyote visions she endured with Morrison: "The
light of the dawn was a very deep green and I believed I was upside
down and the sky was the desert which had become a garden and then
the ocean. I do not swim and I was frightened when it was water and
more resolved when it was land. I felt embraced by the
sky-garden."
Soon after, she started to write a song lyric, possibly her first,
titled, "Lawns Of Dawns," which contained lines such as these:

He blesses you, he blesses me
The day the night caresses,
Caresses you, caresses me,
Can you follow me?

I cannot understand the way I feel
Until I rest on lawns of dawns –<br>Can you follow me?

The cross-eyed, internal rhymes come directly from Jim Morrison, who
wrote `The west is the best' and even other lines less
elegant (`Your
milk is my wine / your silk is my shine.') He showed her how he
worked on his poems, and in doing so offered her a model. She was
reluctant to write anything down, however. It was a major step, to
talk about words and then to write them (especially in a foreign
language, Nico liked to remind her fans.) "Jim gave me permission
to
be a writer," Nico claimed. "He said to me one day, "I
give you
permission to write your poems and compose your songs!" My soul
brother believed I could do it. I had his authority. And why not? His
song was the most popular in America." At the time, this was
strictly
true. The Doors' single `Light My Fire' had been released
in early
June, and by the end of July it attained the number one position for
three weeks. Nico spent her nights in the desert with the
nation's
number one pop star who told her to write songs and read to her
Coleridge, Shelley and Blake. No wonder she stayed faithful to her
boozy, conceited soul brother, when he was the first fuckable man to
acknowledge her mind as much as her face.

Nico told him that she did not know how to compose. She could not
follow the mechanics of writing. He told her to write down her
dreams, literally, write down the images she remembered. This would
provide her raw material. He admitted to her that he started by
imitating other writers, Celine and Blake for instance, but then he
realized that they were writing down their dreams, and so it would be
more creative for him to do the same. The songs would be her
recounting her visions, and that was enough. But then she asked him
where the melodies came from, and he gave the stock answer he had
ready whenever the subject was raised: "The music came first, and
then I'd make up some words to hang on to the melody, because
that
was the only way I could remember it, and most of the time I'd
end up
with just the words and forget the tune." The music, then, was
the
melody, and all the rest was arrangement. Nico felt that she had
finally passed an examination.

Their affair,a torrid mixture of drinks, drugs, fights and poetry
readings, lasted little more than a month before this Adam and Eve
left the garden of Eden without any god's bidding and drifted
down
their separate roads to hell. They were tired of each other, little
more than that, they were exhausted by each other's titanic
demands.
Aside from the authority she had received to compose, and the slanted
introduction to English poetry, she kept two prevailing souvenirs of
her liaison: his blood in hers, and red hair. "He had a fetish
for
red-haired shanties, you know, Irish shanties. I was so much in love
with him that I made my hair red after a while. I wanted to please
his taste. It was silly, wasn't it? Like a teenager." She
kept her
hair tinted pale red until she died.
(pages 184-187)

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Andy Warhol wanted Nico and Jim Morrison t make a feature length film
together. He was bucked by the commercial success of The Chelsea
Girls and he knew that Nico had a lot to do with it. "He wanted
to me
to make a film with Jim Morrison, though he pretended that it was my
idea. He wanted a pop star in his film. While I was at The Castle I
looked after Edie who had joined me. She was still beautiful, but she
had a problem with heroin then. She told me to be careful of Andy
because he would use me to get more famous and then forget me when he
wanted. Well, I had already thought of that. I was not so dependent
on Andy as Edie, I mean not for my career. So Edie said that I should
do the film but with somebody else instead of Jim. So I did. Andy was
expecting Jim and instead I took Jim's friend, who was an actor
called Tom Baker. Andy could not chastise me, but he was annoyed.
This became the beginning of the end."

That was how Nico told the story. However, Jim Morrison had no desire
to make a film with Nico anyway, not even a photograph. Danny Fields
recalled that "I wanted him to do a photo session with Nico, but
he
refused to do it. He'd never say no, but he'd never turn up.
Nico
would be waiting at the location and Morrison was always nowhere to
be seen. He didn't want to pose with a woman, and I don't
blame him –<br>his instincts were right. Posing with a woman would have diffused his
image, and he wanted to remain aloof." To save face, Nico took
Tom
Baker, a kind of "next best thing" in her view, over to
Warhol,
though this handsome Hollywood actor was probably a better performer
than Morrison. There is one other aspect to this that Nico confided
at the time to Tina Aumont but never mentioned again, She spent some
time with Edie and they had sex with each other. Nico's new film
was
called, I, A Man.
(page 189-190)

Although she hated hippies, who `were always trying to sell you
something', she finally bought from a San Francisco hippie a very
hippie thing to buy: a little Indian harmonium. It was portable in
the way a heavy suitcase is portable, but Nico considered it very
portable indeed, because she always would find an unhired hand to
drag it around for her. She would haul it out of a taxi, look lost
and sweaty, and swiftly lure some good soul to lug it behind her.
`It
is the kind of organ that Allen Ginsberg uses in his poetry readings.
It is used for chanting by the Indians (those in India), and it means
I do not have to rely on guitarists, who are unreliable people to
work with,' she declared. The trouble was, she hadn't a clue
how to
play it. She bought the thing because she decided….she sometimes
decided that Jim Morrison had discovered her, and sometimes that she
had discovered herself through Jim Morrison. In whichever way, she
chose to be a composer, because…he had opened the door, or he had
watched her open the door. As she could not write music, and she did
not have a band, she concluded that she must learn an instrument and
compose directly on that. Then she could play her songs in public and
not `rely on guitarists'. Trust Nico to consider herself a
model of
reliability.
(page 194)

She had learnt from Dylan, Jones, Cale, Browne and Morrison that
songs consisted of four distinct elements: the words that are set to
music, the melody, the melody, the harmony that supports it and gives
it direction, and eventually the arrangement or instrumentation by
which the song is eventually the arrangement or instrumentation by
which the song is presented to the public. It seems that nobody dared
talk to Nico about rhythm. She once told a journalist: "I
don't have
a sense of time. Time is timeless to me, and I'm not in a hurry
to
get older. I mean, if I were worried about time, all the time, it
would be terrible.'
(page 196)

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

1968

Nico never saw Jim Morrison again, she claimed, until the day of his
death. She met plenty of alternative Morrisons at The Castle, but no
one special enough to join her phantom family. `She stayed a long
time because she loved the atmosphere so much,' Jack Simmons
recollected. `She would stay in Bob Dylan's suite when he
wasn't
around; otherwise she had her own room at the top of the tower, a
little place where she felt the most comfortable.' Nico
recalled, `When the sun rises in the tower it is especially
beautiful, and at night I had cricket concerts.' She earned her
keep
mooning around, looking sultry and poetic, just as she had ton the
streets of Berlin, giving journalists guided tours. `Jim Morrison
once stayed in this room…but then, he stayed in a lot of
rooms.'
(page 212)

She followed Jim Morrison's advice and made notes of her dreams,
often opium-fed like those of Coleridge. The images nourished the
words, but the words she chose came from the published poetry of old
Romantic England and new-leaf New England; Coleridge and Lovell,
Blake and Plath. The LP's name was stolen from William Blake, but
some of the song titles – `Facing the Wind', `Roses
in the Snow' –<br>sound like those of Sylvia Plath.
(page 219)

By the age of 30 Nico had progressed in looks from a princess to a
peasant. It had been a sluggish journey, starting with hair tinged a
pale strawberry to please Jim Morrison, to the boots of Spanish
leather she continually wore, then working in from either end to
effect a seamless mood of rustic grace (`She'd smell like a
pig
farmer sometimes, she washed so little,' grumbled Viva).
(page 226-227)

A French journalist probed her sternly about the Paris revolution of
May 1968, and all that followed: `Of course, I was there and
followed
the events (this is not true). It is not the unions I follow because
I am not in a union – what a union could I be in? The Union of
Models
or the Union of Protest Singers? I follow the Situationists, which is
only surrealism brought up to date. It is a good bohemian reaction.
Jim Morrison tells me that people are looking at the streets while I
am looking at the moon (this is a mutation of an Oscar Wilde saying).
I do not feel connected enough (with the issues) to throw stones at a
policeman. I want to throw stones at the whole world.' (Page 228)

Nico had taken a sacred vow at the lap of Jim Morrison, no less, to
be an artist. All around her she had seen intellectuals squandering
their time; even Jim himself had neglected Nico and become fat and
idle. She concluded she must take the opposite path.
(Page 235)


She (Nico) once considered which decade she fitted best: "I would
say
the time has not yet come. I rebel against the present, whenever it
is, because I have not seen any change, other than oppositions grow
stronger. I would be a communist if it was more anarchist. Otherwise,
I see only everything as an absurdity, so I can laugh and cry. I have
lived in a continuation, from birth and growing towards death in a
chain that cannot end. I don't see this decade then that decade.
The
same things happen in different guises. I am bohemian but at one time
you would call me a hippie or a punk. I remain a bohemian whatever
you call me. So maybe I am locked in the fifties. But I have never
desired to grow up from my world as a child, which is when things are
most clear and utopian. They are clear because you are at the center
and you see all around you. When you get older you lose your
sight….I
lost something of my childishness when people around me start dying.
Four of my family died within a year."

The first was her mother. The second, Jimi Hendrix (`inhalation
of
vomit due to barbiturate intoxication). The third, Edie Sedgwick, of
a heroin overdose (`she was my warning'). The fourth was Jim
Morrison, who had lately exiled himself to Paris in order to lead a
quiet life as a poet and to blend in namelessly with the other junkie
aesthetes. Nico did not know they now shared the same city (and
possibly the same heroin dealers.) On July 3, 1971, Nico was walking
down the avenue de l'Opera when a black car slowly passed. She
saw
Jim Morrison in the back seat, bearded and bloated. "I signaled
but
he didn't see me. He was looking straight ahead, facing death. It
was
the anniversary of the death of Brian Jones. I am destined to die at
the same time (she did indeed die in July). I knew it was Jim. They
said he died that night in his bath, of heroin. But I knew his spirit
entered me, and it was an unbearable load. It meant nothing put pain.
Thoughts were flying round my head, male and female. And then you can
say that heroin became my lover." They had exchanged blood
exactly
four years before (Nico would claim it was to the very day, though
the dates don't tally). Nico would claim it was why she felt his
spirit. She could not bear to attend the funeral, nor his grave at
Pere Lachaise cemetery. "It was the wrong place. His ashes should
have been scattered in the desert, or pickled in mescal."

Now Nico was acting the mysterious diva to the hilt. She was
increasingly erratic – not an hour late for meetings but a day
overdue – and she was dogmatic beyond belief, telling people what
to
do and how to do it. It was assumed that the `aesthetic' life
had
gone to her head. Yet there is another view her friends put forward:
surely Nico suffered a breakdown, or schizophrenia following the
death of her mother. It would be understandable for her to assume the
presence of the `spirit of Morrison' in such a condition. The
heroin
she increasingly relied on would have cushioned the symptoms, or fed
them, disorientation was now a part of her daily life. She found a
doctor who prescribed Valium. She also smoked cannabis, `to help
my
inspiration'.
(Pages 255-56)

As she was nothing less than Nico the Moon Goddess and novice junkie,
she decided (with the advice of cards and coins) that she would make
a momentous contribution to the cause, in her own special way. She
would write terrorist songs. They would inspire rebellion for sure.
Moreover, she had a splendid outlet for them. In early 1974 John Cale
had signed a new contract with the British label Island; on the back
of it he gave Nico a chance to record another album. It was ratified
in a curious deal with the entrepreneur Jo Lusting (`He thinks I
owe
him money. But he owes me money and he hasn't paid me a penny,
ever.
I signed with Island because I was absolutely broke').

She resolved to make the album a memorial to her soul brother Jim
Morrison. It was her first chance to pay public respect to him since
his death soon after the release of her last album. She would sing
his favourite song and call her record by its name, "The
End", a very
terrorist kind of title. "Nico are you sure you're not
tempting
fate?" quizzed her Island contact, "Oh. no. I don't tempt
fate. Fate
tempts me."

Nico wrote songs for her two heroes, Jim Morrison and Andreas Baader.
To Morrison, her soul brother, she recalled the moment she last saw
him, in a black car facing death. She uses solely the present and
future tenses:

When I remember what to say,
When I remember what to say,
You will know me again,
And you forget to answer all.

You seem not to be listening,
You seem not to be listening,
The high tide is taking, everything,
And you forget to answer all.

The line that runs "you seem not to be lis-te-ning was cited more
than once as Nico's inability to cope, with the stresses and
accents
of the English language. `I don't care,' she retorted,
which is
exactly what Stravinsky said when he was accused of the same
violation. Nico would have done well to memorize Stravinsky's
subsequent remark, that Handel, a composer revered above all others
by the English, often got it wrong (`For unto us a child is
born');
Handel had once been as German as Nico.
(Pages 262-263)

The writers were especially confused by Nico's version of
`The End,'
which they regarded as male territory (`she certainly concocts a
bitch's brew,' claimed Crawdaddy). There was just one
exuberant
review to be had, from Richard Cromelin of America's Creem
magazine.
Nico kept a copy of the piece in her bag for some time, as she
considered the comparison with Morrison's voice to be
wonderfully `valid' (not to say flattering):

Her The End is the soundtrack for the free-fall to the bottom.
It's a
totally mesmerizing performance by this lady hidden in musical mists,
yet at the same time all too clear. If Morrison sang it as a lizard,
Nico is the sightless bird, lost but ever so calm, somehow knowing
the right direction. She is the pure dead marble of a ruined
Acropolis, a crumbling column on the subterranean bank of
Morrison's
River Styx.
(Page 266)

Nico shuttled between Lutz's home in Berlin and Paris, Ulbrich
and
Garrel. She had concerts to play through Hassad Debs, four more films
to make through Garrel, and overwhelming desire to be taken
seriously. Nico despaired, however, that she was no longer in command
of her life. She was dependent on drink, drugs, deceit, and –<br>worst
of all – money. She had changed her looks again. Her very long
hair
was no longer any shade of red, now that Morrison was dead, but
brown. Nico wore black (`in mourning for ever'), though she
hung on
to her brown boots.
(Page 274)

Nico the Nomad flew to California. She was bored stiff with her
active and aesthetic but aimless life. She wanted a record contract.
It was her first trip to America since her exile five years ago.
There had been talk of The Doors reforming with Nico as the new Jim
Morrison (`we have the same voice').
(Page 276)

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

June 1988
Nico returned to Manchester to confront Alan Wise, who was angry that
she arranged a concert privately. `Oh please don't be angry
with me
Alan, I needed the money so that can go to Ibiza to work on some new
songs and be with Ari' (Ari is Nicos' son ) (The last song
she sang
in concert was her song to Jim Morrison about the moment she saw him
before his death.)

Nico and Ari flew to Ibiza, where Nico had rented a cottage up in the
hills behind Ibiza town. "Late one morning, on July 17, my mother
told me that she had to go into town to buy some marijuana," said
Ari. "She sat at the mirror and wound a black scarf around her
head.
My mother stared at the mirror and took great care to wind the scarf
properly. She rode down the hill on her bicycle. `I won't be
long."
By the time she left it was the start of the afternoon, say 1 p.m.,
and the hottest day of the year, 35 degrees centigrade.

A taxi driver found her slumped on the side of a steep road down
Figueretas hill, her bicycle on the dusty ground nearby. The wheels
had stopped spinning. He settled her in the back of his car and sped
to the nearest hospital. The cab driver was obliged to call at four
hospitals before he could unload. At the first two Nico was ranked a
foreigner, and not admissible. At the third she wasn't considered
an
emergency – she looked like an old beatnik, possibly too long in
the
sun. After the driver nagged, the fourth hospital admitted her. She
was conscious but couldn't speak. Nico saw the hospital entrance
and
tried to say no, no. They put her on a trolley and the nurse
diagnosed sunstroke, a doctor examined her the next morning. She had
had a cerebral haemorrhage. The doctor though he could save her with
injections, but he couldn't find a vein." Nico died
officially at
8:00pm on 18 July 1988.
(Pages 308-09)

Thanks to Sara Darkstar for this excellent item

[stuart]

I will admit when i 1st heard Nico's songs, i could not get into it but if you listen it'slike a wonderful world opens up in her songs in general, for sure imo her voice is an acquired taste but if you acquire it, it's great.

At the moment i have on my stereo:Innocent and Vain: An Introduction to Nico

Anyone else got this Cd?