Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decided to Give Up Painting & Manage the Velvet Underground Instead (1966)

In Good Omens—the six-episode adap­ta­tion of Ter­ry Pratch­ett and Neil Gaiman’s satir­i­cal fan­ta­sy about the Bib­li­cal end of the world—a run­ning joke relies on the viewer’s off­hand knowl­edge of the Vel­vet Underground’s sig­nif­i­cance. A refined, rare book­shop-own­ing angel calls the band “bebop” and has no idea who they are or what they sound like, a for­giv­able sin in the 70s, but seri­ous­ly out of touch decades lat­er in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

The schem­ing super­nat­ur­al agent should prob­a­bly know that the Lou Reed (and briefly Nico)-fronted, Andy Warhol-man­aged late-1960s-70s exper­i­men­tal New York art rock band had an out­sized influ­ence on human affairs. Bridg­ing a divide no one even knew exist­ed between beat poet­ry, avant-garde jazz, psy­che­del­ic garage rock, doo-wop, and Euro­pean folk music, the band is anec­do­tal­ly cred­it­ed with launch­ing thou­sands of others—having as much impact, per­haps, on mod­ern rock as Char­lie Park­er had on mod­ern jazz.

Warhol could not have known any of this when he decid­ed to spon­sor and pro­mote the Vel­vet Under­ground in 1966. He only man­aged the band for a year, in what seemed like both a stunt and a per­for­mance art project, part of his trav­el­ing mul­ti­me­dia show Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable, which he calls “the biggest dis­cotheque in the world” in the 1966 inter­view above. Warhol act­ed, and the band react­ed, shap­ing them­selves around his provo­ca­tions. He pro­ject­ed high-con­trast films at them onstage, they put on sun­glass­es. He pushed dead­pan Ger­man mod­el and singer Nico on them, they wrote and record­ed what some con­sid­er the great­est debut album in his­to­ry.

Warhol couldn’t have known how any of it would pan out, but in hind­sight his patron­age can seem like a pre­scient, almost meta­phys­i­cal, act of cul­tur­al subversion—and the work of a guile­less savant com­pelled by vague intu­itions and whims. He pre­ferred to give off the lat­ter impres­sion, then let crit­ics infer the for­mer. Warhol explains that he has aban­doned paint­ing and start­ed man­ag­ing the band because “I hate objects, and I hate to go to muse­ums and see pic­tures of the world, because they look so impor­tant and they don’t real­ly mean any­thing.”

Few peo­ple doubt the man­age­ment of his pub­lic per­sona was at least par­tial­ly cal­cu­lat­ed. But so much of it clear­ly wasn’t—as evi­denced by his own exhaus­tive record­ing of every detail of his life. Despite the amount of cal­cu­la­tion ascribed to him, a qual­i­ty the inter­view­er awk­ward­ly tries to ask him about, he seems to have been stu­pe­fied about his own moti­va­tions much of the time, beyond the fact that he strong­ly liked and dis­liked cer­tain sim­ple things—Elvis, Campbell’s Soup, obscure blonde femme fatales. At oth­er times, Warhol issued apho­risms as cryp­tic and pro­found as an ancient sage or post-war crit­i­cal the­o­rist.

Was the Vel­vet Under­ground more like Warhol’s uncom­pli­cat­ed love of cheese­burg­ers and Bat­man or more like his sophis­ti­cat­ed decon­struc­tion of film, media, and fash­ion, or are these not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive ways of look­ing at his work? The ques­tion may not real­ly con­cern music his­to­ri­ans, for whom Warhol’s ear­ly influ­ence was for­ma­tive, but maybe musi­cal­ly mar­gin­al. But if we think of him as a motive force behind the band’s look and ear­ly sound—a kind of con­scious cre­ative reagent—we might be curi­ous about what he meant by it, if any­thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Big Ideas Behind Andy Warhol’s Art, and How They Can Help Us Build a Bet­ter World

Watch Footage of the Vel­vet Under­ground Com­pos­ing “Sun­day Morn­ing,” the First Track on Their Sem­i­nal Debut Album The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico (1966)

Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness