Nico: Autopsy of an Icon (a grrrl's two sound cents, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to my copies of two of the three final albums by Nico, the enigmatic chanteuse who sang four songs on the first Velvet Underground album and went on to make a series of haunting solo albums that sold virtually nothing. I dug out tne Nico CD’s because last night my husband Charles and I watched a half-hour documentary on Nico, Nico: Autopsy of an Icon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3f3pYnZz7c&t=1s), produced and directed by a woman who calls herself “A grrrl’s two sound cents.” It was a remarkable vest-pocket portrait of this oddball artist who seems to have defined the terms “eclectic” and “boundary-breaking.” Nico was born October 16, 1938 in Cologne (Köln, to use the German spelling), Germany. Her father, Wilhelm Päffgen, was an heir to a brewery fortune who was drafted into the Wehrmacht at the outset of World War II and supposedly died in the war, though researchers have been unable to document exactly how. Nico’s mother, Margarete Schultze Päffgen (Nico’s birth name was Christa Päffgen), moved her family to a Berlin suburb after Cologne was regularly targeted by Allied bombers, and after the war in 1946 Nico and her mother moved to downtown Berln, where they both worked as seamstresses. Eventually Nico’s good looks attracted the attention of photographers who started giving her mideling work. In the 1950’s she moved to New York City, started taking acting classes with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio, and landed a minor role in a major film when director Federico Fellini noticed her on one of his locations for La Dolce Vita in Rome and cast her as herself in the film.

In the early 1960’s she lived in London and made her first recording as a singer. “I’m Not Sayin’” b/w “The Last Mile,” for Immediate Records, the shirt-lived company started by the Rolling Stones’ first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. (“I’m Not Sayin’” is a pretty typical pop number of the period co-written by then-unknown singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, but “The Last Mile” is a haunting ballad that sounds quite a lot more like Nico’s later work.) Nico attracted a lot of potential mentors, including the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and the Doors’ lead singer Jim Morrison, but the connection that would direct the future of her career was with artist Andy Warhol and his collaborator, Gerard Malanga. They had heard “I’m Not Sayin’” and fighred she’d be the perfect addition to a rock band Warhol had just signed and was attempting to manage, the Velvet Underground. Taking their name from a book on the sexual “swinging” scene by Mike Leigh, the Velvet Underground consisted of Lou Reed and Sterking Morrison nn guitars, John Cale on electric bass (and other instruments as well, including an electric viola he bowed into a chilling whine on the Velvets’ most famous song, ”Heroin”), and Maureen “Moe” Tucker on drums. Warhol wanted to add Nico to the Velvets’ lineup because he didn’t think any of the male band members could sing, and there was open warfare between Warhol and Reed over Warhol’s insistence that he give Nico more vocal opportunities versus Reed’s desire to handle the vocals himself.

Nico got to sing four songs out of 11 on the Velvet Underground’s first album – “Sunday Morning,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “Femme Fatale” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” – but she felt too controlled by Reed’s domination and the control issues continued when she left the Velvets’ signed with the same label – MGM’s Verve subsidiary – and made her first solo album, Chelsea Girl. Aside from one track, “It Was a Pleasure Then,” which Nico co-wrote with Lou Reed and John Cale (and which not surprisingly is the one track on the album that sounds like Nico’s later music), Nico was not allowed to write her own songs for the album. Instead she recorded songs by Bob Dylan (“I’ll Keep It with Mine,” a song Dylan had supposedly written about Nico), Jackson Browne, Tim Hardin and others, and she was allowed virtually no say in the production. In a 1981 interview quoted in Autopsy of an Icon, Nico said, "I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! ... They added strings, and— I didn't like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute.” (Now I understand why, when Joni Mitchell signed her first recording contract, she insisted on a clause that said she would never have to take orders from a man in the studio.)

Nico left Verve and signed with Elektra Records, whose owner, Jac Holzman, took her largely on the recommendation of Jim Morrison at a time when the Doors were Elektra’s biggest-selling act. Nico would make several more studio albums, each for a different label – The Marble Index for Elektra, Desertshore for Reprise, The End (featuring a cover of the legendary extended song from the Doors’ first album) for Island, Drama of Exile (a superb album fusing rock and Middle Eastern music which she recorded in 1981 – supposedly she recorded it twice but I’ve only ever seen or heard the first version) for the Italian Aura label, and Camera Obscura for Beggars’ Banquet. (Camera Obscura was produced by John Cale, the one member of the Velvet Underground with whom Nico stayed on good terms even after she left.) Nico spent 15 years of her adult life addicted to heroin – surprisingly, at least according to her Wikipedia page, she was not using when she sang with the Velvets even despite the songs in their repertoire, including “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man” (the latter of which stayed in Nico’s live repertoire and which, while Lou Reed sang it with the Velvets, she covered on Drama of Exile). Instead she picked up the habit around 1971 and, ironically, went through rehab, including methadone treatment, in 1986 just months before she died in a bicycle accident in Ibiza, Spain on July 17, 1968 while on holiday with her son Ari.

Nico’s legacy lives on in performers like Sinèad O’Connor, Bjork and Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees (who invited her as a guest on their 1978 British tour). Male artists like Elliot Smith, Morrissey, Peter Murphy of Bauhaus and Robert Smith of The Cure have also named her as an influence, and Murphy had an interesting comment on The Marble Index and The End: “Nico was Gothic, but she was Mary Shelley to everyone else's Hammer horror. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico's was real.” Along with such other misunderstood late-1960’s singers as Yoko Ono and Melanie, Nico remains an often unacknowledged but very real influence on a lot of pop music today, and like fellow Actors’ Studio student Marilyn Monroe, Nico suffered from the stereotype that beautiful, sexy women can’t also have brains. Whoever was behind the Nico tribute signed by “a grrrl’s two sound cents” did a marvelous job showing Nico’s artistic greatness and the frequently off-putting but always intensely moving character of her work.