In April 1966, the four members of an unknown rock band called The Velvet Underground and a little-known singer and actress named Nico walked into New York’s Scepter Studio. They were there thanks to Andy Warhol, by then a world-famous artist who had recently announced his retirement from painting to focus on filmmaking.
That retirement would be short-lived. But for the time being, the Velvet Underground & Nico were Warhol’s music project — the house band at his Factory studio and the sonic centerpiece of the multimedia spectacles soon to be dubbed the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
After their four days at Scepter, the Velvets weren’t any better known. But the songs they recorded there formed the basis for one of the most influential albums in rock history.
Now, the long-lost tapes from those days are the basis for “The Velvet Underground & Nico: Scepter Studio Sessions,” a new exhibit at The Andy Warhol Museum that’s itself the product of a winding archival journey. The show, including continuous in-gallery music, rare film footage and vintage photos, opened Friday and runs through Sept. 25.The earliest generation
Material from the Scepter sessions has circulated widely for years, including its release in 2012 as part of a Velvet Underground boxed set. However, that and all other known versions originated with an acetate pressing made from the mixed-down ¼-inch reel-to-reel mono tapes in the Warhol’s possession, said Ben Harrison, the museum’s senior director of performing arts and programming.
That makes the rediscovered Scepter tapes the earliest-generation document of the band’s earliest studio time as a unit.
“It’s not that folks haven’t had access to these,” said Harrison. “To me, it’s they haven’t had access to the quality that we have.”
Warhol’s role in the Velvets’ career is well documented. He met the band in December 1965 and became their manager for more than a year. He landed them a recording contract and insisted on adding the husky-voiced Nico to the boundary-pushing quartet of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker.
Warhol also served as producer on their early recordings. That mostly meant his celebrity gave them license to realize their raucously avant-garde artistic vision, which featured Reed’s edgy lyrics about sadomasochism and shooting heroin, and an often-confrontational musical style incorporating drones, dissonance, and pounding rhythms. Those songs were counterbalanced by quieter, more melodic — but still unsettling tunes —like “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”
Warhol also designed the debut album’s cover, with its famous “peel slowly and see” banana design. (The new Warhol exhibit includes 100 wall-mounted copies of the LP on loan from Velvet Underground fan Mark Satlof.)
At the Scepter sessions, the band recorded nine of the 11 songs that would appear on “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” which, due to various holdups, was not released by Verve Records until March 1967.
Three of those nine — “Heroin,” “Waiting for The Man,” and “Venus in Furs” — were later rerecorded in Los Angeles, with famed producer Tom Wilson, while two additional songs were added: “Sunday Morning,” recorded in November 1966, in New York, and “There She Goes Again” (which Harrison said also might have been recorded at Scepter, though it was left off the final tape). The remaining six songs were remixed to varying degrees.
The rest is rock history. Though “Velvet Underground & Nico” drew mixed contemporaneous reviews and reached only No. 171 on the Billboard album charts, it proved a seminal influence on a generation of rockers from early acolyte David Bowie to the punk bands of a decade later, goth music, and beyond. For decades, critics have ranked it as one of the greatest rock albums ever.Mystery boxes
But what about those Scepter tapes?
As Harrison put it, they document the band’s seminal artistic vision. “These are without outside influence,” he said. “These are how the songs were transforming and being arranged at the Factory and how Warhol was hearing them at the Factory.”
Surely, someone must have realized their importance. But seemingly — at the time — no one did. Documentation in the museum’s possession indicates the two reels were shipped to Warhol himself in 1969, some two years after he and the band had severed ties. Harrison said the tapes likely just remained boxed up somewhere in New York all through the 1970s and beyond the death, in 1987, of Warhol, whose hundreds of cardboard-carton “time capsules” full of ephemera attest to his refusal to ever throw anything away.
There the tapes stayed until about 2014, when, Harrison said, the Andy Warhol Foundation (a separate entity from the Warhol Museum) gave the museum a couple boxes of material. Most of the contents were related to Warhol’s film work. But, apparently unknown to anyone, the tapes were in there, too. They were uncovered by the museum’s archivist, Matt Wrbican, who Harrison said seems to have “set them aside.”
After Wrbican’s untimely death, in 2019, care of the tapes passed to director of archives Matt Gray. In late 2021 they were digitized, and late last year the Warhol announced its find.
The exhibit was curated by Harrison in collaboration with Gray and Greg Pierce, director of film and video. The Warhol transformed its second-floor gallery into a sort of black-box theater, complete with subdued lighting, and an immersive sound environment with the Scepter tapes on continuous loop. Thanks to carpeting and treatments on the walls and ceiling, the acoustics are good.
One wall is devoted to Satlof’s album covers. Two walls feature continuous screenings of Warhol’s “screen tests” of band members, live performance footage, and film shot for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, including Warhol intimates Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov doing their famous dances with whips
The exhibit also includes dozens of large prints of vibrant black-and-white and color photos by Steve Schapiro, documenting the band at Scepter, on the road, and in performance. Finally, in a glass case, the Warhol exhibits an ashtray from around 1960 featuring an image of a banana that the museum believes to be the source material for the ripe fruit on the album cover.
Harrison said the point is to suggest everything that was going on in the Velvets’ and Warhol’s joint environment at the time. “We’re just trying to create this context where you can experience it all together and have it complement and feed off each other like it was created in the Factory,” he said.
While the market for musical re-releases, alternate takes and remixes is strong, Harrison said there have not yet been any talks about releases the rediscovered tapes commercially.
The exhibit’s five-month run includes several special events. They include a June 2 presentation on the Scepter sessions by Velvets biographer Richie Unterberger; a Sept. 9 “Velvet Underground & Nico Tribute” by guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and Friends; and a Sept. 22 event titled “You Want to Dance and Blow Your Mind with the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol!” spotlighting Velvets-related film from the ’60s.
