Trivia / The Velvet Underground & Nico

• Acclaimed Flop: As put by Brian Eno, while the album initially only sold approximately 30,000 copies, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."
• Corpsing: Lou Reed can be heard cracking up on the last verse of "Heroin".
• Creator's Favorite Episode: According to Lou Reed, "All Tomorrow's Parties" was Andy Warhol's favorite song.
• Defictionalization: The festival "All Tomorrow's Parties" takes its name from the song on this album.
• Enforced Method Acting: How the Velvets got a good performance out of Nico on "I'll Be Your Mirror".
  Sterling Morrison: She kept singing "I'll Be Your Mirror" in her strident voice. Dissatisfied, we kept making her do it over and over again until she broke down and burst into tears. At that point we said, "Oh, try it just one more time and then fuck it — if it doesn't work this time, we're not going to do the song." Nico sat down and did it exactly right.
  • And they loved her performance so much that when they played it live after she left, they would imitate her German accent.
• Executive Meddling: Despite Andy Warhol's hands-off approach toward managing the band, he insisted that Nico join. The band also got total creative freedom from Warhol, yet the actual release of the album was delayed for almost over a year. Despite the fact that the recordings only took two days! Most of it had to do with making the banana cover "peelable" and Warhol spending more time on other projects. Lou Reed however, was convinced that Frank Zappa had forced the producers to delay their record so that Zappa's Freak Out album could be released in 1966 as the first "underground rock" album. Interestingly enough: Producer Tom Wilson worked on both albums, and they were both released on the same label (Verve Records)!
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Legal disputes over an image on the back of the album cover delayed the release of the album for several months; whatever buzz they'd built up by working with Warhol was cooling off considerably by the time the album finally came out.
• Troubled Production: Averted with the actual recording, which only took a couple of days. The album cover delayed the album, as it was hard to find printers who could produce the peelable banana.
• What Could Have Been: Nico was originally supposed to sing "Sunday Morning", but Lou Reed insisted on singing it himself. She did provide backing vocals.
• Write What You Know:
  • Lou Reed was inspired to write "All Tomorrow's Parties" by watching Andy Warhol and the people at Warhol's Factory.
  • One of Reed's early girlfriends from his college days - Shelley Albin - believes that "I'll Be Your Mirror" was inspired by their time together. In Lou Reed: A Life, she says:
  A song like "I'll Be Your Mirror" — that's a conversation we had word-for-word. I know when he wrote it; I think I was in my junior year in college. I got a lot of letters from him. A lot of them were lyrics. One of them was "The Gift".

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