When the Lower East Side fell into disrepair in the 1960s, artists began taking advantage of the cheap old tenement buildings and started moving in. The building at 56 Ludlow Street became home to countless artists and musicians, and is most famously known as the birthplace for John Cale’s and Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground.
The 5th floor loft that Cale and filmmaker Tony Conrad moved into in 1964 cost $25 for the space–about $190 in today’s currency. In the winters, Cale and Conrad burned furniture and crates in their fireplace for heat and lived off of milkshakes and canned soup.
Cale met Lou Reed in 1964 at Pickwick Records in Queens. The two soon began playing and writing music together at Cale’s Ludlow apartment and recorded some of the earliest demos of the songs that would appear on the Velvet Underground’s debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. Despite rumors, Reed never moved into the apartment, according to Cale, he commuted every day to the apartment from his parents’ house on Long Island.
The group went by a number of different names such as The Warlocks and The Falling Spikes, but eventually changed their name to The Velvet Underground after an S&M novel of the same name that Tony Conrad found on the street. Cale thought it was the perfect name for the band, saying that there was nothing velvet about the situations they found themselves in.
Paul Morrissey, film director and Andy Warhol’s film caster, first saw the Velvet Underground perform at Cafe Bizarre (which was located on West 3rd) in 1965. Morrissey then told Warhol about the band and convinced him to manage them. After Warhol saw them play at Cafe Bizarre, he offered them his Factory as a rehearsal space, and they took him up on his offer. Morrissey then brought in German singer and model, Nico, to be the band’s new singer, saying that Lou Reed was an awkward performer. Together, Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Mo Tucker, and Sterling Morrison began recording their break-through 1967 album.
Though Warhol is credited as the album’s producer in the record’s liner notes, he merely paid for the band’s recording sessions. He also created the album’s iconic banana image, a cover that Rolling Stone magazine ranked as the 13th greatest album cover of all time. The original album pressings featured a peelable banana sticker, which hid a light pink unpeeled banana. Because of the expense of the hand-applied stickers, however, the peelable covers were soon replaced with a printed banana image.
Warhol continued working with the Velvet Underground until 1968. Along with designing the album cover for the band’s second album, White Light/White Heat, he also worked with the Velvets on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, an art show that featured the band performing while images were projected and flashed onto the band.
| 1964 | John Cale and Tony Conrad move in |
| 1964 | Cale meets Lou Reed |
| 1965 | Paul Morrissey convinces Andy Warhol to manage The Velvet Underground |
| 1967 | "The Velvet Underground & Nico" is released |
| sight | Andy Warhol's Silver Factory |
| internal | gDoc |
| article | WSJ: Incubator for the Velvet Underground |