Nico/Christa Päffgen

[anniehall]

Picture and another letter to Danny Fields from this book:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220470701559&fromMakeTrack=true&ssPageName=VIP:watchlink:top:en#ht_3332wt_962

Posted on http://theworldsamess.blogspot.com

LOVED this!!! amazing, thanks

 

[babydoll1125]

ROTTERDAM, HOLLAND - MAY 18: Nico (Christa Päffgen) performing live onstage at De Lanteren, Rotterdam in Holland on May 18 1984 (Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns)

 

[babydoll1125]

same...

 

[babydoll1125]

one more...

 

[PinkGoddess]

I'm sure it's been said before, but Nico was very ahead of her time in terms of style, more so than most women of the 60's I think. Her look can be seen everywhere in the fashion industry, especially since designers today tend to favour strong and masculine features in women. I think Debbie Harry of Blondie took inspiration from her.

 

[PinkGoddess]

What are everyone's favourite Nico songs? So far mine is 'I'll Keep It With Mine'.

 

[Voltaire 6]

^
'Little Sister'

 

[anniehall]

"I'll keep it with mine" too! Just beautiful

 

[babydoll1125]

Julius Caesar (Momento Hodie)

 

[atooomic]

i love i'll keep it with mine, such an amazing song. i also love i'm not sayin'

 

[Little Tiny]

i love i'll keep it with mine, such an amazing song. i also love i'm not sayin'

I'm with you on your picks.

 

[-lucyinthesky-]

Mine is "Frozen warnings".


n-strikesagain.blogspot.com

 

[desertshore]

"You Forgot To Answer." The song entered my life 1) by accident and 2) at the exact time that I needed it, if only to identify with the subject matter. Evidence of the magical universe at work.

 

[PinkGoddess]

Just a random question I'd like to ask, does anyone know anything in regards to Nico's view of other races? I'm curious because of this comment someone posted on Youtube:

"I love this performance and I love(d) Nico. Funny story: I met Nico in CBGBs at the start of her early-80s "comeback" when she sat right next 2 me and told everyone w/in listening distance of having had her purse snatched by 2 "*******," embellishing her tale by remarking how much "blacks reminded her of apes." As an "ape" myself, I listened to this child of Der Fuhrer w irony. Go figure."

I've read about Nico's encounter with the Black Panther girls but that doesn't shed any light in regards to her feelings about black people in general.

 

[babydoll1125]

It's hard to say if she was actually racist or just pretending to be. I think she just liked to push people's buttons. She did feel tremendous guilt that her parents were Nazi's and she used to tell people she was Jewish and that her dad was Turkish. It's funny because i met a guy from Turkey (my sister lived there for awhile) and when i mentioned Nico he said "Oh did you know her dad was from Turkey?" lol but it's not true.

 

[PinkGoddess]

Ah, thanks for that babydoll! I highly doubt she is racist with that in consideration, as she was certainly not the type to have pretended guilt she did not feel.

I find it interesting and sad that Nico seemed not to want to be liked. I wonder if this was because she was overly sensitive and didn't want to expose her true feelings to others? She may have been a bit like Warhol in that way.

 

[babydoll1125]

I think she was just so different from everyone else that most people wouldn't give her a chance. People are afraid of what they don't understand. I think Nico opened up to the people who stuck by her like Nico Papatakis and Philippe Garrel.

 

[PinkGoddess]

Quotes from 'Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk':

"Lou would say something bitchy, but Andy would say something even bitchier - and nicer. This would irritate Lou. Nico had the same effect. She would say things so Lou couldn't answer back. You see, Lou and Nico had some kind of affair, both consummated and constipated, during the time he wrote these psychological love songs for her like "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "Femme Fatale." When it fell apart, we really learnt how Nico could be the mistress of the destructive one-liner. I remember one morning we had gathered at the Factory for a rehearsal. Nico came in late, as usual. Lou said hello to her in a rather cold way. Nico simply stood there. You could see she was waiting to reply, in her own time. Ages later, out of the blue, came her first words: "I cannot make love to Jews anymore."

Nico: "Everybody in the Velvet Underground was so egomaniac. Everybody wanted to be the star. I mean like Lou wanted to be the star - of course he always was - but all the newspapers came to me all the time. I always wanted to sing "I'm Waiting For The Man", but Lou wouldn't let me. Lou was the boss and was very bossy. Have you met Lou? What do you think of him - sarcastic? It's because he takes so man pills - the combination of all the pills he takes...He's real quick, incredibly quick. I'm very slow."

Nico: "In Paris, Edie Sedgwick was too occupied with her lipstick to listen, but Gerard Melanga told me about the studio where they worked in New York. It was called the Factory. He said I would be welcome to visit when I was next in New York, but Edie interrupted with some stupid comment about my hair color. But Andy was interested that I had been in films and was working with the Rolling Stones."

Nico: "My name was somewhere near the bottom of the program and I cried. Andy told me not to care, it was only a rehearsal. They played the record of Bob Dylan's song "I'll Keep It With Mine" because I didn't have enough to sing otherwise. Lou wanted to sing everything. I had to stand there and sing along with it. I had to do this every night for a week. It was the most stupid concert I have ever done. Edie Sedgwick tried to sing along, but she couldn't do it. We never saw her onstage again. It was Edie's farewell and my premiere at the same time."

Gerard Malanga: "Nico latched onto Andy and myself when we went to Paris. I just put two and two together that Nico slept with Dylan. It was kind of obvious. She got a song out of Bob, "I'll Keep It With Mine", so he probably got something in return, quid pro quo. But Nico was of an independent mind. She was not your typical Hollywood starlet. She had her own personal history going for her - Brian Jones, Bob Dylan, she had been in Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita' and she was the mother of Ari, Alain Delon's illegitimate son. Yeah, so Nico already had a life-style when we met up with her".

Billy Name: "All of us at the Factory were very taken with Nico. She was just this fascinating creature who was totally nonflamboyant, nonpretentious, but absolutely magnetically controlling. And she didn't wear all the hippie flowers, she just wore these black pantsuits, or white pantsuits - a real Nordic beauty. She was just too much, really, let me tell you, so anything we could think of to have her play a role in our scene, that's what we were gonna do. We wanted her to have a starring role in what we were doing, and since she was a chanteuse, Paul Morissey thought it would be great to have her sing with the Velvets - which of course was the most wrong thing you could say to them at that point in their development."

Paul Morissey: "Nico was spectacular. She had a definite charisma. She was interesting. She was distinctive. She had a magnificent deep voice. She was extraordinary looking. She was tall. She was a somebody. I said, "She's wonderful and she's looking for work". I said, "We'll put her in the band because the Velvets need somebody who can sing or who can command attention when they stand in front of a microphone, so she can be the lead singer, and the Velvets can still do their thing."

Al Aronowirz: "Nico was using me, she was (c)ock-teasing me because I knew everybody and had access to everybody. I mean everybody was kissing my (a)ss and Nico was always coming on, promising me (p)ussy, and never delivering. I was a dumb (a)sshole. Everybody was getting laid and I was being faithful to my wife. Nico said to me, "Come on, take a ride". So we took a ride out to the Delaware Water Gap and she had this little bottle of LSD that she had smuggled in from Switzerland, and she kept dipping her pinkie into it and doing it. She gave some to me and we got pretty stoned and then she wanted to stop at a motel. I said, "Sure".

Andy Warhol: "The whole time the album was being made, no one seemed happy with it, especially Nico. "I want to sound like Bawwwhhhb Deee-lahhhhn," she wailed, so upset because she didn't."

Sterling Morrison: "There were problems with Nico from the beginning, because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for her, and she wanted to sing them all - "I'm Waiting For The Man", "Heroin", all of them. And she would try and do little sexual-politics things in the band. Whoever seemed to be having undue influence on the course of events, you'd find Nico close to them. So she went from Lou to Cale, but neither of those affairs lasted very long."

Ronnie Cutrone: "Nico was too odd to have any kind of relationship with. She wasn't one of those women who you stay with or you love or you play with or you hang out with. Nico was really odd. She was very icy and reserved on one level, and then annoyingly insecure on another. Nico was totally uncool because she couldn't leave the house without looking in the mirror for a hundred hours. "Ronnie, how does this look?" and she'd do a little dance step and I was like, "(F)ucking Nico, just go out and dance." Yet she was the Ice Princess, she was gorgeous, you know, a killer blonde. But Nico was a strange one. She was a weirdo. Nico was a (f)ucking weirdo, I mean that's all there is to it. Beautiful, but a weirdo. I mean, you didn't have a relationship with Nico."

 

[PinkGoddess]

Leonard Cohen: "I wandered into a place called the Dome. There was this incredibly beautiful blonde woman singing, the apotheosis of the Nazi Earth mother, and behind her was this boy playing guitar who had an equally angelic face. It was Nico, and the boy accompanying her was Jackson Browne. Every writer had written for her - Dylan, Lou Reed - but I didn't know who she was. I just stood there with my jaw agape. My song Suzanne was out (Judy Collins had just recorded it) and I had a credential and somehow I managed to meet her. And within five minutes of our conversation she told me to forget it, because she was only interested in young men. But she said, "I'd love to be a friend of yours" and we became friends. I was madly in love with her. I was lighting candles and praying and performing incantations and wearing amulets, *anything* to have her fall in love with me, but she never did. The years went by and we became tender with each other, but nothing romantic ever came of it. Then one year I bumped into her at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel where I was staying. The Chelsea by then had fallen on evil times. One or two floors were now occupied by hustlers of one kind or another, and there had been a murder a week before, so the place was swarming with policemen...So we were talking about old times, and I thought I detected some remote invitation. I don't know if it was the drink, but she said, "Let's go up to your room and talk", because they were closing the bar. So we went up to the room and sat on the bed, and I sat close to her and she sat close to me and I put my hand on - I think it was her wrist...And she hauled off and hit me so hard it lifted me clean off the bed, and she screamed and screamed. And suddenly the door came down and about 20 policemen came in, thinking I was the killer they were looking for."

He also said the following in another interview:

"She's incredible. She's a great singer and a great songwriter. Completely disregarded from what I can see. I mean, I don't think she sells fifty records, but she's I think one of the really original talents in the whole racket. When I first came to New York - I guess it was around 1966 - Nico was singing at the Dom, which was an Andy Warhol club at the time on 8th Street. I just stumbled in there one night and I didn't know any of these people. I saw this girl singing behind the bar. She was a sight to behold. I suppose the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen up to that moment. I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside. I started writing songs for her then. She introduced me to Lou Reed at that time. And Lou Reed surprised me greatly because he had a book of my poems. I hadn't been published in America, and I had a very small audience even in Canada. So when Lou Reed asked me to sign Flowers for Hitler, I thought it was an extremely friendly gesture of his. The Velvet Underground had broken up at the time. He played me his songs. It was the first time I'd heard them. I thought they were excellent - really fine. I used to praise him."

Cohen apparently wrote 'Take This Longing' for Nico.

 

[babydoll1125]

Thank you for typing all that! It's an interesting read!