Half misplaced Velvet Underground album and half baroque-folk pop-art experiment, Nico’s solo debut LP, Chelsea Lady, was worlds other than anything she’d ever document, however it’s a traditional by itself phrases.
The album was made nearly instantly after the March 1967 launch of The Velvet Underground & Nico, and was reportedly assembled in a mad frenzy of exercise over just some days, with VU producer Tom Wilson on the helm. Its foundation was the solo act Nico had lately begun growing, generally backed by her 18-year-old paramour Jackson Browne, who contributed three songs to Chelsea Lady. Browne would later recall that amid the hectic periods, he was within the studio taking part in with Nico on his compositions the identical day Lou Reed was there laying down guitar on tunes he wrote.
Take heed to Nico’s Chelsea Lady now.
Chelsea Lady was not one million miles from “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Femme Fatale,” the ballads Nico sang with the VU. The fundamental template for the singer’s husky vocal method was nonetheless Marlene Dietrich meets ‘60s mod, however as an alternative of a full-band backing, the album locations the German émigré in a baroque-folk setting.
There have been precedents in Marianne Faithfull’s early recordings, which grew to become mid-’60s U.Okay. hits, and Judy Collins’ In My Life, which helped break the folks singer into the mainstream. This will likely have knowledgeable the business-savvy Wilson’s choice to make a drumless album and have interaction Larry Fallon for chamber-style woodwind and string preparations. A 1968 assessment in New Society would memorably dub Nico “a satanic Marianne Faithfull.”
Time has vindicated Wilson’s choice. From an goal distance, the taut however heat string and flute components really feel like the best foil for Nico’s deadpan supply. However each Nico and Reed would later gripe concerning the preparations. “I cried when I heard the album,” Nico would say, “I cried because of the flute.” In a 1978 Creem interview, Reed held forth on the album: “Everything on it – those strings, that flute – should have defeated it. But with the lyrics, Nico’s voice, it somehow managed to survive. We still got ‘It Was a Pleasure Then’ on, they couldn’t stop us. We’d been doing a song like that in our beloved show; it didn’t really have a title. Just all of us following the drone. And there it sits in the middle of the album.”
Half of Chelsea Lady was written by some mixture of Velvet Underground members. Reed’s “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and the Cale/Reed tune “Little Sister” had each been tried on the Velvet Underground & Nico periods, ballads with calm surfaces belying the lyrics’ psychological and bodily violence. Cale’s “Winter Song” and the Reed/Sterling Morrison-penned “Chelsea Girls” bear the identical kind of distinction, the latter impressed by the studied decadence of the 1966 Nico-starring Andy Warhol movie of the identical identify. The staccato string preparations deliver simply the correct mix of archness and accessibility to all of them.
As Reed steered, “It Was a Pleasure Then” grew out of a wild, avant-garde improv piece from the Velvets’ dwell set generally known as “Melody Laughter.” Whereas it strikes at an unhurried tempo just like the opposite tracks, Fallon’s preparations are eschewed for Reed and Cale’s ebbing and flowing currents of sonic derangement.
The Browne songs are far nearer to the folk-rock singer/songwriter conventions of the day. Their tender melodies and melancholy craving stability with Nico’s emotional distance, particularly on the poignant “These Days,” the one considered one of his three tunes that Browne would later document himself.
Chelsea Lady is rounded out by a music every from Bob Dylan and from Nico’s labelmate and occasional accompanist Tim Hardin. Dylan’s open-hearted “I’ll Keep It With Mine” was first recorded in 1964 by Judy Collins, creating yet one more parallel between her and Nico. The album closes with Hardin’s actually mournful “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce,” which might flip up as “Lenny’s Tune” on 1968’s Tim Hardin 3: Stay in Live performance. Hardin’s lyrics bemoan the substance abuse that led to his well-known buddy Bruce’s premature loss of life, and the music turns into all of the extra chilling in gentle of Hardin’s personal early, drug-assisted exit from our realm.
After finishing Chelsea Lady, Nico diverged from the album’s path as rapidly and drastically as humanly potential. Her 1968 Cale-produced album The Marble Index was the beginning of twenty years of self-penned albums embracing totally uncharted territory. However, for a short second in 1967, Nico occupied the surprisingly compelling area between arty abandon and fragile balladry. It was – and is – a pleasure.
Take heed to Nico’s Chelsea Lady now.
