Witts/The Velvet Underground, 6. Death and Transfiguration

On June 3rd, 1968, a year after he was sacked by Lou Reed, Andy Warhol faced a further disappointment. He was shot in the chest by Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist writer who felt he owed her money. At one point clinically dead, Warhol survived, but the wounded husk that finally returned to work was christened “Cardboard Andy” by Billy Name. Yet even Cardboard Andy retained Flesh Andy’s fetish for celebrity and, once revived, he was eager to see how the press had covered his shooting. Imagine his disappointment to learn that, just as the news of his apparent death had been breaking, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Kennedy – brother of the President killed in Dallas in 1963 – had just won the Californian Democrat “primary” election in the contest to become the next President, which he did on an anti-war agenda. The artist had been wiped from the papers to make way for the politician. And this is how it was for the Velvets. Whatever impact they hoped to make, events on the streets, on campuses, on the Left Bank of the Seine, in the napalmed schools of Vietnam – all conspired to make the Velvets immaterial.