Nico Under Alles

I’ve always liked Grace Slick on that level--there was a point in the 80s when she was asked (by Phil Donohue, I think) about her drinking and drugging, and it would have been the perfect opportunity to cry into her Perrier about what an awful person she had been (admittedly, she was, after a bottle or two) and how she regretted every minute of it. Not our Gracie--she gave out with one of her patented Scorpio stares and said that on the contrary, she’d been having the time of her life; she wouldn’t have been doing it if she wasn’t having fun, and she stopped because her body was no longer physically capable. Finally a moment of honesty, and on national TV yet. No self-flagellation for Grace Slick, and none for Nico either. There was only the silence of the stoic; she never joined the “Just Say No” brigade. It’s hard to imagine Nico joining anything in particular. Negation had been the very thing that kept her alive.

I remember the day I got the news, I was in the local indie store. (Seven years later I got the news about Sterling Morrison. In the same damned store. I need to start shopping elsewhere.) The tale I heard was a little more lurid than the truth--something about how she wandered off a road and drowned in a swamp. I’m grateful for that at least--I’d feared perhaps she might end up with some sort of Mama Cass notoriety, but her end wasn’t quite so colorful. She’d merely substituted an obsession for physical fitness for her heroin habit (let that be a lesson to us all--an addiction is an addiction; I don’t give a shit if it’s white powders, 5 a.m. jogging or Lay’s potato chips...bet you can’t beat just one) and had decided to go for a bike ride, heavily clothed, in semi-tropical heat. Her dress tangled in the wheel-spokes, she suffered a heart attack, and there was an end. The only way to romanticise it would have been if they had buried her in a velvet dress. Nico (like, say, Syd Barrett, who in the late 90s is allegedly breathing in and out, although hospitalized and usually doing little else) was the sort of celebrity whom people are surprised to learn had still been alive, when the obituaries are finally printed. She’d been walking to the grave for a good twenty years before she ever mounted that bike.

It wasn’t always thus; she had been quite the pop girl back in the mid-60s, but who among us can remember that far back, even if we were (more than vaguely) alive then? It was only an incredibly stratified subsection of the highlifes and lowlifes among us who were ever in any position to be particularly aware of her, whether back then, or later on, or even now. She was one of those astronomical phenomena (like a dimly receding comet) that can be observed only on its terms...from the perspective of deepest darkness. As has been noted elsewhere, if the Velvet Underground were the first cult band, her following was the cult within the cult. A friend of mine once called her the Dark Soul of the Other Rock and Roll, but that sounds far too pretty, and Nico never considered herself to be particularly rock and roll. Nico was something far more...medieval.

Before there was grunge, gloom, goth...there is Nico. Onstage, alone--little more than her own narcosis to sustain her, that and the funereal wheezings of her harmonium--all else naked and throbbing with morbidity and resignation. The deep, dank, darkling and utterly Teutonic voice swoons and dives, weaving melismas of satanic charisma as she delivers yet another love song to a dead rocker. Jim Morrison? Henry Hudson? Genghis Khan? Sid Vicious? What’s the difference? Mama’s got a squeezebox, daddy can’t get no rest-in-peace. Her talent was such that at will she could wrench them from their graves to hover before her eyes, fluttering and taunting; just barely perceptible, just barely out of reach.

She was Billie Holiday’s previous incarnation as a Viking moon goddess. That ability to make time stand still, commingling the present with the past, was the one talent she did and will retain in each of her lifetimes.

“She seemed, at first to be only a vision of beauty: whitest skin, flaxen hair, and lovely (though saddened) face. Yet when she sang, it was as if we could see curious lands and people through that strange window that was her voice.” --Augustus Letitio (27BC-?)