The Banana Peel: Lou Waxman on The Velvet Underground & Nico

Lou said he wouldn’t do it.  It’s been done.  Well, let’s get it done and over with.  For months, The Vogue has had a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico on the Wall of Vinyl with the banana sticker.  The album is bruised but the peel is still yellow.  Every record geek has talked or written about this one.  This post will say little about the Velvet Underground and focus instead on Andy Warhol.  It is the presence of Warhol that makes this album so appealing to Lou.

Warhol may be Lou’s favorite artist.  Either Warhol or Duchamp.  They are kindred spirits.  In its infancy, Pop Art was known as Neo-Dada, and it could be argued that Duchamp laid all the groundwork for Warhol’s achievement.  For better or worse, Duchamp was the foundation for most progressive art that developed in the post-WWII era from Pop Art to minimalism to conceptual art.  The indicator of whether Lou loves an artist is the number of books about that artist that find their way into his library.  Lou has quite a few Duchamp books, but he has even more about Warhol.

In terms of the banana cover, the Warhol book to have is Andy Warhol:  The Complete Commissioned Record Covers.  You know the banana and you know Joe Dallesandro’s banana onSticky Fingers, but you might be surprised to know the extent of the album covers Warhol designed.  There are a lot.  A whole book of them apparently.  The album cover book is part of a trilogy that includes Andy Warhol:  The Complete Commissioned Magazine Projects and Andy Warhol:  The Complete Commissioned Posters. In March 2026 will come Andy Warhol: The Complete Textiles and Fabrics.  The three Commissionedbooks rank as some of Lou’s favorites about Warhol.  Relatedly, Andy Warhol Screen Tests;  The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Volume One and The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné:  1963-1965 are also essential.  The level of detail in the Catalogues is impressive and even overwhelming.  In most cases, Lou reads a book from cover to cover, but these books might be best dipped into a few entries at a time for those films that may be of interest.

(If Lou could recommend one book about the Velvet Underground it would be The Velvet Underground:  New York Art by Johan Kugelberg.  Complete disclosure.  At one time, Lou considered Kugelberg an acquaintance so Lou may be biased.  At one point, Lou visited Kugelberg’s apartment and it was like living in a museum.  It was incredible and inspirational.  Later he visited the house of the editor of MIT Press.  Another museum type situation.  In this case, Lou felt he could never sniff a setup like this.  Soon after Lou dedicated his life to PBR and cigars and gave up collecting.)

If you are a Warhol obsessive (and if you have these books, you are), then you might have heard that a cache of lost and undeveloped Warhol films was recently rediscovered.  The most interesting part of the MOMA press release for Andy Warhol Exposed: Newly Processed Films from the 1960s pertaining to them in February 2026 are these words:  “explicit material shot on the Factory couch and in the Factory stairwell.”  Could this be Warhol porn?  Warhol porn has been much speculated upon, like Manson porn and snuff films.  This is the stuff of underground legend.  What could these “explicit” films be?  The title Andy Warhol Exposed is a tease if Lou ever saw one.  Edie Sedgwick on the couch and on the stairwell?  Lou is an Edie guy. Lou could watch Edie for hours.  Lou is all about What-ifs and one of the big What-ifs for Lou regarding Warhol films is what if Sleep featured Edie instead of John Giorno?  

Given how much Warhol documented and publicly presented himself and his work and has in turn been documented and presented, it always amazes Lou that new material ever comes to light.  But it always does.  It just goes to show how prolific Warhol was.  The art industry may never get to the end of it, which is a good thing since Warhol helps to keep the art industry running.  A Warhol exhibition is always good box office.

These newly discovered films remind Lou of the time he found a tantalizing Warhol entry tucked away in a rare book catalogue buried in a box of flea market material at Second Story Books:

Tinfoil:  An Anthology.  N.p. 1965, n.p. 1965.  Side-stapled.  Silkscreen cover by Andy Warhol.  15 tinfoil sheets taped to multi-colored construction paper.  Some age-toning to cover, foxing to construction paper.  Near fine.  Signed by Warhol and Harry Smith.

 

On November 21, 1963, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, and archivist Harry Smith discovered an early phonograph in working condition while rummaging at a garage sale in the Lower East Side.  Months later Smith located several pounds of rolled tinfoil sheet that made the process of recording on and playing the machine possible.  The first phonograph according to Thomas Edison’s patent reproduced “the human voice or other sounds by causing the sound vibrations to be recorded, substantially as specified, and obtaining motion from that record, substantially as set forth, for the reproduction of the sound vibrations . . . The combination, with a diaphragm exposed to sound vibrations, of a moving surface of yielding material – such as metallic foil – upon which marks are made corresponding to the sound vibrations, and of a character adapted to use in the reproduction of the sound substantially as set forth.”

 

Although the phonograph evolved into a device for the enjoyment of entertainment, primarily musical, it was initially a “talking machine” designed to record, or more accurately, inscribe conversations, such as in court or at the office.  From May 1964 to February 1965, Smith took the phonograph to Andy Warhol’s Factory for the purpose of, not recording music (Smith’s recording ends around the time the Velvet Underground arrive on the scene), as he documented folk music to such great effect in his 1952 Folkways release, The Anthology of American Folk Music, but instead in documenting another subculture, this one based on talk:  the Mole People of Warhol’s Factory.  In some ways, Tinfoil:  An Anthology can be viewed as a documentary-style follow-up to Smith’s No. 13:  Oz a.k.a The Magic Mushroom People of Oz (1962), a commercial adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s timeless classic.

 

The Mole People, led by Billy Name (Billy Linich), were a group of extreme amphetamine abusers who hung out at the Factory at all hours ingesting massive quantities of speed and soaking up (and adding to) the frenzied Factory atmosphere.  In February 1964, Name famously papered the Factory with tinfoil.  Tinfoil:  An Anthology is a one-of-a-kind document of that time, place, and drug culture.  In Factory Made, the link between silver and speed is made clear; Name associated the color with the spark of the drug.  The packaging of and smoking drugs over foil is also implied.  In addition, the silver of the Factory has often been associated with the image of the silver screen and film, but here we see a link to an earlier form of “new” media, the phonograph that as “talking machine,” dovetails nicely with the verbal excess of speed.  The tinfoil of the phonograph provides another form of transcription and dictation, which formed the basis for Warhol’s writing technique in works like a:  The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

 

Interestingly, Edison attempted to determine if the phonograph actually wrote a legible language by speaking the letter a into the machine and then searching the tinfoil sheet for its representation.  Edison determined that the script of the phonograph could not be read by humans.  Tinfoil:  An Anthologymemorializes the Mole People subculture while manifesting the act of memory as a material object, with the stylus inscribing into the foil suggesting the engraving of impressions in the mind.  The phonograph as writing machine also possesses affinities with mimeography and the use of stencil and stylus, which were much in use around the Factory at this time with Warhol works being featured in C:  A Journal of Poetry and Fuck You, a magazine of the arts.

 

This artist’s book is side-stapled with a Warhol silkscreen cover of the iconic RCA Victor image of a dog listening to his master on a phonograph:  “His Master’s Voice.”  A truly Pop image in its use of a corporate logo but also a multi-layered image referencing everything from the history of sound recording, the relationship of network communications and of speech to writing, and speed psychosis (hearing voices).  

 

Internally, Smith has taped sheets of tinfoil recordings from the phonograph onto individual sheets of construction paper, in effect creating a scrapbook of recordings from the period.  This harkens back to the Victorian practice of collecting such tinfoil sheets in the 1880’s and 1890’s.  The taping of the foil and the foil’s fragility along with the lack of availability of working phonographs from the Edison Era, essential makes the Mole People ghosts in the machine, for all intents and purposes a lost civilization, similar to the Native American cultures Smith documented throughout his life, such as in No. 15 (1965-1966), from roughly the same period as Tinfoil, which animated Seminole patchwork.  According to Smith’s notes on the project, the first recording is of Edie Sedgwick reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” a reference to the birth of the phonograph as well as a play on her poor, little rich girl persona.  Further recordings include Ondine, Mary Woronov, Freddie Herko, and Rotten Rita.

 

Provenance:  This item is completely unrecorded in the literature surrounding Warhol and the Factory, such as all catalog raisonné on Warhol, Reva Wolf’s Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s, or any documentation on Smith.  The reason for this is because the Anthology was stolen from Factory soon after it was completed, by a fringe member of the Mole People group, who then sold it to an art collector, who shall remain nameless. A lawyer in Pine Plains, New York, managed the estate of the collector’s wife, who passed away in 2004.  In liquidating the estate, our store was allowed to purchase the Anthology.  A shady provenance to say the least, but the signatures of Warhol and Smith, along with the, albeit brief, accompanying note by Smith explaining the project, should suffice to authenticate this authentic piece of cultural history.  The item is priced with its dubious history in mind although my conscience is clear and I sleep well at night.

 

A truly unique and unrecorded work of book art by Warhol and Smith:  $75,000.

 

Lou hasn’t seen mention Tinfoil:  An Anthology since and can find no mention of it on WorldCat.  Like the Specter acetates of The Velvet Underground and Nico or the recent Warhol films, Tinfoil might show up some day.  It is tough to keep Warhol underground.  Wonder what Tinfoil would sell for now?

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

The Banana Story Unpeeled:  How Andy Warhol Created the Velvet Underground's Iconic Banana - Rock Art #3

Warhol Album Covers:  Andy Warhol's Album Covers

Warhol Magazine Work: Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Magazine Work

Warhol Posters:  Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Posters, 1964 – 1987 – Rene Wanner Research Library

Andy Warhol Exposed:  Andy Warhol Exposed: Newly Processed Films from the 1960s | MoMA

Edie Screen Test: Andy Warhol Screen Test 3 Edie Sedgwick

Scepter Acetate: Velvet Underground - Acetate (Full Demo)