Billy Name: Cool As Fuck
[The Guardian, April 25 1997]
A decade after his death, Andy Warhol remains an issue: his presence lives on in film portrayals – David Bowie in Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat”, Jared Harris in Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol”; in Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, where work continues on cataloguing his 120 time capsules; in the Superstar memoirs that have followed the 1982 success of George Plimpton and Jean Stein’s “Edie”, the biography that made Warhol a legitimate publishing subject; in media stories about his estate and the activities of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; in the continued documentation of the vast body of work that poured out of the two Factories in the sixties and seventies, whether silkscreens, photographs, music or films.
Warhol’s reputation is based not only on celebrity and association but on achievement. The high sixties “Death and Disaster” silkscreens alone justify his place among the great artists of the 20th century: here are the great postwar American themes – sex, death, crime, celebrity. A total technophile, Warhol was, if anything, over documented yet, in the middle of all the words, pictures and videotape, he remains a curious, ambiguous absence: a swishy commercial illustrator who made the leap into fine art on his own terms; a non-verbal person who could orchestrate an art factory; a serious worker who nevertheless threw open his work space to all manner of freaks and mutants, and who, in making them celebrities into the bargain, helped to create today’s instant media culture.
Of all the many Warhols that it is possible to access – whether the camp jouissance of his early 50’s drawings, the high pop of the 1967 “Flowers” series, or the severe late 70’s? series which comprise the top floor of the Warhol museum – it’s the high sixties version which continues to resonate the most. As see in the photographs of Steven Shore and Billy Name, the E47th Street Factory offers a paradigmatic modernist aesthetic: minimal yet baroque, sharp angled in high contrast black and white, underscored by the drones of the Velvet Underground, a playpen cum testing ground for all those fabulous characters that populated “Chelsea Girls” – Nico, Ingrid Superstar, Mary Woronov, Pope Ondine. Lifted almost wholesale for London Punk in 1976 and 1977, the Factory has remained a central icon in British pop culture.
Billy Name is a practised Warhol exegete but, if he is part of this heritage industry, he has better claim to it than most. Invited by Warhol in late 1963 to decorate the large loft on E47th Street, Name used his experience in experimental theatre to create the Factory of legend: sharp, angular, high contrast – a perfect minimalist stage for any action, whether it be Warhol and Malanga silkscreening, Edie Sedgwick dancing, or the Velvet Underground rousting the NYPD with an ultra loud, hour long improvisation. Name lit, designed and took production stills for the scores of Factory movies made during this period; his grainily-printed black and white pictures fill the pages of two contemporary Warhol artefacts, the “Index” book and the famous 1968 Stockholm Show catalogue.
As House God of the Factory, Billy Name has his own enigma. That nom-de-plume for instance: how perfectly elliptical, how blank . Then there’s the question of his photographs for the second and third Velvet Underground albums: for “White Light, White Heat”, an impenetrable black on black design, for “The Velvet Underground”, a candid snap of the group smiling. On the reverse, a photograph of Lou Reed cut into a rebus. Then there is the matter of his strange exit from the Factory, that space which he helped to create and, for a while, embodied:
Twenty seven years after this disappearance, Billy Linich is going public with a new cache from the time capsule: a book, called “All Tomorrow’s Parties: Billy Name’s photographs of Andy Warhol’s Factory”, featuring one hundred colour photos from the first few months of 1968 – freezing a brief moment in the Factory, from the move to 33 Union Square to Warhol’s shooting in July. Printed as a sequence of diptychs, the photographs work as gossip and as documentation: Nico with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City, auburn not blonde, distraught; Lou Reed pin sharp at John Cale’s wedding to Betsy Johnson, Brigid Polk outside Max’s Kansas City the morning after a fire in the kitchen. Although the aesthetic is cool, the colour is hot: as Dave Hickey writes in the introduction: ‘colour is vision’s amphetamine – the attribute of seeing that kills history, abolishes its aura and delivers us into the embodied present’.
The shock of seeing a monochrome aesthetic in the complexities of colour is considerable, but this was a moment of change in the Factory. The older, more unstable superstars – like Ondine, Nico and Ingrid – were fading within the new, more business oriented regime; there were new faces, like Viva, or an impossibly fresh faced Joe D’Allesandro caught flicking through some Factory Fotos. The random printing of two images at once sets off some startling images, like the diptych of a candle and light placed next to two young men posing on a bed: shot indoors on outdoor film, the washed out colour bleeds in a woozy hallucination that is very now – the bed photo could easily be a 1997 fashion spread in “The Face” or “Dazed and Confused”. Detail in the big picture: an intimate record of the sixties, Billy Name’s photos reinforce the continued power of that period when anything seemed possible, when worlds fused.
******
In the most famous picture of Billy Name, a Stephen Shore shot reproduced in “Edie”, he is staring down at an early Norelco VCR machine, severe in short hair and stripped down clothing – ‘my Tab Hunter look’. There is very little visual correspondence between Linich then and now. Like many other Factory alumni, he paid the price for all that hyper-intense activity in his twenties: a health breakdown, years in the wilderness. A large bear of a man, he retains the sharpness and the mysticism of his former self, yet, as he speaks, willingly and coherently, the gap between past and present elides. Although only in his late fifties, he has seen his life become history and he is a willing collaborator in the process: ‘I think it’s charming. Billy Name has become like a cartoon character and I don’t feel I have to correct people and say, “No, this is how it was”, because I can let people play with Billy Name and fulfill their fantasies of what it was like then.
Linich now lives where was born – on the 29 of ? 1940, which makes him a – and brought up: Poughkeepsie, a small logging town about two hours north of New York on the Hudson River – which, in late February, is full of ice floes. On the edge of Mount Carmel – ‘an old Italian district’, says Linich proudly – his one-storey house is a few yards away from the !55 freeway. It is small, but comfortable: we sit in Billy’s front room as he zaps the Internet on his television set, the shelves crowded with books about mysticism and the occult. ‘I’m central European stock,’ he says; ‘I was five when the war ended and believe it or not kids used to tease me by calling me Nazi Fascist, because my parents were German and Italian. I’m not an anglophile: I feel really worn down by the language monopoly. It feels more natural to me, speaking Italian’.
By his own admission, Linich had few problems in High School but, aware of his difference, left for New York as soon as he could, when he was 18? A good looking and driven young man, he soon found a job in ?’s Oriental Bookstore – ‘I read everything about Taoism and Buddhism, which is a very earth oriented thing; that made me vulnerable to my own nature, and I liked it’ – before becoming immersed in the world of avant-garde theatre, in venues like the Living Theater and Judson Memorial Church: ‘No one can be the single star in a big production, and that is the joy that professionals have with one another, the give and take. Your magic can only work if you let other people’s magic work as well’. After the unhappy ending of a love affair, Linich, according to Robert Heide in his memoir of the period, ‘really began to run wild; and seemed to be having a good time doing it. He moved to the Lower East Side, got into the hallucinogenic scene, and played “Surfin’ Bird” type music at his parties.’
Out of this transitional moment – “We were after the beatniks and before the hippies; we were the New York cool generation” – came the population of the 1963/4 Factory: ‘I had a knack for trimming hair and, if someone wanted a trim, I’d say “Come over Friday about 8.30″, and 125 people would show up. It was a cool place to hang. Ray Johnson brought Andy along to one of these parties, and that was when he saw that my apartment was decorated in silver foil. That week he had just got a new loft space in 47th Street uptown, and because we’d met before – in 1959, when I was a waiter at this boutique coffee house called Serendipity 3 – he said would you come and do this loft like you’ve done your apartment? From then on, Andy and I synchronised really well’.
‘When I started going about with Andy there was still this tradition where older artists would bring in younger artists and feed them. When I got up to Andy’s loft and we got along so well, I said to Andy, “I like to live where I work, and this is going to take months. Why don’t you just give me the key and I can just move in while I do this” and I gave up my apartment and just moved in there. I had an area in the back: there were two small toilets and I converted one of them into a darkroom. Because there were no electrical fixtures in there, Andy would just be there in the daytime, painting by the front window. So when I started this, I went to the hardware store and installed all these floodlights and spotlights, there were pools of light.’
‘The Factory had two rows of columns, ceiling supports, and then there were three arched ceilings. It was very long and wide. I didn’t literally do everything in silver: I knew about contrast, so I did some areas really white and some really black. If you have real silver and you have a black or white, you have a startling effect. The look came to me intuitively, because chrome is conceptually all colour. The only reason I can put for this coming to the fore is that I would watch them repaint the Mid-Hudson Bridge here, which is our vehicle bridge over the river, with this industrial aluminium paint. It opened in 1935: it ’s a very beautiful Deco suspension bridge. I would attempt to replicate its aura as installations, like I did in my apartment and in the Factory’.
With the stage thus set, the Factory quickly became more than Warhol’s atelier: his fame sucked them in (Career details) ‘When people came in and saw this silver space, things happened,’ says Linich; ‘It occurred because Andy was the centre of a black hole whereever he went, and you knew you wouldn’t ever be able to escape, so that’s why people would go there. The Factory became the place to be: you could just come in, you could help Andy with the painting, you could be in the film, as long as you were here, you were part of it.’ Warhol had already started shooting films in 1963 (with “Sleep”) and the Factory became not only a permanent, fluid set but a technological laboratory: ‘a big box camera – you’d walk into it, expose yourself and develop yourself.’
Armed with Warhol’s Honeywell Pentax 35mm camera, Name shot endless reels of film in the course of his other duties: lighting and set design on the movies, maintenance and upkeep, general creative input, especially once Warhol decided to break into music with the Velvet Underground and the multi-media Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Some of his work from this period can be seen in Debra Miller’s collection of his stills from the Warhol films but, unlike his close friend Ondine, Linich never pushed himself forward as a superstar: ‘The Factory had this thing of being a living place, not just another artist’s studio: you could go there and there would be Andy working and other people working, but I would always be there as the foreman or the manager, always making sure that it remained the art piece which made everyone want to be there. I was such a great controller then: I could handle these temperamental and vicious people because I was one of them, but the butch one, quiet.’
‘The gay world was enormously important to the Factory. In the regular culture, people were paranoid about it, but in the art world, homosexuality was accepted as normal. In the old gay world, very camp, gay bars were specific places, only in the Village or the Upper East Side. They were there for years, and the police would raid and you could all get arrested. It was a cruel life, but because there was a sense of having your own culture that you could participate in, you took the risk. It was so important to make your own life. But then in the 60’s as the art world became the prime factor in the New York cultural scene, and we were the power, we painted the culture over the country, and we were gay, or bi or hetero, whatever, and that it was cool to be what you are. That is the beauty of what you are. It was such a wonderful feeling, like being born, that you’d been around for a while, but most of your soul was dead.’
‘The same that we did with the gay thing, we did with the music scene. We incorporated serious musicians like John Cale whom I knew before when he was working with LaMonte Young. I used to drum with LaMonte and when we did find the group, and I found that John Cale was in it, I said to Andy not to worry about whether it was going to work or not, because John Cale was such a cool guy, it was bound to have some magic in it. Me and Lou got on really well, because we were both butch guys, and it was so cool to hang out with gay people who weren’t fags. Queers were noted for the fag style and it was hard if you didn’t want to do that. We were in our twenties and Lou and I had such strong ideas of our identity: people weren’t going to tell us we couldn’t do what we wanted.’
‘When we took the Velvet Underground and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable on a college tour, there was a poster with the names of everybody involved. It said Edith Sedgwick and Billy Linich, and it just didn’t sound right. I decided to think of something that would look good on the poster. Everybody was a dadaist, where you get into the shapes as beautiful things, and there was this form on the desk, saying ‘_____Name _______Address’ and I wrote ‘Billy Name’, and that really works, so I don’t have to think about it anymore. I said to Andy, ‘next time we do a poster, put Billy Name’ and he said, ‘Oh that’s so cute’. It liberated me in the sense that I didn’t have to be a concerned about my reputation anymore, because it was a cartoon character name. It was a mask.’
‘We used the noms-de-plume to make superstars. Ondine’s real name was Robert Xavier Olivier, but he was already known in the Village as Ondine, this brilliantly flashy fag wit. When we started the Girl of the Year thing in 1964, the first was Jane Holzer and she was on every cover for a whole year. She was succeeded by Edie and then by Nico. Because we doing this cartoon Hollywood thing, we had a brainstorm with Ingrid Von Schiefflin and said, ‘You’re going to be Ingrid Superstar.’ She wasn’t one of the beautiful ones: she was the comedienne with the lantern jaw, who was a waitress in a diner in New Jersey, and she got the most glamorous image. Susan Bottomley became International Velvet because she was more beautiful than Liz Taylor. This was our Hollywood stable, the Factory stable’.
‘According to the book “Edie”, Andy is made to be the villain, where he appropriates these young people and squeezes them until they die and stuff, whereas they would come in and take advantage of Andy and the scene. It was so open and such a great opportunity: you could walk in and you had the chance of being a star. We just let you do it. Edie got bored with the underground thing, and actually fell in love with Bobby Neuwirth, Dylan’s best friend, and they had one of those torrid affairs where you can’t break them apart. I had one of those once, and I never want another one’.
During 1967, Linich shot stills for “The Loves of Ondine”, “Imitation of Christ”, and “****” (Twenty four hour movie). He also did the famously impenetrable cover image for the Velvet Underground’s “White Light, White Heat”: ‘The image was a skull and crossbones, from a tattoo that Joe Spencer, one of our actors, had. Lou and I were going through all my contacts to see if there was anything that he wanted to use. He saw this tattoo on Joe’s arm in a still and said, ‘That’s what I want on the album.” I had to make it a really big enlargement, so it’s very grainy. Then we did it black on black on the cover.’
When the Factory moved in early 1968, Linich moved with it: ‘I started shooting colour negative. I wanted to make a new move. Andy got me an Olympus Pan-F and I set up the darkroom. This was the time that the third Velvet Underground album was coming out. I shot them in colour, although we made a black and white print for the cover. We weren’t ready to get a colour enlarger, so very few of the negatives were developed, and then Andy got shot and the whole thing was traumatised. I was in the darkroom during the shooting and thought, “Well it’s a very unusual noise but I know Paul’s up there and Fred’s up there so they can take care of it.” When I did get out there, Andy was lying in a pool of blood and I went over and held him in my arms and started crying. Andy said: ‘Billy, don’t make me laugh, it hurts too much”. He thought I was laughing’.
‘It was like the Cardboard Andy after that. He said many times that he thought had really died in the shooting, and he was just living in a dream state. Everything became stiffer, more with the wigs and the personality and less with doing the work. He was in pain for the rest of his life. The week before he died, he was still bleeding from those old wounds: they went through the intestines, the spleen, the lungs, they really had to sew him up. After Andy got shot, Paul Morrissey was gradually taking over, and it wasn’t my scene anymore. I rarely come out of my darkroom: the only people I would let in were Ondine and Lou Reed, because we would have a lot of things going with the mysticism and the occult and the astrology.’
‘I was doing speed through most of that period: methamphetamine hydrocloride. I didn’t snort and I hated needles. Mostly I’d get up in the morning, put some water in a glass and drink it. I used it for energy, I’d be up for three days, and I’d sleep for two. I had a cycle. But because you’re so active, you don’t remember to look after yourself: there’s neglect, malnutrition, because you can’t eat. When I eventually left the Factory, I was a wreck. These things are dangerous, but they can be helpful too. For me, amphetamines were a salvation, because they brought me back into the world with the energy to work.’
After he left the Factory in 1970, Billy Name became Linich again, travelling for years while he attempted to reconstitute mind and body. In the late seventies, he returned to Poughkeepsie, where he became involved in local community activism, while developing his photography and his experiments in concrete poetry (if you get his answer machine, you’ll hear: ‘Billy Name Linich. Billy Name goat clinic. Bank krank. Kronk bank’). After Warhol’s death, the Billy Name negatives were found in his effects and returned to Linich, who now owns the copyright. Today he’s revelling in his new found attention and the increased prices for his prints: ‘I’ve been thirty years in this, and I like to take a nice slow pace about things. I’m getting my recognition now.’
Billy Linich shows me a picture from the February Dazed and Confused “Warhol Issue”, where he is flat on his back, bloated and grungy. He makes as if to bridle, then muses: ‘We did like to make people look beautiful in the Factory. We were into glamour like it was a paint, a magic thing you could apply to situations. Andy had this fascination with Hollywood and glamour and how it attracted people. I think kids are afraid of that glamour because it’s so powerful and they have a sense that it is a fake power. Maybe we sucked it all up and there isn’t any left. Maybe we are not giving it to them. I don’t mind that they see it that way because all the things we do are from necessity. We need them. Even art movements. The latest thing is always something that you didn’t figure on, because it actually fulfils an emotional, cultural need.’