Nico 1: Chelsea Girl

Even before she was appended to the Velvet Underground, Nico had been trying to make it in showbiz. Her blonde beauty and cheekbones had already emblazoned album covers and got her into movies, but the girl just wanted to sing. Her husky timber would be an acquired taste, but she exuded enough cool to open a few doors.

Once the band’s first album had been released, producer Tom Wilson took to the task of establishing her as a chanteuse. She’d already been doing solo shows at the same East Village venue that Andy Warhol had already turned into a nightclub, and where she was accompanied by a rotating cast of guitarists, including the guys from the Velvets, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, and a kid we’ll reveal shortly. She built a repertoire, which Wilson recorded in the folk style, then promptly slathered in chamber-pop arrangements nothing like the album she’d just finished, and which she insisted she hated. (Interestingly—to us, anyway—the arranger would work on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks a year later.)

The aforementioned kid was named Jackson Browne, and while his own career would take another five years to really start, he plays on most of Chelsea Girl, and two of the three songs he’d written for the album open it. “The Fairest Of The Seasons” is lovely little reverie, and the strings don’t get too much in the way, but the future classic “These Days” would be bettered by others. “Little Sister” is credited to Lou Reed and John Cale, but the see-sawing organ and airy lyrics suggest mostly the work of the latter. Only his name is on the tense, Gothic “Winter Song”, which comes off as a faster minor-key variation with more polysyllabic words. Folks who were with her so far might not have appreciated “It Was A Pleasure Then”, wherein she sings a haunting, almost Gregorian melody over Reed and Cale’s tapped guitars and burst of feedback for eight minutes. Only the absence of drums keeps it from being a full-on Velvets track.

Another contender, and almost as long, is “Chelsea Girls”, written after the fact for Warhol’s experimental 3½-hour split-screen film experience. Eight nursery rhyme-style verses document the sad lives of the denizens, each culminating in a mournful chorus of sorts. She wasn’t the first person to record Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, but like Judy Collins she insisted he’d written it explicitly for her, and sources say he did. “Somewhere There’s A Feather” is another very sweet Jackson Browne song to which he never returned, while “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” was one of Lou’s earliest songs. At five minutes it tends to drag, and the constantly fluttering flute has the effect of a buzzing fly, causing the listener to swat the air with the album sleeve. “Eulogy To Lenny Bruce” is Tim Hardin’s tribute to the comedian who’d died the previous summer, and a little too specific about their shared addiction to be universal.

Chelsea Girl is one of those “iconic” albums that people seem to revere, but we always suspected it was more due to the fascination with her image and mythology. The arrangements are a little precious, and many of the songs have a sameness to them that take a lot of listens to distinguish. And you’ll either really, really like her voice, or find the accent and pitch problems to be too much to handle. Still, it’s since become part of the Velvet Underground story as a whole, having been included with its stepsiblings in various box sets and expanded reissues.

Nico Chelsea Girl (1967)—2½