New York: A counterpoint to the West Coast, the city offered a gritty radicalism all its own

>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.

If New York did not have as well-defined a scene as Summer of Love hot spots such as San Francisco and London, it had a great deal more going for it. One factor was the avant-garde movement that centered on Andy Warhol and his studio, the Factory. Warhol became a vortex around which hustlers, glamorous society girls and artistic subversives like the Velvet Underground all spun. A conceptual genius, Warhol saw the Velvets as the musical expression of his own desire to blur all distinctions between fine art and commercialism, between the coarsest source material and high artistic achievement. Warhol produced The Velvet Underground & Nico, which came out in March 1967 and provided a dark counterpoint to the wide-eyed utopianism of the Summer of Love. Even its cover--a Warhol-designed peel-off banana skin with a phallic pink banana underneath--was a swipe at hippie softheadedness: a parody of the recent fad of smoking banana peels to get high.

The Velvets' music, however, was dead earnest?stark portrayals of the junkies, sexual adventurers and slumming socialites who populated the New York demimonde in which the band moved. The Velvets' shows, as part of the performance-art circus Warhol called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, were roaring sonic assaults aided by band associate Gerard Malanga, who brandished a whip onstage, and the grainy verite films by Warhol and director Paul Morrissey that were projected onto the group and its audience.

"Andy pulled me aside and said, 'Whatever you do, don't let people clean it up. Don't change the lyrics. Keep it exactly as it sounds--raw,' " Lou Reed recalls about Warhol's role in producing those groundbreaking songs. "We'd be recording live, and he would sit there. The engineer would say, 'We want to change . . . ,' and Andy would say, 'Oh, no, it's great.' And because he was Andy Warhol, it stayed that way."

>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.