“Strike Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart”
I have been a Velvet Underground fan forever; or at least since I was a goth girl. I loved the darkness of their work, the morbid nuances, the feminine beguiling of Nico and her singing of “Femme Fatale” and the ethereal nature of songs such as “Ocean”, “Sweet Jane” and “Pale Blue Eyes” — and right now my emotions are this: “Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad”…
For a girl born in the upper middle class enclave of Darien, CT, and moving to various places within the contiguous US, the Velvet Underground was probably about as close as a young suburbanite girl would ever get to the more (in my mind) hardcore world of NYC and *gasp* the underworld of drugs.
And also, of course, the VU wore black, almost as a religion, which definitely appealed to my emerging gothic sensibilities. They were, in other words, “Cool and hip” and their association with Andy Warhol and the art world only intensified my fascination: I wanted to be wearing chandelier earrings like Edie Sedgwick and releasing the silver balloons like Andy Warhol.
