The night John Waters met Nico: “Where can I get some heroin?”
Every so often, two cultural planets momentarily align just long enough for a single exchange, a weird photograph, or a story told decades later through a haze of memory.
That’s what this is. One of those moments where Nico – the eternal Teutonic ice queen of downtown despair – and John Waters, the gleeful garbage man of suburban sleaze, collide in a nightclub in Baltimore and speak, briefly, in the same language of bad taste, brilliance, and slow suicide.
A chance meeting. A scene. A funeral joke. A request for heroin. A brush with a legend already in the process of turning into a ghost.
You couldn’t dream up two artists more different in their sensibilities, yet oddly bound by their instinct to poke at polite society with a broken stick. Nico, the former Warhol darling who looked like a haunted statue and sang like an East German séance, never gave a damn about being liked. And Waters, whose entire mission was to offend the offended, built an empire on the kind of filth that had middle America clutching their pearls. One wallowed in tragic myth-making and heroin fog; the other in polyester, puke, and suburban apocalypse. But both were dead serious about art, and both played the fucking long game.
The link between Nico and Waters is a shared devotion to the wrongness of things. Wrong voice, wrong face, wrong music, wrong crowd. Waters loved bad taste because it told the truth; Nico wore despair like a fashion statement because it was the only honest thing she had left. Neither of them wanted redemption. Nico loathed being beautiful. Waters made Divine into an icon by literally eating actual dog shit. They made careers out of pushing against the grain, turning failure, freakishness, and fucked-upness into something close to sacred.
The late ’60s through the mid-80s were a fever dream of artistic cross-contamination, before irony had been monetised and “transgression” came with a brand sponsorship. Nico represented the doomed poetry of the Warhol Factory, the nihilism that lingered long after the lights went out on the ‘Summer of Love’. Waters, meanwhile, was building his trash canon in Baltimore basements with stolen costumes and stolen cars, rewriting American cinema with a middle finger dipped in dog turd.
You can trace entire subcultures back to front through both of them. No Nico, no goth. No Waters, no RuPaul. No fun, either.
Which brings us to one of those dusty old interviews where Graham Russell, clearly in the know, asks Waters a question that sends him spinning into one of his legendary recollections: “Tell me about the time you met Nico.” And just like that, we’re transported to a mostly-empty disco in Baltimore, watching a woman who once inspired Lou Reed mutter about heroin between songs.
Read the interview below.
Graham Russell: “Before you go, tell me about the time you met Nico”.
John Waters: “Nico … I met her when she played in Baltimore. Well, (before that) I saw her play with The Velvet Underground at The Dom on St Marks Place(in New York) with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. I have the poster still. But I met her much later when she had her solo career, which I loved.
“She was a total heroin addict. Did you ever read that book The End? (The 1992 book is a jaundiced and not exactly objective account by her former keyboardist James Young). It’s so hilarious. It was that – although it wasn’t that, that was later when she was touring England.
“She played at this disco, and I went. And people went, but not a lot, it wasn’t full. And she was heavy and dressed all in black with reddish dark hair, and she did her (makes guttural moaning noise). Afterwards I said, ‘It’s nice to meet you, I wish you’d play at my funeral’. and she said (mimics doom-laden Germanic voice), ‘When are you going to die?’ I told her, ‘You should have played at The Peoples Temple; you would’ve been great when everyone was killing themselves!’ Then she said, ‘Where can I get some heroin?’ I said, ‘I don’t know’. I don’t take heroin, so I don’t know. But even if I did, I wasn’t copping for Nico!
“It’s a shame: she was mad about being pretty! She was sick of being pretty, being a model”.
John Waters
“But that was basically it. But I’ll always remember her, and I love Nico. I remember when she died, when she fell off the bicycle (in 1988). Every summer my friend Dennis and I, we play Nico music on the day she died (18 July). I saw that documentary Nico-Icon (Susanne Ofteringer, 1995), which was great.
“Nico … great singer; and even the Velvet Underground hated having her. And her music can really get on your nerves. You have to be in the mood. Sometimes it gets on my nerves. You have to be in the mood to listen to it.
“To put on a whole day of Nico can be … my favorite song of Nico ever, and I only have it on a tape that someone made, it’s a bootleg. Did you ever hear her sing ‘New York, New York’? It’s great! I wish she’d done a whole album of show tunes! Like ‘Hello Dolly’ or ‘The Sound of Music’! (Mimics Nico singing ‘Hello Dolly’).
Below, Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman describes his experience with Nico when he put out The Marble Index, and Nico performs on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975.