I just can’t help thinking about Nico these days. I saw La Dolce Vita for the first time last week and loved her deliciously fresh cameo performance as a party girl speaking ‘eskimo’. I put on the Café de de Flore CD and there she was again, spooky as ever, singing ‘Striptease’, a Serge Gainsbourg song.
For you young ‘uns who have no idea what I’m talking about here are the bare bones of her raggedy life, borrowed from a review of the superb documentary “Nico Icon”.
She was born Christa Paffgen in World War II Germany. Her father was killed when she was four. By the age of 16, she had moved to Paris to start modeling. In 1959, her film career took off with an appearance in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. A decade later, she had slipped from the conventional spotlight to join Andy Warhol's "flying circus" as the lead singer for the Velvet Underground. In 1986, a heroin addict who was described variously as a "freak act" and a "middle-aged junkie", she made her final public appearance. Two years later, at the age of 49, she died of a brain hemorrhage. "She" is the "Siren of the Sixties", supermodel Nico, and Nico Icon is Susanne Ofteringer's attempt to present a screen biography.
That paragraph is fine (though she was never the ‘lead singer’ of the Velvets), but I can’t agree with the reviewer’s overall lukewarm assessment of the movie. I thought “Nico Icon” was one of the great rockumentaries, perhaps the most accurate and chilling celluloid testament to a life destroyed by heroin.
Apart from Warhol himself, whose genius transcends his period, beautiful vacant doom-laden off-key Nico is my sixties icon. It’s a word I’ve come to hate, but she was one.
As for La Dolce Vita, I liked it, though perhaps more as social commentary than as art. As a picture of the empty decadence of the sixties that eventually took out Nico, and many, many, others, it can’t really be bettered. [Though I was amazed to discover today that this quintessential "sixties" film was actually filmed in 1959.]
You know, good times just seem
to pass me by
Cafe de Flore is a great mix - everyone wants me to burn it for them. The Lhasa track is great - she has a new album unavailable in the US but you can probably find at Tower in Makati if thats still there. Tower is about to go out of business in the US.
"Striptease," until recently was very hard to find. Its also on this way expensive boxed set of Gainsbourg film music that I can't justify shelling out for since I have most of the tracks already elsewhere.
I've seen Nico:Icon several times - sad and spooky - what a wasted life. I wonder whats become of Ari, her son with Alain Delon.
Being late into the compact disc game, Chelsea Girl was actually one of the first CDs I bought.
There's a new live disc of Reed, Cale, & Nico live at the Batacalan:
http://skunkeye.blogs.com/skunkeye/2004/02/post.html#comments
Nico "sings" on three songs. Nobody seems to be too pleased to be there.
If you like Nico and especially Chelsea Girl check out Mick Jagger's ex Carla Bruni's album. I'm serious, its really good, a real throwback to early Nico, Marainne Faithful, etc.
Posted by: skunkeye | May 06, 2004 at 12:09 PM
I liked your story on the Batacalan concert. Doesn't sound a great record, but the Velvet Underground must have been a great live band -- Live at Max's Kansas City (recorded on a portable cassette recorder) was one of the first live albums I ever owned -- a snapshot of a fantastic band at their peak.
Interesting you should mention Nico's son. That was the only point in the film where I lost patience with her; everything else she did in the film seemed defensible to me, but not turning her son onto junk.
Posted by: torn and frayed | May 07, 2004 at 12:40 AM
How funny. I just bumped into your blog today, and just this morning I was playing a Nico 'all-hits' collection, The Classic Years - and I just got the album from a CD sale this weekend.
Her voice defines 'Royal Tenenbaums' for me. It's a movie I really liked.
The world is so small.
Posted by: disastermari | May 26, 2004 at 10:23 AM