You have to hand it to Nico—she made her mark in rock history by dint of a set of vocal cords that would have made Siberia jealous. You have to put on winter clothes to listen to them.
The German one-time actress/model made her mark with the Velvet Underground, of course, then embarked on a solo career, and while her debut album is accessible in a shivery Teutonic way, her second album, 1968’s The Marble Index, is about as huggable as an ice machine. It’s one frigid piece of vinyl. Heavy gloves are necessary just to put it on the stereo. And talk about catatonically depressing. I strongly suspect it was Nico’s vocals that led Cher to say of the early music of the Velvets, “It will replace nothing but suicide.” This has not stopped The Marble Index from becoming a real cult favorite. Some people like dying in the snow.
So far as I know, Nico’s first musical press clipping was Richard Goldstein’s “A Quiet Night at the Balloon Farm.” Goldstein is worth quoting. “[The Velvet Underground] are special. They even have a chanteuse—Nico, who is half goddess, half icicle. If you say bad things about her singing, she doesn’t talk to you. If you say nice things, she doesn’t talk to you either. If you say that she sounds like a bellowing moose, she might smile if she digs the sound of that in French. On-stage, she is somewhat less than communicative. But she sings in perfect mellow ovals. It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning. All traces of melody disappear early in her solo.” And so on.
But back to The Marble Index. One of its champions was the late, great Lester Bangs, who praised it despite the fact that it “scared” him. He described it as “self-torture.” Now that’s what I call a glowing review. The album was produced by John Cale, who had special things to say about Nico’s non-negotiable determination to accompany her trance-like vocals on harmonium on every track. Said Cale, “The harmonium was out of tune with everything. It wasn’t even in tune with itself.” He was wrong. The harmonium is in tune with her vocals, which are tuneless.
But it’s quite the album. You’ve never heard anything like it. It’s Master Race Rock and Lester Bangs had every reason to be scared. Nico famously had no love for blacks (“I hate black people” she is supposed to have said after stabbing a mixed-race woman in the eye with a shattered wine glass at the Chelsea Hotel) or Jews (Danny Fields, a friend and a Jew himself, described her antisemitism as “Nazi-esque”), and listening to The Marble Index makes me feel like Sammy Davis Jr.
It is not a warm and welcoming work. There are albums best listened to before a roaring fire. The Marble Index is an album you have to listen to before a roaring fire, lest you succumb to hypothermia. Lou Reed biographer Victor Bockris wrote that Nico’s beauty was “as removed from conventional concepts of warmth as Alaska.” The same is true of The Marble Index. And I think he meant to write “Antarctica.”
Nico and harmonium produce a formidable East Prussian drone (never mind she was born in Cologne) that brings Nazi vengeance weapons to mind. The Marble Index’s insistent buzz-bomb drone lulls you into a state of complete terror. You’ve heard of Desert Island Discs? The Marble Index is a Deep Freeze Disc. I listen to it whenever I want frostbite. Which is to say I never listen to it. Because when I try I find myself in a dark, wintry German forest surrounded by hungry wolves.
Nico is the only singer I can think of who requires a defroster. Her “Götterdämmerung voice” (quote gratis VU guitarist Sterling Morrison) has all the warmth of a walk-in freezer. The lost Franklin Expedition died in the Arctic. They’d have died much faster in The Marble Index. Virtually every album I know, no matter how cold the music, has a flesh and blood dimension to it. The Marble Index is Metal Machine Music minus the human element.
Listening to The Marble Index makes me think of something Andy Warhol said of the early Velvet Underground’s habit of deliberately stretching out songs to audience-maddening lengths. He said, “That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.” The Marble Index raises the question, “What’s less than less?” Lester Bangs must have been a masochist (he loved Metal Machine Music too), but self-flagellation isn’t my thing.
The Marble Index isn’t an album; it’s a long-playing wake. Nico’s Valkyrie dirges make “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” sound like a cut by The Monkees. Wagner would have loved her. He’d have immediately put her beneath a helmet with steer horns on it. Her funeral pyre keening raises the philosophical question, How do you kill yourself during every song? Because the sad truth is you can only successfully commit suicide once.
I am not, despite what I’ve written above, a Nico hater. Her work with the Velvet Underground was sublime. She was the perfect monotone siren for the songs Lou Reed wrote for her. Her debut album, 1967’s Chelsea Girls, is ice forest beautiful, even if she hated it (“I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes!”). And her cover of The Doors’ “The End” is, despite being overly busy, harrowing. The problem is that when Nico finally got what she wanted—her own songs done more or less her own way—out went the Plastic Exploding Inevitable and in came the Vinyl Glacial Interminable.
The eight icebergs on The Marble Index have led it to be called “the first goth album,” which is Strike One in my book. Cale did a good job putting together the backdrops to her threnodies, and the results are big funereal fun. You can do the dance of death to every one of them. The Marble Index is catatonic chic and a real Viking Death Ship of a record. You can call it an avant-garde album or a Teutonic folk album but the important thing to remember about The Marble Index is it’s best heard in the bath tub with a razor blade.
Each song is a subtle variation on what the French call “le drone morose,” and Charles Baudelaire would have loved it. I think he was reviewing it in advance when he wrote of an “oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” These songs are timeless—they could have been written yesterday or a thousand years ago, in a gloomy Thuringian forest—but death is timeless too, and in The Marble Index’s case the body in the casket is my happiness.
If it weren’t for Cale’s studio flourishes, The Marble Index could well be the vinyl equivalent of that plain VHS tape in Ring. Listen to it and you die in seven days, unless you can find someone else to listen to it. Cale tosses in everything but your grandmother’s bassoon, but he doesn’t sweeten the thing, which was Nico’s gripe with Chelsea Girls. Cale may have wanted to sweeten the thing, but there’s no sweetening existential dread.
He does do some nice stuff. His master stroke is whatever instrument he’s using to make that sustained tea kettle whistle on “Ari’s Song.” And the quasi-New Age backdrop to “Lawns of Dawn” is downright eerie—it will make you throw away your crystals. And the strings! The album is lousy with strings. Cale really strung the thing up. So much so that the musical backdrops remind me of gallows. That said, I get the idea he at least had fun. Adding the oddball percussive touches to “Facing the Wind” must have been a mad Welsh art rocker’s idea of a jolly good time.
The “poetic” lyrics mostly leave me cold. On “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)” Nico makes it clear you’re not to eat the apples. Nico doesn’t need to tell me this more than once because when Nico tells you to do something you do it. I perked up at the beginning of “Frozen Warnings” when I thought I heard her sing, “Fry a hermit.” Totally cracked me up. Then I realized what Nico was actually singing was “Friar hermit,” and I fell into a Middle Ages funk.
I make fun of The Marble Index. But it’s a fearless album—dauntingly austere, a frozen warning indeed. You approach it on its terms, and its terms are non-negotiable. You can either listen to it or you can’t. I can’t. But it’s the work of a visionary, even if Robert Christgau called the visionary in question a fool. I wouldn’t call her a fool. I’d call her an energy vampire. The Marble Index is enervating—the perfect accompaniment to extreme blood loss.
The album some consider Nico’s masterpiece is an unremittingly bleak work. I’ve stood in the frigid rain in fallow potato fields in the gloomy environs of Northern Germany and I’ve felt cheerier. And I can’t escape the suspicion that The Marble Index was Nico’s way of saying, “Why suffer for my art when you can do it for me?”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C-
