| September 22nd, 2005 01:50 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Exhibit highlights Warhol, Stones collaboration
By Regis Behe
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Andy Warhol's involvement with the Velvet Underground is part of the iconic artist's legacy. His collaborations with the seminal rock group included album covers, films, avant-garde collisions of art and music and even management duties.
Overlooked is Warhol's relationship with another important band, the Rolling Stones, who perform at PNC Park Wednesday. At the Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side, "Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones" features art and archival material, including portraits, press materials, designs for the "Sticky Fingers" album and other ephemera from Warhol's personal collection.
Warhol's involvement with the Stones started when they were little more than a scruffy band of English kids during their first tour of America in 1964.
Matt Wrbican, an assistant archivist at the museum, has listened to a tape from that period of Warhol conversing with Truman Capote.
"Capote is trashing the band, saying you can't dance to their music, the melodies are terrible, the lyrics make no sense," Wrbican says. "And Warhol changes the subject. He starts talking about when he first saw them at the Academy of Music on 14th Street (in New York) and how nobody was there because no one knew who they were."
The relationship between Warhol and the band would go unreported until 1969, when Mick Jagger became one of the artist's favorite subjects. Three times within a year, Jagger was featured on the cover of Interview magazine, even though there are just brief mentions of him inside.
"Either Warhol was really sucking up to him or he knew that Jagger could help sell the magazine," Wrbican says.
Wrbican agrees that some of Warhol's fascination with the Rolling Stones might have been for commercial purposes. Doing the album covers for "Sticky Fingers" and "Love You Live" helped Warhol reach another, younger audience for his art.
But Wrbican thinks Warhol also had a genuine affection for the group, especially Jagger, with whom he did a series of portraits that featured close-ups of the musician's arms, legs, torso and chest in addition to head shots.
"Warhol absolutely recognized Jagger's sex appeal," Wrbican says. "When you look at the portraits, that absolutely comes through."
Visitors to the museum can also hear one-of-a-kind personal recordings that Warhol made at Stones concerts at Madison Square Garden in 1972 and 1975. Only Warhol and museum staff members have previously heard the tapes, which play continuously in the exhibit room on the museum's fifth floor.
Warhol didn't have permission to tape the shows, but being Andy Warhol and knowing the right people, he went backstage and set up his equipment.
These tapes also feature conversations. Wrbican points out an eight-minute sequence where the Stones are conversing with Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess, about old photos of the band from the early 1960s.
Because of rights fees, Wrbican says, the tapes will probably never leave the museum.
"Nobody has this right now, and probably nobody ever will," he says.
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