I didn't know that Nico played a role in this serious movie,how great is find out her cinema career,she's behind the main actors in pink dress smoking,before met Warhol and the Velvets.these shoots are totally new to me,enjoy !!!
This movie, the Sandpiper, was filmed at my old stomping ground, Big Sur California. The location is Nepenthe, a restaurant/bar
that remains to this day mostly unchanged. I have been to Nepenthe at least a 100 times. If the hyperbolic contention that
California was the hotbed of the anti VU virus, then Big Sur could be the armpit of that attitude, the forest standing in
for pubes. Actually the VU had enough friends in California to play there numerous times and get called back. However
the hippies in Big Sur, especially the natives in the late 60's and early 70's, those who lived deep in the heavily
forested hills were more like the VisiGoths as depicted in oil paintings. There were hirsute females running
naked in that shadowed terrain. Anyway Nico made one more pass by Big Sur in the early 1980's, this is
documented in the book "The End" by her keyboardist James Young. There is also a book that I found
at an ex-girlfriend's house in the early 90's called "The Aquarian Age." It had pictures of Angus Maclise
and his wife deep in the woods of Big Sur. Add to that a new age bookstore 26 miles north of
Big Sur had a video for rent about Angus' son,"Ossian Kennard MacLise, who was recognized by
Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the 16th Karmapa, as a reincarnation of a Tibetan saint, or tulku, and at age four became a Buddhist monk."
The threads of the Velvets made many inroads deep into California culture. There is Nico's picture in the booklet that came
with the Monterey Pop festival cd set. It is in the middle of the booklet and is the largest. There is Barry Melton of
Country Joe and the Fish covering "Sweet Jane" with his own band. There were at least 2 clothing stores in California
calling themselves The Velvet Underground, one in San Francisco in the late 60's and one in Santa Cruz recently.
And so it goes. Had I known some of these factoids about that "New York Scum" having infested the pristine
landscape of California as they did I would have made it known to some of those Big Sur natives, the same one
who derided my fondness for the band. Now some are friends on facebook, I will post the pictures there.
