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Andy Warhol - More Than Just 15 Minutes of Fame · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, you're listening to Dirt Nap City, the podcast about interesting dead people.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: And today I'm here with my buddy Alex in his uh dining room, and he has a beautiful house in the Houston, Texas area.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but it is coming down like a mofo outside, would you say?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Raining cats and dogs.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: Raining cats and dogs.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I never understood the people that aren't farmers that enjoy the rain.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: They always say, Oh, yeah, we could use the rain.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like, if I'm not a farmer, I don't I don't ever say we can use the rain.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, do you like green grass?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: Do you like healthy trees?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: Do you like lakes with water in them?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_03: Evidently not.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Jeez, that's my alternative.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: We've got Al from Austin.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so you will go around when somebody when somebody said that right now.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: We could use the rain.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm glad.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: But you also live in Houston.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: You can never use the rain.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: Houston rains a lot more than Austin.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: It never rains, I think.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: I I I did notice everything in your neighborhood is very green right now.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: Rains a lot.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_03: We we don't get that.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: Everything is not as green.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: But welcome, Al from Austin.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: Being from Austin, could we use the rain?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_04: Indeed.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_04: We can always use the rain.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_04: I'm on the side of the fence where I'll I'll take it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: This is the final episode of Al from Austin's uh character arc.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: This is a three-episode arc.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: He was signed on for three episodes, and um this is the part where we kill off your character.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: We're not sure if he's gonna get renewed for 2027 or not.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: I I knew it was coming.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and uh and it is a character, by the way.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: If you if you know this guy that plays Al from Austin, you know he's nothing like his character.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he's more like Big Lou, our fan.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh well.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: By the way, if you are a fan of this show, we do have a Patreon.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how you find it.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: There should be a link somewhere.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: And for levels, we have now we have a t-shirt level, yeah, sticker, sticker level, a t-shirt level, a poster level.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yes, and the the Cadillac Cadillac, yeah.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: You want if you want a pink Cadillac, uh, it's 130,000, I think.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: 130,000.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, get you a dollars US dollars, pink Cadillac.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_03: I also think there should be a come record with us level.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't know.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: No, okay.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we'll we'll talk about that.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but today I've got an episode for you guys.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: I've got somebody that is I I'm gonna be honest, I've struggled with this one.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: I've had a hard time.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: I started work on this particular person.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know why that's funny.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: I started work on this particular episode in November of last year.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let that sink in.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: Let that sink in.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um November of last year, I started a 42-hour audiobook.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: I drove my daughter back from college in Phoenix to Austin and listened to it the whole way, 17 hours or something.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: And then I continued just off and on listening to this, and it got more and more difficult because there's so much minutiae about this person.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: There's so much detail about every little thing that was in this book.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe I picked the wrong book, but ultimately, towards the end, I realized this person is interesting, this person is dead, and this person is worth talking about.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: You hear the rain?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: This person was born in Pittsburgh in 1928.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you guys may have guessed yesterday who it is, so I don't need to go into a lot of detail.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: But this person was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, died in New York City.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: I remember who you said 1987.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't say it, by the way.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: You said that oh, I mentioned it because you were you were right, you were right in my one of my topics about it.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um I just say it yeah, Andy Warhol.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: But he was born Andrew Warhola Jr.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: Eastern European descent.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he was born to Slavic immigrants, born poor, sickly child, recurring theme.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: Recurring theme for sure.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: He never drove an ambulance or anything like that, but he was kind of shy, nervous.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he was definitely an introvert.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_03: And and had there been cassette recorders back in the 1930s, he might have um spent time making little cassettes with records and stuff.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: But instead of that, he would draw, he would doodle.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: What year was he born in?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: 1928.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: In in Pittsburgh, yeah.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: So he was fascinated with movie stars.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: He was fascinated with celebrities.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: He thought they were just really cool.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: And he would make montages.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: He would take magazines and cut pictures out and make that sort of thing.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: So what kind of when he was growing up, what kind of celebrities were there who would be like I mean, I think these were the I think these were the early and yeah, they were the cowboy um people, the the singing cowboys, they were the vaudeville stars, they were the maybe even Charlie Chaplin's and and uh Harold Lloyd's, you know, kind of the comedy films, Houdini stuff like that, Harry Houdini.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, these these were all the early celebrities.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: He spent a lot of time trying to get into into celebrity culture.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: Well, flash forward and he attends the Carnegie or Carnegie Institute of Technology, it's now known as Carnegie Mellon School of Art, in uh, which was also in Pittsburgh in 1945, and he studied painting and design, and he had a knack for it.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: He actually was pretty good at it.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: He, you know, was doing classic painting, he was learning all the different styles of painting and stuff like that, different brush techniques, and he decided he was going to move to New York and become a commercial illustrator, which is what he did.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: He moved to New York City.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I don't know if you guys know this, but before he was a famous artist, do you know what he did?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I just told you, but what kind of stuff was he doing?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: Probably a lot of corporate stuff.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like ad work?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, but what he had a specialty, like something he was actually really good at and known for.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: Shoes.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, oh, interesting.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: He did a lot of stuff for different shoe companies, department stores, shoe advertisements that went in magazines, windows.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: He was also, he didn't actually do the window dressing, you know, where they would make these windows that people would walk by and have mannequins and stuff in them, doing different things and art.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_03: He but he worked with guys that did that.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: And he became known as a great um commercial artist for this.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: Now, initially he was starting to make some money at this, and but he realized he wanted to also do art, you know, as fine art on the sale on the side, you know.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: That was kind of his side gig initially.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and he did some things, he made some money, made some sales, but not much, nothing really significant.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: The thing that really sent him over the edge made him really popular.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: Do you do you recall what this was?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: The Campbell Soup.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: Campbell soup cans, yes.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: He took an everyday object and he made a commercial object into a work of art, or at least in his mind it was.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_03: And guess what?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: The world agreed.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: And this was really one of the first uh instances of pop art.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: Pop art, yeah.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: This was something where people had not done this kind of thing before, and he he had a quote, and you know, it's a lot of the quotes said here are not verified that they they actually said this.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: There, there were a lot that he did say, but then there were some that people said he was attributed to, but he never said kind of thing he would have said, kind of thing he would have said.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: He said that he grew up eating Campbell's soup every day, and it was something he saw every day, and that was what inspired him to do the original paintings.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: But did Campbell's soup initially have a problem with this, or were they cool with it?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was like free advertising.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the second.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: They they were they were not there was no lawsuit, there was no litigation.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was like try to deface it or make some kind of commentary about it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: And if you're not, if you know, you're probably familiar enough with Andy Warhol.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of the most famous things he did was the Campbell soups.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a can of Campbell soup over a white background.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: But one of the things I've learned about Andy Warhol, he liked repetition.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: So he did every flavor of Campbell's soup.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: They looked the same, it just had a different name.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, cream of mushroom, cream of celery, cream of mushroom, wow, chicken noodle.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_04: So when you when you talked about him growing up in Pittsburgh and the comment about him, he ate Campbell soup every day, which is you know probably you know an exaggeration, but even still, uh, what was his upbringing like?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_04: What was his home life like?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: So, so he um, as I said, um, Slavic, um, Eastern European parents, his his father uh I think was did construction or something where he you know it was kind of a hands-on kind of thing.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: His father died youngish.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: His mother was named Yulia, you know, like Julia, but Yulia.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um, she was a very overbearing, very um typical what you think of as maybe an Eastern European mother who just was, you know, always kind of oh Andy, oh Andy, Andrew.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and and they were warholes.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: And he did have brothers and sisters, and I don't think he had any sisters, I'm not sure about that, but I know he had some brothers, but they were living and and they were also Eastern Orthodox Catholic is there an Orthodox Catholic?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: I have no idea.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they were they were they were Byzantine Catholics which I think is a different type of Catholic than a Roman Catholic.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: They were they were Catholics, and and he actually was um known to attend church quite a bit.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: Like he as a young person, he attended a lot of church.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: So so but he was a different kind of kid, and he didn't really flourish at all when he was uh young.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: He he he came to be known uh more when he moved to New York.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: So he moved, he he did these Campbell soup cans, and he would do multiple canvases.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: So he would do one canvas of one's can, another canvas of another, and then he would pour, he would hang them in exhibits with like 32 canvases all in a row.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: So that was kind of his thing.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: He did this repetition, and he felt like repetition made it look strong, made it stronger, made more of an impact.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that was what he people hadn't done that before.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: This was a totally different thing.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: After these um initial uh canvases he did with the soup cans, he did many other things, but he did um something interesting that hadn't been done before, and he started silk screening.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: So silk screening was not really him painting an original thing, it was taking a canvas and silk screening onto it.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, you know where he got his uh his content for some of these silks screens?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: The newspaper.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: So he would just take a photo in the newspaper or a magazine, and he would uh silkscreen it in a way that would blow it up to a bigger scale, and he didn't care that it looked a little distorted, that you know, blowing it up, you know, like just like a uh a JPEG or a GIF file or any computer file, if you stretch it, it looks kind of jagged and ugly.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: He considered those imperfections part of the art.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: He also would outsource a lot of his uh or or assign a lot of his silk screening to his minions who worked for him at at the factory.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: That was the name of his art studio.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so some of these weren't even done by him, but he became, and this was true of a lot of his art.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: He did films, he did photos, he did portraits of people, but he had a team of people that worked on them, and they were like Andy Warhol products, but they weren't necessarily done by Andy Warhol, especially the films.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_04: I I think that's pretty common with some of these really large-scale pieces.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: It was it what it was after him.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: He was one of the first to do that.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I'm thinking about going back to Leonardo da Vinci and some of the people of that they would be, you know, this would be a Leonardo uh Da Vinci piece, but he would sign out, you know, either apprentices or other people to do parts of it.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, okay, that's fair.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: I I I kind of thought that um Andy Warhol had innovated in that way, um, creating the brand of Andy Warhol.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: But what are when you think of a Warhol just generally, just if I say a Warhol, what kind of visual in impact do you think it has?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: The Marilyn Monroe with the four the four uh the square with the four boxes in it.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's four, it repeats, right?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: Repetition.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, big on the repetition, but also like color wise, very stark, very vibrant, lots of different colors, like same same painting, but in four different green, red, blue, yeah.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, yeah.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: So he was big on bright colors.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was actually flat.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: Like he didn't put a lot of dimension into his into these artwork, into this artwork.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't put shadows, he didn't put curves, you know, like like kind of making it feel beveled or 3D.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: He made everything very flat, and then that was just a style that he had.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so he did Marilyn Monroe, he did Elvis Presley, he did Elizabeth Taylor, um, he did Jackie Kennedy, he did Jimmy Carter later in his career as a silk screen.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: He also did Chairman Mao from China, uh Mao Zhang.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Was he trying to like do this with commentary about like celebrity, or did he just think it looked cool?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: So, so here's the thing about Andy Warhol.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: He had this facade of a personality, and I don't know if you've ever watched interviews with him or seen him talking about.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: No, in fact, I was just thinking for somebody so like famous and has such an iconic look, I can't even picture what he sounds like.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I've ever seen an interview with him.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_03: So he had kind of a quiet, um uh demure voice, and he played this role of someone who was kind of clueless, and he actually had a nickname.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, they called him Drella.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the people in his orbit called him Drella.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: It was a combination of Dracula and Cinderella.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he was a gay man and he was pretty feminine in some ways, um, and he had this personality that would uh when he did an interview, for example, he wouldn't say very many words.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: He would just say, Oh, yes, I think that's wonderful.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: They'd ask him a long, complicated question, and he would sort of dodge the question and not answer and just say, I think that's wonderful.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: Or mystique.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of people think he was also that that's the Cinderella side, but the Dracula side was he was very manipulative and he was very conniving.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: He was, I say conniving and manipulative or negative words.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: He was very calculated in the way that he said things, and he did these things on purpose to build this mystique, to also avoid having to answer questions.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: He was very socially anxious too.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't like to be interviewed, he didn't like um, he liked the thing.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you said he was an introvert, yeah.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so so um, you know, all this time he's doing these things, he's got this studio and it was called the factory, and he had this idea that art should be done.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of so we went to see Triumph, the band, and they had the rock and roll machine, right?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: That was what they said.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: He also called his art a machine.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: He actually he actually liked that idea that it was a machine, and each there were different parts of the machine.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_03: So there was the the you know, selecting the image, there was the silk screening, there was the painting on top of it, there was a signature, there was the prep of the canvases, and you know, different people did different things, but he he liked to think of it as this one complicated machine with many parts that created art.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't just him standing there at an easel.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and and so he had a lot of friends and a lot of hangers on.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: So during this time at the at I think that's part of his legacy, like his crew.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he had a big crew, and at the time uh at the factory, he had uh rock stars, he had celebrities, he also had drug addicts.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: So Lou Reed is also is always like affiliated with him.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground, and he actually managed the Velvet Underground.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: Didn't he do their album cover?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: He did, yep.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna talk about that.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so so let's talk about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground for a second.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, first of all, I didn't know this before, but um the Velvet Underground was the name.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_03: Anyone know where the name came from?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um the Velvet Underground name came from a 1963 book about atypical sexual behavior.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so the The Velvet Underground was about uh it was it was written by a person named Michael Lee, and it was about sadomasochism, about SM bondage, yeah, like about all these kind of things.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_04: And so I think that's a nice tie-in to the uh DNC episode with uh Marquise de Saud.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: There you go.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you're listening, if you want to hear about sadomasochism, we got it.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: But but so that was where that idea of Velvet Underground, I I never really thought of what it was, but that was that was the name of that book.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: So he became for a little while the manager of the Velvet Underground.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he had a German woman named Nico in his in his orbit that was part of the the the Warholion.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: They called the people Warholiens and and uh the factory crew, they had a lot of different nicknames.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: She would sing.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um she she was on an album with the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, and they would put on these multimedia shows where the the Velvet Underground would play, they would have flashing lights, which at the time they didn't have all these lights like they have now for concerts, but it would be flashing, moving lights.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: It might be honestly somebody just holding the light and moving it around in circles because they didn't have the technology to make them move automatically, changing colors, um, lots of noise.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: These things would be at these shows called the exploding plastic inevitable.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: And that was his concept.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: He would take this show, it was almost like the warp tour or the um what are some of these like you know, shows where it's like art meets music meets.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: It was like that.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: He was one of the first people to do that.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: So he would take this to different venues.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: The Velvet Underground would play, he'd have um films projected up on walls.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: That was going on.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was really into video at one point, right?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: And he'd make like 24-hour movies.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna talk about his films in a minute, yeah.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: And very voyeuristic, too.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he would just put a camera on somebody, yeah.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, as a matter of fact, that's that's that is coming up, but it was very much innovation.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: He and and this wasn't a pleasant thing to be at.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was loud.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: The Velvet Underground also wasn't very good at that time, especially live.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_03: They had bad sound systems, they didn't have they didn't play Les Paul's, you know.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: They they they sounded noisy, and these were echoey places where they would play, but this experience was something different that people had not seen before, and that was where his innovation came from.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_03: Were you gonna say something?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: No, okay.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so he also coined a phrase, and I think this was attributed to him, that uh it it was sort of the introduction or the prediction of uh content producers, content creators, influencers for today.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know what that phrase was?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: No, in the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: That was that was Andy Warrell.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: And now did he actually say that or was he attributed to him?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's attributed to him.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody knows for sure, but but it's it's you know, nope, yeah.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: Whoever said it meant for him, sort of to come from him.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: What an iconic phrase.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, now I mean and ahead of its time.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like we now that is literally true.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, it is.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: It is.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: That's the thing, is he he was one of the first people to understand that idea of a branding yourself.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: So Andy Warhol wasn't about painting, Andy Warhol wasn't about making films, he wasn't about Polaroids and and photos, he was about Andy Warhol.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_03: Andy Warhol was a brand, and and this 15 minutes of fame, a lot of the people in his orbit, like Nico, like Lou Reed, they had their 15 minutes of fame from being around him.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: But is there a woman named Edie?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: Edie Sedwich.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: Edie Sedwich, yes.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: So she was also his muse, and she was somebody that he really adored.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Now, he he wasn't um generally he had a lot of women friends, but he was romantic with men throughout this time, and there were a lot of men.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: He would take crotch shots of men, straight and gay men, that would come to the factory and he would have them take off their pants and take pictures of them peeing and take pictures of them doing all kinds of things that I'm not gonna even bring up on this podcast, but he very much was into men, the form of men, but he was the same thing with Edie Sedgwich and and Sedwick, I think I'm saying it correctly, um and the women, he would have them pose nude, or he would have them pose topless, and they were fine with it.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_03: And the same thing with the films.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the films, he did a movie called uh The Chelsea Girls.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_03: Have you heard of that movie?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: And not a movie in a conventional sense at all, right?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was very much it was very much a voyeuristic kind of thing where you're just watching and and all of these people who were in his orbit, the world.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Warholions that would come to the factory, they would be in these movies and they would do it for really cheap or for nothing because they liked the attention, they liked being associated with Andy Warhol, you know, and again, a lot of it was nudity.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: There was a lot of sex in these movies.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of it you wouldn't sit down and watch it, you would just have it on while there's lots of other stuff going on, too, right?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: No, no.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: Uh actually, maybe so so I mentioned the exploding inevitables, uh, plastic exploding inevitables earlier.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_03: That might have been that case, but when he made a film, he wanted people to sit and watch it, and he would get kind of pissy if they didn't.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: Like an eight-hour film called Empire that was just a shot of the Empire State Building.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_03: I have to ask, there were a lot of drugs involved in this.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_03: There were a lot of drugs, yeah.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: This was this was New York in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, right?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of this stuff when you're watching it and you're impaired, probably seems higher quality and like a triumph concert.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: Important that more important than it actually was, right?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then you watch it 50 years later, dude.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, then it's stuff probably doesn't age well.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_03: The things, the things, well, you know, if you think about what he was trying to do, he was trying to challenge people's notions of attention, of boredom, of time, right?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: So let's talk about his films for a minute because those are good examples.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: Can I uh just ask a question before you go on?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: You said he he was trying to test your attention, your norms.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_04: Is that deliberate, or is that someone interpreting Andy after the fact, almost justifying what he did, or was is it known that, hey, this is what I'm trying to do?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: So, so so let me give you a non-answer answer.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: My non-answer answer is it's not sh nobody's sure.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: They think he was either brilliant and pushing people's boundaries and defining new genres, or he was just um he was just trolling everybody, right?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: And and and to that point, remember I said about how he would say things, he would be vague during interviews and kind of drella.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: He would say something that sounded really sort of high in the sky or just uninformed or whatever.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: Here's an example.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't actually say this, but this is the kind of thing he would say.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: Like this movie Empire, they went up into a building near the Empire State Building and filmed it for eight hours of just the building.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: There's the sh the camera angle doesn't change, there's no zoom in, there's not even really anything going on because you can't even see the whole building.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: Which at the time is such a waste of film.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, that's not digital.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's well, that's your opinion.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, his but if you had unlimited, if you had as much money as he had, you would have done the same thing at the time.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't have a lot of money, he didn't have a lot of money at the moment.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: Then it was a waste of money.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: So, well, but we're talking about it, right?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: So was it?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_03: But I don't know.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: Did you watch the movie?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_03: So my point on all that was um you asked if he was doing this intentionally or if this was just him trolling or you know, right being clueless.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_03: If if somebody were to ask him about that, so why did you film, you know, what was it the behind the idea of Empire?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: Why did you film eight hours of the Empire State Building?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: He would say, I think it's a pretty building.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_03: That would be the kind of answer he would, and that would be it.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: There would be no other explanation.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_03: So so you wonder, you know, what's going on?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: What why is he challenging all these norms, but not explaining why he's challenging all these norms?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: Expecting drugs, probably.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_04: Very much of another Andy that you guys talked about.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_04: Andy Kaufman.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_04: Andy Kaufman.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: Very Andy Kaufman was you were never sure.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: You were never sure.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: It was all you were always guessing, is he doing this to do this?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that was part of his brilliance.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: He also had a couple of um philosophies that were interesting.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he would say that failure is success.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I've done some YouTube videos, and I found when I get a negative comment on a YouTube video that I made, um, I've I consider that a success.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody took the time to sit down and write a negative comment.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's like our one-star review for Pilates, it's my favorite.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: So, so when he would get when he would get a negative uh review from an art critic or from a film critic or from anybody, he considered that a success.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: He he would he would uh actually be happy about that.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: Was he respected in the art world?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_03: Very much so.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: Other artists, really, at times yeah.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he was the thing.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_03: He was the thing guy after the Campbell soup cans.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: He did the he did the screen, you know, silk screening.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_03: He started doing this, he did this whole thing called Death and Destruction.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know about that?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean, that's a rare thing because he was popular and spawned boundaries, but like Norman Rockwell, for example, was not respect we'll do him some other time, but was not respected among other artists, right?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know that.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think a lot of people thought it was just too easy and commercial and crass.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And but you're saying that our other artists thought he was so something.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: So he had a lot of contemporaries, and as I said, this was a very long book that took a long time to get all the way through.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: They mention a lot of other contemporary artists from back then, and I can't I didn't write their names down, I can't necessarily spout them off, but they were other people doing pop, doing avant-garde things, some classical artists.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: The thing is, they all kind of ran together.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they were almost like there might be some think about rappers today.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them have beefs with each other, some of them are on the same crew and like each other.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: It was like that.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: It was like that, except with, you know, gay white men.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_04: Was he financially successful in his time?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, he eventually became that way.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: But he it took him actually much longer during the 50s and 60s.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: Even the whole thing with the Campbell soup cans, while they were very successful and they sold, they weren't worth as much as they are today, right?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't, they didn't have or as much as they were the minute he died or even in the 70s.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: They were they were selling well, but they weren't enough to make him really wealthy, and he spent a lot of money.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: He was a bit of a hoarder, he had a lot of uh antiques, he would go antiquing a lot.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_03: He loved to go shopping, he loved to collect things, and he had these things.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, ah, what did he call them?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh they weren't archives.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: I'll have to he kept these boxes.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: He had 600 of them when he died that are are now archived as art, and he called them art.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: He would take this um water bottle that I've been drinking in and throw it into the box.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: He would take a wrapper from a sandwich and throw it into the box.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: He would take junk mail and then he would seal it up and he'd call it Archive One or something like that.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: And there were 600 of them in his space when he was done.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: My point is you were asking about his money.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_03: He had a big crew, he paid a lot of people, he began to develop expensive tastes.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you hear a lot about like sports teams, like sports players who get a big contract making, you know,$300,000 a year, which is a lot of money to make in a year.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, they but then they spend so much more than they make because they're around other people.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: They have a they have a crew, they have um of um you know people they have to pay on their payroll and they get a bigger and bigger space and they buy a better car.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_03: He did all those things, he fell into all those traps.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: So he kind of struggled financially.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it was Johnny Cash did the same thing.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: We talked about that with him, but to your point, he wasn't really wealthy without worries until later in his career.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um he really liked the idea of uh mistakes uh in his art.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: He would uh make he would take um some of those uh silk screens, and if they look too perfect, he would smudge them up because he didn't want them to look too perfect.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_03: He wanted it to be something that that looked like it was made by a person.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: But getting into his filming, same thing.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: He would make mistakes in the films and just leave it in, like we were talking about with mixtapes.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you could make a mistake, and if you leave it in, he was one of the first people to do that.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: But some of his films included in 1963 uh sleep.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: That was five hours, more than five hours of a man sleeping.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: Now they did do a couple of different angles, and he would make people sit down and watch that.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, they would have screenings and they full full disclosure, guys.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: I made Sleep Two last night.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: It'll be coming out.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's on your phone.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, uh Sleep Two Electric Boogaloo.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, I wish I had made more sleep, but I stayed up late.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, Empire was the Empire State Building.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_03: He did several other films.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, so Sleep, he did one called Kiss, and it was long takes of people kissing, like really extreme close-up.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: And what was interesting about that is he broke norms.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: You know, he had men kissing men, women kissing women, uh, interracial kissing, stuff that back then was was kind of out of the ordinary, maybe even illegal to show in some places.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, possibly kind of stuff that would get you in trouble in some conservative.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: But he was in New York, you know, they were they were pretty open there.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: He had one called Eat of a Man Eating Mushrooms.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he did Poor Little Rich Girl, that was Edie Sedgwick.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: Sedgwick was in that one.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that was one of her first roles.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, my My Hustler, um, that was a little bit more narrative, and then Chelsea Girls was his first big hit, the first one that a lot of people went to see, um, kind of made him some money in the art film world.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: And that was kind of about these ladies in New York that uh were, but it's just them talking.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I think Chelsea Girls was one where he did a split screen, and so it was one conversation between several people going on over here, and at the same time, another conversation with several people going on over here, and you were just watching, and again, voyeuristic, right?
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: You're just watching and listening in on it.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so imagine you were sitting in a in a cafe, and you have a group over on one side, and you're eavesdropping on that conversation, and there's another table over to your left, and you're you know kind of creating that yeah scenario.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's you get him.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: You get Andy Warhol.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_03: We're tight.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um he he did one called Lonesome Cowboys in 1968, which was a gay western satire.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, kind of again, a lot of kind of raunchiness to it.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: He did one called Flesh.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: He did some movies about Dracula and Frankenstein that were very bloody and gory.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they were just blood for Dracula.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, a lot of these were just films you would never actually want to watch.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: He did actually meet John Waters one time.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: John Waters John Waters came to his studio, and for those of you that don't know, John Waters also made these raunchy films, but John Waters films had a little bit more of a story to them.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't they weren't just the Empire State Building for eight hours.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um so he kind of he at one time declared that painting was dead.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_03: He said painting is dead, but then he went back to it because he needed money.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: And you know how he made a lot of his money painting portraits.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_03: So rich people would sponsor a portrait of themselves and pay him a hundred thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars or whatever for a sitting in a portrait, and he he sometimes they loved it and sometimes they would hate it.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: He would he would like if a woman was like like vain and she didn't like the way you painted him, he would just say too bad.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: You know, this this is this is how you you agreed to this, and I guess it was probably payment in advance, right?
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like a caricature artist.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well, no, no.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: So so the his process, his process for painting portraits was he had he had I'm not saying he was a caricature artist, I'm saying that yeah, yeah.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_03: Give me give me your money, I'll do the picture, and I don't care if you like it.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he would uh take a Polaroid of the people and paint from the Polaroid, and he he had this way of getting people to pose in such a way that they didn't look happy, they didn't look sad.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it was called the Big Shot.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_03: It was uh came out around 1970, and this was later in his career.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: He was doing these portraits because he wanted to make more money, and it was designed as a portrait um photo, it was a fixed focus.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: You had to be about three or four inch or three or four feet away, like you couldn't focus it, it didn't have any zoom, and it created these kind of stark images.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_03: So when you see portraits that he's done, they always look very stark because it started from this um Polaroid camera.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_04: So let me give you a uh a quick uh John Waters story.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_04: Let's hear it.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um, my uh my wife and I we got married uh about two and a half years ago.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_04: But one of our very first dates, uh, we went to hear John Waters speak at the Paramount.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_04: And uh it was not our cup of tea.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and what did he talk about?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_04: Honestly, I don't remember because we were getting ready to leave the Paramount.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we were up in the balcony, which is very steep.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's a very, very old classical theater.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_04: It was very steep and very dark, and just as we were about to leave, a man falls and slides down the stairs.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sitting right on the aisle, slides down the stairs and is lying next to me and has broken his leg.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_04: And the EMS has to come to get him out of there.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_04: And we are stuck, and there's people, you know, amassed around us, all the while John is speaking on stage, and we come up with a great idea.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_04: I said, Listen, we're gonna get out of here to give you guys some space.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_04: And we stepped over this poor man who's lying there with a broken leg, and we got out of there, and as the as we're leaving the theater, you can hear the sirens coming in.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_04: So that was one of our first dates.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_04: And John Waters, uh, you don't even remember.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_04: I don't even remember what what he was saying.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_03: But he was there, he never knew what happened.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, he just kept talking.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_03: He just kept talking.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_03: So well, um, you know, speaking of incidents and accidents and terrible things, uh, I think you both know that Andy Warhol was shot.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know this?
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_03: I don't I had forgotten this, yeah.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: So that's not how he died.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_03: This was in 1968, and he didn't die until the 90s, but or no, sorry, he didn't die until the 80s, but in 1968, he was shot by a woman named Valerie Solanus, and she's a pretty interesting character.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_03: She was she was somebody that had been um in the factory, and there were different versions of the factory.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_03: Every time he moved locations, like as he got bigger and got more money and more um fame and more people around him, he had to grow.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: So he went from a small one.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_03: There was one point at which the entire factory was covered in silver paint and tinfoil, it was called the silver factory, and that was just an art idea, but like they literally kept it up for several years where they would re-tinfoil it um to make it look silver.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_03: But he had been through several different factories, and people would fall in and out of him because again, they called him Drella, so he had sort of a you're dead to me attitude sometimes.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: He would also um just have falling outs with people about uh people owing money to them or them owing money to him, and also like he would have people doing work for him that then they wouldn't get credit for it, and he would be taking the credit, and that would rub some people the wrong way.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this woman, Valerie uh Solanus, she was a radical, fringe intellectual feminist, um, and she had been involved in the New York underground scene.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: Now she had been a uh panhandler, she had done odd jobs, she had been a prostitute.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_03: All of this came after she had been college.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: So she had been in college for a while, but actually dropped out, moved to New York City, and then just was kind of out on the street, met Andy and his crew, became part of his factory crew, you know, Warholian factory crew, and she was pretty radical about hating men.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: She had a manifesto called Scum, which stood for Society for Cutting Up Men.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_03: And she uh, but she liked Andy because Andy, I think partly because he was gay and you know he was he was more he had more feminine energy, or I I can't say for sure, but he she liked Andy.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_03: Andy liked her at first, took her in.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_03: She he she was in several of his films, um, but she realized at some point that Andy um wasn't paying as much attention to her, started to get a little bit jealous, and she had written a play called Up Your Ass.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_03: And she had given Andy one of the first I think Alex wrote one of those.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: She she had given uh she had given Andy one of the first copies of the play, a manuscript, and he lost it, or he says he lost it.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: And she was pretty upset because you know she thought it was really valuable and she thought he owed him for it, you know, this is worth thousands of dollars, and it's gonna be a big hit, and it's gonna be a play called up your ass.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um she basically decided that he was trying to control her, manipulate her, steal from her, and they had a falling out.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_03: She comes back to the factory and she brings a gun and she guns him down in the lobby of his of his own art studio, and he was with another man named Mario Amaya, who was an art critic.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_03: She shot Mario as well, but that just kind of grazed Mario.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_03: But she got Andy like three times or maybe more.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: And it penetrated parts of his body.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: He was bleeding out, he was in very bad shape.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, she runs away, and Andy goes to the hospital, and then while after she's run away, she goes home.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, she changes clothes, and then she just goes back out to a restaurant or something, just like nothing happened.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_03: And the police arrested her.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: She ended up being uh declared mentally incompetent, going getting institutionalized.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: And there, you know, there definitely was some schizophrenia or something going on with her that that, you know, not not saying it was right or wrong, or it wasn't or wasn't her fault.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: It just she had mental illness.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: It was wrong to shoot him.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_03: It was wrong.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was wrong.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: It was wrong.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, but I'm just saying that um yeah, no, you're right.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_03: It was wrong to shoot him.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was more just like the circumstances of it, you know, did did she really know what she was doing?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: She eventually actually got out of prison and in some circles was kind of a feminist hero, but she died in obscurity.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_03: Meantime, Andy's rushed to the hospital, he is on the brink of death.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and again, this is in 1968, June 3rd of 1968.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: And the doctors brought him back, like they had to massage his heart at one point to to bring him back.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think they realized, hey, Andy Warhol is here.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he's not dying on our watch.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: Not because they loved him, but just it would be bad publicity, right?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: If and so he ends up being okay, like surviving.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_03: He's in the hospital for several weeks.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_03: At that time, um, he actually kind of got I don't know about drugs, but he got hooked on television.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_03: He watched, started watching a lot of television, and he hadn't really been a television guy before this, but he's in the hospital, he has nothing else to do.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_03: He liked Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan's Island.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this was all before that, '68.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe Beverly Hillbillies was on in the late 60s.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_03: But okay, so he's yeah, he's watching whatever.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: He's watching that, he's watching this, and he's kind of deciding that that television is his next big step.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_03: He's gonna do start making shorts and movies and all that kind of stuff for television.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: But there's a very clear delineation between uh the time before he was shot and what his life was like.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_03: He was more chaotic, he was more playful, he was more experimental, he was more uh available.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_03: And then after he was shot, he became more uh cautious, he became more controlled, like he he he kind of I I would imagine that three shots to the torso would do that.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, absolutely.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'm not I'm not saying yeah, I can I can totally get it, but it was a it's it's interesting because the book emphasized that again and again.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was like, you know, there was before he was shot and after he was shot.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: Totally became a somewhat of a different person.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_03: And after he was shot, he also started to care more about the commercial value of things.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: He started thinking more about money and started thinking more about.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_03: I think before this, he was willing to do these films and make nothing on them and basically lose money making these films because he loved doing it.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_04: So last night, Alex, you were talking about you know, our kids, y'all's kids, or they're all in their early 20s, and you're like, this is my favorite time because you know the world is your oyster and there's no limitations.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, you don't have you haven't dealt with mortality.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, that's kind of what I'm hearing you you say about Andy is like you know, prior to this, the the sky's the limit, you know, and then suddenly there is a there is an end.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_04: This is what death looks like.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he starts doing more um more stuff for rich people.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_03: He starts doing more commercial work again.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the interesting thing before Andy Warhol, you were either an artist or you were a commercial person.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: But commercial artists didn't really exist.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_03: You it it we talked about this with rock and roll and sellouts, right?
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_03: You were either you're either a punk rocker and you're you're into it or you're a sellout.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: He was not afraid to blend those two.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_03: He was not afraid to say, I like making money.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: My art makes money.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to make more of it so I can make more money.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: So do you think the Velvet Underground would have been happy with the number one hit?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: No, because he broke up with them.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: They they split ways before they were about not being too successful.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: Correct.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: They were very punk rock, you know, in their attitude.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: Attitude, yeah.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_03: They they they were not trying to be commercial, they were not trying to make a million dollars.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_03: So they parted ways.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of his old crew after he was shot kind of split ways because his personality changed, and he wasn't there for just the fun.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_03: He wasn't there just to host parties and all that.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but he did he did start to have a lot of um clout, and so he was meeting famous people, um, like like Elizabeth Taylor, uh Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: He became friends with Mick and Bianca Jagger.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then he was spending a lot of time at Studio 54.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: Are you have you heard of that?
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_03: The nightclub, a lot of a lot of drugs, a lot of um dancing, but also in an interesting way, a very open place where uh straight people, gay people, all kinds of people would go dancing together.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that that that didn't always happen.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and they liked the idea of Andy Warhol being there.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was a good thing for them.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: So they kind of gave him a VIP room and let his crew in, and and he would see people like John Lennon there.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: John Lennon and Yoko Ono would go to Studio 54 a lot, if if you've heard of that.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he did meet David Bowie one time.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, David Bowie had come into his studio, and it was pretty awkward, uh, apparently, uh, from people who observed it, that he and Bowie admired each other but didn't know what to say, and you know, just was kind of this.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it seems like they would have met more than once.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: Seems like they would have ran in the same crowd.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think that was more true of I think that was definitely more true of like John and Yoko, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, Lou Reed obviously became a bigger name in in in rock than the rest of the Velvet Underground, although they're still pretty well respected.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, Truman Capote, we were at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: There was a lot of people influenced by Lou Reed.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, or Andy Warall.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_03: Velvet Underground.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: So again, I said he kind of got hooked on television while he was in the hospital.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_03: He decided to start doing more commercials.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_03: He was willing to sell.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: If you guys watch The Simpsons, if anybody watches The Simpsons, Krusty the Clown will put his his name on anything, um, you know, if it makes him money.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_03: This was Andy Warhol during this period after '68.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_03: He became willing to endorse um cars, endorse furniture, endorse um, you know, food.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm sure Madison Avenue ate that up.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember a mystique to him?
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: You slap his his image on something or his you know a picture of him sitting in a certain car.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: It it creates a certain um cachet.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, yeah, a certain patina of your of your brand or whatever.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's like an imprint with cool, right?
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_03: And and he was considered very cool.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_03: Do you um do you remember his 1981 Burger King commercial?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_03: You haven't seen this?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_03: So he did a commercial for Burger King, and he basically just sits and eats the burger.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, let's call it a 60-second spot.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: I actually think it was longer than that, and but I don't, you know, most commercials aren't.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: But he unwraps it out of the bag, he pulls it out, he opens the plastic.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_03: He and it's just one shot.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_03: There's no close-ups, there's no zooms or pans, anything like that.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a shot of him at a table, and then he takes a bite and he says, My name is Andy Warhol, and I just finished eating a hamburger.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't even mention, he doesn't even mention Burger King.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that you probably got paid a quarter of a million dollars.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, here's here's the thing is that actually went viral.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_03: Not there wasn't any way to share that.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: You couldn't just, you know, send it on your phone, but people were talking about it, and it got people talking about Burger King and the Whopper.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it was it was what he called anti-advertising advertising.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_03: It was like the opposite of advertising, but um Yeah, he he didn't mention the product, right?
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_04: You know, he just didn't say anything nice about it.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_04: I just say it a hamburger.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yep, yep.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Andy, but my name is Andy Warhol.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, that's right.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_03: Very distinct.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_03: By the way, he wore a wig.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you guys know this.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_03: He wore a wig.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_03: He generally dressed in heavier, long sleeves.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: Even when he would go to the beach with friends and they'd all be out in their swimsuits, he'd be in long sleeves like a jacket.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, it wasn't even a suit.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_03: He went through a period where he wore like a um a biker um jacket, you know, like a motorcycle helm jacket.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: He went through a period where he'd wear like a wool jacket, he, but he never showed much skin.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_03: He had um actually kind of bad skin, and that was something that bothered him.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_03: He was losing his hair, so he would wear either a silver or a white wig.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_03: That was kind of his brand.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the wig was pretty iconic, and I was wondering, are there pictures of him without the wig?
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_04: Not that I've seen.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, me neither.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, I think he was very careful not to allow it.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: So he must have gone gray early, too, because I mean having white hair, it was a pretty young man with the wig.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think he had white hair.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think the hair, the white hair was a wig.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you don't think he was white under that?
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think so.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't know, actually.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: But um back to his commercials, he would um he did something for Braniff Airlines, which famously went broke.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: By the way, um, I probably shouldn't mention this.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: My mom, my mom, if my mom's listening, she may be mad at me for this.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry, mom.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_03: She bought a bunch of Braniff stock one time and and then went broke, and we lost some money on that.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_03: I remember I don't know why she bought all that Braniff stock, but I remember her sitting at the newspaper going, Oh my god.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um she heard a tip from Andy that they were gonna go.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_03: She saw the commercial.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Andy Orle, and I rode this airplane.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, yep.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he also did um three different segments for Saturday Night Live.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_03: Did you guys know this when it was first starting?
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think I may have seen one.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: So, in addition to SNL, uh, he was famously on.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I don't know if it's famously, but it I found it to be actually one of the most interesting um little bits of getting to to see what he was really like, uh, even though he's vacing.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_03: He was on an episode of the Love Boat.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh Andy Warhol.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: What year was that?
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_03: That was in October of 1985.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_03: It was season nine, episode three, and it was um the 200th episode of The Love Boat.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_03: Now, by season nine, the Love Boat had kind of run its course, and this was one of its last one of its last seasons.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if if they made it to ten.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_03: But take he he was on it.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_03: It was an all-star session.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_03: Now, for those of you that watch The Love Boat or don't, you know, it was an there was a cast of the crew of the Love Boat, Isaac the bartender and Captor Captain Stubing and Julie McCoy and and you know gopher and doc and all these guys.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but then they would have different celebrities that would come on, kind of like Fantasy Island.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_03: If you haven't seen her or listened to the Herve uh Velicez episode, please do.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_03: You'll understand because those two shows really go together.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, this had Andy Warhol as himself, but it also had um Sheriff Andy Taylor.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so he was on not the character, no, no, no, no, no.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um Andy Griffith.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_03: No, Andy Griffith was was was uh on it.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_03: Andy Griffith was on it.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um Cloris Leechman was in this show, and they were a couple.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_03: So Andy Griffith and Cloris Leachman were on.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_03: The the storyline was that um it was called the hidden hidden treasure uh episode, and uh uh Andy Griffith was obsessed with finding a valuable hidden stamp on the ship somewhere.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: But he played himself.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_03: He no, he didn't play, he played just a guy.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_03: He he he didn't play uh Andy Griffith or he just played um he played a he was just a guest on the Love Boat.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_03: Andy Warhol just played their guy.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, there's Andy Griffith and Andy Warhol.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: Andy Warhol played himself.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: Andy Griffith played a guy looking for a stamp who was married to Cloris.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: Warhol played himself.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_03: Correct, correct.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_03: That's what we're talking about.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but I'm telling you the other characters who were in this episode.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_03: So I got that.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Marian Ross from Happy Days was was on it.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_03: And guess who she's uh with?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_03: She's with Tom Bosley.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: Of course she is, but they don't play the Cunninghams.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_03: They're not the Cunninghams, they are they are another couple uh from a conservative uh Midwestern town, and the entire episode reveals that um Marion Ross's character had once been in an underground film with Andy Warhol, and she doesn't want her husband to find out because she lives in a conservative Midwestern town.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_03: So that's that part.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_03: So she spends the entire time trying to avoid Andy Warhol.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then there was uh Milton Burrell, right?
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_03: And he uh guest starred, it doesn't say any details about what he did.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: Peter Duchen, D-U-C-H-E Dutchen.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_03: You guys know who that is?
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_03: No, I don't know who that is either.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and Raymond St.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_03: Jacques, um, who played Andy's um Entourage Manager, who kind of handles most of the interactions.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: Andy Warhol had like two lines in this whole thing.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, he just he's walking around mostly, it's him walking around with his um uh entourage.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_03: There's a couple of scenes where they're out by the pool, you know, the the love boat had a pool on it, and he's on the Lido deck.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_03: On the Lido deck, that's right.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_03: Where they also had a bar.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but he's there with his Polaroid taking photos of women.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_03: And it was mentioned that they he originally wanted it to be men, but they they wanted it to be women on the love boat.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so yeah, this was a very odd thing for him to do, but it was one of the many things he did as far as um if you want to hear his voice, like his actual voice, that's one place.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_03: But you can also watch the Andy Um Warhol show, which was kind of an interview thing he did on public access TV for a while.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of um places where you can actually hear him talking.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, he had been shot in 1968.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_03: He kind of changed his his demeanor and the way he lived during the 70s and the 80s, doing a lot more commercial stuff.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but all this time he had suffered with um medical issues after the shooting.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_03: He had to wear a medical corset, which I don't even know exactly what that is, but I think it kept um like his organs in place and helped him to maybe breathe better.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he had to wear That sounds miserable.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that was it was a cause of pain.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um he had gallbladder problems, and his father had actually died of gallbladder issues earlier.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_03: He started having gall bro gallbladder pain, and he didn't even know what it was.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_03: He would just double over.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_03: He went to see a doctor that was recommended by one of his entourage who basically had him use um crystals.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: They were gonna be these healing crystals that were supposed to allow the energy to take the bad out of his body and replace it with good.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_03: He spent thousands of dollars doing this, and he had money at this time, and you know, they saw a big target and they they kind of started doing this.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_03: And this was 1987.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he eventually went to the hospital to have his gallbladder looked at, and the doctor told him you have to have emergency surgery.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_03: Your gallbladder is infected, it is causing this pain, but it's also got stones in it, it's got a bunch of issues, and this was not a good thing.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't want to do it because his father had died from gallbladder surgery and had died from gallbladder problems.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so he thought, you know, he wanted every other way.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_03: Three doctors, um, he had another doctor, he went and saw a second opinion, and then that doctor called a third doctor and said, if you don't believe me, talk to this guy.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that guy was the guy who had saved his life when he was shot years ago.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: So he trusted this guy.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so he goes in, they remove his gallbladder.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_03: Pretty routine surgery for the mid-80s.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, he is recovering, he's doing okay.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: And then uh after two or three days in the hospital, something happened overnight.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_03: He had some kind of a problem where he couldn't breathe.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_03: It was you know, three or four in the morning, the nurse couldn't get to him quick enough, and he passed away.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and in 1987, February 22nd of 1987, at the age of 58.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, kind of ironic.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_03: What did they say the cause of death was?
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, well, there were a lot of things.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, his body was still in pretty bad shape from the shooting and the surgeries he had had.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_03: He had also been um, he had some underlying health issues where he had yo-yoed his weight a lot, where he would lose a lot of weight and get really skinny, and then he'd allow himself.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_03: He never was overweight, but he would kind of fluctuate to unhealthy, you know, between an unhealthy weight and a healthy weight.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but ultimately he got an infection.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he thinks they think maybe he had a cardiac, um, like had a heart attack of some sort, but again, that might have been caused by other factors going on.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um there was a lawsuit, and the family took got some money, you know, his brothers and and other people got some money from the hospital.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_03: They they settled it.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, after he died, his influence cannot be understated.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_03: We've mentioned, I don't think we've ever done, but we've mentioned Pablo Picasso.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_03: Pablo Picasso is maybe considered to be the most famous artist of the 20th century, but a lot of people say Warhol is that that Warhol surpassed Pablo because Pablo Picasso was a little bit earlier than than Warhol.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_03: He was never called an asshole.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I mentioned that earlier.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's from uh from um Repo Man.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's a repo man soundtrack.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_03: So the the biggest influences that he had and his things that he came out with, he really was one of these people that saw fame as a product.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_03: And and that was not something everybody saw.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_03: He saw selling out is okay.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_03: That wasn't something everybody was okay with.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, before that, artists would turn their nose up at commercial work.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm an artist, I don't do commercial work, you know.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of like I'm a punk rock, I don't play with triumph, you know.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's beneath me.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um he also was really someone to make it okay to make mistakes.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_03: He liked the idea of there being these, I guess, authentic things in his uh in his art that that was a style he had.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um but you know, he had debate.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_03: People some people said he wasn't very talented.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_03: He was um he was more of an opportunist and stuff like that, which is right.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_03: Some people say he was very talented and very uh calculating, and he created all this opportunity for himself.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so if you think about people he was a precursor to, um I think one or two people come to mind immediately.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_03: They're both famous women.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_03: Any any thoughts of of who you could say is more of a brand themselves, but all the Kardashians?
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, Kim Kardashian.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_03: The Kardashians are very much a product of the kind of self-branding and self-marketing that Andy Warhol did.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_03: Paris Hilton, you know, a few years before was kind of the same way, known for being in the celebrity circle, but not known for any actual real talent.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_03: Warhol did have talent, but his talent may have actually been overshadowed by he did he stopped painting, like he didn't really paint that much later in his career.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_03: You mentioned the uh album cover for the um uh Velvet Underground.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_03: So do you remember what that looked like?
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_04: It was a banana, it's like a purple background with uh the banana.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: Did you know in the early versions of that that banana was peelable?
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_03: You could peel that banana.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_03: No, but that's very cool.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_03: The first round, it was very impractical.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: Sure, like very hard.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, what happened, and the he also did one for the Rolling Stones.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_03: Now, do you remember Sticky Fingers?
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, with a zipper.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_03: It was a picture of a crotch and a zipper.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_03: And by the way, it was rumored to be Mick Jagger's crotch.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_03: It was not, it was one of the guys at the at the factory, his crotch, and Andy took a lot of crotch pictures.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: The zipper would come out, but what would happen with these sort of and they're cool, you know.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_03: That's there's a coolness to that.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, if you stack these records in a box, guess what?
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_03: They all get cracked because they're not sitting flat and they're getting warped and bent.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so extremely impractical, these these artwork things.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but he also did um he also did album covers for um Aretha Franklin.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_03: Now, there is if you saw the picture, it looks like a picture of Aretha, it is a picture of Aretha Franklin, kind of the silkscreen style, yeah, with color and stuff like that.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_03: He did um he did some album covers when even before he was famous for I think Thelonious Monk and some jazz people, but they weren't attributed to him.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_03: These were done for the record label just for money.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't necessarily done.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um he did a couple more for the Rolling Stones.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he did an album cover for Frank Zappa.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, have you ever seen the apostrophe album?
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's just it's just an apostrophe on the on the cover.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_03: White within that was him, supposedly.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um and then, like I said, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, these were early ones that he had done before becoming famous.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and he did actually did one for John Lennon.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_03: After John Lennon died, they released an album called Man Love Avenue, and he did the cover for that.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of a lot of influence there.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_03: Ultimately, he was an artist that really um defied what it meant to be an artist.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_03: Sure, sure.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_03: Everything all time leading up to him.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he was totally different.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I've done a lot of talking.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_03: Any any final thoughts from you guys on Andy Warhol?
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_03: Or I'm gonna say I don't really like art that much.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_03: Art is not my thing.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's not I don't care about it that much.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_03: So this was a little bit of a struggle for me to get through this.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_03: It was a long book, it was a lot of detail about everyone he ever dated and every film he ever made, and a lot of detail about all that stuff.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_03: So I tried to keep it at a high level and more about him as a person and his impact versus that.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_03: But what do you guys think?
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think um younger people you think he's still a name that is iconic for younger people?
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think if you asked them to name one American artist, that'd probably be the only one most people could name today.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_02: Do you agree?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if kids in their twenties know who he is.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_03: I I disagree because I feel like you see his his images on skateboards, you see it on jackets, you see it on wall, you know, like like it just seems like it's become it's become so generic that if you've if you look at it, you go, oh, that's an Andy.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_03: Like it seems like there's so much exposure, I don't know how that people wouldn't know what he was, who he was.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think that sounds lovely.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_04: All right, Andy Warhol.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_03: Bye.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: Soup cans lined up like a choir.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sign Disney Monkboard shadows.