According to Paul Morrissey, \u201cAndy was [saying], \u2018There\u2019s no money here. We\u2019re not making any money. What is happening?\u2019 He was always very uncomfortable if money wasn\u2019t coming in. Even though they had signed their management contract before the Dom had opened, it was not easy, and Andy had to pay for the lawyers and all that. I said, \u2018We have to do what everybody else does. They have to make a recording, and we have to try to sell it to a record company.\u2019 Again, he had to lay out the money for the recording studio, but it was only two or three thousand dollars for two or three nights.\u201d (Other sources put the figure closer to $1,500, Reed referring to it as \u201cthe profits from like one week at the Dom\u201d in a 1987 interview with Joe Smith.)<\/p>\n
So sometime around mid-to-late April, The Velvet Underground finally entered a recording studio for the first time, laying down the bulk of their debut album in just a few days. As the group didn\u2019t yet have a recording contract, the idea was to produce material that could then be shopped around for one.The costs were shared roughly equally between Andy Warhol and Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records sales executive with a straighter background and character than most of the Factory crowd. Dolph was also an art collector, however, who met Warhol through his side job supplying music for art gallery shows and openings with his mobile disco \u2013 including the EPI\u2019s Dom shows, where the scheme to make a record quickly took hold.<\/p>\n
On the first or second night of the Velvets\u2019 Dom stint, remembers Dolph, Warhol told him, \u201c\u2018We\u2019d like to do an album of them, a record.\u2019 I said, \u2018I can help you with that.\u2019 He said, \u2018Oh really? Okay, good. Do it.\u2019 I think he did that with a lot of people; if he found somebody that could do what he wanted, he\u2019d just say, \u2018Do it.\u2019 And they would, whether it was appear in this movie or go out for pizza. He never gave a lot of orders that I ever saw. He just made sugges- tions and people took him up on it. He had plenty of people around to do anything he wanted. He didn\u2019t ask me any questions about \u2018do you know this studio or that engineer or this producer\u2019 or any of that. It was: \u2018We\u2019d like to make a record,\u2019 and I said, \u2018I\u2019ll take care of it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Through his day job in Columbia\u2019s Custom Labels Division, which provided services for smaller labels without their own pressing plants, Dolph was aware that one of his accounts, Scepter Records, had its own recording studios. He arranged for the sessions to take place at Scepter\u2019s midtown Manhattan facility on West 54th Street, in the same building that would later house the famous Studio 54 discotheque. He asked to be paid in art instead of cash, receiving a silkscreen picture from Warhol for his engineering services; if he held onto it, it probably amounted to a much higher fee as Andy\u2019s work shot up in value over the years.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/5.-The-Velvet-Undergrounds-performance-at-the-Action-House-on-Long-Island-on-December-4-1966-copy-99.jpeg\")
4th December 1966: Left to right: Director Paul Morrissey, singer Nico (1938 \u2013 1988), artist Andy Warhol (1928 \u2013 1987) and poet Gerard Malanga attend a \u2018Freakout\u2019 party featuring a Velvet Underground and Nico performance at the Action House, Island Park, Long Island, New York. (Photo by Tim Boxer\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Even in the absence of a record deal, the intention was always to make a releasable album, not just a collection of demos. \u201cAt no time was what we were doing ever referred to by anybody as a demo,\u201d Dolph recalls. \u201cThey were going for the jugular. They wanted to make a record that sounded like they sounded.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Joe Harvard\u2019s book The Velvet Underground & Nico, part of Continuum\u2019s 33 1\/3 series on classic albums, Dolph speculated the sessions spanned sometime between April 18 and April 23. He believes they amounted to a total of four days: two for recording, a third for listening to playback and a fourth for mixing. The Velvets later gave different estimates as to how much time was involved, but the total recording time probably added up to around ten hours. Recording must have wrapped up by April 25, as acetates were cut on that day of the finished tracks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did it quickly, yes,\u201d acknowledged Cale to Uncut in 2009. \u201cBut why should it have taken any longer? We\u2019d been rehearsing those songs for a year and a half. We knew exactly what we wanted the record to sound like, which was how we sounded live, and just as loud.\u201d Only Maureen Tucker had no experience of anything like a studio environment. Martha Morrison, a visitor to the sessions, recalls that \u201cMoe\u2019s drums were wiggling around, so I had to go in there and hold them for her.\u201d<\/p>\n
John Licata, Scepter\u2019s in-house engineer, was brought in to lend the proceedings some approximation of professionalism. Neither he nor Dolph were credited on the eventual The Velvet Underground & Nico LP, but both are listed as engineers of the Scepter sessions on later CD reissues, even if Dolph\u2019s role was much more like that of a producer. Licata, says Dolph, \u201cwas wonderful, cooperative, easy to get along with\u2026 he was the total antithesis of The Velvet Underground. At no time did any of the musicians ever tell him what to do. They went in and played, and he got what they wanted. When I heard the album [a year later], it didn\u2019t sound appreciably different from what we did at Scepter.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was not the producer in any sense that Quincy Jones is a producer,\u201d Dolph admits. \u201cThe only thing I would say is because they were doing it on my money, and we had limited time resources fiscally \u2013 \u2019cause we were always bumping up against commitments that Scepter had in the studio \u2013 I kept the thing on the rails. I think part of the way the record sounds the way it sounds is because of John [Licata] and I keeping the damned thing going and moving \u2013 you know, \u2018Okay, next take, let\u2019s do it, blah blah.\u2019 That\u2019s my contribution as a producer.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2.-Lou-Reed-at-the-New-York-Society-for-Clinical-Psychiatry-dinner-at-the-Delmonico-Hotel-on-January.jpeg\")
Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground performs on stage at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry annual dinner, The Delmonico Hotel, New York, 13th January 1966. (Photo by Adam itchie\/Redferns)<\/p>\n
Although the Scepter label was known for pop and soul hits by the likes of The Shirelles and Dionne Warwick, its studios weren\u2019t quite as state of the art as The Velvet Underground and their producers might have expected. In fact, the studio was probably only available to the VU because the facility was in a state verging on the unusable. \u201cWe went in there and found that the floorboards were torn up, the walls were out, there were only four mics working,\u201d Cale recalled in his autobiography. \u201cWe set up the drums where there was enough floor, turned it all up, and went from there. Dolph ran the sessions, but he didn\u2019t understand the first thing about recording.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scepter\u2019s studio might have had its limitations, but it still had equipment the Velvets couldn\u2019t have accessed easily otherwise. Its two-track machine and four-track machine, which were probably used for overdubbing and alternate vocals, were a big step up from the Wollensak reel-to-reel at Ludlow Street. Dolph acknowledges the studio was \u201csmall, certainly by contemporary studio sound. But they often recorded fairly large ensembles. They recorded a big orchestra behind Dionne Warwick, and they recorded gospel choirs in there. But they were always very crowded. Once you had everybody in there, they had to pretty well stay put, because there wasn\u2019t a lot of room to move around. For a playback everybody but John [Licata] and I had to stand, there were no real seats in the place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recording The Velvet Underground in such an environment presented its own set of challenges. \u201cIt seemed to me that the instruments, as heard live in the studio as opposed to on the other side of the glass, were being played rather loudly,\u201d Dolph remarks. \u201cYou would ordinarily expect if they were gonna play that loud, they would be in a much larger room to get some isolation between one and the other. But there could have been little separation or isolation in any kind of modern sense in that room, considering how loud they were playing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe adrenaline quality of it was because we knew we had eight hours,\u201d he says, \u201cand they wanted to get on with it, and I wanted to get on with it. Anytime they\u2019d break down, I\u2019d stop the tape and we\u2019d start over. I don\u2019t think there are two different complete takes of more than one or two songs, and I\u2019m not even sure the breakdowns were saved. Because we were paying for the tape at probably $125 a roll, usually the broken takes were backed up and recorded over. Otherwise, there would be some interesting scraps lying around.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1.-Nico-on-the-British-TV-programme-Ready-Steady-Go-in-1965-1024x1021.jpg\")
CIRCA 1968: Singer and entertainer Nico performs on a TV show in circa 1968. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
The role Andy Warhol played in the recording studio during these sessions has been much debated over the years. In a 1970 interview with Fusion magazine, Sterling Morrison described Warhol as a producer \u201cin the sense of producing a film,\u201d helping to finance the sessions and generally keeping the band afloat and in good enough musical and psychological shape to enter the studio in the first place.<\/p>\n
As Dolph recalls, \u201cLicata was there 100 per cent of the time, I\u2019m there 100 per cent of the time, and Morrissey was there much of the time. Warhol was there on occasion. He had his little tape recorder, which he carried all the time. I seem to remember him there probably for about two hours in the aggregate over maybe three occasions. But he was totally fascinated by what was going on, and I don\u2019t think he made any aesthetic judgment whatsoever. \u2018Gee, that sounds good\u2019 might have been it. He was a spectator.\u201d<\/p>\n
At least one Factoryite remembered Warhol doing more than watching and paying the bill. Joey Freeman, then a teenage assistant to Andy, told Barbara Rubin documentarian Chuck Smith that \u201cwe would sit in the cab and go [to] The Factory, and Andy would play the Velvet Underground takes from the recording studio the night before. And he would make suggestions to Lou about what he had heard in the car.\u201d However, the Velvets were in the studio so few actual calendar days it seems there would have been few opportunities for Andy to give Reed such immediate feedback.<\/p>\n
\u201cAndy would always like the more gothic, operatic versions of these songs,\u201d Freeman added. \u201cHe didn\u2019t like the rock\u2019n\u2019roll as much. He liked the ones that had a lot of drama to them. \u2018All Tomorrow\u2019s Parties\u2019 was one of his favourites.\u201d In his interview for the Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart documentary Cale speculated, \u201cI think Andy\u2019s love of \u2018All Tomorrow\u2019s Parties\u2019 is really about the topic itself, about someone whose dress never lived up to the occasion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both Cale and Reed, however, were later emphatic that Warhol\u2019s contributions weren\u2019t merely decorative. Cale praised Warhol\u2019s insist- ence that the band stay true to their live sound, and Reed appreciated Andy\u2019s refusal to shy away from controversial lyrics that could have endangered their commercial prospects. \u201cWhat he did do is he made it all possible,\u201d Reed pointed out in the Transformer documentary. \u201cOne by his backing. And two, before we went in the studio he said, \u2018You\u2019ve got to make sure \u2013 use all the dirty words. And don\u2019t let them clean things.\u2019 And so, when he was there, they \u2013 you know \u2013 they didn\u2019t dare try to say, \u2018Hey, why don\u2019t you don\u2019t do that over,\u2019 or, gee, any one of all the other things they would normally have done never happened.\u201d<\/p>\n