On the evening of 13 January 1966, the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry held its annual dinner at a hotel on Park Avenue. On the menu were string beans, roast beef and baby potatoes. The entertainment was less conventional – a local artist named Andy Warhol had been invited to say a few words, but instead put on a multimedia performance with the band he was managing. The Velvet Underground and Nico cranked up the volume and played Heroin (“Because when the smack begins to flow, I really don’t care any more”) and Venus in Furs (“Kiss the boot of shiny shiny leather … tongue the thongs”) while 300 medical professionals and their spouses looked on in tuxedos and gowns. “I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id,” one doctor fleeing the scene told the reporters that Warhol had stationed in the lobby; another said “it was like the whole prison ward had escaped”.
That wasn’t totally wide of the mark; Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol “superstar” writhing on stage had once been institutionalised by her wealthy parents (while in hospital she met Barbara Rubin, another scenester who filmed part of the evening). And the band’s linchpin and songwriter Lou Reed had, in his late teens, been given electroconvulsive therapy to treat suspected schizophrenia (he claimed later it had been to “discourage homosexual feelings”).
