The original back cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico has formal portraits of six people. This is the album with the famous Andy Warhol banana front cover. It is often recognized as one of the most influential albums of the rock era.
The way John Cale’s avant-garde musicianship opened up layers beneath a traditional blues-rock surface. The way Lou Reed’s lyrics made any subject fair game for a rock song. The famous quote typically attributed to Brian Eno sums it up…
“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”
The Magic Tramp – the punkest of them all
One of the six people in that original back cover photo was also the very first musical performer to take the stage at Hilly’s on the Bowery, a grody biker bar in the East Village of New York. It was the fall of 1972, and owner Hilly Crystal was hoping to offer a mix of jazz, bluegrass, and blues music in his establishment.
A year later, he would use those genres as the initials for his rebranded club – CBGBs. (The OMFUG part of the name, as in CBGB-OMFUG, never really caught on.)
So you have the same figure intimately involved with one of the most important albums and one of the most iconic rock venues in rock & roll’s most important years. Surely, you know his – or her – name.
It wasn’t Reed or Cale, though those would have been the logical guesses. Cale would have been an especially smart guess if you knew Hilly Crystal's initial preference for jazz over rock and roll.
It wasn’t Nico, who would have been a good offbeat guess. Nor was it Sterling Morrison or Mo Tucker, the other two members the Velvet Underground on the band’s debut album.
It wasn’t Warhol either – he was never a performer. But we’re getting closer.
The answer is Eric Emerson, an actor, dancer and musician who epitomized the Warhol definition of “superstar.”
Emerson was not a great musician. As the frontman of the Magic Tramps, his voice left something to be desired. His performances in Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey movies from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s do not exactly reveal a Shakespearean actor either.
That should not for one moment suggest that Eric Eemerson was not a skilled performer. He may have lacked formal training but he had something just as valuable. He was a showman.
Emerson was gorgeous. He was willful. As a disciple of Warhol, he learned how vital it was to put yourself forward as a star. Along with other largely forgotten artists from the scene – the likes of Jayne County and the Suicide boys – Emerson epitomized the DIY aesthetic that has become crucial to many burgeoning artistic movements.
On that Velvet Underground & Nico back cover, there are portraits of each of the five band members along the bottom. Above them, there is a photo of the band performing in front of a crowd. And above that, looking down on them like an angel from heaven, is a ghostly image of another man. That is Eric Emerson.
He never gave consent for his image to be used in this way. He was never asked. And so, when he learned what was on the album, he asked to be compensated. Then he sued. Verve, then owned by MGM Records, did not acquiesce.
They simply plastered a sticker over the covers that had already been printed and airbrushed Emerson out of existence for subsequent runs. It caused a minor delay for an album whose release had already been delayed, and though I don’t know this for a fact, it probably pissed off Lou Reed.
It didn’t take much to piss off Lou Reed.
Soon after, Emerson left New York for the west coast. Sesu Coleman, a drummer who knew the Warhol crowd, convinced him to join a jazzy, improvisational rock trio called the Magic Tramps. They had had ambition and attitude but no vocalist. Emerson was an ideal fit.
Emerson convinced the band to give New York a try in 1971. He fell back in with the Warhol crowd, taking a role in the Morrissey film Heat – scored by John Cale – and looking for places for his band to perform.
In short, they performed everywhere. Max’s Kansas City. The Mercer Arts Center. As documented by Jesse Rifkin in This Must Be the Place, Coleman and Emerson convinced Hilly Crystal to let the Tramps perform at Hilly’s by agreeing to construct a stage for the venue, which they did by slapping together wood and carpet scraps they rescued from dumpsters and construction sites.
Then, in October of 1972, long before Television or Squeeze and or Ramones – or any of the bands most associated with the early days of CBGBs, Emerson and his Magic Tramps played the first show at Hilly’s. They opened a bill that featured jazz guitarist Ralph Towner, Weather Report bass player Miroslav Vitous, and the headliner, jazz flautist Jeremy Steig.
The Magic Tramps, when Emerson was fronting them, was a fixture in the early ‘70s glam rock world of New York. They played often with the defining act of that era, the New York Dolls.
As for that music, it is difficult to put it into perspective today. There are no quality recordings of the Tramps with Emerson fronting. You can hear a selection of their originals on Kickin’ Up Moonlight Dust, a compilation released in 2005.
Eight of the tracks are from the Emerson years and they range from the flower power psychedelia of “Hey People” to the more Velvet Underground-inspired chaotic rock of “Trippin’” and especially “S&M Leather Queen.” There are also a few instrumentals and the title track, a lovely Donovan-esque slice of trippy folk rock.
None are especially good recordings but they let your mind wonder.
Emerson would quit the band in 1974 to pursue acting. Jay Mala – a much better rock singer – would take his place and the Tramps would veer into classic Zeppelin-style tunes. Their subsequent releases were technically better, but far less interesting.
As for Emerson, a year after leaving the Tramps, he was found dead in Manhattan, the presumed victim of a hit and run accident. He was 29.
Rumors quickly spread that the supposed accident was staged to cover up Emerson’s drug overdose. True or not, the legend almost certainly inspired one of Lou Reed’s greatest songs, “Street Hassle” in 1978.
Emerson was a major player in the vibrant early-‘70s culture in New York, thriving during an era in which the great city was dying, but a group of young artistic visionaries were refusing to let urban and cultural decay stand in their way of achieving fame, even if it were fleeting.
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