‘‘I THINK Nico saw The Marble Index as a chance to be taken seriously, which she craved, and be known for something more than her beauty. She thought that was a flimsy kind of fame. She hated it. That whole scene around The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol she’d got into, she was really turned off by a lot of it and had walked away from it. She hated fashion. She hated the idea of being blonde and beautiful, and in some ways she hated being a woman, because she figured all her beauty had brought her was grief. She wanted to do something more substantial, her own music.
She’d done that first solo album, Chelsea Girl, and she’d hated the way it came out. It was very conservatively produced and arranged. She thought it was another example of the superficiality that attached itself to her. She knew she was better than Chelsea Girl and couldn’t understand why that was the kind of album people thought she wanted to make. So The Marble Index was an opportunity for her to prove she was a serious artist, not just this kind of blonde bombshell. Where the songs for The Marble Index came from I don’t know. That’s a mystery. I knew she’d latched onto Jim Morrison and had started writing poetry, and suddenly she had a harmonium and was writing songs, which is not something that had been encouraged when she was in the VU.
I didn’t even hear the songs until we were in the studio. She had this small book with her poetry in and she would sit at the harmonium and work on songs all the time. She didn’t talk about them or what they meant to her. Writing the songs and singing them, that was her responsibility. Explaining them was not her responsibility. So to an extent, I didn’t know quite what I was getting myself into.