The Marble Index was Cale’s first production job, though to call him a producer vastly understates his role: his work on the album is an extraordinary compliment paid by one artist to another. Cale took Nico’s pulseless recitatives and the obsessive iterations of her harmonium and lifted them into a pale, exotic anti-world of his own. His pre-Velvets drone experiments, his unique instrumental palette, his skills as an orchestrator, all came into play. “Frozen Warnings” is the standout, a graveyard lullaby seared and electrified by the frequencies of Cale’s viola: “Friar hermit stumbles over/The cloudy borderline/Frozen warnings close to mine/Close to the frozen borderline.” It was a sound that ignored the oncoming ’70s altogether: it looked behind, to plainchant and folklore, and beyond, to the marmoreal chill of late Joy Division, or the ice ballads of Jesu.
Three unverifiable stories from Nico’s past, retailed by her in various forms at various times. The first: her father, a soldier in Hitler’s army, was driven insane by a head wound and finished off by an officer in his own unit. The second: as a child in the railway town of Lübbenau she witnessed freight cars full of Jews being shunted toward the death camps. The third: as a teenager in Berlin she was raped by an American soldier; she testified against him and he was hanged. True or not (and some of it surely was), Nico claimed this triptych of suffering as her own. “Over railroad station tracks/Faintly flickers a modest cry,” she sings in “Frozen Warnings.” “From without a thousand cycles/A thousand cycles to come/A thousand times to win/A thousand ways to run the world.” The warning is wasted: the war is already over. Life kneels in almost soundless consent to the thousand-year Reich. Touring Germany in her later years, Nico would sing the banned national anthem and get bombarded with seat cushions. “If I had a gun,” she said, “I would shoot you all.”
Steven Lee Beeber, author of The Heebie Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk Rock (Chicago Review Press), is fascinated by Nico. “She’s so indirect and elusive in her Germanness,” he says over the phone from his home in Jamaica Plain. “You could compare her with Dee Dee Ramone, who was also born in Germany, with a soldier for a father. Dee Dee’s big conflict was that his father was an American serviceman who married a blonde blue-eyed German woman and then fought with her terribly, and as a kid Dee Dee started collecting Nazi memorabilia just to piss off his father. A lot of the Ramones songs that feature Germany were originally written by Dee Dee, and then made funnier by Tommy [Ramone]. But I mean, these guys grew up in Forest Hills, and they were doing it with that sense of humor. Which Nico seems to be completely without, perhaps because Hitler and the Fatherland took her own father from her.”
