Nico: the end

From Library Journal

In the late 1960s, Andy Warhol formed a rock band called the Velvet Underground, featuring the songs of Lou Reed and occasional vocals by German-born Christa Paffgen, who was dubbed with the alluring stage name Nico. After the Velvet's breakup, Nico recorded a few solo albums and drifted into a nasty heroin habit. The author entered her life in 1982, when he was recruited by a demented promoter (here referred to only as "Dr. Demetrius") to play in Nico's band during a tour of Italy. Predictably, the venture was a disaster. Over the next five years, Nico, Young, and company hopscotched the globe, wherever the flames of her fame still flickered. As good as Young's writing is, that's about all this sordid tale has going for it. A bigger star would have given the book broader appeal. For large music collections.
- Thomas Wiener, formerly with "American Film"
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly

For those who relish stories of moral degradation and famous junkies, this witty and sordid biography provides ample entertainment. In 1982, piano player Young scrapped his Oxford studies and joined a touring band that backed the 42-year-old female singer known simply as Nico. Once a fabulous beauty, paraded before the camera in Fellini's La Dolce Vita and chosen by Andy Warhol to sing for his rock group the Velvet Underground, Nico had squandered all in pursuit of heroin, and performing was her only means left to support her addiction. By June 1988, when Nico died in a fall from her bicycle, Young brimmed with anecdotes gathered in the seedy underbellies of the U.S., Italy, Eastern Europe and Australia, including bizarre encounters with John Cale, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Young's claim to quote conversations verbatim suggests some embellishment, but otherwise his chronicle of Nico's final years rings pathetically true. The charm here lies in Young's ridiculous lack of hipness (when Nico obliquely requests something "sharp"--a hypodermic--he proffers a Swiss army knife), his acerbic humor and his ability to portray has-been and never-will-be antiheroes. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Model, singer, and pop icon Nico was at the center of 60's hip, but when keyboardist James Young backed her up in the early 80's, a lifetime of heroin addiction had reduced her to a rude and demanding specter haunting the fringes of rock 'n' roll society. Here's Young's coarse and chaotic, entertaining and disconcerting, account of the final years of the Queen of the Junkies. Born in 1938 as Christa Paffgen, Nico was Berlin's top model at 17, soon working for Chanel in Paris and Ford in New York. After hanging out with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, she was taken up by Andy Warhol, who made her the singer for the Velvet Underground (who weren't pleased, but Warhol paid the bills). While never a huge success, the Velvet Underground is widely acknowledged as the hippest band ever, and Nico's association with it created a small audience for her subsequent scattered singing career, managed in the 80's by eccentric rock entrepreneur ``Dr. Demetrius,'' who hired the author for a 1982 tour of Italy. For the next six years, Nico, Young, and the rest of the band performed for often disappointed audiences everywhere from L.A. to Australia to Prague to Japan, in tours ineptly planned by Demetrius and modified by Nico's need to score drugs. Joining them along the way were pop luminaries John Cale and Allen Ginsberg (``Ginsberg...was never really hip, being too much of a celebrant...He'd get excited and take off his clothes in the presence of people who were too cool to remove their Ray Bans''). Young's portrait of Nico is generous, considering the selfish single-mindedness of a career junkie, and his natural ear and eye render scathing takes on everyone else. Unevenly written and sometimes troubling--there are hints of scores settled here--but,