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Andy Warhol gets soundtrack for 'Screen Tests'

Dean & Britta to perform '13 Most Beautiful' at MCA

By Althea Legaspi | Special to the Tribune

March 7, 2009

Andy Warhol is renowned as a painter, filmmaker, multimedia artist and saying "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."

However, among music aficionados it was his involvement with The Velvet Underground & Nico that perhaps makes him most iconic. When the Andy Warhol Museum commissioned a performance piece that pairs live music with the artist's "Screen Tests," Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips seemed an obvious choice for the project, titled "13 Most Beautiful ... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests." The duo performs in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday.

Velvet Underground not only influenced Wareham/Phillips' band Luna, which disbanded in 2004, but Luna was also handpicked to open for the Velvets during their 1993 reunion tour. And late Velvet Underground guitarist Sterling Morrison also appears on Luna's 1994 album, "Bewitched."

"[We thought] the unabashedly pop quality of the 'Screen Tests' and the immediacy of them ... and the very pop component [of Luna] would be interesting," says Ben Harrison, the Andy Warhol Museum's associate curator for performance. "And I've just been a big fan of their music and their approach, and obviously with The Velvet Underground influence, it doesn't hurt."

Now performing as Dean & Britta, the husband/wife musical duo combed through scores of Warhol's "Screen Tests" to bring the project to fruition. Filmed in the mid-'60s, some 500 screen tests featured the people—from the famous to obscure—who populated Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Wareham was drawn to the personalities who were most integral to the Factory, and he chose "the people who were there every day—people who had lived there," says Wareham. "Rather than just some famous actress or collector who happened to waltz through for the day."

The early "Screen Tests" were shot in 2 1/2 minutes per subject, then slowed down to play in the span of 4 minutes. "[This] kind of amplifies, or magnifies ... every little emotion you can see morphing across people's faces, and oftentimes there's a shift. ... They sit there looking at this camera and then about halfway through they can't hold it," explains Wareham. "So Ingrid Superstar, she sits there giggling and laughing and making funny faces ... but then with about 30 seconds left she looks like she's crying. ... Or Dennis Hopper starts out looking like he's about to cry, and then towards the end he starts giggling."

The tasks of writing music, then, to complement the screen tests without overpowering the moods on film held particular and intriguing challenges. "When you're doing soundtrack, you have to serve the picture. And so you might have a perfectly nice song, but you put it up against a picture and maybe it makes that picture seem dull ... the picture kind of tells you if you have the wrong mood for it," Wareham says. "It also dictated the length obviously. They all had to be four minutes ... which was a challenge and it was a real challenge to do the show live. I'm not used to doing that, I'm used to picking and choosing the best songs, the ones that work live and do them on my own sweet time, but the thing has to run like clockwork."

While the majority of the "13 Most Beautiful" songs are written by Dean & Britta, the couple picked two apropos covers for the screen tests of Lou Reed and Nico. "This Velvet Underground song popped up on the Internet last year," says Wareham. "It's called 'I'm Not a Young Man Anymore,' and it's from a live performance in 1966 at the Gymnasium in New York. And that's the same year the screen test was shot—it just seemed a good fit."

Their rendition of Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine," which appears on Nico's 1967 "Chelsea Girl" album, is paired with her time on-screen. Luna fans may also get a kick out of the tune matched with Hopper's screen test. "It's a reworking of an older Luna, rare Luna B-side called 'The Enabler,' " says Wareham.

In the '60s, "Screen Tests" often served as background for Velvet Underground performances and Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" events. Recontextualizing these rarely seen silent film portraits with new music may give them resonance for a new generation. "It takes a 40-year perspective and makes ['Screen Tests'] fresh in a new way, makes it fresh in the way of it being from the point of view of Dean & Britta," says Peter Taub, MCA's director of performance programs. "And also they're so good at writing these sort of pop classics that are of our time, which grew from nostalgia for another time."

ctc-live@tribune.com