On June 21, 1966, 18-year-old Susan Pile and a group of friends lied to their parents, saying they were going out to a sock hop. Instead the Elmhurst teens drove to Poor Richard’s in Old Town, where Andy Warhol’s traveling psychedelic revue, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was beginning a weeklong run. Amid dizzying strobe lights and projections of Warhol’s films and slides, Pile and her pals gyrated to the sounds of the Velvet Underground.
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“It wasn’t quite the full-strength version of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” says Pile. “Nico had gotten bored or didn’t want to come to Chicago or something, and Lou Reed was down with hepatitis, so the Velvets’ lineup consisted of Mo Tucker on bass, Angus MacLise on drums, Sterling Morrison on lead guitar, and John Cale playing viola and organ. Mary Woronov wasn’t there, and of course, neither was Andy. But to us it was fantastic. It was our ecstasy. We had never taken a drug in our entire life, we were desperate for culture. Do you know how straight Elmhurst was? Totally Republican. That was a very exciting summer.”
A few months later, Pile moved to New York to attend Barnard College, where she renewed her acquaintance with the Warhol crowd. “There wasn’t a dorm immediately available for me at Barnard,” she says. “So my parents, who were really conservative and had absolutely no idea what they were doing, arranged for me to stay at this awful YWCA at 50th and Eighth Avenue. It was a horrible neighborhood–hookers and drug addicts. Coming from Elmhurst, I was scared, so I called the only people I knew on the whole northeastern seaboard: Ingrid Superstar, Paul Morrissey, Malanga, and that configuration of the Velvet Underground. They said, ‘Poor dear, come on over to the Factory.’ So I did.”
