Heroin

“Heroin” is the song that unexpectedly brought Andy Warhol back to his work on the Velvet Underground’s first album. In a Fifth Avenue record store, hearing Lou Reed sing it made the record feel both strangely present and newly distant: the music still sounded good, but its continued circulation had not brought Warhol any money.

The Song in the Record Store

On August 3, 1981, Warhol was walking down Fifth Avenue when he entered a record store and heard “Heroin” playing. He was unsure whether the staff had put it on after seeing him arrive or whether it had already been playing. That uncertainty sharpened the oddness of the encounter: Reed’s voice and the familiar songs seemed to return him to the album without any clear explanation for why they were playing at that moment.

Warhol recognized the record as the Velvet Underground’s first album, which he had produced and for which he had created the cover. Hearing the song brought him back to that earlier work; despite the distance of time, he thought the music still sounded good.

The Album’s Afterlife

The record store then asked Warhol to sign the album. Its cover was still the original one featuring a banana whose skin could be peeled away, a distinctive physical detail that made the album’s continuing visibility tangible in the scene. Warhol wondered whether MGM kept reissuing it, but noted that he had never received any money from the record.

The diary entry thus joins recognition to an unresolved question of value: “Heroin” remains audible, and the album remains available in its memorable original packaging, while Warhol’s own role as producer and cover artist has yielded him no payment, as he describes it. The song’s significance here lies in this brief collision between a durable musical afterlife and the creator’s recorded sense of exclusion from its proceeds.