– I was making love to Nico a lot. All day pretty much. Nico was really something special. I dug her a lot. I couldn’t fall in love with anybody, but I was really thrilled and excited to be around her. She was older and she was from somewhere else. I really liked that – her accent was from somewhere else, everything about her was from somewhere else. Also, she was extremely strong. It was like hanging out with a guy except she had girl’s parts; that was the only difference, otherwise it was like hanging out with a tough-minded, egotistical, artiste kinda guy. She’d be very opinionated about my work, and this, that, and the other thing – then all of a sudden that veneer would fall off and she would show tremendous vulnerability.

– And then I would see her: Here’s someone over thirty, not a model anymore, not a commercial entity of any kind in the big business called America, and what the fuck is she gonna do? Nico had a great sadness about her. You know, she had all the accoutrements of a really groovy international gal – the right boots, the right sheepskin coat, the right hair, and she knew people on the right level, and yet she was fucked-up – she had a twist to her. She was a great, great artist. It was just a real kick to be around her. I’m absolutely convinced that some day, when people have ears to hear her, in the same way that people have eyes to see a van Gogh now, that people are just gonna go, “WHOAAAA!” Then she came with me to Ann Arbor and lived in the band house with me.

– The Stooges didn’t want any girls in the house, especially one who had a very deep voice. They would imitate how she talked. Nico would try to cook for us, but she would cook a pot of brown rice and pour half a container of Tabasco sauce in it. She had an ear infection and she felt the Tabasco would clear her ear out. And Nico liked to drink. She got me into that, too, and while she was living with us my shows started getting really, really bad. Because Nico was a bad seed. You know, she was not like the girl next door.

– Nico used to say to me, “Zhimmy, oh Zhimmy, you must be totally poisoned to do what you do. You are only mostly poisoned, you must be totally poisoned.” She meant I had too much humanity. Then she’d feed me red wines with French names I never heard of. That’s how I learned all that bullshit; that’s how I learned how to modulate my voice…wear light blue suits and speak to record company executives.