Dean & Britta: 13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests

There certainly hasn’t been a lack of programming associated with the Wexner Center’s “Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms” exhibition, especially of the musical variety. And for good reason, considering Warhol’s inseparability from the Velvet Underground.

There was the Robert Forster event, at which the former Go-Between covered the Velvets; in February, Times New Viking will do the same. And last Thursday, Dean & Britta gave a performance that combined with Andy Warhol visuals to create a captivating hour of mixed media.

“Dean” refers to Dean Wareham, former frontman of genre-shapers Galaxie 500 and its successful follow-up, Luna, of which Britta Phillips eventually became a member. For this show, Dean & Britta performed (mostly) new music to complement 13 of Warhol’s famous “screen tests,” also throwing in a Bob Dylan cover (“I’ll Keep It With Mine”) and a Velvet Underground tune (“Not a Young Man Anymore”).

Warhol made around 500 of these screen tests at his studio, the Factory, each of them being shot with a 16 mm camera on 100-foot rolls of silent, black and white film. The films normally would have lasted 2¾ minutes apiece, but they were projected so that they ended up as 4-minute films, the slight slow-motion effect elongating and exaggerating any movements.

Some of the subjects seen in the featured screen tests were well known. A young Dennis Hopper cycled through several emotions, looking fierce, confused, amused and contemplative. Velvet Underground vocalist Nico, someone who was undoubtedly used to cameras, seemed bored and slightly annoyed. Lou Reed drank a bottle of Coke, making art of a mass-produced item—a concept made famous by Warhol.

Between a few of the songs, Wareham gave a little commentary on the video portraits. Sometimes the background was a nice addition, and other times I wished I had plugged my ears, because the story and emotions I was projecting onto the images were more interesting than the reality.

Take the screen test of Ann Buchanan. While Dean & Britta played a song called “Singer Sing,” the dark-haired, dark-eyed Buchanan gazed unfalteringly at the camera as tears began to well up in her eyes and eventually cascade down her face one at a time. It had me wondering what could be causing so much sadness in her life. Or was it something Warhol was saying in the background of the silent film that we, the viewers, weren’t privy to? And how did she remain so stone-faced with such internal grief?

Perhaps if I’d been more observant, I would have noticed that the tears were merely a result of not blinking for nearly three minutes, as Wareham noted after the song. That explains the stone face and lack of any visible grief other than the tears. Still, I like my version better.

Wareham’s comments about Freddie Herko, on the other hand, were a welcome—if a bit disturbing—confirmation of suspicions I already had. Herko appeared shifty and angry in his screen test, at times looking downright menacing. Something was not right with him, like a man searching for peace but finding the opposite. The band accompanied the portrait with a repetitive instrumental melody that built to an intense climax toward the end of the film.

Turns out Herko, a dancer, committed suicide soon after the screen test. At 29, he leapt out the window of a friend’s apartment. He also was a speed freak, which would account for some of the shiftiness, too.

During the performance, the musicians often faced the video screen, undoubtedly taking cues from the larger-than-life projections. The Velvets cover, appropriately played during Reed’s test, was the only real rocker of the night. Most songs were marked by Dean & Britta’s dream-pop vibe, a nice companion to the portraits.

Wareham’s voice oozed his usual indolent cool, and Phillips’s silky-sweet singing was almost as gorgeous as her runway-model looks. I couldn’t help thinking how well she would have fit in with screen-tested Factory starlets like “Baby Jane” Holzer and Ingrid Superstar.

Adding music to such an iconic project is a daunting and risky proposition, even for someone with as much cred as Wareham. But Dean & Britta’s pop and Andy Warhol’s art melded to make a most beautiful evening, indeed.

Also at The Other Paper