Hey that's my hometown too! So I've also been interested in that show. When I visited the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh a couple years ago I was tickled to see a review of the Hamilton concert on display in the VU section. The concert and review is covered in the book White Light/White Heat and just by googling the source and date (Artscanada magazine) I managed to find the full text:
https://archive.org/stream/ArtscanadaFe ... 7_djvu.txt
Velvet Underground
in Hamilton
Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable
by Barry Lord
Arts/canada attends McMaster University's
multi-screen audio-visual psychedelic eve-
ning.
Back in 1960 Andy Warhol was painting
works like Dick Tracy, using casein on
canvas to represent the comic strip char-
acter with pertinent smudges, smears and
drips. By 1962 he was painting in liquitex,
and had replaced the brush strokes and
drips with the subtle distortions of an un-
evenly screened reproduction process. He
had also collaborated with Campbell's
packaging department to produce his fa-
mous soup cans, and with Raymond Loewy
Associates to paint Coca-Cola bottles. His
interest in the repetition of an image
screened at different values of detail and
intensity led naturally to the newspaper
photograph, and thereby to the motion
picture: the successive frames of a film
are a vertical correlate of the still photo
reproduced with varying screens, and a
Warhol film like the one of the Empire
State building with its lights going on and
off over a period of many hours is a logi-
cal extension of works like the Jackie
Kennedy series, where the uneven screen
sets up a comparable play of light values
on an immediately recognizable image.
These characteristics - significant dis-
tortion of the image, interest in the visual
and psychological results of its repetition,
collaboration with others, the maintenance
of a single environmental effect through
experienced time, and a concern with
mechanically produced light effects - are
evident in Warhol's latest work, The Ex-
ploding Plastic Inevitable. The Inevitable
is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor cine-
ma; it cannot be called a happening, since
it recurs at regular intervals on schedule
(nightly in New York). Nor is it an environ-
ment limited to one place, as McMaster
University in Hamilton proved by inviting
it up to open an arts festival in November.
At centre screen, faces of the members of
The Velvet Underground are superimposed
over the film. Here, Nico materializes,
sometimes in colour.
The evening began in McMaster's new
gymnasium, before a quiet seated
audience; though the Inevitable prefers
the response of dancers, McMaster de-
cided to sit everyone down, pleading a
new plastic floor.
After about thirty minutes of sight and
sound, during which spotlights and slide
projectors add to the spectacle, The Velvet
Underground musicians, one by one,
quietly take the stage, and begin to impro-
vise to the recorded sound of their own
music. Thus Warhol continues in the pop
art tradition of concern with levels of rep-
resentation, the reproduction and the
original. Nico, whose face is on the screen,
suddenly appears in a spotlight.
On a wide screen behind the stage, Vinyl,
a film by Gerard Malanga. Warhol's fore-
man in his New York art factory, was
projected from two machines: to the right,
the first part of the film, in which Malanga
dances, exercises, sits watching a man
and girl, and finally becomes aggressive;
to the left, shown in the same time period,
the second part, in which Malanga is
beaten, stripped to the waist, and bound to
a chair with his head encased in a black
vinyl hood covered with metal studs. The
same persons remain or re-appear in both
halves, so that we are watching two images
similar in general character, but signifi-
cantly different in specific detail -a cine-
matic equivalent to the repeated faces of
Marilyn and Liz in Warhol's silk-screened
paintings of several years ago. Two loud-
speakers provided sound, the film dialogue
purposely distorted on one track, and on
the other the recorded sound of The Velvet
Underground, the group which Warhol
chose to play with the Inevitable.
Nico, with striking features and a driving
voice with a rich chromatic range, is the
singer with The Velvet Underground. Some
of the lyrics, which must be heard while
the speakers, the slides, the films and the
spotlights continue, are about psychedelic
experiences; most are not as explicit.
The Velvet Underground’s electronic in-
struments include amplified guitars, violin,
cello, piano and drums. The sound is
harmonic, insistent, pulsing and sustained
-suggesting comparisons with Indian ra-
gas, and usually called simply psychedelic.
Gerard Malanga, Warhol's art foreman
and film-maker, is also the group's dancer.
Before a constantly flickering battery of
strobe lights. Malanga uses a variety of
props - a Marlon Brando shirt, a variety of
sashes and ropes, and spoon and gear for
a "fix" in the set piece Heroin. Sometimes
he used the strobes directly, sometimes a
candle-suggesting again the Warhol in-
terest in light values. The final half-hour
song created an environment in time as
well as place, so that it began to seem to
at least some of the McMaster audience as
if life had always been this way. To others,
it had been a confusing, noisy, probably
frightening experience, and when the lights
went up it was found that a good number
had left. The ones who stayed had been a
little more than an audience; like the news-
paper photographs and Brillo boxes that
Andy formerly used, they had become part
of a Warhol art work.
It's actually an interesting review that takes the whole thing seriously, though it's more about the visuals and Warhol's art than the music itself. I particularly like the detail about insisting the audience sits down to protect the new gym floor...
The only other thing mentioned in White Light/White Heat is that on the way home Nico had to be smuggled across the border because she 'forgot' her passport, possibly so no one would find out her real age, but from the info in one of the links above it seems she had trouble crossing the border due to visa/immigration/arrest issues.