Sterling Morrison At Grad School

by Alexandra Molotkow

In 1971, Sterling Morrison left the Velvet Underground behind to start grad school at the University of Texas at Austin. He busied himself with study and joined a band called the Bizarros:

“He knew we weren’t going anywhere. He’d already done it, he told me once. He wasn’t counting on anything from music other than fun — and we had a lot of fun,” Bentley says. “Austin was an incredible time in the ’70s, a continual party.”

But Morrison’s musical rebirth in Austin was short-lived. In 1978, the Bizarros voted to kick Morrison out of the band due to stylistic differences, and the members nominated Bentley to deliver the message.

“It broke my heart. It ruined his pride. He got kicked out of a dumpy bar band in Austin,” Bentley says. For the next 15 years, the two didn’t speak, and Morrison never attended another Bizarros show. He quietly worked on his dissertation and taught technical writing courses, but the financial pressures of supporting a family began to weigh on him, so in the summers he’d commute part-time to Houston to pilot tugboats.

Wait, it’s OK!

“He enjoyed it,” [his wife] Martha says, of Morrison’s new life, even further removed from the seemingly glamorous life at the Factory. “I know that he liked the friendship, the guys, fishing off the fan tail. They worked awfully hard.”

See? It’s soooooo easy to leave it all behind.

“Theodore Tugboat at Murphys cable wharf” by Dennis Jarvis, via Wikimedia Commons.