“The Velvet Underground & Nico” (The Velvet Underground, Nico)
Like a lot of musical obsessives, The Velvet Underground was essential listening when I first began exploring music.
Jonathan Jones had the good fortune to check out John Cale’s exhibit in the Venice Biennale. Sounds like an interesting exhibit, but of course, The Velvet Underground’s history is always on the agenda:
It sounds at first like an electronic whine, a build-up of noise in the amplifier. Then there’s Lou Reed’s voice, young but hardened: “When the smack begins to flow, and it shoots up the dropper’s neck, and I’m rushing on my run, then I feel just like Jesus’s son.” Behind it all, there’s that strange keening, humming note. Listen to the Velvet Underground’s Heroin on headphones and you realise it’s not feedback after all, not a synthesised warble, but the rich timbre of a violin playing a single note, held for a disturbingly long time. It’s the darkest thing in the darkest of songs. If Reed sounds as if he’s made a pact with the devil, then the musician who plays that buzzing fiddle – John Cale – must be the devil himself.
and doesn’t sound like any feel-good reunion between Lou Reed and John Cale will ever occur
Andy Warhol produced the Velvets’ first album and designed its banana peel cover. No figure in modern culture is more misunderstood than the Velvets’ manager, and nobody speaks up for Warhol more eloquently than Cale. He won’t hear a word against Andy. The Factory, he insists, was a true underground – “it was outrageously creative and vital” – and Warhol cared about, and properly curated, the Velvets. A rare bit of footage Warhol shot in the Factory shows Cale fiddling with the amplifier, while Reed strums and drummer Maureen Tucker knocks out her steady, dry beat. Warhol listened carefully, and remembered it all. “He was the one who’d remind us of an idea we’d forgotten.”
Cale is still smarting from what he sees – amazingly – as the tragic waste of the band. Warhol took them to the west coast, he tells me. While they were away, Bob Dylan’s manager took out a lease on their Manhattan venue. This was part of Dylan’s feud with Warhol, whose world is caricatured in lyrics on the 1966 album Highway 61 Revisited. Then Reed sacked Warhol and Cale. A new manager, says Cale, “appealed to Lou’s desire for glory”. In the years since, Reed and Cale have occasionally got back together – but from the furious way he talks, I’d say any further reunion was unlikely.
All through the solo career that followed, Cale has returned again and again to his Welshness. He has recorded Dylan Thomas poems, and in the early 1970s composed a nostalgic Thomas-inspired song, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. And apart from the Thomas obsession, there is a lyricism to his music, one that struggles with his severity and evokes all those years in the Welsh Youth Orchestra.
If you own just one Cale solo album, Paris 1919 is my favorite.
One of John Cale’s very finest solo efforts, Paris 1919 is also among his most accessible records, one which grows in depth and resonance with each successive listen. A consciously literary work – the songs even bear titles like “child’s christmas in wales,” “macbeth,” and “graham greene” – paris 1919 is close in spirit to a collection of short stories; the songs are richly poetic, enigmatic period pieces strongly evocative of their time and place. Chris Thomas’ production is appropriately lush and sweeping, with many tracks set to orchestral accompaniment; indeed, there’s little here to suggest either cale’s noisy, abrasive past or the chaos about to resurface in his subsequent work – for better or worse, his music never achieved a similar beauty again.