JOHN CALE WAXES ARTICULATE ON: LOU REED, THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, ANDY WARHOL, AND ASSORTED HEROES & VILLAINS, ca. 1966

A fact- and insight-studded interview with a vital musical force, going strong at 81

Two of John Cale’s bandmates from the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, are dead. A third, Maureen “Moe” Tucker, has become a virulent right-winger. Which leaves Cale, who, at 81, released his 17th solo album earlier this year. (I’m leaving aside the raft of live albums, collaborations, and soundtracks.) Cale is going strong; soon we’ll have to start referring to him as a force of nature.

I interviewed Cale in early 2004 for my biography of Andy Warhol, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol (HarperCollins, 2009). The Welshman (Cale came stateside in 1963, at 21) was happy to share his hard-won musical insights, and much besides. In the course of a 90-minute interview, he proved a smart, good-natured, unpretentious, vastly informed interviewee. I’ve edited the audio of our interview into three pithy, informative, and very lively segments. I’ll mention, as I did a few posts ago, that I could not have been more excited to discover dozens of audio interviews that I’ve done since the ‘80s and never knew still existed: a rich trove indeed.

As a music writer for most of my career, I never considered writing about Warhol without devoting lots of thought, energy, and space to the Velvets, whom Warhol mentored and (nominally) managed in 1966 and ‘67. Warhol had once been smitten with early-’60s girl-group rock, driving visitors to his studio crazy with endless replays of his favorite song, the Jaynetts’ “Sally Go ‘round the Roses.” (Anything Warhol did, he did obsessively. And that is a great song). But his primary interest in rock was financial, namely, as a way to bankroll the unwatchable movies he’d begun to churn out. So musically clueless were Andy and his left-hand man, as Cale refers to Warhol’s business manager, Paul Morrissey, that they chose to align themselves with a band that one critic has called “the first important rock-and-roll artists who had no chance of attracting a mass audience.”

Several dozen pages of my Warhol biography, a big chunk of Chapter Seven, are devoted to the Velvets. Chapter Seven’s epigraph is a quote from Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”—“I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough”—a reference to the dreadful reception that the Velvets got on their first, 1966 tour (especially in San Francisco, where the band’s fascination with decadence, drugs, and darkness was anathema to the city’s mushrooming hippie population. The rock impresario Bill Graham, for instance, booked the Velvets into his Fillmore Auditorium only to refer to them as “you disgusting germs from New York with your disgusting minds.”

My leeriness of interviewing Lou Reed, whom Cale has called “the most difficult person to work with I have ever known,” was confirmed by a memorably unpleasant phone conversation with the chap. Although I occasionally feel a twinge of guilt over my unprofessional behavior (I blew Reed off before he could do the same to me), I had zero desire to subject myself to an hour of scorn and abuse. I would characterize John Cale’s attitude towards Reed as charitably ambivalent. “Lou could be a total asshole,” Cale told me, “but if you persevered, you’d get some good things from him.” I have not read Will Hermes’s extensive new biography, Lou Reed: The King of New York. The title makes me suspect a hagiographic slant, but I’m obliged to withhold judgment until I read it.

Cale, who spoke barely a word of English until he was seven, was classically trained as a violist, though he secretly loved rock & roll. He received a solid musical education at London University’s Goldsmith College, corresponded with Aaron Copland and John Cage, and won a conducting scholarship to Tanglewood in 1963. Cale was no sooner stateside than he fell, hard, under the influence of the minimalist composer LaMonte Young, whose chief interest was in the effects produced by holding notes for extremely long periods of time (Cale recalled playing two viola notes for two hours). Cale also served as Young’s drug courier; the latter supported his unprofitable musical adventures with a very brisk weed business. Early in 1965, Cale met Reed, an emotionally fragile but volatile 22-year-old, and the two discovered a wealth of shared passions. Cale was enthralled by Reed’s accounts of his life on the street: “Lou’s experience of street life,” Cale told me, “was really extensive. I mean, Midnight Cowboy…. He’d been around.”

After finding dependable bandmates in Morrison, who joined Reed as one of two guitarists, and Tucker, a very primitive drummer, the band started looking for gigs. The first was in suburban Summit, New Jersey, where the Velvets opened for a band called, appropriately, the Myddle Class; the occasion was a dance at Summit High School. “Nothing could have prepared the kids and parents assembled in the auditorium for what they were about to experience,” recalled one attendee. “[E]veryone was hit by a screeching wall of sound…. About a minute into the second song, which the lead singer introduced as ‘Heroin,’ most of the audience retreated in horror to the safety of their homes. Backstage after their set, the viola player was seen apologizing profusely to the outraged Myddle Class and its entourage for scaring away half the audience.” “All British politeness on the outside,” I wrote in POP, “Cale was inwardly delighted” to have so thoroughly shocked the bourgeoisie.

The junkie life romanticized: Lou Reed’s “I’m Waiting For The Man,” from that first Velvet Underground album, with its famous, Warhol-designed cover. It always sounded to me as if, from 4:11 on, the piano player (Cale) was pounding randomly on the keys with his fists. When Cale and I spoke, I asked him how he produced this effect. “By pounding randomly on the keys with my fists,” he said.

The Velvets expanded to a quintet (for one album only) when Warhol and Morrissey brought in “a five-foot, nine-inch twenty-seven-year-old German woman of almost flawless beauty, with a mane of dyed blonde hair,” as I wrote in POP. One could almost call Nico a guest artist on the album—she sang lead on three songs only: “Femme Fatale",” “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties”). Nico “was so beautiful,” wrote Mary Woronov, a member of Warhol’s coterie, “that she expected everyone wanted to fuck her, even the furniture.” At first dead set against Nico’s joining the band (the four Velvets considered themselves a self-contained unit), Cale came to agree with Warhol’s thinking: adding Nico to the mix, Cale realized, was a visual as much as a musical choice, and a good one: dropping a Nordic goddess in the midst of four seedy-looking characters. The band’s first album was pointedly titled The Velvet Underground and Nico. Released in the spring of 1967, the record barely dented the market, entering Billboard’s Top 200 at #199 and rising all the way to #195 during its four-week run. But those it affected, it affected deeply. Rolling Stone’s critic, for instance, called The Velvet Underground and Nico “one of the finest rock debut albums ever.”

Above: The Velvet Underground and Nico (with so-called manager) in Los Angeles on their disastrous 1966 tour. From left: Nico, Andy Warhol, Maureen Tucker (at rear), Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, and John Cale, seated.

Cale left the band in 1968 to embark on a prolific solo career, as a producer as well as a player; it was Cale, of course, who masterminded Horses, Patti Smith’s game-changer of a debut.

I wonder how Cale’s doing—it’s been almost exactly 20 years since he told me the story of how he and his bandmates brought something new into the world, which, initially repelled, came to acknowledge the harsh, uncompromising beauty of the Velvets’ music. Here’s John Cale, creator and survivor, to guide and inform you.

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