Back in May I wrote a bunch of posts about the 50th anniversary of the Velvet Underground’s debut album. Here’s another Velvety post, celebrating the great John Cale. Here’s the word from a recent Rolling Stone interview celebrating the anniversary…
The way John Cale tells it, he had a revelation one day in the mid-Sixties. He’d dedicated the majority of his first two decades to classical and avant-garde music, to such an extent that, he says dryly, “I may have missed out on my puberty.
“I woke up one day and said, ‘Wait a minute, there are people running around singing Beatles songs,’” he recalls. “The Beatles Invasion was going on. All the enjoyment that I’d gotten as a kid out of rock & roll was receding, and I thought, ‘Let’s put something together that blends the two.’ I wanted to cross-pollinate rock with the avant-garde, and then I met Lou Reed, and that was the solution.”
The union of Cale’s musical wanderlust, spurred on by collaborating with minimalist composer La Monte Young, and Reed’s rock-steady songwriting, which he had been exercising as an in-house songwriter at Pickwick Records, became the soul of the Velvet Underground. This weekend will mark the 50th anniversary of their most daring experiment – their debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico – the Andy Warhol–produced LP that found Cale, Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker fusing gritty garage rock with overdriven viola noise and, on some songs, the lilting, expressionistic vocals of German chanteuse Nico.
The record, whose songs vividly described drug abuse and sexual deviance at a time when the Beatles were dominating the charts with a gentler, more whimsical countercultural vision, was far from a commercial hit, but its influence over the past half century has been undeniable. Artists ranging from David Bowie to Duran Duran have covered its songs, and Brian Eno is fabled to have once said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”
Read the whole article at the link above and watch this documentary to find out more about Cale’s extraordinary career in the Velvets and beyond…
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