Twenty years ago, when prompted to "name an album that is perfect all the way through, no filler," I immediately responded "Songs for Drella."
I just listened to it for the first time in *mumble* years. I vaguely remembered it as being kind of slow and dragging in bits, and maybe not entirely to my taste anymore.
Wrong. It holds up.
This is a rock group called the Velvet Underground
We show movies on them, do you like their sound?
I only know Todd Haynes as the director of I'm Not There. I've not seen this but I am told it's sort of a biopic of Bob Dylan, with multiple actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing Dylan. So I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that he made a documentary on the Velvet Underground.
Erin and I watched it last week. It's good, I think. Lots of neat split-screening, sometimes with the sound of a recorded interview rolling (sometimes from the sixties, sometimes contemporary) and a Warhol movie portrait of the speaker on one side of the screen.
I'm a John Cale fan from way back and got into the Velvets as a result of that, so there weren't a whole bunch of surprises. The doc spends a lot of time on Cale and on Lou Reed, where they came from, how they got together, how they made that first amazing album as part of Andy Warhol's Factory. It's got less to say about White Light/White Heat, and after Reed fired Cale even less to say about the last two albums as the Velvets turned into The Lou Reed Backing Band. But, you know, the Warhol and Cale stuff is what I'm interested in, and that was well done and neat.
I came into this with a belief that Lou Reed was an egomanic asshole, and I was not disabused of this notion.
The trouble with personalities, they're too wrapped up in style
It's too personal, they're in love with their own guile
After Andy died, Lou Reed and John Cale collaborated (their first collaboration since White Light/White Heat) on a 1990 album called Songs For Drella, subtitled A Fiction. It's sort of a bio of Andy in bits and pieces, and sort of Lou and John processing their grief and anger and pain at Andy. It's a bare-bones production: Lou, John, Lou's guitar, John's piano and occasionally viola.
There exists a video for the album, which I guess is a concert film; it was released on VHS and is available
here on Youtube. The description reads in part "Cale is fantastic on keyboards and viola and for once Reed actually sings and plays well," which is accurate.
I dunno. I don't know how to talk about music, even less than I know how to talk about books or movies. It works for me. It is my favourite John Cale album, narrowly edging out his other 1990 collaboration, Wrong Way Up with Brian Eno. I don't listen to it often but it's maybe more effective for that.
Lou, apparently, remained an egomanic asshole and control freak. He and John kept civil long enough to do the Velvet Underground reunion concert in 1993, and then never worked together again.
It's a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
The way to make friends, Andy, is to invite them in for tea
Twenty-five years ago this past summer, Steph and I showed up late to the movie theatre in Dupont Circle. We clumsily made our way past seated moviegoers to our seats, where I proceeded to explode a packet of Reese's Pieces all over the place. We were there to see Basquiat, because it had David Bowie playing Andy Warhol, and we came in in the middle of the "suicide hotline" montage, so we had basically no idea what was going on.
That movie... that movie. It is probably not, objectively, a good movie; it's certainly not an accurate depiction of Jean-Michel Basquiat's life. But it's still compelling. It's why I started following Jeffrey Wright and Claire Forlani, it got me interested in Warhol. And the soundtrack... the last track was Cale's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," which was enough to send me down the John Cale rabbit hole.
He's been prolific since leaving the Velvets but his stuff tends to be obscure and go in and out of print. So it was another few years before I tracked down a copy of Songs For Drella.
Listening to the album again just feels like the late nineties, living in a rundown four-bedroom apartment with Mandy and Justin and Kym later replaced by Vond, next door to Emily who basically never slept at her place. Late nights with Jonathan and Stephen, role-playing games with whoever run by whoever. Road trips to DC or Origins, a box of CDs to hand, making other people listen to Cale's "Pablo Picasso" or "Heartbreak Hotel" (yes). And sometimes, just sometimes, putting on "Songs for Drella" and listening to it all the way through.
I'm not that guy anymore, and I'm mostly glad for that, but sometimes he had really good taste.
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