{"id":3669,"date":"2017-04-02T21:20:55","date_gmt":"2017-04-02T20:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennywilson.org\/?p=3669"},"modified":"2017-04-02T21:20:55","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T20:20:55","slug":"velvet-underground-nico-john-cales-track-commentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/2017\/04\/02\/velvet-underground-nico-john-cales-track-commentary\/","title":{"rendered":"Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale’s Track Commentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>John Cale offers his memories of recording each song on the iconic Velvet Underground debut<\/p>\n

Source: Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale’s Track Commentary<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s heard the famous maxim, generally accredited to legendary music producer Brian Eno: while the Velvet Underground\u2019s debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico<\/em><\/a>, sold a paltry 30,000 copies upon release in 1967, every person who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band. Though a slight exaggeration, the line is a testament to the album\u2019s far-reaching influence trumping its commercial failure. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker\u00a0merged raw rock and roll with\u00a0<\/span>musique concr\u00e8te and the avant-garde to\u00a0create an untamed and menacing sound that perfectly underscored\u00a0their\u00a0poetic tales of drug deals,\u00a0sadomasochistic sex and other snapshots of the urban underworld.<\/p>\n

Emboldened\u00a0by\u00a0manager and patron Andy Warhol\u2014who linked them up with featured vocalist, Nico\u2014the Velvet Underground\u2019s\u00a0brand of leather-clad Lower East Side cool emerged onto vinyl with all of its grit and daring intact, serving as a beacon to generations of young artists unwilling to conform to pop music niceties. Decades ahead of its time, it planted the seeds for\u00a0punk, glam, goth, and a host of others genres to flourish.<\/p>\n

In honor of the groundbreaking album\u2019s 50th anniversary this month, Cale spoke to PEOPLE about his memories recording The Velvet Underground & Nico<\/em>. Read on for his exclusive track by track commentary.<\/p>\n

\u201cSunday Morning<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cThat happened one Sunday morning at Lou\u2019s friend\u2019s house. We were out boozing and running around the Lower East Side and Lou suddenly had a great idea. He said, \u2018Hey, I\u2019ve got a friend who lives around the corner, let\u2019s go see him.\u2019 And it was like three o\u2019clock [in the morning]. I said, \u2018Yeah, ok!\u2019 We ran over, and he had a harmonium in the corner of his living room. Generally what we did when we went anywhere, we just zeroed in on the instruments and started playing. It was kind of manic\u2014anywhere you\u2019d go, if you saw an instrument you\u2019d just pick it up and start playing. Lou saw the guitar, I saw the harmonium, and off we went writing \u2018Sunday Morning.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m Waiting for the Man<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cI remember the first gigs we did with just him and me \u2014I had a recorder and a viola, and he had an acoustic guitar. We\u2019d go sit on the sidewalk outside the Baby Grand [bar] up in Harlem on 125th<\/sup> and see if we could make some money. Every time we got moved on the cop always had a suggestion of where we should go. \u2018Try 75th<\/sup> on Broadway! That\u2019s a good spot.\u2019 So we\u2019d go down there and make a little bit more money.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFemme Fatale<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cAndy saw that Lou was moping around the factory, and he gave him a list of words. He said, \u2018Here are 14 words, go write songs with these words.\u2019 And Lou was never happier. He had a task in hand and he sat down. That was a lot of fun for him. We had our own thing going [before Warhol] but he showed up and was more of a guy helping us not forget who we were. He would always say things like, \u2018Tell Lou, don\u2019t forget to put little swear words in that song.\u2019 He was reminding us of who we really were. And he didn\u2019t have to say very much to do that, he could just be around and it would be like that because he\u2019d notice what was going on around you. He\u2019d notice the art that was going on. We didn\u2019t understand it. We were just flabbergasted by it, but we loved it at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cVenus in Furs<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cLou wrote \u2018Venus in Furs\u2019 while we were playing around when we met at Pickwick. He told me that the label wouldn\u2019t let him record all of the songs he really wanted to do. That sort of pissed me off. I asked him what they were and he showed them to me. He\u2019d play them on acoustic guitar and I said, \u2018These are rock songs. These can be really big and orchestral if you want them to be.\u2019 Then I said, \u2018Let\u2019s just do it ourselves, let\u2019s get our own label and get our own recording situation\u2014not here.\u2019 So we put a band together. That was a signature number for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRun Run Run<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201c\u2019Run Run Run\u2019 was always the first number to do, because it was up-tempo and got everybody going. It was great.\u201d\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAll Tomorrow\u2019s Parties<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cWe had made the arrangement for \u2018All Tomorrow\u2019s Parties\u2019 before Nico came along. That was the result of a year of weekend work\u2014sitting around on the weekend and just playing and playing and playing and playing until you slowly gradually moved out of the folk music side of things.<\/p>\n

The record was all done with just us playing, there were no effects involved in that. We tried a version where Nico doubles her vocal, but the vocal just became too heavy. \u201cBut the noise of putting paper clips in between the strings of the piano gave it a ring that made it a little more orchestral. We were trying to make orchestral stuff. We were trying to be Phil Spector, really. Phil Spector would mix Wagnerian orchestrations with R&B. That was a really unique combination. We had the drone. The viola wasn\u2019t wasn\u2019t used, so the piano became the drone. Whenever we\u2019d try to do something, we\u2019d always try to find something that would be the drone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHeroin<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201c\u2019Heroin\u2019 is really special. At that point it was kind of a resident of the band because it was so important to the set. Everybody had heard of it. It was one of the attractions of the set, apart from the attitude of the band. Whatever we were doing, we were trying to get more people in the door. But we had a lot of different ideas of how to do that. My idea of getting people in the door was doing something experimental. I tried to get Lou to see that we don\u2019t have to do the same set every night. That was a direct result of all these club owners in New York saying, \u2018You\u2019ve got to play one or two songs that are in the top 10, otherwise you won\u2019t get a gig.\u2019 We said, \u2018We\u2019re not doing that. We\u2019ve got our own numbers.\u2019 And until Andy showed up we barely got any venues at all. I thought, \u2018One selling point that we can have is that we never do the same set twice.\u2019 We improvised songs every night, which was rather fun with Lou. I said, \u2018We can give Dylan a run for his money if we just improvise every night, because our lyrics are just as good.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere She Goes Again<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cThat was probably the easiest one, with a soul riff from Marvin Gaye. You could hear Lou\u2019s time at Pickwick writing pop songs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll Be Your Mirror<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cLou was writing songs for Nico, and some of the best songs he\u2019d written were written for her. That was one of them. She was becoming more interested at that time in being her own songwriter. She\u2019d sit down and write poetry, and to her it was in a foreign language. She was trying to find poetic language in a foreign language, because she was German-speaking. But she was determined, she bought a harmonium for herself and was really single-minded about doing all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Black Angel\u2019s Death Song<\/a>\u201c<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201c\u2019Black Angel Death Song\u2019 no one ever got. It would go over everybody\u2019s head. But in general, I think what people responded to, even if they didn\u2019t understand it, was the energy that we had. Lou and I, we knew we could play these songs, but we were never genuflecting to each other about how to play them. The performances were more done as a bald statement of fact: \u2018This is what we do. Whether you like it or not, we don\u2019t care.\u2019 And we didn\u2019t care whether we played it well. We really were on top of that. And we were excited about what we were doing. And then the band gets a record deal right away? Come on, that\u2019s great. Really exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEuropean Son<\/a>\u201d<\/u><\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201c\u2019European Son\u2019 in my mind was purely for improvisation. Whenever we played anywhere, we couldn\u2019t wait to get to the point where we\u2019d improvise and do \u2018European Son.\u2019 It was always different. That was the fun part for us, doing those improvisations. And those improvisations would really get the best of us in the end, because they\u2019d go on and on and on and on. We\u2019d be up there for an hour just improvising before we\u2019d even done a song! In San Diego we did that. That\u2019s kind of the rep we had when we got to San Francisco and L.A.<\/p>\n

Bill Graham didn\u2019t appreciate all the songs and improvisations that were going on. He thought we were invading [the San Francisco group\u2019s] territory. There wasn\u2019t much love lost between us and the West Coast. Lou was always talking about, \u2018Never mind the flower children, give us the hard drugs!\u2019 We were happy that Woodstock ended up in the mud\u2014that kind of resentment was very healthy, I thought.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Cale offers his memories of recording each song on the iconic Velvet Underground debut Source: Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale’s Track Commentary Everyone\u2019s heard the famous maxim, generally accredited to legendary music producer Brian Eno: while the Velvet Underground\u2019s debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, sold a paltry 30,000 copies upon release in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,36,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-andy-warhol","category-new-york","category-the-velvet-underground"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}