“All the enjoyment was receding”: the 1960s band that made John Cale hate rock and roll
For a group whose output is often held up as a prime example of 1960s cultural revolution and musical experimentation, The Velvet Underground acted in absolute defiance of the decade. Everything that emerged from the fingertips of John Cale and Lou Reed came as a rejection of the ‘flower power’ era that they are often unjustly lumped in with.
While the rest of the rock and roll landscape was busy with expansive, acid-dripped jam sessions or ‘peace and love’ folk odysseys, The Underground were concocting something entirely different.
With Lou Reed taking more inspiration from the realm of 1950s R&B than anything being played at Woodstock, and Cale carving out his own distinctive sensibilities as an unpredictable experimenter, their home base of Andy Warhol’s Factory became the only place during that era where you could go and hear the sounds of the future.
Although often overshadowed by Reed, John Cale’s contributions to the band were absolutely essential in establishing that reputation. You only need to look at the band’s declining quality in the wake of the songwriter’s departure in 1968 to understand what a gaping hole he left in the group. Still, his experimental tendencies were not instilled in Cale from his birth in the Welsh mining town of Garnant.
Cale’s interest in music was instilled in him at a young age, and he was such a talent that he made it into the National Youth Orchestra of Wales before earning a scholarship to study music in London. However, if there was one moment where his musical tendencies became radicalised, beginning the avant-garde interest that would typify both his time with the Velvets and his subsequent solo career, it was the moment he heard The Beatles for the first time.
While being exposed to the Fab Four was a revelation for countless budding songwriters and musicians, Cale had an expectedly unique, subversive experience with Liverpool’s favourite sons. “I woke up one day and said, ‘Wait a minute, there are people running around singing Beatles songs,’” he once told Rolling Stone. “The Beatles invasion was going on.”
Rather than celebrating that explosion of Beatlemania, Cale sought to attack and destroy the kind of musical tribalism that the band brought with them. “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,’” he explained of his plans to break down the barriers of the pop world. “I wanted to cross-pollinate rock with the avant-garde, and then I met Lou Reed, and that was the solution.”
In essence, that was the manifesto of The Velvet Underground: to subvert normality and tear down the typical conventions of rock and pop music. While Cale might have been an appreciator of The Beatles’ music, particularly once they decided to trip out and move away from the bubblegum pop of their early years, he could not abide them being the be-all and end-all when it came to the musical landscape.
The Velvet Underground might never have rivalled The Beatles in commercial success – in fact, the group couldn’t rival virtually anybody in terms of commercial success during their tenure – but those collaborations between Cale and Reed ended up being incredibly influential on the development of similarly revolutionary, against-the-grain rock that followed in later years.
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