The 1990 album Lou Reed wanted to cut John Cale out of: “I had to make choices”
It’s a well-known fact that Lou Reed could be acerbic, bitter, and biting. But was that really his best look when he was meant to be paying tribute to the dead?
It seemed that bringing up certain demons of his past was a catalyst for bad things to happen. But the year was 1987, and Andy Warhol was dead: a dark world without the effervescent, illuminating visionary artist had dawned, and it left the lives of all the legions of people he touched completely rudderless.
You knew things were really stark when Reed started talking to John Cale again. By this point, it had been almost two decades since the latter had left The Velvet Underground, and he and his former right-hand man hadn’t spoken in years. The circumstances of Warhol’s memorial had brought them back together for a rare moment of peaceful harmony, but it wasn’t long until things descended into their old ways of sparks and sparring.
They initially had the idea of a reunion, translating into the tribute album for Warhol named Songs for Drella. That all sounds very sweet and honourable, but once Reed got back in the driving seat and remembered why he struggled to work with Cale in the first place, his nasty habits of days gone by started to make an unwelcome appearance again.
To Cale’s mind, the process had gone swimmingly up to that point. “It was really easy to set it up,” he said during an event in 2018. “We agreed to do all this work. So we had three weeks. We rented a studio and recorded everything we did, and chose which ones were going to work. At the end, we looked at it, and it was fine.”
“We had really good ideas and some interesting music”.
John Cale
Then Reed had to hit the nuclear button.
“But at the end of the process – it’s always at the end of the process when something goes wrong – Lou just didn’t want my name on the record,” Cale recalled with a grimace. “So I had to make choices. I don’t know what you think I did do or didn’t do. But I didn’t do all this work so I could be insulted.”
The vagueness with which he described these “choices” makes the imagination run riot, conjuring up images of hurling insults and throwing punches. But at the end of the day, Cale could have a smug satisfaction in knowing that any of Reed’s efforts to remove him would be fruitless at this last-minute stage. “By that time, it was too late, and we put it out and made the film. But it was done with the right spirit and the right heart.”
The addendum tagged on to the end of that seems to imply that the original message and intention of honouring Warhol had somewhat fallen by the wayside amid all the fighting and snide moves, but then again, you couldn’t argue against the fact that it was created entirely out of Reed’s mean streak. There were times when he was perhaps right to pick up the battle axe, but paying tribute to his dead friend was not one of them.
Even still, Songs for Drella was released in 1990, and seemed to put an end to the whole affair. Reed and Cale took up the same amount of space on the cover and received equal amounts of lavish praise for their stirring tribute to a true artistic icon. Between friends and enemies, in this respect, at least they did manage to find some common ground.
