‘Songs For Drella’: The album Lou Reed and John Cale made for Andy Warhol
In the wake of tragedy, a new form of unity often shines through. In the darkness of grief after the passing of a loved one, there are often moments where people can gather, talk about the person they’ve lost, and all come together to support one another. Sometimes, death can help heal long-held wounds and finally bring people back together. There’s often a sense of any minor arguments or past feuds feeling small and meaningless in the wake of a big loss. That’s how it was for Lou Reed and John Cale as the two former bandmates put their differences aside to remember Andy Warhol, their friend and mentor.
For the loved ones of Andy Warhol, grief came in two waves as he technically died twice. In June 1968, the pop artist was shot by Valerie Solanas and during a lengthy surgery to save his life, he was medically dead for a few minutes. All of his friends and loved ones held their breath, devastated by the tragedy and waiting on their phones, expecting the worst to come through. But luckily, Warhol survived.
However, some believe it was still that shooting that killed him, only 19 years after the event. Solanas’ bullet tore through his spleen, stomach, liver, oesophagus, and lungs, so even after the surgery saved him, he was medically impacted for the rest of his years. In February 1987, when he was 58 years old, he died following a gallbladder surgery. After the operation, he was reportedly recovering well but then died in his sleep due to a post-operative irregular heartbeat. Following the shooting, the artist developed a major fear of hospitals and a clear complex about death, so he put off treatment and let his gallbladder issues worsen and worsen. So even though Solanas’ bullet didn’t kill him, her impact was still arguably fatal.
That fact, along with Warhol’s huge, looming legacy, made the news of his death incredibly hard for his friends and peers to process. He had been the centre of so many people’s social lives and careers for so long, so to lose him left a massive hole.
Lou Reed and John Cale were amongst those left reeling by his death. After the pair met in 1964 and formed The Velvet Underground, they met Warhol pretty soon after in 1965. From then on, their connection became a collaboration; Warhol managed the band and gave them a platform amongst his own unique world of musicians, actors and art society folk. In return, the ground became a project of his, collaborating on performance art pieces like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and following his lead when it came to decisions like letting Nico into the group for a while.
At the time, the split between the band and the artist was messy. “We got a lot of notoriety very quickly, attached to Andy. I guess Lou didn’t like that,” Cale recalled, adding, “The way [Reed] handled it and the way he did it was really destructive. I mean he just like blew up the band and fired Andy without telling anybody, and it was like, ‘What?’” After that, things started coming apart a bit. They fired Warhol in 1967, then Nico quit and then John Cale himself, ending not only his and Reed’s long-running musical partnership but their friendship too.
It was only with the clarity of hindsight that Reed could see how invaluable Warhol had been to the group. Not only did he give them notoriety, but he afforded them freedom, too. “I was a product of Andy Warhol’s Factory,” Reed said, “All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.” But being a part of that sphere and having Warhol at the helm meant something, as his seal of approval was unquestioned. Reed remembered of their early studio days with Warhol, “At one point the engineer would say, apropos of something we’d done, ‘Mr. Warhol, is that OK?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ And as a consequence of that, we experienced total freedom, because no one would change anything because Andy said it was great.”
The news of Warhol’s death made the importance of his role in their career and the years of friendship clearer than ever. All those arguments between Reed and Cale disappeared as they clocked eyes at Warhol’s funeral and knew it was time to put them aside and come together to honour their lost mentor.
The result was Songs For Drella. “Drella” was a nickname the factor scene had given Warhol, thought up by his superstar Odine, who saw him as a mix between Dracula and Cinderella. The choice for Reed and Cale to use it was a personal one, signalling that this was a deeply personal collection of songs by people who truly knew him. Across the songs, they explore their feelings about his death from all vantage points. Some of them dive into Warhol’s mind as the pair wrote songs from the perspective of their old friend. They wrote about his humble origins on ‘Smalltown’, and his home on ‘Openhouse’. They even wrote about the artist discovering the band, singing on ‘The Style It Takes’, “This is a rock group called the velvet underground / They play when we show movies, don’t you like their sound.”
Across the other songs, they sing of Warhol from a third-person view, chronicling his life in a more historical or academic way. But in the final songs, their view point becomes more personal as the musicians deal with their own grief towards his death. On ‘I Believe’, Reed deals with his anger over the death and the role Solanas played in it, singing, “I believe life’s serious enough for retribution / I believe being sick is no excuse and / I believe I would’ve pulled the switch on her myself.”
Obviously, with Warhol being such a notable public figure, Songs For Drella becomes a kind of historic artefact. But at its core, the album is a personal attempt to commemorate and mourn a friend, created in the coming together of two old friends able to put their problems aside in the wake of tragedy.
