White Heat: Lou Reed vs. John Cale

Two burgeoning musical geniuses came together in the mid-60s to form the Velvet Underground, a group that expanded the definition of what a rock band could be. Lou Reed’s literary ambitions led him to craft lyrics steeped in the gritty language of the streets, while John Cale called upon his background in the avant garde music scene of downtown Manhattan. Their unique talents coalesced on tracks like “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray,” and “Heroin,” groundbreaking songs that laid the groundwork for punk, art-rock, and many other genres to come. The Velvet Underground’s historical influence cannot be overstated, but their lack of commercial success led to heightened tensions in the group. Reed felt his dominance challenged by Cale’s musical virtuosity and forced him out of the band, which would never achieve the same level of musical daring. Their prolific solo careers in the ’70s and beyond bore traces of their ex-partner, as Reed sought to bolster his artistic credentials with noise experiments, while Cale developed his gift for melody and song craft. Ultimately, it was the unexpected death of their estranged one-time benefactor, Andy Warhol, that brought the pair back together to make peace with themselves, their troubled history, and their towering musical legacy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Rivals is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to Rivals, the show about music, beefs and
feuds and long simmering resentments between musicians. I'm Steve and

(00:21):
I'm Jordan, and today we're gonna talk about Lou Reed
and John Kale, who's on easy Partnership form the crux
of the Velvet Underground. I gotta say the phrase drug
fueled is overused, but it's pretty unavoidable in this case.
So get ready for a lot of leather, whip speed,
unlistenable records and some decapitated chickens. Why not? Can I
also add the word genius to this equation? You know,

(00:42):
I think that word is overused in most contexts, but
I think it more than applies to both of these guys,
who rank among the greatest and most influential artists ever
to work in the realms of punk, indie, alternative and
underground music. I mean, you can't write the history of
outside of rock music in the twentieth century without devoting
at LEAs is a couple of chapters to Lou Reid
and John Klee. Oh totally. I mean Lou and John

(01:04):
pushed the envelope in so many different ways, but they
did so in very different ways in the time in
the Velvet Underground, like Lou wanted to do so by
incorporating the sort of rough and raw language of the
streets and writing these really highly literate lyrics to create
what he thought was sort of rock and roll for adults,
and John Klee wanted to incorporate his ideas from his
time in the avant garde scene in the Lower East

(01:25):
Side of New York. He worked with people like Lamont
Young and John Cage, And for me, the best Velvet
Underground songs are songs like Heroin Venus and Furs and
All Tomorrow's Parties, which utilized really both of their approaches.
And when Lu forced John out of the band, it
really became for me a totally different band. And there
are some who say that when he fired John Kale
was his biggest creative mistake in a career really characterized

(01:48):
by a lot of self sabotage. Yeah, I was gonna say,
like ranking all of the self sabotage and Lou Reid's career,
I mean, that would be an incredible list, you know,
but like, yeah, you could say that forcing John Kale
out of the Velvet Underground was a mistake. But on
the other hand, we are again talking about two geniuses here,
and it's hard to imagine any man that could have
contained talents as forceful and idiots and critic as Louis

(02:09):
and John Kale for like a sustained period of time.
What's interesting to me is that when you listen to
the records that they made apart from each other, I
feel like you could hear the presence of the other guy.
I mean, they really did continue to influence and even
haunt each other's records for years after they split. So
you know, there's lots to dive into with this. I'm
excited to get into it. So without further ado, let's

(02:29):
get into this mess. Lou Reid was really someone who
from an early age felt suffocated by social norms and
the conformity of the post war era. He was born
in Brooklyn, and his dad was an account and his
mom was a scenographer, and they moved out the Long
Island in the suburbs, not far from like the Levitt
Town tract houses, like the height of fifties conformity. Uh.

(02:53):
And you know, even as a little boy, he seemed
miserable he attended Hebrews School. Anybody later describe it as
like being in a concentration camp. So not exactly a happy,
go lucky little boy here. And really, even at this
early age, he felt removed from his peers, and there
was a friend in school would later say that while
most kids were sneaking beers, Lou was smoking joints and
reading French erotic fiction like the Story of Oh and Uh.

(03:16):
It was sort of the first sign that Lou might
not be completely heterosexual. His parents took him to a
psychiatrist and they famously administered he really brutal electroshock therapy
that really read havoc on his mind and his outlook
on the world. I mean, he felt this was a
huge betrayal from the people who were meant to protect

(03:36):
him and uh, really, I think that colored his view
of the world as a sort of even darker and
scarier place, and he already imagined it and uh, and
his relationship with his family really never recovered. There was
a story when he was out walking with his friends
as an adult in New York and his friends and
the only time he ever saw Lou read afraid was
when he accidentally bumped into his family on the street,

(03:56):
so that that says a lot about him, I think, yeah,
And I think we're going to see that the relationship
that he had, I think, especially with his father, you
know how troubled that was, it's going to, I think,
color some of the other relationships that he has with
other men in his life, like the crucial relationships. And
I think the first example we're going to see of
that is when lou Reid goes to college at Syracuse

(04:20):
University and he's at school, he's interested in becoming a writer,
and initially he had thought that he might become a journalist,
which to me is hilarious considering that lou Reid, I think,
more than any other rock star, like it's famous for
hating journalists and like torturing journalists. He was also playing
folk guitar at this time and really worshiping at the

(04:40):
altar of Bob Dylan like a lot of other I think,
aspiring songwriters in the early sixties. All the while he
was developing this very cynical, sarcastic and often like just
flat out meme persona that I think ultimately was a
defense mechanism for his own insecurity and fragility. I mean
that is an old clear say about bullies, that they

(05:01):
are deep down, you know, very insecure and fragile people.
But I think that was certainly true of of lou Reid.
But a crucial meeting that he makes at Syracuse is
with the poet Delmore Schwartz, who becomes I think the
first of his like surrogate father figures. And you know,
if you're a lou Reid fan, you know Delmore Schwartz.
If you've like read lou Reed biographies, Delmore Schwartz appears

(05:25):
lots of times. There's also that great song My House
from the Blue Mask two, like one of the great
lou Reid records, and that song is a tribute to
Delmore Schwartz. And I think Delmore, you know, he was
the first again of these like surrogate father figures. I
think Andy Warhol was going to end up being that,
And in a weird way, I feel like that also
applies to John Kle maybe not a father figure per se,

(05:48):
but a mentor type figure who is gonna help Blue
I think, again compensate for that insecurity that he has
about his own talent. But going back to the timeline
here at Syracuse, University, louis starting to experiment with songwriting,
and supposedly he starts getting into songwriting because it's hard
for him to concentrate on longer form prose writing, I

(06:11):
guess because of his electric shock therapy, like that really
screwed him up mentally, made it hard for him to
kind of focus on more sort of novelistic typewriting. But
he already had this idea at Syracuse that he wanted
to take that street level rock and roll that he
loved as a kid, like he was a huge doo
wop fan back then, like Dion and the Belmonts, exactly

(06:32):
infusing that with the gritty street level literature that he loved,
like he was a huge fan of, like Hubert Selby's
Last Exit to Brooklyn. So like, how do you take
less exit to Brooklyn with like this great gritty New
York doo wop rock music, Well you end up with
songs like Heroin, you know. And he was already tinkering
with Heroin the song and also the drug of course

(06:55):
when he was at Syracuse, although it would be many
years before the outside world would hear that song. And
it's really interesting because his first job out of college
is working at a sort of budget label called Pickwick,
and what they would do is they would basically write
knockoff versions of hits. And it's sort of here that
he really hones his gift for melody, because he's listening

(07:16):
to hit songs and trying to basically rip them off
and making twenty five bucks a week to do so.
And he writes a song that's kind of a parody
of the dance crazes that we're sweeping the nation in
the early sixties, like the Twist and the and the
Watusi and stuff like that. It's called the Ostrich and
it's a total joke song. I mean it has lyrics
like put your head on the floor and have somebody
step on it like very It's Blue Red writing a

(07:38):
dance craze parody song and um, and he writes it
in this really unique way. He takes his guitar strings
and d tunes them all so they're all playing the
same note, so it sounds almost like a sit tard.
It's this drone sound. It's this really weird sound. And
he releases the song. The Ostrich is given a fake
band name called the Primitives. It's just a bunch of
studio musicians and the song actually does reasonably well, and

(08:01):
the label wants to promote it by putting a band
together and go out and play it on the road.
And lu doesn't really know anybody to play with, and
he's looking around to try to find somebody to UH
to put this, make this fake band the reality, and
that's how he meets John Kale. Yeah, and I love
the beginnings of their relationship because it almost sounds like
the Monkeys or something, you know, this prefabricated band. And

(08:23):
the appeal of John Kale to lou Reid at that
time was one that he had long hair and to
that John Kale is from Wales, so he had a
Welsh accent which was close enough to a British accent
to you know, tie them in with the British invasion,
which was of course very big at the time. John Kale,
of course, had very little connection otherwise to rock music.
He was already a rising star in the classical and

(08:46):
avant garde scenes. The reason that he ended up in
America is that he was awarded this very prestigious UH
scholarship is like the Leonard Bernstein Scholarship to study musical composition,
and he was actually interviewed for that position by Aaron Copeland,
like this very legendary composer. So John Kale was already

(09:07):
like rubbing shoulders like with modern musical giants at this time.
When he ended up in New York, he cooked up
with this guy Lamont Young, who at the time was
considered to be at the vanguard of avant garde classical
music composition. He had taken over that mantle from John
Cage in the early sixties. And John Cage, by the way,

(09:29):
also had a connection to John Kale. Actually, John Klee
had some notoriety and I guess like the hippest parts
of the avant garden scene in New York because he
had been photographed performing with John Cage on stage. So
people saw that photo, it was published in the newspaper.
So he had some like I guess, like like a
modicum of celebrity, like among those circles. It's interesting to

(09:52):
because like when he first heard lou Reads songs, John
Kale didn't like them because musically they just sounded like
folk music to him. And of course John Kale is
coming from this classical and avant garde background and he
just thought folk music was boring and conservative. It wasn't
until he started paying attention to lou Read's lyrics that
the songs really started to connect with him, and he

(10:14):
could appreciate like how sophisticated the words were, how literary
they were, how gritty they were, and how lou Reid
was already writing about the sorts of things that people
didn't talk about in pop music, and it really entranced
John Kale and he basically just like a bandoned Lamont
Young and started working with lou Reed, which in retrospect
seems like a natural decision to make, but in the

(10:36):
you know, mid sixties, was a pretty like strong vote
of confidence for lou Reid. You know that he would
take up with this guy that really like didn't have
a pot to piss in at that point, and their
relationship early on it really was like a true friendship.
You know. Kale has talked about how lou Reid was
the was his first real friend in America, and he

(10:58):
felt that lou Reid in a way taught him how
to survive in New York. You know, like we think
of lou Reid as being like this quintessential New York character.
He's of course written about New York in rock music
as well as anybody, but even back then he was
a native of the area. He knew the lay of
the land, almost like a Ratzo Rizzo type figure that

(11:19):
had been that cowboy type thing. So he looked to
lou Reid for that. Also, lou Reid introduced junk Kill
to Heroin. They started shooting up together at this time,
which is I guess a dubious thing for your friend
to introduce you to you. Maybe that's a down thing,
but like it did, you know, bond them together. Looking
at it from lou Read's perspective, you know, I said

(11:40):
this earlier, you know, talking about John Kale being a mentor,
maybe not so much like a father figure, but he
did seem almost like a record producer for lou Reid
in a way. Like Kile himself said that he felt
like he took on a Spengali like role with lou
Reid because lou had all this talent, he had good
songs already, but he was suffering from depression, and Cale said,

(12:02):
I think he used the phrase low energy to describe
lou Reid at this time, which is a very Trumpian phrase. Now,
but you know, he said he was low energy like
so Cale kind of encouraged him and said, like, look,
you have talent and we could do something together. And
I'm sure Kle thought in his own mind that like,

(12:23):
I can take the words that this guy's written and
sort of realized them musically and really take it to
a whole different place. And and that right there, I
think you can see like the velvet underground starting to
take shape. Yeah. Absolutely, Lou was really in a fragile
place at this time, and not only just psychologically because
he'd been he'd just gone through this this really traumatic

(12:43):
therapy and prescribed all of these tranquilizers. And I think
upon his one of his first meetings with John, he said,
you know, they think I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy,
And John said to him, You're not crazy, come on,
come make music with me. And I think, I mean,
it's difficult to imagine now how badly Lou probably needed
to hear that and all these songs that he was

(13:04):
playing for John's his record label didn't want to know
anything about, you know, Pickwick Records, who was trying to
make off knockoff hit songs, don't want to hear Heroin.
So to get such a vote of confidence from this
guy who has you know, rubbed shoulders with Aaron Copeland
would have been huge for Lou at this time. So
so they shot up at this Lower Eastside basically a
tenement house, which was you know, the landlord would come

(13:24):
and collect rent with a shotgun because it was a
really rough neighborhood. And they spent about a year, uh,
kind of coalescing their sound. And like you said, John
sort of serves as a sort of a musical director,
and they both have this incredible gift for improvisation, and
they just would have these jams at they're at their flat,
and John would kind of move lose folky songs over
into more of the stuff that he was doing with

(13:45):
Lamont Young, which was also very drone bassed. I think
that was a musical connection early on was when John
heard the Ostrich song and it was played with this
D tuned guitar that was like a drone. He thought,
wait a minute, this is very similar to the kind
of work I do. So they had that point of
connection early on too, but John shaped it a little
more and uh, and that that really, as you said,

(14:06):
sort of the genesis of the Velvet Undergrounds just was
those two. I love the story about Lou Reid and
John Kale like Busking and Harlem at this time, and
like I think Lou had an acoustic guitar and John
would have a viola and they'd just be playing on
a street corner. I don't know if they were playing
Velvet Underground songs. There's no way this happened, but I
would love to imagine that there was like a bootlegger

(14:27):
recording some of those busting performances. That be incredible. But
as far as the Vote Underground goes and their lineup solidifies,
once they add Sterling Morrison on guitar and Mo Tucker
on drums, and you know, as unusual to rock music
as I think Lou Read songs were, and John Kale's
you know, classical avant garde background, you know, Morrison and

(14:49):
Tucker I think brought their own flavor to the band,
especially Mo Tucker, I mean, who I think is a
great drummer, but certainly not a conventional rock drummer by
any structure that imagine San All these elements were going
to go a long way to ensuring that the Velvet Underground,
we're not going to sound like any other rock band
that came before them, which again is great. Now when

(15:10):
we think about the Boat Underground, you know, this iconic,
you know band of American rock music, but in their
own time, it was very difficult to find a place
that was appropriate for them to play. Like if you
heard that story about like how they would play like
high school auditoriumspac then like who, I have no idea, like, yeah,
you booked Underground, like for like the Sok Hop or something.

(15:33):
I don't even know, like what the occasion would be
to have the Vote Underground come through Ladies Choice for
Heroin and even like when they were playing like Greenwich
Village venues. You know, the Bote Underground didn't really fit
in because they weren't a folk band. You know, the
folks scene of course was still pretty big at that time,
and they weren't you know, like a beatlesque British Invasion

(15:55):
type group. You know, they were definitely something very different
and again much more provocative and noisy than bands were
at that time. There's a great story about them playing
I think somewhere in New York where they're playing Sister Ray,
which is one of the great Devin Underground songs, this epic,
you know, like twenty minute or so Noise, Noise, Opus
and uh. The the owner of the bar where they

(16:18):
were playing was like, you know, don't play that song again.
You know, I don't want to hear that song. It's
just the cacophonous mess. So then they proceed in their
next set to play a forty five minute version of
Sister Ray where the entire set is just them blaring
away on Sister Ray, which is so awesome for us now,
like that is why we love the even Underground. But
you know, you could see how in the moment it

(16:39):
wasn't the best thing for their career, right, And so
I think they ended up losing that gig. But fortuitously,
somebody from Andy Warhol's factory had actually seen them play
at this at this venue, and we're got back to
to Andy that this was a pretty cool band. And Andy,
by this point in sixty early sixty six, he was
already a prolific painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and he was trying

(16:59):
to expand and his sort of factory empire into rock
and roll, and uh and and he dropped in and
he saw the band perform and he really liked them,
and he offered to be there their manager, and this
kind of had very loose connotations. I think he was
almost more of like an executive producer. He sort of
financed their records and gave them spots at his multimedia
art shows, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and he used his

(17:22):
clout to get them record deals. I mean that Lou
Reid would say in later years that he thought that
the band got their first record deal because Andy agreed
to do the sleeve for their album, which is you know,
probably true at that time. As far as shaping their sound,
he really didn't do much. He he he urged Lou
to keep the dirty words in his lyrics. That was
his big his big, his big insight. And he also

(17:44):
he would just sort of hector Lou to write more.
I mean, in a lot of ways, he wanted to
Lou to write in the same way that Andy himself
would just crank out prints and silk screens at his factory.
You know, he treated it like work, and he was
incredibly prolific. Lu less so so to be helpful, and
he would would just throw song titles at him. Are
just things that he thought would make good song titles
and just kind of urge him to keep writing. And

(18:06):
the other main influence that Andy had on the Velvet
Underground was he thought they weren't glamorous enough. He thought
they were kind of boring to look at. So he suggested,
suggested it's kind of two weak a word. He forced
them to team up with this very striking German model
known as Nico Yes. And this ends up being a
big point of contention, especially for lou Reid, because he

(18:29):
wants us to be his band, you know, as far
as he's concerned, he's the front man. And now Andy
Warhol wants to put in essentially a new lead singer
into the band, this beautiful blonde German woman who is
only going to distract the audience from lou Reid. And
he already has to worry about John Klee being in
the band. You know, it was already I think pretty
apparent that while lou Reid was writing the songs. I

(18:50):
think John Klee was just as important in The Velvet
Underground early on as lou Reid was, as again as
a musical director and as like a sonic innovator. In
the Velvet Underground, it's hilarious to me that h lou
Reid ended up writing this song Sunday Morning, which is
like maybe the prettiest pop song on the first Velvet

(19:11):
Underground record, and it was supposed to be for Nico
to sing, but then I guess he realized that was
such a great song that like he wanted to sing
it himself, so, you know, very resistant to bringing in Nico.
I have to say though, that I think Andy Warhol's
instincts were correct. I love the fact that Nico's on
that first record, and when you have songs like fem

(19:34):
Fatale and I'll Be Your Mirror, those are just like
perfectly like crafted for her persona, and I think it
brings something unique to that record that sets it apart
from the other Velvet Underground records. What's also interesting, I guess,
like in a behind the scenes kind of way with
a Velvet Underground, is that lou Reid and John Cale
both had flings with Nico and Um like around the

(19:58):
same time, right around the same time. And think like
I mean didn't like lou Reid like Wright fem fatall
like about that, like like Atwood, Yeah, you know, early
rumors type record UM and I have to imagine that
there was some tension, like between Lou and John over

(20:19):
that that they were involved with the same woman. Or
maybe it was just the sixties and people were cooler
about that sort of thing. But I would think that
that would, you know, sort of exacerbate the sense of
competition that was already brewing between these guys. Yeah, it's funny.
It's it's almost like with David Crosby and Graham Nash.
But Joni Mitchell, It's been spoken about so much over
the years, but I've never heard any like stories of

(20:41):
resentment about that. But you're right, it has to have
played some kind of role in in just the growing
tensions between them. It must have. But so called Banana album,
it goes on to become, you know, one of the
most influential albums of all time, stripping away the legend,
though I think you can kind of see the schism
between Nico and the rest of the band. I mean,
Lou insists did that the album be called The Velvet Underground,

(21:02):
and Nico just to underscore the fact that she really
wasn't part of the group. This was like, you know,
a collaborative thing, and she wasn't in the Velvet Underground,
and I think that there's I mean, Ne's necessarily in
a bad way, because it's one of the things that
makes it cool about it. There's a certain lack of
cohesion I think on the album. I mean, just the
differences from song to song are jarring, you know, in
a way. In a way, it's like a microcosm of

(21:23):
Lose solo career just distilled into one disc. And just
looking at the first four songs, You've got Sunday Morning,
which is just the catchiest, breeziest song. It almost sounds
like sinister. It's you almost imagine he's like a knife
behind his back when he's singing it or something. It's
like a parody of a Harper's Bizarre track or something.
He really sends his his past working at as a

(21:44):
as a hit cribber at Pigwick Records, coming to the
four here, and then you've got the relentless I'm Waiting
for the Man, which is you know, punk a decade
early with his street poetry that I think recounts Low
and John's journey uptown to busk and to sell drugs.
And then you've got Nico coming in for fem Fatal
with her sort of Germanic accent, slightly flat reading of

(22:05):
lose lyrics. And then of course you have Venus and First,
which to me is when you hear Velvet Underground for
the first time. I mean, you know Venus and First.
It might be about S and M, it could be
about anything, just it's so musically shocking that it is
just never anything like it before. Yeah, I think with
Venus in Furs on that first record, that is where
the Velvet Underground really makes a break from rock music

(22:26):
as it existed before that album. You know, the collision
of noise and subversive lyrics. You know that menacing feeling
that you were talking about, and how it all holds
together with surprising melody. I mean, that record is so
noisy and like repulsive in a lot of ways, but
it's also very seductive and uh, you know it, there's

(22:49):
a magnetism to it that draws you into the murk
and the direc and the filth, even as like you
feel haunted by it. You know, to me, that's just
the Velvet Underground by in a nutshell. And then of
course you have Heroin, which we've already talked about. I mean,
That's another obvious landmark on this record. I mean much
has been said about like how groundbreaking the lyrics are,

(23:11):
but the way the music conveys what the lyrics are
expressing to me is like is the true brilliance. I
think of that track, it's it's addiction, you can't stop,
it gets going faster and faster, you can't get off
this train. It's it's incredible, and it's incredible with the
way he was able to convey that. Yeah, And I think,
you know, you can really see like the way that
Kale connected with Reed's words and how he was able

(23:32):
to convey what those words were expressing musically, you know,
to me, like Heroin is like the peak of that.
And look, so much has been said about the first
Relevet Underground record, one of the greatest and most influential
rock records of all time, and it really shows the
power of what lou Reid and John Kale could do together.
But unfortunately it's also in many ways the beginning of

(23:54):
the end, because we see that their partnership is going
to like pretty quickly disintegrate after that. And I think
it really starts with lou Reid's decision to fire Andy
Warhol as their manager, which let's just take a moment
to appreciate, like how ballsy that was of loue Reid
to do that, because Andy Warhol, you know, was maybe
the most famous artists in the world at that time,

(24:17):
I mean, if not the most famous, like among the
most famous, just a huge media star. And as you
said before, I mean it's unlikely the Velvet Underground would
have even had a record deal if Andy Warhol hadn't
designed their album cover and like literally put his name
on the cover of the record. Like I don't think
the Velvet Underground's name is on the cover of the

(24:39):
Banana record, but like Andy Warhol's name is, you know,
which I think tells you a lot about uh, you know,
the level of celebrity that he had at that time.
But um, I think for lou Reid, he came to
see Andy warhol celebrity as a liability at some point
that like this guy who uh you know, was there manager,

(25:00):
was in many ways bigger than the band that he
was managing, and you really start to see lou Reid,
i think, asserting himself as like the sole tour of
this band, like he wants to be the one perceived
to be in the driver's seat, and I think when
that first record ultimately proved to be a commercial failure,
it was probably like justification enough in his mind to

(25:22):
make a change in management. So they end up hiring
this guy named Steve says Nick, who is essentially like
a Lou Read loyalist. And that's certainly how John Kale
sees it, because from his perspective, you know, this new
manager comes in and he's really pushing Lou Read to
the forefront, and Kale is starting to feel marginalized in

(25:42):
this band. And I think rightly he felt like he
was a co pilot at the Underground, But because of
this new manager and also Lou Reid, you know, his
insecurity or his need for power, however you want to
put it, it's putting John Kale in a corner. And
John Kale is not going to be comfortable in that
corner for very much longer. All right hand, we'll be
right act with more rivals, and this sets the stage

(26:11):
for sessions for it would become white light, white heat,
and Lou feels liberated at this point. He'spired Warhol, He's
gotten rid of Nico at this point as well, It
gave him a taste of what true control felt like,
and he was less and less inclined to compromise with
the band, and the pushing pool between him and John
is really apparent in this album, and it's been characterized
as a sonic war. Kale is still this musical director

(26:34):
and he's adding form to lose improvisation. But Read's insistence
on sort of making melody more, you know, giving more
importance to melody and and narrative lyrical narrative reigned back
some of John's wilder experiments. And for Kle, he really
saw this as as an experiment and what he called
anti beauty. It was like sort of the antithesis of commercial.

(26:55):
He would say, I wanted to fund these songs up
and uh Mo Tucker called it structed lunacy, which is
also really good. And it makes sense that this is
John Kle's last album with them because Lou was trying
to push things in a more commercial direction. He wanted
this to be a commercial success and uh and John
Cabel later saying, you know the problem with the Velovets
was it was always a conflict between doing revolutionary songs

(27:15):
like Venus and Furs and pretty songs, and you know,
John obviously was on the side of what he called
the revolutionary songs. And I think the best illustration of
this kind of sonic war was s ster Ray, which
is this seventeen minute you know, done in one take.
Because everybody was more or less fed up with each
other at this point, I said, Okay, you know, do
whatever you want. We're going We're giving it all. We

(27:36):
got to this one take, and it's really indicative of
their relationship because I mean, it just sounds like a
musical battle, like especially when John turns his organ up
about ten minutes in starts trying to blast through lose guitar.
I mean it, it's really it's striking to hear. And uh,
I think that for all of the collaboration that they
had on the album that works so well, Lou would

(27:57):
still pull these kind of sneaky power moves, like I
think he remixed the Masters behind the band's back, and
he would later claim full ownership of all the writing
and arranging, which which obviously kissed Kale off. But you know,
if if White Light White Heat Like was a war
between you know, John Kale, like you said one to
do revolutionary songs, and lou Read wanted to do pretty songs.
Then John Kale like won that album because that is

(28:20):
a very noisy record. There are moments of beauty on it,
but like it's definitely like the chaos wins out on
that record. Uh, and the Velvets wouldn't make a record
remotely like that after John kle laughed. I mean, if
you listen to you know, the self titled album and Loaded,
they're much more straightforward, conventional sounding rock records. I think

(28:40):
they're both wonderful albums, loaded with just tons of great
Lou Read songs, but that uh, innovative musical quality that
the first two Velvet Underground records have, I mean, they're
undeniably missing from the next two records. What's interesting to
me is this binary that existed at this time between

(29:02):
like lou Reid supposedly wanted to do pretty songs and
John Kylee wanted wanting to do noisy songs. Because if
you look at their subsequent like solo careers, I think
John Kale made like a like many albums that are
very pretty and like very kind of singer songwriter oriented.
I mean really like his most celebrated solo records like
Paris nineteen nineteen or vintage Violence. Uh, you know, it's

(29:25):
like piano bassed songs that have great melodies. And he
has a really nice singing voice. I think arguably he
has like a nicer singing voice than lou Reid, even
though I love lou Read's vocals. Meanwhile, lou Reid made
some of the most like alienating rock records of the era.
I mean, starting with metal machine music. I mean, you
don't get much noisier than that, even up until like

(29:46):
the end of his career making you know, Lulu with Metallica,
you know, very noisy, alienating, you know, kind of break
the mold type music. So it shows that like both
guys were capable of like doing what the other guy did.
Just wonder like if lou Reid was going to contradict
whatever John Kale wanted, you know, to me, he strikes

(30:06):
me as like one of the most famous contrarians in
rock music. Like if if John Kale wanted to make
a pretty record, I wonder if lou Reid would have
wanted to make a noisy record. You know, I just
think that he was like ready to get John Klee
out of the band, Like he wanted it to be
his band, John Kile, I think ceased being a collaborator
in Lou Read's eyes and now became a threat. So

(30:27):
it's like I have to get rid of the threat
in my band. And John took a very uh an
interesting view of all this in later years when he
was talking to the band's biographer, he said, Lou and
I eventually found the group too small for the both
of us, so I left, which is sort of a
self serving view on history, because reality Lou fired. Lou
went to a Granite Village coffee shop with with Sterling

(30:48):
and Moe and basically said, look, either he goes or
I go. And that really wasn't much of a choice
because if you're your primary songwriter leaves the band, there's
not much of a not much of a band left
to really save. So so that the decision was made,
Lou didn't even do it himself. He sent Sterling over
to fire John, who viewed it, you know, understandably as
as a betrayal. He characterized it as being stabbed in

(31:09):
the back. And you know, Velvet Underground fans would spend
decades uh passing through all the many reasons why this
might have happened, and sort of the great music that
could have been made between them in later years if
they'd stuck it out together. So John Chale is out
of the band as of nineteen sixty eight. The Velvet
Underground end up making two more records with lou Reid
at the head. As I said before, there's the self

(31:31):
titled record from nineteen sixty nine, and there's Loaded from
nineteen seventy, and then by nineteen seventy lou Reid himself
has exited the band and he starts his own solo career.
And you know, I've recently gone through like a heavy
lou Read solo period phase, like where I was listening
to all of his records, because you know, I've always
loved lou Read, but I was probably more of a

(31:52):
Velvet Underground person than a Lou Read solo artist, you know,
partisan But I've really come around to his records recently.
Although I think you have to decide that you love
lou Read solo records in order to get into them,
because because he does have this pattern in his career
where he makes a record that is maybe a commercial breakthrough,
like Transformer, and then he follows it up with like

(32:14):
the most anti commercial move that you can imagine, like
making a record like Berlin, Like I don't know, it's
two steps forward, one step back. Are you a fan
of Berlin? By the way, I love the record Berlin,
but it's probably the most oppressing rock record ever made.
It's too it's too much for me. I can't live
in that world too long. I'm afraid I'm gonna get
like it's like the Nothing from the Never Ending Story.

(32:36):
It's just this black wave. I'm afraid I'm gonna get
sucked in. I mean, I appreciate it for what it is,
but it's definitely not something I'm more of. A John
Kale solo. Vintage violence I think is amazing Paris, but
a lot of of you know, the Berlin era loose
stuff I can't handle too much. If you've never heard Berlin.
There is literally a song on that record called the Kids,
where the backing vocals I'm gonna put the backing vocals

(32:59):
in and quotes are are just screaming children, like literally
screaming children, and they are and they were actually screaming.
It was Bob Ezrin, the producer. I think it was
his kids, And I forget what he told them exactly
like he might have said that like their mother died
in a car accident or something. He said something to
his kids to freak them out, so they would scream
on this track for this lou Reid record, because it

(33:22):
was the most depressing record of all time, and we
need legitimately screaming children. So lou Reed makes Berlin and
at seventy three, and then he follows it up with
like Sally Can't Dance, which is like almost like a
parody of a mainstream rock record, at least that's how
I sell it to myself, because it's so inane. It
was sarcastic. Yeah, it's such a bizarre record that. Yeah,

(33:45):
it's almost like he's like making fun of like mainstream
rock listeners for like liking this kind of pap like
that's the vibe of Sally Can't Dance. And then of
course he makes Metal Machine Music, which is a record
that like no one liked at the time. I've actually
kind of come around to it in later years. I
think I maybe appreciated it more as like a like
as a funk you gesture and as music. But it's

(34:06):
a fascinating record. And then occasionally he would hit upon
like a happy medium, like a record like Coney Island Baby,
which to me just sounds like essentially like the non
John Kale Velvet Underground Records, where you know he's writing
in a melodic style with like great lyrics not too alienating,
but also like not to mainstream. It's like the Goldilocks Porridge,

(34:27):
like just right option for Lou Reed Records. His discography
is like all over the place, But then you have
John Kale and like, would you agree that? Like his
discography I think is like pretty consistent. Oh yeah, I
think it's amazing. I mean it's just said earlier, like
I really think it was. Their solo careers have so
much of an element of trying to prove that they
could do what the other person really wanted to do.

(34:49):
And I think but John Kale, I mean Vintage Violence
to me sounds almost more like a band record, like
the band Not Underground, than like anything by Lamont Young
or John Cage or anything. I mean, for all of
the talk of John's way out ideas, then that was
why he got dismissed from the Velvet Underground. You know,
it's really accessible in ordinate I mean, tracks like Gideon's Bible.
It's like a later a Beach Boys song or something.

(35:12):
And uh. He would later say that he approached the
album as kind of an exercise to see if he
could write, you know, like accessible, catchy tunes, um, and
the results are really stunning. I mean, and he revisits
his his sort of more avant garde roots with the
mostly instrumental Church of Anthrax and Academy in Peril. But
then you've got Paris nine, which is even more poppy

(35:33):
and delicate. It's almost like like a Van Dyke Parks
record or something. And you know, I wonder if he's
not he's trying to beat Lou in his own game.
He's crafting these incredibly catchy songs, but he's giving him
these elaborate baroque orchestrations that Lou doesn't have the ability
or the patients to do. And then the lyrics to

(35:54):
are almost like short stories. I mean, you've got you know,
Child's Christmas in Wales and Macbeth and Graham Green and
in the title track, it's almost like he seesed on
lose ambition of being like the Raymond Chandler of rock,
and then he put his own spin on it by
reflecting his own European heritage and doing it in a
way that that Luke couldn't touch. And so yeah, I
I love John stuff. The album Fear is also incredible.

(36:15):
I think that he definitely has a more consistent solo career,
at least in the seventies. I also want to shout
out John Kale's career as a producer because his contributions
in that regard during this period are maybe even more
important than like his own albums. I mean, he he
worked with Nico on the Marble Index, which is a
mind blowing record way ahead of its time. Lou Reed

(36:36):
himself talked about how he thought that was like one
of the best records he'd ever heard. He also ended
up producing the first Stoges record, He produced the first
Modern Lovers record, He produced the first Patti Smith record.
You know, again, like he is at the forefront of
like bands that defined what punk music was going to be,
you know, for the next several decades. You know, John

(36:57):
Kale is there in the background, and that can't help.
But contrast it with like lou Reid him trying to
be a producer. This is great story. Chris France's book
Remain in Love, where he talks about how lou Reid
almost became a producer for the Talking Heads early on
in their career. Apparently lou Reid saw them I think
it was at CBGB's, invited the Talking Heads back to
his apartment and they were hanging out its like maybe

(37:19):
three or four in the morning, and at one point
lou Reid takes a court of hogandas ice cream out
of the freezer, gets a spoon and sits on the
floor of his apartment and proceeds to eat an entire
court of ice cream while also talking to the Talking
Heads about like different uppers and downers that he likes,
Like apparently he has like a textbook in his apartment.

(37:43):
It's like one of the only things in his apartment
that it's like a medical textbook of just pills. And
France says that like lou Reid was going through it
like it was an l. L. Bean catalog. I'm sorry
about different pills. Uh. And ultimately Talking Heads decided not
to work with lou Reid because lou he offered them
like a really bad deal, basically like a classic record

(38:05):
company type rip offs type situation. So along with being
you know, kind of out of it. He was trying
to rip off this band from New York in a
way that you wouldn't expect an artist to do to
another artist. But Chris Francis like up and coming artists. Yeah,
we can't really work with this guy. So yeah, a
pretty obvious contrast there between John Kale and Lou Read
in terms of the production work that they've done or

(38:25):
didn't do. Yeah. You know, if you're gonna ask me
what I thought some items that would be in liter
reads apartment, I would probably say a court of hog
and dos, a burned spoon, and a physician's desk, reference
as being like the three solitary items in his in
his apartment, sat right, Yeah, Lou for all of his
you know, being Lou, he was always very complimentary about

(38:46):
John Kale's solo work, and years later he would say
if John music runs out of him like water down
a mountain, which I always thought was a beautiful thing
to say about him. And contrary to popular belief, Lou
and John actually did share the stage a few times
in the seventies prior to their late eighties reconciliation. They
played with Nico, most famously at a really uh off
the bootleg now commercially available nine two show in Paris

(39:10):
and Nico, John and Lou. They performed really mellow, sort
of acoustic versions of some velvet underground songs and it
was lose last performance with with Nico before her death
in the eighties, and he and John got together sort
of like intermittently a little clubs in New York and uh,
I think they spent like a Christmas together once in
the late seventies, but they really didn't get back together

(39:32):
until the late eighties. Yeah, this album Songs for Drella,
which is a beautiful record, a duo record where louis
playing guitar essentially and John Kale is playing keyboards and
there's no other instrumentation on it. One of the best
records I think that either one of those guys has
ever made. But leading up to that, it's interesting to contrast,
like where they were at in their careers because you know,

(39:54):
Lou and John both we're doing with substance abuse problems
that they were trying to get over. I think Lose
problems are much better documented, just because he's more famous
than John Kale. But Kale himself was addicted to heroin.
Then he got into cocaine and then booze, you know,
fairly I think common arc for a lot of rock
stars at that time, and he really seemed to be

(40:16):
slipping into obscurity at this time. I mean lou Read again,
he had his ups and downs throughout the seventies and eighties,
but there was a period in the eighties where he
was putting out I think pretty great records that were
critically acclaimed and that we're doing like fairly well commercially.
I mentioned the Blue Mask earlier from two. I think
mostly read fans considered that to be among his very
best records. And then after that he put out the

(40:38):
album New Sensations, which had the song I Love You Suzanne,
which was actually a kind of like a medium sized
MTV hit in the mid eighties, which is like incredible
that Louis would have had something like that at that time.
And then meanwhile, you have John Kale who started doing
this thing like where he would perform on stage with
like a hockey mask on and like all old Jason Vorhe' style,

(41:01):
Like yeah, just crazy. And there was that story where
he was doing his cover of the Elvis Presley song
Heartbreak Hotel, and like didn't he cut like a like
the head off a chicken on stage, like literally like
actually did that. Yeah, and then he threw it into
the audience just because. And I mean he would tell
the story of like his bandmates were like almost throwing

(41:22):
up on stage. Nobody knew he was going to do it,
and they were absolutely horrified, and they all stormed off
the stage and disgust. And I guess he wrote a
song called Chicken Shit in retaliation just that his bandmates
for for storming off in the middle of him decapitating
a chicken on the stage. Yeah, he would call it
his his most effective show stopper ever, which is one
way of putting it. So it's weird to think of

(41:44):
John Kale in the same context as like Ozzy Osbourne,
But like, I think cocaine will do that to you,
Like there was something about cocaine in the eighties. If
you were doing a lot of blow. Don't let any
animal on stage, especially birds. Don't bring any birds on
stage because they will lose their head get chopped off
for bitten off. So John kill you know, he's struggling
to get over his demons. Lou Reid is having an

(42:05):
up and down career and then their past end up
intersecting over a tragedy. Essentially, Andy Warhol passed away in
seven and that ends up being an impetus for these
two guys to work together again. It was twenty years
after Lou fired him, and his death was really unexpected.
He went in for gallbladder surgery and he was only
fifty eight, so it was not something anyone was expecting.

(42:26):
And Lou and Andy's relationship had been really weird. It
had been twenty years, as I said, after he was fired,
and there was a lot of resentment on Andy's part.
I guess he was really angry at Lou for not
visiting him when he got shot in nineteen sixty eight
my Valerie Salanas, and it got really petty. I mean,
Lou and Andy would be sitting in the same row
at the MTV Awards in four, which is amazing on

(42:48):
its own, and Lou wouldn't speak to him, just things
like that, and didn't invite Andy to his wedding because
he thought Andy would bring too many people, just a
lot of like little things and so, and he was
very hurt by that. So when he died, I think
Lou tremendous wave of remorse for the way that he
treated him all these years. And he goes to his
memorial service at a church in New York and he
runs into to John Kale and they're sort of, you know,

(43:10):
mutual friends are there, and they lead him to each
other and there's a bit of what John would say,
it was sort of eggshell walking for a little bit
of time, but they let their guard down and they
started to discuss the notion of recording a musical tribute
something for Andy, just in recognition of his tremendous role
in in their career. Uh And it was mostly Kale's idea.
He was sort of the primary motivator, and he was

(43:30):
the one who kind of embraced the fall on their
relationship and made the calls. And this became Songs for Drella,
and Drella was a nickname for Andy. It was a
portmanteau of Dracula and Cinderella, which was a name that
Andy didn't like very much. So I always thought that
was very very interesting choice to have that as the
title for the tribute record. Yeah, I think it suits

(43:52):
the record in a lot of ways because it's an
album that has a lot of affection for Andy. Warhol,
but it's not a sent of and all tribute. It
is really awards and all depiction of how Lou and
I'm sure John felt about Andy Warhol and also how
Andy Warhol felt about lou Reid. And to me, it really,

(44:15):
you know, exemplifies I think the greatness of Lou Read's
writing that he's a songwriter that never just had like
a simplistic type approach to his lyrics, so they were
never just about one thing. He could express multiple emotions,
like complicated feelings, all at the same time. And I
think it really suited this record really well because it
does feel like two people grieving someone that they looked

(44:38):
up to, but again, it also has the feel of
like we're not going to sugarcoat how awful this guy
could be at the same time. The song that always
stands out to me that I think is a great
collaboration between lou and John is that song a Dream
Like that's the song that that jumps out to me,
like you know that song right? Oh, yeah, incredible song.

(45:02):
It takes passages from Andy's diary which had recently been published,
and it's all Andy and his diary, uh ship talking
lou Reid basically, and John gets to read those passages
to Lou. I mean it's it's an incredible artistic choice
because I can't really think of anybody in an artistic
sense have been hurt as much, uh you know, equally

(45:25):
as Andy as John Kale. So I mean he really
gives I don't want to say, a venom, but he
gives an emotional authenticity these words that no one else
could bring. I mean, it's an incredible moment on the record.
I mean, the lyrics are I saw Lou. I'm so
mad at him. Lou Reid got married and didn't invite me.
I mean it's because he thought I'd bring too many people.

(45:46):
I don't get it. Could have at least called and
just things like that. You know, I hate Lou, I
really do. He won't even hire us for his videos,
and I was proud of him. Heartbreaking stuff. It's so heavy,
and there is that subtext to it where, uh, you know,
lou Reid and John Kale are also reconciling. You know,
it's like too late for lou Reid to you know,

(46:09):
reconcile with Andy Warhol in this life, but he is
able to reconnect with with John Kale. And I'm sure
you know some of the things that Andy Warhol felt
about Lou Reed. I'm sure John Klee felt the same way,
you know, because he was also fired, kicked out of
the Velvet Underground Circle, you know, many years earlier. I
love the performance too, that they filmed for that album.

(46:31):
I think it was at St. Anne's Church in Brooklyn,
and again, it's just those two guys on stage. Louis
playing guitar, John Kale playing piano, no othern musicians. It's
a very intimate performance and it does feel like two
friends that have been a strange for a long time
reconnecting musically and communicating through these songs that are wonderful.

(46:54):
But again there's always that underlying subtext of the relationship
between these two guys, how they're working through it. And
it's just riveting because again it's I think there's a
lot of warmth and affection there, but it's non sentimental.
It's very honest, and all of the resentment and anger
and frustration that was also inhering these relationships that comes

(47:15):
to the four two, along with all of the I
think genuine love and camaraderie that existed. Yeah, and this
sort of sets the stage for the reunion that they
have a few years later. Songs Pagela comes out, takes
a few years for for the fall to really set in.
It's funny they've been offered so much money for tours

(47:35):
over the years and they actually finally have their reunion.
It was an impromptu moment at a at a Andy
Warhol exhibit in France. Lou and John are performing songs
from songs Padella and Sterling and more in the audience,
and then they welcome them on stage and they play
a couple of songs together and they end up having
a full scale reunion. A few years after this, they

(47:55):
tore Europe. It was going to be basically a dry
run for a bigger American tour, and it was great.
Was the first time the band had ever played Europe.
Was really the first time that most people had ever
seen the band perform, and it was seen as almost
like a huge risk because the band were this mythic,
you know, untouchables, almost like if the Beatles had reunited
or something. It was there was fear that it was
better in people's imaginations and to see them in the

(48:17):
early nineties, you know, on stage. But it was the
tour UH. From a musical standpoint, UH was was fairly successful,
but the same old resentments came back, mostly with Lou
who wanted to basically control as many elements as he could.
There was a live album that was put together that

(48:37):
he demanded the right to produce, and they wouldn't let
him do it, so he brought his right hand man,
Mike Rathkey to do the job, and UH and John
Kale would always complain about the album's mix. He said
that the bootlegs sounded better than the results, and the
back cover of the live album has all songs written
by Lou Reed in text that's bigger than the song
titles themselves. Yeah, and there was also that thing like

(48:58):
where they were going to play an MTV plugged and
that had to get scuttled because Lou Reid insisted on
producing those recordings as well. I think that there was
also talk of doing an American tour at some point,
and that ended up getting canceled because, you know, the
old thing that existed in the sixties are weird its
head again, whether you want to call it Lou Reid,
you know, being a megalomaniac or him being insecure he

(49:21):
had to be in control of the Velvet Underground, and
it is I think especially weird or funnier Roneck Harver,
you want to put it that like, you know, John
Kale again, he has this great reputation for being a producer,
you know, much better track record than lou Reid does.
And yet you know, lou Red had no interest in
letting John Klee sort of helping to guide these recordings.

(49:43):
So you know, John Kale could see the writing on
the wall and he was like, look, I I can't
be in this situation again. I have my own career.
I don't have to put up with lou Reid anymore,
he said at one point, you know, it was the
end of a very fruitful relationship, a poison one, but
it has been fruit full. So it really the only
performed together one more time when the Velvet Underground was

(50:04):
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Uh,
they performed a song called last Night I Said Goodbye
to My Friend, which was dedicated to Sterling Morrison who
passed away, and they played that song as a trio
Read Kale and Mo Tucker, and that was it. No
more Velvet Underground after that, when Lou Read died in October.

(50:25):
John put out a tribute on Facebook which I'll probably
have a hard time reading out loud because I find
it so sweet. The world has lost to find songwriter
and poet. I've lost my schoolyard, Buddy ellaborated in a
further statement, the news I feared the most pales in
comparison to the lump in my throat and the hollow
in my stomach. Two kids have a chance meeting, and
forty seven years later we fight and love the same way.

(50:46):
Losing Losing either one is incomprehensible, no replacement value, no
digital or virtual Phil broken now for all time. Oh yeah,
you know. Lou once said that, you know, someone asked
him if you know how he felt about John Klee
and and Mo Tucker, and he said, yeah, we fight
like all the time, but like I'm the only one

(51:07):
who's allowed to say anything bad about them. If anyone
else has anything bad about them, I'll defend them to
the death, you know, which to me really speaks to
how they I think looked at each other as family.
You know, like Lou Reid and John Kale, they were
like brothers who fought all the time, but they were
always going to have each other's back when the chips
were down, and uh, you know, when lou Reid died,

(51:28):
I think John Kilee recognized that, Like, I'm connected to
this guy, you know, as much as he might drive
me mad, sometimes we're always going to be together. And
you know, we've done so many great things. We're gonna
take a quick break and get a word from our
sponsor before we get to more rivals. All right, we now,

(51:52):
which is the part of the episode where we give
the pro side of each part of the rivalry. Uh,
let's do lou read first. I mean, look to me,
he is one of the greatest writers in rock history, um,
and especially as a lyricist. He's on a very short
list for me with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen.
He's one of the few lyricists I think where you
can read the words on a page and it works

(52:13):
almost as well as it does in a song, Like
it really does read like literature. There's also the fact,
and again this has been remarked by many people, but
I think it bears repeating that Lou Reid really did
expand the subject matter of what rock songs could be.
I think as much as Bob Dylan did, he brought
I think a literary quality to rock music that a
lot of people I think I've tried to live up to,

(52:35):
but I don't think they've quite matched what lou Reid
was able to do in his best songs. And louis too.
You know, he's one of the great characters in rock history.
You know, he's an eccentric, he's a crank, but he's
always riven ng And you know, as much as I
would be afraid to interview lou Reid, you know, as
a rock critic and journalist, I'm sure he would have

(52:56):
hated my guts. It's like I still I think would
have relished the oportunity to be insulted by lou Reid.
I mean, to me, there's no greater honor than that.
I mean, of course, he had the voice, he had
the attitude, he had the swagger, and in Velvet Underground
he had the melodies. And I think John Kale would
have been completely content to be the next Stockhouse under
John Cage. And I think that lou Reid is the

(53:18):
one who actually had the ambition to reach sort of
mainstream or at least semi mainstream listeners, and his ambition
to write adult rock and roll, you know, may sounds
kind of bloated, but it was sincere and I think
his efforts really did push the genre forward. And not
to be too reductive, but I think that his songs,
especially on the first album UH, gave Kale a product

(53:38):
to edit or you know, when his words funk up, like,
I don't think anything would have happened in those first
Velvet Underground sessions if Kale had been the one in
the leadership position. I think that Reid was the engine
of the band, and Cale responded to what he was given,
and I think he was given great stuff because he's
freaking Lou Reid and he's one of the most compelling
artists of all time. Moving over to the pro John
Kale side, you know, well, I think you can obviously

(54:00):
make a case for Lou Reid pushing rock music forward
as a lyricist. I think in a lot of ways,
John Kale did the same thing musically by bringing in
these avant garde and classical music references, the drone, the noise,
you know, the fucking up of like beautiful pop songs
and taking them to a much different and experimental place.
You know. I happened to love the Velvet Underground records

(54:21):
that came out after John Kale left the band, But
there's no question that they became a more normal rock
band in his absence. Even with like Lou Read's great
songs and his great lyrics, I'm not sure that they
would be regarded as revolutionary as they are now if
John Kale hadn't have been in the band. You know,
I think that they would have been looked at as

(54:42):
a really great sixties rock band with amazing lyrics, but
you know, musically kind of doing what a lot of
other bands were doing. But the things that John Kale
brought in it just took those songs to a different place.
And I think even now those records stand out as
being really in a vative and cutting edge and fresh
and energetic. And I think it's always going to be

(55:05):
that way as long as people care about rock music. Yeah,
I think John Kale's drone tone was really his gift
to the band as far as I'm concerned. I mean,
you hear that in many of Velvet Undergrounds best tunes.
I mean, Heroin Venus and furs Hey, Mr Rain, the
Base on White Light, White Heat. He showed you the
power and versatility of a single note, and his talents
as a producer later in his career showcase. I think

(55:26):
what he brought to the Velvets. He has this gift
for arranging and orchestrating and sort of overseeing the construction
of sound, and I think he's just this incredible interpreter
helping other artists find their voice. And he did that
with Iggy Pop, he did that with Nico, We did
that with Patti Smith, he did that with Modern Lovers,
but he did it first with Lou Reed. I think

(55:46):
that John helped Lou find his style and move away
from the sort of more folky approach to this edge,
ear more abrasive sound that became, you know, the Velvet's
trademark sound. And uh, you know, in later years, John
proved to be a really incredible singer in his own right,
but I think his genius is really in arranging. I mean,
that's why when we think of the song Hallelujah, we
don't think of Leonard Cohen when we think of John Kale's.

(56:08):
And uh, just as an aside too, I just I
really appreciate John Kale's authenticity. You know, so much of
what Lou seemed to do seemed to center around poses
to me at least, and I feel that that Cale
really poured his heart and feelings into to his songs
in in the seventies period at least, and imbuing them
with this intensity and emotional charge that I think is
you know, really rare in contemporary pop music. So when

(56:30):
we look at these two guys together, I mean, look,
just listen to the first two Levet Underground records and
listen to songs for Drella. You know, like those three
albums I think are all masterpieces, and it really shows
that for as much tension you know, existed between these
two guys, they really were soulmates personally and professionally. You

(56:51):
know that they could see in each other like what
made them great and how they could take what the
other guy did and create something that was I think,
ultimately greater than the sum of its parts, even though
both parts are worth a whole hell of a lot.
It really is, like, I think, one of the great
collaborations in rock history. And while it's sad that they
didn't do more together, I feel like maybe we should

(57:13):
just be grateful that they were able to make records
together at all, you know, like the records that they
made are all really amazing and always worth revisiting. Lose
lyrical skills and his gift for melody, and John's sort
of European orchestra orchestral sensibilities and daring avant garde arrangements.
I think that's what elevated them from being a highly

(57:34):
literate garage band, like sort of a nihilist fugs or something,
to to something greater, something. As I said earlier, that
really pushed the genre forward and still still sounds fresh today.
So Jordan's on the show. I like to think of
us as Lou Reid and John Kale type collaborators. And
I just want you to know that I will always
be your mirror. I thought I was Nico, but but

(57:54):
I'll take it. I'll take it. This is a tough
one for puns. I gotta say the best I had
was there. He goes again, But that's that's well. I've
been waiting for my man to come up with a gun.
I'll keep on waiting, I guess, until our next episode.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Rivals. We'll
be back with more beefs and feuds and long simming resentments.
Next Week Rivals is a production of I Heart Radio.

(58:20):
The executive producers are Shawn ty Toone and Noel Brown.
The supervising producers are Taylor chicogn and Tristan McNeil. The
producer is Joel hat Stat. I'm Jordan's run Talk. I'm
Stephen Hyden. If you like what you heard, please subscribe
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