Top 102 Albums. No 83 Songs for Drella

Top 102 Albums. No 83
Songs for Drella - Lou Reed & John Cale

Over on Cathedrals of Sound the selection at No. 84 was Grant McLennan's Horsebreaker Star, an excellent album. Following a trail from it I've been listening to it, then others by McLennan and his on/off songwriting partner Robert Forster. I remember the trepidation when buying the first solo album after The Go-Betweens split. Then I followed the trail to albums by Husker Du's Grant Hart and Bob Mould and then spent a long time listening to John Cale albums before I thought of this and for some reason this spoke to me and said "I'm today's choice." In a tone not to be argued with (I started this post yesterday but something disagreed with my stomach and I had to take to bed. Seems sort of appropriate as this album was made between disagreements.)

It was going to take something exceptional to bring Lou and John back together. The two albums they made together as The Velvet Underground in the late sixties have a claim on being the most influential in rock history. But they had not been friends after Cale left. It took the death of their mentor Andy Warhol to get them back together. The whole process of making this album was fractured and ended by both saying they hated each other and would never work together again. But they did in fact play some gigs as the Velvets after this.  It's clearly a hard itch not to scratch, having been in a group as influential and extraordinary as the Velvets. ( I just realised that The Smiths have been apart for 25 years, the same time as there was between White Light, White Heat and The Velvets reunion tour. Age.)

Excitement and trepidation co-wrote my expectations for this album but I need not have worried. There is a lot of restraint but it manages to be extraordinarily moving. Cale and Reed are paying hommage to their mentor Andy Warhol in what is a funeral oratorio of sorts, for Andy and for their own youth. The stiffness is part of the emotional journey, as after death there are disappointments and guilt  and other uneasy emotions to digest, even "resentments that can never be unmade". It is also quite a fearless album, even if it steps carefully. Here's the first verse of Reed's powerful Hello It's Me.

"Andy it's me, haven't seen you in a while
I wished I talked to you more when you were alive
I thought you were self-assured when you acted shy
Hello it's me
I really miss you, I really miss your mind
I haven't heard ideas like that in such a long, long time
I loved to watch you draw and watch you paint
But when I saw you last I turned away."


Cale and Reed speak largely in imagined voices of Andy and layer by layer build a picture of the artist, the inspiration, the socialite, the vulnerable dying man. Barring Images the songs do not draw too much on the Velvets legacy but there is certainly a frisson to the music on Images, reminiscent of European Son, which was Reed's tribute to an earlier mentor Delmore Schwartz.

The key song on this, for me is The Dream, narrated rather than sung by Cale (just like The Gift, and like The Gift it ends in death).   Drawing on Warhol's Diaries Cale introduces both himself and Lou through the eyes of an ageing Warhol. He even gets to say "You know I hate Lou / I really do." I'll let the last verse speak for itself:


"I was so scared today
There was blood leaking thought my shirt
from those old scars from being shot
And the corset I wear to keep my insides in was hurting
And I did three sets of fifteen pushups
and four sets of ten setups
But then my insides hurt
and I saw drops of blood on my shirt and I remember
the doctors saying I was dead
And then later they had to take blood out of my hand
'couse they ran out or veins
but then
all this thinking was making me an old grouch
and you can't do anything anyway so
if they wouldn't let me play with them in my own dream
I was just going to have to make another
and another
and another
Gee, wouldn't it be funny if I died in this dream
before I could make another one up

And nobody called

And nobody came"