would rather see them work with cale than reed!

i knew you were joking cause:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL32grJl-WI

This.

but, more than anything....I've just really been wanting to here an all-acoustic SY album for some time now.

youst a question : what did john cale for the sound of the velvet underground. i guess some guitar tunings , but isnt it right that lou wrote all the songs ?i mean really all the songs ?and the singing...

I still can't get over the fact one of the members of the VU is Welsh. I wonder if John Cale is a friend of Tom Jones or Shirley Bassey? :D

If you need to ask this question maybe you should listen to the first two records and a series of bootlegs more. Perhaps visit their forum ( www.thevelvetforum.tk ), everyone is pretty friendly and helpful on there. I agree that this notion that John Cale was the only experimental force in VU is grossly exagerated. A song like European Son was Reed's attempt at doing Ornette Coleman in a rock way. A failure by his own admission, but still. It's also been documented many times before that a number of those songs have been credited to Lou Reed but were in fact written by more than one member. And certainly if you have heard some of them in their stripped down versions you can hear for yourself that they sound very different from the official versions. Venus In Furs was an acoustic number initially.

can't see it, doesn't make any sense to me.

yeah, i dunno. i don't think you can split the velvets easily like that. both of 'em were the driving force(s.) it's not like reed was the strictly rock 'n' roll one and cale the ~avant garde~ one.
cale came from a more avant, classical (etc) background... but reed certainly wasn't in the dark about, y'know, the feedback/repetition/volume aspects cale often gets acredited with in early VU.

reed did their weird tuning, i think. ostrich tuning? it came about when he worked for this brill-building type songwriting company...
fucked if i know if he was the first person to ever tune all his guitar strings to the same note though. eh.

sterling + moe were crucial to their "sound" (whatever you'd like to call it) as well. they get downplayed in VU discussion a lot i reckon... aaaand people play up nico's tenure in the band a bit much...

wank wank

/incoherent rambling

ps. all- or mostly-acoustic SY album would be interesting... seems like something they would have done around/after murray street though. didn't t, l, + j do some acoustic gigs during that time?

He'd just quote the Raven over top of SY's brilliant skronk.

I wonder if John Cale is a friend of Tom Jones or Shirley Bassey?

Yeah, they all go for pints at the Welsh stereotypes theme park. Dylan Thomas is there too.

All Welsh people know each other... don't they?

hmm i have heard that a few times before that reed was more the clean poppy songwriter and cale upgradet their songs with noisy arrangments.but.....i don´t think this is really true.after all i think lou reed was pretty much the velvet underground.the driving force even the "noisy stuff" youst think about "metall machine music" right now.sonic youth is different.there you have 3 great songwriters.even if thurston might be the creative head.

I'm sure Catherine Zeta-Jones joins them for a pint on occasion.

Interestingly enough tom jones did record at a studio that cale co owns in swansea.

Didn't he do something with the manic street preachers singer?