John Cale is infinitely better than Lou Reed
 

Now im not a huge Velvet Underground fan, but what ive heard makes it CLEAR than Lou Reed is a Charlatan.
Discuss the truth.

You trippin fool
Actually, I've only heard Vintage Violence by Cale and Transformer by Lou Reed.
Both good albums, but neither of them blow me away.

I have to agree. I find Cale much more enjoyable.

This reminds me I still need to obtain Metal Machine Music. Never checked out Cale solo. Not too long ago watched the Warhol film of the VU jamming at the factory and it sort of came across that Cale was more into some experimentation and shit whilst Reed was more into smug posturing.. that's the way it came across to me sort of, anyway.. Still, what I've heard of Metal Machine Music is pretty fucking splendid and way way ahead of its time..

I've listened to to Metal Machine Music a couple of times and it isn't really that great.

if you mean is a charlatan in comparison to Cale, implying that Cale is the true musical genius behind the mutual VU tunes, then you have something of an argument. but if you just mean a charlatan in general, then that is just not a fair critique, I mean the man can clearly sing, play and perform these tunes with some level of skill, whether or not it is to your tastes should not discredit the technicality of the music.

theyre both brilliant, cale is indeed a better composer, but lou reed is a songwriter and had a vision.

the velvet underground was the best band of all time, they influenced everything we listen too.

I have only heard one Cale solo tune on an Uncut magazine cd haha. And I've onlyheard Metal Machine Music, which is actually fucking awesome, so textural and eerily beautiful... but I know that's not his 'norm'.
But I mean... Loaded is a fucking wicked album, consistently incredible songs, and Cale wasn't on that album.

But I love what Cale brought to the band, anyway... I wouldn't say all the experimental bits, because Lou made the damn Ostrich guitar, did he not?! But I would probably agree with what batreleaser said, John is a batter composer, but Lou is the songwriter and conceptualist, man.

I find Lou to be the more consistent of the two.

DUH

John Cale is obviously a better musician, but a better songwriter I don't know.

The latter part of your post is simply an overstatement. The Velvet Underground simply was not that great, and in terms of influence, they've indirectly upheld a lot of truly lousy, third-rate bands over the years--not so many as Led Zeppelin, mind you, but still quite a few. Because of the poor recording of their first two albums, and the underrehearsed sound of many of the tracks, too many groups over the years have misinterpreted The Velvet Underground as an excuse to sound like shit. The result has been a lowering of standards, sadly. I'm glad bands like Joy Division and The Psychedelic Furs listened to The Doors and Roxy Music too, otherwise....

Lou Reed wrote most of the songs of the VU , and it's a good band ( very influencing , but not great ) , so no way is he a charlatan.
My favorite record by these two fellows is "Song for Drella"

There is no texture in Metal Machine Music at all. It's all pedal-controlled feedback coming from some amplifiers, but yes, it still sounds pretty good. Good point about the Ostrich guitar, which allowed Reed to explore one-note playing and attracted Cale, amongst other things.
To be honest, if it came down to the solo work of any member of the Velvet Underground, Nico made most of the albums that resonate with me more than any other, and even Maureen Tucker's solo albums are much better than some of the rubbish that both Reed and Cale produced over the years. Cale I prefer to Reed simply for introducing me to a different musical world that Lou Reed could have not, and he also produced and played on much of Nico's best work, so there. Much underated is Sterling Morrison's guitar-playing, which personally I find just as good as Reed's, but less of a show-off. They all made their own contribution, in one way or another.

Nico's solo stuff is definitely the best.

I feel Cale's solo stuff is hit and miss. There is some stuff off of Vintage Violence, Slow Dazzle, and Paris 1919 that I appreciate. I don't really care for any of Lou Reed's solo stuff.

The Velvet Underground was still great after Cale left. The self-titled 3rd album is really awesome, and a testament to Lou Reed's ability as a song writer, and the Morrison and Tucker's contributions.

Cale's Words For The Dying is one of the best LPs of '89, and certainly made my Christmas that year. (There's something about Cale singing Dylan Thomas's poems--especially 'On a Wedding Anniversary'--with a Russian orchestra backing him up that goes well with cheap booze and blowing snow on December 25th.) That album opened up a fair number of young people to classical music, I think.

It's fair to say that Chelsea Girls is the least interesting of Nico's albums, but Marble Index alone is very much a peerless album. There hasn't been one that sounds like that or with a person who sings like that on it ever since. Similar, yes, but not quite sounding like that.

im not gonna start an arguement. theyre brilliant, i love them, lotta people love them, i love roxy music too, but theres no way they had the huge influence that the velvet underground or the stooges had. ure entitled to your opinion tho.

i like loaded and self titled a lot, there is a lot of beautiful songs on both of them, but i feel like that theyre more like reed solo alblums than velvet underground alblums. ive always thought of as the velvet underground as the songwriting collaboration of john cale and lou reed, granted maureen tucker was a great drummer. but john and lou made the VU what it was.

Well, we couldn't have had The Stooges without The Doors, The Velvet Underground and The MC5 now, could we? Similar things could be said of David Bowie and Roxy Music, throwing in The Beatles, The Who and American R & B (Motown, Stax) as additional influences in their cases.

Frankly, I don't think The Velvets, The Stooges, The Doors, MC5, Led Zeppelin or even The Beatles can match Roxy Music when it comes to influence, mainly because--unlike the others--Roxy influenced considerable portions of both underground/noncommercial rock and mainstream pop. There was a while there in the late '70s and '80s when virtually everything one heard on commercial rock radio sounded like Roxy Music (Duran Duran, Heaven 17, Images In Vogue, Platinum Blonde, ABC, INXS, early U2, Psychedelic Furs, Blue Peter, etc.), and certainly everyone looked like them on Much Music and MTV. In fact, I would rank Roxy Music to be the No. 2 most influential rock band of all time, second only to Black Sabbath. Rounding out the Top 5 or 10 would be mostly other early British Invasion acts. I'm not sure that any North American (or international) acts would make the list; possibly The Stooges and/or The Ramones (I would include Hendrix as part of the British-based Jimi Hendrix Experience). As far as North America goes, we've given the rock world the most influential solo artists: Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, Neil Young, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Chuck Berry--and Lou Reed!!!

Actually, when all is said and done, one can trace just about all the major movements and sub-genres in rock music back to a handful of groups and artists in the mid '60s: Dylan (folk rock), James Brown (funk), The Yardbirds (heavy metal), The Who (punk/metal), The Nice and Zappa's Mothers of Invention (progressive), The Doors and The Velvet Underground (new wave/art rock), and The Pink Floyd and The Red Crayola (no wave). Most of the other styles that came along after this were cross-polinations or extensions of the mid '60s inventions.

Yeah, other than 'The Murder Mystery', 'After Hours' and 'The Story of My Life' (written before Cale left the group, and the only number on the LP credited to him), the self-titled album sounds like the beginning of Reed's solo career.

What I've always gotten a kick out of is just how similar Loaded and Squeeze are--right down to the cover art! This can be baffling, for Reed has always maintained (and sued to prove it) that Loaded is 90% his material; while most folk regard Squeeze as a VU album in name only, Doug Yule being the only Velvet on it. As far as I'm concerned, one can analyse and assess this in one of three ways: 1)Yule (and possibly the others) contributed far more to Loaded than Reed has ever let on; 2)Reed (or more likely the others) contributed far more to Squeeze than the public has ever realised (or wants to admit); or 3)Reed had a far bigger impact on Yule as a songwriter than has previously been chronicled.

i dont feel even like offering a rebuttle, i like most of the shit you mentioned, i think the doors are garbage but yeah whatever u can think what you want ill think what i want. allright, good.

Frankly, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't like The Doors. Their first two albums are easily the classiest records of 1967, containing the best lyrics, musicianship on par with The Hendrix Experience and Cream, and production values a shade above everyone else that year, including The Beatles.

Actually, backdated production values--e.g., number of tracks used in mixing--is one of the major reasons why so many great and classic bands from that era have not endured like The Doors and a few others have. The Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and the majority of the other San Fransiscan bands sound terribly dated owing mainly to their recording on just 3 or 4 tracks; while John Cale himself has called White Light/White Heat "a technical failure".

Something else: from my experiences, meeting someone who enjoys The Velvets and The Stooges but not The Doors is something of a rarity. Personally, I've always seen The Doors and The Velvets as two sides of the same coin--Morrison is analogous to Reed, Manzarek is analogous to Cale, same beatnik and avant influences, and everyone (plus Iggy!) was nailing Nico! It's interesting to note that The Doors and The Buffalo Springfield were the only West Coast bands that The Velvets got along with/approved of.

wha? doors? dude, jim morrison is a drunken idiot who was posing as a poet writing shitty lyrics over what is essentially a bar band with the odd psychedelic "were so wierd and high on acid" tune, i could offer a thousand reasons why i dont like them, but im studying for final exams so i dont have time to do so.

You just told me so much without actually saying anything of substance or resonance (not to mention basis or clarity). Keep studying, my boy, keep studying...

I've seen Cale play live twice and it was abyssmal - him fucked up beyond belief doing mostly Paris 1919 material in a Billy Joel/Liberace sort of "style" at the piano where at one point he hit the microphone hard enough with his face that it was quite audible and yet he didn't notice. Chris Spedding carried him through this pathetic set in 1987, and I never would have seen him again, except he was opening for Pere Ubu on their Tenement Year tour and the Showbox in Seattle had no reentry. I've heard nothing in recent years to indicate he's gotten any better either.

That said, as far as the roots of the Velvets go, I'm pretty sure a lot of what makes them so incredibly out there comes out of what he and Angus Maclise brought from the Dream Syndicate, and his grounding in avant classical is awesome, plus his production of the Stooges first album is also brilliant. So I could accept an argument that he started out the better of the two.

In terms of classic solo albums, Berlin and Metal Machine Music are two of the best records I have ever heard, while Sabotage and Paris 1919 are quite good but no where near on that par. Magic and Loss was a great album that came out in the '90s so Reed has stood the test of time infinitely better (though I must admit that I've never seen him live, but I've for the most part always heard good things.)

You really have some wrong opinions, there. Quite a lot of the, erm, Roxy Music soundalikes that you mention took a lot of their aesthetics and sounds from a lineage that goes from Elvis Presley to the Sex Pistols, amongst others. Keep in mind that such aesthetics didn't necessarily determine the way those bands went on to sound, and a lot of the time I can't hear that much more of a prominent Roxy Music influence than any other band that you have mentioned in your post. Since you also namedrop quite a few of those 80's pop bands, keep in mind the advancement in the technology for portable synthesizers was more important in the way a few of them sounded than just influences etc.

There may be some truth to it, but people who knew him say that he was much deeper than that. I haven't personally studied the question (not being a big Doors fan), I anyway think that if the Doors were good Tim Buckley would deserve more recognition than them.

Keep 'em comin', keep 'em comin'! The posts on this thread become more erroneous, uneducated ("..and what they saw they thought it blew big time"--Are you trying to say that The Stooges didn't like The Doors, when Iggy alone was such an out-and-out worshipper of Morrison that when ol' Jimbo croaked he left him a trunk of his stage clothes? The same Iggy who would later do shows with Manzarek on keyboards? The same Iggy who would base the lyrics for 'The Passenger' on lines from Morrison's The Lords volume ["Modern life is a journey by car..."]?), and uncultured by the hour. Saying The Doors were "third-rate at best" is simply wishful or childish thinking, and sounds just as absurd to a sophisticated ear as saying, "Sid Vicious was a better musician than Robert Fripp," "Ed Wood made better films than Fellini," or "President Bush is an educated communist."

Nevertheless, keep 'em comin'--I want to see just how out of touch, misguided and lacking in artistic reference points some of you are. What's next? "Led Zeppelin: less talented than Anal Cunt"? Come on--make me snicker!

Actually, Roxy Music, especially Eno, had a huge influence on bands from Sheffield, many of which went on to become pop stars of the day (Heaven 17, The Human League, etc.). Mostly it was the use of technology and oddball production, but one might say the same of Can on PiL.

the did not influence Parliament Funkadelic

The Doors, out of the myriad bands in the late 60's american musical landscape, are outshined only by the VU in terms of influence. The doors opened up the dark side of music to a LOT of people.
Without them we may never have been able to klill the fucking hippies.

I do think that much of the influence of the VU is not through their actual recorded output, but through the recorded output of the acts and bands and artists who took the VU as their direct source language and proceeded from there. These bands pushed through the VU way.

I guess Oliver Stone's crappy biopic is partially to blame for that.

Yes, the Doors were nihilists, not hippies (contrary to what many people may think).

I have been listening to the first three stooges records for months now, and I have to be frank. They are each of them , maybe 30% crap. just plain crap. suck ass shit songs with suck ass riffs and suck ass stupid lyrics. so what? the 60-70% on each stooges album that is fucking GOLD makes up for it.

the doors are that way. Their albums are not transcendent. They are not perfect albums, but their songs are fucking amazing and hold up.

Morrisson was never claiming to be some stop-the-world poet. he wrote his poetry and put it to music with the doors. I find his poems atrocius, but then I find all poetry by his idols (Baudelaire, whoever) atrocious.

Actually, I think The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Zappa's Mothers and a couple of other American acts were the original hippie bands (or beatnik bands, considering when they got started). The other (mostly) lesser talented acts came along a year or two later and exploited the whole scene, commercialised it, emphasised the sillier, zanier elements.

that is true. I hates me some jefferson airplane so bad.

You're trippin' right now, aren't ya?!!

You can't place on the same level beatniks (who are individualists) and hippies (who have a - stupid - sense of community).

I think what stops a lot of people in their tracks when it comes to The Doors is the manner in which they seemed to have been four different groups in the space of just 6 or 7 years, based solely on their 8 original studio albums alone. The Doors and Strange Days are art rock/proto new wave; Waiting For The Sun (their least consistent album, due to its consisting of the remnants of 2 or 3 abandoned or Elektra-condemned projects) and The Soft Parade are jazz-inflected big-time; Morrison Hotel/The Hard Rock Cafe and L.A. Woman lean towards blues and early rock 'n' roll; and Other Voices and Full Circle stand apart simply by virtue of the band having been reduced to a trio (they were also heading towards a Santana- or Focus-style fusion to a certain degree on those albums). In these jazz-hating times, people tend to think of them in the contexts of studio albums 3 and 4 and 7 and 8, and, as a result, get put off.