Cheap Songs for Drella (Music) (Lou Reed & John Cale) Price

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Customer Reviews of Songs for Drella

AN EMOTIONAL POWDER KEG!
"SONGS FOR DRELLA" may be one of the most emotional pieces of music I have ever encountered. Not only is this disc a tribute to Andy Warhol, but it may also be the finest work of both Lou Reed, and John Cale. These songs feel so personal, one feels as if one is invading the very souls of each of these brilliant songwriters. While telling Andy's story they reveal much of themselves. Reed & Cale take turns covering every conceivable aspect of Andy Warhol's world. From art, work, style, childhood, fear, and envy. No stone is left unturned. One of the most haunting moments on this disc is "The Dream" by John Cale. A true masterpiece of inner terrors, and human weakness. Lou Reed shines on "WORK", "NOBODY BUT ME", and most notably on "HELLO IT'S ME". Here we can hear Lou's sadness, and longing for a friend lost. "SONGS FOR DRELLA" is heart wrenching, enlightened, and unimpeachable as music can get. Wether you're a fan of Lou Reed, John Cale, The Velvet Underground, or Andy Warhol; you will find beauty and truth in the music found on this emotional powder keg.

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If you weren't interested in Warhol you will be...
...after hearing this attempt by two middle-aged musicians come to terms with the death of a mentor. Loosely structured as an autobiography, Songs for 'Drella is a remarkably honest work, recognizing not only Warhol's shortcomings, but Reed and Cale's as well.

The narrative arc begins with the young Warhol's decision to leave Pittsburgh for New York ("Smalltown" -- Pittsburgh may not qualify in a literal sense, though the Oakland neighborhood where Warhol grew up in the 1940s might qualify in some cultural sense), the move to New York and employment as a commercial graphic artist ("Open House"), and the subsequent founding of the Factory and Warhol's emergence as an artist.

Valerie Solanis nearly succeeds in killing him ("I Believe" in which Reed and Cale advocate her execution), and it is pretty much downhill from there, both personally and artistically. The disk closes with "Hello, It's Me," an epilogue delivered from the standpoint of Reed and Cale.

The music is quite extraordinary, especially insofar as it is just Reed (vocals, guitar) and Cale (vocals, keyboards, viola). The soundscapes that they create are quite varied, particularly in the Cale dream song ("A Dream").

My work takes me places where I quite literally have to pack desert island disks. This one is among the ones I always take.

Parenthetically, if you ever find yourself in Pittsburgh, drop by the Warhol museum and you can see many of the objects (the silver flaoting pillows, the cow wallpaper, the Maos, the films etc.) that are referred to in these songs.

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Worth thinking about
At the beginning of the CD liner notes is a page devoted to a description of "SONGS FOR DRELLA - A Fiction" which states that this "brief musical look at the life of Andy Warhol . . . is entirely fictitious." All fifteen of the songs are mentioned in a quick run-through of the plot, but some are merely quoted, and "A Nobody Like You" has the title "Nobody But You" on the other pages. Musically, this is a series of performances by two persons. I hesitate to name them because this CD deserves to be considered without comparison to their other work. I think it is more like church music than rock 'n' roll: two people often play together for simple musical interludes in the services that I have been to, and these songs seem to be offered in a similar spirit, though institutionally this music was "co-commissioned by The Brooklyn Academy of Music and The Arts At St. Ann's." There are two pictures of a performance in the CD liner notes, so it looks like those institutions received what they were paying for.

Me too: I had a lot of difficulty understanding Andy Warhol as a person with an exalted position in American society until I listened to this CD often enough to get a sense of the innumerable steps ("I drew 550 different shoes today It almost made me faint") that he went through before "He'd probably say you think too much That's cause there work that you don't want to do." The songs on this CD are not trying to be big hits. The perplexity of making statements like "And he doesn't know who he is, standing, staring at this log" reaches too far out for truly popular success, but it scratches the surface of the primal mystery about these things.

I have a big problem with the modern, thinking that most knowledge is about things that are far more primitive than life as we know it. This is particularly true of the guitar solo in "Nobody But You." The first time I tried to figure out what it was, I thought it was all one note. Maybe I am missing the experience of seeing someone's foot on a wah-wah pedal or playing with a tremolo bar and tone settings on an electric guitar, or holding the guitar in front of an amplified speaker to produce feedback while the guitarist played that one note, which produces enhanced overtones that standard musical notation does not record. This really ties into the events of 1968 for me: Andy Warhol got shot, but I was only drafted. The feeling: "Inside I've got some shattered bone for nobody but you" seems as absurd as the politics of 1968, when a new Nixon and the nobody Spiro Agnew were elected because everybody believed South Vietnam would get a better deal from the Republicans and neither of them had promised to send me to Cambodia, so the U.S. was as safe as it had ever been from anything that I might say. I like the song "Nobody But You" for its great bouncing bass line, but in spite of the line "Sundays I pray a lot," you can't sing this song in church because it ends with the kind of idea that only becomes a fictitious hero: "all my life -- It's been nobodies like you."