Chapter Eight
1967–68
The relationship between John and Lou was symbiotic. They loved each other, but they also hated each other.
Lynne Tillman
In the summer of 1967, despite all the maneuvering for control, the band was charged with the enthusiasm of a fresh start. Instead of dwelling on the poor response to The Velvet Underground and Nico, and the possibly adverse effects of breaking with Warhol, everyone had great expectations for Steve Sesnick and the new material they were working up for a second album. In turn, Sesnick had his own terrifically high hopes for the group. Maureen thought, “He was honestly convinced that we could be the next Beatles. He always talked up—never down. Of course, even I realized he was in it to get rich. He had such high, high hopes.”
The dissenting opinion about Sesnick came from Cale, who instinctively distrusted the fast-talking, cigar-smoking entrepreneur who managed to manipulate everybody in the group as well as their record company with a smoke screen of promises, laughter, and exaggeration. “Steven just drove a wedge right between Lou and me,” said Cale. “His main concern was to say, ‘Look, Lou’s the star, you’re just the sideman.’ Wrong, Steve.” John found himself constantly arguing with Lou about arrangements for the new songs. Lou was pushing the band to appeal to a wider audience. John was resisting with all his might. “There were pressures building up, and we were all getting very frustrated,” Cale recalled. “After the first record we lost our patience and diligence. We couldn’t even remember what our original precepts were.”
The Warhol crowd also despised Sesnick. “It was as if your daughter married someone from the wrong family,” sniffed the man who continued to be the band’s strongest supporter and Lou’s staunchest friend, Danny Fields.
“The person they picked,” Warhol noted icily, “was terrible.”
Although not yet officially their manager, Sesnick immediately got to work behind the scenes on a number of Velvets projects. He sent a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, with an eye to making a publishing deal with Epstein’s company, Nemperor. The deal, backed by an Epstein-produced European tour, might have elevated the band to international stardom.
One night that spring Danny Fields found himself at Max’s with the British impresario looking for an opportunity to encourage the deal. “I wanted Brian to manage them or promote them or get them to Europe or something!” Danny recalled. Spotting Lou in the crowded back room, he hurried over and urged him, “Pretend you have to go uptown and I’ll get you a ride with Brian Epstein!” Although in the midst of an intense conversation, Lou complied.
In the limousine, Brian, who had just returned from Acapulco, leaned over and, fondling Lou’s arm, murmured, “My lover and I spent our whole vacation listening to your record.”
“Oh?” Lewis replied.
“Well, I like it very much.”
“Why, thank you.”
Reed sniffed dismissively to a friend the following day, “Everybody thinks we homosexuals are wanton perverts, but as a matter of fact we’re all quite straight and selective.” Sesnick continued to pursue a deal with Epstein in the ensuing months, cashing in on his friendship with Epstein’s lawyer Nat Weiss. Tragically, Epstein died of a drug overdose before the end of the year, without having done anything about the VU.
In July, John helped produce and arrange Nico’s first solo album, Chelsea Girl. It was a magical record and collaboration, containing three songs by Lou (who seemed willing to collaborate with Nico from a distance), as well as tracks by Dylan, Cale, Morrison, and Jackson Browne.
Browne recalled meeting Lou during the sessions: “Lou, who always had this incredible menacing scowl on his face, wouldn’t say more than one or two syllables because that was how Andy was. But he was a sweetheart underneath. Afterwards he took me for a big Chinese meal and then on to see the Murray the K Show at RKO. There was Wilson Pickett, the Blues Project, the Who, Etta James. What a day.” Impressed by Jackson, Lou took the seventeen-year-old singer/songwriter under his wing. At one point he told Jackson about the recent “be-in” hippie celebration in San Francisco and revealed that he’d been to the simultaneous event in New York: “The way he described it, you realized there was a place for all that inside of him. He loved seeing Central Park full of people all just high and loving each other.”
Unfortunately, when Nico’s Chelsea Girl was released in October, Lou, John, and Nico were all disappointed by its production. “If they’d just have allowed Cale to arrange it and let me do more stuff on it,” exclaimed Reed. “I mean everything on that song ‘Chelsea Girls,’ those strings, that flute, should have defeated it, but the lyrics, Nico’s voice, managed somehow to survive. We still got ‘It Was a Pleasure Then’; they couldn’t stop us. We’d been doing a song like that in our beloved show, it didn’t really have a title. Just all of us following the drone. And there it sits in the middle of that album.” Lou became more determined to make the next Velvet album a success no matter what the cost.
The Velvet Underground recorded their second album, White Light/White Heat, in September. They had been working up the material since the previous summer and took three days to complete it in the studio. Reed was quite taken with astrology at the time and would enthusiastically explain how a lot of his songs embodied the Virgo–Pisces opposition. Lou and John were Pisces, and Maureen and Sterling were Virgos. (All the songs on the second album were published by their company, Three Prong Music, representing the trident of Neptune—the ruler of Pisces.) “White Light/White Heat” was an obvious drug song showing the Pisces: suffering, self-indulgent, and living on the “road of excess.” Virgo, on the other hand, was about enlightenment, expressions of Christian purity, self-control, living in the “palace of wisdom,” as expressed in songs like “Here She Comes Now” and “I Heard Her Call My Name.”
The short, intense sessions lent the music a feeling of spontaneity. Nowhere was this more evident than on “Sister Ray,” which Reed had written on a train coming back to New York from Connecticut. The lyrics echoed scenes from Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, one of Lou’s favorite writers. “‘Sister Ray’ has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking a bunch of sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear.”
In terms of musical arrangement, “Sister Ray” was Cale’s greatest masterpiece with the Velvet Underground. Though Reed and Sesnick were pushing Cale to tone it down, he stood his ground and eventually forced both of them to see things his way. “When we did “Sister Ray,” we turned up to ten flat out, leakage all over the place,” said Reed. “That’s it. They asked us what we were going to do. We said, ‘We’re going to start.’ They said, ‘Who’s playing the bass?’ We said, ‘There is no bass.’ They asked us when it ends. We didn’t know. When it ends, that’s when it ends. It did a lot to the music of the seventies. We were doing the whole heavy-metal trip back then. I mean, if ‘Sister Ray’ is not an example of heavy metal, then nothing is.” Later Lou commented on just how far ahead of their time they were: “No one has ever attempted what we did on the second album, where we used raw electronics.”
The seventeen-and-a-half-minute song, unrecognized when it was released, has been compared to Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” as well as such rock classics as “Wooly Bully” and “96 Tears.”
White Light/White Heat was the most manic, abrasive, and powerful album of the Velvet Underground. It reflected the internal tensions of a band ascending into prominence and “at each other’s throats,” as Cale said. The intelligence in the band, however, could not offset the daily antagonism of differing musical ideas. Some observers insisted that Lou, at this point, realized he wanted to make it as a solo performer, regarding a band as a necessary but supportive evil.
“I Heard Her Call My Name,” which opened side two of the record, played a decisive role in the intensifying Reed–Cale battle. Lou, in an extraordinary move, went into the studio without telling any of the others and remixed the track so that he would appear prominent on it. According to the normally restrained Moe Tucker, the song “was ruined by the mix—the energy. You can’t hear anything but Lou. He was the mixer in there, so he, having a little ego trip at the time, turned himself so far up that there’s no rhythm, there’s no nothing.”
***
In the fall of 1967 the band split up their communal living. Sterling moved in with Martha Dargan and her brother Tom on East 2nd Street. John moved into the Chelsea Hotel with his girlfriend, Betsey Johnson. Moe was living on Fifth Avenue and 9th Street. Lou bounced from place to place, staying mostly on Perry Street, and later in a loft on Seventh Avenue and 31st Street. Lou’s loft was “just me, a bed, and our stuff, five or six huge amplifiers and guitars.” Despite this separation, the band still spent most of their time hanging out together. “We’d come flying in at five in the morning and play ‘Sister Ray’ through them,” Lou continued. “I was the only guy living in the building, except for this big black guy upstairs who had a gun. When it got too loud, he’d start jumping up and down on the floor; you knew when the ceiling started buckling that things were getting serious. Then he’d come down and start pounding on the door. That was it: rehearsal canceled due to gun.”
The major shift in the group came, however, not from the recording of White Light/White Heat or from the breakup of their living situation, but rather from their having signed a managerial contract with Steve Sesnick. Cale’s predictions were beginning to play themselves out with catastrophic consequences. “Lou was starting to act funny,” said John. “He brought in Sesnick—who I thought was a real snake—to be our manager, and all this intrigue started to take place. Lou was calling us ‘his band’ while Sesnick was trying to get him to go solo. Maybe it was the drugs he was doing at the time. They certainly didn’t help. Basically, Sesnick just became an apologist for Lou. He was just a yes-man, and he came between us. It was maddening, just maddening. Before, it had always been easy to talk to Lou. Now you had to go through Sesnick, who seemed pretty practiced in the art of miscommunication. We should have been able to sort out our own problems. He should never have been brought in. Things had been bad between us for a while, but when Sesnick arrived, they got worse. There was a lot of intrigue, a lot of duplicity, and a lot of talking behind people’s backs, a lot of plotting.”
Cale later claimed that it was at this point, after the recording of White Light/White Heat in the fall of 1967, that he first thought of leaving the band. He realized that they weren’t going to progress any further on the path that he and Lou had embarked on in early 1965. Lou was beginning to introduce to the group a light, much more pop style of playing. The songs he was writing that fall signaled a clear backing away from the material typified by “Sister Ray,” and an increasing emphasis on his lyrics.
Cale’s original idea—to create an orchestral chaos in which Lou could spontaneously create lyrics—was being lost, because Lou wasn’t looking for an orchestral chaos anymore. He was looking for a group that would follow his directions to create pop songs. Sesnick was also playing a large role in this, because Sesnick was supporting Lou’s approach toward what he imagined to be a more popular and commercial form.
Making matters worse for John was that Lou, who demanded 100 percent allegiance and attention from his collaborators, resented John’s close relationship with Betsey Johnson. Betsey had a great belief in John and encouraged him to step out of Lou’s shadow and make his own music, write his own songs, and sing them himself. A fashion designer of international fame who had recently been written up in Time magazine, Johnson had a shop called Paraphernalia, which was said to be the hippest clothes shop in America. John was very photogenic, and Betsey enhanced this greatly by designing clothes for him. She also designed clothes for the rest of the band, but John’s tastes and style became increasingly flamboyant. In one instance, he wanted her to make special gloves for him so that his hands looked as if they were on fire when he was playing. Sometimes he wore dramatic masks onstage. Sterling recalled that after being dressed by Betsey Johnson, John became astonishing to look at and even more charismatic onstage next to the diminutive, uncomfortable Lou.
John’s outshining Lou onstage was counterbalanced by the fortuitous appearance of Andy Warhol’s Index Book, by Andy Warhol, published in December, which helped pave Lou’s way as a solo star. Less a study than a celebration of the Factory, the book contained interviews with Andy and his clique and was packaged with a number of Warholesque objects and a flexidisc. The record was decorated with a photo of Lou Reed, clad in the Factory-standard impenetrable shades. The recording consisted of an interview with Nico, with the Velvets’ music playing in the background. The book, which made an enormous media splash when it hit the stores, raised Lou’s profile.
***
With the rock field expanding rapidly, the stage was set for a successful debut of White Light/White Heat on January 30, 1968. But, to everyone’s dismay, it too was banned on the radio. Lou, however, was still confident that they would succeed and, if anything, took this rejection as a sign that he was right to move further into the mainstream.
White Light/White Heat turned out to be another severe commercial disappointment, receiving an even harsher response than the first album. Because of the lyrics, there was almost a complete blackout on the radio. Moreover, the lack of association with Warhol limited their channels of publicity. With no Warhol or Nico publicity boosting it, the record had to rely on the standard conduits for rock music, where White Light/White Heat was largely ignored. Even Rolling Stone magazine refused to review the album. “Most of our singles were never distributed,” noted Morrison. “However, where they appeared on jukeboxes, people have really liked them. ‘White Light/White Heat’ as a single is nice. That single was banned everyplace. When it was banned in San Francisco, we said, the hell with it. That’s as far as it ever got.” Aside from neglect, the album faced competition from an enormous pop market that was being flooded with all sorts of flash-in-the-pan products, soaking up the teen market’s dollars. As the rock-and-roll industry came into its own, alternative groups like the Velvets found it increasingly difficult to break in. Making matters worse was the fact that the band was still being put down for being Warhol acolytes—drug-taking, homosexual, S&M devotees—without the advantage of Warhol’s umbrella protection and buoyant encouragement.
The Velvet Underground, though, knew how good they were and maintained a positive outlook despite the reviews. Fortunately, by the end of January, their financial situation had improved significantly. When managed by Warhol, the Velvets had lived on paltry per diem handouts from the Factory. But after Sesnick became their manager, they began to make some money. Lou especially, as the songwriter and lead singer, got enough money to live a reasonable life.
Most of their money came from touring. In one bright moment of an otherwise terrible relationship with MGM/Verve, Sesnick persuaded the company to take the money that they would have used in publicity and devote it to the expenses of the Velvets’ touring. As a result, they flew first-class, stayed in the best hotels, and ate in nice restaurants. Moreover, they were sure they would sell out and get a great response at several of their regular venues—La Cave in Cleveland, the Tea Party in Boston, the Second Fret in Philadelphia, and a number of other places on the West Coast and Texas.
“We never did tour Europe, but it vexed us beyond imagining that we never made inroads in the U.S.,” said Sterling. “It was tilting at windmills. We were obsessed by the idea of somehow changing California. We were always sallying forth to the West Coast for months, living well and playing occasionally. The longest we were ever away was two months, and that was hell. If we went out to the Coast, we couldn’t afford to fly back and forth so we’d stay out there and play for six weeks and play up and down the Coast a little bit. Being on the road is mostly real boring. The only real good thing is playing.”
The band, who received no royalties from their albums, earned $600 one week, $2,500 the next on the road. It was the only way they could make money, and they liked to play, but the pressures of touring did little to assuage the developing tensions.
Like any rock group spending large amounts of time on the road, they had problems getting along with each other. Whenever they got to a hotel, for example, Sterling would virtually knock everyone over in his attempt to get the best room in the suite. He usually shared a room with John, while Maureen would team up with Lou. Cale and Reed fought about the musical direction. According to Morrison, “One time in Chicago the club had a circular stage. I was playing the solo on ‘Pale Blue Eyes,’ Cale was lurching around on bass and stepped on a distorter, which quadrupled my volume. It was an accident. Everybody staggered back. John shuts it off and kicks the box across the stage. I look over at Lou and Lou’s eyes were saying, ‘What an asshole.’ But for Cale, offense is the best defense, so when confronted, he attacks. I said, ‘John, I wish you wouldn’t come lurching over, blah, blah, blah. Oh, forget it.’ Cale was really getting into it. On one occasion he drank nineteen whiskey sours. They had a big argument in Chicago. They may have thrown a few punches at each other. The first time they did that in California, I was horrified. I wasn’t alarmed by the fighting, I was enraged. Sesnick and I felt like throttling the both of them.”
Indeed, Cale found himself fighting more than Reed and Sesnick about maintaining the band’s radical sound. Facing the extreme counter-avant-garde while touring the Midwest, he found that an element of compromise crept into their original precepts. “To make audiences feel comfortable,” John explained, “we ended up putting a backbeat on everything, as if to say, ‘We may be crazy, but we’re still rock and roll.’”
During the early months of 1968, with Steve Sesnick egging him on, Lou Reed chipped away at the Velvets’ democratic foundations. Sesnick and Reed decided where the band should play, setting up a surfeit of gigs at the Boston Tea Party, broken by occasional visits to California, Cleveland, and Canada. They also masterminded a subtle shift in the band’s musical axis, away from the explorations of sound toward an emphasis on lyrics. Lou stepped into the forefront with his poetic investigations of a human spirit burdened by obsession and guilt.
John recalled it as an unhappy time. “Lou and I couldn’t see eye to eye anymore. We weren’t rehearsing, we weren’t working, we were flying all over the place, and we couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to work. It was a result of touring day in and day out—which can be a detrimental influence. In terms of emotional balance, there was no more room in the band for anyone else—Lou and I did enough fighting for all. We weren’t very compatible writing together, but we did turn out a number of songs.”
In 1968, in two recording sessions that served to harvest the seeds of their breakdown, they attempted to cut a single. During the first session they recorded “Ferryboat Bill” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” poppy, crowd-pleasing rock-and-roll songs that indicated the direction Lou wanted to take. In the second session they produced “Mr. Rain,” Cale’s recording swansong with the Velvets, a return to the prominent drone and viola. None of the songs were particularly inspired. Whereas they had previously gone into a recording studio and recorded an album in a day or two, they were now hacking around for days getting nowhere just trying to record a single.
In defending his turf musically, John went to extremes that even Sterling found intolerable. He recalled how John drove them all crazy: “One thing that really rankled was John insisting on building this bass amp of his with band money. Something to do with acoustic suspension speakers producing this great wall of sound. Thousands were spent on these goddamn things—and then they didn’t work. Meanwhile, we were on endorsement to Acoustic Amplifiers, who made this fabulous bass amp, the Acoustic 360. John refused even to accept a free one from the factory. Later on, John found out that if he’d only had a preamp, it would have worked. All this money for what I called the Tower of Babble. There was a general dissatisfaction with his free-spiriting—and free spending. It really did piss everybody off. What the hell was he up to? Ha ha ha! But it was an ugly business, stupid and counterproductive.”
According to John, “Because there was less and less finesse of anything we were doing onstage, we lost sight of the music. There were a lot of soft songs and I didn’t want that many soft songs. I was into trying to develop these really grand orchestral bass parts. I was trying to get something big and grand and Lou was fighting against that, he wanted pretty songs. I said, ‘Let’s make them grand pretty songs then.’ All of that was just irritating, it was a source of a lot of friction. It was unresolved, it was a constant fight of who was gonna play what. They were creative conflicts. I think egos were getting bruised.”
Even for Moe, Lou could be hard to deal with, primarily because she could never tell whether he was going to be superfriendly or withdrawn. Just like Lou’s childhood friend Allen Hyman, Moe felt that Lou was overly influenced by his surroundings, too sensitive to anything that happened to him. Whereas this left her simply feeling sorry for Lou, whom she characterized as “a kind of sad person” at this time, Sterling found Lou’s mood swings harder to handle. If Lou was down, Sterling would go down too. This dynamic, combined with the pitched battle between Reed and Cale for control of the music, transformed the Velvet Underground from being a band that had had a lot of fun together to being a band that began suffering together.
In February, John and Betsey Johnson announced that they planned to be married. Lou, she realized, “was not happy that John was getting married. Period. To me. Period.”
“When you’re in a band,” Cale explained, “you’re married to the band.”
In Betsey’s words: “The Velvets were totally insecure all the time anyway. It was an on-the-edge kind of time every day. Now it was like the girl breaking up the group.”
The wedding was postponed when Cale came down with hepatitis and spent several weeks in the hospital, but John and Betsy finally got married in April. Lou attended the ceremony, but the Reed–Cale relationship was clearly under siege. Watching from the sidelines, Betsey sensed “a real edge with Lou all the time. Ego jealousy. Lou was definitely the star. Any guy who is out there singing is the star. It was hard for John because he was backup star. He had so much charisma.”
If the Velvet Underground was a family and Lou was the husband, it raises the question of whether Lou had a personal life beyond the band. Mary Woronov, who saw him occasionally through the speed circle that centered around Ondine, recalled that Lou did not date, and other friends had the impression that Lou was no longer interested in sex. However, the truth is that from 1966 on, when Shelley Albin moved to New York City with her husband, Ronald Corwin, Lou had a relationship with her.
At first Shelley hoped that she could maintain an open, honest friendship with Lou that would include her husband, but when Corwin rejected the notion of having anything to do with Reed because he was a bad influence, she found herself having to reject Lou’s overtures since she could not imagine being dishonest. Consequently, through 1966 and 1967 they rarely met. However, by 1968 she crossed the border and entered into a secret affair with Lou. Despite its occasional moments of satisfaction and inspiration for a number of outstanding songs, the relationship tortured Lou, who felt that she possessed everything he wanted but could not keep. “Are you going to come and spend your life with me,” Lou would ask, “or are you going to stay with that asshole?”
Shelley felt ambivalent. Part of her was so relieved to be with an intelligent and real person with whom she could have a conversation, but another overriding part was scared off by Lou’s lifestyle and all it entailed. “You’re more interested in security than love,” Lou would often chide her, and Shelley had to admit he was right.
What kept the relationship alive for Lou as much as the magic effect her presence had on him was the challenge. “Leave Ron,” Lou would urge her. “What are you doing with him? Why don’t you just come out the door and stay out the door?” Shelley, who still knew him better than anybody else, was quite sure that if she had agreed to move in with him, Lou would have made her life a living hell as he had done at Syracuse and pushed her out again. That was the curse of being Lou. He was, she was convinced, miserable throughout the sixties and obsessive about his misery to boot, rooting around in it like a pig in shit.
One striking difference Shelley found in Lou was that wherever he was with her, walking down the street, sitting at a lunchroom counter, he appeared to be constantly composing music in his head. Suddenly out of the blue he’d bark out: “You beat on the Coke glass, boop boop de boop. You sing, doo wah doo.” In other words, either help me write this song or shut up. Actually, Shelley reflected, nothing had really changed. The bottom line was, if you were with Lou, you had to resign yourself to being an instrument.
Months would pass in which they would not see each other. Then they would get together in the simplest way, meeting for a Coke or a walk in the Central Park Zoo. In order to protect herself from being seduced against her will, Shelley had stopped listening to the radio altogether for fear that Lou’s music would have the effect upon her that the sirens had on anyone who heard their song.
That summer the band toured the West Coast. Lou had hardly recovered from John’s wedding when one morning in Los Angeles, riding down to breakfast in the elevator with Sesnick at the exclusive Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he glanced at a stack of newspapers piled on the floor to see a glaring headline announcing that on the previous day, June 3, Andy Warhol had been shot at the Factory and had less than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Badly shaken, Lou found his jumbled emotions difficult to sort out. Part of him wanted to rush to the phone and call New York to find out what the prognosis was, while another part of him was frightened of being rejected by his former mentor.
Shortly after Warhol was shot, Lou, back in New York, met Shelley at Max’s and told her he was hiding out because Warhol’s would-be assassin, a radical-feminist writer named Valerie Solanas, who had penned the manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM), was after him.
Before the end of the month, Lou mustered the courage to call Warhol in the hospital. “I was scared to call him,” he remembered, “and in the end I did and he asked me, ‘Lou, Lou, why didn’t you come?’” Reed felt terrible, but after a few minutes Andy started to gossip, and Lou realized Andy would be all right. Already tinged with guilt, Reed’s relationship with his former mentor grew even more complex after the attempted assassination. Father figures weren’t meant to be mortal, so Reed distanced himself from the wounded Warhol by avoiding him. “I really love him,” Lou confessed on many occasions, and the emotion was always reciprocated by Andy. But there was also an inhibition on both sides, an awareness that some boundary of behavior had been breached.
Reed was among the most outspoken of Warhol’s disciples about the shooting. In his song about the assassination attempt on Songs for Drella, written twenty years later, he concluded that he wanted to execute Valerie Solanas. In an extensive interview with the British writer John Wilcock, who compiled a book of interviews with Warhol’s friends in the wake of the tragedy, Lou spoke about his feelings for the man who was—after Cale—perhaps the most important influence on his life. “Andy’s gone through the most incredible suffering. They let her [Solanas] off with three years. You get more for stealing a car. It’s just unbelievable. But the point is the hatred directed at him by society was really reflected.” Lou also revealed his own fears about the relationship between success and persecution. “I had to learn certain things the hard way. But one of those things I learned was work is the whole story. Work is literally everything. Most very big people seem to have enemies, and seem to be getting shot, which is something a lot of people should keep in mind. There is a lot to be said for not being in the limelight.”
***
After the Warhol shooting, Lou decided to take extreme measures to get rid of Cale. The question of who was really in command of the Velvet Underground had to be definitely settled. John felt strongly that they’d worked constructively to capture something rare on the first two albums, but that the motivating spirit was gone. By the summer, Reed and Cale were blocking each other’s progress. Cale felt the problem could be solved; the more aggressive, business-minded Reed did not.
Once again their conflict centered on Sesnick’s role. Reed, of course, wanted Sesnick in, whereas Cale continued to find his presence unbearable. “Whenever a new song came around, it was like picking at sores. It was very badly handled and exacerbated constantly by Steve Sesnick. Sesnick built up a barrier between Lou and the rest of the band. Lou and I were very close and running the band, and gradually Sesnick came along and said, ‘Lou’s the songwriter, he’s the star.’” After a year with Sesnick at the helm, Cale admitted, “I felt like a sideman, more or less. It was a mishandling of the situation.” However, although Cale felt demoralized, he did not think things were irreconcilable. He wanted to go on.
The Reed–Cale conflict was as common in the rock world as the clap. Most partners resolved it in some manner that allowed them to continue. Undoubtedly the VU’s commercial failure exacerbated the tension. Whatever, in September, Lou called a meeting of the band at the Riviera Cafe on Sheridan Square in the middle of Greenwich Village. When Sterling arrived, he found Maureen and Lou waiting, but no John. “Lou announced that John was out of the band,” Morrison recalled. “I said, ‘You mean out for today, or for this week?’” and Lou said, ‘No, he’s out.’ I said that we were a band and it was graven on the tablets. A long and agonizing argument ensued, with much banging on tables, and finally Lou said, ‘You don’t go for it? All right; the band is dissolved.’”
For a blind second Sterling and Maureen were shocked by the finality of Lou’s decision. In retrospect they both admitted they saw the split coming and had been paralyzed to do anything about it. It was a black moment in the band’s history; Morrison and Tucker yearned for the lost sound of Cale’s viola and organ. Yet both admitted that their desire to keep the band going was more powerful than their loyalty to Cale.
What upset John most was the way Lou handled the situation. It fell to Sterling to deliver the news. “We were supposed to be going to Cleveland for a gig,” Cale remembered. “Sterling showed up at my apartment and effectively told me that I was no longer in the band. Lou always got other people to do his dirty work for him. Lou never confronted me, saying, ‘I don’t want you around anymore.’ It was all done by sleight of hand. As for resentment, I dunno. Things had been pushed pretty far between us and I can’t say I was entirely blameless, but I felt that was treason.”
Disgusted with Lou, and creatively frustrated, John stormed off, claiming, “I left because the music was getting redundant, we weren’t really working on the music anymore—and I decided I was going to find another career.”
“It was really John’s music and then Lou’s music,” concluded Betsey Johnson. “It seemed like they went as far as they could go in a way being the Velvet Underground. There was no kind of growth for them. Now they’re heroes for what they did, but then, to keep a group together for what—a record contract, social acknowledgment, acceptance? Not people like that.”
In retrospect, Reed laid the blame for the split on management problems. At the time, however, he felt triumphant enough to say, “I only hope that one day John will be recognized as … the Beethoven of his day. He knows so much about music, he’s such a great musician. He’s completely mad—but that’s because he’s Welsh.”
As a result of the brutal betrayal of the man who had offered him his home and introduced him into a world he had only benefited from, Lou gained complete control of the Velvet Underground, but at the same time was eternally alienated from Sterling Morrison, which would turn out to be perhaps the biggest mistake he made. When he would need Sterling’s support in the years to come, Sterl would not be there.
John’s reflections about the episode were dismissive and bitter. “It was just a flash in the pan,” he reflected on his four-year investment in the Velvet Underground. “It came and it went, and all of it had gone on without anybody really noticing that it had been there.”
Ironically, at the time Cale left the band, their influence was just beginning to get a foothold on the front ranks of rock. The Rolling Stones, who had lost themselves in psychedelic rock in 1967, made a superb return to form in 1968 with Beggars Banquet. “Lou’s basic influence on songwriting was his use of plagal cadence,” asserted Robert Palmer. “Plagal cadence is a one-chord—four-chord. C to F to C to F. ‘Heroin’ is that. ‘Waiting for the Man’ is basically that. An awful lot of Velvet songs are basically that. Lou really taught everyone to use the plagal cadence with a drone. The other people who really mastered the plagal cadence were Keith and Mick. ‘Street Fighting Man,’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ are all plagal-cadence songs.”
However, Cale was convinced the experiment had been a failure. “We never really fulfilled our potential. With tracks like ‘Heroin,’ ‘Venus in Furs,’ ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ and ‘Sister Ray,’ we defined a completely new way of working. It was without precedent. Drugs, and the fact that no one gave a damn about us, meant we gave up on it too soon.”
“I think he’s right in a way,” Lou would admit twenty years later.