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Who's best: Lou Reed or John Cale?
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Sin Agog
Sin Agog
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Edited Apr 24, 2010, 19:07
Re: Who's best: Lou Reed or John Cale?
Apr 24, 2010, 17:33
This clip of Cale on a weird American gameshow in 1963 just slayed me. Really hard to believe that I just saw that.

It seems to me that Cale is getting short shrift (is there such a thing as a regular-sized shrift?) as a melodicist and a songwriter here. His melodies were less reliant on rock 'n' roll archetypes than Lou's. He had the same ability as Bacharach, Brian Wilson and all those cats to just pluck a melody out of the air without ever letting genre come into the picture. And his lyrics... I can see how they might come across more than a little alienating, but I've never listened to anyone who had the same ability to make each line seemingly unrelated to the one before it but still part of a unified whole. Although whenever he gets a yen to write a really cathartic personal song, he always gets it dead right: Leaving it Up to You, Guts, Dying on the Vine.

Reed's sweet nothings may have gone down a storm in the classic rock climate of the '70s, but Cale's genre-shifting art-rock seems to mesh much better with today's music-world of clued-in hipsters.

It's interesting that they both played the Southbank centre within a week or so of each other recently. Reed did a live version of Metal Machine Music and Cale did Paris 1919. I wonder if... Naw, better not get my hopes up.
In reply to:
Who's best: Lou Reed or John Cale? (Carlos)		 Replies:
Re: Who's best: Lou Reed or John Cale? (keith a)
Re: Who's best: Lou Reed or John Cale? (Popel Vooje)
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