The Velvet Forum

Got yer attention?

It seems that so many people hold such a grudge against Doug. They hate him for what he did to the band, without really knowing what he did FOR the band! And Sterling seems to be so forgettable, so far beyond contempt, that people...well...forget about all of his contributions! Someone even called him a member of Lou's pickup band (meaning a member of the VU other than Lou).

First, for everyone who blames Doug for making the VU "Mainstream" on Loaded, here is what he had to say in an interview (found on http://www.furious.com) about the Loaded sessions: "The only thing that stuck in my mind [about the Loaded sessions] was "Ocean" because I knew I'd scored a piece, the first and only piece I'd ever scored, so it kind of stuck with me."

Same interview, on the band's goals for Loaded: "You have to understand at the time, the motivation was... Lou was, and all of us were, intent on one thing and that was to be successful and what you had to do to be successful in music, was you had to have a hit, and a hit had to be uptempo, short, and with no digressions, straight ahead basically, you wanted a hook and something to feed the hook and that was it. "Sweet Jane" was arranged just exactly the way it it is on the original Loaded release exactly for that reason - to be a hit! 'Who Loves The Sun' was done exactly that way for that reason - to be a hit. The first time he ever conceived of the song "Satellite Of Love", he was thinking of it, he was in a limousine. He, me and Sesnick were riding in a limo and he was talking about , someone had just launched a satellite, I forget what it was, he was riffing off that idea and conceiving of this song and tying it back into songs about love. Because that's what always sells and that's literally where it came from. It was designed in his mind as a hit and that's what he was looking for- a hit."

You got that? Straight out of the horse's mouth.

For anyone who does not know, you do not have to be a fantastic guitarist to be successful. You don't have to be friggin' Jack Bruce in order to be a cog in a well oiled Rock 'N Roll machine. I don't even need to comment on this one any further. If you mock Doug for being a loser and an amateur, go listen to Yes and ELP and toss your VU records in the dustbin.

As for Sterling, if you guys want to believe that he contributed a few guitar lines here and there to Loaded, then fine. There is no way I am going to convince you of otherwise, regardless of what all of the players have actually said (let alone what the MUSIC actually says).

Some poeple are so goddamned nit-picky that it takes all of the pleasure out of the music. If only Cale had wanted to fall in line behind Lou, we wouldnt have all these arguments, would we? Oh well. F 'em all.

I think the under appreciation of Doug Yule started with the Up-Tight book where the authors tried to make him look like an ignorant kid. And why? Because he's not John Cale. And tihs attitude has been blindly accepted by a lot of the fans. You only need to listen to the last two albums, not to mention all the VU/Another View stuff AND all the live stuff from when he was in the band to see how important Yule's contribution was.

The third album is my favourite anyway. And I certainly listen to both the 3rd album and Loaded more often than WL/WH. It sometimes seems to me like maybe there are some young people here who've gotten into the band relatively recently who are more gung-ho about the Cale era stuff.

mg196 wrote:As for Sterling, if you guys want to believe that he contributed a few guitar lines here and there to Loaded, then fine.

It's what Doug says (http://members.aol.com/olandem3/lowdown.html) and Sterling as well, in Up-Tight: that he wasn't nearly as involved with the making of Loaded as he was with the other records, being angry with Lou and generally too busy studying.

He did contribute rhythm guitar to all tracks on Loaded and he did contribute greatly to songs like "Head Held High", which he arranged together with Reed, it's just that he couldn't be bothered too much all the time and so Doug simply played some of his parts.

Actually, despite your angry tone, which I believe is greatly due to my postings in that thread, I agree on most points you raise. But I never tried to marginalise Sterling. I just repeated wat he himself and Doug said on his involvement with Loaded. I actually am glad you write so passionately about the band on this forum, which had gone to sleep a bit. And I thank you for rooting for Sterling, who is my favourite Velvet (and guitar player in general) as well.

Hey Arj, don't mistake my sarcasm for anger. Life is too beautiful to get pissed off abou tstuff like this. Think of it as passionate ranting!

As for Up-Tight, I take that with many grains of salt, much as I do Bockris's "Transformer."

OK, back to the topic at hand!!

I've never heard any solo Lou stuff besides whatever is on the radio and I prefer listening to the 3rd album and Loaded over the first two. I think Doug brought something they needed to the band. What direction would they have gone if John stayed in the band?

Probably a similar direction to the one they ended up taking anyway. They recorded 'Stephanie Says' and 'Temptation...' while he was still there, and they're about a billion miles away from Sister Ray. Hence Cale's departure, maybe?!

PhantomRaspberryBlower wrote:They recorded 'Stephanie Says' and 'Temptation...' while he was still there, and they're about a billion miles away from Sister Ray.

But they're not a billion miles away from "Sunday Morning" (in fact, "Stephanie Says" is, production-wise, a straight SM copy). It is clear, though, that Cale was bored with the "soft" direction, he said so himself re. the 3rd album songs that he played when still in the band, "Pale Blue Eyes" etc.

I've always thought that John's first solo album, Vintage Violence, is the closest thing either he or Lou has done to the sound of Loaded. Suggests to me that the reason he left was more to do with personal differences and the overall situation in the band than musical direction.

It's difficult to say where the band would have gone had Cale stayed with them. My best guess is to agree with the above comments and suggest they might have moved into a more commercial mode. Given the semi-commercial nature of "Vintage Violence," it's obvious Cale wouldn't have been dead set against it (plus he, like everyone else, I'm sure, wanted to make some money!).

To clarify my previous "Lou's pick-up band" comment - this is not meant to disparage the other members of the band, simply to indicate that I feel that, on "Loaded," they could have been replaced by any number of thousands of other musicians and I don't think it would have made much difference in the final product.