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Of all the Velvets, his solo records are possibly the ones I like the least. Most of them, I mean. Paris 1919 is excellent, and all the 60's table of elemts stuff. Most of the others I find unlistenable. His voice is not ragged-sounding enough for my liking either, and I don't like the way his music instruments are recorded. Too clean, too music hall. A great deal is made of him being the real creative force behind the Velvet Undergeound, but I don't think those records would have sounded the way they do if it wasn't also for the rock and roll element brough in by the others in the band, and his intensily close relationship (musical and intimate) with the cooler Lou Reed of the time. Strangely enough when Lou Reed started coming up with all this shit about ''The Great American Novel'', the theatrical blah balh blah, in short trying to be a bit more like John Cale solo, he went downhill forever.
He is great at song arrangements, as a producer, and at working with other people in general (let's forget about that record with Brian Eno, though). I was listening to ''Music For a New Society'' again the other day, and thinking that it's so strange that someone so brilliant at producing other people's records would let his own have the sort of sound that new age, cheap relaxation records have. Pity because a couple of the songs aren't bad per se.
His is undoubtedly an excellent musican, I just wish that he would have never tried to mix a classical approach to the rock approach in his solo work. Funnily enough, the classical music approach/rock thing is often mentioned about the Velvets too, yet you can barely hear any classical music in them, much more, instead, the drony tones of Theatre of Eternal Music.
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