#333 John Cale's Paris 1919 w/ Mark Doyle
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
John Cale is probably best known as a founding member of Velvet underground, but the four years he spent alongside Lou Reed represent a small fraction of the influence Cale has had on modern music. In this episode, recorded live at MTSU's Center for Popular Music, Ben talks to his friend and colleague Mark Doyle about his new book in the 33 1/3 series, which explores John Cale's 1973 album Paris 1919 and where it (may) fit within the greater context of his career, the evolution of rock music, and world history.
Mark Doyle is a Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University and previously joined us to discuss his book on The Kinks in episode 169. His new book is John Cale's Paris 1919 and you can get your copy here.
A special thanks to Greg Reish & Martin Fisher at the Center for Popular Music for hosting, recording and allowing us to share this conversation.
Join us for a live recording of the Road to Now in Washington, DC on May 29 at The Hamilton Live ft. guests Major Garett, Margaret Talev & Doug Heye. The theme is murder & mayhem in the capital city- get your tickets here!
This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:08.7 | This week, a special treat for you guys. |
| 0:11.6 | A conversation with my friend and colleague Mark Doyle on his new book, John Cale's Paris |
| 0:18.4 | 1919. |
| 0:19.6 | It's a contribution to the 33 and a third series, which is a great series of books on albums. |
| 0:25.5 | Also, this is episode number 33. How could that be any better? I freaked out about that when I realized it. |
| 0:32.1 | It wasn't on purpose, but if you want to think we're that clever, we'll let you hold on to it. |
| 0:36.5 | You may remember Mark from our conversation about the kinks a few years ago. |
| 0:40.9 | Mark invited me to host a conversation at Middle Tennessee State University's Center for Popular |
| 0:47.8 | Music. |
| 0:48.4 | And it went so great that we decided to air it on the feed. |
| 0:51.2 | And I got to tell you guys, you know, I like music history. It's not my thing. But when Mark Doyle writes a book about music history, it's good. If you're interested in music history, I would say check this out. It's such a fun book. It's rooted in history. But then he goes off on, you know, asking questions like, is John Kale's Paris 1919 a Christmas album? Which is honestly a blast. It's still |
| 1:13.1 | kind of mind-blowing that you could even make it that. For you guys who aren't familiar with |
| 1:16.1 | John Kale, and that may be a lot of you, he was one of the founding members of Velvet Underground |
| 1:20.3 | and was thrown out of the band by Lou Reed in 1968. And since then, for over half a century, has made all of these incredible contributions |
| 1:31.0 | to music that I feel like are really unsung. And so this gets into the history of Velvet Underground, |
| 1:38.0 | the history of the moment that this album, Paris, 1919, comes out in 1973, questions of why Kale is just making |
| 1:46.6 | noise in the background in Velvet Underground and suddenly puts out this beautiful polished |
| 1:50.8 | album. Such a great conversation. So one thing up front I should say is that this wasn't really |
| 1:55.8 | recorded to be a podcast. The format's great, but you get some noise in the background. Apologies for that. |
| 2:01.7 | We couldn't really take that out since it wasn't done in a studio. I will say here, though, |
| 2:07.5 | shout out to Greg Reich and Martin Fisher at MTSU Center for Popular Music for recording this |
... |
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