Tour 1965

On tour with The Primitives

Cale goes on tour with The Primitives to promote Lou Reed's offbeat dance craze The Ostrich. He doesn't perform on the actual recording.

"When I first met Lou Reed at the beginning of 1965, he was a 22-year old songwriter at Pickwick Records in Long Island City, and I was a 22-year old avant-garde musician in La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music. We were introduced by a Pickwick producer, Terry Phillips, who thought I was a pop musician because I had long hair. He asked me, Tony Conrad and a friend, the sculptor Walter de Maria, to form a band witht Lou called the Primitives. Phillips wanted to publicize a song had written and recorded in a back room and Pickwick has released as a single, 'The Ostrich', by a fictious band, the Primitives.

The pop programme American Bandstand wanted them to perform this on on TV, so Phillips was forced to put out an appropriate-looking band together. We thought it would be fun, and as a lark spent a couple of weekends playing the TV show and a few other East Coast gigs. Even though the record bombed, the experience of being in a rock band, however ersatz, gave Lou and me the opportunity to connect."