As members of the infamous Velvet Underground, John Cale and Lou Reed knew Andy Warhol in a way few did. After all, their sixties proto-art band was very much a product of Warhol's Factory, right down to the banana peel on the album cover. Songs for Drella, a rare collaboration between these Undergrounders, is a hard-edged, elegiac look at Warhol, the man, the artist, the icon. In a performance staged for the Next Wave Festival, Cale and Reed careen through Warhol's career with fourteen moody songs, painting a different picture of celebrity. From the young man suffocating in Pittsburgh ("Smalltown") to the superstar isolated by his own success ("Slip Away"), Songs for Drella strips away Warhol's notoriety to find a fragile genius, vexed by mortality and the burden of éclat: a story you'll never see in the pages of Interview. -Steve Seid