John Cale, by Kiran Sande

The story of John Cale isn’t just the story of one man; it’s the story of 20th century music. He’s the artist and enabler who links LaMonte Young with Lou Reed, Brian Eno with Andy Warhol, The Stooges with Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen with Shrek. History understandably tends to focus on the Welshman’s role in The Velvet Underground – it was his sonic radicalism, combined with Lou Reed’s songcraft, which made them the most significant rock ‘n roll band that ever rocked, that ever rolled – but his contribution to pop and the avant-garde extends far beyond those five years of white light and white heat. “I’m impatient,” he reflects. “I get twitchy. When I get that feeling I just go out and make something happen.”

Yes, the fiercely intelligent, mordantly witty John Cale has made many things happen, and he‘s done it in numerous roles and guises: classical prodigy, minimalist, drone scientist, chemical adventurer, A&R man, production wizard, virtuoso violist and owner of one of the most distinctive and oak-smoked singing voices in the business. We can hardly begin to address them all in this short tribute, but by golly, we’re going to try.

Born in 1942, Cale was a precocious if introverted youth, taking up piano and viola at an early age and giving his first BBC performance when he was eight years old. “I missed out on my teenage years,” he recalls. “I was practicing scales instead of playing football.” Having outgrown his hometown, “draconian” Garnant in Wales, Cale headed for Goldsmiths in London to study music formally. As befits a genius, he was expelled before too long, but won a scholarship to study in Massachussetts with Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer whose work explored the hidden relationships between music, architecture and mathematics. Here too Cale ruffled feathers and caused consternation, and was eventually thrown out for – among other things – violently attacking his instruments. Clearly, no conventional college or conservatory could contain the energy of the adolescent John Cale. “I learn from thinking about the future, what hasn’t been done yet,” he says. “That’s kind of my constant obsession.”

Having already worked with John Cage – on a headline-grabbing performance of Erik Satie’s notorious piece Vexations, which consists of a sequence 180 notes played 840 times without interruption, taking over 18 hours – Cale fell in with another singular and questing musical visionary: La Monte Young. Young’s work had long fascinated the talented young turk, and it was surely his destiny to join The Theatre of Eternal Music (nicknamed The Dream Syndicate), Young’s primary outlet for exploring his interest in drone and minimalism. Inspired by Eastern musics and the outer limits of jazz, the Syndicate was about getting to the very essence of what music is, and could be. Cale had found his level.

“What I had learned first about John Cale was that he had written a piece which pushed a piano down a mine shaft,” Tony Conrad fondly recalls. “We [The Dream Syndicate] hungered for music almost seething beyond control – or even something just beyond music, a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machines across abrupt and torrential seas of pounding blood.” 

Even a he discovered more about himself and music (and “something just beyond music”) through the Dream Syndicate, Cale couldn’t suppress his mounting love of rock ‘n roll, with all the urgency and viscerality it entailed (“I’ve said it over and over again that I’m a classical composer,” he would later protest, with characteristic wry humour, “Dishevelling my personality by dabbling in rock ‘n’ roll.”

Decamping to New York in search of dishevelment with Conrad and another Dream Syndicate member, Angus Maclise, Cale became friends with one Lou Reed. He was impressed by Reed’s unusual guitar tunings and playing technique, and saw immediate parallels with the drone music he’d created under La Monte Young. He saw the opportunity to apply what he’d learned in the classical avant-garde to Reed’s song structures, making for a sound as dizzyingly psychedelic and transcendental as it was streetwise and swaggering. The rest, as they say, is history: Andy Warhol fell for the band‘s charms, installing them as house band at his studio, The Factory, and as headliners on his Exploding Plastic Inevitable roadshow (“The only reason we wore sunglasses onstage was because we couldn’t stand the sight of the audience,” Cale said of their enduringly influential style).

Perhaps most crucially, Warhol introduced them to the beautiful German model and singer Nico, with whom Cale in particular would forge a lasting creative alliance. Under Warhol’s playful but typically canny stewardship, the band became the toast of New York, and created The Velvet Underground & Nico, the most influential debut album ever recorded (as the oft-quoted, variously attributed legend goes: very few people heard it, but everyone who did immediately started their own band). Almost overnight, pop art had become art-pop. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Never one to sit still, Cale left The Velvets in 1968, shortly after the release of their true masterpiece, White Light / White Heat, a face-meltingly noisy work which he once described as “consciously anti-beauty“. The band would continue to produce fine work, but without the Welsh drone magus in their ranks they were a rather more ordinary proposition. “I only hope that one day John will be recognized as the Beethoven or something of his day,” Reed would later affectionately opine. “He knows so much about music, he’s such a great musician. He’s completely mad – but that’s because he’s Welsh.”

Our madman was just warming up: in ‘68, rather than taking break, he produced The Stooges’ incendiary self-titled debut LP. “The challenge was to get that magic and impish behavior onto a record,” Cale said, and indeed he succeeded in capturing the raw power of Iggy and his under-rehearsed gang with great honesty but also emphasising their most angular and dissonant qualities. The touch-paper leading inexorably to punk had been lit, and it was Cale holding the spent match. 

Cale’s interest in producing and arranging for other artists continued to grow. 
He’d played on Nico’s slightly directionless solo debut Chelsea Girl, but he took a far more involved role in the creation of her next three albums: the stark, misanthropic and unforgivingly modernist The Marble Index (“There was a very powerful sense of style involved here. It wasn’t just throwing notes around.”), the lush, neo-classical Desertshore, and the elegiac, oft-underrated The End, which benefited from atmospheric synth textures supplied by Cale’s friend Brian Eno. He would go on to midwife classic LPs by Patti Smith, The Modern Lovers and countless others.

“I really love producing other artists,” he says. “I love helping someone achieve his goals. I always try to approach it from the point of view, ‘What would a Zen master do in these circumstances?’ And that is not to give the artist a direct answer to all his questions, but to suggest a solution by other means…”

1970 saw the release of the debut solo album by John Cale, Vintage Violence. He would later reflect that there wasn’t “much originality on that album, it’s just someone teaching himself to do something.” What was immediately striking was how tender and folksy it was, a world away the feedback-drenched nihilism of Cale-era Velvet Underground and the bleak, brutal beauty essayed on the Nico LPs. Cale was finding his voice as a songwriter, and it wasn’t quite as spiky as anyone had expected; it’s perhaps no coincidence that 1970 also saw him contribute to Nick Drake’s impossibly romantic and rueful Bryter Later.

There was a brief return to the classical idiom for 1971’s Terry Riley collaboration Church Of Anthrax and ‘72’s The Academy In Peril. But Cale’s career as a mature solo artist really began – and arguably peaked – with 1973’s Paris 1919. It’s this album that Cale has been revisiting in recent months, and that he’ll be revisiting in all its glory on-stage at Field Day 2011. Backed up by Little Feat, Cale created his most accessible and traditional work, but also his most ambitious: he’s never quite matched the near-symphonic grandeur of Paris 1919. Was there ever a song as joyous as ‘A Child’s Christmas In Wales’, as breathtakingly pretty as ‘Hanky Panky Nohow’, as boisterous and stomping as ‘Macbeth’? When the album was reissued in 2006, it was given a 9.5/10 rating by Pitchfork – proof, if it was needed, of its enduring appeal. Whether or not your familiar with the songs, you can rest assured that when you hear ‘em at Field Day your heart will soar. “We had a whale of a time doing this thing,” remembers Cale. “There were some crazy things going on.”

Of course, Cale has hardly been quiet in the 38 years since Paris 1919 was released. In ’74-’75 he released an essential trilogy of albums – Fear, Slow Dazzle, Helen of Troy – on Island, for whom he was working as an A&R man at the time. He returned to his minimalist roots with the hard-going but hugely rewarding Music For A New Society (1982). “If I’m interested in what I’m doing, other people will be interested in it,” Cale has said, and this has largely held true, though perhaps it’s fair to say that these 70s solo records have only recently garnered the degree of acclaim that they deserve.

Releases gradually became more sporadic over the course of the ’90s (perhaps his most memorable offering from that period, is Wrong Way Up, the full-length collab with Brian Eno that featured the immortal tune ‘Spinning Away’). In 2003 Cale embraced looping and sampling techniques with his customary vigour on the album HoboSapiens, and then four years later he covered LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All My Friends’ – as one of Cale’s most ardent admirers, we can only imagine how proud this must’ve made James Murphy feel. Oh, and did we mention that it’s Cale singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ on the Shrek soundtrack? Class.

When the tireless 69-year-old takes graces Field Day this year, be sure to pay your respects to a bona fide legend. “I learn from thinking about the future, what hasn’t been done yet. That’s kind of my constant obsession.”

Remember: it’s Cale’s world, we just live in it.