Cale, John

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John Cale

Singer, songwriter, producer

Felt Velvets Contribution Was Minimal

Paris 1919 “A Pop Masterpiece”

Collaborated With Eno

Reuinted With Reed for Warhol Tribute

Selected discography

Sources

In 1968, having become increasingly dissatisfied with his marginal role in the Velvet Underground, John Cale left the enormously influential avant-garde rock group to embark on a strange and prolific solo career. Cale’s talents as a classically trained arranger and his interests in experimentalism had lent the Velvet Underground much of their mystique and musical sophistication. In addition to utilizing these elements, Cale’s solo career proved that he was also a great songwriter and a mesmerizing performer—capable of both a dream-like frailty and a phobic fury that earned him the reputation of progenitor of the late 1970s punk rock movement.

Born in Wales in 1942, Cale trained to be a concert violinist and violist at an early age. Although he had heard rock and roll, he became primarily involved in electronic music and performance art after entering London’s Goldsmith College. He received a scholarship in 1963 to study at the prestigious Tanglewood music center in Massachusetts with famed American composer Aaron Copland and Franco-Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. At Tanglewood Cale was not allowed to play his own pieces because they were considered too violent—one involved smashing a table with an axe. After Tanglewood, he gravitated to New York City, where he worked with leading avant-gardist La Mont Young and his performing group Theatre of Eternal Music. Cale then fell sway to the underground arts scene; in 1966, with singer/songwriter Lou Reed, he formed the Velvet Underground, which soon became associated with pop artist Andy Warhol.

Felt Velvets Contribution Was Minimal

Although his viola, bass, and musical approach was a significant influence on the band, Cale did not contribute to the writing of the group’s material and was occasionally intimidated by Reed’s compositional authority. “I did very little with the Velvets,” he explained in Beyond the Velvet Underground. “It was very educational in its own way, but my contribution was, I felt, quite minimal.”

Cale’s first solo release, 1969’s Vintage Violence, was a collection of pop songs sharing straightforward arrangements and a markedly detached surrealism. A promising debut, it featured a masked Cale on the cover. But in Interview, Cale said of the album, “You don’t see the personality. I didn’t realize it until I put the thing out, but the cover was really more about the album than I had thought.”

Cale then recorded three albums that explored his classical background. Church of Anthrax was a collaboration with avant-garde composer Terry Riley.

For the Record…

Born December 5, 1942 (some sources say 1940), in Garnant (some sources say Crynant), Wales; married briefly to a woman named Cyndrella, c. 1970. Education: Attended Goldsmith College, London; attended Guildhall School of Music, London; studied with composer Humphrey Searle; studied with Iannis Xenakis and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood Music Center, c. 1963.

Recording and performing artist, producer. Participated in Boston Symphony summer festival and performed with La Mont Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, mid-1960s; co-founder, and member of the Velvet Underground, 1966-1968; released first solo album, Vintage Violence, on Columbia Records, 1969; staff producer and A&R representative for Warner Bros, and Elektra Records, consultant for Columbia Records, early 1970s; signed with Island Records; signed with Opal Records, 1989. Producer of the Stooges’ The Stooges, Elektra, 1969; Jennifer Warnes’s Jennifer, Reprise, 1972; Patti Smith’s Horses, Arista, 1975; Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers, Beserkley, 1976; Squeeze’s U.K. Squeeze, A&M, 1977; and the Happy Mondays’ Squirrel and G- Man …., Factory, 1987. Contributed soundtracks to filmsHeat, 1972, and Caged Heat, 1974.

Awards: Leonard Bernstein Fellowship, 1963.

Addresses: Record company —Opal/Warner Bros., 330 Harrow Rd., London W9 2HP, England; 3300 Warner Blvd., Burbank, CA 91510.

John Rockwell of the New York Times remarked of the effort, “The results didn’t always work, but they were never less than interesting.” In 1972 Cale set out to record his first purely classical album. However, after deciding that the three symphonic pieces he had composed to this end did not work well on their own, he added other music to the album. The final product was titled The Academy in Peril, which Rockwell called, “an absolutely fascinating amalgam of quasi-movie music orchestral pieces, fragments of rock, dream-like sustained chordal textures with disembodied voice-overs and bizarre … arrangements.”

Paris 1919 “A Pop Masterpiece”

Paris 1919, released in 1973, is regarded by many as Cale’s best work. In it Cale makes the most of both his classical and pop sensibilities to create a natural blend of sheer pop elegance as his dark baritone delivers an eerie, post-World War I geo-political dream diary. Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone called Paris 1919 “a pop masterpiece … closer to being a finished work of art than any previous attempt to effect a rock-classical synthesis “and” the most ambitious album ever released under the name ’pop.’“The New York Times observed,” What really binds the album together is a pervasive sense of dream-like distance, a sort of sadly schizophrenic nostalgia for something that has more to do with one’s own memories than a particular place in time. Cale’s arrangements and Chris [Thomas’s] production emphasize lower-register strings, filtering techniques and overdubbing that transforms Cale’s none-too-striking voice into a gentle chorus, and continually idiosyncratic instrumental and rhythmic effects.”

Despite the critical raves, Paris 1919 sold poorly. During this time Cale worked as a staff producer at Warner Bros. He then signed a six-record deal with Island and moved back to England, where he began another phase of his career. In 1974 he told Creem magazine, “There were glimmers of light on Paris 1919— I was beginning to come through the cracks. But these songs I’m doing now, make me feel like I’m a songwriter for the first time.”

Collaborated With Eno

Soon after, Cale began to work with enigmatic art-rock high priest Brian Eno; the relationship remained an important one throughout both artists’ careers. Cale made a rare live appearance on the album June 1, 1974, recorded in Paris with Kevin Ayers, Eno, and Cale’s Velvet Underground colleague Nico. Cale’s contribution included a blood-curdling rendition of the Elvis Presley classic “Heartbreak Hotel.” Aided by Eno and Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, Cale released Fear in 1975. Though he stripped down the dreamy string effects that had become his trademark, the album, nonetheless, remained tuneful. Fearfound Cale’s paranoid delusions driving him to lyrical fury and Eno’s eccentricities inspiring him to create the abrasive sound demonstrated on the songs “Gun” and “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend.”

Cale’s next four albums, Slow Dazzle, Helen of Troy, Animal Justice, and Sabotage/Live continued to explore a morbid recklessness and an assortment of threatening, claustrophobic nightmares commanded bythe singer’s tense, brooding vocals. Richard Mortifoglioof the Village Voice called Sabotage/Live “Cale’s best songwriting to date. Sabotage makes up for its beery looseness by rocking hard, fast… [coming] close to matching Helen of Troy and Paris 1919. The whole of side one is a relentlessly spirited tour de force.” These records played an influential role in the punk rock movement that flowered in the late 1970s, and Cale’s outrageous performances during this period were highly acclaimed and often controversial. Cale’s output through the early 1980s sought to widen his audience; although the music remained dark, it became less dangerous and more diffuse. Again, his work receives favorable reviews, but he did not see the commercial success he had hoped to achieve.

In 1986 Cale teamed with Eno again, on Words for the Dying, a work comprised of two lengthy orchestral pieces and one shorter section. Of his next project, Cale told Melody Maker, “While the Argentine flag was being raised on South Georgia [during the Falklands Islands War between Britain and Argentina in 1982], I was feverishly embarking on a comprehensive setting of the collective poems of Dylan Thomas. Each night I would sit thrashing about from one poem to another with the tape running. By the end of the war I had arrived at ’Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed’.... Of the nine poems done there were four that felt all of a piece.” This eventually became 1989’s “Falklands Suite,” which, along with “Songs Without Words,” comprises an ambitious, elegiac orchestral work that was recorded by the Orchestra of Symphonic and Popular Music of Gosteleradio, in Moscow.

1990’s Wrong Way Up was the first project wherein Cale and Eno collaborated fully to produce a completely joint album. It was also Eno’s first pop vocal performance in years. Rolling Stone contributor David Fricke called the release “a gem, if an oddly anachronistic one. [Cale and Eno’s] trademarks—launching synth patterns, carefully plucked guitar strings, self-consciously simple lyrics, chant-like choruses and echoey production—have been so plundered by their proteges over the years that they have lost some of their initial mystique.”

Reuinted With Reed for Warhol Tribute

In 1989 Cale and Lou Reed wrote and performed a stunning collection of songs titled Songs for ’Drella, a 50-minute portrait of former manager and mentor Andy Warhol. ’Drella revealed the paradoxical nature of Warhol’s personality and art—in its simplicity and complexity—while at the same time uncovering for the listener the similar contradictions at the center of both Cale and Reed’s work. Fricke called ’Drella “a dream come true, a brilliant landmark collaboration by two headstrong avant-rock pioneers … a testament to the continuing strength of Warhol’s catalytic powers and the enduring force of the Velvet’s deviant genius.” Jon Pareles in the New York Times opined, “As tunes, nearly every one of the song cycle’s segments is memorable. Cale and Reed are past masters of making simplicity eloquent.”

In 1992 Cale released Fragments of a Rainy Season, a live offering recorded in Europe earlier that year. Though not as celebrated as Magic and Loss, Reed’s offering of 1992, Fragments did remind some critics of Cale’s haunting musical legacy. A stripped-down affair of piano and voice, Rolling Stone concluded of the work, “Fragments of a Rainy Season covers the erratic sweep of John Cale’s career...… [It] makes an informative primer for initiates, but veterans who (understandably) wrote Cale off in the Eighties may want to use it as a refresher course.”

Equally significant as his own solo recordings is the work Cale has produced for other artists. His first landmark work outside the Velvet Underground was his production of the Stooges’ With the Stooges, a collection of three-chord Detroit-style punk that was many years ahead of its time. Cale also produced Patti Smith’s highly acclaimed debut album, Horses, and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ first two records, in 1976. In 1977 he worked with Squeeze on their debut. Although Cale’s style as a producer has varied from album to album, he has consistently demonstrated a willingness to present artists as honestly as he can; as would be expected from a creative force so uncompromising in his own artistry, Cale has made it his mission to produce powerful statements that are as much about the raw personality of the artist as they are about the artist’s music.