No limits to musical journey
Velvet Underground co-founder, producer and solo artist mentoring new generation of avant-garde creators
Just a few years after he’d left the provincial Welsh mining town where he was born, a 23-year-old John Cale was invited — along with his friend Lou Reed and their budding band the Velvet Underground — to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York.
“The first day you walked in, you joined the Academy,” Cale said recently, recalling the first meeting with the pop art power broker who would become the band’s manager.
“The atmosphere of that place was really special,” the musician, now 80, added; artists from all over “came in and unzipped a bag of magic.”
It was, however, just the beginning of one of the most accomplished resumes in rock history, if not 20th-century culture. Cale studied under John Cage and Aaron Copland, and later learned about the transformative power of drone from avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. He had a fling with Edie Sedgwick and a short marriage to Betsey Johnson. After he was unceremoniously booted from the Velvet Underground in 1968, he became a prolific, risktaking producer, helming trailblazing albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith. His catalog as a solo artist is unbelievably rich, tonally varied and full of buried treasure. He is arguably responsible for plucking a little-known Leonard Cohen deep cut called “Hallelujah” out of obscurity. He is inarguably the most important electric viola player rock has ever seen.
On Cale’s recently released album, “Mercy” — his 17th as a solo artist — he occasionally glances back with songs that honor late friends like David Bowie and Nico. But more often, he’s making art focused firmly and defiantly in the present, responding to the political turmoil of the day and collaborating with a supporting cast of younger avant-garde and indie artists: Celestial crooner Weyes Blood, punky provocateurs Fat White Family and art-rock dreamers Animal Collective all make guest appearances.
“I consider it an honor to watch little decisions he makes,” Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz (who records as Geologist), said. “He’ll throw out one or two sentences to explain it, and it means the world.”
The breadth of Cale’s accomplishments has left his collaborators and admirers in awe.
“If you had one part of his career, you’d be a legend,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said. “If you were only the producer that John Cale was, you’d go down in history. If you were only in the Velvet Underground, your ticket’s punched to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But then you did all those Island solo records, and the Eno collaboration, and then ‘Songs for Drella,’ ” he added, referring to Cale’s 1990 reunion with Reed, before trailing off.
In 1963, Cale came to New York and quickly fell in with Conrad, Young and the boldly minimalist Theater of Eternal Music. At last he’d found community and the mind-expanding experiences for which he’d always longed. But the glory days didn’t last long.
Warhol spent the latter part of 1968 recovering from a gunshot wound; by the end of the summer, Reed had given the rest of the Velvet Underground a Cale-or-me ultimatum and insisted that guitarist Sterling Morrison break the news. For all their merits, the albums that the band released without Cale are quieter and more conventional.
“It made some other people in the band unhappy, but it was just a challenge to me,” Cale said of his ousting. “I decided, well, OK, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can get up, move your butt and produce some things.”
The first album he worked on would change Nico’s image forever, the stark, harrowing “Marble Index.” The second was the Stooges’ 1969 self-titled debut, one of the founding documents of punk.
After the refined chamber-pop of his great 1973 album “Paris 1919,” Cale’s solo work grew increasingly feral, too. He unleashed lacerating screams on the 1974 album “Fear” and embraced postpunk on the adventurous “Honi Soit,” from 1981.
Cale and Reed hadn’t spoken in years when they ran into each other at Warhol’s funeral in 1987. The old spark was back, and they began work on a tribute to their former manager, which would become the theatrical, confidently sparse “Songs for Drella.” By the time it arrived in 1990, they were no longer speaking. A Velvet Underground reunion in the early 1990s was similarly short-lived, also owing to creative differences between Cale and Reed, who died in 2013.
Cale cleaned up his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle when his daughter, Eden, was born in 1985. He released more classically minded albums and continued to exert an inconspicuous influence on musical culture.
In the early 1990s, a French record label asked him to contribute to a Cohen tribute album. He chose “Hallelujah” — a song from the 1984 album “Various Positions” — and made some tweaks to the lyrics and simplified the song’s arrangement. His version certainly struck a chord. When Jeff Buckley first began playing the song, a magazine editor in the audience told him backstage that he liked his Cohen cover. “I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version,” Buckley is said to have replied. “I know it by John Cale.”
In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom.
“I jokingly tell people that it’s like a friendly godfather-type relationship that I have with him,” Animal Collective’s Weitz said. Cale has long been an admirer of the band, and Weitz described their reciprocal appearances on each other’s records — Cale played on the band’s 2016 album “Painting With,” and Animal Collective appears on a track from “Mercy” — as a kind of “music-formusic swap.”
Cale still makes art on the edge. In June 2019, he headlined the DMZ Peace Train Festival on the border between North and South Korea. In 2014, at London’s Barbican museum, he conducted the first orchestra of flying drones. A certain defiance also courses through “Mercy,” a slow, meditative album. The songs have immediate emotional resonance, but they ask the listener for patience, too.
LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy admires that.
“He always approaches it as, ‘What’s interesting to me right now?’ rather than being careerist,” he said. “Songs made by people like that last in a very different way. They feel alive and current for much longer, because they’re made with respect.”
There are plenty more of them coming, too. Cale spent much of the pandemic holed up in his studio, and he estimates that he has written around 80 new compositions in the past few years.
“Something snapped, in a good way,” he said. “It was like, you can’t turn your back on this. This is something that’s going to go on. And I want to go on.”