John Cale will rethink his own history at POP Montreal
John Cale helped rewrite the language of popular music, and reinvents his own history
John Cale chuckled down the phone line as he recalled one of his great acts of iconoclasm.
“A lot of times when I was touring in Europe, I put up no-smoking signs. That drove the promoters crazy.”
Well, not every rebellion can count toward updating the language of popular music — a mission Cale has fulfilled as a steadfast but approachable avant-gardist with an ear for both intense beauty and searing agony.
Cale will forever be known as the radical foil to Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground, where his serrated viola and Richter-scale drones sliced through Reed’s unshakable cool. But his towering achievements in that group over the course of a few volatile years in the 1960s have unfairly dwarfed a solo career that has remained an adventure at every turn.
From a sequence of 1970s releases in which raging paranoia collided with dark pop, to harrowing minimalism (Music for a New Society), scholarly poetics (Words for the Dying) and a latter-day fascination with warped electronica, nearly every Cale album has been accompanied by disregard for what listeners might expect. That is, those few listeners who didn’t abandon expectations decades ago.
The need to approach Cale on his own terms extends to the concert hall, starting with his tour itinerary. Which is to say, there isn’t much of one: he says Thursday’s one-off POP Montreal show will be the first nod to North America in his sporadic live activity this year. (Further making the case for POP as one of the city’s most thoughtful musical curators, it will also be his first local concert in 11 years.)
Then there’s the repertoire drawn on by his band (featuring bass, guitar, drums “and a lot of electronics”); Cale suggests songs will be new even when they’re old. Considering he has trained his fans to stay alert, it says something about his continued ingenuity when he adds that the improvheavy shows with this three- or four-year-old lineup left early audiences perplexed.
“I may do some material that’s familiar to everybody, but you may not hear it familiarly. You may say, ‘Oh, that’s what that song is.’ I like reworking the arrangements, and I do that a lot. It took a while for me to get the audiences on the same page … to know that what you’re going to get is a little bit different from just the standard concert, doing the same set list.”
The onstage deconstruction of his catalogue was mirrored by Cale’s most recent album, M:FANS. The disquieting character studies from his 1982 masterpiece Music for a New Society, originally conveyed with spartan arrangements haunted by background ghosts, were reinterpreted in irreverent electro-heavy settings that dispel much of the chill.
The original album was due for a re-release, Cale said (the same could apply to many tragically hard-to-find items in his catalogue), and he was approached to do a live performance of the complete work. “We had a string quartet and backup singers, and I was glad I did it, because I realized I didn’t want to do the album that way anymore. I wanted to do it as something a little more energetic, building on the strengths of what was there in the original but not wallowing in self-imposed disgust.”
Considering the intense creation of Music for a New Society, the desperate anxiety of the songs’ characters may have mirrored Cale’s mindset in 1982. “The rules of the album were: it doesn’t count unless the tapes are running, you don’t do anything the same way twice, and you write new songs every time you turn the machine on.
“I wanted it to have an immediacy. The album after that, Caribbean Sunset, had Experiment Number 1 on it, where I’m shouting out the changes for the band … and if that song is the only example of immediacy that you have on the album, you’ve got to do better. So the thing was, you really don’t know where you’re going with a song, and that worked itself out through the characters.”
Understandably for someone given to reinvention, and for someone whose most revered music has been analyzed for a half-century, Cale has often seemed disinterested in discussing his distant past. But he has brought it up in his own way — for instance, in a video for the M:FANS track If You Were Still Around released as a tribute to Reed in 2014, upon the one-year anniversary of his death. The former collaborators shared a notoriously fractious history; a cautious question about whether they had been in communication at the end of Reed’s life was met with a previously recounted but telling anecdote, alluding to a long-distance respect and a groundbreaking partnership that was rooted in dissident art.
“I found a photograph of Stravinsky; it was said to be an arrest photograph from the Boston police department. You remember that Stravinsky did an arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner? He was accused of being a traitor . ... Lou was in bed in the hospital, so I sent him that photograph and I said, ‘You think you’ve got problems?’ He burst out laughing.”