John Cale

John Cale, the psychedelic viola player of the Velvet Underground, began a solo career in the 1970s that highlighted his personality as a European intellectual, steeped in existentialism and expressionism, and educated in the postwar avant-garde. Skeptical and detached in the face of the Velvet Underground’s chic provocation—which was, at its core, a largely adolescent and hardly subversive act—and indifferent to the emergence of punk, whose paternity he could legitimately claim in part, Cale instead delved into a mature, autumnal art. The central contradiction in his music—between the decadent rock of New York’s underworld and the classical composer trained in British conservatories—was both the creative force that made him a unique case in rock history and the limitation of his works, which could sometimes be pretentious and forced. His attempt to create a new form of romantic ballad, blending rock and classical music, was far more successful on Nico’s records. By the age of twenty, the Welshman John Cale was, along with Cornelius Cardew and others, one of the driving forces of London’s avant-garde. Having won a scholarship, in 1963 he moved to New York to complete his studies and became a student of Iannis Xenakis and John Cage. There he soon joined La Monte Young’s Theatre Of Eternal Music (with Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, and others) and befriended Lou Reed, with whom he performed on street corners in the era’s most bizarre folk duo (viola and guitar). Young introduced him to Andy Warhol, the guru of pop art, who at the time was seeking musical talents for a multimedia show. The experience with Warhol helped him cross to the other side of the barricade, that of “low” art. Leaving the Velvet Underground in Reed’s hands—more interested in lyrics than in music—Cale recorded Vintage Violence (Columbia, Mar 1970), a work of horror-tinged psychedelia, revealing himself as a sophisticated chansonnier rather than a reckless experimenter (Adelaide, Amsterdam, Ghost Story).

He returned to classical music with a collaborative work with Terry Riley, Church Of Anthrax (Feb 1971). Riley plays electronic organ in a minimalist style or saxophone, while Cale alternates between viola, harpsichord, and piano. The nine-minute title track is a rock-paced acceleration of Rainbow In Curved Air, spiced with some dissonances and counterpointed by the saxophone’s orientalisms. Its counterpart, Ides Of March, develops through an improvised duet between two pianos, “minimalizing” elements drawn from music-hall, boogie, classical music, and jazz. Cale’s production altered the original tapes so profoundly that Riley repudiated the work.

Another experiment in classical-rock was the instrumental album Academy In Peril (Reprise, Jul 1972), a collection of romantic sketches for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and even symphony orchestra. Two compositions draw inspiration from the transfigured minimalism of Church: the evocative blues for detuned guitar The Philosopher, which unfolds in a martial progression amid long, alienated trumpet notes and free dissonances of percussion, and the psychedelic samba King Harry for xylophone, acoustic guitar, flute, viola, marimba, and accordion—a crescendoing jumble reminiscent of In C.
However, the album is mainly populated by the ghosts of 19th-century chamber music: a couple of anguished and pretentious piano sonatas (Brahms and Academy In Peril) and a harrowing three-part symphonic poem (Orchestral Pieces) create a funereal atmosphere, culminating in the chilling concerto for tragic piano and stationary string orchestra, John Milton. Pretentiousness and cerebralism undermine the work’s overall value, as with almost all symphonic rock of the era, but the two “folk-minimalist” pieces remain flashes of genius.

Paris 1919 (Mar 1973), on the other hand, is the work of a more disengaged spirit—a refined chansonnier/dandy, somewhat neurotic but always dignified, who enjoys getting his hands dirty with a certain Tin Pan Alley kitsch (Andalucia, Half Past France).

At a much higher peak, Cale returned with the dark and abrasive sound of Fear (Oct 1974), a strong and harsh album that feels like a requiem for nuclear holocaust. Fear Is Man's Best Friend is a compelling epic that overturns the life-and-death relationship established by Jim Morrison, in an orgy of cynicism and humanity, human cynicism and cynical humanity. Other solemn odes adorn the album (the transcendent country of Buffalo Ballet), reflecting Cale’s never-abandoned “serious” ambitions, but the record mainly features oblique ballads reminiscent of Brian Eno, such as Barracuda and Monamma Scuba, enriched by Phil Manzanera’s atonal and surreal guitar work, and ironic doo-wop in a vaudeville rhythm like The Man Who Couldn't Afford To Orgy, where Cale’s dark humor emerges. Nostalgic choruses and poignant violins (Emily), or minimalist organ, liturgical piano, and martial drumming (Ship Of Fools), provide material for redefining rock song structures according to more “classical” standards. The majestic and hypnotic Gun manages to merge both approaches into a whipping, claustrophobic boogie, occasionally recalling the hammering, distorted pace of Sister Ray, featuring perhaps the finest solo of Manzanera’s career.

His tenor voice, like that of Jim Morrison, can swing with masculine vigor between the extreme registers of melancholy and anger, imbuing the decadent ballad with a disorienting and sinister, almost metaphysical, force that Lou Reed lacks. The two albums from the following year, Slow Dazzle (Mar 1975), arranged with Phil Spector-like clarity and compactness (Mr Wilson), and Helen Of Troy (Nov 1975), a dark and depressed epitaph of the times (Leaving It Up To You, I Keep A Close Watch), complete the trilogy opened by Fear. These are also albums in which one can detect early signs of the coming punk rock (Cale had just produced the album by the Modern Lovers).

Over the next six years, Cale produced very little, although the epic Hedda Gabler on the EP Animal Justice (Illegal, 1977), Sabotage, Mercenaries, and Doctor Mudd (1979) on the live album Sabotage (Spy, 1979), and Dead Or Alive and Riverbank on Honi Soit (A&M, Mar 1981), belong to one of the most intense songbooks of the era, always balancing between the splendid desolation of Syd Barrett, Jim Morrison’s supernatural metaphor, the neurotic elegy of Neil Young, and the fairytale-like spleen of Kevin Ayers.

The middle-aged Cale celebrated his anxiety over incommunicability in the most paranoid way with the leaden, alienated sound of Music For A New Society (Island, Aug 1982), particularly in the nonsensical psychodrama of Damn Life and the classical-leaning vision of Chinese Envoy, austere examples of the chamber-music style Cale had pursued since his early days. In the solemn romances of this album, arranged in a spectral and cacophonous manner (Taking Your Life In Your Hands), reminiscent of Renaissance song (Close Watch) and martial balladry (Broken Bird), sometimes infused with the grandeur and majesty of a requiem (If You Were Still Around), the concept of the rock song is stripped bare, reaching the extremes of free-form conversation pieces (Santies) and hallucinatory delirium (Thoughtless Kind). Cale stands, more than ever, as the dark messiah of metropolitan solitude. His sound—sad, gloomy, cryptic, gray, and claustrophobic—with lyrics drifting blurred amid obsessive and painful mental associations, and with a high, almost epic, declamatory style reminiscent of expressionist theater, increasingly resembles a modern, vernacular form of transcendental meditation.

As often happens in Cale’s career, the next album is a joke among friends, Caribbean Sunset (Ze, 1984). Artificial Intelligence (Beggars Banquet, 1985) is more serious, but again disappointing (Dying On The Vine).

Words For The Dying (Sep 1989) returns him to the symphonic romances of Academy, even including an orchestral suite set to Dylan Thomas’s texts, Falklands Suite.

Songs For 'Drella (Sire, 1990), with Lou Reed on vocals and guitar, is an unusual rock requiem for Andy Warhol.

Wrong Way Up (Opal, 1990) is a collaboration with Brian Eno, but most of the songs are Cale’s, ranging from the suave and lazy melancholy of In The Backroom to the solemn ballad of Footsteps and the sprightly boogie of Crime In The Desert. The pop format of Lay My Love, Spinning Away, and Been There Done That is unpretentious and unambitious.

On the scholarly collaboration with Bob Neuwirth, Last Day On Earth (MCA, 1995), a cycle of electronic lieder commissioned by an art institute, Cale experiments with orchestration for a small ensemble combined with electronics. The fusion of classical and pop produces some of the most solemn and dark ballads of his career (Who's In Charge, Angel Of Death), continuing the extremely bleak program of “Drella”: this is the mature Cale, a learned shaman who awaits death as a form of liberation from the ghosts that obsess him. The spirit of the record is more Neuwirth than Cale: the apocalyptic theme is examined from the perspective of the characters wandering in a phantom “Cafe Shabu” of another spacetime. The folk of Paradise Nevada and the epic sweep of The High And Mighty Road, at the intersection of Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon, represent the quintessence of his magical meta-style. The story, as with all of Neuwirth’s, is fascinating in its depth and allegorical nature: in the Homeric (or “Calvinist”) journey from the café to the town of Paradise, Nevada (the state of Las Vegas), the protagonist repeatedly asks the people he encounters—painters, philosophers, philanthropists, bankers, and so on—for directions, but in vain. At one point he is told that all the maps in the world are obsolete. He then sets out on the road that will bring him back to the point from which he started. Applause.

Paris S'Eveille (Crepuscule, 1993) contains assorted experiments that hark back to Academy, like the 17-minute Paris S'Eveille and the 18-minute Sanctus.

Seducing Down The Door (Rhino, 1994) is a career retrospective. Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (ROIR, 1991) and Fragments Of A Rainy Season (Hannibal, 1992) are live albums. Cale also scored a handful of movie soundtracks.

Walking On Locust (Hannibal, 1996) is possibly Cale's worst album ever, a lame collection of pop songs.

Eat Kiss (Rykodisc, 1997) collects soundtracks that Cale composed for Any Warhol's films.

Sun Blindness Music (Table of the Elements, 2001) collects Cale's earliest compositions: the 44-minute minimalist improvisation Sun Blindness Music (oscillating between LaMonte Young's droning music and Steve Reich's percussive music), the psychedelic Summer Heat, the electronic Second Fortress.

Stainless Gamelan (Table Of the Elements, 2001) collects performances of John Cale before the Velvet Underground, some of them featuring Sterling Morrison and Angus MacLise. The centerpiece is the 25-minute hypnotic wall of noise of At About This Time (Sterling Morrison on guitar).

Dream Interpretation (Table Of The Elements, 2001) contains two duets between Tony Conrad on violin and John Cale on viola and organ: Dream Interpretation and Ex-Cathedra (1968).

A revitalized John Cale delivered Hobosapiens (EMI, 2003), one of the most vital and exhilarating works of his career, a worthy manifestation of his art at the border between pop and avantgarde, now updated to the digital age. "Hobosapiens" is the nickname that John Cale gave to Bob Dylan, but the album hides most of its nostalgic references under a layer of futuristic references.
Cale the consummate entertainer can pen an impressive variety of songs: a rocking and bouncy Reading My Mind, reminiscent of Kevin Ayers' eccentric novelties (with an interlude of strings and a counterpoint of voices leading to a car crash), a soulful and pensive Things (both a literal and stylistic tribute to Warren Zevon), a vibrant Twilight Zone, fueld by a tribal beat and instrumental noise, and even an instrumental disco ditty such as Bicycle. His narrative skills are best viewed in calm pieces that twist musical structures in an almost psychotic manner, such as Magritte, a hybrid of neoclassical music (cello, violins, piano) and religious music (organ), and Caravan, in which the arrangements quietly build up to overwhelm the recitation.
At 60, Cale can still disorient his audience by mixing sound and metaphysics in a way that approaches a religious experience. His melodies have the rare quality of inexistence, of virtuality, of abstraction; a quality that transforms his disturbing, downcast urban themes and messages into nightmares rather than commentaries or documentaries. Few musicians have understood how to create "electronic songwriting" as he does in the stately ode of Zen (possibly an answer to his own autobiography "What's Welsh For Zen?"), amid sparse beats, a feeble drone and a ghostly female choir; or in the fatalistic atmosphere of Look Horizon, blending a pounding beat, a guitar twang, atonal strings and a female voice; or in the melodrama-collage Archimedes; or in the industrial shuffle of Letter From Abroad, overflowing with sound effects. These are complex narrative constructions that don't waste a single second.
Cale has consistently turned existential contradiction into a new form of synthesis and coherence, defying all laws of physics and of logic.

New York in the 1960's (Table Of The Elements, 2004) is a 5-LP box-set that documents Cale's early career as an avantgarde composer.

Even at his not-so-young age, John Cale's career continues to alternate between ambitious avantgarde works and second-rate collections of pop muzak. Black Acetate (Astralwerks, 2005) belongs to the latter category. Unusually bombastic and unbalanced, it sounds like the work of a novice who is striving to find his true voice and struggling to learn how to produce his songs. Except for the catchy Perfect (possibly the only reason to release this album) and the ballad Satisfied (that could have fit on Hobosapiens), the songs are simply mediocre compositions that are over or under produced. It is inexcusable that John Cale at 63 could put out such truly awkward music. He is a real talent, not a David Bowie.

The heavily arranged Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood (2012) is equally disappointing. I Wanna Talk 2 U, a collaboration with Danger Mouse, is trivial pop.

Most songs on Mercy (2023) are difficult to listen to: third-rate lounge pop with a lot of misplaced orchestral sections and some very misplaced autotune vocals and some misplaced electronic beats. The seven-minute Mercy is ideal for falling asleep. The even longer The Legal Status of Ice amounts to nothing but an attempt to incorporate "modern" arrangements. One can salvage Out Your Window (which could have been on Fear) and the gothic ambient experiment Marilyn Monroe's Legs.

POPtical Illusion (2024) is a very electronic album that contains There Will Be No River.