Heavy Friends
Saturday March 23rd, 2024 with Heavy Ben
John Cale (pt.2): producer, collaborator

Marking the 82nd birthday of John Cale. Episode 1 covered the 1960s Dream Syndicate experiments, music from The Velvet Underground, and Cale's solo albums. https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/410/64273.html John Cale has never made the same record twice. Since his mind-altering 60s drone experiments and the seminal art-rock of the Velvet Underground, he has created erudite chamber-pop, incendiary rock shows and orchestras of drones (the flying robot kind). After studying with the cream of the new avant garde, including Iannis Xenakis and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood College in Massachusetts, Cale swapped academic rigidity for the fervid experimentation of downtown Manhattan, and mingled with John Cage, Yoko Ono and Allen Ginsberg. Being exposed to their ideas about Zen “really took a lot of weight off my shoulders,” he says. “It helped me through.” He turns deadpan. “I mean, my background as a Welsh Presbyterian was not fed by any Buddhist ideas.” A grounding in eastern religion also helped him grapple with the strange new music he was making with jazz saxophonist turned minimalist doyen La Monte Young and experimental violinist Tony Conrad in their ensemble, the Theatre of Eternal Music. “‘How abstract do you want to go?’ That was the rule of the day,” he says of their groundbreaking collaboration. “How do you maintain a drone? And when you have the drone going, where do you drive it to?” He experimented with that question within the Velvet Underground, where his volatile songwriting partnership with Lou Reed briefly embodied the white-hot nucleus of the 1960s freak scene: the cold moon to San Francisco’s frazzling sun. Booted out after two albums, Cale spent the next decade writing some of his best-known albums, not to mention a round of hippy minimalism with Terry Riley and a classical set with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. His side hustle was as impressive, producing so many of the era’s influential records – including the first Stooges album, Patti Smith’s Horses and The Modern Lovers self-titled debut – that one can barely imagine punk without his contribution. Perhaps his most innovative studio work appears on the four solo albums he made with Nico, framing that singularly haunted voice with arrangements of strings and bells. Though she died in 1988, her memory is very much alive. He pays tribute to her on Moonstruck (Nico’s Song), which even bears the echo of her wheezing harmonium in its shimmering two-chord lilt. “What’s happened over time is that her songs appear to be getting better and better,” Cale says. Her music has a certain impenetrable beauty, I suggest. “I recognise that. But she worked hard on that, that impenetrability. And it worked for her. Her lyricism, you had to dig for it. You’re always wondering, what did she mean with this? And I never really wanted to question it, I just accepted it for what it was.” If Cale’s contribution to the canon seems obvious now, it hasn’t been to him for most of his career. After leaving the Velvet Underground in 1968 he felt stranded between disciplines: should he pursue classical rigour, avant-garde experimentalism, dirty old rock’n’roll – or all three at the same time? His results were often out of step with prevailing trends. As much as Cale’s output has shifted and modernised over the decades, he retains the same open-minded approach to discovery and creativity that kicked off his career. He recalls his early years in New York, when he was trying to figure out where his music fitted in relation to the Zen experiments of Cage and the drone sorcery of his mentor Young. “I learned,” he says wisely, “that not understanding the direction of their thinking was an easier way of dealing with it than trying to work it out, and work it out, and work it out.” ‘Humanity hit a brick wall’: John Cale on the Velvets, Nico, Covid and a gun-ridden world gone bad https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/18/humanity-brick-wall-john-cale-velvets-nico-covid-gun-ridden-world-gone-bad (to embiggen the show icon, right-click and choose "Open image in new tab")