The Eternal Return of John Cale

He began with his viola from Wales, wrote history in New York with The Velvet Underground and continued his solo career, proving that, avant-garde is taking a glance back while gazing forward.

“It doesn’t matter if some information is repeated. I mean, repetition is good, let’s not forget. Burroughs used to repeat parts in his texts and I think Andy used repetition, didn’t he?”. This is one of the very first lines someone will come across in John Cale’s autobiography, What’s Welsh for Zen (John Cale, Victor Bockris, with exemplary illustration by Dave McKean, Bloomsburg, 1999). The Welsh musician that, after a 55 year, still going, career, has his name side by side with the term “avant-garde” and is on the pantheon of great cotemporary musicians –even if he never had a commercial breakthrough. Or maybe because of that…

Defining John Cale is not easy. There is a dipole: On the one hand, his academic music education and the structured elegance it consequently brought to his work. On the other hand, even if his work holds hands with the future, Cale beckons to the past from the present. His own past, music’s past, even history.

John Davies Cale was born 76 years ago (9th of March, 1942) in Garnant, Carmarthenshire, Wales. His mother was a teacher and his father a coal miner. Apart from the different class of his parents, there’s one more paradox. His father spoke only English, but in their household, the only language allowed was welsh. As a result, Cale first talked to his father in the age of seven, something that, after years, he would admit it being the key of his love for instrumental music. “An incomplete sense of language” made music a language equal to his native tongues.

It didn’t take long for Cale to enter this sonic world with viola as his vehicle. In fact, by chance, as he chose this instrument because it was the only one left in his school orchestra. But he went through a not at all implacable course: from prodigy, he earned a scholarship in the USA, with blessing from Aaron Copland. And once he arrived in Big Apple, he started taking lickerish bites of it.

The first encounter was determinative. He collaborated with Dream Syndicate (not the ones you may think of, but that’s where they took their name from, anyway), Tony Conrad’s and La Monte Young’s band, one of the pioneers of minimalism. This starting point carried Cale in the band that incubated in Andy Warhol’s Factory. The band that released an album nicknamed “Banana”, that, in turn, carries the myth of “the album that did not sell much in its time, but those who bought it started a band”. And these are only fragments of the mythology that follows Velvet Underground and Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and there’s been more than enough ink printed for, that using more KBs here is no worth.

The coexistence of the explosive personalities of Lou Reed and John Cale will withstand for one more record, White Light/White Heat (1968). After that, the viola with guitar strings (an intervention with Cale’s poetic license) will be kept silent. The Velvets will go for a more acoustic path in the homonymous The Velvet Underground (1969) and this is the point that the determinative significance of John Cale will shine through its absence.

But Cale has already opened his wings, proving in the following years that he (also) has the makings of a bright and flexible producer. He’ll meet again with Nico, diligent of the cold art elegy of The Marble Index (1968). From here, he’ll give a hand in the building of primitive proto-punk minimalism of Stooges’ homonymous debut (1969). During the 70s you’ll find him in two more iconic albums: Horses (1975) the work that made Patti Smith punk’s priestess and Modern Lovers’ debut the next year –an album that proved to be one of the main influences of British punk explosion.

-You don’t seem afraid to tackle your past.

-No, but I usually tear it up. I usually try to change it all.
(Interview Magazine, December 2016)

This answer came two years ago, however, from the dawn of the 70s and the solo beginnings of John Cale, there were always fragments of references to the past. First solo album, Vintage Violence (1970). Apart from the title’s retro reminiscence, Cale is sonically stripped, inclining to a more intense “regularity” compared to the Velvets. He never forgets history: singing about Charlemagne (“Charlemagne”). The following year he will join in two songs of Nick Drake’s Bryter Lyter (“Fly”, “Northern Sky”).

He quickly takes a turn, recalling his classical and minimal groundwork. He collaborates in one record with Terry Riley (Church of Anthrax, 1971) and the instrumental experimentation creates numb feelings. On his next solo work, he moves deeper into classical terms, brushing off any pop integument (The Academy in Peril, 1972) addressing to those more comfortable with conservatory enviroments.

The sequel is clearer, but always with a specific weight. Paris 1919 (1973 perhaps his only solo album known to those who have not gotten into his work and accepted as one of the best moments in his career –possibly misreading a part of his work. Pop colored by baroque elements and it’s not only about 1919 Paris Peace Conference implied to the title. Cale pulls the thread of time up to “Macbeth”, while he’s recalling his childhood in the opening track “Child’s Christmas in Wales”. He will return back to this album three times on stage in the more recent years: in Coal Exhange in Cardiff (21st November, 2009), in London’s Royal Festival Hall (5th March, 2010) and in Thetre Royal in Norwich (14th May, 2010).

The first five years of the 1970s were the most productively dense, since in a year Cale released the informally known as “Island trilogy”: Fear (1974), Slow Dazzle (1975), Helen of Troy (1975), inaugurating the beginning of a collaboration with Brian Eno (at this point, keep a note, as we will come across it later on). One would notice that in this trilogy Cale went the rockiest he’s ever been to, only flipping remotely with Helen of Troy’s lyrical excitements.

Here he will revisit the past through covers (keep also a note): he brings out of Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel” the darkest and dirtiest self it kept, in a version that well-aimedly, music critic Ned Raggett once described as one of the best cover songs ever recorded. In Helen of Troy he will do his version of “Pablo Picasso” from Modern Lovers’ record he produced a year earlier. But, the most obvious and also immersive moment of shifting the past hides in Slow Dazzle’s “The Jeweller”. Its spoken word seeks its roots in the core of the 8-minute narrative stream of “The gift” from Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. There’s also a special mention in Brian Wilson, one of Cale’s all-time biggest influences, in the opening “Mr. Wilson”.

Up until 70s, John Cale might not stop glancing fragmentary in the past, but in the 80s comes the most important moment of his career, waiting him in the future. After the decent Honi Soit (1981), in 1982 Cale will suggest Music For A New Society, his most concise work, an ideal welcome on his universe. Two of his strongest tracks are here: “Chinese Envoy” and “Close Watch”, that we first heard in Helen of Troy, honoring his celtic origin. Again, he does not give up the past in any sense: he goes back in the “utter”, using a recorded dialogue with his mother (Mama’s Song”), while, in “Damn Life” uses the theme of “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, in perhaps the most effortless way that could be assimilated to a pop song.

Here lies his imaginative point of view: in 2016 Cale does a remake of the album, titled MFANS (featuring Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors), a literary unrecognizable transformation. He only keeps the compositions’ backbone, that he otherwise glosses with electro and even industrial colors. “If You Were Still Around” will now work as an emotional homage to late Lou Reed, that died through the making of MFANS.

If we kept anything more from the 80s, maybe it’s worth to pay attention in “Chinese Takeaway (Hong Kong 1997)” mash-up (from the album Artificial Intelligence, 1985). There you can listen to patterns from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue to Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” whilst the use of Dylan Thomas poems in Words For The Dying (1989) it’s still an interesting venture. We should forget Carribean Sunset (1984) in its entirety, an unlucky attempt of integration in 80s aesthetics that Cale himself also probably will have forgotten.

Nevertheless, he will enter the 90s with two great albums with old acquaintances: he again collaborates with Eno (you had some notes kept) on the art masterpiece called Wrong Way Up (1990), while Andy Warhol’s death in 1989 will break a silence of many years with Lou Reed. They will get into the studio and leave it having made the concept album Songs for Drella (1990) (Drella was pop art’s leading figure’s nickname, coming from Dracula and Cinderella). Songs For Drella might be one of the most lively and proximate rock operas ever written, communicating love and admiration without tearful connotations. The two of them simply use memory as a poetic trigger and art as a means of emotional declaration.

There’s the word “covers” somewhere on your notes. That’s because of Cale’s take on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as included in the tribute album, I’m Your Fan (1991). Cale’s version decreased the verses, increased the rhythm and stripped down the production, making it the invisible hand for the big hit version of the song f by Jeff Buckley in 1994, from the first and only album he was about to release. Cale’s version stood in a creative way in between.

During the 1990s, John Cale wasn’t much productive (his only album was the rather moderate Walking On Locusts in1996, and the collaborative album with Bob Neuwirth, Last Day On Earth in 1994). But in the 00s he returned with some interesting and up-to-date work: the almost ambient HoboSapiens (2003), the art pop of blackAcetate (2005) and the most playful album of his entire career, Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood (2012) featuring Danger Mouse in “I Wanna Talk 2 U”. The cartoonish creature on the cover would approve The Guardian describing the album as “ an album that combines the 70-year-old’s experience with the glee of a small child”.

In more recent years, the ghost of the band that made him famous, did not stop returning: First with a tribute concert for Nico titled “Life Along the Borderline” in 2008. In 2017 he appeared in a concert for the 50 year anniversary of the legendary “Banana” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music along with guests like Animal Collective, Saul Williams, Pete Doherty, Mark Lanegan among others.

John Cale is still creative. Making albums, touring, or putting his touch on soundtracks as he has been doing endlessly since the 70s. Without ever forgetting what is the base of avant-garde: the past, the story of art itself, rediscovered in a new light. He may not have the star quality of Lou Reed. He may never have albums meant for the mainstream breakthrough. But he is the embodiment of deep faith in the artistic creation itself, in the discreet charm of the conscious creator.

“My mother told me that she doesn’t care what I do as long as I don’t hurt anybody, and that’s been a big influence”. This 76-year-old Welsh, with an always alert gaze, white hair and a goatee-making him look much younger- seems to not only never stopped remembering and returning to his mother, but also to the uterus of creation. His entire life, is an eternal return that stares towards the future. Even creates it.

This article was originally published in greek in popaganda.gr.