John Cale

Early life and career

John Davies Cale was born on 9 March 1942 in Garnant, a Welsh coal mining village in Carmarthenshire. His father, William Arthur George Cale, worked as a miner and spoke only English, while his mother, Margaret Davies, was a primary school teacher who taught Cale Welsh. He did not start learning English until around age seven, when he began primary school. As a child, Cale was assaulted by two different men: an Anglican priest in a church and a music teacher.

He served as an organist at Ammanford church, and the BBC once recorded him performing a toccata he had written, a piece that some critics likened to the style of Aram Khachaturian. Showing a gift for the viola, Cale joined the National Youth Orchestra of Wales at thirteen. He later earned a scholarship to study music at Goldsmiths College, University of London. While there, he put together an early Fluxus event called A Little Festival of New Music on 6 July 1963.

He also worked on the short film Police Car and had two of his scores published in the July 1963 issue of Fluxus Preview Review. Cale conducted the first UK performance of John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, with the English composer and pianist Michael Garrett as soloist. In 1963, with help from American composer Aaron Copland, who recommended him for Tanglewood, Cale moved to the United States to further his musical education. Once in New York City, he connected with several key composers.

On 9 September 1963, he took part in an 18-hour-and-40-minute marathon piano performance, the first complete rendition of Erik Satie’s Vexations, alongside John Cage and others. Afterward, Cale appeared on the TV panel show I’ve Got a Secret, where his secret was that he had played in an 18-hour concert; he was joined by Karl Schenzer, whose secret was that he had been the only audience member to stay the whole time. Cale later said that Cage’s influence gave him a more relaxed approach to art, a shift from his earlier belief that European composers had to defend their work.

Around this time, Cale performed in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, whose drone-heavy sound shaped his later work with the Velvet Underground. One of his fellow musicians in those sessions was Sterling Morrison, who would also join the Velvet Underground. In 2001, three albums collecting Cale’s early experimental recordings from this period were released.

The Velvet Underground (1964–1968)

John Cale had been into rock music from a young age, alongside his interest in avant-garde and European art music. Earlier in the year, he and Lou Reed founded the Velvet Underground, bringing in Cale’s flatmate Angus MacLise and Reed’s college friend Sterling Morrison to round out the original lineup. Right before the band’s first paid show—a $75 gig at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey—MacLise walked out because he thought taking money for art was selling out.

Moe Tucker stepped in as drummer, hired just for that one performance, but she soon became a permanent member. Her style became a key part of the band’s sound, even though Cale initially objected to having a female drummer. During a 1965 trip to Britain, Cale picked up records by the Kinks, the Who, and the Small Faces that weren’t available in the US, and he tried to land a recording deal by shopping a rough acoustic demo tape of the Velvet Underground to British rock figures like Marianne Faithfull.

That didn’t work out, but over the next year and a half, the tape spread through the UK underground thanks to people like producer Joe Boyd and Mick Farren of the Deviants. As a result, the Deviants, the Yardbirds, and David Bowie all covered Velvet Underground songs before the band’s first album came out in 1967. The very first commercially available Velvet Underground recording was an instrumental feedback experiment called “Loop,” written and conducted by Cale, given away with the Pop Art issue of Aspen magazine.

Cale’s creative partnership with Reed shaped the sound of the band’s first two studio albums, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and White Light/White Heat (1968). On those records, Cale played viola, bass guitar, and keyboards, and sang occasional backing vocals. White Light/White Heat includes two lead vocal spots from Cale: “Lady Godiva’s Operation,” where he shares vocals with Reed, and “The Gift,” a long spoken-word piece based on a short story Reed wrote at Syracuse University.

Cale co-wrote the music for several Velvet Underground songs and used an electrically amplified viola on early recordings. He also played on Nico’s debut album, Chelsea Girl (1967), which features songs co-written by Cale, Reed, and Morrison, all of whom appear as musicians. Cale made his debut as a lyricist on “Winter Song” and “Little Sister.”

Solo career

After his time with the Velvet Underground ended, John Cale became a record producer and arranger, most famously for the Stooges' groundbreaking 1969 debut album and for Nico's records The Marble Index, Desertshore, and The End. On those Nico albums, he backed her vocals and harmonium with a diverse range of instruments. During a meeting with Joe Boyd, who co-produced Desertshore, Cale discovered Nick Drake's music and pushed to work with him; he contributed viola and harpsichord to "Fly" and piano, organ, and celesta to "Northern Sky" on Drake's second album, Bryter Layter.

Cale launched his own solo career in early 1970. His first album, Vintage Violence, drew from roots rock and drew comparisons to the Band, Leonard Cohen, the Byrds, Phil Spector, and Brian Wilson. A more experimental collaboration with minimalist composer Terry Riley, Church of Anthrax, came out in February 1971. He continued with art music on 1972's The Academy in Peril, but then stopped composing in that classical vein until the 1980s, when he started working on film scores.

In 1972, Cale signed with Reprise Records both as a recording artist and a staff producer. His 1973 album Paris 1919 returned to the singer-songwriter style of Vintage Violence, featuring a backing band that included Lowell George of Little Feat and Wilton Felder of the Crusaders, plus the UCLA Symphony Orchestra. The album is noted for its melodic songs and intricate, obscure lyrics, and critics consider it among his best work. While at Reprise, he produced albums for Jennifer Warnes, the group Chunky, Novi & Ernie, and the Modern Lovers' debut, which Reprise declined to release.

In 1974, he signed with Island Records as an artist, while continuing to produce for others, including Squeeze, Patti Smith, and Sham 69. He also served as a talent scout in Island's A&R department.

Personal life

John Cale’s first marriage was to fashion designer Betsey Johnson in 1968, but it ended three years later in 1971. That same year, he met Cynthia “Cindy” Wells, known as Miss Cinderella of the GTOs, and they quickly wed.

Their relationship was turbulent, and they divorced in 1975. On December 6, 1981, Cale married his third wife, Risé Irushalmi, with whom he had a daughter; that marriage lasted until 1997. When he appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2004, he picked Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me” as his favorite song, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Repetition as his book, and an espresso machine as his luxury item.

As a child, severe bronchitis led a doctor to prescribe opiates for Cale, and he became dependent on them to sleep. Biographer Tim Mitchell described this early reliance on medication as a formative experience. After moving to New York in the 1960s and 1970s, Cale used cocaine heavily and reportedly tried nearly every drug available in the United States. He later recalled that in the ’60s, drugs felt like a cool experiment, but by the ’70s, he was in over his head.

He believes his addiction hurt his music in the 1980s, especially his live shows. The birth of his daughter and that decline in performance pushed him to get sober. In a 2009 BBC interview, he said coffee was then the strongest drug he used. That same year, he hosted the documentary Heroin, Wales and Me to raise awareness about heroin addiction in his native Wales.

Did You Know?

• Cale participated in the first full-length performance of Erik Satie's Vexations, an 18-hour-and-40-minute marathon piano concert on 9 September 1963, alongside John Cage.
• Cale wanted to record the next Velvet Underground album with the amplifiers underwater, which Lou Reed rejected as 'too out there'.