The Academic In Peril: JOHN CALE ADDRESSES THE INEVITABLE

The Academic In Peril: JOHN CALE ADDRESSES THE INEVITABLE

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Dave DiMartino

I'll eventually make concrete moves to write symphonies, start writing orchestral pieces again. —John Cate

“I don’t really aim for being a ‘renaissance man’ or anything like that—but sometimes you end up that, if you do a lot of things and you do them all well...

“But I can’t understand how you can do them all well, though. Something’s got to lose...”

—John Cale, on if he died, how he would like to be remembered.

I could probably tell you about how John Cale has been on more good records than any human has a right to be. Or how, after he left the Velvet Underground, he turned up playing sessions on records by Nick Drake, Mike Heron, Tax Free, Earth Opera and Chunky, Ernie & Novi. Or how he produced the first albums by the Stooges, Patti Smith and even the Modern Lovers.

For that matter, I could talk about people like Brian Eno, who seem entirely willing to take credit for “innovations” that are continuations of projects and approaches John Cale pioneered—or at least took part in—long ago. There’s the time Cale spent with Lament Young in the early ’60’s, building a sonic environment that foreshadowed “ambient” music and lots more. And the Velvet Underground, the group every band had been trying to sound like since 1977; and Terry Riley, with whom Cale collaborated for the Church Of Anthrax LP, “flawed” but sounding every bit as current now as it did 11 years ago.

Anyway, this “renaissance man” business is either a curse of a write-off, depending how you look &t it; John Cale’s never been 100 percent predictable, but he does manage to do most things and do them very well indeed. Pop songwriter: check out Vintage Violence, “The Soul Of Patrick Lee” horn Anthrax, Paris 1919, his Island albums, and the first & last tracks of Honi Soit, his latest. Textural musician: the first two Velvets albums, the rest of Anthrax, The Academy In Peril, the Nico albums. Businessman: Cale was an executive for Warner Brothers Records in the early ’70’s. Live performing: he’s never been better.

Actually, the only thing John Cale is not very good at is selling his own records, which he himself attributes to past unwillingness to go on the road to promote them. (“I learned when I was at Warners of the folly of making albums in a vaccum and not going out and supporting them,”) Beginning w|th his signing to Island Records in 1974, and the performance captured on the June 1, 1974 live multi-artist LP, Cale took to performing and now, seven years later, has finally developed into a consummate—if eccentric-showman.

Though Cale has never greatly changed his music, popular tastes have changed since the Velvet Underground; Cale can play whatever he wants today and more people will probably like it than ever. Whether that’s good or bad is hard to say—since he signed to Island in ’74, his last truly adventurous work was the production and arranging on Nico’s The End. He now seems content to work in the pop context more than anything else, and his last few albums—the three with Island, Sabotage, Honi Soit and even the Animal Justice EP—were simple pop recordings with few J hints of Cale’s past experimentalism. < Disappointing for some, myself included, | but then Cale’s rock ’n’ roll is more interesting than most everyone else’s anyway.

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Having been foolish enough to turn down an offer to see the Velvet Underground in Miami years ago—I don’t even want to talk about it, OK?—I first saw John Cale perform two years ago. At the time, he looked vaguely puffy—sort of a cross between qne ot my Italian uncles and Dick Martin from Laugh-In, and I was depressed. Cale played a few new tunes, most of which turned up on the live Sabotage album and some that didn’t: one was called “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues,” which featured vocalist Deerfrance whimpering while Cale beat himself over his hard-hat-covered head. Great idea, and fun, but Cale seemed to actually be playing down to the audience in a way he certainly didn’t need to, acting “weird” because it was expected behavior. Not entirely becoming, but it was the best we’d get for a while.

The Velvet Underground seemed to be partially based on adversarial relationships. —John Cale

Since then, Cale’s trimmed down considerably, got an entirely new band, and cut out the fluff. End result: his shows are better than ever. In a way, he might’ve learned something from Iggy years ago; when weird people act weird, it’s boring— but when they act normal...

At 39, Cale is “acting normally,” is as unpredictable as ever, and is probably about to attain the commercial success he’s (admittedly) been striving for for years. If Lou Reed could ever have a Top 40 hit, then Cale—who has a much better ear for melody than Reed, among other things—has the potential for several.

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I’m downstairs in Ann Arbor’s Second Chance, talking to Cale in a dressing room. It’s about 7 p.m.—soundcheck for the night’s show just completed—and Cale’s talking about Mike Thorne, producer of Honi Soit. Thorne, whose work on the Wire albums alone is thoroughly remarkable, is the only producer John Cale has ever had.

“I just had this feeling,” Cale explains. “The songs we’d rehearsed and were ready to go into the studio with, I was junking. Real fast, because we’d done them to death, rehearsed them until we were sick of them. And I was figuring that when we got into the studio this time, I could just make up new songs again. Just like every other album I’ve done, like Fear, Slow Dazzle, all that stuff. Except for Paris—Paris was cut a little beforehand, but then a lot of stuff happened in the middle of Paris that tended to go that way.

“Anyway, I needed somebody with both feet on the floor, considerate and quiet, someone that I could ask questions of and get dependable answers from. Someone who’d be able to put up with me waltzing around the room a little bit.”

Apparently Thorne fit the bill—Honi Soit is probably the best-sounding album John Cale’s ever made. Cale thinks so, too. “It wasn’t that I needed a change,” he says, “it’s just that when you come down to mixing something, you really have to change. You can’t go through that process, your head’s still a little too much into it. So I decided I’d leave that up to him.”

When Fear arrived in 1974, I remember reading somewhere that Cale signed a sixalbum deal with Island Records. Only Slow Dazzle and Helen Of Troy followed, though—and Cale then disappeared from view. What happened—wasn’t he satisfied with his records there?

“Kind of,” Cale says. “Except for Helen. Helen was a bit rushed, and the company had a different view of what I was supposed to be doing than /did.”

What was their view?

“They just picked different material. That’s all.”

Different material that you did?

“Yeah. When I got to Copenhagen, the journalists that came there said, ‘I just got hold of the new album, it sounds really good.’ I said, ‘Let me hear it.’ Island manufactured 1,500 copies of the cassette that had no relationship to the line-up that I’d given to my engineer. What had happened was, my engineer had made a deal with the guys at Island—and they did whatever they wanted to do without consulting me, the producer of the album. ”

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Cale called Island and complained, but the damage was already done. As a result, certain editions of the album feature Cale’s “Leaving It Up To You,” tasteful references to Sharon Tate and all, while some feature another song entirely. The album was Cale’s last for the company, and the only one he’s ever done not issued in America.

More Cale music—the soundtrack to Jonathan Demme’s classic B-film Caged Heat, recorded roughly at the time of Fear—never even made it to vinyl at all, though Cale says he has all rights and may eventually release it. Island Records still have his unfinished reggae version of Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows”—with, typically for Cale, full cathedral choir and chorus.

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After performing for almost 20 years, does John Cale ever get tired of young journalists asking over and over again what it was like to be in the Velvet Underground?

“Not only young journalists,” he says. “Young people. When we were in Louisiana, it was crazy—we drove from Tampa to New Orleans, 18 hours straight, we got there at 6 in the morning, and I had to do a record store appearance at 11. So when I got there, folding at the knees, people shoving beers and coffee in my hands, this young kid, 13 years old, comes up to me. ‘Hey,’ he says, i got all your records, really love the old Velvet Underground stuff ...’’Cale brings his hand to his chest. “And this little brat comes up to here on me—13 years old and in tennis clothes, real cocky. It was amazing.”

I mention I think Nico’s Marble Index—which Cale arranged and played almost everything on—is the best work he’s ever done.

“That’s one of the things I’d like to pursue,” he says. “The musical side. I’ll eventually make concrete moves to write symphonies, start writing orchestral pieces again. That’s something I want to pursue, that style of arranging, extended into the symphonic context with a major orchestra, brass section and all. A hundred-piece orchestra. I’m more interested in extending the European tradition of classical music than the American tradition.”

Is there anyone you think is doing that now?

“No.”

Do you listen to much music these days?

“Classical music, I do. When I listen to the radio, I listen to rock ’n’ roll.”

What classics?

“Umm...any. Still, if I had my ’druthers, it'd be Brahms, Sibelius, Mahler...”

How do you react to criticism, then, that you’re “playing down” to your audience, that you’d really rather be performing classical music?

“I don’t want to give that impression,” Cale says. “Still, though, I have a real passion for that stuff. I have real regret that I haven’t done something to music. But I can’t just sit down and write the stuff—it’s better to just go out and do it, go in a studio and do the thing and overdub everything, then come out and write it down for copyright and performance purposes. Then you’ve got the tape and you’ve got the score, so at least you’re dealing with it instead of sitting around in an ivory tower and just waiting around for 10 years...”

Since he’s always seemed to be attracted to passionate music, does Cale think the passion expressed in classics and rock is at all on the same level? Or is there a major intellectual difference?

“The thing about Sibelius and Brahms and Mahler and Tchaikovsky” says he, “is they all had a real individual personality in terms of the way they scored things. Sibelius was really cold and empty, and he seemed to...”

Cale trails off.

“I don’t know what it is that attracts me, but to really be able to achieve that in orchestra writing—I didn’t get it with Academy In Peril, with ‘John Milton’ and ‘Three Orchestral Pieces,’ they seem to me to be sort of wishy-washy. All the interesting tracks are like ‘King Harry,’ ‘Days Of Steam,’ ‘Legs Larry,’ maybe...”

It’s funny, though, I remark: as influential as the Velvets are now, most new bands—especially the British ones—seem to be striving for as passionless a music as possible...

“Cold, you mean?” Cale asks. “I hate cold and passionless stuff, faceless things— I hate that. Brian Eno, he didn’t used to be like that, but I don’t like the stuff he’s doing now. ‘Baby’s On Fire’ was like a real belter. ”

Eno’s “ambient” music and his work with Robert Fripp all sounds like—aside from, obviously, Terry Riley—material Cale probably did with Lamont Young years ago. Was it?

“I could never figure out what—or where —Lamont was taking it. I guess I do now. He’s got a Foundation.”

Is any of the music you recorded with Young available?

“It’s all archived, but he is the only person with a copy. Which represents to me about three or four years of hard work, and I don’t have copies of it. And the tapes are very brittle, old Scotch tapes that could snap at any minute and they’d be gone. And I don’t like this notion that someone can take it upon themself to work with four other people, who contribute so much time and effort to this project, and do that.”

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Somehow the last snippet of conversation brings up the Velvet Underground, who, inevitably, lurk behind any rational conversation with Cale or Lou Reed. Cale had just read part of a recent interview with Velvets guitarist Sterling Morrison and, apparently, liked it very much.. “He’s really eloquent as a speaker,” Cale recalls. “He really is an English major. And he reads well.”

Is Cale’s live presentation now anything like it was back in the Velvets?

“Oh, no. It was Lou’s, all Lou’s. I was a sideman, Lou was the frontman. We just went onstage and made a lot of noise. ”

And have you achieved something by yourself that you wouldn’t have with Lou?

Cale nods. “I don’t feel as if my sensibilities are being infringed upon quite as much. The band seemed to be partially based on adversarial relationships. There was a sympathetic adversarial relationship: someone who had basically the same goal in mind, but a different means to go about ft *

And if you saw Lou Reed today?

“If ever Lou and I were in the same room, everybody would walk out.” Cale lowers his voice and mumbles something about a “distasteful personality.”

Then we change the subject.

☆ ☆ ☆

Our conversation comes to a close, Cale mentioning that he’d like to produce Captain Beefheart (“I met him in Europe and asked him if he was still drawing—he said ‘Are you kidding? After what they did me in music?’”) and Split Enz (“for entirely different reasons”).

And at 39, John Cale is a man who— when asked—admits he probably hasn’t found his niche yet. Does he think he ever will?

“Yeah, I do. Only if it happens, I’ll be the last one to find out. But it’s something I imagine being elusive, difficult to attain— impossible to attain—and ultimately a source of great frustration as well.

“It’s just something that has to be cautiously and carefully approached. You have to go about it rationally, that’s all. ”

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End of interview.

☆ ☆ ☆

“All that shit is a seductive way of saying nothing.”

—John Cale, on the terms “genius, ” “ahead of his time, ’’and other ones you can probably figure out.