JOHN CALE

JOHN CALE

FEATURES

Roy Trakin

Twenty years have passed since John Cale, along with Lou Reed, emerged with the Velvet Underground preaching a naked vision that had nothing in common with the era’s prevailing peace ’n’ love vibes. The Welsh madman, who came to America on a classical grant at the age of 21, has long since parted company with his original sidekick, embarking on a solo career that has encompassed producing (artists like Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Nico, Squeeze and the Police), A&R (discovering Jonathan Richman, among others), avant/classical collaborations (with Terry Riley and the Royal Philharmonic) and performing with his own rock groups.

Despite the re-release of remastered versions of the first three Velvet Underground LPs and two compilations of unreleased Velvets material, Cale downplays any talk of a ban$l reunion as we chat in New York. But Cale still has affection for his old group, even though he admits he didn’t think the fascination with the Velvets would have lasted this long.

“I didn’t think Lou wrote those lyrics for nothing,” he insists. “I thought they were very penetrating. And I had no intention of letting the music be anything other than troublesome to people. It was a revolutionary, radical situation. We really wanted to go out there and annoy people. So, what happened? We had Walter Cronkite and Jackie Kennedy dancing to it. We were fooling ourselves even then.”

The hearty figure who tells me this looks in better shape than he’s been in years, sober and steeled by a regimen of touring with his latest band. Cale played with the Velvets through their first two LPs, claiming he contributed more to the debut album than the second, White Light/White Heat.

“I was involved in the songwriting of 'Black Angel’s Death Song’ and ‘Heroin.’ Lou sang and I played the guitar, but it was kind of difficult to tell which way those songs were going to go. They would change every time. Sometimes Lou would take the lead and I’d follow, and sometimes it went the reverse.

‘‘The second album was just a case ol going into the studio and making it conform to what we wanted to do. We were a touring band at the time, and our music was changing. For the first record, we rehearsed constantly and worked very hard on getting different arrangements and something close to a unique sound. The second one was just, like, bang.. .just crank up the amplifier and let the engineer worry about it. We’d go into the booth with Gary (Kellgran, the engineer), turn it all the way up, and, when we left, he’d just open up the drawer and turn it down again.”

As for house producer Tom Wilson’s role in all this, Cale laughs, ‘‘He knew more, uh, ladies of the night than there are women on this planet. He’s a swinger par excellence. It was unbelievable, a constant parade into that studio. He was inspired, though, and used to joke around to keep everybody in the band light.”

Cale was involved with two tracks which date from February ’68 and were finally released on Polygram’s V.U. compilation. The songs were originally turned down by MGM under pressure from Mike Curb, who was ridding the label of all ‘‘undesirable influences” at the time. One is called ‘‘Stephanie Says,” a tune which reappeared on Lou Reed’s solo Berlin LP as ‘‘Caroline Says.” The other is a ditty called ‘‘Temptation (Inside Your Heart).” Shortly thereafter, Reed demanded that Cale leave the group.

‘‘Sterling (Morrison) came up to me when we were about to go to Cleveland to play, and told me Lou said if I went to Cleveland, he wouldn’t, and that was it.”

Cale still plays ‘‘Waiting For The Man” as part of his own group’s live set, though.

‘‘The way we do it, it sounds more like the Velvet Underground than the way it is on the record,” he says. “We used to just bang out the rhythm and not do any changes at all. When we do it that way live, it gets a great response.”

Meanwhile, Cale’s own solo career has veered from the experimentation of Church Of Anthrax and The Academy In Peril to the crunch rock of Sabotage to the gentle balladeering of Paris 1919.

“I like to design arrangements in terms of independent parts,” he explains. “So that one part has nothing to do with the other, which is how we recorded (Nico’s) Marble Index. We just let Nico’s voice go and improvise parts on top of her that were all working against one another in a contrapuntal fashion. Then you take out the center of the songs and build from there. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

“I’m impatient in the studio, and I’ve had to learn to calm down, work and be precise about what I’m doing. I was able to do that on Patti Smith’s Horses album. It’s just a lot easier doing it for someone other than yourself. ’ ’

Cale is too busy with his own band to do much producing these days, although he has done some tracks with Gene Loves Jezebel and James & The Lone Wolves.

“The main reason I haven’t been doing more is I haven’t been able to go out and find the bands myself,” he says.

Cale describes his current audience as ranging in age “from very young to very old.”

“A lot of them are doing their Lou Reed/John Cale comparisons,” he adds ruefully. “If Lou Reed were to give up performing, my audience would probably dwindle.”

And as for his own cult status after all these years...

“When I first came to New York, Allen Ginsberg asked me if I’d made many friends,” he recalls. “And I said I thought I had, but I couldn’t seem to keep in touch with them. And he told me that in New York you practically have to go out and grab people by the clothing and hang on to them physically in order to maintain any kind of relationship. Maybe it’s the same thing with audiences. You just have to constantly keep on playing and hammering away.”