10 Reasons to Rediscover John Cale

Dear listeners,

For today’s playlist, I have a treat for you: a deep dive into the world of a musician I find endlessly fascinating — John Cale.

Cale is best known as a founder of the Velvet Underground, where he played viola and very occasionally sang, but that association hardly does him justice. The Welsh musician was in the V.U. for just three years before creative differences with his perpetual frenemy Lou Reed came to a head; his wildly eclectic solo career has now lasted nearly six decades and is more than worth your time.

Even as a longtime admirer of Cale’s music, immersing myself in his catalog earlier this year I discovered entire albums — even entire eras — I was unfamiliar with. A high percentage of them were totally awesome. I found myself saying things to friends like “You have to hear ‘Honi Soit,’ this wild post-punk album he made in 1981 …”

I went to Los Angeles to interview Cale in January, and he shared so many fascinating insights and star-studded anecdotes — when he said “Andy,” he meant Warhol; when he said “David,” it was Bowie. I couldn’t fit them all in my story, so I’ve peppered some of them in here, along with notes from some of his illustrious admirers, including Patti Smith, Todd Haynes and James Murphy.

Whether you’re a Cale devotee revisiting some classics or someone who still gets him confused with John Cage (as several people confessed to me after the piece was published), I hope this playlist makes you feel like you’re having tea with Graham Greene.

Listen along here on Spotify as you read.

1. John Cale: “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend” (1974)

Cale’s incendiary fourth solo album, “Fear,” was the one that made Patti Smith recruit him to produce “Horses” — not only did she love its anarchic sound, but she found the stark, close-up shot of Cale’s face on the cover striking because it reminded her of her hero Arthur Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” (It was all in the cheekbones, she says.) I’m with Patti: This whole album ranks among Cale’s best, and the opening track is both an early example of punk rock’s spirit and an inviting portal into Cale’s musical universe. (Listen on YouTube)

2. The Velvet Underground: “Venus in Furs” (1966)

While Lou Reed brought a pop sensibility to the VU’s sound (he got his start as an in-house songwriter for the low-budget novelty label Pickwick Records), Cale brought avant-garde adventurousness, particularly a fascination with the hypnotic qualities of drone, which he honed in the Dream Syndicate with Tony Conrad and La Monte Young before he joined the Velvet Underground in 1965. “Venus in Furs,” from the Velvet Underground’s epochal debut album with Nico, would be an entirely different song without the low, molten drone of Cale’s electric viola. (Listen on YouTube)

3. John Cale: “Paris 1919” (1973)

“Paris 1919” was the first solo Cale song, and album, that I heard. He’s such a natural fit for the stately chamber-pop sensibility of this album — the perfect-postured piano-playing; the indelible Welsh accent — that I mistakenly assumed all his records sounded like this. A few years later, when I dug deeper into his catalog, I discovered its contained serenity makes the album something of an outlier, but it’s still probably his most popular release, and one of his best. (Listen on YouTube)

4. John Cale: “Big White Cloud” (1970)

Cale was still finding his distinct voice on his first solo album, “Vintage Violence,” but it certainly has its moments of sublimity — the best of which is the drifting, dreamy “Big White Cloud.” (Listen on YouTube)

5. John Cale and Terry Riley: “Ides of March” (1971)

Here’s something from the more avant-classical side of Cale: a long, gloriously cacophonous composition driven by piano and not one but two drummers, from “Church of Anthrax,” a collaborative and mostly improvised album he made with the experimental musician Terry Riley. “Ides of March” basically sounds like a bunch of stuff falling out of a closet for 11 minutes straight, in the most compelling way possible. I’m a huge fan of this album and was delighted to find in my reporting that Todd Haynes is, too — it’s one of the more obscure in Cale’s discography, but we enthusiasts are quite passionate about it. (Listen on YouTube)

6. John Cale: “Honi Soit (La Première Leçon de Français)” (1981)

As I was researching Cale, this album, “Honi Soit” from 1981, was my most thrilling discovery. (Hey, the guy has released 17 solo albums; even a fan like me can’t always keep up!) Cale’s approach was so consistently ahead of its time that he was easily able to slot into various emerging genres as the decades went on. “Fear,” along with his production for Smith and the Stooges, heralded him as a godfather of punk, while “Honi Soit” proves he understood post-punk and new wave just as intuitively. The refrain in this pummeling track is “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” an old Anglo-Norman phrase that is still the motto of the British chivalric Order of the Gartner; it’s roughly translated as “shame on anyone who thinks evil of it.” Leave it to Cale to make something so esoteric sound immediately catchy. (Listen on YouTube)

7. Lou Reed and John Cale: “Work” (1990)

Reed and Cale met up again for the first time in years at Warhol’s funeral in 1987; their friend’s unexpected death hit them both hard and they wanted to find a way to pay tribute. Their offering was the 1989 album “Songs for Drella,” which they workshopped at various locations around New York City, like St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy (a John Cale superfan) told me that the album’s starkly minimalist production had an impact on him. “Up until then I didn’t know you could leave a song like that and be confident enough to say it was done,” he marveled. I, too, love the clean outlines of Cale’s antic piano and Reed’s insouciant guitar, all the better to hear them clash. (Listen on YouTube)

8. John Cale: “Hallelujah (Fragments)” (1991)

Before it was the woefully over-covered, culturally ubiquitous standard that it is today, “Hallelujah” was a semi-obscure Leonard Cohen track that hadn’t made much of an impact when it was first released in 1984. It was, however, the song that Cale chose to cover on a 1991 Cohen tribute album — which turned out to be the version that initially caught Jeff Buckley’s ear. The rest, for better or worse, is history. Cale and I discussed the song quite a bit, and we both bemoaned the way “Hallelujah” has transformed into a solemn, self-serious dirge. Cale’s expertly inhabited version certainly gets at the wry, Cohenian humor that most other interpreters miss, especially in his delivery of the line, “There was a time when you let me know what’s really going on below/But now you never show it to me, do ya?” Said Cale, correctly: “It’s cheeky, isn’t it?” (Listen on YouTube)

9. Brian Eno and John Cale: “In the Backroom” (1990)

Though their time in the studio together was contentious, Cale and fellow art-rocker Brian Eno created something compelling and unexpectedly accessible in “Wrong Way Up,” a collaborative album released in 1990. The album is best known for the songs that Eno sings — especially the bright, poppy “Spinning Away” — but I like this more laid-back, poetic number that Cale sings in a cool murmur. (Listen on YouTube)

10. The Velvet Underground: “Lady Godiva’s Operation” (1968)

And here’s one more Velvets classic for good measure, from the final VU album Cale appeared on, the caterwauling “White Light/White Heat.” With all due respect to Reed, I love the few moments when Cale sang lead with the Velvets. There’s something so deliciously creepy about his vocals here, but at the same time they’re always imbued with a signature elegance. (Listen on YouTube)

I’m the bishop and I’ve come to claim you with my iron drum,

Lindsay

Bonus tracks

I was sad to hear last week about the passing of former Luscious Jackson keyboardist Vivian Trimble, at the way-too-young age of 59. Luscious Jackson was a refreshing presence during that unfortunately brief moment in the mid-to-late ’90s when a whole bunch of interesting female musicians actually got played on rock radio, and I always dug the group’s singles, like the slinky “Under Your Skin” and the groovy “Ladyfingers.” In Trimble’s honor, I’ll recommend this 1997 performance of the band’s big hit “Naked Eye” on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” featuring Trimble on keys, gorgeous backing vocals and effortlessly cool dance moves.

The Amplifier Playlist

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“10 Reasons to Rediscover John Cale” track list
Track 1: John Cale, “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend”
Track 2: The Velvet Underground, “Venus in Furs”
Track 3: John Cale, “Paris 1919”
Track 4: John Cale, “Big White Cloud”
Track 5: John Cale and Terry Riley, “Ides of March”
Track 6: John Cale, “Honi Soit (La Première Leçon de Français)”
Track 7: Lou Reed and John Cale, “Work”
Track 8: John Cale, “Hallelujah (Fragments)”
Track 9: Brian Eno and John Cale, “In the Backroom”
Track 10: The Velvet Underground, “Lady Godiva’s Operation”