"See, the beauty of Cale in the beginning was that he really didn’t know very much about rock. In fact, he knew next to nothing. So, if you turned him loose on an instrument he wasn’t able to play any kind of cliched anything because he didn’t know any of the cliches. It was all original."

Sterling Morrison

Fear Is A Man's Best Friend (Est. 1999) is the ultimate unofficial John Cale website

Equipment

Equipment

Stratman 12 string with modified tremolo

Custom guitar built by made by Michael Spalt with tremolo made by Don Ramsay. Michael Spalt:

"I met JC when I fixed his red Gibson flying V where the headstock had broken off. He had an old LP special which he used as his main guitar and he didn't want the risk of taking it on the road. So he asked me to build him a guitar. He selected a body and I built the first guitar, "Puzzle". eventually he wanted something close to the LP and so I made him one, with a Bigsby. Then he saw the linear tremolo at my shop and we made another one with the linear tremolo. Last year he came to me and expressed his wish to have a 12 string built with the linear trem. Don Ramsay and I worked on it together and it's a very rare guitar indeed. There's very few 12-strings ever made with a trem (tuning issues). This one came out beautifully. So, I made 4 guitars for him, all built from the ground up, and a few rather groundbreaking... I had been a fan of his since the 70's and it was great to work with/for him..."

Building the 12-string

» Fresh Cale

Order the remastered and expanded Paris 1919 album (2LP, CD) via Domino Records

Order the remastered and expanded The Academy in Peril album (LP, CD) via Domino Records