Timeline: 1979
Stopping by Lou Reed's guest host radio show
He drops in at Lou Reed's radio show at WPIX-FM on January 28. They are having fun:
Lou: "John, I was just telling them about Rolling Stone, my great concern for good reviews. They panned my latest album."
John: "Again?"
Three songs from his show at CBGB on October 27, 1978 are aired to close out the program: Jack The Ripper, Evidence and Leaving It Up To You.
Roxy Music in NYC with David Bowie
On March 29 he attends a Roxy Music show at the Palladium in New York with David Bowie and music journalist Lisa Robinson.
After the show they meet up with lead singer Bryan Ferry backstage.
WKCR Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall, with David Bowie on viola
He is one of the performers at the WKCR Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall in New York on April 1st. He shared the bill with Philip Glas, Steve Reich, Leroy Jenkins, and The Model Citizens.
The band consisted of John Cale; Deer France, vocals; Marc Aaron, guitar; Joe Bidewell, keyboards; Tony Shanahan, bass & Dougie Bowne, drums.
The event was produced by critic and historian Tim Page. Cale taught David Bowie how to play the viola, the first time he played that instrument. He sat in on Sabotage. After the concert he quipped: "My mum would have been proud of me!"
Bowie, looking back in an interview with French magazine Les Inrockuptibles in 1993:
"Curiously, it wasn't really Lou Reed who attracted me to the Velvet Underground. For me, the band's sound was John Cale. This was confirmed a few years later, when I worked with Lou on Transformer. John was the subversive element of the band, one of the most underrated musicians in rock history.
This guy is a danger, a real character. I don't know anyone as terrifying and dark as him - he'd make Lou Reed look like a choirboy! In the Seventies, we hung out together, both of us a mess. From the vague memories I have of our jaunts, John liked to flirt with danger. I even remember a knife fight one day... All these legends about Keith Richards, John Cale lived them from the inside.
We worked together in the late 1970s, for a festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Steve Reich, Phil Glass and John Cale were the masters of ceremonies, and John invited me to join him. I was worried, but he just told me to come and join him on the day of the concert and not to prepare anything. When I arrived, fifteen minutes before going on stage, backstage, he quickly played me his piece.
I said to him, 'OK, you want me to write some lyrics quickly?' He replied, 'You're not here to sing. Take this!' He handed me an electric violin, even though I had never played one before. I was scared to death. 'John, I'm going to make a fool of myself.' 'Yes, with a bit of luck, that's exactly what's going to happen!' He just showed me a few notes, and I found myself on stage with him, not knowing what was happening. I played as fast as I could, just to get it over with. It was a wonderful experience."
Sterling Morrisson sits on "Mercenaries" in Austin
Sterling Morrisson, who was working as a tugboat captain in Austin at that time, joins the band during a show at Armadillo World Headquarters on April 19 to play guitar on Mercenaries (Ready For War). After the show they were interviewed on local radio station KWT. Morrison would join the band again four weeks later on May 17 at the same venue.
Meeting Margaret Moser in Austin and San Antonio
Gets into a relationship with Margaret Moser, who is based in Austin, Texas. The pair first meet at the April 19 show at Armadillo World Headquarters. They are an item every time he passes through the city for a couple of years. She is part of "The Texas Blondes" (Cale named them so) who were active in the groupie scene until around 1982.
She would become a respected music critic and journalist in later years and wrote this in her I Love (Live) Rock & Roll in the Austin Chronicle:
"10 years after leaving the Velvet Underground, John Cale was taking his place as one of punk's godfathers with his Sabotage tour. I had met Cale in Austin at the Armadillo show, where his paranoid military consciousness and crackpot conspiracy theories collided onstage in a mangle of punk rhythms, skewing my focus of the new sound I was in love with. Cale and I flirted outrageously backstage but I snubbed him; three days later, however, I drove to San Antonio to see him play - at the Sunken Gardens amphitheatre.
Now, here I was, ten years later, at age 25 - a whole fucking decade, for Chrissake - born again at the scene of lost innocence and a rock & roll renaissance, watching a ragtag army of New York punks prophesy the dark and druggy but riveting and intelligent visions of one of rock's bonafide geniuses. I smiled: the black leather and torn t-shirts of Cale's band were as much an anomaly among the majestic, Grecian columns as the hippies' tie-dyed attire had been.
That soft April Sunday brought back memories with every ruffle of the afternoon wind; I walked slowly, deliberately, toward The Spot and stood, hearing the musical direction of my future performed in front of me. Cale and the band were placating Velvet lovers with "Waiting for My Man," and the familiar feel of sound ricocheted off the back wall and slammed my head from both sides. A journal entry dated April 24, 1979 reads: I was reeling from the memories that flooded back, and the implication of being here ten years after with no less than John Cale. Could I have imagined 10 years before, a mere high-schooler driving around listening to the Velvet Underground jones during I'm Waiting For The Man that I would be here, now?... I was flush with lust, yes, for the estimable Mr. Cale, but also lust for the renewal of faith in rock & roll performance. Once again, it was musical epiphany that would forever transform what I listened to and how I heard it, back in the same place it all started. (I busted this rejuvenated cherry by fucking John Cale backstage after his performance, mere steps from the very spot I lost it the first time. It was shamelessly gratifying.)"
They kept in touch and she would write the liner notes for the reissue of Vintage Violence in 2001. She died in 2017.
Ian Hunter's "You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic"
Cale plays harp, keyboards and piano on Bastard, a track on Ian Hunter's You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic album.
Angus MacLise dies
Angus MacLise, the first drummer of The Velvet Underground, dies of hypoglycemia and pulmonary tuberculosis om June 21st at the Shanta Bawan Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was 41.
Four of his experimental recordings featuring Cale can be found on the 2CD The Cloud Doctrine released in 2003: Trance #1, Trance #2, Two Speed Trance, and Four Speed Trance. The tracks were recorded by Tony Conrad in New York in 1965. Cale plays guitar, viola and keyboards.
Producing the Model Citzens
Produces the four track EP Shift the Blame by New York based New Wave band Model Citizens. Tracks: Shift the Blame, Animal Instincts, I Am Honest and You Are What You Wear.
It is released on his own label Spy Records.
Spare Change cover "Ski Patrol"
Australian band Spare Change covers Ski Patrol< on their Lonely Suits album.
Producing the Necessaries
The Necessaries single produced by Cale is released in October. Tracks: You Can Borrow My Car and Runaway Child. Note: this New York based power pop / new wave band is the follow-up of Harry Toledo & The Rockets, a band he produced in 1978.
Runaway Child is included on the Conflict & Catalysis: Productions & Arrangements 1966-2006 compilation album (2012).
Squeeze single
Release of the Wrong Way single, produced by Cale. It is an outtake of the London based New Wave band Squeeze self-titled album (1978).
It comes a single-sided green 7" 33RPM flexi-disc with the October 4th - 17th 1979 edition of Smash Hits magazine.
Bowie/Cale sessions
A session with David Bowie at the Ciarbis studio in New York on October 15 results in two songs: Piano-La and Velvet Couch. Never released officially. On meeting Bowie:
"David and I didn't actually meet until I first went back to New York, after I'd done Patti [Smith]. When we did that bootleg, it was like the good old bad old days. We were partying very hard. It was exciting working with him, as there were a lot of possibilities and everything, but we were our own worst enemies at that point."
"We also played that show for Steve Reich and Philip Glass. That was a lot of fun. That was when we were hanging out, so I asked David if he'd like to come and play Sabotage with me. I ended up teaching him the viola part, which he had a whack at and then ended up playing on stage for the first time."
"Did I ever want to produce Bowie? After spending time with him, I realised the answer was no. The way we were then would have made it too dangerous. Nowadays it would be different, though. He could improvise songs very well, which was what that bootleg was all about. The great thing about when we met and then started hanging out in the '70s was that he would say [puts on thick Welsh accent] "That's Dai Jones from Wales, isn't it?" He loved all that. That set us off. We got along really well, but most of what we were doing was just partying."
Sabotage/Live
On December 4 the live album Sabotage/Live hits the shops. Recorded live at CBGB's, New York, June 1979, the album contains all new material and one cover, the Rufus Thomas song Walkin' The Dog.
"Those kids punching the air in mock salutes declaring they are Ready for War! make me sick... I bet they are ready... like hell. I should have an induction room backstage. Let's see you come back and enlist.
But I have received a lot of reaction from the album like that. Even some of the guys who devise war games for the Pentagon have come to the shows as a result of that record and this tour. It looks like finally I have made an American album.
Right now America has this lingering weak-sister image, but that's because both America and Russia attempt to make deals about the rest of the world while working under the threat of nuclear confrontation. This album is about going through that nuclear barrier, I think that's important. You've got to experience a nuclear war and find out exactly what it does, how people live in the face of it after the fact of it.
There's no reason though, to force my notions on people, I suspect other people are more effective at putting across some of the things i'm interested in. Their ways, at least, are more digestable. I'm afraid nobody really wants to hear what i'm singing about. Its beginning to dawn on me that not that many people are convinced of my commercial appeal."
In January 1999 the album reissued on CD with four bonus tracks: the three songs from the Animal Jusitice EP: Memphis, Chickenshit and Hedda Gabler plus Rosegarden Funeral of Sores which was released as the B-side of the Mercenaries single in 1980. The master of the studio version of Mercenaries is lost and therefore not included.
Meets Risé Irushalmi in CBGB's
Cale plays CBGB's in New York on New Year's Eve. He meets Risé Irushalmi on his way out. They start living together after a few weeks and get married in 1981.