A brief biography
John Davies Cale is born March 9th 1942 in Garnant in the Amman Valley, Carmarthenshire, Wales.
Cale's father Arthur George Cale was a fitter in the Gelly Geidrum coal mine. His mother Margaret Davies was a school teacher at the local school until she married Arthur at the age of 36. John was their only child.
Music enters his life after his mother signs him up for piano lessons. It is the start for becoming a multi-instumentalist: viola, guitar, bass, keyboards, harpsichord, harmonium, celeste, marimba, sarinda, horn, harp, piano and organ.
Cale composed his first piece of music while attending the Ammanford Grammar School: Tocatta in the style of Khachaturian.
Studied musicology at Goldsmith's College, London, from 1960 to 1963. He got the "most hateful student" award, given by its department heads, but was also picked for a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship, thanks to American composer Aaron Copland. He moves the States to attend the Eastman Conversatory in Tanglewood, Massachusetts.
The works of avant-garde composers John Cage and La Monte Young make a huge impression. He joins the latter as a member of Theatre of Eternal Music.
"I'd never been involved of music of that kind before, where you sustained a drone for an hour and a half, every day, for a year and a half."
The Velvet Underground
Co-founder with Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground in 1965. He was ousted in 1968, a couple of months after the second album White Light/White Heat was released . There was a one-off reunion in 1990 and a 1993 European reunion tour.
"The aim of the band on the whole was to hypnotize audiences, so that their subconscious would take over. It was an attempt to control the unconscious with the hypnotic. We thought that the solution lay in providing hard drugs for everyone, but there was already a very strong psychedelic element in sustained sound, which is what we had... so we thought that putting viola drones behind guitars and echo was one way of creating this enormous space... which was itself a psychedelic experience."
Solo career
Went solo in the Seventies. Has released twenty studio albums, three EPs, a handful of live albums and compilations, and has written soundtracks for dozens of movies.
"I'm content with making records, but I don't want to be doing the same thing all the time."
Producing
Cale is highly valued as a producer. He started producing bands in the late Sixties, stood at the forefront when punk exploded and is still much in demand.
He produced the debuts of The Stooges and Patti Smith. Other production feats include the Happy Mondays, the Mediæval Baebes, Nico, Siouxsie & The Banshees and Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses.
"I really love producing other artists. I love helping someone achieve his goals. I always try to approach it from the point of view, "What would a Zen master do in these circumstances?' And that is not to give the artist a direct answer to all his questions, but to suggest a solution by other means. You've got to stick to what you believe in. It might be lucrative for me to work with a particular personality, but if I don't feel sympathetic to what he's doing, I'm just letting myself down. And you lose all your credibility if you do that."
Going to the movies
From the Nineties on providing movie soundtracks became an important part of his income.
He has also acted in a couple of movies and TV shows, and featured in a documentary about the recording of the Words For The Dying album and the visual biography John Cale: An Exploration of His Life and Music.
Let's rock (again)
Cale returned to avant-rock in the 21st century, releasing a string of highly acclaimed EPs and albums, and hitting the road with a full backup band on a regular basis.
- 5 Tracks
- HoboSapiens
- blackAcetate
- Circus Live
- Extra Playful
- Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood
- Mercy
- POPtical Illusion
- MiXology (volume 1)
As of 2009 he has performed his Paris 1919 album in full quite a few times.
John Cale currently lives in Los Angeles, California. He does a lot of his recordings in his own ARM studio from the release of Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood onwards.