"I only hope that one day John will be recognized as ... the Beethoven or something of his day. He knows so much about music, he's such a great musician. He's completely mad - but that's because he's Welsh."

Lou Reed

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

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John Cale - Producer

Searching for sound

Cale has been busy producing artists since the late Sixties, when he captured the raw sound of the Stooges and the teutonic tones of Nico.

Production jobs came and went (and sometimes fell through), but he was in demand guy for getting the job done by acts who wanted to show off their cool with having "Producer: John Cale" in the liner notes of their albums.

Last added: The Sick F-cks unreleased EP (1978)

It never happened

Production jobs that failed to materialize:

Roxy Music contacted Cale to produce their second album. Cale recommended using the AIR studios, but it never happened.

The Cale produced 1976 demo sessions with The Police never see the light of day.

Australian singer Geraldine Fitzgerald's cover of Antarctica Starts Here falls through in 1978.

He produced a couple of tracks for Canadian pop punk band The Poles with the prospect of releasing them on his Spy label in 1978. The same goes for The Loose Screws and The Reasons.

In 1978 he produced a 6-track EP by New York punk band The Sic F-cks for Polish Records. Never released and the masters have been long gone. They got lost after the Sundragon Studios went out of business.

American punk band The Embarrasment had a nice chat, but backed out after learning about the costs.

Sessions with British new wave band Gene Loves Jezebel in 1984 are shelved.

Dutch garage rockers Claw Boys Claws came close in obtaining his services when they met him after a gig at the New Music Seminar in New York in 1988.

Singer Mark Lanegan tried tot get him as a producer in 2003.

In 2007 Cale was producing a new Ambulance LTD album with that band's last remaining member, Marcus Congleton. The results have never been released officially, because the record label went bust.

In his autobiography See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody, published in 2011, Bob Mould mentions that a quite drunk Cale offered to produce Hüsker Dü. The band said no.

Cale himself always wanted to produce Captain Beefheart.

Got more?

"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."

More producing quotes

Producing overview

He hits the ground running with the production of the self-titled debut album by The Stooges in 1969. He got the job through Elektra owner Jac Holzman:

"Jac took me to Detroit to see the MC5 recording live. The opening band was the Stooges... I fell in love with Iggy's character and personality as a performer. The challenge was to get that magic and impish behavior onto a record."

He lands a job at record label Columbia to work for their project to gain at foothold at the all new Quadrophonic sound. It fails to take off, after which Cale joins Warners as a staff producer in 1971.

He moves from New York to Los Angeles. Warners hopes to make a quadrophonic version of A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. It turns out that the costs of refitting the movie theatres for the new sound are too high to make it happen. Also, Cale never was not compatible with big company big bucks producing methods and he left in 1975. He has been freelancing ever since.

In the Seventies he produced the classic Horses album by the Patti Smith Group in 1975:

"It was not clear what persona this record was going to have until I had her improvise against herself. At that point something clicked. There was a track she did where she read poetry against poetry and there were two lines going on and I had her mix it. When Clive Davis [head of Arista, the record label - HW] heard that, he said, 'Hey, you've got a collaborator.' And that's exactly the thing that made that record different. She was really a poet and you had to respect the fact that she was not a musician but out of sheer bravado and desire was making herself into a rock-and-roll singer and basically wanted to be Keith Richards. But I was awed that she had gotten all that input from Bob Dylan and Lou Reed to some extent. She had a Welsh Methodist idea of improvisation, in that it was like declamation. Lou was kind of psychological, but a lot of Patti's impulses came from preaching."

In 1977 punk and New Wave bands like Squeeze, Sham 69 and Menace record seminal tracks under his supervision. He is one of the co-founders of the Spy label in 1978 and some of his production jobs end up as singles and EPs on the label, which shuts its doors in 1980.

Nico called upon him three times to produce one of her albums: Desertshore, The End, and Camera Obscura. On producing Desertshore:

"She cried when it was finished. She did that with the others too."

In the Eighties he produced New Wave groups like Made for TV and Belgian singers of the Lio variety. He has no fond memories of working with anarchic English indie dance band Happy Mondays:

"A very quick nightmare. I had just stopped drinking and everything else. The band complained that I was on a health kick and that all I did was sit around eating tangerines all day long."

The Nineties found Cale producing the New Zealand act Garageland, Corsican revival band Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses, Siouxsie & The Banshees, the Breton singer-songwriter Alan Stivell, and Goya Dress. Singer Astrid Williamson of this Scottish alternative rock band remembers:

"The sessions for the album seemed to move very fast. It drove me nuts. I think I shouted of possibly cried about it. Then John caught me red-handed trying to redo a vocal, 'Katie Stood On The Benches'. 'Aargh, Astrid, you wouldn't be you if you didn't do this stuff.' Horrifying."

He made the British musical ensemble Mediæval Baebes sound like 21th Century angels. He added non-medieval instruments, including saxophone and electric guitar to spice things up a little.

His latest finished production job was The Boxing Mirror, an album by American rock musician Alejandro Escovedo, released on May 2, 2006.

Conflict & Catalysis: Productions & Arrangements 1966-2006

Twenty Cale produced tracks can be found on the John Cale - Conflict & Catalysis: Productions & Arrangements 1966-2006 album.

More?

It's hard to keep track of everybody he had his hands on.
Any additions? Use the form.

Albums, EP's and singles produced by Cale

Artist	Album	Year

Ambulance LTD	(never released)	2007
Art Bergmann	Crawl With Me	1988
Chistina	Disco Clone	1978
Chunky, Novi and Ernie	Chunky, Novi and Ernie	1974
Element of Crime	Try to be Mensch	1987
Alejandro Escovedo	The Boxing Mirror	2006
Louise Feron	Amour Fou	1991
Louise Feron	Louise Feron	1991
Garageland	Feel alright	1997
Goya Dress	Glorious	1996
Goya Dress	Rooms	1996
Happy Mondays	Squirrel And G-man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)	1986
Happy Mondays	Loads (& Loads More)	1995
Harry Toledo & The Rockets	Harry Toledo & The Rockets	1978
David Kubinec	Some Things Never Change	1978
Larry and Tommy	Yo-Yo	1968
Lio	Popmodel	1986
Made For TV	So Afraid of the Russians/Unknown Soldier	1983
Maids of Gravity	The First Second	1996
Marie et Les Garçons	Attitudes/Re-Bop	1978
Mediæval Baebes	Undrentide	2000
Menace	I Need Nothing	1977
Model Citizens	Shift the Blame	1979
Modern Guy	Une Nouvelle Vie	1980
Modern Lovers	Modern Lovers	1973
Necessaries	You Can Borrow My Car / Runaway Child	1979
Nico	Desertshore	1970
Nico	The End...	1974
Nico	Camera Obscura	1985
Nico	The Frozen Borderline 1968-1970	2007
Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses	In Paradisu	1996
Los Ronaldos	Sabor Salado	1990
Sham 69	I Don't Wanna / Red London / Ulster	1977
Siouxsie & The Banshees	The Rapture	1994
Patti Smith Group	Horses	1975
Snatch	Shopping For Clothes / Joey / Red Army	1980
Squeeze	Packet of Three	1977
Squeeze	Squeeze	1978
Squeeze	Wrong Way	1979
Alan Stivell	I Douar	1998
Stooges	Stooges	1969
The Jesus Lizard	The Jesus Lizard	1998
The Sick F-cks	(never released)	1978
Various Artists	Sixteen Candles	1984
Various Artists	Caged/Uncaged	1993
Ventilator	desert station frequency	1999
Big Vern	Lullabies for Lager Louts	1989
Jennifer Warnes	Jennifer	1972