John Cale - Quotes
On producing
"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."
- On producing the Stooges
- On producing the Modern Lovers
- On producing Nico
- On producing Patti Smith
On producing the Stooges. Cale 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"
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On producing the Modern Lovers:
"It was just rehearsed to death - that's not the way. I was picking at sores after a while... At the end, he didn't trust me and I don't know why, something happened, and that broek it with me. I thought: I don't why this is happening, but it's a painful. I'm going to leave ... It was shame, because I felt that there was such an innocence that was worth capturing, that was kind of unbelievable in a way."
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On producing Nico's albums:
The Marble Index
"We had only four days to make it, but luckily Jack Holzman at Elektra really understood that there was a very powerful sense of style involved here. It wasn't just throwing notes around."
Desertshore
"We were able to do more on Desertshore, getting a greater variety of sounds, but, ach, I don't know. I think The Marble Index has still more balls to it."
The End
"There was something uncanny about her sense of timing. I really noticed it when we did The End. I just didn't understand why the hell we were devoting so much track space to Jim Morrison."
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On producing Horses by Patti Smith:
"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."