John Cale has been one of the giants of rock’n’roll for the past four decades. Of course he was a founding member of the Velvet Underground, a band whose influence is so pervasive I don’t think I need mention it again; but even were it not for Cale’s role in the Velvets, his influence on modern music would still be immense. As well as producing the debut albums of The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, and Patti Smith, he has created a body of music under his own name that is staggering in both its diversity and its extent. From his classical pieces to his drone experiments of the ‘60s; from the stately pop perfection of Paris 1919 to the stripped-back bluesy stomp of 2005’s Black Acetate, John Cale has kept a foot firmly in both rock’n’roll and avant garde camps, to the benefit of all concerned. This slightly nervous Big City Redneck hack caught up with John Cale over the blower, as he was pottering around his LA Studio following the release of Circus, a 2CD live retrospective, and his recent collaboration with New York dance-punk hipster James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem.
BCR: This year you released Circus, and that's what, your fourth live album now?
JC: Uh huh…
BCR: So what's the appeal of live albums for you?
JC: Well, it's a long story. It started off… this thing got out of hand! It started off as a single, Jumbo, and then we thought, instead of doing a single let's do an EP, like we did with 5 Tracks. And so we then decided well, we've got all these live tracks here, let's think about that, and we just had a few scattered tracks, and slowly, the word came down – “Look, forget it. Just do a live album”. And then it became a live album that's 90 minutes of music on two discs. There was some other music we had from a previous concert, which was the last concert I did with the trio before retiring it. So all in all, it just sort of unravelled until it became a mixture of acoustic stuff, on the DVD, and you have the vinyl version, it got kind of nightmarish in the end. You know, if you try and keep an art department together, focused on not just different records and different content but different formats as well… then it gets a little hairy. It slowly grew into this mushroom.
BCR: It sounds like, on the audio CD at least, it sounds like there's a lot of improvisation going on. Is that an important part of your live shows?
JC: Yeah, very. Very. I mean, the way the show turned out, we ended up recording the last two concerts of a nine-week tour, and we were burnt. We really gritted our teeth and focused… there's one song in the show at that point, which was “Gun”, a deconstructed version of “Gun”, and that became kind of like our sort of Miles Davis moment. We all… it took us a long time to get there but the band sort of grew into the role.
BCR: Is it important, do you think, to have a record of the kind of stuff that goes on when you're that ragged and hairy, at the end of your tether?
JC: Well, you know, if we agreed to do something then we've got to do it. And we didn't know that we were going to be so compressed by the time we did it. But I'm still happy with the results, it really represents what the band is capable of doing. And sometimes it's hairy, sometimes it's energetic, sometimes it's funny.
BCR: What does it feel like listening to that? Do you sometimes wonder where you got it all from?
JC: Absolutely draining. The thing about improvisation and doing long numbers like “Gun” was, is you work really hard to develop an idea on stage. And you're listening to everything that's going on, and as time goes on… every night after night after night… you have to come up with something new every night. And the minute that you start repeating ideas that you've done the night before, I mean you come off stage feeling somewhat disgusted with yourself. Because you're not really going and walking the edge, you're not really losing it, to the point where you have to struggle to survive. And that's really, that's really kind of the pay-off for me is that we, we look at it as a problem that gets solved eventually. But it gets solved in a different way every night.
BCR: Is that when you have your, as you say, your Miles Davis moment?
JC: Well he did it all the time! He would just start, you know, on the horizon and go from there. We start with at least, you know some kind of structure, we know what the chorus is… but I applied it to the lyrics as well, because the lyrics changed, and I just did what I thought was coming up at the time. So there's a certain amount of presumed knowledge in the whole thing. You've got to know what the song is about, what “Gun” is about, two detectives… and then you go and you're really into this Freudian moment of trying to figure out, whose head are you in now?
BCR: Obviously they're your songs and you put the band together, does that put you in kind of a leadership role when this is going on? Can you take cues from you bandmates as well?
JC: It does put me in a leadership role, but the kind of leadership is… the end result is not clear… the adventure is trying to figure out "are we doing something new and different? Are we doing something new and exciting?" And there are a lot of different ways of getting there. And after being on the road, after working with these guys, they've now got a taste for what, you know, they're fearless! They used to be concerned about "how do I put what I'm doing into this", and now they don't care about that, they're more… they're looking, they're listening more. And that's really it. I'm really happy with the way things have gone. They've really stood up.
BCR: The album is kind of bookended by drone tracks. What part does drone play in your live shows?
JC: It's kind of where I come from. When I first came to NY in ’63 I was working more in the avant garde field. I wasn't doing rock'n'roll at all. And about three years later, after doing three years of avant garde, I suddenly got very interested in… I mean the Beatles revolution happened in NY! You know, the Beatles landed and everything changed… everybody's idea of melody, and everything else. I just remember I realised "hey, you're 21 years old and you've missed out on your teenage life. Now here's a great opportunity to catch up, and try and do something that combines both the avant garde and rock'n'roll.”
BCR: Due to your classical training, do you think you on the fun of listening to the Beatles as a teenager?
JC: Well… there were no Beatles when I was a teenager!
BCR: Oh, sorry!
[laughter]
BCR: Well, pop music…
JC: I know it's a way back. We had Matt Munroe when I was a teenager, God! And Lonnie Donegan. Does his chewing gum lose its flavour on the bed post overnight? A couple of Goon Show records… But, I tried to put a jazz band together in Wales, in my village, in the school that I was in but it didn't really work out. So anyway, you know, I caught up in '64, '65.
BCR: When you were experimenting with drone in the 60s, did it ever cross you mind that you might still be playing it to audiences 40 years down the line?
JC: Yeah! I mean, I had to make that decision: "Look – this is what you do." And, if you're coming out of Wales and you don't have a job and you really want to do classical music, or if you don't want to do classical music, you're influenced by John Cage and you want to go out and find a new means of experimenting with music. So you go and work with La Monte Young. And from there you suddenly wake up one morning and say "Hey! I'm playing for smaller and smaller audiences as time goes by - and this is not fun." And it may have been startling and intellectually stimulating to figure out a new intonation system, but in the end… you know…
BCR: Fun's important?
JC: It didn't pull any girls, I'll tell you that!
[laughter]
BCR: Some of this material is starting to get commercial release, with the Table of the Elements releases, are we going to see some more of Tony Conrad's tape archive coming out?
JC: I hope so. But he's… I don't know, Tony's on a roll himself. I don't see why he'd want to sit around at home when he can go out and perform. I think he's got that bug – going out and performing is really where the payout is.
BCR: Speaking of performing, I saw your show last year in London, you played the Garage-
JC: Oh, that one?
BCR: -as far as venues go that's definitely down the greasy, beer-soaked end of the spectrum…
JC: I couldn't believe the number of people who came up to me afterwards and said "it was so great to go home and not have my clothes smell"… you know, the non-smoking thing?
BCR: At the time it was very strange for a venue like that to be non-smoking. They all are now, of course, with the smoking ban.
JC: You know, you go to Russia – we did it in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And they didn't know what to make of it actually. You know from their point of view, they're looking at rock'n'roll as the great liberator, in a way. This is a revolutionary force. This where you can clandestinely get your rocks off without actually breaking the law. They're in that mindset at that time, because they don't have… the indigenous rock'n'roll scene in Russia is, sort of, is fleeting. And so when I came along and I said look, no smoking, they just scratched their heads and said wait a minute – this is not the great rock'n'roll revolutionary we thought we were getting. This is some kind of doctrinaire guy who wants to tell everybody what to do! You know there's a mindset there that I wasn't really… I didn’t deal with it properly. I don't know how else to say it. All I can tell those people is, you can either smoke and I can not sing, or… it's just telling people that there are certain things that will destroy the show.
BCR: It was quite funny, in a way. There were all these jaded people who hadn't been shocked by anything a rock'n'roll artist had done in years, and all of a sudden "no smoking" and they're flabbergasted.
JC: It was funny in a way. There was one concert I gave in a little club, and there was the usual very rich kids there, who were very drunk and they were smoking DMT. DMT is an animal tranquiliser that you put in cigarettes and you smoke. It has this really disgusting smell, it is very noticeable, it’s like burnt leaves. And the thing about it is, if you inhale the smoke you start to hallucinate, because it’s a hallucinogen. And anybody who’s in the vicinity of that will start reacting to it, and pick up on it. So I’m sitting in the front row and I’m doing this solo show and this guy is very happy and drunk, and reeling around and blowing huge clouds of this smoke, you know? What do you do in that circumstance? Do you get this guy thrown out or… it’s very difficult, ‘cause you know if you keep on breathing this stuff you’re going to start gettin’ high. And that’s a real invasion issue.
BCR: You’ve been drug-free for some time now.
JC: Yeah… yeah. I mean, I’ve been focusing on a lot of things. At the time, I focussed on getting high. Now I’m focussed on making more music.
BCR: On Black Acetate you went in quite a funky direction in some places. Can we expect more of this from you?
JC: Yeah absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s stripping things down. Some people are very good at it, and some people have a different approach to it. I mean Arcade fire has a different approach to Interpol, and…
BCR: You’ve covered one of LCD Soundsystem’s songs on his new single…
JC: That was very easy! It turns out that the range of my voice is exactly the same as James’. And it was just, you know, there it is. I think we did something like ten drum tracks on top of what was there, but it was…
BCR: How did it come about? It’s called “All My Friends”, were you two mates before it-
JC: No, not at all. I just, I liked that single he did, and all of a sudden out of the blue came “ we want you to do a remix”. And then the idea of a remix went by the way, and they said “no, maybe you should just do a solo version of it”. At that point I hadn’t heard the song. And before I got to hear the song they changed it to “no, no, we just want you to just sing the song again, do your version again, because we got Franz Ferdinand.” So I listened to it, and went in there with my band, and put my band on top of what was there, and as soon as I got a grip on the vocal it was, fine.
BCR: And you took the piano out of a pop song, which is a first for John Cale, surely.
JC: Yeah! I told James when I saw him, the one thing I wish I’d done was put the piano back in, right in the middle of the guitar solo. There’s an instrumental in the middle, put it back in there.
BCR: Do you think this collaboration could open up a new audience for you?
JC: You never know. You never know, absolutely. There’s always a new audience to be found, I mean, I’m surprised every time I go back to Europe; when I play in Canada, or here. The people that show up… in Spain it was ridiculous. In Barcelona the audience that showed up was like Haight-Ashbury in the 60s. You know: “Hey, brother! Hey John Cale, my brother!”
BCR: Have you got any other collaborations on the cards this year? Or are you producing anyone at the moment?
JC: Not yet… We’ve mainly been talking about doing… I rerecorded for Smoking Aces, the movie, and there’s some other movies, some of the songs need a little different shape, so we’ve been doing some rerecording. There’s a movie that I think Quentin Tarantino’s involved with that needs a different version of “Gun”, so…
BCR: Did you see Factory Girl? One of the members of Weezer was playing you in that.
JC: I did read that New York Times piece on how great Sienna Miller is, and I saw her last night on Letterman. She’s very bright and bubbly and good. And I really like the fact that they had… you know, that she had suddenly developed into this creature that made everybody wake up. That’s really good. I don’t know, I don’t know much about the film.
BCR: Never mind. You’ve got a reputation as kind of an intellectual songwriter, you find a place for literary and artistic themes in your pop songs… I’d like your opinion on why there’s not more of this in pop music.
