John Davies Cale was born on 9 March 1942 and is a Welsh musician, composer, and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band The Velvet Underground.
71 Facts About John Cale
2.
Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styles across rock, drone, classical, avant-garde and electronic music.
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John Cale studied music at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before relocating in 1963 to New York City's downtown music scene, where he performed as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music and formed the Velvet Underground.
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Since leaving the band in 1968, John Cale has released sixteen solo studio albums, including the widely acclaimed Paris 1919 and Music for a New Society.
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John Cale has acquired a reputation as an adventurous record producer, working on the debut studio albums of several innovative artists, including the Stooges and Patti Smith.
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John Davies Cale was born on 9 March 1942 in the mining village of Garnant in the valley of the River Amman in Carmarthenshire of Wales to Will Cale, a coal miner, and Margaret Davies, a primary school teacher.
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John Cale was molested by two different men during his youth: an Anglican priest who molested him in a church and a music teacher.
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The BBC recorded John Cale playing a toccata he composed primarily on the black keys of the piano in the style of Aram Khachaturian.
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John Cale's mother was institutionalized for breast cancer when he was 11.
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John Cale contributed to the short film Police Car and had two scores published in Fluxus Preview Review for the nascent avant-garde collective.
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John Cale conducted the first performance in the UK of Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra, with the composer and pianist Michael Garrett as soloist.
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John Cale's secret was that he had performed in an 18-hour concert, and he was accompanied by Karl Schenzer, whose secret was that he was the only member of the audience who had stayed for the duration.
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John Cale played in La Monte Young's ensemble the Theatre of Eternal Music.
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John Cale had enjoyed and followed rock music as well as avant-garde and European art music from a young age; on a visit to Britain in 1965, he procured records by the Kinks, the Who and Small Faces that remained unavailable in the United States.
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On his aforementioned visit to Britain in the summer of 1965, John Cale shopped a crudely recorded, acoustic-based Velvet Underground demo reel to several luminaries in the British rock scene with the intention of securing a recording contract.
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John Cale played on Nico's 1967 debut studio album, Chelsea Girl, which includes songs co-written by Velvet Underground members John Cale, Reed and Morrison, who appear as musicians.
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John Cale was enticed back into the studio by the band's manager, Steve Sesnick, "in a half-hearted attempt to reunite old comrades", as Cale put it.
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John Cale wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and [Lou] just couldn't have it.
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John Cale was trying to make the band more accessible.
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John Cale appeared on Drake's second studio album, Bryter Layter, playing viola and harpsichord on "Fly" and piano, organ, and celesta on "Northern Sky".
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John Cale's debut studio album, Vintage Violence, is a lushly produced roots rock effort indebted to a range of disparate influences, including the Band, Leonard Cohen, the Byrds, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson.
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John Cale released Animal Justice in 1977, an EP notable particularly for the epic "Hedda Gabler", based very loosely on the play of the same name by Henrik Ibsen.
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John Cale took to wearing a hockey goaltender mask onstage ; this look predated the creation of Friday the 13th's villain, Jason Voorhees, by several years.
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John Cale has admitted that some of his paranoia and erratic behaviour at this time was associated with heavy cocaine use.
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Also in 1977, John Cale produced "I Don't Wanna", the debut single by punk rock band Sham 69.
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John Cale named the group of women that Moser hung out with the Texas Blondes.
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Also in 1979, John Cale played piano and the ARP synthesizer on the track "Bastard" by Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople, on his fourth solo studio album You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic.
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John Cale worked with record producer Mike Thorne towards this end.
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John Cale signed with ZE Records, a company he had influenced the creation of and which had absorbed SPY Records, the label he had co-founded with Jane Friedman.
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In 1982, John Cale released the sparse studio album Music for a New Society.
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John Cale followed it up with his ninth solo studio album Caribbean Sunset, on ZE Records.
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John Cale again returned to record producing, producing Belgian pop singer Lio's third studio album Pop model, and Happy Mondays's debut studio album, Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile.
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In part because of his young daughter, John Cale took a long break from recording and performing.
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John Cale made a comeback in 1989 with the Brian Eno-produced studio album Words for the Dying.
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John Cale again collaborated with Brian Eno, in 1990, Wrong Way Up, a collaboration album characterised by an up-tempo accessibility at odds with John Cale's description of the fraught relationship between the pair.
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In 1996, John Cale released Walking on Locusts which turned out to be his only solo studio album of the decade.
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In 1994, John Cale performed a spoken-word duet with Suzanne Vega on the song "The Long Voyage" on Zazou's studio album Chansons des mers froides.
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The lyrics were based on the poem "Les Silhouettes" by Oscar Wilde, and John Cale co-wrote the music with Zazou.
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In 1995, John Cale co-produced Siouxsie and the Banshees's eleventh and final studio album The Rapture, which included the single "O Baby".
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John Cale produced Scottish alternative rock band Goya Dress's debut studio album Rooms.
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John Cale composed an instrumental score for a ballet titled Nico, performed by the Scapino Ballet in Rotterdam in October 1997 and was released as Dance Music.
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John Cale has written a number of film soundtracks, often using more classically influenced instrumentation.
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In 1998, John Cale mainly spent the year on tour with singer Siouxsie Sioux, formerly of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
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John Cale recorded a cover version of "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen for the tribute album I'm Your Fan.
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In 2002, John Cale played piano and sang vocals on the track "Don't Pretend" by Gordon Gano of Violent Femmes, from his debut solo studio album Hitting the Ground.
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In 2005, John Cale produced Austin singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo's eighth studio album, The Boxing Mirror, which was released in May 2006.
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In June 2006, John Cale released a radio and digital single, "Jumbo in tha Modernworld", which was a standalone single.
48.
In May 2007, John Cale contributed a cover version of the LCD Soundsystem song "All My Friends" to the vinyl and digital single releases of the LCD Soundsystem original.
49.
John Cale has continued to work with other artists, contributing viola to Replica Sun Machine, the Danger Mouse-produced second studio album by London alternative pop trio the Shortwave Set and producing the second studio album of American indie band Ambulance LTD.
50.
On 11 October 2008, John Cale hosted an event to pay tribute to Nico called Life Along the Borderline in celebration of what, five days later, would have been her 70th birthday.
51.
John Cale represented Wales at the 2009 Venice Biennale exhibition, collaborating with artists, filmmakers, and poets, and focusing the artwork on his relationship with the Welsh language.
52.
In January 2010, John Cale was invited to be the first Eminent Art in Residence at the Mona Foma festival curated by Brian Ritchie of Violent Femmes held in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
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In February 2011, John Cale signed a recording contract with Domino Records subsidiary Double Six and released an EP, Extra Playful, in September 2011.
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John Cale appeared at the invitation of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was the festival's guest director.
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John Cale released his sixteenth solo studio album M:FANS in January 2016.
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At the 2017 Grammy Salute to Music Legends ceremony, John Cale performed with, amongst others, Moe Tucker, two Velvet Underground classics, "Sunday Morning" and "I'm Waiting for the Man".
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In February 2019, John Cale collaborated with Marissa Nadler on her new single "Poison".
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On 6 October 2020, John Cale released a new track and accompanying music video called "Lazy Day".
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In February 2022, John Cale announced his first full UK tour in almost a decade.
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On 19 October 2022, John Cale released another track, titled "Story of Blood", featuring American chamber pop singer Weyes Blood.
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John Cale was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Velvet Underground in 1996.
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John Cale was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2010 Birthday Honours for services to Music and to the Arts.
63.
In 1971, John Cale met Cynthia "Cindy" Wells, better known as Miss Cinderella or Miss Cindy of the GTOs, and they married soon afterward.
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On 6 December 1981, John Cale married his third wife, Rise Irushalmi.
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John Cale would come to rely on the drug in order to fall asleep.
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Biographer Tim Mitchell claims John Cale's early dependence on medicine was a "formative experience".
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John Cale later told an interviewer that, "When I got to New York, drugs were everywhere, and they quickly became part of my artistic experiment".
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John Cale was heavily involved in New York City's drug scene of the 1960s and 1970s, with cocaine as his drug of choice.
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John Cale feels his drug addiction negatively affected his music during the 1980s.
70.
John Cale decided to clean up following a series of embarrassing concerts and the birth of his daughter.
71.
John Cale has hosted a documentary called Heroin, Wales and Me to promote awareness of the problems of heroin addiction, easy availability and low cost of the drug in his native Wales and thousands of addicts.