CULTURE

Keep up with the veteran, if you can

At 63, John Cale, one of the most esteemed, spirited and restless figures in contemporary music, seems to have lost none of the vigor that led the young Welshman to New York in the early 1960s for the beginning of a remarkable and relentless career that hasn’t stopped moving. With «Black Acetate,» his latest addition to 40 years or so of record making, Cale, a co-founding member of the Velvet Underground, is touring and headed for Greece with two shows coming up, in Thessaloniki tomorrow at the Mylos Club, followed by Athens on Saturday at the Gagarin Club. The Greek leg of the artist’s tour includes opening slots from Bob Mould, formerly of ’80s indie-circuit act Husker Du and, later, Sugar, who will perform as a solo act. Cale and Mould have met just once before, following a Husker Du show in Chicago back in 1981. The double-header bills for Greece were arranged by local concert promoters Astra, who had also booked Cale for the two most recent of his three previous shows in Greece. Highlighting the man’s endurance, two of the venues Cale has performed at here no longer exist. There was the recently closed Rodon Club, where Cale offered one of its first shows early in 1988, and the Pallas Theater, where the Welsh musician played one of the eminent Athenian hall’s last concerts, some five years ago, not long before it succumbed to the hard-hearted schemes of real estate development. Cale’s still around, though, and he’s been touring and putting out solid and enchanting work without signs of relent. His elusive, often hard-to-define material has contained the artist’s willingness for rock’n’roll adventure over a solid foundation provided by a classical and avant-garde upbringing. A child prodigy, Cale, the son of a coal miner and a schoolteacher, was granted a scholarship for music studies in the USA, which prompted a move to New York City in 1963. There, he eventually hooked up with the avant-garde circuit and, along with Tony Conrad, joined La Monte Young’s pioneering minimalist ensemble the Dream Syndicate for mesmerizing performances of drones, usually for numerous hours on end. Not long after, Cale took all this with him to his new band, the Velvet Undergound, whose use of drones on the first two albums, played by Cale on viola, were integral to the legendary act’s pioneering – and still fresh-sounding – take on rock music. Cale abandoned the group, under dubious circumstances, following its second album, 1967’s «White Light, White Heat,» and has since worked mostly solo, with plenty of soundtrack work making up part of the artist’s immense discography. On a recent trip to Athens for a rare performance and projections of a collection of his own short films, Conrad, these days a media studies professor at the University of Buffalo, spoke of his early days with Cale and how the Welshman eventually drifted from their avant-garde interests to more rock and, at times, pop-inclined ways. «At some point we met this young, drugged-out kid called Lou [Reed] who still lived with his mother. Whenever he’d speak, rock’n’roll just came out of his mouth – a real natural. John was really impressed and wanted to start working with this guy,» recalled Conrad of the Velvet Undergound’s embryonic phase. It was the beginning of a fascinating musical journey, one that’s gone on to swerve stylistically like few others, and even crash on occasion, during a dry and less-inspired spell in the early ’80s, but has been on track for quite some time now with no signs of a slowdown.

Subscribe to our Newsletters

Enter your information below to receive our weekly newsletters with the latest insights, opinion pieces and current events straight to your inbox.

By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.