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Saturday 19 August 2023

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Prospect Park West and 9th St. 11217 Brooklyn, NY, US

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• August 19, 2023 Setlist

John Cale Setlist at Prospect Park Bandshell, Brooklyn, NY, USA

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Tour: Mercy Tour Tour statistics Add setlist

• Jumbo in tha Modernworld Play Video
• Hedda Gabler Play Video
• Night Crawling Play Video
• Moonstruck (Nico's Song) Play Video
• Rosegarden Funeral of Sores Play Video
• Guts Play Video
• I'm Waiting for the Man ( The Velvet Underground  song) Play Video
• Cable Hogue Play Video
• Helen of Troy Play Video
• Out Your Window Play Video
• Heartbreak Hotel ( Elvis Presley  cover) Play Video
• Mercy Play Video
• Half Past France Play Video
• Hanky Panky Nohow Play Video
• Barracuda Play Video

Edits and Comments

17 activities (last edit by daveroberts45 , 24 Aug 2023, 10:46 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Moonstruck (Nico's Song)
• Night Crawling
• Out Your Window
• Cable Hogue
• Helen of Troy
• Half Past France
• Hanky Panky Nohow
• Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley
• I'm Waiting for the Man by The Velvet Underground
• Hedda Gabler
• Rosegarden Funeral of Sores
• Jumbo in tha Modernworld

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John Cale Gig Timeline

• Jun 19 2023 Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2023 Athens, Greece Start time: 9:10 PM 9:10 PM
• Aug 16 2023 Luna Fest 2023 Coimbra, Portugal Add time Add time
• Aug 19 2023 BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival 2023 This Setlist Brooklyn, NY, USA Start time: 9:00 PM 9:00 PM
• Aug 23 2023 Stroud Subscription Rooms Stroud, England Start time: 8:10 PM 8:10 PM
• Aug 24 2023 Albert Hall Manchester, England Add time Add time

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John Cale’s Musical Journey Knows No Limits

At 80, the musician who helped found the Velvet Underground before a prolific run as a producer and solo artist is releasing a new LP and mentoring new generations of avant-garde creators.

John Cale’s new album, “Mercy,” is his 17th as a solo artist. Credit... Chantal Anderson for The New York Times

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By Lindsay Zoladz

• Published Jan. 14, 2023 Updated June 20, 2023

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LOS ANGELES — Just a few years after he’d left the provincial Welsh mining town where he was born, a 23-year-old John Cale was invited — along with his friend Lou Reed and their budding band the Velvet Underground — to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York.

“The first day you walked in, you joined the Academy,” Cale said in the industrial but cozy lounge of his studio on a recent afternoon, recalling the first meeting with the pop-art power broker who would become the band’s manager. “The atmosphere of that place was really special,” he added; artists from all over “came in and unzipped a bag of magic.”

The musician, now 80, was reminiscing on an uncharacteristically gloomy January day in Los Angeles. Cale seemed to have summoned the Welsh weather along with his memories, and sat bundled up in a black puffer jacket and wool socks. “That’s the first thing you remember: all the work that was being done,” Cale said. “Andy was nonstop. We were nonstop. And it paid off.”

It was, however, just the beginning of one of the most accomplished résumés in rock history, if not 20th-century culture. Cale studied under John Cage and Aaron Copland, and later learned about the transformative power of drone from the avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. He had a fling with Edie Sedgwick and a short marriage to Betsey Johnson. After he was unceremoniously booted from the Velvet Underground in 1968, he became a prolific, risk-taking producer, helming trailblazing albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith. His catalog as a solo artist is unbelievably rich, tonally varied and full of buried treasure. He is arguably responsible for plucking a little-known Leonard Cohen deep cut called “Hallelujah” out of obscurity . He is inarguably the most important electric viola player rock has ever seen.

It’s possible to chart the eras of Cale’s vast career by his succession of iconic haircuts: the chic, chin-length pageboy of his Velvet Underground days; the greasy bed head of his proto-punk ’70s; an asymmetric art-crop as the ’80s became the ’90s; and the feathery, birdlike style in which he now wears his distinguished, white-gray locks, set off by a playfully Mephistophelian soul patch. Two months before his 81st birthday, he is still spry, sneaking in a pre-interview workout in his studio’s gym. (He’s been a disciplined exerciser since the late 1980s, when he kicked drugs by taking up the most physically demanding sport he could think of: squash. “It got me through,” he said.)

On Cale’s new album, “Mercy” — his 17th as a solo artist, due next week — he occasionally glances back, on songs that honor late friends like David Bowie and Nico. But more often he’s making art focused firmly and defiantly in the present, responding to the political turmoil of the day (one song is titled “The Legal Status of Ice”) and collaborating with a supporting cast of younger avant-garde and indie artists: The celestial crooner Weyes Blood , the punky provocateurs Fat White Family and the art-rock dreamers Animal Collective all make guest appearances.

“I consider it an honor to watch little decisions he makes,” said the Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz (who records as Geologist), in a phone interview. “He’ll throw out one or two sentences to explain it, and it means the world.”

Cale has always been a man of contradiction: a classically trained violist with a penchant for chaos. In our conversation, he casually referenced such thinkers as John Ruskin, Bertrand Russell and Henri-Louis Bergson, but was just as quick to ad-lib a flatulence joke. When interrupted midsentence by a deafening gurgling coming from the building’s pipes, Cale grinned impishly and said “Excuse me” with impressive comic timing.

“He could be so formal in a certain way — he’s so learned and classical,” Smith said in a phone interview. (Cale produced her landmark debut album, “Horses,” in 1975.) “But he could also be as wild as any of us.” She recalled a kinetic 1976 gig in Cleveland when Cale played bass with her band during a cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” and “it got to such a fever pitch and the ceiling was so low that John put his bass through the ceiling of the club.” 

The breadth of Cale’s accomplishments has left his collaborators and admirers in awe. “If you had one part of his career, you’d be a legend,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said in a phone interview. “If you were only the producer that John Cale was, you’d go down in history. If you were only in the Velvet Underground, your ticket’s punched to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But then you did all those Island solo records, and the Eno collaboration, and then ‘Songs for Drella,’” he added, referring to Cale’s 1990 reunion with Reed, before trailing off.

For all his creative triumphs, Cale never quite became a household name like Reed, his collaborator and sometimes antagonist. Todd Haynes’s acclaimed 2021 documentary “The Velvet Underground,” though, served as a corrective, arguing that Cale was the band’s secret weapon.

“There was no way to overstate John’s absolutely primary role as a conceptual and creative partner with Lou Reed,” Haynes said in a phone interview, describing Cale as “the most elegant flamethrower of ’60s utopianism that I can think of.”

Cale loved the film (“The minute I heard Todd was going to be doing it, I relaxed”), but he’s not one to sit around and think too hard about his legacy — he still has work to do. “I think that came to me from Wales and my mother,” he said. “She was a teacher, and I got it all basically from her: You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”

CALE, THE ONLY child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher, spent the first 18 years of his life in Garnant, a small village in South Wales, “a strange, remote, some said mystical land,” as he wrote in his autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen.” When he was 7, he started learning English, and classical piano. A few years later, the BBC came to his school and recorded the precocious youngster playing a composition he’d written himself. The sheet music went missing, so Cale had to wing the ending. It was a thrill: his first improvisation.

“Creatively it liberated me,” he wrote. “I started to take chances.”

The viola, the crucial element that would later transform the Velvet Underground’s sound, came into Cale’s hands by chance: When it came time to choose an instrument for the school orchestra, it was the only one left. The local library was his portal to other worlds, especially when he realized he could request sheet music. “I was able to put my fingers in all these scores of the avant-garde,” he said at his studio, citing Webern, Berg, Haubenstock-Ramati and, of course, John Cage.

When Cale was 15, he caught “Rock Around the Clock” at the local cinema; all his classmates rushed the screen and started to bop. He was electrified, bewildered — up until then, Stravinsky had been his idea of rock ’n’ roll — and a little scared that everyone was about to get in trouble. After that, he said, “I was confused. Did I want to go into the avant-garde, or did I want to go into rock ’n’ roll?”

He went to Goldsmiths’ College in London, a suitable place to figure that out. Cale’s incendiary student performances — including one that involved playing a piano with his elbows — scandalized some of the faculty, but he was already dreaming of America. After exchanging letters with Cage and Copland, Cale received a scholarship from Leonard Bernstein to study at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. In 1963, he came to New York and quickly fell in with Conrad, Young and the boldly minimalist Theater of Eternal Music, joining them frequently to play meditative drones that lasted for hours. At last he’d found community, and the mind-expanding experiences he’d always longed for.

“I knew what I wanted from New York,” he said. “And I got it.” 

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Lou Reed had been born exactly a week before Cale; “I always knew he had an edge on me!” Cale quipped in his memoir. So began one of the most generative and — still, almost a decade after Reed’s death — tumultuous partnerships in rock.

Each time I asked Cale about Reed, he slyly rerouted the conversation: “We drifted apart,” he finally said. But maybe everything that needs to be known is right there in the music. As he wrote in a statement shortly after Reed’s 2013 death , “Unlike so many with similar stories — we have the best of our fury laid on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse.” 

Last year, the archival label Light in the Attic released a collection of 17 previously unreleased tracks from Reed’s earliest recordings , including a May 1965 tape that features folky, self-recorded demos of future classics like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (Cale, who was Reed’s roommate in a drug-fueled Ludlow Street loft at the time, sings backup on some of them.) It’s revelatory to hear the material in this larval stage: They are unmistakably Lou Reed songs, yes, but they’re not yet Velvet Underground songs. 

“You see that he really hadn’t begun to imagine the potential of this music,” Haynes said of Reed, “and that what he was doing in content and lyrics hadn’t found a correlative energy and sensibility yet in the music.” Enter Cale, with his interest in drone, his connection to the avant-garde, and the low, sonorous viola that melted down traditional rock-song structures like molten lava.

“That dialectic, that tension, that attraction, that romance that brought the two of them together,” Haynes said, “therein lies the mystery of this music.”

THE GLORY DAYS didn’t last long. “I didn’t quite know how to exist outside the environment of the Factory,” Cale said. Warhol spent the latter part of 1968 recovering from a gunshot wound; by the end of the summer, Reed had given the rest of the Velvet Underground a Cale-or-me ultimatum, and insisted that the guitarist Sterling Morrison break the news. For all their merits, the albums that the V.U. released without Cale are quieter and more conventional. (“Who gets kicked out of the Velvet Underground for being too avant-garde?” Murphy mused. “I love that. That’s John Cale.”)

“It made some other people in the band unhappy, but it was just a challenge to me,” Cale said of his ousting. That Welsh work ethic, and his mother’s humble advice, saved him: “I decided, well, OK, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can get up, move your butt and produce some things.” The first album he worked on would change Nico’s image forever, the stark, harrowing “Marble Index.” The second was the Stooges’ 1969 self-titled debut, one of the founding documents of punk.

After the refined chamber-pop of his great 1973 album “Paris 1919,” Cale’s solo work grew increasingly feral, too. He unleashed lacerating screams on the 1974 album “Fear” (the recording that made Smith seek him out as a producer) and embraced post-punk on the adventurous “Honi Soit,” from 1981. “There’s this counterpoint of Lou going and doing Zen,” he said and laughed, referring to Reed’s interest in meditation and tai chi, “and then I’m going and doing rock ’n’ roll.”

Cale and Reed hadn’t spoken in years when they ran into each other at Warhol’s funeral in 1987. The old spark was back, and they began work on a tribute to their former manager, which would become the theatrical, confidently sparse “Songs for Drella.” By the time it arrived in 1990, they were no longer speaking. A Velvet Underground reunion in the early 1990s was similarly short-lived, also owing to creative differences between Cale and Reed.

Cale cleaned up his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle when his daughter, Eden, was born in 1985. He released more classically minded albums and continued to exert an inconspicuous influence on musical culture. In the early 1990s, a small French record label asked him to contribute to a Leonard Cohen tribute album. He chose “Hallelujah” — a song from the quietly received 1984 album “Various Positions” that he’d first heard Cohen perform at the Beacon Theater — and made some tweaks to the lyrics and simplified the song’s arrangement. His version certainly struck a chord. When Jeff Buckley first began playing the song, a magazine editor in the audience told him backstage that he liked his Cohen cover. “I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version,” Buckley is said to have replied . “I know it by John Cale.”

Cale has remarkably open ears for an octogenarian: He often speaks of “what a boon to music” hip-hop is and, in our conversation, expressed admiration for rap producers like Mike Will Made-It and Dr. Dre. “Hey guys, do you know what’s going on here?” he said to his imagined peers. “Better ideas of mixing, better ideas of melodies — it’s like, get on the train or get off.”

In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom. “I jokingly tell people that it’s like a friendly godfather-type relationship that I have with him,” Animal Collective’s Weitz said. Cale has long been an admirer of the band, and Weitz described their reciprocal appearances on each other’s records — Cale played on the band’s 2016 album “Painting With,” and Animal Collective appear on a track from “Mercy” — as a kind of “music-for-music swap.”

Cale still makes art on the edge. In June 2019, he headlined the DMZ Peace Train Festival on the border between North and South Korea. (The wildlife surprised him: “Korean rattlesnakes!”) In 2014, at London’s Barbican museum, he conducted the first-ever orchestra of flying drones. A certain defiance also courses through “Mercy,” a slow, meditative album. The songs have immediate emotional resonance, but they ask the listener for patience, too.

LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy admires that. “He always approaches it as, ‘What’s interesting to me right now?’ rather than being careerist,” he said. “Songs made by people like that last in a very different way,” he continued. “They feel alive and current for much longer, because they’re made with respect.”

There are plenty more of them coming, too. Cale spent much of the pandemic holed up in his studio, and he estimates that he’s written around 80 new compositions in the past few years. “Something snapped, in a good way,” he said. “It was like, you can’t turn your back on this, this is something that’s going to go on. And I want to go on.”

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

An earlier version of this article misstated the release year for John Cale and Lou Reed’s “Songs for Drella.” It was 1990, not 1989.

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Latest release, john cale mercy, album | 20th january 2023.

For nearly 60 years, John Cale has been reimagining how his music is made, sounds, and even works.  MERCY , Cale’s first full album in a decade, moves through true dark-night-of-the-soul electronic torment toward vulnerable love songs and hopeful considerations for the future with the help of some of music’s most curious young minds. Cale has always searched for new ways to explore old ideas of alienation, hurt, and joy;  MERCY  is the latest transfixing find of this unsatisfied mind. 

Album Description

Tracklisting.

• 1 MERCY feat. Laurel Halo
• 2 MARILYN MONROE'S LEGS (beauty elsewhere) feat. Actress
• 3 NOISE OF YOU
• 4 STORY OF BLOOD feat. Weyes Blood
• 5 TIME STANDS STILL feat. Sylvan Esso
• 6 MOONSTRUCK (Nico's Song)
• 7 EVERLASTING DAYS feat. Animal Collective
• 8 NIGHT CRAWLING
• 9 NOT THE END OF THE WORLD
• 10 THE LEGAL STATUS OF ICE feat. Fat White Family
• 11 I KNOW YOU'RE HAPPY feat. Tei Shi
• 12 OUT YOUR WINDOW

20th January 2023

John Cale Night Crawling

1st august 2022.

John Cale Lazy Day

6th october 2020.

John Cale The Academy In Peril

20th june 2017.

John Cale Black Acetate

John Cale Circus Live

John Cale Eat / Kiss: Music For The Films By Andy Warhol

John Cale Hobosapiens

John Cale Paris 1919

John Cale Fragments Of A Rainy Season

9th december 2016.

John Cale M:FANS

6th february 2016.

John Cale Music For A New Society

22nd january 2016.

John Cale Music For A New Society/M:FANS

John Cale Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood

1st october 2012.

John Cale Face To The Sky

27th august 2012.

Various Artists John Cale: Extra Playful Transitions

23rd april 2012.

John Cale Extra Playful

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At The Barrier

Live music, reviews and opinion / est. 2018, john cale – town hall, birmingham: live review.

John Cale delivers a fulminant retrospective, blending the current with the past, a mix of deep cuts and a lot of new.

Mercy, John Cale’s 20th solo release in the 55 years since his partner in crime/nemesis, Lou Reed, engineered his being bounced from the Velvet Underground, is a beguiling and sometimes baffling listen. Yes, his powerful boom of a voice is intact, his gift for melody largely preserved, but, as with much of his work this century, it is as if he is driven to remain at the more experimental end of his oeuvre, sometimes at the expense of appeasing his audience. Fair play; it’s his party and he can (make us) sigh if he wants to. But, tin hat, the album tries just a tad too hard to be forward looking, managing a feel somewhere round about 1993, with too many dated synths and vocoders messing with voices. Having said that, there are at least two or three bangers, up there with his best, that make it worth a detour.

So it was with some sense of anticipation that I sat in the stalls at Brum’s Town Hall, a venue nearly as iconic as the performer and his backstory. Sadly, only 2/3 full, nonetheless the expectation of the committed faithful was palpable, many of those present possibly able to have seen VU in their pomp. And many, no doubt, as the story goes, would anyway claim to have, whether or not they then started a band.

A brave young woman started things off. Alone on stage, save the, largely, props of a bass, a guitar and a keyboard, she tinkered with each in turn, her laptop doing most of the musical heavy lifting. With vocals as nervously breathless as she clearly was: “it’s an honour to even being in the same city as John Cale“, she was a rabbit caught in the headlights. Yes, one could sense the germ of probably a decent idea in each of the songs she played, but it was if she had forgotten that, in the glow of the spotlight. Best received came an unadorned voice and guitar of Jackson Browne’s These Days. Or, given present company, Nico’s. Manu Grace her name, I would actually like to hear her records, to hear how she should sound.

Lights back down, a low keyboard drone filled the hall, like a cloud of malevolent flies, mood music while we waited for the man. Apt and atmospheric, with more of those flies later. As the stage lights came up, smack on 9, strangely, so did those in the auditorium: “so I can see you”, said the surprisingly sprightly figure, standing, behind a keyboard, front stage right: “Hello, Brum”. With every fibre in me saying don’t say his age, it’s impossible not too, as, a slight stoop in his steadied gait, he looks ridiculously good for a man a fortnight shy of 81. Lights back down and showtime!

With a conventional trio of musicians behind him, guitar, bass and drums, there came the reassuring feeling this might show the more human side of his more recent material. And that it was, as they opened with the clash and clatter of Jumbo In Tha Modernworld, immediately displaying Cale’s baritone to be in fine fettle, and displaying the pedigree chops of his band from first note onward. Alex Thomson showed himself to be a percussionist of no little nuance, his mighty thumps riding both around and on the rhythm. Regular bassist, Joey Maramba, and even more regular guitarist, Dean Boyer, locked horns and locked in, Maramba with surely 8 fingers on either hand, and Boyer providing accord in his discordance, finding melody from chaos. Cale, singing apart, was content to add sporadic tinkles of piano, guiding the flow, turning his head back to his boys as the destination arrived. This 2006 single was a triumphant start.

With a screen suspended at the back, above skyline of the band, random visuals now became a distorting image of the much younger Cale, alongside Nico. For the next song was Moonstruck (aka Nico’s Song), from the new album. Without all the orchestration of the studio version, it was nonetheless a delight, the simpler arrangement carrying better the beauty of and affection in the song. Then the more challenging Rosegarden Funeral of Sores, with it’s uplifting and catchy title, let alone lyric. Less gaunt than in the form first aired, this was a textbook definition of post-punk, the band a controlled coil of pent-up energy, Maramba a metronomic pulse, Cale intoning the vocal with implied threat. From there a return to Mercy, the double whammy of the title track and Nightcrawling. The former is as melodic as any song he has written and, here, without any of the FX that come with the album, it showed a far greater naked beauty. Nightcrwling is a tale looking back to his and David Bowie’s late night cavortings in a New York of long ago last century, and came accompanied by a short cartoon video of the two of them, and other notables of the time, doing just that, repeated on a loop to underline the sense of another age. Or the shortness of the clip. Again, with the band and without studio trickery, it was a delight, a very, appropriately, 70’s feel to it.

Wasteland, from 2005, is another of Cale’s more majestic tunes. No viola tonight, whilst that would have been nice, the rendition tonight didn’t need it. It was good to see the band enjoying it; no mechanoids these, the glee with which they pummelled this and all the selections was a delight, all smiles as they added the backing vocals. I think for Wasteland came a striking film clip, maybe for another song, but featuring the above promised flies. A motley selccion therof, crawling over what seemed initially to be a shoulder, later a unscpecifiable haunch of meat. Lovely…. Guts is another winnining tune, to my mind very early Roxy Music in feel, yelps and all, with pounded piano and guitar flourishes. Is this good or is this better? Cale then shuffles from behind his keyboard to accept a stratocaster around his neck, playing this for a faithful Cable Hogue, a storm kicking up behind his causal strum.

If Paris 1919 is his most accessible album, Half Past France is one of the more elegiac songs, here treated to a somewhat different arrangement and even tune, to the delight of my gig-buddy, well versed in all things Cale. Out Your Window is another from Mercy, and, like the recorded version, had me wryly rueing on how much like a mid-period Human League song it sounded, the vocals strainingly like Phil Oakey, together with the chordal progressions and Thomson’s use of an electronic drum pad This thought returns on re-listening to the album, and in a number of places. It is an irony not lost on me, somehow feeling one of the singers might take more pleasure from the comparison than the other, convinced that Cale was a prime influence on the original Being Boiled hitmakers. Caribbean Sunsight is generally seen his nadir, but, from that album, Villa Albani gets a radical reworking, all extreme noise terror. The band again grinning like loons as they deconstruct with abandon, bowed bass and Theremin featuring alongside the cataclysmic drums, with Boyer laughingly giving Thomson’s tom-toms a sly wallop on his way past. A cacophony of controlled chaos, it seemed clear we were at the end.

Encore? Even the lighting crew seemed uncertain, the long pause triggering the house lights to start coming back up again, despite the sustained applause. Were we to get one at all, Cale notoriously fickle in that department? Heartbreak Hotel had been aired on an earlier night, his revisioning of the Presley great into Brecht and Weill territory, and as aired on the Ayers, Cale, Nico, Eno live album of, shh, 1974. No, joyously and gloriously it was personal Cale favourite, Close Watch, performed straight and solo, the keyboard set to piano, and showing he has lost no jot of his mastery of the keys. His voice, frail for the first time tonight, matched perfectly the tender lyrics and it could not have ended a stupendous evening better. “See you again”, a wave and he was off. Not if I see you first, John!

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Published by Seuras Og

"Well, what sort of music do you like, Seuras?" Ever since that question was first aired by his mother a decade or six back he has struggled with the answer. And struggles still now. Call him a folkie, a country dude, a bluesman and he'll be happy, but don't forget the whiff of jazz, electronica and more. Not so keen on the charts, mind. View all posts by Seuras Og

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Connect to explore John Cale's 60+ year career of musical innovation

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Main Character of the Day

John cale, ever restless, keeps moving out of his comfort zone.

Manuela López Restrepo

John Cale says hip-hop is the avant-garde of today. Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

John Cale says hip-hop is the avant-garde of today.

With a legendary musical career that spans decades, John Cale is still restlessly creating and collaborating on new music.

Who is he? The Welsh musician, producer and avant-garde royalty was one of the founding members of The Velvet Underground, and had a part in some the most iconic experimental music of the late 20th century.

• Cale has collaborated with and produced for artists like Nico, The Modern Lovers, The Stooges, Patti Smith, David Byrne and Nick Drake, just to name a few.

Want more on musical legends? Listen to Consider This dive into the life of the late Tony Bennett .

What's he doing now? At the age of 81, Cale is still performing, collaborating and finding inspiration.

• His most recent Album, Mercy , was released at the start of the year and includes collaborators like Weyes Blood, Sylvan Esso and Animal Collective.

The titular track from Cale's album.

What's he saying? Cale spoke with All Things Considered host Juana Summers earlier this year about the longevity of his music career.

On why he wanted to work with these specific artists:

Most of the artists that joined me on the tracks, they had their own atmosphere to them. And I didn't try and push them in any direction. I just let them be and really inhale the spirit that they brought to the song. The emotion of the song really was joined by their performance. Weyes Blood has a very deep and emotional voice. She just warms the track. And Animal Collective really has this multi-voice personality. So I laughed a lot when we did Everlasting Days .

View this post on Instagram A post shared by John Cale (@therealjohncale)

I've always enjoyed Sylvan Esso's style of harmonizing. And I was hoping that our paths might cross, but as I was putting the finishing touches on this song, I got a call saying Amelia and Nick were in L.A. and would love to drop by and say hello. And it was then I thought that the perfect time to see if they'd want to guest on the track that I was working on. I guess that's the perfect example of serendipity, but it was a natural fit. And I couldn't be happier with the results.

On being influenced by trap and hip-hop:

I mean, I sort of fell in love with hip-hop. It has so many lively approaches to songwriting. Hip-hop is the avant-garde of today. They are unconventional approaches to emotions and creativity. They have no respect for solos and for all the other usual trappings that you have in songwriting.

On pushing himself past musical precedents he has set before:

I realized a long time ago that if you start a song with just any kind of melody or rhythm that you have, you don't just stop because you haven't got a solution yet. You're better off working at it and helping it advance its ideas, whatever they are. And your audience is then your friend.

So, what now?

• Here's Cale on what's next for him: "I have this uncanny kind of idea that if you go and end up in a corner that you feel uncomfortable in, something will happen, and you will come up with a solution. So that's kind of my mantra."
• Mercy is out now.

Learn more:

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• PinkPantheress, IRL

The interview with John Cale was conducted by Juana Summers, produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Sarah Handel.

“I have to thank Eric Clapton for boosting my bank balance by recording After Midnight then cutting Cocaine”: the life and times of JJ Cale, American music’s best kept secret

Eric Clapton loved him and Mark Knopfler borrowed his style, but singer and guitarist JJ Cale never had the success to match his massive influence

JJ Cale was one of American music’s best-kept secret. The singer and guitarist notched up a few hits of his own, including 1971’s Crazy Mama and the following year’s After Midnight, but his relatively low-profile was in inverse proportion to the influence he had – the likes of Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler have called him a huge inspiration. Cale died in 2013 , but Classic Rock say down with him four years earlier, around the time of 2009’s Roll On album, to look back on a quietly influential career.

John Cale is sitting in the kitchen of his rural ranch-style bungalow with the blinds drawn against the sun, staring at the wall. He lives in Southern California, in San Diego County, outside of Escondido – which is Spanish for ‘hidden’, and that’s just the way he likes it; nice and quiet, as befits the undisputed king of minimal southern rock, the epitome of laid-back, but a sonic architect just the same. His old Airstream motor home parked out front may be re-commissioned: Cale about to go back on the road to promote new album, Roll On . Ever since his companion, an English Springer called Buddy, passed on, Cale has been on his lonesome.

“Life without an animal is terrible,” he sighs. “I loved that old dawg. And Foley before him. Keep meaning to get me a new one.” His nearest neighbours are three acres away – unless you count his close friends, the squirrels, racoons, rabbits and birds running round his modest estate. “It’s like a Disney cartoon out here,” he chuckles.

The 70-year old Oklahoman, or Okie, with a long drawl is weather-beaten, with a grey beard, looking not so much unshaven as unshaveable. Dressed in ancient Lee jeans and a work shirt, and pulling on a Kool, Cale admits to being a hypochondriac. “I’m gettin’ by okay for an old man, though since the rain came and ended the drought I got flu. Still alive though. At my age that’s a good deal,” he chuckles. “Any day above ground…”

Forever typecast as a recluse, Roll On is ol’ JJ’s sixteenth record. And it’s terrific, on a par with his early 70s albums – Naturally, Really and Okie – which turned him from a 32-year-old late developer into an American legend, albeit of the best-kept secret kind. It’s safe to say that without his influence Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler would not be where they are today, while Neil Young says: “When I think of great guitarists I think of Jimi Hendrix and JJ Cale. There is no one better than him.”

Clapton’s cover of Cale’s After Midnight on the former’s 1970 debut solo album gave his mentor a weird career, though he still reckons “my songs are way more famous than I am. My bass playing friend, the late Carl Radle, played him [Clapton] the tune.” When he later heard that Clapton had covered it, he thought it was a wind-up. “Then Delaney Bramlett [of Delaney And Bonnie] talked me up. That was like discovering oil in your backyard. But I just do it and move on. Hell, I can’t tell one of my albums from the next. I try not to make ’em sound like anything else, but everything I do sounds like me. It is what it is.”

Roll On features Clapton on the title track, a song that Cale has been playing live for more than 20 years. The two men have combined before, for the The Road To Escondido album [2006], a mutual admiration project which won Cale his one and only Grammy – much to Clapton’s delight and embarrassment.

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“Originally I asked him if he’d consider making an album with me,” Clapton recalls. “ I really wanted him to produce me, because I’m a fan of his recorded sound. His minimalism is the way I want to go. He has a unique approach, and I wanted to avail myself of that.

“So I moved in with him for a week, to go over material and to get to know each other. Not a lot of work got done, but that wasn’t the point. His idea was to bring in the musicians and record ‘live’. I thought we might have a problem capturing the ‘groove’ I heard on his demos, usually created with drum machines etc and such an important part of his sound. Eventually the Road … album became a duet thing, which improved it and made the experience more memorable for me.

“Hanging out with John is one of my favourite pastimes. He’s got a great sense of humour, and has been misunderstood by most people, referring to him as a recluse when he’s very sociable, open and charismatic. He just prefers his own company. JJ has never even been nominated for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, while I’ve been inducted three times. In my opinion he’s one of the most important artists in the history of rock, representing the greatest asset his country has ever had. Yet a lot of people have never even heard of him.”

Clapton’s involvement changed that to an extent, although the Grammy didn’t faze Cale.

“That is still in the box,” he says. “I may put it on the mantle but I probably won’t. My domestic duties are kinda slow. It didn’t really change my life, ’cept it was a nice pat on the back. Good for my ego. Me and Eric laughed about it, but I have to thank him for boosting my bank balance by recording After Midnight on his first solo record, then cutting Cocaine and I’ll Make Love To You Anytime . Same with Lynyrd Skynyrd , who cut They Call Me The Breeze . Man, they rocked that up! They cut it so hard it astonished me! I wasn’t aware they were even listening to me. Then those kids all died. That was too bad.”

Cale hasn’t had a hit himself since 1972, when a Little Rock DJ flipped his Magnolia single and hammered the B-side, Crazy Mama , which eventually reached No.22 on the Billboard chart. Top Nashville guitarist Mac Gayden, of Area Code 615/Barefoot Jerry fame, who played the distinctive wah-wah slide on that track, recalls the session: “Cale’s producer, Audie Ashworth, hired me for the studio at Bradley’s Barn, outside Nashville. We ran through it one time only, then Cale gets on the talkback and says: ‘Come on in, Mac, and sign the time card, you’re done.’ I said: ‘I can do it better.’ He said: ‘No, you can’t.’ I swear it only took seven minutes – first take.

“That cut launched the career of one of America’s most emulated guitarists. John was a total joy, very loosey-goosey with a don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff vibe. In a business packed with people trying to be hip and cool, he is a rare personality.”

Shortly afterwards, Gayden joined Cale’s band for a tour supporting Black Oak Arkansas, whose teenage audience started throwing bottles and booing them in Baton Rouge, LA. “So we turned our amps to full throttle and let rip – and it worked. Next night we played the Warehouse in New Orleans with Quicksilver Messenger Service. JJ still played on a stool with his back on the crowd, but they got it.”

Gayden also witnessed a rare flash of Cale temper. “The last time I saw John was in LA a few years ago, at his house. We talked about ‘old friends’, and then suddenly John started to ‘rag’ on Mark Knopfler. He mentioned how much he didn’t appreciate him ripping off his guitar style and his singing. Just as John was reaching a fever pitch, guess who calls? None other than Mark Knopfler himself, inviting JJ to go on the road and open for his upcoming tour. John was nice, but hung up and started to ‘rag’ him again. I left in total agreement. A few weeks later I read that he was opening for Mark on his US tour. I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Cale – who Clapton calls “a superior musician… one of the masters” – runs in a straight line. In the late 50s and early 60s he cut a sequence of rockabilly and rock’n’roll sides with his own Quintette and helped create the Tulsa Sound with fellow Oklahomans David Gates and Leon Russell. In 1965 he moved to Los Angeles when pop producer Snuff Garrett told him that psychedelia was a-happening. Cale migrated and hung out with members of Ronnie Hawkins And The Hawks (the nascent Band ), before making the one-off album A Trip Down The Sunset Strip in 1967 with old Okie pals he christened The Leathercoated Minds.

The LP contained super-fast acid takes on the Yardbirds ’ Over Under Sideways Down , the Byrds’ Eight Miles High , Donovan’s Sunshine Superman , and a few originals composed under the influence of LSD and plenty of pot. “I hate that album,” Cale says. “I’ve tried to burn it whenever I see one. We bought into the psychedelic scene but it was a bad imitation. You guys might like it, but you’re nuts! I enjoyed LA though. I played at all the East LA bars. We supported Johnny Rivers when he was hot, and I saw Love and The Doors. I also saw Otis Redding, who was better. I think I was only the third act ever to perform at the Whisky. Club owner Elmer Valentine gave me the JJ handle. Said it would look good on the marquee. Smartest thing I ever did.”

While the hierarchy of young, long-haired LA groups thrived, Cale found he’d outworn his welcome. He had a spell as an engineer, working on Blue Cheer’s debut album, Vincebus Eruptum , but felt out of place among the acid crowd. “I spent too much time drinking and got real poor, real fast,” he recalls. “LA ain’t a good place to be hungry. So I came home and got a job in a country band and lived in motels, earning 10 bucks a night and all the beer you wanted. I really thought I was finished and would end up selling shoes, until Eric cut After Midnight . I was going to be a construction worker, or an insurance man. I was that down on luck.”

One day, Audie Ashworth, Cale’s future business partner, told him that Clapton had covered his song. He didn’t believe it until the first royalty cheque hit the mat. “Audie got me to Nashville around 1971 and we made Naturally for $3,000-$4,000. This is when the south was gonna rise again, like Charlie Daniels sang. Nashville, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Memphis – suddenly they became hip towns. The players were real good and people like Bob Dylan and Steve Miller were recording in our neck of the woods. It was good timing because rock folks discovered country. The studios were good and professional and the guitarists could play a lick. Like the Lovin’ Spoonful song [ Nashville Cats ] says about the 1,352 pickers in Nashville.”

The stoned, sexy calm of Cale’s albums gave him instant cult status among discerning record buyers. “Yeah, but I didn’t put Nashville on the map. Perhaps to Europeans I helped, but the Grand Ole Opry was famous since the 40s. My heroes remained the same: Charlie Parker, Elvis ’fore he got too operatic, Chuck Berry, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown and Mose Allison. I loved The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and that song We Can Work It Out . I loved Dylan’s folk stuff, Randy Newman, Nilsson. I don’t mind stealing a lick or borrowing a technique off them. I’m a musician, that’s what we do.”

Naturally was an easy album to make for Cale, since he had hundreds of unrecorded songs in his locker. The albums Really and Okie followed in short order, the former written on the way to Shelter Studios and finished in six days. “Audie and the label owners, Leon Russell and Denny Cordell, phoned every six months: ‘When’s the next one ready?’ My attitude was always: ‘What was wrong with the last one?’ But I got sucked in.”

In 1976 Cale embarked on his first of two European jaunts, promoting his most successful album, Troubadour . I saw him play at Hammersmith Odeon. It’s an indelible, dope-crazed memory. “I don’t remember it myself,” Cale laughs. “It was a blur of VW vans and big cities. The fish and chips were good in London. Eric sat in with us, unannounced. I’ve spoken to people who didn’t know he played! “Am I laid back? I guess. I call my music ‘humming mud’, and my singing, if you can call it singing, is craggy and baggy. My range is kinda limited. One and a half notes – on a good day.”

Troubadour included the candid drug song Cocaine , while in Cale’s touring band was guitarist Christine Lakeland, who many have taken to be JJ’s muse. It’s thought that Cale has never married, but may have several ‘wives’. “Hmm… I don’t mind a bit of innuendo and sensuality but I don’t discuss my private life,” he says. He once filled out a Guardian newspaper questionnaire and omitted to answer anything remotely personal other than ‘What vehicle do you own?’ (truck and motor home), ‘Object always carried’ (pocket knife), ‘Motto’ (do unto others before they do unto you) and ‘How would you like to die?’ (a very old man). ‘Significant others’ didn’t use up any ink from his pen.

“Nobody likes to be followed to the bedroom. Well, maybe some people do,” he smiles. “Christine is a very old friend. She’s way more of a recluse than I am.” It’s true. Lakeland’s website contains one page: a photograph of her holding an electric guitar. Marvellous.

The thing about JJ Cale is that he doesn’t change and doesn’t need to. He was good when he started and he’s good now. Like his song says: ‘They call me the breeze/I keep blowing down the road.’ He ain’t broke, he don’t need fixing. “I’ve always been rock’n’roll and country; then again I’m more jazz than your average Britney Spears. But I ain’t a hermit. I’m home a lot writing songs cos that’s what I am. You don’t get that done by playing basketball…”

Five years ago Cale returned to his roots when he recorded the album To Tulsa And Back , hooking up with his old cronies Lakeland, Bill Boatman and Jimmy Karstein, and resolving his fall-out with Ashworth, who became exasperated every time Cale told him: “Send me the money and let the younger guys have the fame.” It was going to be called To Nashville And Back, but Ashworth died before the tapes were loaded.

New album Roll On closes with a song called Bring Down The Curtain , which says: ‘ Enough is enough/Can’t do it no more .’ Is that it? Adios, amigos? “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have put that on but it is a good ending. Didn’t mean to depress ya. I’m at an age where I am looking at the end of the clock. Intimations of mortality? I guess. Mind, Willie Nelson is older an’ me and he’s still going. So don’t take it too literally. I’m not only a reality writer, I’m a fictitious writer. I like to amaze myself with a cute twist and turn.”

Perhaps that’s the ultimate self-analysis from an artist who doesn’t do ‘projects’ and only signs one-off deals. “I don’t ever think I’m making a record,” Cale says. “I just do it, and when it falls into place, 75 per cent cohesive, I’m always surprised. I listen to it and think: ‘Is it any good?’ ‘Are the songs any good?’ ‘Is it a concept?’ I don’t have a clue. It’s just natural evolution. Everything I do is an accident. But it’s my accident.”

And, he points out. “No one tells me what to do. There’s no one at my door. I’m famous for Cocaine, Call Me The Breeze and, hell, they might even make After Midnight the Oklahoma State Song soon. It don’t bug me if that’s all the average guy knows. I don’t make music most young people would like. Some do. I isn’t no rapper, though I like rap now they made the lyrics more interesting.”

Suddenly Cale gets a fax confirming the bitter-sweet news that he’s booked to tour California and beyond. “Oh Lord,” he sighs. “I’d better watch my voice. I’ve got to play well enough so people don’t throw tomatoes at me. If I’m healthy enough I might even get on an aeroplane and see you. Maybe.”

Originally published in Classic Rock 132

Max Bell worked for the  NME  during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for  The Times  and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the  Standard  and mags like  The Face  and  GQ  kept him honest. Later, Record Collector  and  Classic Rock  called.

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• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• John Fogerty

John Fogerty Announces New US & European Tour Dates in 2024

by Em Casalena March 12, 2024, 10:16 am

If you’re an American or European fan of the famed Creedence Clearwater Revival , you might just have a chance to see the band’s former frontman John Fogerty perform live this year. Fogerty’s current Celebration Tour has been going strong, and additional US and European dates have been added to the tour. Fogerty will be accompanied by his sons’ band Heart Har for all of the tour dates, and George Thorogood & The Destroyers will also be joining for select tour dates.

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“George and I have done shows together before but for years we’ve talked about doing a full tour together,” said Forgerty in a press release. “This summer we decided [that] time is short, we better do this now!”

The next leg of the John Fogerty 2024 Tour will start on June 2 in Simpsonville, South Carolina at CCNB Amphitheatre at Heritage Park. The tour will close on September 11 in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Utah State Fair (without support from George Thorogood).

View this post on Instagram A post shared by John Fogerty (@johnfogerty)

Tickets for this tour will go on sale on March 15 at 10:00 am local time. There are some presale events going on right now as well through Ticketmaster /Live Nation. Fans can also get down on tour packages and VIP tickets through Ticketmaster.

As always, we recommend that European fans take a look at tickets through Viagogo for the best deals. If you missed the presale event, we recommend checking out Stubhub , too. Stubhub is a great resource for finding last-minute tickets or tickets to shows that have already sold out, so it’s definitely worth trying your luck.

Tickets won’t last long for the John Fogerty 2024 Tour . Get yours before it’s too late!

John Fogerty 2024 Tour Dates

June 2 – Simpsonville, SC – CCNB Amphitheatre at Heritage Park 

June 4 – Charleston, SC – Credit One Stadium 

June 5 – Raleigh, NC – Ted Hat Amphitheater 

June 7 – Camden, NJ – Freedom Mortgage Pavilion 

June 8 – Scranton, PA – The Pavilion at Montage Mountain 

June 9 – Bristow, VA – Jiffy Lube Live 

June 11 – Canandaigua, NY – Constellation Brands – Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center 

June 12 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Saratoga Springs Performing Arts Center 

June 14 – Bethel, NY – Bethel Woods Center for the Arts 

June 15 – Holmdel, NJ – PNC Bank Arts Center 

June 16 – Uncasville, CT – Mohegan Sun 

June 19 – Gilford, NH – Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion 

June 20 – Lenox, MA – Tanglewood Music Center 

July 12 – Weert, Netherlands – Bospop Festival 2024 (without George Thorogood)

July 13 – Zottegem, Belgium – Rock Zottegem 2024 (without George Thorogood)

July 16 – Lucca, Italy – Lucca Summer Festival (without George Thorogood)

July 18 – Saint Julien en Genevois, France – Guitar en Scene (without George Thorogood)

August 26 – Morrison, CO – Red Rocks Amphitheatre (without George Thorogood)

September 11 – Salt Lake City, UT – Utah State Fair (without George Thorogood)

Photo by Theo Wargo

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Peter Gabriel, The Waterboys’ Mike Scott Among Artists Paying Tribute to the Late Karl Wallinger

© 2024 American Songwriter

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Liam Gallagher John Squire review – fans left short-changed by duo devoid of chemistry

Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow The connection that sparked an enjoyable No 1 album by the ex-Oasis and Stone Roses men disappears in an underwhelming 50-minute live set

T he opening night of the Liam Gallagher John Squire tour is full of fans who’d listen to the two rock’n’roll heroes play the phonebook. Unfortunately the Oasis singer and Stone Roses guitarist put that loyalty to the test – and not only because Gallagher lists colours on psychedelic, stomping opener Just Another Rainbow .

Currently UK No 1, their self-titled album blends Gallagher’s brusque swagger with Squire’s fluid songwriting, then filters it through 60s rock and Britpop nostalgia. Clearly both musicians thrive in a yin-yang partnership, but their recording-booth chemistry dissolves on stage; barely acknowledging each other, they miss opportunities to riff on their contrasting personalities.

Backed by heavyweight session musicians, the record’s big Gallagher choruses and equally big Squire guitar solos are polished and festival-ready; songs such as bluesy I’m a Wheel feel precision-engineered to soundtrack pints in the sun. It’s fun to hear quiet Squire’s lyrics in Gallagher’s mouth, too: “Thank you for the thoughts and prayers, and fuck you too!” he snarls, as fans happily throw up middle fingers.

But then: “We’ve got no more fucking songs!” Months back , Gallagher warned this tour wouldn’t include any original Oasis or Stone Roses tracks, “cos that’s naff”. Fair enough, but how else can they pad out an hour? A cover of Jumpin’ Jack Flash serves as both time-filler and finale, underlining the lack of fire in much of Gallagher and Squire’s joint material and leaving fans audibly disappointed under the house lights barely 50 minutes since the show began.

It should feel special to witness two era-defining, arena-headlining musicians in a cosy venue, and tickets (£65 pre-fees) sold out in seconds, but tonight lacks the personality and showmanship that a more intimate setting deserves. Gallagher blasts his almighty, evocative voice far beyond the back rows, with minimal chat to bring the show down to size, while Squire is so engrossed in his beautiful, laborious solos that he firmly ignores the mic stand placed optimistically in his vicinity. This accomplished band sounds good, as you’d expect, but the whole night feels like a rehearsal for festival fields to come, with their most loyal fans footing the bill.

Liam Gallagher John Squire play the Civic, Wolverhampton , 14 March; O2 City Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne , 18 March; O2 Apollo Manchester , 20, 21 March. UK tour continues to 26 March

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