John Cale discusses the song that sold him and Lou Reed on The Beatles
Most people know John Cale as one of the founding members of The Velvet Underground, but beyond his transient spell working alongside Lou Reed, his subsequent career boasts a bounty of cutting-edge material. Before moving to New York City to find his future, the multi-instrumentalist and avant-garde innovator was born and raised in the small mining village of Garnant in the valley of the River Amman in Carmarthenshire of Wales.
By the age of 13, Cale had discovered his musical talent on both the viola and the piano, and his virtuosity with the former earned him a scholarship to study music at Goldsmiths College, University of London. This opportunity allowed Cale to escape a childhood setting he never felt at home with.
“I’d forever listen to foreign radio broadcasts as a kid; my mind was always somewhere else – that notion that the grass is always greener someplace else, you know?” Cale told Nathan Bevan of Wales Online in 2016.
“The notion of places like New York as this 24-hour society where you could work as long as you liked, stay up as long as you liked was fascinating to me,” he added. “To end up in America had always been my aim, even before I got an offer to go there.”
On establishing The Velvet Underground, Cale helped to create an opposing force in rock music of the 1960s, just as the so-called British Invasion was reaching its climax. The band’s dark, unorthodox approach to both sound and subject matter placed them at odds with the hippie-generation groups that soared in the UK and America’s west coast.
With such an obstinate passion for the avant-garde, Cale would rarely admit to enjoying too much of the pop music of the time. Like his bandmate Reed, Cale refrained from praising the shinier side of pop music. As the Velvets’ material suggests, the band identified more with The Rolling Stones’ bad-boy visage than that of their friendly rivals, The Beatles.
“There was always this competition between the Stones and the Beatles,” Cale told Uncut in 2015. “Even though The Beatles could be brilliant, the Velvets would always side with the Stones because they were darker, rougher.”
However, five decades later, Cale was comfortable admitting that the Beatles’ oeuvre holds moments of undeniable magic. For the Uncut feature, Cale was asked to pick out his favourite Beatles track, and, like many, he was drawn to the 1966 masterpiece, Revolver.
“Then ‘She Said She Said’ turned up, and I could see The Beatles were changing,” Cale continued. “Lou [Reed] and I looked at each other and realised something was happening, which we zeroed in on. The way [John] Lennon did it seemed so natural. It was obviously not just something he made up his mind to do; it was always part of who he was.”
“It’s got a very tricky time signature,” Cale continued, discussing the intricacies of the track. “He stops the beat at one point, which made me sit up. The mindset was so unusual – ‘you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born’. This is nihilism. What I liked about Lennon was his terseness. He could make a point very fast. I love that ability to be very piercing and savage. You get a physical sense of something from him. As soon as I saw him play, it was there too. He used his entire body when he sang. By ’66, The Beatles were a big deal, it was like a giant wave. We were in New York, and every night on the radio, there’d be Murray The K calling himself the Fifth Beatle. People would hang on to every word.”
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