John Cale is a fearless Welshman.
The former UK child prodigy turned New York teen sensation turned Dream Syndicate minimalist rocker turned Velvet Underground founding member has released nearly 25 solo albums since his seminal 1970 release “Vintage Violence.” That came two years after he was kicked out of Velvet Underground by Lou Reed. And with the recent “Black Acetate,” he shows yet again his restlessness with the usual – even when it’s his definition of the usual.
“I try and find things that make me uncomfortable, things that I’m unaccustomed to,” Cale said in a telephone interview earlier this week from a Los Angeles recording studio. He performs Sunday at the Bluebird Theater.
“I write my material in the studio, and when you do that, it’s the immediacy of the writing that you’re really trying to capture all the time. When you write and improvise a lot, then you tend to have a live quality to what you’re trying to do – especially in the vocals, because a lot of (mine) are first-time vocals.”
It’s one thing for your run-of-the-mill respected artist to say he was experimenting with his new record. But it’s something else when John Cale says that.
One, it’s expected. Cale has made an epic underground career out of pop and rock experimentation, genre-bending songs that aren’t suitable for the mainstream because of their avant- garde stitching and aesthetic inconsistency.
Two, we’re dealing with John Cale, the performer. His solo catalog is huge, but forget about that for a moment. This is the same guy who lent his bass, piano, viola and keyboards to “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs,” all classic Velvet Underground tracks that have survived the decades with an amazing dexterity and relevance.
Three: John Cale, the producer. When his story is truly written, much will be made of Cale’s influential production work on the Stooges’ debut, Patti Smith’s “Horses,” The Modern Lovers’ eponymous 1976 debut and Nico’s “The Marble Index.”
Cale, who will be producing work from Alejandro Escovedo and the Manic Street Preachers in the coming year, called “Black Acetate” his reaction to his previous record, “HoboSapiens.”
And what a reaction it is. “Black Acetate” is a tight masterpiece, an album culled from 48 songs and about two patched-together months in the studio from October 2004 to January 2005. The remaining 13 songs, when pieced together, form an expert series of portraits, starting with the loose-lipped pop of “Outta the Bag” and closing with the quiet, understated, Johnny Cash-like fury of “Mailman (The Lying Song).”
In “For a Ride,” it’s almost as if the ghost of Jim Morrison invades Cale’s vocals, which are possessed and on- point, the soulful opposite to the song’s relentless tambourine. “In a Flood” is sort of a backcountry “Sweet Jane.” And “Woman,” with its sparse hip-hop drum machine backing and soaring, U2-like chorus, captures the power of the first-take swing on the vocals. In fact, it’s something that makes changing the lyrics/vocals later on in the recording process nearly impossible, he said.
“That’s infuriating, in a way, when you’re in the middle of the process,” said Cale. “You have the basics and you load it with mood and character and sensibility and fill it out by working with the vocals, but then you find a third of one verse that’s not right, but you cannot match the mood and sensibility of that one verse by going back in there and rerecording the vocal. When you’re doing that original vocal is when you’re wide open, your pores are wide open and filling the song with as much as you can.”
“Black Acetate” is more a John Cale record than “HoboSapiens,” in which he collaborated with a French DJ named Dmitri Tikovi. Tikovi, who rocks a band and a DJ night called Trash Palace, would send Cale loops, and Cale would manipulate the loops and morph them into something that worked for him as a solo artist. But this time Cale crafted his own loops.
“It was easier because the more I did it, the better I got at it, and the simpler things got,” Cale said. “You didn’t need 10 tracks to finish the song off. You could do it with four or five. On ‘Hobo,’ some of the stuff that Dmitri gave me – the ones in the system, drum patterns and the like – I used them, but I spent more time trying to doctor up the ones that were there than I would have had I just created my own.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
John Cale
EXPERIMENTAL ROCK | Bluebird Theater, 8 p.m. Sunday | $25 | via TicketWeb outlets, ticketweb.com or 866-468-7621.
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