Disgust in Its Closing Moments: John Cale’s Slow Dazzle at 50
Before his Velvet Underground counterpart released a discordant collection of guitar feedback in the summer of 1975, Cale first leaned into more conventional and clear-cut rock production on his fifth solo album.
Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns
When John Cale found out the Velvet Underground would be continuing without him a year after releasing their debut album, he was perhaps most taken aback by his bandmate Lou Reed’s desire to follow a prettier melodic path. The dissonance of “Heroin” and the dark atmosphere in “Sister Ray” no longer tickled Reed, whose earliest musical outfit—the Jades—mainly produced doo-wop numbers; his focus turned towards a sweeter, “Stephanie Says” style of playing. “I said [to Lou Reed], ‘You’re going backwards with that idea,” Cale recalled in a 2016 interview with Noisey. He believed his former collaborator was making a big mistake.
Up until that point, John Cale’s musical trajectory had been guided by prestigious scholarships to London’s Goldsmiths College and, later, Tanglewood before migrating across the pond to an exciting New York experimental scene in the early 1960s. It’s remarkable—dizzying, in fact—to map how rapidly things evolved for Cale not just within the first decade of his post-VU career, but in his life in New York altogether. He arrived in the States in 1963, aged 21, and quickly connected with leading avant-garde composer John Cage. Cale even showed up on an episode of the popular television game show I’ve Got a Secret, where he disclosed that he’d played an 18-hours-long concert. He’d fallen in with LaMonte Young and his Dream Syndicate and successfully integrated himself amongst a community of like-minded artists spurred by improvisation, harmonics, sustained notes and drone-based music. In Todd Haynes’ 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground, Cale recalled that, in those sessions, no one asked for a note per se, but tuned their ear to the sound of a refrigerator, or “the hum of Western civilization.”
After John Cale’s final shows with the Velvet Underground in September 1968 at the Boston Tea Party, a favorite stomping ground for the band (and the site where the Modern Lovers’ frontman Jonathan Richman, who would work with Cale on the band’s debut album, watched them adoringly on several occasions), the wild-looking Welshman with the electric viola was replaced by Doug Yule. With Cale gone from the band, drummer Moe Tucker noted how the music “became a little bit more normal” since “the lunacy factor” Cale supplied had vanished.
Cale has frequently spoken about how important work is to him, that work is “more fun than fun.” This ethos meant he was not left idle in the absence of the Velvet Underground or Warhol’s Factory as an anchor. Before the release of his own debut solo record, Vintage Violence, in 1970, Cale garnered a reputation as a record producer, manning the boards on the Stooges’ self-titled debut in ‘69 and frequently collaborating with his former bandmate Nico on her solo records. As the ‘70s began, Cale even showed up on records by Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band’s Mike Heron. From the very beginning, he demonstrated a discipline in his creative practice by always having a project at hand, something one has to assume he cultivated as a child, when music provided a lifeline, language and, crucially, a ticket out of Wales.
As a young boy growing up in the mining village of Garnant, Cale overcame several hardships. His grandmother enforced a rule where English was not to be spoken in the house, thus preventing him from communicating with his father, who couldn’t speak Welsh, until he began learning English in school at the age of seven. He was severely ill with bronchitis for which he was treated with opiates, which he would become dependent on to sleep. Cale has also talked about being sexually abused by his music teacher in a church. Music, whether playing his viola in the school orchestra, ordering scores from the local library or listening to the radio in his childhood bedroom, became a form of respite.
In his appearance on the popular BBC4 program Desert Island Discs in 2004, Cale described the magical escape that radio provided by choosing the Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” released the year he arrived in New York. The significance of this selection, and the context for its inclusion, will be immediate to fans of his fifth solo LP, Slow Dazzle. “And you know it’s true / That Wales is not like California in any way / And when I listen to your music / You’re still thousands of miles away,” Cale croons on “Mr. Wilson,” the brilliantly bombastic opener that serves as an ode to the Beach Boys’ leader, Brian Wilson. It’s surprisingly sweet—given the dark and dissonant musical identity he cultivated with the Velvets—to hear Cale earnestly express a boyish fandom for Brian and for that to be how he introduces himself within Slow Dazzle’s world of rock extracurriculars.
Unfortunately, when Slow Dazzle arrived in March 1975, Brian Wilson, still encumbered by a period of seclusion and addiction, was far from flattered by John Cale’s tribute. Instead, he believed the song, which culminates in a warm embrace of Beach Boys-like layered harmonies, was “sarcastic.” It’s a tremendously successful expression of chamber-pop, steered by the Phil Spector-influenced Wall of Sound production style Wilson once chased in his own material—which Cale initially flirted with on Vintage Violence, in the commanding, reverbed percussion of “Big White Cloud.” Each component of “Mr. Wilson,” from the twinkling xylophone motif, pulsing synths and rush of strings, beautifully articulates the feeling of being completely moved by the transformative qualities of someone else’s artistry, while also acknowledging an intrinsic vulnerability or insecurity crucial to the work’s impact. “Take your mixes, not your mixture / Add some music to our day,” Cale pleads with the Pet Sounds maestro. “Don’t believe the things they tell you / Don’t let them get in your way.” It’s endearing and empathetic.
Having relocated to London in 1974, Slow Dazzle’s studio set-up saw the return of Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera and his former bandmate Brian Eno, both of whom featured on Fear the year prior. Also present in the studio, adding to the deft pop-rock arrangements, were Gerry Conway, whose CV included drumming for Cat Stevens, producer and musician Chris Thomas and guitarist Chris Spedding. The latter, a prominent session musician known for his contributions to LPs by Donovan, Elton John and Harry Nilsson, also provided guitar chops to the Wombles guitar. With an accomplished and trusted arsenal of collaborators behind him, Cale set out to write an album of singles.
However, Island Records, Cale’s third label in five years, had different plans, electing to not release a single from Slow Dazzle. Instead, they selected the 1950s, rock-fused, piano-led ballad “Darling I Need You” to be included on the Island Disco Sampler, a 4-track promo EP sent out to DJs with Spencer Davis Group’s “Keep On Running” and “All Right Now,” which had already been released as a single by English rockers Free in 1970. At the same time, Lou Reed—who, remember, severed his partnership with Cale in favor of making pretty songs—was gearing up to release Metal Machine Music, a 64-minute album of discordant guitar feedback. Island Records presented Cale as a man with a cigarette-coated throat howling a theatrical plea: “Darling, darling, darling, I need you.” In spite of the song’s admittedly catchy hook, Cale sounds pathetic in his helplessness upon discovering that his partner is nowhere to be seen at breakfast time. It’s not exactly the shape audiences anticipated to find the former Velvet in.
That feeling of loss and alienation, in a romantic sense, is palpable across Slow Dazzle. “Taking It All Away,” with its tempered, “Paris 1919”-like melodic sensibility, describes a “sentimental fool” consumed by “misery and pain.” A few songs later, the mournful ballad “I’m Not The Loving Kind” aches with Cale’s sincere delivery: “When my lady passes me by / I lose the love I thought I had in mind.” In these moments, Cale—an artist who would decapitate a chicken on-stage in ‘77, and an artist who typically eschewed simple human sentimentality for intellectual-based musings with songs named for “MacBeth” and “Graham Greene”—exposes his own vulnerabilities in plain language. In the midst of his Island Records trilogy—which spawned Fear, Slow Dazzle and Helen of Troy between October 1974 and November 1975—Cale’s second marriage to Cynthia Wells had fractured beyond repair, as well. While writing Slow Dazzle, their divorce was especially imminent, and the flagrant “Guts” gives a hardened insight into the downfall of the relationship: “The bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife / Did it quick and split.”
To the uninitiated, the bugger in question is Soft Cell co-founder Kevin Ayers. The infidelity was interrupted by Cale, who caught the pair together the night before he was to take to the stage for the June 1, 1974 concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre alongside Ayers, Nico and Brian Eno. Released as a live album (and featuring the Slow Dazzle track “Heartbreak Hotel”), the artwork captures Cale and Ayers, the night after the incident, engaged in a glam-rock-pastel-jacket face-off. “Guts” hears Cale articulate Slow Dazzle’s anchoring emotional plight with a vitriolic edge, one that also steers Cale’s chilling rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel,” which interpolates the melodic structure and riff central to Fear’s closing track “Momamma Scuba.”