John Cale didn’t come to popular music from the usual places. His muse was born in the classical avant-garde, and when the young Welsh musician first arrived in New York in the early 1960s, he was pulled first into the evocative drone sounds of La Monte Young, joining on viola the composer’s Theatre of Eternal Music (a.k.a. the original Dream Syndicate). Then he met Lou Reed and became excited with the possibilities of a new kind of pop music, colliding all he had learned in the uncompromising avant-garde with Reed’s literate, highly crafted rock songs, and the Velvet Underground was born.
Their collaboration would remain sporadic through the decades
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