Artwork by ANDREW SPEAR

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview first ran on VICE/NOISEY.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Brazilian actor/musician Seu Jorge is probably best known to American audiences for his performance as the Bowie-singing sailor Pele dos Santos — he of the pointy blood red toque, lip-dangling Gitane and vintage white Adidas Sambas — in Wes Anderson’s 2004 film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. But his breakout role was the homicidal avenger Knockout Ned in City Of God, Fernando Meirelles’ graphic 2002 study of the spiralling ultra-violence of internecine gangster warfare in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. After seeing City Of God, Anderson offered Jorge the then-unrealized role of Pele dos Santos, a crew member aboard long-in-the-tooth oceanographer Steve Zissou’s aging research vessel, The Belafonte, who performs and records acoustic versions of classic early ‘70s Bowie songs in Portuguese in his downtime. The idea for a sailor singing samba variations of glam-era Bowie at key junctures in the film was Anderson’s, but the execution fell to Jorge, a well-established singer-songwriter in the Tropicalia tradition of Jorge Ben Jor, Gilberto Gil, and Milton Nascimento, with eight albums under his belt. Although it went on to achieve beloved cult status in the twee annals of Andersonia, The Life Aquatic was a box office flop. However, The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions, the 2005 album that collects Jorge’s arresting Bowie esperanto, was a hit. But, busy with other acting projects, Jorge never mounted a proper tour in support of the album. Shaken by the loss of Bowie and his own father in space of a few days back in January, Jorge was moved to revisit the project and will pay tribute to the dearly departed art-rock icon with a 13-city U.S. tour that comes back to Union Transfer December 12th for a second, way-sold out Philly performance. Recently, we got Jorge on the horn to talk Bowie, Bill Murray, and The Life Aquatic 12 years after.

How did you come to be cast in The Life Aquatic? Did you have to audition?

Wes Anderson contacted me. No audition, we sent him a video of one of my version of Bowie’s song and he loved it.

Was Wes Anderson on your radar prior to your involvement in The Life Aquatic?

I didn’t know Wes before, so it was a great surprise to get in contact with this brilliant artist’s work and make part of It. He’s fantastic!

How did the Portuguese covers of Bowie songs come about? Were you doing them prior to your involvement in the film or was it envisioned as part of your role in the film?

It was envisioned as part of my role in the film. I heard the songs and got involved with the melody; the lyrics flew naturally according to what I was experiencing in life. I was fucked up and in need of money, with a newborn baby and just did it, there’s a lot of inspiration in adversities. Although most of the songs were composed during the shooting, and I wrote many of the lyrics inspired by The Life Aquatic story.

What are the challenges of translating a song out of the language it was written in and into another while maintaining the melody and rhyme scheme that are central to its charm?

The challenge is to keep the rhyme scheme and melody, changing the lyrics, using only my guitar and voice but keeping up with the whole energy and power vibe that Bowie created for his original songs, all epic pieces.

Got any amusing anecdotes about life on the set of Life Aquatic?

The day by day on this project was funny and full of amazing episodes, but what really will never get of my mind is the day we were filming in Cine Citá. I was dressed like Pele dos Santos, and we had to change the location from one set to other, and walking by the place we had to cross [Martin Scorsese’s] Gangs of New York movie set, It was very amazing to me the image of the Life Aquatic crew walking through the Gangs of New York set. Felt like in a surreal dream.

I’m wondering how Wes Anderson explained the role of Pele to you in advance of production or even during production.

I didn’t speak English at that time. Wes never told me who Pele was in words; we discovered the character together, while doing it. It was a very sensorial process.

I’m sure you have some funny Bill Murray stories, so please share.

There are many funny stories with Bill. He’s such a strong personality and one of the biggest and wildest hearts I ever met in life. At his 54th birthday party the DJ was doing a terrible job, I could see on Bill’s face that he was getting annoyed with him. Suddenly the DJ started to play “Girl from Ipanema” and Bill got really mad, he thought it was an old people song, not appropriate to his party. We were fresh, young and wanting to dance till the sunrise, the guy was really fucking up everybody’s mood, then Bill asked the DJ to change the song, immediately he started to play “Pink Panther,” I’m pretty sure Bill took that as a provocation — I did — that made him wildly mad, and ended the party yelling: “Are you fucking crazy? You are not going to play damn “Pink Panther Theme” at my party!! No Pink Panther in my party, get off, off offff!!!” It was so funny! Bill got balls! The guy was clearly provoking Bill, being a bully, and you don’t do that to Bill Murray!

Assuming you are a fan of Wes Anderson’s films, I’m wondering how you would rank his films and why and at where you would put The Life Aquatic in that hierarchy?

I think Royal Tenenbaums is so far the most brilliant work he’s ever done. After that, if I had to put in a hierarchy order it would be: Life Aquatic, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr Fox, Darjeeling Limited and Rushmore.

Did you ever get any feedback from Bowie about your renditions of his songs and/or get to meet or speak with him about it?

No, never got in direct contact with him, unfortunately, because it would have been amazing to meet this legend in person. But he heard my versions and said: “Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs in Portuguese, I would never have heard this new level of beauty which he has imbued them with,” which makes me feel I’m walking in clouds. Something that will make my kids proud of me forever.

What was your motivation for doing this tour of Bowie covers now?

My father passed away one day after Bowie’s death. I lost both in one shot. I realized how brief and fragile this life is. This soundtrack is a very successful work, people really loved it and always asked me to play it live, I never had the time, always busy with other projects going on, then this year all these sad episodes happened and I decided to take a break and throw Bowie a tribute. I think celebrating life, art, and the good things are always the best way to keep going and honor the memory and legacy of the ones that have left us.

What else is on the horizon for you as far as music or acting?

I just finished a film called Soundtrack that should be out soon. In January next year I’m getting into a new feature film about Pixinguinha, the iconic Brazilian flute/sax player from the early 1900s. I’ll play the main role. I’m working on a new music album. You know, there’s a lot coming up! 2017 is going to be lit.

SEU JORGE PERFORMS THE SONGS OF DAVID BOWIE @ UNION TRANSFER 12/12

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR VICE It has been said that the genre of power pop—white man-boys with cherry gui­tars re­in­vig­or­at­ing the har­mon­ic con­ver­gence of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Byrds with the hormonal rush of youth—is the re­venge of the nerds. Big Star pretty much in­ven­ted the form, which ex­plains the wor­ship­ful al­tars erec­ted to the band in the bed­rooms of lonely, dis­en­fran­chised melody-makers from Los Angeles to Lon­don, and all points in between. Though they nev­er came close to fame or for­tune in their time, the band con­tin­ue to hold a sac­red place in the cos­mo­logy of pure pop, a glit­ter­ing con­stel­la­tion that re­mains in­vis­ible to the na­ked main­stream eye.

Big Star was the sound of four Mem­ph­is boys caught in the vor­tex of a time warp, re­in­ter­pret­ing the jangling, three-minute Britpop odes to love, youth, and the loss of both that framed their form­at­ive years, the mid-60s. Just one prob­lem: It was the early 70s. They were out of fash­ion and out of time. With­in the band, this dis­con­nect with the pop mar­ket­place would lead to bit­ter dis­il­lu­sion­ment, self-de­struc­tion, and death. But that same damning ob­scur­ity would nur­ture their myth­o­logy and be­come Big Star’s greatest ally, a form­al­de­hyde that would pre­serve the band’s three full-length al­bums — No. 1 Re­cord, Ra­dio City, and Sis­ter Lov­ers/Third — as per­fect spe­ci­mens of clas­sic gui­tar pop. That Big Star’s re­cor­ded leg­acy would go on to in­spire count­less indie sensations is one of pop his­tory’s cruelest iron­ies—every­one from R.E.M. to The Re­placements to Elli­ott Smith would come to see Big Star as the great miss­ing link between the 60s and the 70s and bey­ond.

There is a dreamy, pre-Raphael­ite aura that sur­rounds the le­gend of Big Star. Like the doomed, tender-aged beau­ties in Jef­frey Eu­gen­ides’ nov­el The Vir­gin Sui­cides, the band’s tra­gic ca­reer would un­ravel in the au­tum­nal Sunday af­ter­noon sun­light of the early 1970s. The band’s sound and vis­ion hinged on the con­trast­ing sens­ib­il­it­ies of song­writers Alex Chilton and Chris Bell. In the gos­pel of Big Star, Bell was the sac­ri­fi­cial lamb—fra­gile, doe-eyed, and marked for an early death. After the first two Big Star albums were DOA, Bell quit the band he started. After a failed attempt at a solo career, he succumbed to drug and alcohol abuse, further exacerbated by Bell’s lifelong struggle with depression and his inability to reconcile his homosexuality with his Christian faith, culminating in a fatal car accident in 1978.
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Chilton was the prod­ig­al son, re­turn­ing to Mem­ph­is after trav­el­ing the world, hav­ing tasted the bac­chanali­an pleas­ures of teen star­dom with the Box Tops in the 1960s. Where Bell was pre­cious and na­ive, Chilton was nervy and sar­don­ic, but the band’s steady down­ward spir­al would set him on the dark path of per­son­al dis­in­teg­ra­tion—booze, pills, vi­ol­ence, and at­temp­ted sui­cide—documented with harrowing lucidity on Big Star’s final album, which, depending on who you ask, was either called Sister Lovers or Third. The album’s shattered sonics and desolate beauty were deemed—by the best ears of major label A&R at the time—as too weird and depressing to release. The album collected dust in the vaults for four years. In 1978, a semi-legit version of the album culled from select tracks briefly surfaced, but it would not be until 1992, some 19 years after its completion, that Third/Sister Lovers was given a proper, high-profile release.

In the wake of Third/Sister Lovers stillborn birth, Chilton would re­in­vent him­self as an iras­cible icon­o­clast, seminal new wave/punk progenitor, and semi-iron­ic in­ter­pret­er of ob­scure soul, R&B, and Itali­an rock ‘n’ roll. He died in 2010, but history will remember him as one of the unwitting founding fathers of the Alternative Nation—his alt-rock sainthood immortalized by The Replacements’ “Alex Chilton”—that rose up in the 80s and 90s, and a direct inspiration for the waves of celebrated indie weirdness that rippled through the dawn of the 21st Century. A new three-disc, 69-track box set called Third Complete collects and curates all the extant recordings—rough sketch demos, alternate takes, unreleased tracks and multiple mixes—from Big Star’s last gasp. It is an embarrassment of riches for the long-suffering faithful and a yellowing road map through the madness and majesty of Third/Sister Lovers for adventurous newbies. Here’s hoping some kid finds it and changes music again.

At the time of his death, Chilton was in the process of mounting a live revival of Third/Sister Lovers set to debut at SXSW. In tribute to Chilton, founding Big Star drummer Jody Stephens, The dBs’ Chris Stamey, Let’s Active’s Mitch Easter, and R.E.M.’s Mike Mills performed Third/Sister Lovers beginning to end in a series of concerts in New York, London, Sydney, Seattle, and Los Angeles. On the eve of the release of Third Complete, we got the R.E.M. bassist/songwriter on the horn to talk about the legend and the legacy of Big Star’s lost masterpiece.

NOISEY: How did you first come to Third/Sister Lovers?

MIKE MILLS: I was familiar with the first two [Big Star albums] before I really paid attention to the third one, and when I did I’m not even sure what iteration of it it was. When I first heard it there was no official release, it was whatever people had cobbled together; it had some of the songs, but not all of the songs. Some of them I loved and some of them I didn’t. I think about this record, some of the songs take a few repeated listenings to truly see what’s going on, and to get the full impact of it, or at least it did for me. I came to it really gradually as I managed to hear all the different versions that came out over those years in the early ’80s.

NOISEY: Did R.E.M. feel a certain kinship with Big Star given that both bands were comprised of white, southern bohemian types with artistic ambitions that weren’t always met with commercial acceptance?

MIKE MILLS: I don’t think the home towns had anything to do with it really. I don’t remember thinking about that. It was just that clearly, they came from the same musical place as we did, especially Peter [Buck, R.E.M. guitarist] and I, because the songwriting is just so strong, and the guitar playing so amazing, all the instrumentation was really amazing. So the fact that you could be that good at your instruments, and write songs that good, and sing that well, was just sort of exactly what we wanted to do.

NOISEY: What are the key tracks on the record for you?

MIKE MILLS: “Jesus Christ” has always stuck with me. I recorded a version of that for an R.E.M. Christmas single. “O, Dana” has always stuck with me. They’re so oddly fragmented, some of these songs, it’s just the most amazing thing. Those are the ones that got me first.

NOISEY: What about the big, bleak set pieces like “Big Black Car” or “Kangaroo”?

MIKE MILLS: Those took me a couple of times. “Holocaust,” you know, those ones, they’re so harrowing, my natural, sunny disposition was kind of shocked by those and it took me a little while to let my guard down and actually explore those, but they’re among the most moving. MORE

Photo by CRAIG MCDEAN via Interview

EDITOR’S NOTE: A shortened version of this interview first appeared on VICE’s NOISEY website on February 3, 2016

BY JONATHAN VALANIA In 1982, VU architect John Cale recorded Music For A New Society, an album of wrenching, emotionally-shattered torch songs that prophesied a denatured dystopia, somewhere between Blade Runner and Metropolis, looming ominously on the horizon, full of vintage violence and hysterical laughter, homicidal mothers and greedy angels with broken wings exfoliating the crawling skin of God. Thirty-four years later, we may not quite be there yet, but you can see it from here.

Which explains, in part, what prompted him to create a version 2.0, a radical re-imagining of Music For A New Society that pushes the envelope of modern recording technology called M:FANS. Late last month he released M:FANS/Music For A New Society, which pairs a remastered reissue of the original with the 21st century re-make.

For Cale, the new album is not so much about revisiting the past as it is about reinventing it as the present. M:FANS is arguably as good as anything he’s released since leaving the Velvet Underground after the release of White Light/White Heat in 1968 — maybe better. Forty-eight years and 16 solo albums later, he’s still bringing his A game. Not too shabby for a guy who turns 74 on March 8th. Last month, we got Cale on the horn to discuss the new album and take stock of all that has come before.

DISCUSSED: His opiated childhood; his abuse at the hands of a church organist; discovering Fluxus at the University of London; being taught the deafening power of silence by John Cage; exploring the infinite cosmic possibilities of drone and the raw power of an amplified viola with The Theater Of Eternal Music; inventing the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed; thriving amidst the mind-bending velocity of life inside Andy Warhol’s Factory; performing “Heroin” for Walter Cronkite; pissng off Cher; the real reason why he left the Velvet Underground; working with Nick Drake on Bryter Layter; the connection, or lack thereof, between creativity and recreational drug use; the time he cut the head off a live chicken onstage; and what he thinks of Wacka Flocka rapping over “Venus In Furs.”

NOISEY: First of all, let me say I think M:FANS is fucking great. I’m not just blowing sunshine up your skirt because you’re on the phone right now and I want to talk to you about the Velvet Underground. I think this is one of the best things you’ve ever done. I think Music For A New Society is good, but I think M:FANS is great. At 73 years of age, you’re making some of the most vital and cutting edge music of your career.

JOHN CALE: I agree with you.

NOISEY: Let’s go back to the making of the original album. The songs were largely improvised in the studio with tape rolling. What prompted that approach?

JOHN CALE: I wasn’t happy with the way albums were happening. I wanted to capture the immediacy of negotiating a way through the emotions of the song.

NOISEY: You said recently that listening to the original tapes of the Music For A New Society recording sessions was like re-opening old wounds. Back when the album came out, you told the Melody Maker, “That album was agony. It was like method acting. Madness. Excruciating. I just let myself go. It became a kind of therapy, a personal exorcism.” Where was your head at when you were making the album?

JOHN CALE: It was very confused.

NOISEY: Even though you are revisiting an album you made 36 years ago, I think M:FANS is really the antithesis of nostalgia. You’re not reliving the past, you’re reinventing it as the present.

JOHN CALE: I agree. I think the songs at the time that they were originally written, were really kind of trying to define where you were, and trying to understand how you got here and where you were going. Trying to be honest about the forces that were working against you, figuring it out.

NOISEY: Let’s go back to the very beginning. You were born in 1942 in the mining village of Garnant, Wales. Your mother was a school teacher who spoke fluent Welsh and brought you up to only speak Welsh. Your father was a coal miner who only spoke English. You did not learn to speak English until around the age of seven. So, the first seven years of your life on Earth, you were unable to communicate with your father. Is that correct?

JOHN CALE: Yeah, yeah. It’s true. The sense of identity you have as a kid is really tied to the language that you speak. If you’re being pointed out as being under-qualified in any way because of the language you speak, you’re trying to gain somebody’s trust at every minute of the day. The only thing you have is music, which replaces language very easily. It becomes the way which you communicate with people easiest. I clung onto that.

NOISEY: I read that you were somewhat sickly as a child, and heavily-medicated and essentially tripping all the time, is that true?

JOHN CALE: Yes, if you had bronchitis as a kid they had one suggestion for you: this mixture that was pretty much just opium. It was this chemical. I had very bad bronchitis, and it kept you breathing quietly so that you could sleep at night. You’d end up sitting in your bedroom, looking at the wallpaper, and the flowers would change and all that.

NOISEY: You’ve spoken publicly about the fact that when you were boy you were molested by the church organist who was was giving you organ lessons. How did that impact your perspective on organized religion or, for that matter, the existence of God?

JOHN CALE: No, no. I can’t blame religion for what happened there. I feel such a sense of betrayal about it, that I don’t know. I can say I don’t know with a sense of despair.

NOISEY: You don’t know whether there’s a God or not?

JOHN CALE: Yeah, because it really comes back to, “Why didn’t my parents protect me from this?” And they couldn’t.

NOISEY: You studied music at the University of London, you became an acolyte of the Fluxus art movement, which in many ways had very similar ethos to punk. There’s this creative destruction element, ‘we had to destroy the village to save it.’

JOHN CALE: Some of Fluxus is like that. At the same time, it was explosive and experimental and cathartic. I mean, there were some very good ideas there, with [Fluxus founder] George Maciunas. He was a very strange individual, but he was also very forward-thinking. Maciunas was responsible for the establishment of [New York’s] SoHo [district]. He was the one who looked at those buildings — because he was an architect — he looked at those buildings and said, “Hey, these buildings are not going to fall down, these buildings are gonna have to be bombed to bring them down.” The rents were ridiculous. You had things like AIR, Artists In Residence. If you wrote a poem, you could go down to the city and say, look, I’m an artist. This is my poem. I want this special rent deal over here. Fabulous.

NOISEY: You came to New York in ’63 on a scholarship to study music. You quickly enmesh yourself in the avant-garde world. You participated with John Cage in an eighteen-hour piano-playing marathon…

JOHN CALE: Right, Satie.

NOISEY: …of Erik Satie’s “Vexations.” I’m guessing that Cage was a hero of yours by this point.

JOHN CALE: Cage was the guy. He really opened my eyes. The internal life of a musician in Europe was distorted by the Second World War. There were all of these problems about how you really have to prove the social worth of what you were doing before composing it. There was all of these memories of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting for Hitler. And the history of the Second World War. The intellectual basis of creativity was really being distorted. Then all of a sudden, Cage comes along, and he has this book [called Silence], and it’s really full of Zen koans. All of a sudden, my head turned around. I got this clarity from Zen that was — humor was all right, but you never talk about God. It was kind of an intellectual emancipation for me.

NOISEY: Around that time you joined the LaMonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music [pictured above, right], which was all about exploring the infinite cosmic possibilities of drone. Is that when you first came upon the idea of electrifying the viola?

JOHN CALE: Yeah. Tony Conrad showed up one day. He used to bow the guitar, and he put a pick up on the guitar. And it sounded gorgeous. Then, he got another one, and I put it on the viola. Slowly, holding a drone with two strings, I filed the bridge down until it was a three-string drone, and it became a very powerful instrument.

NOISEY: I think that music still sounds incredibly radical 50 years later. I can’t imagine what that sounded like to people back in 1963. It must have just sounded like it was coming from Mars.

JOHN CALE: They didn’t like it. At one concert somebody yelled out, ‘LaMont, you should be ashamed of yourself!’

NOISEY: You met Lou Reed when you were hired to be a member of The Primitives, a band invented by Pickwick Records, a Long Island label and Brill-style songwriting factory that specialized in cheap knock-offs of the radio hits of the day. Lou had written and recorded a song called “The Ostrich” under the name of an imaginary band called The Primitives, in the hopes it would become the latest dance craze, like “The Twist.” And Pickwick sent you guys out to play high school dances in the tri-state area. How do you come into the picture?

JOHN CALE: Tony and I were discovered by Pickwick when we were at a party, they thought we looked like we were in a band. We got invited to Pickwick Records, and I went along and ran into Lou. All of a sudden, it became a discussion of literature, and who are the greatest writers in modern literature, and so on.

NOISEY: The Primitives were pretty much over before they began. But you and Lou start working on your own music, which would eventually become The Velvet Underground. There’s a passage in Transformer, Victor Bockris’ Lou Reed bio, about your apartment on Ludlow Street, where a lot of the early Velvet Underground sound and songs were born. I wanted to read this passage back to you, and you tell me if he got it right, OK?

JOHN CALE: OK.

NOISEY: “The whole place was sparsely furnished with mattresses on the floor, and orange crates that served as furniture and firewood. Bare light bulbs lit the dark rooms, paint and plaster chipped from the woodwork and walls. There was no heat or hot water and the landlord collected the $30 rent with a gun. When it got cold, they often sat hunched over instruments with carpets wrapped around their shoulders. When the toilet stopped up, they picked up the shit and threw it out the window. For sustenance, they cooked a big pot of porridge and made humongous vegetable pancakes, eating the glop day and night as if it were fuel.” That about right?

JOHN CALE: I don’t know about throwing shit out the window, but yeah, that’s pretty much it.

NOISEY: I don’t know what’s crazier about that story, that the landlord shows up with a gun to collect the rent, or that there was a time when you could rent an apartment in Manhattan for $30.

There’s another passage from Transformer that I would like to read back to you about this period, where it talks about how the songs evolved, and how they were written: “Lou could be the sweetest, most charming companion socially, but he was virtually always a motherfucker to work with. His biggest problem apart from demanding complete control, and having a Himalayan ego, was a matter of credit. Just as The Rolling Stones had done when creating their music, The Velvet Underground worked up almost all their songs collectively. Reed, who composed the simple inspirational chord structures, or sketchy lyrics, was under the impression, however, that he had single-handedly crafted masterpieces like “Heroin,” “Venus In Furs,” “I’m Waiting For The Man,” “Black Angel’s Death Song,” etc. In truth, although Reed undoubtedly supplied the brilliant lyrics and chord structures, the various and greater parts of the music — Cale’s viola, Sterling Morrison’s guitar, Angus MacLise’s drumming — were invented by each individually. In short, Reed should have shared the majority of the credits with the other members of the band.”

JOHN CALE: We all agreed that on the business side of things that we should really share the publishing. That is, everybody had a piece of the publishing of Lou’s songs, of all the songs we did for The Banana Album, the idea was that we all got a piece of the publishing as long as we were a band. That was the driving factor in Lou deciding not to go any further with it.

NOISEY: Not to go any further with what? Working with you?

JOHN CALE: Well, when he decided “That’s it. I’m not doing this anymore,” he told [VU drummer] Mo Tucker and Sterling, “You can go with John, but I’m not working with John anymore.”

NOISEY: It really just came down to money?

JOHN CALE: Yeah. I mean, you gotta understand, by that time, we were really struggling to get along with each other on the road, because there were so many things going on. So many chemicals in the air. Rational thinking was not something we were proud of at the time. That finally drove things to this point. He also had somebody that he suddenly discovered was really somebody that could help him deliver that circumstance. He found a manager.

NOISEY: Steve Sesnick?

JOHN CALE: Yeah. All of a sudden, Steve came in and said, “This is Lou’s band. You’re sidemen.” It was a big mistake.

NOISEY: I think that is the biggest mistake that Lou Reed ever made. You guys should have made many, many albums together.

JOHN CALE: Yeah. He’d also fired Andy without telling anybody around that time. So yes, I agree that it shut the door on a lot of possibilities. Lou had a habit of doing that.

NOISEY: I’m curious about what your personal relationship with Andy Warhol was like. He just seems so emotionally elusive and impossible to decipher. I’m wondering if there was a side of Warhol that you got to know that’s not reflected in the mythology that’s surrounding him?

JOHN CALE: No, I don’t think so. I mean, we never got that close, but there was a very warm working relationship, you know? This thing about work. We got to The Factory, and all that stuff that was going on around us, with all the stars walking in and out. It was head-bending, but at the end of the day it was this concentration on work, and how hard work was really how you do it. That’s what we wanted. We just wanted to play all the time.

NOISEY: I’ve seen the film footage of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, what was it like being at the center of that? Did you feel a sense of power and control that all of these lights and sounds and people were moving according to your dictates, or was it all just chaos and you just felt like one more cog in the machinery of sensory overload?

JOHN CALE: I think so. I remember Walter Cronkite came to see us at The Dom for a news piece about youth culture. You gotta understand that from a musical point of view: there were these four guys up onstage with their backs toward the audience, with shades on all night. This beautiful blonde chanteuse in the middle, and we had three amplifiers. All the guitars, all the voices, went through these three amplifiers. The speakers would blow because there was too much going on in them.

NOISEY: I’m trying to imagine Walter Cronkite standing in the middle of all this madness.

JOHN CALE: Yeah, and Jackie Kennedy.

NOISEY: Cher saw the EPI and her verdict was, in my opinion, the greatest moment in rock criticism: “It will replace nothing but suicide.”

JOHN CALE: Yeah, I agree. It’s fabulous. We were so proud of that.

NOISEY: Moving forward post-Velvets, you sort of become this Zelig of rock ‘n’ roll.

JOHN CALE: [laughs] That’s funny.

JOHN CALE: You were present for all of these touchstone rock ‘n’ roll moments. You produced the iconic debuts by The Stooges, The Modern Lovers and The Patti Smith Group. It’s a little known fact that you played on Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter. Tell me about working with him. What was your take on the man? Was he inconsolable and mopey and depressed all the time?

JOHN CALE: Very fragile. And gentle. I was really in on the action after the basic tracks were done, and all of the singing was done. I just overdubbed a bunch of things on the album.

NOISEY: Can we talk briefly about the role that drugs played creatively? Was the drug use all negative, or was there positive things that came out of that? Was it able to open you up to new ideas, new ways of seeing or hearing things?

JOHN CALE: Well, at one point, I thought that was possible. After I stopped, I realized how much time was wasted, because as soon as I stopped, my output multiplied. I could get through more ideas, I could get through more songs, investigate more sounds.

NOISEY: By the mid-’70s, your music took a darker turn. Louder, more abrasive. You had a much more confrontational live approach. You performed wearing a hockey goalie mask. But that attitude of yours dovetailed with the rise of the punk scene. I read somewhere that during one gig in Croydon that you chopped the head of a chicken off with a meat cleaver, and the band walked offstage in protest? Tell me about that.

JOHN CALE: Unfortunately, my band were vegetarians. We were coming down from Oxford, and I had my tour manager stop at a farm and get me a chicken. I said, “Look, put the chicken in a box, and don’t show it to anybody.” Just come out with a box, and put the box in the gear van, and just leave it there.” So, of course, he went in, and what does he do? Like any roadie, he’ll say, “OK, now’s my time to screw the artist.” He brought it out, and showed everybody that he had a chicken there. Everybody in the band went quiet. Then the questions started, “What are you gonna do with the chicken?” I said, “Nothing.” They said, “Well, are you gonna hurt it?” “No, man, come on.” For the gig, I brought this beautiful meat cleaver.

You know, the thing was, at those punk gigs, slam dancing was going on and also a lot of gobbing going on. Everyone was drinking. It was a form of adulation, in a way. Everybody was hot and steamy onstage, and then you get a splat of beer or whatever it was. And you’d be soaked. So, I thought, well, you wanna think about this then. I brought up the chicken, chopped its head off, and threw it in the audience. The audience was like, “Holy shit!” After the show, I actually found the chicken’s head laying on the ground at the back of the room. Everybody stayed away from it. [Laughs]

NOISEY: Didn’t the band storm off in protest, though?

JOHN CALE: Yeah. The next day I spent the afternoon in the van teaching my new band the songs.

NOISEY: Have you heard this sample of “Venus In Furs” in the song “Ask Charlemagne” by the rapper Waka Flocka?

JOHN CALE: Yes, I have. It was great until the changes started happening. They should’ve used the drone all the way through it.

NOISEY: Has the new society you refer to on Music For A New Society finally arrived 34 years later?

JOHN CALE: No.

NOISEY: What is that new society you’re envisioning? Is it utopian or dystopian?

JOHN CALE: Dystopian.

NOISEY: It seems pretty dystopian to me, my friend.

JOHN CALE: [laughs]

NOISEY: Last question: Do you still think that fear is a man’s best friend?

JOHN CALE: Yes. Always keep one eye in the back of your head.

Music for a New Society/M:FANS is out now via Domino

Why Philly? A lot of people in your situation would have chosen New York.
I couldn’t afford to move to New York. Besides, Philadelphia is really a good city and a pretty creative place. I guess it’s tougher than New York in terms of the competition because everybody hates each other. If you can make it out of Philly, you have pretty tough skin. I also got a scholarship to go to university there, so school was another reason. MORE

Vice founder Suroosh Alvi goes to Mecca with mom and dad. Takes camera. Fascinating, Captain.