John Cale is a Welsh musician, composer and producer, born John Davies Cale on 9 March 1942 in Garnant. After studying music at Goldsmiths in London, he went to the United States in 1963 on Aaron Copland’s recommendation for the Tanglewood programme, and that September took part in an eighteen-hour relay performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations in New York.
In New York he played viola in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music alongside Tony Conrad and Marian Zazeela, learning to hold a single tuned sound for very long spans. He then co-founded the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, and his electrically amplified viola on the band’s 1967 debut album brought that sustained drone into rock. He left the group in September 1968 and went on to produce Nico’s The Marble Index (1968) and the first album by the Stooges (1969), alongside a long solo career.