John Cale

John Cale Where: Royce Hall (UCLA), 340 Royce Drive When: 8 p.m. Thursday Price: $38 to $68 Info: http://www.uclalive.com

John Cale Where: Royce Hall (UCLA), 340 Royce Drive When: 8 p.m. Thursday Price: $38 to $68 Info: http://www.uclalive.com

"When we started in the '60s we were trying to be radical and commercial at the same time, which is really opening a can of worms," says John Cale, recalling the heyday of the Velvet Underground. "When we got on stage we turned up the amps, destroyed the equipment, acted unsociable. It wasn't entertainment, it was aversion therapy--but with a human side."

Whether featuring Pavement, the Pixies or the Police, reunion concerts have become the default when it comes to live music. John Cale's restaging of his classic 1973 album "Paris 1919" ? hitting UCLA's Royce Hall on Thursday ? transcends a mere nostalgia trip, however. For one, "Paris 1919" doesn't have the mainstream consumer awareness of, say, "Zenyatta Mondatta": It remains as challenging a work as it is gorgeous and nuanced. In a 9.5 Pitchfork review of the album's 2006 reissue, critic Matthew Murphy praised the album's "stately, haunted grandeur," concluding, "For better or worse, Cale has never again made another record quite like 'Paris 1919,' at least in part, one suspects, because so many in his audience have since longed for him to do so. " As such, many consider "Paris 1919" the idiosyncratic pinnacle to Cale's thrilling yet perverse career, despite the fact it never topped the charts.

Listeners got something more than mere songs from avant-garde rock pioneer John Cale during his Monday performance at the Key Club. It was art. And music. Art music. Two great tastes that tasted great together -- at least, as mixed by this master.

Given a title like "Vintage Violence," listeners might expect some pretty fierce lyrics and music from this album. But instead John Cale, emerging for the first time since he'd left the Velvet Underground in 1968, transmitted the toughness of the era in quite classical terms. Cale was and is a rare bird in pop music: a trained musician. A native of Wales, he first came to America on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship, and his classical training illuminates this beautiful record.

One of the great benefits of the compact disc revolution is that hundreds of underappreciated--indeed, previously deleted--albums have been given new life. Among them: John Cale's "Paris 1919," an inspired, sometimes elegant work, arguably the iconoclastic Welshman's most accessible effort. Some of the melodies here are so rich and enticing that it's hard to understand why this album didn't make more of a commercial dent when it was released more than 20 years ago.

Few rock musicians have pursued an agenda as diverse as John Cale's. His hugely influential first band, the Velvet Underground, was marginal in its time (1965-70) but since has become a rock-cultural monument. The Velvets are recognized as the cornerstone of the "alternative" rock movement that, shockingly, has come to occupy a penthouse suite in the commercial edifice of '90s pop.

Whether featuring Pavement, the Pixies or the Police, reunion concerts have become the default when it comes to live music. John Cale's restaging of his classic 1973 album "Paris 1919" ? hitting UCLA's Royce Hall on Thursday ? transcends a mere nostalgia trip, however. For one, "Paris 1919" doesn't have the mainstream consumer awareness of, say, "Zenyatta Mondatta": It remains as challenging a work as it is gorgeous and nuanced. In a 9.5 Pitchfork review of the album's 2006 reissue, critic Matthew Murphy praised the album's "stately, haunted grandeur," concluding, "For better or worse, Cale has never again made another record quite like 'Paris 1919,' at least in part, one suspects, because so many in his audience have since longed for him to do so. " As such, many consider "Paris 1919" the idiosyncratic pinnacle to Cale's thrilling yet perverse career, despite the fact it never topped the charts.

You don't often hear the name John Cale and the words "street fair" together, but that was the case Saturday when the Velvet Underground veteran was among the top acts playing Day 1 of the annual Sunset Junction Street Fair.

You don't often hear the name John Cale and the words "street fair" together, but that was the case Saturday when the Velvet Underground veteran was among the top acts playing Day 1 of the annual Sunset Junction Street Fair.

Listeners got something more than mere songs from avant-garde rock pioneer John Cale during his Monday performance at the Key Club. It was art. And music. Art music. Two great tastes that tasted great together -- at least, as mixed by this master.

Velvet Underground founding member John Cale is an iconoclast of legendary passions. At the El Rey Theatre, where he performed on Wednesday, he delivered little of his trademark disturbing theatrics. At times reminiscent of Leonard Cohen--but without Cohen's pointed attack and agility with irony, Cale came across as tame as the bouncy avant-pop on the new "Walking on Locusts," his first rock album in a decade.

Consistently hailed for his literary character monologues and luminous stories of anomie, David Cale has long eschewed the identity politics that continue to dominate performance art. And so it's somewhat ironic that Cale is returning to Los Angeles--after a seven-year absence--on a bill called "Identities: An Evening of Solo Performance," at Cal State L.A.'s Luckman Fine Arts Complex Friday and Saturday. The evening also also features Jude Narita, Blondell Cummings and Ruben Sierra.

John Cale came to the Coach House on Monday to promote a new double-CD compilation of his post-Velvet Underground music. So he played a set with hardly any songs from the collection. A typically contrary gesture from the 52-year-old musician, whose varied body of work has been treasured by a loyal cult that's followed his moves from rock psychodrama to orchestrated Dylan Thomas poems, from stately, folk-like ballads to ambitious song cycles.

John Cale brought an amalgam of rock, musical theater and classical methods to the Coach House on Monday night. A classically trained composer and one-time member of minimalist La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music, he perhaps is best known as co-founder of the Velvet Underground, the rock band that traveled with Andy Warhol as part of his mid-'60s mixed-media show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. However, before a moderate audience here, he brought only glimmers of an experimental bent.

If you want simple answers, don't ask John Cale or Bob Neuwirth what their collaborative album "Last Day on Earth" is about. "It is non-specific in time and it's an interior/exterior travelogue, as seen through the sensibilities of the habitues of the mythical Cafe Shabu," said Neuwirth with a shrug as he sat in the Universal City offices of MCA Records, which released the album Tuesday. Cale, in a separate interview from his home in New York, wasn't any more helpful.

The late Andy Warhol, who prospered in part by creating portraits of the famous, is now on the receiving end. The medium is music, and the artists are two essential rock figures whose careers Warhol helped launch 25 years ago. The work is "Songs for Drella," a 15-song biography of the Pop Art icon that marks the first collaboration by Lou Reed and John Cale since their stormy partnership in the Velvet Underground, the band that Warhol shepherded into rock legend in the swinging '60s.

Few rock musicians have pursued an agenda as diverse as John Cale's. His hugely influential first band, the Velvet Underground, was marginal in its time (1965-70) but since has become a rock-cultural monument. The Velvets are recognized as the cornerstone of the "alternative" rock movement that, shockingly, has come to occupy a penthouse suite in the commercial edifice of '90s pop.