John Davies Cale was born on 9 March 1942, in the Amman Valley, South Wales UK, of Welsh descent, and is a singer-songwriter and record producer, perhaps still best known for being one of the foundation members of the band Velvet Underground, an American experimental group in the 1960s.
So just how rich is John Cale, as of late 2016? Authoritative sources estimate that Cale’s net worth is now over $10 million, accumulated during a career in the music industry which now spans more than 50 years.
John was raised bi-lingual by his Welsh schoolteacher mother; his father was a coal miner. John eventually enrolled at the University of London, studying music at Goldsmith’s College; apparently his instrument then was the viola. He engaged largely in classical music, conducting and writing, but became interested in rock too, and travelled to the US in 1963, meeting musicians and composers in New York City, and even participating in an 18-hour marathon of piano-playing, the first full-length performance of”Vexations” by Erik Satie, with John Cage among others.
John Cale co-founded Velvet Underground with Lou Reed in early 1965, enlisting Angus MacLise and Sterling Morrison for the line-up. Their first performance earned them $75, but in 1967 their first album “The Velvet Underground & Nico” – featuring the German singer-songwriter – was released featuring Cale on bass guitar, piano and viola, as well as vocals, followed by “White Light/White Heat” in 1968, with Cale adding organ to his repertoire. The modest popularity of these albums started Cales’s net worth. Artistic tensions between Cale and Reed then saw John leave the band, and move into a solo career.
John now concentrated on arranging and producing, but also supporting artists with his ability on a number of instruments, including collaborations with Nico. His extensive list of collaborators spanning the next three decades includes La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Cranes, Nick Drake, Kevin Ayers, Patti Smith, the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Marc Almond, Squeeze, Happy Mondays, LCD Soundsystem, the Replacements,and Siouxsie and the Banshees. All contributed to his net worth.
However, John has been prolific as a solo artist too, releasing more than 30 albums over the years, ranging from “Vintage Violence” in 1970 and classified as folk-pop, ” Paris 1919″ (1973) with complex, arcane lyrics, to the punk rock “Sabotage” (1979). The commercially aimed “Artificial Intelligence”(1985) actually failed to hit the target, after which he took a break of several years, before releasing a number of albums setting the poems of Dylan Thomas to musical accompaniment.
Albums since and more recently have included “Walking on Locusts” (1996), “HoboSapiens” (2003), “BlackAcetate” (2005), “Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood” (2012), and “M:FANS” (2016), with varied commercial success which does not appear to have detracted too much from his net worth.
In recognition of of musical ability and contributions to the music world, Cale as a member of Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, and in 2010 was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire(OBE).
In his personal life, John Cale married Betsey Johnson in 1968, but that lasted just a year. He then married Cindy Wells in 1971 – they divorced in 1975. His third marriage was to Risé Irushalmi in 1981 – they had a daughter, but divorced in 1997. John has confessed to relatively mild drug use over a number of years, until the birth of his daughter in 1985, but which he still believes effected his playing and composing ability, reflected in some of the albums he recorded. He subsequently hosted a documentary entitled “Heroin, Wales and Me”, identifying the dangers of heroin use in particular.
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