Manhattan is a very long way from south Wales but, even at an early age, the thoughts of John Cale were already flying around the Lower East Side. Long before the Velvet Underground, Cale's position in the creative life of that city was a persistent dream he was to nurture and pursue with quiet and steady determination. By the age of seven, he had realised that music defined who he was. The only place for him would be within that vibrant community of beat poets and avant-garde musicians who thrived in downtown New York. He would lie awake at nights imagining how John Cage might well be performing his silent "Four Minutes and Thirty Three Seconds" at that very moment. And this, he says, is what "kept his heart alive" - the knowledge that only 3,000 miles away, these people were actually alive and that he would one day join them.
Born on March 9th, 1942, in the village of Garnant, John Cale was the only child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher. According to his autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen, his was a childhood of fairly mixed experience, some of it happy, but much of it certainly very unhappy. He had a nervous breakdown at 16 and recalls that his teenage fantasies concerned either suicide or his planned escape to New York. Music was to provide his only outlet and it was quite evident that he had a prodigious talent. As a 13-year-old violist he joined the Welsh Youth Orchestra and here, for the first time, he made friends and found some vital fellow-travellers.
Cale's next step on the road to New York would be Goldsmiths' College in London. Here he met the musician Cornelius Cardew, who took him yet one step closer to the avant-garde New York scene. Soon Cale was in correspondence with John Cage and Aaron Copland. Copland later interviewed him for a place at Tanglewood College in Massachusetts. On his last day at Goldsmiths', Cale, having been voted "most hateful student" by his heads of department, organised a performance of what he considered "incendiary" new music. This included La Monte Young's X, which involved pallbearers carrying a corpse and dustbin lids as Cale knelt at the piano and pounded it with his elbows. While the authorities were certainly not amused, Cale was past caring. He had already been awarded a Leonard Bernstein scholarship and, at last, he was off to the US. "As I walked towards the Pan Am jet with a sense of incredulity and excitement that I had never before experienced, I found myself looking at the sky."
In the early pages of the autobiography, Cale makes two telling observations which will be of particular interest to those who have followed his career through the Velvet Underground and beyond. The first concerns his asthmatic attacks for which he was given Dr Brown's syrup, a cough mixture laced with opium. This caused the young Cale to hallucinate, and, rather than sleep, he would lie awake at night and watch the wallpaper come alive. This, he suggests, might have set up an early connection between music and drugs, yet another destructive relationship he was to pursue as far as he possibly could.
The second point concerns musical collaboration. After the death of her own father, Cale's mother stopped playing the piano. Having been so "inspired and comfortable" when she was around, he had come to find her presence a crucial one. This, he says, is the origin of his absolute need for a collaborator, not only to complete the work but to actually complete himself. Throughout his career that very need to collaborate was to produce his finest work.
Cale's most significant collaborator had been born in Brooklyn exactly one week before him a coincidence which, Cale jokes, always gave the other musician the edge. His name was Lewis (Lou) Reed - a young musician who was working as a production line songwriter for Pickwick Records. Cale had been asked to join a fictitious outfit called The Primitives which would promote one of Reed's Pickwick songs called The Ostrich, and he agreed. Artistically it was an inauspicious start, but there was much more to come.
Cale was, at the time, a 22-year-old classical musician involved in the avant-garde and working with La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music. Reed was a 22-year-old rock 'n' roller, but with a literary sensibility that was rare in rock music. The two men connected almost immediately, both of them excited at the possibilities of combining their respective talents. And so began a period of extraordinary song-writing and equally extraordinary drug-taking.
The relationship between the two is usually compared with the other great rock 'n' roll collaborations such as Jagger and Richards and Lennon and McCartney. As Cale points out, critics usually take the view that it is precisely the tension between these artists which has led to such phenomenal creativity, but he also asks the questions whether it always has to be such "a war of attrition". He always wanted, he says, to find "the joy in creative completion" he had felt as a child. According to the book however, this was to prove quite impossible given the personality of Cale's chief collaborator.
And this is where readers might have certain reservations about Cale's book. His sidekick in the project is Victor Bockris who has previously dealt extensively with New York's downtown scene. He has written books on Warhol, Burroughs and the Velvet Underground and published a biography of Lou Reed which tended to present its subject as the Devil incarnate - only worse. Reed doesn't fare too well in Cale's book either, given that one of the obvious legacies of the Velvet Underground is that Cale never got enough credit for being the sonic brains behind the band. But then maybe Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker didn't get enough credit either. And surely Reed can't be blamed for everything? Particularly as the front-man always gets the flowers.
The particular problem for me, however, is that I don't really know what I'm talking about. I certainly don't know enough about Lou Reed to be able to defend him with any authority (and I've certainly never had to make a record with him) but on those occasions when I've been in his company, the man has been as nice as nine-pence. My point is simply that Bockris has previously displayed an angle on Reed which, to my mind, is worryingly typical of much rock 'n' roll mythologising - something which always causes me to step on the brakes. Cale too has an angle on Reed and, while it ought to be taken more seriously than that of Bockris, it is an angle nevertheless.
But there was creative life after the Velvets. As a producer, John Cale was a hugely significant figure. His involvement in pre-punk, punk and new-wave, just like that of Reed, cannot be underestimated. He did, after all, produce albums by The Stooges, Patti Smith and Jonathan Richman, while continually bringing out influential though erratic records of his own, collaborating with everyone from Brian Eno to Bob Neuwirth. In 1990 he was back with Reed for Songs for Drella - a tribute record to their old mentor and manager Andy Warhol. The musical success of the project was to lead to a couple of Velvet Underground reunions in the early 1990s, but again, none of it was to last. Lou's fault of course.
What's Welsh for Zen, the Autobiography of John Cale is a rarity among rock autobiographies - it's a good read. Cale, like Lou Reed, is a particularly intelligent rocker who still believes in rock music. It is "as valid as any other art form" he says. "It's constantly changing. Not too long ago I heard somebody going over what he couldn't listen to in rock 'n' roll. He couldn't listen to rap. He couldn't listen to Kurt Cobain, because they were both really destructive and depressing. And I thought to myself, now, I've heard all this before. That's the purpose of rock 'n' roll, to legitimise your personal grievance."
It has often been said that John Cale is one of the greatest musicians to have ever involved himself in rock. Bringing with him the sensibilities of classical and avant-garde music, he sometimes even managed to replace the black roots of rock with something entirely different and original. In the company of Reed, Tucker and Morrison, he undeniably made some of the best rock music ever recorded and deserves full recognition for it. That said, Cale is entirely dismissive of any talk of his influence. "I found the resurgence of interest in the Velvet Underground, and in particular an attempt to see their influence everywhere, fatuous. I don't think rock and roll is based on influence. The notion of the father figure handing down the baton is a classical thing. In rock and roll, people sound similar, but they don't influence anyone. One of rock and roll's distinct, precious qualities is that individuality counts for more than almost anything."
And so, this very individual book is essential reading, not just for individual Velvet Underground fans, but also for all those thousands of bands who, by sheer coincidence, sound exactly like them.
What's Welsh for Zen, the Autobiography of John Cale is published by Bloomsbury at £22