John Cale

John Cale is many things: avant-chamber-classicist, student of La Monte Young, soundtracker to films American Psycho and Basquiat. He’s been celebrated recently for contributing couture outfits by Yamamoto and Gaultier to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 125th anniversary and a vivid autobiography, What’s Welsh for Zen. Then there’s this solo show in connection to the Rudi Gernreich exhibit at ICA, donated in part due to Cale’s friendship with ICA director Claudia Gould. Cale’s ties to Gernreich’s androgyny-driven designs come via Cale’s partnership with Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground, that non-swinging drone thing they created under Warhol’s publicity hungry nose. The VU’s anti-pop was a most radically rude part of the Pop era. The band’s last gasp was fantastically captured (sans Cale) by guitarist Robert Quine for a first in a series of boxes The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (Universal). Pulled from three 1969 shows, VUBSVol1 proves Cale/Reed classics "White Light/White Heat" and "Sister Ray" — moments made momentously torturous by Cale — to be quite pop-rocky, accessible even. This ultimately reveals that Cale, the man who once screamed "fear is a man’s best friend," and his chamber pop can be jovial and exquisitely civil. When it wants to be. Having witnessed many sides of solo-Cale, anything’s possible.

—A.D. Amorosi

Fri., Sept. 14, 8 p.m., $21-$31, Zellerbach Theatre at Annenberg Center for the Arts, 3680 Walnut St., 215-898-3900.