As the classically trained member of the Velvet Underground, few would have been surprised had John Cale gone the avant-garde route. And he did just that on 1971’s Church of Anthrax (a collaboration with Terry Riley) and 1972’s The Academy in Peril.But on his 1970 debut Vintage Violence, Cale produced a collection of more or less conventional rock songs that had virtually nothing in common with Cale’s contributions to such VU songs as “The Gift” and “Lady Godiva’s Operation.”

What was even more surprising were Cale’s influences. Country rock is the last thing you would associate with Cale, but one can hear its echoes on no less than six of Vintage Violence’s ten songs, most often in the guitar playing of Garland Jeffreys–a rock and reggae guy no one would have associated with the country rock either. One can only wonder how to account for this. Did someone dump Hee Haw into the studio water supply? Mix Gram Parsons into his Welsh rarebit?

But the John Cale of Vintage Violence is still John Cale, the off-kilter singer-songwriter capable of veering from lovely ballads to flights of whimsy (“Ski Patrol” from 1975’s Slow Dazzle is a hilarious must-hear). Cale’s lyrics make obvious he’s every bit as conversant with the poetry of the French surrealists as he is the traditional love song, and the only thing missing on Vintage Violence is the cocaine-induced paranoia that would crop up later on songs like “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend” and “Gun”–which is odd given that “violence” in the LP’s title.