Creativity Quote by John Cale

That line lands because it weaponizes a familiar rock trope and turns it inside out. Sunglasses onstage are supposed to signal cool detachment: the performer as untouchable icon, buffered from the room. John Cale rewrites the accessory as armor against something uglier and more intimate - the audience’s visibility. Not noise, not heckling, not nerves. Their faces.

The joke is savage, but it’s not just contempt-for-the-crowd posturing. Cale came up in a scene where performance wasn’t designed to be “relatable.” Between the Velvet Underground’s confrontational minimalism and his own art-music pedigree, he’s always treated the stage less like a meet-and-greet and more like a lab. The subtext is that the audience isn’t a partner in communion; it’s a variable that distorts the experiment. Sunglasses become a way to preserve the music’s internal logic when the room wants entertainment, validation, or a story to post.

It also admits something vulnerable: being seen is the risk, not the reward. The audience’s gaze isn’t flattering; it’s consuming, evaluative, hungry. By saying he “couldn’t stand the sight,” Cale flips the usual power dynamic. We assume crowds are there to be impressed; he suggests they’re there to take, to demand a version of the artist that feels good to them.

The best sting is that it’s probably half-true. That’s why it works: it reads like misanthropy, but it’s really a confession about what performance costs when you refuse to play lovable.