On September 16, 1963, a 21-year-old Welsh musician named John Cale made an appearance on the CBS game show program I’ve Got a Secret. His “secret” was that he was one of several pianists to have taken part in an 18-hour performance of composer Erik Satie’s Vexations, a short composition that, at Satie’s instruction, is intended to be played 840 times in succession. Watch as the show’s contestants guess at Cale’s secret and that of the other secret-holder, Karl Schenzer.

As becomes clear, Schenzer was the only person to stay for the entire performance of Vexations, which took place just a week before this taping on September 9, 1963 at the Pocket Theater in New York City. Along with Cale, a few of the other distinguished pianists involved were musicologist/ragtime revivalist Joshua Rifkin and the now-legendary composer John Cage.

Cale would make some serious marks on rock and avant-garde music in the following years, playing strings in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music (aka the Dream Syndicate) and co-founding the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed in 1965. His solo career is filled with highlights: he continues to be an interesting, compelling artist, but for those starting out, you can’t go wrong with early classics like 1970’s Vintage Violence, 1973’s Paris 1919, or 1974’s Fear.