Waiting for Blonde

A long-time New Yorker like John Cale surely couldn't resist the lure of adding a "September 11 song" to his catalog, right? I mean, Leonard Cohen gave in, Bruce Springsteen went concept album, and Neil Young and Paul McCartney managed to plumb some career-low depths in their attempts. Even Lou wrote poetry to grapple with the event.


No, dear reader, he couldn't resist. But he did exercise an astonishing amount of restraint back in 2003, working on the 5 Tracks EP and really stretching the boundaries of his songwriting. It was a very fertile time in his later career, and "Waiting for Blonde" benefits a great deal from the amount of experience, closely observed human interaction, and narrative trickiness poured into it.

It opens with transit station samples, followed by a laggy beat and a stop-and-go baseline that starts out faint and pensive. Viola creates a haze made thicker by various electronic trickery. Cale makes a statement of purpose: he's giving us a preview of a play he intends to write, about a subway car hawker. With that single line of setup, he switches into the hawker's voice.

The hawker speaks in repetitive phrases: "I am a very good businessman. Good morning ladies and gentlemen," selling batteries (including the MIGHTY C BATTERY) and taunting (?) the people on the train who are "waiting for Blonde: You are New Yorkers. You are the very best." The title is never explained, and doesn't need to be.

Halfway through the song, after the first chorus, it hits the bridge: everything stops, turns; the tension ratchets up. "Your skin is crawling; your tongue is in a trance. Remember you are New Yorkers, and this is your last chance. Good morning ladies and gentlemen - good morning! Step away from the closing doors." The finality with which that familiar exhortation is delivered is really striking.

For the final section of the song, Cale gives a lesson in NYC subway geography (I'm still a little unclear which station the song is supposed to be set in.) It's obvious that he's going for the WTC, though: familiar names pop up "the Z train and Port Authority; the PATH train" -- and here he slips the crumbling-civilization dagger in -- "and all stations to Atlantis."

An ambiguous, haunting track that actually succeeds in its stated aim as theatre, and addresses a catastrophe and tragedy without being trite or stupid. Not bad, Mr. Cale. Not bad at all.

Now, if only I could figure out the scat backing vocals at the end. "The spider sat beside her to the left"...?

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The Moon Her Majesty

Celebrating the just-past full moon in June, here's another little oddity from the late Nineties, when our man was happy to do recitations for just about anybody who asked. Mr. Cale recorded this poem as a spoken-word piece for the Kerouac tribute Joy Kicks Darkness. I can only assume he composed the music as well, as the quasi-ambient keyboards certainly fit his style and sound. There's not really that much to discuss in the content: analysis of Kerouac certainly isn't my game.

I will say that I prefer Cale's planetarium-music reading of the piece to the author's own looney tunes take (props to Funeral Pudding), though Cale's recitation of "little spritely otay" is probably the most sheepish he's ever sounded on record. In parts, he makes Kerouac's writing sound like Dylan Thomas, which is something of an achievement.

I'd really like to make this available for download, but it's on Amazon MP3. Warren Zevon's recording of Running Through Chinese Poem Song, another poem about the moon (a jaundiced look at Apollo), is worth picking up for contrast. (Note: Amazon's track artist listings are completely wrong for this album. Which is somewhat appropriate.)

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Ship of Fools

Part of the insane fun of following John Cale is engaging in cross-referential snipe hunts in an attempt to get inside Cale's head. For instance, one might listen to "Cable Hogue" and have one's curiosity piqued enough to pick up the bizarro Sam Peckinpah film The Ballad of Cable Hogue. "Ship of Fools" might likewise trigger the Dear Listener to check out the Katherine Anne Porter novel involving an international bunch of losers sailing from Mexico to Nazi-infested Germany. I do not recommend this course of action; it won't help you much in understanding Cale's song. The novel comes down squarely on the "people suck" side of the philosophical fence, but you can get that just by listening to Fear and it won't take nearly as long. So let's just concern ourselves with Cale's take on the loaded allegorical image of deranged passengers aboard a ship with no pilot.

Cale's "Ship of Fools" opens with a lovely floating motif, less appropriate to a ship than to a carousel. It sounds like a metallophone but apparently isn't, so it must be Brian Eno on the synth. Then Cale's weary voice comes in, complaining of hunger. Hunger is prominent in the early verses, hunger and desolation: "The black book, a grappling hook / A hangman's noose on a burnt-out tree." Cale and his friends are in Arizona, it seems-- wait a minute, Arizona? And fishermen who dream of sailing to there from Tennessee? On what river?

Cale's phantom caravan sails from Tombstone to Memphis, where Dracula gets onboard, and from there proceeds to Swansea. Home to Wales, in other words. And that's really the key here-- the images of hunger and poverty and desperate fishermen have nothing to do with Tennessee and Arizona at all. The hangman's noose and southern prayers are just another fantastic vision, Old Europe's fever dreams of the New World. Invisible cities, again.

But hold on, sister's gone south to give the sign. Is there hope? Probably not; the entire point of a ship of fools is that it's a bogus ark of salvation. Like a jester king on Mardi Gras, it's all cheap dazzle with no substance or authority. It'll be another Christmas in Wales with no food, just unfulfilled delusions.

And the ship fades into the distance with the carousel motif burbling merrily away. Round and round we go, and we're not getting anywhere.

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Sanities redux

I don't normally make apologies for irregular posting, but after calling Ian out I have to make my own mea culpa. I've just been very busy with other projects and have neglected this blog.

Ironically I've been going through a Cale renaissance. I was disappointed but not surprised that the shiny new Watchmen film did not include Sanities (which I already covered). Can't really say anything about it, as I've not seen it, but I was inspired to get some version of Sanities on the internet, and so put together this cover in an hour.

There's no special insight in this version, and it loses some of my favorite things about Cale's original. This is much more of a one-note horror film number. It does have a certain something in moments, though, I think. In any case, I made it, I'm not too ashamed of it, and I thought I would share it. I promise I won't make this a habit.

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Everytime the Dogs Bark

So, as promised, next time. The official John Cale Sunday morning record, 1985's Artificial Intelligence, is led off by the song "Everytime the Dogs Bark" (referenced in a verse or two of 2005's blackAcetate's leadoff track Outta the Bag). It's the dawn of a new era in his career, and it shows in his songwriting.

The album, whose Lazarus "Ratso" Sloman-assisted composition should indicate debauchery and dissolution, is in fact something of a cleanup album. For all its anger and randomness there's a new self-consciousness and a desire to present some sort of respectable front to the world. I should really save this stuff for the post on "Song of the Valley," though. The leadoff track, then.

At first and several subsequent listens, it's a bit of a mess, sonically: artificial instrumental keyboard textures, weirdly processed guitar, and a sort of 80s-funk feel that might well be repulsive. Many people, in fact, do seem to find it repulsive. But not me. Partly because Cale's vocal is clean and strong and aggressive, no longer the overly affected vocal of Caribbean Sunset, trying too hard to reassert itself. Partly because I can't resist that opening lyric:

If you want to be the heart of midnight, you've gotta be either cynical or dead.
All those you hold in estimation no longer count among your friends.

The lyrics sort of meander from there, though, and I can't tell you what the hell the song's supposed to be about. But the money moment, the one that contributes the title to the song and provides that reference twenty years later, that's probably what really hooked me on the song:

Listen to the slamming doors
Listen to the ship-to-shore
Listen and listen hard
Everytime the dogs bark

The music there, keyboard chords like huge bells being struck and everything else falling silent, combined with Cale's vocal (touching the edge of danger and threat without going too far, without losing control), makes me think of some escaped and vengeful convict, hauling himself onto shore after an exhausting swim - an escape from an island prison - a pursuit of some black demon ship - I dunno. Some great, anachronistic, fantastical adventure out of Dumas or Alan Moore. It gives a context (or a Greek chorus?) to the disconnected verse lyrics that allows them to resonate better than they should - and played a big role, along with other songs on this album, in informing my understanding of Cale's view of his own career.

But let me put a word in for the music. Instrumentally, it's really not the genuine bad fake funk (rebadged disco?) of the 80s. It's something more respectable than that. (Hell, it's not far from "Outta the Bag" or even real Beck-funk.) The guitar work is really quite tasty. And I do have a thing for dirty, messy, noisy, artificial 80s keyboards. And this was one of the first Cale records I heard, after Fragments and Paris 1919 and the doom trilogy. So perhaps I am uniquely qualified to enjoy this track - but I hope not.

Further back up the chain of references: As I fell further into Cale-addiction, picking up the obscure and rare releases one by one off foreign web stores and eBay and less reputable sources, I snagged one particularly odd release. And when I got to the second track, one of the least in-control and respectable tracks on one of his least in-control and respectable albums, it struck me that this song referenced it. So maybe next time we'll visit that seedy and disreputable part of his career.

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FIGHTER PILOT!

[nor is this]

Funny how old things can sound relevant after twenty years, isn't it? Something happens to you personally or happens in the world that gives new life to some odd little painting or movie or song? I mean, in 2005, when I first heard that martial drumbeat, the crude production, that off-kilter bassline, and then way behind the beat those "Bomberettes" (who are they?) chanting

FIGHTER PILOT

And all of a sudden, a song for which I had no expectations started to make sense to me. What it looked like in my head was something like this. (Sorry for the crudity of technique and content. I'm not a video man.)

I don't know how long beyond the last administration this song will continue to resonate with me. After all, it's already something of a novelty number on an album with several novelty numbers. But for as long as it lasted, it was remarkable.

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Thoughtless kind.

[this is not next time]

If you grow

The best things in John Cale's catalogue do not get the most releases or the most exposure. Or the best recordings, even.

If you grow tired

They might not cry out for attention. They might be buried under an avalanche of noise and aggressively push the listener away. They might be slathered underneath snickering and tape clicks and random keyboard twinkling. You might not realize for quite some time that those versions might be the best ones, the ones that most fully realize the possibilities of the song.

If you grow tired of the friends you make

You might start out with a live version (on Fragments of a Rainy Season, mostly). You might crave a hearing of another version, before being hit with the awful reality of the studio recording. In case you mean to say something else.

Other versions you find might get overly mannered and fussy, and lose some of the soul. It's hard to put your finger on it, but there's just something off. Maybe it's just an unreflective night for the artist. Say they were the best of times you ever had. The best of times with the thoughtless kind.

Or they might be sloppy and aggressively goony and full of drunken foolishness, and after the initial shock you might be surprised at how well they hit the mark. We dress conservatively at the best of times, prefer the shadows to the bright lights in the eyes of the ones we love.


Or they might hit the right balance of feelings: sentimentality and contempt. Nostalgia and nausea. Remembrances of past glory and the bitterness of irremediable mistakes. What we see, what we imagine. The eyes tell us nothing. The bright lights in the eyes of the ones we love will tell us nothing like the scars of imagination.


But when you get down to it, a song is more a possibility space than a specific set of words and chords (I mean, it's just G C Am D - not so far different from "Good Riddance" ferchrissakes in music or topic or live execution). It's the space defined by the way it sounds and the life experiences of the artist and the words and your own life experiences and the best and worst and most extreme performances of it, and the volume of that space depends greatly on the individual experiencing it.

And yet there are more of us who value, even treasure, those possibility space, than there are people to create them. Maybe this feeling of shared understanding or experience is an illusion, but it's one I wouldn't give up for anything.

The bright lights in the eyes of the ones you love will tell us nothing except we're the thoughtless kind. So if you grow tired of the friends you make, never, never turn your back on them. Say they were the best of times you ever had. The best of times were the thoughtless kind. The very best of times with the thoughtless kind.

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