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"...?

More...

Verses

Now this is a comeback. "Verses" kicks off the John Cale Is Back EP (er, that is, 5 Tracks). It's about one's responsibility to others, the ethic of reciprocity. I have the sense that it relates to his daughter Eden, who sings (beautiful) backing vocals on the track. Which doesn't really accord with the negative-sounding lyrics (which seem to reference a Nico voice sample from Ari Sleepy Too), but oh well. What a song says and what a song does don't always coincide.

The lyrics are imagistic, and very vivid - the last verse, "Coal smoke on the city / is from another age / The scribbling in your notebook / is soaking with rain," always gets to me, I'm not sure why. What I don't get is: what verses in the golden rule? Isn't it simply "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? This strikes me as sloppy, and irritates me a bit on every listen. If you can justify this lyrics, please do - I'd like to listen to this without the niggling at the back of this editor's mind I have.

The song is heavily pro-tooled; I don't know what's live and what's Memorex. In any case, it's compositionally strong and has a great set of melodies - like most of the EP. The percussion sounds totally synthetic, and done with a very primitive sound generator at that. The song has three different "breaks", with Eden's vocals arching over interesting basslines and synth patterns - the first graceful, the second pensive and tense, the third mysterious and foggy. Bass is definitely the primary instrument here. Synth and keening guitars form a melody-free bed for the vocals, but the focus on the vocal is so dramatic here it's reminiscent of Cale's production of Nico's The Marble Index.

Of all Cale's post-millennium work, I think this EP is the most essential. The main strike against it is that it's several years out of print. At the time of writing, there are two new copies on eBay, in a card sleeve package I haven't seen before, for less than ten U.S. dollars. Maybe there's been a silent reissue? In any case, if you can pick this up for a reasonable price, I highly recommend it.

More...