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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Wilson Joliet

Close the door and let's have some private light!
As mentioned earlier, Wilson Joliet is the equally evil twin of Sanities. Along with Strange Times in Casablanca, it defines the mainline of Honi Soit. Characterized by a paralyzing paranoiac tension, the songs build from a sinister beginning to a crisis point - or a psychotic break? - and culminate in an ecstatic bout of screaming gibberish. (Riverbank and Russian Roulette hew roughly to this template as well.)

Like Sanities, it starts with a woman terrified of her mother. However, this immediately and bizarrely detours into even stranger territory: "Before the clock slammed another door on the weary hours we were facing, a second-hand Shylock shylocked in, in on us." It's rather shocking to hear Shylock, the "evil Jew" of the Merchant of Venice, invoked in such a stark and simple way. It sounds, well, bad. What's worse, it's totally opaque, admitting to no analysis. You don't know where the words are coming from or what they're supposed to mean, so you don't really know how to react. I feel that I have to bring it up, but I've got nothing to say about it.

It then proceeds to, like Riverside, weave military atrocities of the past and their effects on society ("like the lovers below Bataan") into a modern context, though even more obscurely than that song does. Is a lyric like "mothers weep while children sleep like ancestors in the ground" too manipulative, playing the "dead kiddies" card for quick emotional resonance in an otherwise meaningless song? Or does it get points for pointing out the bitter irony of children serving the role of the old (fertilizing the soil) rather than of the young (changing, ha ha, the world)?

Even more than Russian Roulette, it has no shame about its political incorrectness. It's one thing to feature audio clips from the 1954 British WWII film The Dam Busters in which characters call to the commander's black dog Nigger, as Pink Floyd did in The Wall. It's another thing entirely to create a militaristic fantasy world and end the song by screaming about you and the dog blasting out of confinement. Imagine driving through the city, blasting John Cale on your car stereo, and sharing with the world at large repeated screams of "Me and Nigger blasted our way out!" Not comfortable. And you can't explain nor rationalize it.

Like Syd Barrett's solo ramblings, the song's value lies solely in the atmosphere the song creates and the thoughts that it evokes. I don't know whether it's the audio equivalent of a Hieronymous Bosch or of a Jackson Pollock, but this war word salad just does trigger feelings in me. Is it

• the crashing background noises?
  
• the cascading tribal/march drums?
  
• the church organ hovering ghostly over the song?
• the endlessly reverberating guitar?

It might just be the prostration of the almost tuneless vocal, just barely in the realm of song rather than spoken-word, delivering such unexpectedly moving lines like "Yesterday's streets, burned out buildings reduced to shells" or "We are shuffled like a pack of cards" (a lyric he reused in Zen).

I don't know which of these things in particular gets to me, what turns improvised babble into something moving. But something does get to me, and apparently to him too, given that the song was mystifyingly included on the Close Watch compilation. Does it get to you? Why, or why not?

And would someone please tell me what the title means?

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Streets of Laredo

At the center of Honi Soit, an album obsessed with foreign affairs and all the sordid relations of men, lies a cover of an ancient cowboy ballad: "The Streets of Laredo." Why?

Back in 1974, Cale had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Nico to record a cover. Seven years later, he recorded it himself. Why did an overexposed Traditional song, already performed and recorded and arranged to death, hold appeal for so long?

The arrangement here is terribly slow, stop-time with a dragging beat. Each instrument sounds as if it's playing in its own world, only dimly aware of the others. A two-chord synth part drones on in the background, bass and drums occasionally play at roughly the same time, an acid guitar call bursts forth once per measure. The only thing pretty on the track is the mournful, passionate viola cadenza, but it's played over the ugly, metallic strumming of muted strings (a sound used prominently on Music for a New Society).

The production recalls his work on The Marble Index and foreshadows the sound of his next album, Music for a New Society. What merits so much investment of the John Cale Sound?

And why is such a shambolic performance of a tired song one of the most arresting things on the album?

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Riverbank

Having learned very little about origins or substance of the China attraction, then, let's break this "theme" thing by jetting over to Vietnam. Or Great Britain. Or something. On Riverbank, Cale's major theme seems to be the suffering of those that soldiers leave behind, but the particulars are mysterious.

In concert he claimed the song was about Liverpool, home of shipbuilding and dockyards. On the other hand, the lyrics reference Madame Nhu, the disastrously powerful fascist at the heart of the corrupt and "Catholic" South Vietnamese government. 'Course, he may have been obliquely referring to another legendary Dragon Lady, Maggie Thatcher, but gentlemen never tell. (The comparison, if it exists, is manifestly unfair.) You might think the song was inspired by the Falklands War, but that's impossible: the album Honi Soit preceded the war by a number of months.

So out with historical context! This is a song with a magnificent melancholy and a straightforward first two verses that quickly careens off into "satisfied as heretic vicars" and "foulmouthed pupils, broken heart surgery creatures crawling back inside of you," only returning to the main topic in the last verse. Lyrically, it seems to be another child of the moment, with composed lyrics sitting alongside improvised ones in a marriage made in frustration.

Instrumentally, you can't knock it. A tentative, chiaroscuro piano part starts out the song with a single cymbal being tapped fast. Other instruments encrust the sound before the vocal comes in: organ and restrained bass, then finally guitar. The guitar meanders, a bit randomly but in counterpoint to the vocal melody. It's a committed and sincere vocal from Cale. The structure is funny: though no lyrics are repeated, a chorus-type section comes in once at the end of the first verse, then twice after the second. This "chorus" music, with choppy guitar and martial drumrolls, turns into the middle-eight. Then comes a final verse, and a vocal coda based on the verse music "the stones around their necks are the stones of the riverbank." And an instrumental coda, which sounds awfully like "Hey Jude" and, despite some nice arching guitar lines, doesn't make itself worthwhile. It's a good song but not a great song, and I'm not sure why it occupies valuable space on the only in-print compilation album, Close Watch: An Introduction to John Cale.

A much finer ending was used for the solo-piano renditions of the 1983 tour. Cale sings that same vocal coda with halting piano accompaniment, then ends the song with single-note piano stabs that seem to go on forever. An audience member keeps trying to start applause and Cale keeps playing. It's extremely uncomfortable. Despite the much rougher vocal, this is the version to listen to. I've posted a high-quality MP3 from the show in Hamburg here.

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Russian Roulette

Good morning, class. Today Professor Cale will be giving the state of the world in his inimitable way. "The Russian Bear is hungry. He's dancing in his chains. His trainer's melancholic, feeling low and grey. He would have to dig for miles underground (soil) if not for Frenchmen dizzy from turning their backs on everyone's story, everybody's disgust, everybody's distrust. And John Wayne, he can't feel no pain 'cause he's got no brain. Japan, Japan, Japan, we love you, feed you hungry missiles... Russia is defective, defecting, defected. What's wrong with the Motherland? What's wrong with the Fatherland? Here comes the China Ku Klux Klan!"

Yeah, so, uh. "Russian Roulette" is a hilariously offensive song, a pissed rave-up that mashes global politics circa 1981 into a guacamole of random insults and bizarre imagery. The Russian Bear's trainer is presumably Brezhnev (nembutal numbs it all, but I prefer alcohol). Ronald Reagan is presumably satirized as John Wayne (and as another(!) crosseyed Paul McCartney?). If Maggie Thatcher's in there somewhere, I don't see where, though it's a curious omission. Really, I can't begin to explicate the lyrics. I'm not sure there's anything to explicate - like several other songs on Honi Soit, it seems to be stream-of-consciousness. I can't even make out all the words, much less make sense of them.

The music is pretty basic: a 4/4 beat with a few simple drum fills, a verse over a constantly repeating guitar part, and a slightly syncopated pseudo-chorus with a chunkier rhythm guitar part and some nice lead-guitar soloing from Sturgis Nikides. There's a great, frantic vocal. It's the rock-out track of the album, in the tradition of "Gun" or "Macbeth."

In closing: it's not an objectively great song, I admit. It's a very strange and problematic song. And yet it scratches an itch for me: it's unhinged and vomitific, an unstoppable torrent of images with no respect for anything human. (Distrust, disgust.) The aware human being can't escape a persistent, needling knowledge of the myriad darknesses in the heart of man. I can only really speak for myself, but our helplessness to put the world to rights generates a frustration that can only be dealt with through loud music or violence*. Sometimes both. And that's why I'm hooked on John Cale, one of the few recording artists qualified to soundtrack Rising Up and Rising Down.

* to inanimate objects only, please.

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Dead Or Alive

'Honi Soit,' Cale's tenth studio album, was a very strange album. Although there are signs that someone wanted commercial accessibility, "Dead Or Alive" and "Magic & Lies" chief among them, most of the album was nearly as far from accessible as possible. It's a very good album, hurt by the poorly miked drums and questionable and very heterogeneous mixes.

Of course, "Dead or Alive" is really only commercial by comparison to the rest of it. I think it's the story of a lover of the narrator who drifts from the party lifestyle to pornography to prostitution to death. Lyrically, it seems a reworking of the CGBG's-era song "Somebody Should Have Told Her," though they share virtually nothing musically. Both are full of frustration and regret, mixed with an element of "told you so." This one has the standout line, "She turns and smiles/says goodbye in her inimical way."

The song has one of the strangest guest instrumentals I can think of in the Cale ouevre: a trumpet plays baroque phrases over the intro and choruses. The guitar tone is great on this one. More stacatto guitar chords for the verses, merging into long, low growl on the verses. I'm not sure I like the piano: the live solo version I have (which I'll try to get an mp3 up for next week) has the same piano part and still feels dated. Anyway, underneath the mediocre and mushy arrangement there is a painful and fairly powerful song. That's the story of Honi Soit, really.

I should note that this album is in print in Great Britain via an on-demand service. That is, they burn you a CDR when you order it and print out cover art. It's better than nothing, I suppose.

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