Secrets

"What do you think is going on here?" the old man said from his chair.
"D'you think this is anything new? Now look here, son. This is just like
it was back in the old days before the last war. Then the politics
changed, the scene rearranged and became how we know now is quo.
Oh, yeah, there were times when everyone smiled and agreed and the
good times would roll, but a heartbeat away was the crime that did
pay - the shot that was heard around the world."

"But nevertheless, there ain't no money," said the kid.

Ah, the magic of collaboration. You take a spoken and entirely un-Cale rant about intergenerational differences, anti-futurism, world war and global change, slam it into a reggae-ish music (with harmonica!), and have a five word chorus come in now and again, and you get the improbably lovable "Secrets." In fact, "improbably lovable" is how I feel about the lumpy, extremely imperfect Last Day on Earth in general - it's not great, but it's charming, absolutely unique, and something only a collaboration this weird could accomplish.

Often nonsensical, often funny, mixing cliche with potent images, Bob Neuwirth is in raconteur mode here. I don't know much about him, except that he recorded a number of albums and was part of Bob Dylan's long-term coterie. But with the sharp and self-deprecating DIY aesthetic he shows on this album, I feel I should find out more. It's odd that he sounds so much like Bob Newhart, though - whom I can't help imagine delivering this rant.

Neuwirth and John Cale provide the chorus vocals, singing the sweet but prickly chorus: "Secrets, secrets, dirty little secrets." I don't know how much input Cale had on the music here - it sounds like him on (terribly outdated) synth keys, but it's not exactly characteristic. In any case, it works with Neuwirth's clipped diction to provide some syncopated appeal. There's not much really that stands out - the guitar tone is nice, and harmonica! on the coda, but otherwise it's more than the sum of the instruments.

The fast patter, the repetition of the chorus verse, the repeated objection by the kid that "there ain't no money" have an incantatory effect that build up over time. I think I didn't much like this track the first time I heard it, but the "Secrets, secrets" bit got stuck in my head anyway - possibly after one listen. It still pops in frequently. Often too (too often, say those in the know) I can't resist quoting "'But nevertheless, there ain't no money,' said the kid" at moments of varying appropriateness around the house and town.

Here's an mp3. I'd really like to know what you (yes, you!) make of this oddity. Try to hear past the sickly synth tone and the prissy production job, if you can.

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Old China

Bob Neuwirth sings the verses on Old China, one of the prettiest songs on Last Day on Earth. Cale sings the chorus. Among the virtues of the album is that it feels like a real collaboration - it's very hard to figure who did what.

Just because it's pretty doesn't mean it isn't dark. It's an elegy for hope from a narrator who has chosen stasis. All the narrator does is talk and hope, and his hopes diminish with his inaction ("I threw that other chance away today") until all that's left to hope for is that time will slip away. The chorus, in the context of the album at large, seems to reference the nuclear age: "Cross your heart and hope to die / it'll happen in the blinking of an eye." (Nuclear apocalypse may have been a little anachronistic in 1994, but not that anachronistic. I was still obsessed with the possibilities in 1999.)

The music is very straightforward: some major key piano arpeggiations (coincidentally - it's a pretty trivial pattern - mimicking Pink Floyd's "If"), some beautiful strings (violin and viola?), and some simple but very piquant slide guitar. There are some tinkling synth-bells on the chorus that haven't aged well, but otherwise I can't complain about anything. I love the tone of the strings as the song ends.

"Sitting here talking 'bout Old China and how old ladies' hair will go to gray." I'm not sure whether it's "old China," i.e. porcelain, or "Old China," the China coming to grips with the rest of the world's existence. I like the ambiguity, but I always think of the period of so much turbulence and promise in the world's oldest civilization, and how gruesomely it came to an end at the hands of Kai-shek, the Japanese, Mao, and the Cultural Revolutionaries. I do not mean to attribute equal culpability to these four scourges, but from each according to his ability. Hoping for a speaking revolution, wishing that the crimes would go away.

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Ocean Life

What do you do with a track that has some great bits and some crap bits? What do you do with an album of it? What do you do with several? These are the questions I have meditated upon this week, while listening, repeatedly, to Cale's almost-decade of work from 1989 to 1996. Primarily Words for the Dying (1989, errr), Last Day on Earth (1994, mostly good), and Walking on Locusts (1996, aarrgh). The things I do.

Ocean Life is one of Cale's trademark spoken-word pieces, the centerpiece of Last Day on Earth , the bizarre "blueprint for theatre" collaboration of Bob Neuwirth. The catch is that the vocal is provided by a Jenni Muldaur, who I see is the daughter of folk singer Maria Muldaur. She brings a weary and wry, yet suspiciously hippie-inflected, voice to some surreal thoughts about the ocean. I thought I hated her voice when I first heard the track, but there's something almost hypnotizing about it.

She is also given credit for "additional lyric." I don't have any idea which lyric that is. The lyrics here suffer from an attraction to cheap paradox and wordplay ("I don't have the patience, but what does it cost on the open market? And who can afford that?", "the dull, sacrilegious commandment of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a truth") that seems unique to this album. Maybe I can blame Bob Neuwirth. Anyway, it's not without its lyrical high points: I appreciate any song (..."or spoken word piece") that refers to peeling retinas, and it ties in conceptually with Barracuda ("I want to be buried at the bottom of the ocean ... kissed by the fishes, sushi for Shabu").

Despite the downmarket synthesizers (or is it infinite guitar?) also unfortunately characteristic of the album, the music manages to be soundtrack kitsch worth listening to. The orchestral drums, throbbing bassline, and synthesizer planes you've heard before, but the banjo and whistled melody (the chorus, as it were) make for a surprising and entertaining listen. It's pleasant, not particularly substantial music.

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