Mercenaries (Ready for War)

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of a stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you."
- Niccolò Machiavelli, 'The Prince' Chapter XII

Back in January 1980, with a nightmare awakening in Afghanistan, Thatcher getting comfortable at Downing Street, Reagan waiting to be inaugurated, and decades of mercenary-assisted bloodshed in Africa, John Cale released a topical single that he'd been playing live for a year or so. A rocking little ditty with prescient and sinister artwork, "Mercenaries (Ready for War)" was a studio recording of the lead-off track of the previous month's live LP of new material, Sabotage/Live.

The circumstances being what they were, then, you may be surprised to know that the song's not about war. It's not about killing and terror and bloodshed and death. It's about money. Sort of the dog-o-war version of Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)", when you get down to it. Just another soldier boy, looking for work, cleaning his rifle, and above all making sure he gets paid. Sure, the song ends with a guitar-based "charge!" bugle call and a run on Moscow, but that's just the new frontier of the bank account.


If the single were the only recording of this song, it would be a highlight of the catalog. The vocal is one of Cale's most intimidating studio attempts; the sound of the band is raw and live like few of his other studio cuts. The guitar tones are exceptional. (The bass could be heavier, but let's not nitpick.) Even the fadeout doesn't sound cheap - Cale goes out screaming. (The b-side is worth a listen too.) Too bad the masters of the single are presumed lost forever.

... but fortunately the definitive version of the song had already been recorded. The live version that opens Sabotage starts with Cale declaiming a much pithier paraphrase of the Machiavelli quotation above over the disjointed solo bassline. Then the guitar storm starts, and every compliment I just paid to the studio version applies tenfold. Cale delivers every word right. In the live/LP environment, the song is allowed to unfold in a more frighteningly relaxed way, and the tension by the ending raid sequence is intolerable.

"Mercenaries" formed a set staple through the geopolitical insanity of the early 80s (e.g. the decent version on Live at Rockpalast), then was left behind with most of the more martial stuff. It was resurrected in odd fashion at a memorable concert at the Amsterdam Paradiso in 2004. Redone as a electronic jazz poetry-slam number with synth backing vocals, with "Taps" replacing the "Charge!" call, the song was one of the more controversial moments of a controversial concert, but it works for me.



Perhaps at that time of madness and paranoia, anything that engaged seriously with the horrifying mistakes my country had made and the amount of money flowing to the Halliburtons and Blackwaters of the world was bound to connect. With a possible invasion of Iran looming, hearing the inspired "Let's go to Tehran / find the back door to the Majlis, kick it down and walk on in..." hit buttons I wanted/didn't want pressed. (This version was released on Circus Live, but with an unnecessary and detrimental layer of "drone" added for reasons I don't understand. To drown out the audience chatter, I imagine.)

The song may not be all that deep, but it still offers us something to reflect on. We still live in the world of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, of the realpolitik American use of coup and assassination and cooperative dictatorship to fight its ideological opponents, of the British partition of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, of the Mongol destruction of the irrigation canals of Iraq. (And we kill in it.) We even live with some of the mercenary murderers of 20th century - the greatest son-of-a-bitch of them all is still alive! The past is with us always, even when we don't see it; each decision we make could, invisibly, one day prove fatal. Sleep tight.

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Chickenshit

About the lede the other day...

I'm stealing from Hans here, who did the work of typing in the following from Cale's maddening, intriguing, invariably sordid quasisemihemidemiauto- auto- auto- autobiography What's Welsh For Zen?:

One day on the tour, we were driving back to London and I said to the tour manager, 'I want to get a live chicken.' We had bought a meat cleaver in Germany and it gave me an idea. I told him to stop at a farmhouse and buy a chicken, but put in a box so that nobody else in the band would know. However, he came out of the farmhouse holding the squawking chicken by its legs. All the way back to the Portobello Hotel everybody in the band was asking, 'What's he gonna do with the fucking chicken? You're not going to hurt it, right?'

The gig was at Croydon. I had the chicken killed backstage and put on a wooden platter with a handle. I told the roadie: 'When I get into the second verse of Heartbreak Hotel, slide it out to me on the platter.' I already had the meat cleaver stashed on stage. The guys in front were slam-dancing, bopping and swaying. All those punks with their leather and chains, pushing everybody because they had taken too much speed. So I thought, try a little voodoo! I am singing, 'We could be so lonely,' swinging the chicken around by its feet, nobody in the audience knowing it was dead, 'we could be so –' Twhok! I decapitated it and threw the body into the slam dancers at the front of the stage, and I threw the head past them. It landed in somebody's Pimm's. Everyone looked totally disgusted. The bass player was about to vomit and all the musicians moved away from me. Even the slam dancers stopped in mid-slam. It was the most effective show-stopper I ever came up with.

And then he goes and throws a hilariously awful dramatization on the even more hilariously titled 'Animal Justice' EP:

"Hi, my name is Arthur- and I quit!"

Chickenshit!

"You know he said something about a taking a feather home for his wife, you know for a hat that she was making."
"I don't- I don't know what he's gonna do with that chicken..."
"He said he's not gonna hurt it, so, so it's OK."
"Alright, fair enough."

Ain't nobody gonna waste my time
Nobody tells me what's his and what's mine
Break down a window, break down a door
Don't wanna listen to you no more

"I don't know man, I mean, it's uh, it's kinda, I'm getting kinda nervous."
"Starting to get worried?"
"I'm not qualified to..."

Go on by my houses, you tear down the wall
Darling don't like it, better stay at home
I need her trouble like a hole in the head
Get out yer gun and use it instead

"Checking out, need my things? Room 42, please."
"You alright, John? You're not gonna hurt it, are ya?"

Wasting your time, telling me what to do
Take it or leave it or put it down
Get out of the way, don't bring it down
Gotta be, gotta be put out in the ground

Chickenshit! Chickenshit! Chickenshit!

"Oh, oh my god."
"Did you, did you see what he did, he did?!" *retching noises*
"Oh, I don't believe he did it. I mean, I was standing right there, I saw the whole thing with my own eyes. I never thought he'd do something like that. I mean, what do you think? It was so unreal!"

Nobody gonna push me around
Nobody gonna put words in my mouth
Listen to no one, I don't get my mail
Told me a fool always ends up in jail

"What were you thinking? You said you weren't gonna hurt it!"
"I didn't hurt it, I killed it. Gave it the fucking heave-ho."
*chatter and recriminations*

Not an episode to be proud of (as Cale admitted, not quite convincingly). I'm not tolerant of cruelty to animals. Why, then, is this episode such a guilty pleasure to me as a fan?
Photo by Ronald van Kaam.

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Sabotage

Life is short and love is very sweet.

Why, John, how... romantic!

Look at all the people running for their lives in the street.

Well, I knew that wouldn't last.

What they running from? What they running to?
Goddamnit, ask them! I wanna know, too.

The title track of Sabotage/Live is one of the best songs in the John Cale oeuvre. It is also one of the weirdest songs in the catalog. I mean, it's not very songlike. The chorus consists of the title. The verses are spoken/sung. The various instrumental parts, for the first several listens, seem to have very little to do with one another.

And yet, you put it all together and let it gestate in your mind, and eventually the thing won't get out. If I'm going to be playing something alone with a heavily amplified guitar at 2AM on a Wednesday night, odds are very high it's this. (I'd like to take this chance to apologize to my neighbors.)

Read and destroy everything that you read in the press.
Read and destroy everything that you read in books.
It's a waste of time and a waste of energy.
It's a waste of paper and a waste of ink.
Whatever you read in the books, leave it there!

It's not as if the lyrics are particularly poetic, or tightly written, or sharply observed. I mean, they're striking, but they're also formless and a bit flaccid. ("in books"?) It must be the frenzied way they're shouted. There's malicious intent. Malicious, but morally ambiguous.

There's a word for that:

(For what? Wasting time and energy, paper and ink, you and me? Or leaving what you read in the books there?)

Sabotage!

And yet, I don't know if there's any more glorious moment in Cale's catalog. It's the apotheosis of Cale's confrontational tendencies that first surfaced in his post-VU solo career on the coda of "Fear (is a Man's Best Friend)." With him and Deerfrance screaming "Sabotage!" over a churning set of solo performances: his outlandish bass part, the bizarre lead guitar, the stop-start rhythm of it all.

Military intelligence isn't what it used to be.

The lyrics are striking, and sort of one-of-a-kind. If I had to extract a message from it, it would be that the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by British and American governments up to and including the Thatcher and Carter (???) administrations, had created and perpetuated a climate of fear intended to batter consciences and spirits into submission, cogs sarcy cogs swrking round in the machine. This is hardly an original premise!

So what?! Human intelligence isn't what it used to be either.

(Pardon the American politics, but Cale was a genuine New Yorker by that point: OK, it seems to have been written in the summer of '79, so maybe it was inspired by the Reagan campaign. But Reagan didn't take a lead until the infamous second presidential debate, on October 31, which gave birth to modern-day campaign cliches like "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" That debate more or less cinched the election for Reagan - his election looked not especially likely until that point.)

Maybe not an original premise, but the implementation is unique in its mixing of carefully parsed New Frontiersman and Foreign Affairs language with atonality and controlled chaos. The arching vocal on

It's a riii-sing expecta-tion! It's a riii-sing of the tides!

is powerful beyond reason. And, what can I say, it's an atavistic, primitive, brutal song.

The wards will discharge all their patients in the street.
Are they hurting? Yeah, they're mine. (???)
There's a word for that: sabotage!

Er, atavistic, primitive, brutal, crazy song. (No idea what that last bit's about.)

All I know is that it tickles my lizard brain like very little else. And that it's a crime against the catalog that it's left off every anthology. And that it should be used as the theme song for the film of Watchmen, whose atmosphere it anticipates brilliantly (provided, of course, that the film is any good). Oh, yes, and that you should hear it. Download here.

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Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler, the epic final track of 1977's bizarre Animal Justice EP, takes the structure of Mary Lou's lyrics and some of the lyrics themselves and turns them into a different sort of song altogether, a sprawling downtempo brooder that swells to an odd majesty. It's no accident that this b-side of an obscure EP has been a mainstay of his repertoire for nearly thirty years.

(The connection to Ibsen seems extremely tenuous - maybe he was just going for a self-destructive femme fatale idea. I've read somewhere that the song is "about" Anita Pallenberg, of whom it has been quipped that she was fluent in four languages and three Rolling Stones. [CORRECTION: Jack informs me that the Seducing Down the Door liner notes refer to Anita Bryant, late 50s singer and 70s anti-gay crusader. Huh. I still don't get it.] As far as self-destructive blond-haired northern European femme fatales go, well, I tend to think of someone else in Cale's life.)

The song is very similar in construction and feel to Riverbank: heavy, weary, and slow. A woozy, gauzy electric piano and almost-infinite slide guitar form a bizarrely comforting bed of fog for Cale's very straight, affectless vocal. Viola noises break up the verses. Drums and rhythm guitar (and church organ?!) break out at the first chorus, as a touch of menace creeps into Cale's voice. It's an odd menace, though, more resigned and regretful than anything.

The lyrics are rather terse, repetitive, and dour: tired of waiting, tired of the human race, down in all her misery. Her family doesn't brighten things: her brother is sitting around reading Mein Kampf (puts a different spin on Mary Lou, eh?); her mother hangs her banker husband in the closet (though the verb used means "suspend on a hook or hanger" rather than "suspend by the neck" - love that little bit of dark humor in the ambiguity!). And all we learn about Hedda is that she's miserable and tired (so tired of listening to the gossip and complaints). It's a character study with no character except the music itself.

And it's the music that's transfigured in the end. The coda lyric, "Sleep, sleep, sleep, Hedda Gabler" is an interesting gambit after what has come before, but the line would be nothing without the remarkably sympathetic cast of the whole coda: a gentle lullaby piano vamp, a towering and beautiful guitar solo, and ensemble vocals that really seem to mean it. It's an absolution and a purification, and it's amazing to hear.

Here's a video from that great show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam:

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Captain Hook

Happy Independence Day, India! (And, belatedly, Pakistan.) Today's the day, sixty years ago, that the sun set on the British Empire. This isn't the place to get into the morality of British colonial involvement or the terrible failings of the partition, but it was more than time for them to get out. While India and Pakistan weren't the first colonies to gain independence (ahem), they were the first of many dominoes to fall.

Er, right, this is a John Cale blog. Today's track is about the decline of British colonialism. Captain Hook, which leads off the second side of the vinyl Sabotage/Live, seems to owe nothing but the title to J.M. Barrie - the title character/narrator is a bitter parody of British nationalism.

There isn't much ambiguity in "Tried to break India's back, but she broke the back of me." Yet it's not entirely unsympathetic - you get the idea, with lyrics like "Past the Cape of Good Hope, but there's no hope for me" sung in a way that indicates a partially identification with the mindset. The chorus lyric is even more mysterious: "I can't keep living like this no more / Oh can't you see you're losing me again?" Screeds are seldom more interesting than contradiction and unresolved tensions, and this song benefits from its obscurity. Maybe I give it too much credit - some of the lyrics seem not very polished, and Cale introduces it with, "Take it with a pinch of salt." Still, it works for me.

The music is the real substance of the song. It's divided into three distinct segments. The long instrumental intro is built around fluttering piano, echoed by guitar, backed by a sliding bassline and inventive drum fills. There's some of the evil overdriven organ that appears elsewhere on Sabotage. The tension built here is huge. Everything goes quiet, and Cale goes into his piano intro to the main body of the song. Mark Aaron's scalding guitar is initially the lead instrument, replaced by a wordless vocal from Deerfrance, then Cale's verse vocal. The chorus features nearly the whole band on backing vocals. And the coda works in a new melody from Cale, one he sings for all he's worth. That a sonic picture this complex was created live on stage is impressive - in terms of "orchestration," it's one of Cale's greatest achievements. The band is in top form throughout, and Cale's hoarse vocal couldn't be better. It's an astonishing eleven and a half minutes long - by nearly three minutes the longest rock song in the catalog.

Now, why Robert Christgau calls it the dumbest song on the record, I can't say. I think it's great. A villain hasn't gotten a song this good since Pete Townshend gave up on Lifehouse the first time, I'll tell you.

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Dr. Mudd

Dr. Samuel Mudd fixed up John Wilkes Booth's leg, broken after an appropriately dramatic jump from Abraham Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater. You know, for all the whining these days about entertainers talking politics, at least they don't get as involved as Booth. Nobody really knows whether Mudd was actually a conspirator in Lincoln's assassination (my bet's no) or whether he had doubts about turning Booth in (my bet's yes). In any case, he did almost four years before being pardoned by President Andrew Johnson.

Now, what the assassination has to do with Chinese nuclear ambitions I don't know. Dr. Mudd the song is a fairly straightforward tract on the Red Menace. Cale revisits Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where "the children's hair fell out and all their skin turned blue." Whatcha gonna do? It seems to be a sympathetic warning to Taiwan and/or Japan, that maybe their American allies aren't very interested in helping them if it comes to all that: "The people back in Washington D.C., they've got a curious sidelong glance / it goes all the way from Capitol Hill up to the Pentagon. What they gonna do, what they gonna do when China drops a bomb on you?"

Which sounds dry and potentially dull, but no! This is a poppy new wave song, with great group backing vocals ("doo doo doo doo-ooh") and a sprightly and highly melodic main vocal line (even if Cale's vocal strain works against it). It's a great combination of dark subject matter with accessible music. It's also a terrible earworm, causing one to annoy the piss out of others when one putters around the house singing the chorus. *ahem*

And the band is hot. The guitar tones sound so good on Sabotage/Live it's criminal, and the playing is exceptional. The bass is a little lacking in force (the recording isn't the best), but it has nice lines. The drums work, providing tension and just a little disco feeling. Compositionally, it feels surprisingly like a Talking Heads song, or perhaps a funkier Siouxsie and the Banshees. Maybe it's not that precise, maybe the recording is naive at best, but the music captured on this album is incredible. I'd even call it a fundamental live recording. Thank god for CBGBs.

(This song is included on John Cale Comes Alive, which I have on vinyl and which I haven't listened to in a while. I'll withhold comment on that version until I hear it again. Can anyone recommend a good service for vinyl ripping, or a trustworthy USB sound card/preamp/turntable combo under $250? My turntable is OK for listening, but not really for recording from.)

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Rosegarden Funeral of Sores

Vocal Distortion Intended

is printed on the label of the b-side of the Mercenaries (Ready for War) single. This b-side contains one of the most bizarre things Cale ever recorded, the ineffable Rosegarden Funeral of Sores. I'll try to eff it - that's my job - but ultimately you'll just have to listen. Here's a high-quality audio file (up for a limited time).

A perverted blues bass figure as mechanical as the drum machine track it accompanies drives this song forward. It's the first released song Cale used a drum machine on, and the drum machine proves essential to the artificial chill that pervades this track. It's a terrible feeling that these instruments produce, a feeling of being moved against one's will, a feeling of automation (this is compounded by the jerky stop-and-go construction of the song - like being on an assembly line). But it's the Wurlitzer organ that encrusts the rhythm track, crystallizing on it like minerals on glass, that really pushes it into horror. For all the fever-dream songwriting around, this is the first song I've heard that sounds and feels like a fever dream.

This feeling extends to the vocals and to the lyrics, the smashed and splintered lyrics that ooze out from that intentionally distorted vocal, metallic and mechanical like the other instruments. There's an explicit dichotomy between Madonna and whore, but I'm not at all convinced that they're discrete actors. The lyrics loop back on themselves, repeat, stop midway and restart. Some men are chosen from the rest. But their choices don't seem to matter.

P.S. That the, uh, less subtle Bauhaus cover is better-known than the original is a damn shame.
P.P.S. The live mash-up with Femme Fatale on Circus Live is an interesting experiment, but it doesn't really get off the ground.
Also: I like the 'n' that they randomly added to the title for the Sabotage/Live reissue - "Rosengarden Funeral of Sores" has a better ring to it.

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