Damn Life

Everybody knows the Kübler-Ross model of grief. First the grieving person faces denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression, then, finally, acceptance of their situation. Like many things that everybody knows, it's bullshit. Kübler-Ross herself originated the hypothesis dealing with terminally ill patients facing their own deaths, though she later expanded it to encompass all grief. She did not believe that her stages were the only emotions people experienced, only that they were common; she did not believe they happened in any predictable order; and she did not think that one simply moved through them. In the real version of her model, they are states that may be visited repeatedly while processing the life-altering event. Beyond the popular misconceptions about what the model is, there is no compelling evidence in scientific studies that the stages even exist, and the idea that they do may be harmful in pressuring people to fit their emotions to them.

My own experience of grief is like a fire, flickering and flaring up and dying down, with hot spots moving and the flames dancing unpredictably. You can't point to one place in my emotional landscape and say what it is; the map is forever changing. One hour I am filled with joy for having experienced what came before; the next, with anger and looking for somebody to blame; emptiness and blankness; guilt and self-loathing; then resignation; paralyzing sorrow; an urge to do something useful to honor the lost or to avenge the loss on the guilty; elation at release and freedom; hopelessness, and hope renewed; then, hope dead, peace and tranquility restored. (When this process has struck me during the working week, I'll tell you, the mental gymnastics involved while keeping external placidity and professionalism are nothing short of Olympian.) And then I sleep, and I wake, and it all starts again.

And that's how this song goes.

Arguably the emotional climax of Music for a New Society, occupying the penultimate spot in the tracklist, "Damn Life" starts out with warm-up-y piano and synth burbles before absurdly breaking into Beethoven's Ode to Joy. It begins in disconnected jagged fragments of lyrics over that damned joyous beer-hall melody, the wistful and hard-panned guitar and synth, and the eerily funereal lagging kick-drum-driven beat. "Damn life. Damn life. What's it worth. Getting on without... This city... It's just self-pity. Damn life. You're just not worth it. You're just not worth it. ... Oh no, respect, respect, what's respect? Cause and effect. Self-respect." It might be funny if there were any sign of humor in his voice. There is not. Just dejection, depression, despair.

Then the tempo quadruples. Piano chords. Guitar scales. Tambourine. Constant drum fills. Fucking ? and the Mysterians "96 Tears" style bubbly organ. He's talking about somebody else now? "She was the one that got left behind, she was the one got lost." He sounds almost happy. "Never took from anybody, self-sufficient at any cost." Then... non-sequitur? "No, nothing can break this heart of mine!" Celebratory and defiant vocals. God, the drum fills. It's like somebody different in the kit. "It stands invincible all the time. Can't always get what ya left behind. Seek and you shall find, yes seek and you shall find. Oh, the daaaa" and here everything slows and Ludwig returns, "aaaaaaaamnlife!"

And back to the slow chorale, sans vocals, the drummer lagging even further behind the beat. And now the Mysterians return, then leave again.

And again we're left with the Ode and the mysterious lady. "So she's still wandering her heart away; doesn't even know if it's night or day." And here... his voice... is that all... contempt? "And even if someone helped her up, she'd stand little hope of recognizing those friends she had." Yes, definitely contempt. "And in many, many ways, those friends were GLAD." Holy shit what just happened. There may even be an element of triumph in that final scream.

I have listened to this song so many times now, and every time I still wince at the end. My heart cannot help but go along for the ride. Sometimes I sympathize with the depressed narrator, sometimes with the defiant, sometimes with the contemptuous. Who is "she"? Nico? His stalker? Who knows. It doesn't really matter.

Feeling this song might make me a worse person. But it represents the fire of loss better than almost anything else I can think of. There are better-known songs on Music for a New Society, but there's nothing more powerful. Make this your own at your own peril, but it bears the truth among the flames.

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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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Leaving It Up To You

So finally we're here, and I'm about to grab the third rail of Cale commentary. There's no way to successfully elucidate this song. It's been nice knowing you.

Almost impenetrable, murderous, regretful, cancerous, marinating in vengeance and resentment and loss, "Leaving It up to You" seems to be many people's favorite Cale song. It touches on assassination, Manson, the press, war in the desert, crumbling buildings, wastelands, and black magic. It makes very little rational sense. Our man even runs out of words in the last verse, repeating himself somewhat inanely, all bluster and threats of sorcery because he's got nothing else left.

So why do I get the sense that the song, like Close Watch or Ship of Fools, started as a reference to the pop music of the previous generation? The 1957 Don & Dewey doo-wop number "I'm Leaving It Up To You" didn't make much of a splash. Dale and Grace popularized it as a duet. Maybe that one caught Mr. Cale's fancy? Not only was it was the number 1 easy listening single the day JFK was shot, the performers were in Dallas attending Kennedy's motorcade that day, seeing him just before the fatal moment. I think that scene would be up Cale's alley.

But more likely: the song became a hit again, coincidentally right before the album this song appeared on, Helen of Troy, was recorded. At the accursed golden throats of Donny & Marie Osmond, no less. God, wouldn't it be great if exposure to those two drove JC to thoughts of murder?



But if there's any connection, it doesn't go any deeper than the chorus at best. Actual song commentary after the jump...

There's no way to avoid the obvious: the studio version of this song is almost unbeatable. The heroin-rock loping bassline, the chugging twitching drums, the eerie edge-of-the-mix organ, the tersely tremendous Spedding guitar stabbing, the unearthly Eno synth over the last verse.

And the vocal! It is surely one of Cale's greatest performances in the studio. Flat affect and boredom in the first verse, an edge coming on in the first chorus. The stakes raising in the second verse with the best lyrics - "all the buildings are breaking down like the whispering in your heart and it's sordid how life goes on when I could take you apart" - with threats and accusations building as his voice rises to a scream. The final verse features a rare instance of shamanism - Cale relaying images of the distant horizon, bobbling syllables, convulsing with the words as that synth bubbles malevolently. (This verse would prove hard to put across live without the backing.) And the resignation turning over to desperation in the end. "For God's sake, TAKE IT!" he cries, whispers, sobs. Sure, it sounds like there's a clumsy tape edit between takes at "I know we could all feel safe like Sharon Tate", but that's small potatoes.

The song was inexcusably pulled from the album - read the whole story in my writeup of "Coral Moon", the sweet nothing that replaced it - allegedly because of the Sharon Tate reference. I suspect Island actually pulled it because it scared the shit out of them. It did find wide and permanent release two years on the then-essential compilation Guts.

Live band performances on record are mostly wanting. Comes Alive features a mix of enthusiasm and diffidence on everybody's part, the almost excellent performance (with a great pleading-for-his-life coda) on the recently issued Rockpalast set is weighed down by ill-advised gang vocals.

But then there's the solo acoustic version, and it might even unseat the studio version. The chorus now features suspended chords that rise eerily, providing a weird pool of calm between each wrenching verse. Even his threats to get media coverage now seem less terrible. Somehow this makes the vocal even more powerful. Both released acoustic versions (on Live at Rockpalast and on Fragments of a Rainy Season) have a lot to offer, and you really ought to obtain both by any means necessary.

It's not just the Welsh throat and tongue that gives the acoustic arrangement its power; it's one of my favorite songs to play live, and impresses even the people who are horrified by it. The third verse is really difficult to put across, though - what tanks? why are they crawling across the desert? why are the tanks breaking up your spell? what spell? why are you casting spells anyway? and what are you looking on on the ceiling at the back of the room? Maybe I just don't play the shaman very well. Mr. Cale doesn't always do it so well either, though.

I have to confess that I have no idea what this song means. I think I'm happier that way.

Phew, dodged that one. Say, who's that behind me? Excuse me, I-- *ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAP!*

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Paris 1919

Stealing from myself, from when I was first learning of the mysteries of John Cale a long long time ago. I don't know where I got the lyrics, or why inane pop culture references seemed like a good idea at the time. But it may have led to the existence of this blog, so oh well.

Well, kids, today we're going to analyze a song. Well, "analyze" is a little strong. "Annotate" is better.

Paris 191917
John Cale

She makes me so unsure of myself
Standing there but never talking sense0
Just a visitor you see
So much wanting to be seen
She'd open up the door and vaguely1 carry us away

It's the customary thing to say or do
To a disappointed proud man in his grief2
And on Fridays she'd be there
And on Wednesday3 not at all
Just casually appearing from the clock across the hall4

You're a ghost la la la5
You're a ghost
I'm in the church6 and I've come
To claim you with my iron drum7
la la la la la la

The Continent's just fallen in disgrace8
William William William Rogers9 put it in its place
Blood and tears from old Japan10
Caravans and lots of jam and maids of honor
singing crying singing tediously11

You're a ghost la la la
You're a ghost
I'm the bishop12 and I've come
To claim you with my iron drum
la la la la la la

Efficiency efficiency they say
Get to know the date and tell the time of day13
As the crowds begin complaining
How the Beaujolais14 is raining
Down on darkened meetings15 on the Champs Elysee16

0. Stop making sense. Also, Cale sings, "never ever," which suits the meter better. It feels better in the mouth, so to speak. Try them both, you'll see.
   
1. It's strange how evocative a word as vague and unconnotative as "vague" is in this context. Perhaps we appreciate vagueness in our haunters.
   
2. George McGovern. Or... hm.
   
3. He sings "Mondays" on the record. The significance of this is unclear.
   
4. Could it be he's singing to a figure on a mechanical clock show? Perhaps a clock figurine relating to the end of World War I?
   
5. A spectre, a spirit, a spook. The tension between the lightheartedness of the delivery and the rather morbid subject matter is what drives the song.
   
6. He actually sings, I believe, "I'm the Church," which accords better with footnote 12.
   
7. The symbol of power-hungry oppression. Or perhaps the original Ghost Trap. Who ya gonna call? JOHN CALE!
   
8. This could refer to any number of political, religious, or cultural events. Speculation is imprudent.
   
9. Richard Nixon's Secretary of State (1969-1973). So... either [M.o.t.A.] is right and it's Will Rogers, or the song is tangentially about Vietnam. Or the Middle East. Hm.
   
10. Japanese captives, perhaps? But Japan was on the side of the good and the right in World War I (for all it mattered)... so what gives?
    
11. A tableaux of the spoils of war, one assumes... but of the Second World War? It fits Paris 1919, I suppose...
    
12. A Catholic or Episcopal ecclesiastical middle manager. They have been known to haunt the cathedrals of Paris.
    
13. An old Norman saying. Or possibly an old Welsh saying. Or I could be making this up.
    
14. A red wine from the Beaujolais region, duh. Made trendy recently through the brilliant marketing of a mediocre wine from an increasingly mediocre winery.
    
15. The sort, one assumes, conducted by drunken politicians.
    
16. La plus belle avenue du monde. Notably the avenue that passes under the Arc de Triomphe.
    
17. As in the Treaty of Versailles. What, Korea or Vietnam? And how does this relate to Graham Greene?

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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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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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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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Heartbreak Hotel

This is the song that killed a chicken, and that's hardly the most remarkable thing about it. That was in 1977, in Cale's mid-post-Glam-ish-whateverthehell period. He was doing polo shirts before the Talking Heads, I'm saying. Back then, in those innocent days of good friends, fast women, lots of drugs, and no studio recordings whatsoever, Heartbreak Hotel was pretty much camp, as it was from its debut in the Cale arrangement on June 1, 1974 (yeah, that's the name of the album it's on, too - and we all know what happened on May 30). He would change the arrangement a bit over the years, but through the end of the Seventies it was pretty much the same old bloated parody.

Something like this, from as late as 1981 (gawsh, that's Andy Summers! yet another Cale almost-producee):

And as over-the-top as Cale was through most of that period, and even as genuinely threatening as he could sound, Heartbreak Hotel never really seemed more than a bit of good fun - something to lurch through with some high-concept stage mischief.

But somewhere between playing mit der Polizei and coming out of his lost years, in the less innocent days of good friends, fast women, lots of drugs, and possibly too many studio recordings, somewhere around the time he seems to have hit bottom in '83/'84, he started playing it on solo piano. And no more was this man kidding around.

You can hit this version as being equally over the top, less pleasurable, pretentious, laughably melodramatic without the sense of self-satire that earlier versions had. Hell, audience members start laughing - albeit nervously, this not being what they were used to.

But whatever you think of it, it's hitting an entirely different set of emotional targets now. Like Cale's other piano in extremis songs - Fear and Guts and Waiting for the Man - there's a potent mixture of emotions here. I don't know if it would stand as well on its own without exposure to the Presley version, Cale's earlier and later versions, etc. - but you who haven't heard any of it before can tell me, eh? But IMO it's the definitive Cale version of the song - hell, the most affecting arrangement of the Axton/Durden/Presley song around, says I - and it's not really represented on any albums (John Cale Comes Alive is as close as you get).

But in a radio studio late at night in the winter of 1984, in the middle of an almost unbelievably shambolic performance/forty minutes of weirdness, Cale essayed the unbeatable performance. Anger, resignation, hatred, fear- everything surfaces in it like tongues of flame in a fire. The ending even shut up the annoying radio personality (who, to be fair, was probably panicking at the disaster on his hands). Hear it, if you haven't. Listen again if you have.

Cale gradually gentrified the arrangement, removed the screaming and scenery chewing. The new arrangement, different spins of which can be heard on Circus Live and Fragments of a Rainy Season, is fine - moving in its way, more emotionally resonant than the original - I say this lovingly - wankfest. But it's almost background music now, and doesn't grab you by the balls. I don't think it's coincidence that it's paired with Style It Takes both places.

Subtlety has its virtues, and you can't live like Cale was living in 1984 for very long. But thank God we have recordings of Cale at rock bottom.

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Fear (Is a Man's Best Friend)

I was saying to M.A. around the time of the last post, "I really have been avoiding the essential stuff. I'd like to write up Fear, but I don't really know what I can bring to it. Something would have to get me in the mindset." I joked, "Maybe I should go get mugged."

Shortly thereafter, a kid got gunned down a few houses down from us. A drug thing or a gang thing, most likely. And I thought, with very little human decency, "Maybe now I should write up Fear."

But I didn't, because, after all, I had not changed. An burst of automatic weapons fire and a corpse on the neighbor's lawn does not necessarily change you. Scare you, yes. Especially when you consider that you were seen by the whole block talking to the police, and not everyone might be innocent. But that state of fright and shock doesn't last long before being swallowed up by the complacency of the day-to-day. I think back on that early, early morning with little fear or sympathy - little pity, even - just with disgust and not a little wonder that it really happened. Ah yes, and the detectives never bothered to call.

So I can't really blame my unplanned hiatus from this work on any scar from the experience, only on a sense of disappointment that I was not in a better position to write about this, one of Mr. Cale's finest songs. Especially one so tantalizingly apropos to the situation on the ground. I just hacked away at the song on my guitars, over and over again, for the next week or so.

Look, there's a reason it's on every greatest hits that's ever been put out for our man Cale. If you've listened to it, you know. If not, you haven't been listening to me, have you?

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Taking Your Life in Your Hands

What a sound to hear when you put on a John Cale record. Some kind of electric organ, synthesizer stuff. Graceful, arcing, legato stuff. The music seems bashful, tender, maybe a little ashamed to be there. The bass figure that speaks up about a minute in sounds like it really has something to apologize for. Maybe Cale means this "New Society" thing? Maybe after the derangement of Sabotage, the further derangement of Honi Soit, the years of being off the rails, Cale is mellowing?

Except his voice isn't very warm. He's singing about children and their mother, and blue men in uniform, and tears in her eyes. That guitar stab isn't very warm or comforting. Dear me, he's back to his Riverbank vocal mode. And now it's the chorus. Hm, the title is taken from the chorus. "The children will always be there"? What's that supposed to mean. And now it's

Cancel the day, cancel the night.
Can't sell the day, can't sell the night.
'Cause who would be watching
when she steals and runs away
full of hysterical laughter to say
Mama, mama, I've left school today

So. "Taking Your Life in Your Hands" ushers in Music for a New Society, an anti-lullaby to open a rather nightmarish (but quiet!) album. It exhibits a main flaw of Cale's early-80s oeuvre: sloppy first-take-grade lyrics. But they sort of work here... "blue men in uniform" doesn't mean "men in blue uniforms," but it subtly exposes the fractures in the narration. Similarly, "I hope I get to see you in that funny school far away," a dull dead set of words as a lyric, does sort of convey that the perspective character is a young girl.

I seem to recall Cale saying that he didn't know what the song was about, specifically; that he liked the superposition of possible meanings just fine. There's the mentally-ill mother, the mentally-ill child; the runaway from a broken home; the suicide, the filicide, the spouse-murderer; and the interpretations go on. I like the ambiguity just fine; I pick a different one almost every time I listen, or just let my critical response drift among them. It's not the lyrics that make the song, or the music; it's how they interact. I can't weigh it or judge it, just feel it.

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Antarctica Starts Here

You know the drill...

Shackle: Another remake from John Cale. He's making a cottage industry of these, eh?

Ibert: These aincher typical remakes, Jean. No Oceans 11 or Italian Job here.

Shackle: I'll admit that. And this is difficult material he's working with - Cable Hogue was no cakewalk, but to take on Sunset Blvd. - and bring something new to it! - is an impressive feat.

Ibert: Yes, "Antarctica Starts Here" captures something about the material that neither the original nor other attempts at reenvisioning (such as noted director Alan Sparhawk's impressionistic take, "From Your Place on Sunset") could.

Shackle: The staginess here was an initial sticking point for me. It's a problem usually encountered in stage plays: when King Lear is playing to the back of the auditorium, the people in the front-row seats just see a ham caked in make-up. But at some point... I think it was the second time through... the artificiality of the performance somehow gets at the nature of the material in a more direct way.

Ibert: And to cut away the fake realism of the original's framing conceits and to introduce a cruel and derisive narrator - perhaps the voices of the Fates - it cuts away any pretensions the characters have. And yet in the narrator's admiration for their excesses it exposes some of the hidden beauty of human pride and folly. A mainspring of Cale's finest work, by the way.

Shackle: The most impressive thing is how he turned an existing - er, semi-? - fictional universe and brought it organically into his body of work at the time. It marks an end to, some say, his greatest work - a period of small, unassuming works with depth and gravity - but what an ending. Take it from this skeptic - even a non-Cale fanatic will come away from Antarctica with a new perspective on a timeless story. And it deserves every viewer it gets.

Ibert: This means you.

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(I Keep a) Close Watch

(Fik shun)

Akron, Ohio. Late 1977.

"I got it!"
"Got what?"
"John Cale's last album. The album they wouldn't release here."
"Whaddya mean? Guts just came out."
"Guts wasn't a real album, just random songs from his last two albums."
"Huh. So what's this album?"
"Helen of Troy. The cover's, uh, kinda cheesy. Cale is in a straitjacket on an antique chair, and some woman is making a face from a mirror on the wall. I haven't actually listened to it yet. Do you wanna come over?"
"Sure, gimme twenty minutes."

Half of Akron, Ohio's John Cale fanclub sped across the city to visit the other half.

"So where did you get it?"
"Man, I told you already. Dave went to England for a couple weeks with his folks. I asked him to send me a copy if he could find it. I gave him money, a pile of money, for it. I still owe him, he says."
"Well, put it on!"

You can imagine the many layers of confusion side one of this schizophrenic album inspired in the membership that day. (Can you? Hell, can I?) Hard rock, hard rock with a gay guy doing the sexy monologue instead of Judy Nylon, pseudo-Beach Boys, whatever the hell that was, more hard rock, murderous gay desperados. And then on the flip side... the first cut is a big sentimental love song drenched in echo and huge sappy string orchestration?!

"I don't know about this, man."
"Yeah, it... is... a little strange."

Little did these two young Ohioans know that the song in question was trying desperately to have a great performer cover it. Cale wanted so badly* to have Frank Sinatra sing "(I Keep a) Close Watch" - he hired the orchestra, carefully calibrated the melody, ripped off one of Johnny Cash's best lines, kept the lyrics universal enough that Frank could do that thing he did. But it didn't work. Maybe the fact that it was lodged between a song about gay love and murder in the Wild West and a song about Pablo Picasso never getting called an asshole had something to do with it. Or the fact that the album that featured it was never released in the US. Or maybe it just wasn't up to Frank's standards.

Anyway, what we got was an over-the-top pile of sloppy sentimentality in performance and instrumentals and arrangement on top of a touching but slight song. It's a shame Cale can't do this one over again.

* According to the contributor of liner notes to Seducing Down the Door. Blame him if it's not true.

(I Keep a) Close Watch/Mama's Song

"Hi, this is Terry."
"Hey man, how's it going."
"Pretty good. Sandy's under the weather, but she's doing a little better. How are you and Vicky?"
"Fine, fine. I mean, she left last night, but that's fine."
"Aw, shit. I'm sorry to hear that."
"You shouldn't be. I'm not."
"OK. I am, though. Well, the reason I called... this is gonna sound kind of silly now."
"C'mon now, I'm a man. I can take it. Hell, I'm a free man now."
"Well, OK. Do you ever listen to John Cale anymore?"
"Yeah, once in a while. Paris 1919 and Fear, anyway. Heh, you know, that record really pissed off Vicky. Maybe I'll put it on..."
"Well, his new one came into the store. It's... it's pretty fucked-up."
"Really? Like Helen of Troy? Or do you mean good fucked-up?"
"Heh, ouch. No, this is good, I think. But it's painful stuff."
"Helen of Troy was pretty painful. Remember how excited you were to get it?"
"It's not that bad. Besides... you remember that 'Close Watch' song?"
"The Disney song?"
"Yeah, uh, that one. Well, he recorded it again."
"Shit."
"No, no, this is great. It's really... desolate. No strings. Nothing. Just him and his piano... and some organ... and... weird stuff. And it's the most pleasant thing on the album."
"Huh."
"Well, if you want to hear it some time, I've got it. Just let me know."
"Sure, I will."
"You wanna go out for a drink Friday?"

So, yeah, social engagements and such aside, the record eventually did change hands.

And on its return:
"Yeah, fucked up is right. Shit, I'm never listening to that again. But you're right, I do appreciate Close Watch a lot more now... until the fucking BAGPIPES start! Let me know when he makes a rock album again."

I Keep a Close Watch

Fifteen years after Helen of Troy destroyed the Akron Ohio Chapter of the International John Cale Fan Club, our friends, still in contact as they arc through middle age, happen to reminisce about music. Which leads to...
"You know, he released the best album he ever made a couple weeks ago."
"Aw, no. I heard some of that Andy Warhol album - the wife borrowed it from the library. Not my thing."
"No, not that. This is a solo acoustic live album. It's the best live album I own."
"You own an awful lot of live albums."
"I'm not exaggerating on this one."
"Heh, you seem serious enough. You know, I kind of would like to hear some of those songs again. Can you make me a tape?"
"Sure. Hey, you know...
"What?"
"... he does Close Watch!"
Groan!

An intro like "This is a love song, so hold onto someone you love," deserves a groan. But sandwiched between "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Hallelujah," Close Watch finally found a context that made sense - not to mention its best recorded performance. And you know what? That's the year the Akron John Cale Fan Club reformed... at least for a while.

Here's a video for your trouble, from a 1983 solo gig down under:

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Child's Christmas in Wales

I can't really talk about John Cale collaborations without talking about Dylan Thomas. It would be a mistake to harness these two oxen together or to put a Cale cart behind a Thomas horse. Still, there's a real sympathy between these two men's work, and Dylan the Elder was clearly an inspiration to our Mr. Cale. A long-lived inspiration - long before he was setting sea poems to music with Brian Eno, Cale was filching a title for the leadoff track of 1973's Paris 1919.

There's no direct connection between the kaleidoscopic short story "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and the equally kaleidoscopic song, only a shared spirit of wry reminiscence upon the wonderful and laughable circumstances of their authors' childhoods. Dylan Thomas references dot the song ("long-legged bait" and something else that escapes me), but it's very much Cale on the whole, with wonderful lyrics that perk up the ear on first listen ("Did he say 'murdered oranges'? Bled on board ship? Huh.") but carry emotional resonance ("Take down the flags of ownership, the walls are falling down.") while keeping a reserve of mystery ("Sebastapol, Adrianapolis, the prayers of all combined...") And only on Paris did Cale write lyrics like "The cattle graze bolt uprightly. Seducing down the door..."

I have to admit, I like the song better in its stripped-down solo piano incarnation. It's unadorned and unornamented, one of the barest tracks in a library of stripped-down recordings. It helps that the vocal on the Fragments version is superb, hitting all the right notes of warmth, scorn, admiration, longing, pity. But at root the song deserves to be heard without the thick coating of instrumentals laid on it in the studio.

In fact, I'd say I like the live version much better, but then you'd think I don't appreciate the warmth and fullness of the studio version, the way the slide guitar and bass and piano and organ interplay to wrap around you like the heat from a fireplace. And I do! I wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm just glad I have both versions to enjoy.

Either version's better with some cognac-enhanced eggnog. Whatever your yuletide traditions and innovations may be, I hope they've been grand. From us and ours to you and yours, best wishes and Nadolig Llawen!

P.S. Here's a little present. Nico sings and Cale does his distorted piano thing at CBGBs in 1979. "There's a lady with class," Cale says appreciatively. And even if her singing's not great here, you know I think he's right.

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Sister Ray

Take it away, Maestro!

I'd wager that "Sister Ray" is the most widely-heard track of its violence and aural hostility. What track on a widely available album by a major artist competes with it? Joy Division and New Order and the Sisters of Mercy covered it. (As did, amusingly, author Alan Moore, in a bizarre parody version about an Objectivist (!) comic book superhero.) Jonathan Richman, in "Roadrunner," simultaneously neutered it and made it really appealing. It sits on countless record store shelves worldwide, lying dormant on copies of White Light/White Heat, waiting to perforate eardrums and induce bad trips and anxiety attacks.

The topics, as the Wikipedia entry dryly notes, cover almost every item on the Lou Reed menu: homosexuality, transvestites, prostitutes, heroin use, sudden violence. It's so over the top that it's much more funny than it is threatening. Reed's voice is mesmerizing here - whether he's chanting "whip it on me, Jim," nagging his friends about shooting a man dead ("Aw, doncha know you shouldn't do that? Doncha know it stains the carpet!"), or droning raga-style "Iiiiii'm searching for myyyyy maaaaaaaain liiiiine," you can barely take your ears off him.

And yet if the song were an instrumental, it would be nearly as astonishing. Here's a war on tape: each player tweaking his volume measure by measure, a band whose every part is trying to drown each other out. It's arguably the single point of John Cale's rock career in which real honest-to-god rocking coexists with his earlier systems-music work whole and entire, body-and-blood soul-and-obscenity. His organ part could have been released as a track on the New York in the 1960s records, and nobody would have thought it out of place; but harness it to Moe Tucker's thumping, Sterling Morrison's squawking, and Lou Reed's guitar and vocal assault, and you have one of the most arresting pieces of art ever created.

A band that created music so powerfully destructive and destructively powerful couldn't last for long. It's a shame that Cale's greatest collaborative relationship - the one with Tucker and Morrison and Reed - couldn't have lasted just a little longer, though. But at least we have White Light/White Heat, and "Sister Ray," to show for it.

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Gun

Of course John Cale worked with Brian Eno from early on. I mean, sure, Brian Eno works with everybody. He does unreasonably brilliant work with almost everybody. What's impressive is how unique his collaborations are: the Enoed Phil Manzanera guitar part in "Gun" does not sound like David Bowie's Enoized instrumentals, which don't sound like the Talking Heads' Enoid nightmares. There's a common aesthetic and set of techniques there, but very different sounds. It's giving him too much credit to call him the central figure of "art music" in the 1970s, but it's not that far from the truth.

Not that I'm going to give Eno credit for this track. His processing is amazing, but it isn't the keystone. If I had to give credit for Gun's frightening power to a single instrument, it would be the drums. Playing ahead of the beat (establishing the track's nauseating anxiety), thumping so atavistically as to embarrass Meg White or Moe Tucker, throwing in violent tumbling fills... fuck flash and precision, this is great drumming*. The guitar is close behind, screaming eerily like human voices in distress, chopped up into stroboscopic pieces and reassembled. And then there's the vocal, at a singularly effective spot in Cale's range - particularly on the choruses, where it brilliantly undermines the potentially stadium-rock riff.

And his phrasing! He gets so much mileage out of the lyric, a film noir script about detectives on a bad beat in an awful world. It doesn't sound that original or compelling if you haven't heard it, maybe; but there's so much fear and hatred in his delivery of these Philip Marlowe-esque lines that the song completely surpasses the concept.

This song is on every single Cale compilation, and for one reason: it is essential. I will brook no dissent here. If you don't own The Island Years/Gold (which includes Fear whole and entire), you should buy it. If you don't want to, pirate the track for all I care. But you'd better goddamn listen to it, or that final guitar solo might rip out your throat.

* I do appreciate technique. But you've got to know when to just pound those suckers.

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Dying on the Vine

It's Día de los Muertos. Why not enjoy a sugar skull with this post?

A note about Robert J. Widlar.

Besides many other distinctions, Bob Widlar was the father of the operational amplifier, an arrangement of transistors and biasing circuits that easily slotted into more complicated circuits, becoming a core building block of the technological revolution of the late 20th century. He did not invent it, but he set the standard for integrated circuit op-amps and designed some of the best and most versatile that have been created. After making Fairchild Semiconductor the leader in the IC market, he started the linear IC division at National Semiconductor.

This is where, over the course of four years, he established a reputation as an excitable boy. He brought a ewe in to mow the lawn. To stop people from raising their voice to him, he created and secretly installed in his office a device called the Hassler, which would echo any noise in the vocal frequency range at a higher frequency, on the edge of the ear's range; as the volume increased, the frequency offset dropped proportionally, making the echo more noticeable, and giving the effect of a ringing in the ears. He smashed nonfunctional components into a fine powder to ensure they had zero chance of causing him trouble in the future.

And then, after that four years was up, he got in his car and drove down to Mexico, to Puerto Vallarta, leaving no forwarding address. He took a single-room adobe apartment, where he could concentrate on his alcohol and write technical papers on electrical circuits without so much as an electric lightbulb around. National Semiconductor sent a mission down to track him and reacquire him. Eventually he signed on as a contractor, but kept his Mexican residence. He died at fifty-three during a demanding jog. He wasn't identified for several days.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled fragment.

I think of Bob Widlar when I hear this song. I don't only think of him - I think of the Katharine Anne Porter novel Ship of Fools, as well, and of Ambrose Bierce, charging down into Mexico despite his age to join Pancho Villa's army, disappearing from the face of the earth.

To be honest, I think of myself. Even though I'm not an alcoholic, nor a gringo in Mexico, nor hanging out among troops and criminals. I don't think it's self-dramatization; there's something about the song that reaches out and pulls you into it. It's an epiphanic moment, a passing instant of understanding crystallized into a song. Despite the very particular scenario, it's a song with a weird universal resonance.

That's a big claim, but consider this: "Dying on the Vine" is a fairly obscure song in Cale's catalog, its definitive version a live take, the studio album entirely forgotten. And yet I have heard from several other people who call it their favorite Cale song. It is my favorite Cale song. It is not his best song, it is not his most characteristic song, but it is the song that most reaches into my chest and clamps down on my heart.

Two albums feature this song: Artificial Intelligence as an inebriated slow-motion dance, a life observed from the bottom of the bottle; Fragments of a Rainy Season as a flood of illumination. The video above comes very close to a perfect hybrid of the two. Of all the versions, the Fragments version (mp3 here) is the most essential; it's the most accessible path into the song. (It's worth noting that the version included on the Close Watch compilation is indeed the Fragments version.) I was very disappointed by the studio version on first listen, but I've come to understand and appreciate it.

It's interesting to think about the choices behind Cale's different approaches to the song: play up the Spanish motif or not? play up the emotion or hide it? emphasize the choruses or the verses? what spin do you put on the narrator? and how much of him is you? I've gone through six solo guitar arrangements of this song myself, and tweaking each of these parameters has a substantial effect on the nature of the song. But the song stands up to everything! There are few songs I've encountered that can stand up to as much resculpting as this one does, and yet it always seems to retain its soul.

I'm not a reliable guide to the lyrics of this song; my interpretation is completely personal and extremely idiosyncratic. Just part of the magic of the song is the sentence fragment in the chorus: "I was living my life like a Hollywood..." A Hollywood what, he doesn't say, but it evokes so many Nathanael West-type possibilities.

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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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Secret Corrida

Why don't I tell you about a song from Walking on Locusts that I love, then. Something that isn't schmaltzy, or draggy, or overwrought. Something like "Secret Corrida." The title, punning gently on "secret corridor," works well as a preview of the grace and ambiguity the track brings to its difficult subject matter. It's a meditation on the slaughter in the Balkans, you see, but Mr. Cale intentionally obfuscated it.

Not that the horror is completely removed. Cale describes a bullfight (La Corrida) in endless repetition. It's curiously bereft of action, just a sequence of still scenes: on the empty street on the day of a bullfight, listening to the crowd cheer; blood on sawdust, the door slammed shut, the crowd hungry for excitement (that is, death). There's no ranting about Milosevic, just meditation on human bloodlust and the monsters within us. And... though I feel cheated, a bit, by the evasion, I appreciate what he's done here in creating a subtle nightmare.

The music is gauze: somnambulant guitar coats the back of the aural picture, Cale's electric piano plays hypnotically repetitious three-note sequences throughout, and the vocal is restrained and nearly affectless. There are Spanish-inflected runs in the piano here and there. Trumpet (excuse me, mutantrumpet), gentle and as woozy as that guitar, takes the lead between each vocal section, and it nearly stops my heart each time. The Moroccan percussion works well on this track, adding to the circular and "out of time" feel.

This is one of the few pieces on the album where Cale's "less drama is more" approach really bears fruit. It's music for insomniacs, perhaps, but not for those who'd like to go to sleep. I love the song as a taste of what could have been: an album of songs like this would occupy an honored place in his catalog.

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Zen

A punk asked John, "How can I find Heartbreak Hotel?"
The head of the chicken landed in his Pimm's. At that moment the punk was enlightened.*

What's Welsh for Zen? is the title of John Cale's incredibly weird and often nauseating 2000 autobiography, and it's an interesting question. (Cale isn't really one to speak in koans, but the book is, like his life, an exercise in apparent contradictions and bizarre paradoxes.) In any case, the book's title foreshadowed this song, which would emerge three years later as the lead track on HoboSapiens.

And "Zen" has got very little to do with Zen, really -- the song is built around a litany of "Zen and the Art of" variants (Bollywood, forgery, sorcery, reality, algebra). I'd have called it "And the Art of...", but then how can the lotus bloom without pond scum? It's a very loosely connected series of images, but - aside from a few bum lyrics - it works well. There seems to be a political political edge to it, though possibly more with hindsight; there's the germ of a relationship song in there, too. I tend to mentally emphasize whatever angle I'm more interested in on a given day, but I always love the opening verses: "It's midnight, and our silver-tongued obsessions come at us out of the dark, scrambling to be recognized before tearing themselves apart." (As my coauthor can attest, it's something I often mumble come 12AM.)

A lot of the song's appeal comes from the dazed, stop-time track: bodiless female backing vocals being cut in and out artificially, a subterranean bassline, atonal piano twinkling, multiple treated Cales singing in unison. It sounds like a subtle nightmare, one without any outright horrors that just makes everything feel wrong. It loses that live, and becomes less interesting (though more pleasant) because of it.

I feel as if the song deserves more. ("Keep talking," said the snow-white Mandarin.) But I've got nothing to say.

* Like Mumon said,
Without revealing his own penetration,
He offered another's words, not his to give.
Had he chattered on and on,
Even his listeners would have been embarrassed.

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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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