Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

I've made clear that I find Words for the Dying an affront. The instrumental and choral arrangements by Cale and Eno don't seem intrinsically bad, but between the completely affectless boy's choir and the sloppy Russian orchestra, the execution never gets better than tolerable. This feeling is amplified every time I listen to the unimpeachable stripped-down and focused solo piano arrangements featured on Fragments of a Rainy Season.

The chromatic harmonies and dissonant notes of the Words... arrangement of Dylan Thomas's most famous poem, however, add a layer of discontent to the oddly buoyant vocal and instrumental melodies that Cale uses for this poem that seems to extol senile dementia. For a while, I felt uneasy about it: the orchestral version that I disliked seemed to communicate the poem's tone more accurately than the solo version I loved.

A couple years ago, though, something extremely improbable happened: I found a useful YouTube comment. The author pointed out that the poem, after all, is a villanelle, a form originating in light pastoral subject matter. The poem subverts the form by taking this innocent form and twisting it to honor the incompleteness of even the greatest lives. The solo Cale arrangement does the same by taking more of the melodies into major keys and letting the dissonance out only in the connective tissue and certain vocal phrases.

(Not to give Dylan Thomas too much credit. "Do Not Go Gentle..." certainly helped repopularize the form, but it was on its way back already. Its resurgence in the 20th century led to many disturbingly effective poems, e.g. Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song".)

Here's the author himself reading the poem. It's striking how similar his meter is to Cale's - do you think that's a coincidence?

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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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Been away

But now I'm back.

What did we miss? A new compilation album of Cale productions, some limited reissues of 70s records, and, oh, right, a new record. (And a remix album, but that didn't do a whole lot for me.)

I did at last manage to see Mr. Cale live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last month with the Wordless Music Orchestra. He performed Paris 1919 and a selection of new and old songs. I only caught him one night of the two, and apparently missed a live performance of Do Not Go Gentle... (which might be the first thing I discuss in this brutal new year).

A little review: Paris went well, with some interesting spins on some of the songs. To be frank, Child's Christmas was a wreck, with guitar wanking all over the track and a little something off in everyone's timing. I steeled myself for an unpleasant evening, but things improved markedly on Hanky Panky Nohow. I wish I had written down my notes the same night, but precision is unnecessary. Some songs got dronier, some songs got poppier. Half Past France got a raga development that worked surprisingly well. The most pronounced change was Graham Greene, which lost its reggae completely and transformed into a Latin number, meanwhile achieving its ultimate destiny... well, I guess I ought to write about it. Macbeth was awkwardly grafted onto the end of the album. Why, I don't know.

The second set was on the whole less awkward. Opener Hedda Gabler is a song I've heard too much; I still like Ibsen too much to entirely approve of Cale's use of the name, but the coda was worth the rest of the song. Captain Hook was catastrophically powerful, though Marka did not care for the guitar pyrotechnics. New song Cry was OK, but seemed a bit generic as many recent relationship songs have. I quite enjoy Living With You on the record, but except for a few moments where everything gelled it felt unworthy of stage time. Riverbank was a complete surprise and really hit the spot. A keyboard-driven I Wanna Talk 2 U (whose name still hurts to type) was boring live and not half as good as the album version, to me, but Marka liked it. The Hanging took me a while to place; it's an awfully strong song to bury on a Black Friday special edition!

The orchestra then left the stage. Wordless Music includes many performers I like, and they mostly did very well, but I have to say, things felt much more natural and visceral with just the band. Nookie Wood blew the audience quite away, vocal effects and all, and Venus in Furs was the only way to end the night.

I'm looking forward to the next time I see the band. Hopefully sans orchestra.

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Heartbreak Hotel X

OK, so I sort of made up the name, but there needs to be some way to refer to the new reworking of Heartbreak Hotel that debuted as a sketch from the 2006 rehearsals on the Circus Live DVD*.

It seems to be improvised - I say that because it's labeled "Heartbreak Hotel of sorts!!" on the DVD, and somebody says, "That was a moment!" when they're done. Cale's vocal isn't really in the same key as the rest of the track, to my ears, though as atonal as it is, it's hard to tell. The worst part of the original version is the cringe-inducing "diddy wah diddy" (verbatim) scat in between verses instead of "feeling so lonely" and the rest of the chorus. Despite these flaws, it's fairly compelling. He ends the song with a slurred chant of "whadda whadda whaddid I do," which sounds better than it looks.

I thought it was a one-off when I first saw it, but Cale has been performing it live ever since. He's got a better handle on it now - it's less atonal and less jokey. (Occasional caveman backing vocals from his guitarist aside.) It's not as emotionally satisfying as the piano-driven versions from the early 80s through the 90s, but in general I like it at least as much as his original hard rawk recomposition of the song. (The main post about Heartbreak Hotel is here, if you missed it.)

"I'm scared and I wanna go home," said the guitarist after they played that first version. I agree with the first part at least, but I'm happy that he's still doing violence to old songs.

^* The forty minutes of rehearsal footage alone being a perfectly good reason to pick up the set. The DVD is region-free and the set is cheap now!

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Catching up...

¿Qué Pasa? They snuck out a new Cale album yesterday in the US without me knowing about it? I never dreamed I'd learn of a new Cale release by discovering it in a record store, but there you are.

The Record Store Day 2: Black Friday release of EP: Extra Playful features two new tracks not otherwise available. The full tracklist:

1. Catastrofuk
2. Whaddya Mean By That
3. Hey Ray
4. Pile A L'Heure
5. Perfection
6. Bluetooth Swings
7. The Hanging

Black Friday pisses me off, and I did not partake. There were only two copies left at my record store today. Lucky me.

I'm midway through my first listen, but I'm favorably impressed so far. I had managed to avoid hearing Hey Ray and Whaddya Mean in their live versions. It's somewhat unserious and even jokey, though, in the vein of some of blackAcetate or Jumbo. The two bonus tracks on the US Black Friday release seem more demo-ish than the five original tracks. The Hanging is more fleshed out by far. I think this will have legs, but only time will tell...

In other news... I have done you a disservice by not commenting on the recent CD, DVD, and vinyl (!) releases of John Cale's two Rockpalast shows. I picked them up shortly after release, but didn't have much to say at first.

The CD release is great. It could be mixed better, but it's much better than the bootleg I had previously. The band show (Essen 1984) is not his best of that tour, and that band wasn't his best of the era, but it's still a good listen. (John Cale Comes Alive covers the same tour in superior versions but with many fewer tracks.) The solo show (Bochen 1983) is excellent - rather less crazed than other shows, but more competent. It features my favorite recording of "Only Time Will Tell" to date.

The DVD is essential if you like watching Mr. Cale live... and who doesn't. The band show is more entertaining to watch. Heartbreak Hotel and Streets of Laredo will make much more sense when listening to the show after you've watched it.

The vinyl is disappointing. The two-disc release includes the entire band performance, but only four tracks from the solo performance, and not the best ones at that. I'd have preferred selections from both shows. But it is nicely done (better materials than Cale Comes Alive) and worth picking up for superfans.

Hopefully I'll see you again sooner than this time next year. It is beginning to be a habit, though...

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Ship of Fools

Part of the insane fun of following John Cale is engaging in cross-referential snipe hunts in an attempt to get inside Cale's head. For instance, one might listen to "Cable Hogue" and have one's curiosity piqued enough to pick up the bizarro Sam Peckinpah film The Ballad of Cable Hogue. "Ship of Fools" might likewise trigger the Dear Listener to check out the Katherine Anne Porter novel involving an international bunch of losers sailing from Mexico to Nazi-infested Germany. I do not recommend this course of action; it won't help you much in understanding Cale's song. The novel comes down squarely on the "people suck" side of the philosophical fence, but you can get that just by listening to Fear and it won't take nearly as long. So let's just concern ourselves with Cale's take on the loaded allegorical image of deranged passengers aboard a ship with no pilot.

Cale's "Ship of Fools" opens with a lovely floating motif, less appropriate to a ship than to a carousel. It sounds like a metallophone but apparently isn't, so it must be Brian Eno on the synth. Then Cale's weary voice comes in, complaining of hunger. Hunger is prominent in the early verses, hunger and desolation: "The black book, a grappling hook / A hangman's noose on a burnt-out tree." Cale and his friends are in Arizona, it seems-- wait a minute, Arizona? And fishermen who dream of sailing to there from Tennessee? On what river?

Cale's phantom caravan sails from Tombstone to Memphis, where Dracula gets onboard, and from there proceeds to Swansea. Home to Wales, in other words. And that's really the key here-- the images of hunger and poverty and desperate fishermen have nothing to do with Tennessee and Arizona at all. The hangman's noose and southern prayers are just another fantastic vision, Old Europe's fever dreams of the New World. Invisible cities, again.

But hold on, sister's gone south to give the sign. Is there hope? Probably not; the entire point of a ship of fools is that it's a bogus ark of salvation. Like a jester king on Mardi Gras, it's all cheap dazzle with no substance or authority. It'll be another Christmas in Wales with no food, just unfulfilled delusions.

And the ship fades into the distance with the carousel motif burbling merrily away. Round and round we go, and we're not getting anywhere.

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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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Dance of the Seven Veils

Today's my favorite feast day in the old Catholic calendar: the beheading of St. John the Baptist. It so happens that our man Cale has the perfect song for it, too - a live dramatization featuring Judy Nylon on vocals. Dance of the Seven Veils is a somewhat cheesy recasting of the very cheesy Oscar Wilde interpretation of the biblical Salome story. I find a little girl childishly toddling around the room and then asking for the head of the great (loony) ascetic to be a lot more appealing dramatically than Wilde's psychosexual obsessive.

Cale & Nylon & Co. thankfully do not take the material overly seriously. Judy chews the scenery nearly as well as her partner - as morningside posted over here, Salome is recast as a sassy New York Girl. Nylon's narration proceeds through flirtation ("to tell the truth..."), lust ("take his lips and..."), murder ("I want the head of the Baptist!"), and denouement ("'Now get her.'")

The instrumentals are really appealing, building and building circularly in a very post-rock way before crashing into that coda. The coda, the part that actually features singing, seems a little rough/incomplete, but it's an appropriate conclusion to the piece. ANYWAY, I wish there were more and better recordings of the Cale band(s) of this period - they're among the tightest and rapport-ful of any of Cale's bands. The performances on Sabotage are better than anything on Cowgirls, but not by that much.

Somehow I suspect that there was a visual component to this. Damn shame we don't have a record of that.

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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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Waiting for the Man/Augustus Pinochet

AUGUSTUS PINOCHET!
I don't know what I'd have thought if I were in that audience. Cale is doing his usual mid-80s tour thing on "Waiting for the Man," hamming it up, performing it the way he did back then. It's really moving along. So of course he starts rapping about going to Chile in search of the great coffee bean.

Wait, what? Then he starts screaming at Augusto Pinochet? "I CLAUDIUS," he says. Which gives this modern monster of an "Augustus," a man unworthy of such a name, far too much credit. "Have another cup of coffee!" he bids the Generalissimo. "What's the matter, Augustus? Poison? I drink this poison to you, Augustus! I Claudius!"

Most amusingly, he changes the song's denouement - always the highlight of his versions - to a rather different sort of transfixion:

Augustus saiiiiiiiiid
Augustus SAIIIIIIIID
Augustusssssss aaaaaiiiii Claudius
He said-
Don't leave me, don't leave me Clau-
Baby don'tcha holler
Daaaaarling pleeeeeease don't bawl and shout
I'm Catholic too
I'm gonna work it on out
I'm feeling so good, feeling so fine
Until tomorrow
But that's just
Just another

WAITIIIIIIIIIIN
WAITIIIIIIIIIIN
WAITIIIIIIIIIIN

And what can you say to that? Nothing. You just shut up and listen.

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Empty Bottles

It's a shame that the only official recording of this unknown classic is from the essential, horribly recorded, and shadily published Reed/Cale/Nico album Le Bataclan 1972. "Empty Bottles" does better as a mainstream ballad of loser love than anything else Cale would write, and could have perhaps gone somewhere as a single. So of course he gives it to Leonard Cohen accompanist and "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" singer Jennifer Warnes, whose 1972 album Jennifer he was producing at the time, and never bothers recording it himself. (Jennifer, naturally, would never see reissue or CD release - though a 2007 twofer rerelease confusingly reused the name.)

It's interesting to hear Lou Reed providing lead acoustic guitar work over Cale's rhythm, even if the two sometimes seem at cross-purposes. The instrumental track is pretty unremarkable G/C strummy stuff. What makes the song is the knowledge of the narrator that this relationship is mutually self-destructive, and his commitment to it anyway. The lovely vocal melody helps, especially on the bridge:

And I do love you, against all odds
Though you don't know what I want
We're much poorer than that bottle
More foolish than that wine

John Cale and Miss Cindy of the GTOs would marry that year.

I'd post contemporary indie band The Ladybug Transistor's cover of the song, but it's up for sale on Amazon now. So, have a listen to a speed-corrected version of the Bataclan performance instead and raise a toast to Mr. Cale.

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I Wanna Be Around

Me? I'm in great shape; here's the latest thing from the workshop.

I Wanna Be Around was a Tony Bennett hit back in 1963. The song was written by Johnny Mercer and Sadie Vimmerstedt, a cosmetician from Youngstown Ohio who sent a note to "Johnny Mercer-Songwriter-New York" containing a lyric she thought would make a good song: I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart. Mercer wrote the song, and, being a supreme gentleman, gave her a 50% co-credit, guaranteeing her a few thousand dollars a year in royalties for the rest of her life.

And it might never have made its way to John Cale's music stand if Brian Wilson hadn't penciled it into the SMiLE tracklist back in 1966. But he did (even if he got the lyrics wrong). I have no evidence that Cale had a stack of SMiLE bootlegs, but I will assume he did, and shame on him if he didn't.

But the version he recorded with Jools Holland's big band owes little to either Wilson's gentle version or Bennett's slow croon. Cale takes the song fast, hard, and - you can hear this in the vocal - with a sharklike smile. The growl in Cale's voice on "I wanna be around to see how he does it, when he breaks your heart to bits" raises hackles.

Shame, though, that there's so much boilerplate big-band pyrotechnics going on around him. It's fun enough, sure, but a sparer arrangement with a vocal so venomous would be an essential part of the canon. But, hey, the album is cheap and you get great songs by dead guys. For pocket change, I recommend it.

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Decade

The slab of noise generously titled "Decade" was allegedly recorded on December 31, 1979. Though guitarist Richie Fliegler denies involvement with or knowledge of the band performing, it's a pretty convincing Cale band. What's most notable about it is, perhaps, the fairly conventional nature of the thing. It sounds like Rock Music. The guitar lead goes places (at least in circles), the stolid and martial drumming sounds like it should be backing a very unrehearsed garage band, and (Cale's?) bass part (which seems to appear only in the last third) thumps along.

After turning over in place with one feedback-loaded guitar explosion after another, it finally moves into some appealingly chunky rhythmic territory after Cale joins in. There's nothing particularly experimental or even very confrontational about it (unlike the title track or "Dance of the Seven Veils"). It sounds completely spur-of-the moment, a tune-up that turned into a "piece of music" - I think that's a virtue. It's just a loud, agitated-but-enthusiastic way to ring out one bad decade and ring in another.

Nothing changes but the numbers on the wall, so turn up your amps and say hello to 2008. Happy New Year!

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Frozen Warnings

The Marble Index is, for my money, one of the most difficult records to listen to Cale ever made (well, helped make). It's hostile and atonal, cold in a way the New York 1960s recordings aren't, and relentlessly SLOW - not to mention Nico's voice and melodies are more than usually soporific. It's an album I admire more than I enjoy: Nico's vision is singularly intense and Cale's "arrangements" are some of the most interesting music he's ever written, but I find it almost impossible to identify with the mindset behind it.

The song I most enjoy is the most tuneful thing present, "Frozen Warnings." The vocal melody is a weird blend of Gregorian chant and Indian raga, and shows more movement than most other tracks. The backing music builds up around an organ/viola drone, creating a feeling of suspended animation. I don't know what else I can say - this is hard music to talk about.

Well, here's something. Cale wrote a piano part and performed this in the Nico retrospective film Nico: Icon. Below is a video; here's an mp3 of that performance. Great stuff.

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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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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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Mary Lou

Record labels add a smidgen of unreleased material to compilation albums to get die-hard fans to buy in. This has been going on for quite some time. John Cale's infamous collection Guts, which introduced hockey mask chic and Helen of Troy outtake "Mary Lou" to the world, was something of an exception, though: Island Records, you see, hadn't issued Helen of Troy in North America, and put this out by way of apology.

It's a very bizarre album, a sort of Songs in the Key of Death: side one is led off by the title track, from Slow Dazzle; then "Mary Lou" and three of the more raucous songs from Helen ("Helen of Troy" itself, Modern Lovers cover "Pablo Picasso", "Leaving It Up to You" - yep, it's back!); Fear tracks "Fear (Is a Man's Best Friend)" and "Gun"; and Slow Dazzle rave-ups "Dirty Ass Rock'n'Roll" and "Heartbreak Hotel." Now, I'd have put "Cable Hogue" on there instead of Helen, myself, but it's a pretty decent selection of the bloodiest tracks of the Island trilogy.

"Mary Lou", like Pablo and Dirty-Ass Rock'n'Roll, is on the album as leavening. Oh, it sounds threatening, but the lyrics are an innocuous and insubstantial imitation of Dylan's "Maggie's Farm." Mary, mother, brother, father, check. Though her father being in the government and not knowing the difference between right and wrong doesn't sound so innocent.

The woo-woo girls start the song out with threatening "oohs" that would pop up in a much less restrained and irritating version in the far future. Cale's vocal is pretty aggressive, especially on the chorus, and he throws in a scream or two for good measure. His screams don't really seem justified by the song's feel, but, hey. The guitar is choppy and pleasant, sort of reminiscent of "Pablo Picasso."

(In fact, very reminiscent of Pablo Picasso, which Cale did with this in a medley as the closer track on this year's Circus Live. "Mary Lou," slight as it is, did better in the medley than it does alone. They have the same turgid feel as all the other rock tracks on the album, but it's a fun pairing anyway.)

I don't agree with Robert Christgau that "Mary Lou" drags down the compilation, but it's not a track I crave hearing very often. It's just sort of there. However, it did lead to something stranger, scarier, and more substantial. Which is what we'll look at next time.

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On a Wedding Anniversary

For my money, the supreme accomplishment of John Cale's Dylan Thomas project Words for the Dying is "On a Wedding Anniversary." Though Thomas's symbologies can seem random, this poem, examining the falling-apart of a young marriage, is razor-sharp. With economical language, it evokes a very complex set of ideas and feelings. Marriage is one of the most interesting and controversial institutions of human society, and the poem explores the ideal of it ("down the long walks of their vows") and the reality ("this anniversary of two").  It suggests that, regardless of catechism and other fantasies, marriage is not a true union but an alliance of two individuals - though the final verse's "their heart/their brain" seems to suggest a true union through suffering even as the institutional union of marriage is broken. It achieves a great deal with the device of the pathetic fallacy: "The sky is torn across this ragged anniversary." I read in the poem of the death of a young child, "Now their love lies a loss," and I think of the early Robert Frost poem "Home Burial."

Even lying on the page these words can lacerate, but when Cale sings them these shards of glass are hurled. On Fragments of a Rainy Season, to devastating effect, he hits just the right emotional notes on each lyric. The piano feels like sheets of rain. The vocal melody winds around the chord progression unpredictably. I think it seemed a little random when I first heard it, but now it feels natural, even necessary. As the "rain" tapers at the end, Cale's repetition of the second verse over a sinister two-chord vamp ushers out the song (and connects it to the middle song of the suite, "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed").

It doesn't fare as well in the orchestrated original version, but it does better than the other tracks. Cale's vocal is delivered well (though not as well) and fits with the orchestra better than his other vocals do. I'm not that happy with the horn parts, which seem out of sync with his vocal, and I don't care for the ending, but it would be an entirely acceptable recording.

That is, if it weren't for the temporally and emotionally out-of-sync choirboys. They sing the key word of the lyric Cale is singing throughout the last few verses. They're fine when they're repeating "brain" endlessly over the end of the third verse, they're at least effectively creepy when they're chanting "Death strikes their house" at the end, but when they sing "chain" and "too late" and "windows" and "door" it's like someone (pardon the Americanism) blowing a raspberry. Ach! Cale should have had them sing bouche fermée (i.e. hum).

Thank goodness this stuff got a do-over.

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