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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Year of the Patriot

The aesthetics of desperation really work for me. That said, I have another obscurity for you, from the recently reissued Words for the Dying documentary - and its tragic nature (and the story gets worse) isn't its only notable aspect.

As usual, Hans scooped me on the money quote, but, hey, I'm not proud:

There was a Russian double bass player that Brian Eno and I ran into when recording ‘Words For The Dying’. He had gigantic hands. He had hands like spades. I remember before I met him I was listening to the radio in New York and they played his record. He used to play Paganini on the bass. I got to Moscow and I asked, “Do you know this guy?” And someone says “Yeah he’s in the next building. He works next door!” I told Brian about him and I said, “You gotta hear this guy play. He is just amazing! He plays the double bass but he plays Paganini on this thing!”

So we set it up and arranged it and it was really sad. I mean the guy walked in a tuxedo and sat himself up and brought all the armors with him and set the armors up on chairs behind him in a semi circle and he stood in the middle and he started playing the bass. We noticed there was something wrong and also we noticed that the people that worked with him were making fun of him. What was happening was the guy had a disease called lupus [ed. note: um, no, though quite possibly Marfan Syndrome.] and his whole body was changing. You know the bones kind of crumble and they swell up. And his hands were gigantic. Very efficient in playing what he was doing but his face had altered. And he had this sort of distorted flat face. And it was horrible the way they were making fun of him.

It's an uncomfortable scene - Cale and Eno are obviously rather horrified by the situation, and they're both remarkably condescending - but what emerges from it is an outline of a remarkable piece. Despite the project, the lyrics don't appear to be Dylan Thomas, but Cale - "I'm buying my enemies to sell my friends. I'm buying my friends to sell my enemies. In the year of the patriot, the traitor is king and the genie's out of the bottle." OK, somewhat rough, but it's the start of something.

When I first saw the documentary - on a hard-won VHS tape - I was struck by the piece and was saddened that it was reduced to this little scrap. It's hard to see what more they could have done with it, to be sure, but what's there is evocative. I guess I should be grateful to have it.

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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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Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

It's easy in these days of ubiquitous recorded music to confuse recordings with compositions, a particular version of a song with the song itself. OK, not that easy, but hear me out. A recorded version of a song may not grab you, even after repeated listenings, while a live version or a rerecording may enthrall you. (The opposite also happens: great performances of mediocre songs are easy to come by.) We could get into the notion (illusion?) of performer authenticity and all that, too, but that's old hat.

Well, The Falklands Suite runs into that problem. It's an orchestral and choral setting of four Dylan Thomas poems that is the main content of Words for the Dying, Cale's ne plus ultra of weird tracklists. However, unlike most unsatisfying recordings, three of the four songs got a do-over on Fragments of a Rainy Season, and we're all the luckier for it. On record, the suite is one beast; live on solo piano, quite another.

The difference is pronounced on Cale's setting of "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed." The Russian television orchestra is clearly more engaged than it often is, and the boys' choir isn't too sloppy in the beginning. Cale's vocal is decent, if a wee bit overwrought. And yet, the elements stubbornly refuse to emulsify, remaining a lumpy mixture.

Individual elements are worthy of praise. The strings feel organistic in the "middle 8", as if they're driven by bellows, matching the tone of the (synthesized?) harmonium - hi Nico - they're playing with in an interesting way. The winds and brass do amazing work at creating a feeling of adriftness. The use of the boys' vocals even seems warranted at first.

The welcome of the vocals wears out quickly, however. It seems that Cale tried to assign vocals to himself or the boys based on the perspective he felt the poem was using. In practice, it feels totally random and very irritating. As elsewhere, when Cale sings together with the boys the result is horrifying - somebody isn't in key, or maybe the voices just don't work with his. Where they trade poem fragments, it feels lumpy as well. The choir probably should have been used for only the first line ("Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound | In the throat, burning and turning.") and the last ("through the drowned"), with Cale doing the rest. Cale's added coda, "We will obey the drowned, the drowned of Falkland," wasn't really necessary to get the drift, either.

Live, though, Cale's amazingly expressive vocal communicates his reading of the poem irresistibly. The free tempos provide an expansive feel, the changing piano inflections representing a powerless drift over the open ocean almost as well as the full orchestral treatment. Maybe it's so focused that it makes the original recording sound worse than it deserves to.

In any case, he had a great text to work with. I'm not a huge fan of Thomas (another contribution of Wales to the arts), but do enjoy his work. I can't say whether I like this poem so much because of the quality of its arrangement or enjoy the arrangement so much because of the quality of the poem. Although it uses more advanced poetic techniques than Cale usually does, Thomas's tendency for phonetically rich language fits well with Cale's. It's easy to imagine Cale writing lyrics like: "Under the mile-off moon we trembled listening to the sea."

[P.S. If I recall correctly, the poem was written for Thomas's father, dying of throat cancer. I don't really want to speculate about Welsh fathers in general, but it's an interesting subject worth considering, especially given that "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" follows this track in both the full and the redacted suite. There's also the title of the album to account for.]

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