Don't Pretend

So, see if you believe that this exists. This is a self-helpish track, just this far from Max Powers in its lyrics. Our friend John urges us to carpe the diem in very blunt terms, with some seemingly obvious inversions of what is meant ("the physical world will transcend", "life is the dream that you must wake"). It lacks any sort of particular angle that would make it particular to a specific scenario, but is sort of generic and all-encompassing. Only the coda gives it any hint of an interesting spin: "You'll be a big man someday / just starting with today," which might be interpreted to mean that it's directed at the young.

But why does it feel like a Violent Femmes song? The vocal melody, the weird and American word choices, the occasional lapses into anachronism ("troubles must needs come"), the pulsing/stabbing instrumental (except here it's piano)? It's so blatant you'd think it was written by Gordon Gano.

Which indeed it was, appearing as it did on GG's strange 2002 quasi-self-tribute album Hitting the Ground. Elsewhere on the bizarre my-new-songs-performed-by-my-heroes album, Lou Reed got a cowriting credit on the much earthier "Catch 'Em in the Act", but Cale just plays the notes and sings the words as written. Gano observes, "I wrote 'Don't Pretend' trying to play like John Cale. Instead of me imitating him on the record, you get the real John Cale playing the song they way I envisioned it. How cool is that?"

It sounds like an interesting sort of hall of mirrors, Cale performing Gano (writing like Cale) like Gano, but really it just ends up being insulting to both of them. My favorite part of the whole weird scene is the credulous reviewers suggesting it would fit on Paris 1919. Thank God Cale was about to come out of his period of collaborative drift with 5 Tracks.

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Images

Of course, Cale's longest-running, deepest, most meaningful, most destructive collaboration was with Lou Reed. Those who don't know Cale think of the Velvet Underground as Reed's band. Those who worship at the shrine of Cale tend to view Reed rather negatively, and the reverse seems equally true. Me, I enjoy a lot of Reed's work, but it doesn't engage me as directly or as deeply as Cale's. If you're coming from a different conceptual space I can imagine "Street Hassle" would be more moving than "Cable Hogue" - to me the former's very interesting and intellectually engaging, but weirdly like darkside Harry Chapin.

Anyway, you'd think that both viewpoints would find something appealing about Songs for Drella. The two poles of the Velvet Underground, together to remember their lost friend and mentor. And it just doesn't work out that way. They try to find the old magic of the Velvet Underground on a few tracks, notably "Images" - a seemingly born-of-improv attempt to recapture the assault-drone they produced live for Warhol's film showings. They do some Lou Reed songs, some John Cale songs, many indeterminate ones.

It's an enjoyable album, it's touching in spots and illuminating in others, and it's convincing as a collaboration - it's hard to tell who to credit for most of the songs. (Reed is quite sure he did all of it, but what else is new.)

I don't know why I don't care much for it. It may be the subject matter - Warhol was a catalyst of many interesting things, but his art generally doesn't do much for me. There's also the fact that the album has a decidedly passive-aggressive feel to it - Reed had a lot of animosity towards Warhol, and he couldn't get rid of it completely. There's the little biographical note that both men abandoned and avoided Warhol his last five years of life.

Listening to it, you feel you've intruded on an uncomfortable wake, where the guests are drunk enough to admit past cruelties and to slip in barbs at the deceased, but not drunk enough to let go their masks and hit emotional catharsis. Then, too, they hate each other. Don't you get enough of that in real life?

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The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles

The collaboration between Cale and Terry Riley, on the other hand, was a short and apparently unhappy one. (Riley's statement on the album: "Yes! Church of Anthrax! [half-mirthful, half-exasperated laughter]"). It's not a fruitless collaboration, though - even if Riley felt that Cale commandeered the sessions, their respective styles did merge and more or less complement each other.

"The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles." Of all Cale's discarded pretentious high-art tics I miss the bizarre titles the most. The title isn't entirely inappropriate for this highly repetitious and recursive piano and sax voyage. Cale bangs away at a few chords on the piano (much faster than usual for his "classical" incarnation!), Riley plays undulating streams of sax akin (so they say) to A Rainbow in Curved Air. There are some special effects with stereo - sax flowing from left to right, echoes of the right sax in the left channel, etc.

There's a moment almost three minutes in which they change key, and it sounds like they've turned the boat out to sea. Similar picturesque developments keep the piece interesting almost all the way to the end, but the track outstays its welcome near the five-minute mark when the stereo panning of saxes gets a little overheated and the piano work lingers too long in the same vein. The ending is beautiful, though.

In all, it's a striking listen but not the most effective thing on the album. There's potential here that just wasn't realized.

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Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Church of Anthrax

It's rare that a John Cale composition evokes Kraftwerk, but the title track of 1971's collaboration with Terry Riley, Church of Anthrax, achieves just that.

Sounding for all the world like Ruckzuck's overly shrill little cousin, "Church of Anthrax" piles on just a few too many instruments for the static nature of its main modal progressions. It's a fun listen, but the high-pitched organ irritates and distracts from the clever and brawny exchange going between the bass and... er, prepared piano? or horns, or something. (It's a strange sound, but a good one.) The piece's component parts drift further and further from one another as the song goes on, and don't really mesh again until halfway through. That's four and a half minutes. Once they mesh, they do nothing much in particular for the next two and a half minutes. It's a pleasant nothing much, but such things only go so far. A low drone comes in at the seven minute mark and swells, adding haunting brass, while everything else fades, and the song finally falls apart. It's a satisfying ending.

What's cool is that Terry Riley's playing the organ here, so I can't blame Cale for the worst bits.

Its flaws aside, it's quite odd to hear a Krautrock piece by John Cale. The "Krauts" had been working for a while at that point, so it wasn't all that original, but it's surprising anyway. He never did come close to this style again. It's a shame: there are some good ideas here, and it appears many of them were his. I wouldn't sacrifice any of his Seventies albums for the great lost Cale prog-rock album (OK, maybe this one), but I'd be interested to hear it.

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