In the Library of Force

[I was going to start this with, "You might wonder why I didn't include 'Music for a New Society' in the essentials list." Then I noticed a comment on the introduction post calling me out on the omission, heh heh. Fair enough. I keep vacillating on it. The material is generally strong, it's a unique album in modern music, and it has one of the best album titles around. It is Cale's nakedest-feeling recording. On the other hand, I think it a bit overrated, at least insofar as most of his catalog is underrated and neglected. Its extreme low-fi nature is effective, but it gives me pause, as well - the mistake on Chinese Envoy, while surely intentionally left in, doesn't add anything. Finally, it doesn't entirely gel as an album. Quibbles aside, if it were in-print and affordable, it would certainly be on the list. However, I paid 12$US for my cassette tape of it and more than twice that, nearly a year later, for my CD copy. It is a great record, but I can't call it essential until it comes back into print. ]

The difference between the original version and the reissue of Music for a New Society, other than a vanishingly small sound quality improvement on the CD, is "In the Library of Force." It's a unique track. Like most of Music for a New Society, it's incredibly spare musically. Silence keeps poking through the noise like sunlight filtering through clouds and torn cloth. It's more or less atonal: disconnected instrumental bits (synthesizer, drum, acoustic guitar) play randomly, occasionally interacting with one another or the vocal before breaking off again. Meanwhile Cale rants about "the library of force," seemingly a metaphor for the political enabling and rationalizing of violence. It's not the most coherent metaphor - I think the lyrics are improvised - but the vocal is compelling and the images memorable: "Glittering from pages come the precious stones of guilt." Maybe it's the way he sings it, I dunno.

And then the clouds pass, and a beautiful and serene new melody is played on a piano. This darkens with forcefully played minor chords, then brightens, then goes mysterious. The piano piece ends without resolution. A kick drum sounds, and silence reigns.

I think very highly of this piece. It's one of the most satisfying "classical" compositions Cale has done, and yet here it is on a "songwriter" album. If you treat the lyrics as stage dressing and the music as the real content, you'll get more out of it. I'll admit most people would find it unlistenable. There's only one way to find out if you're one of them.

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Amsterdam

You might get the impression that Cale is all blood and guts and foreign policy. (To be honest, I think that's what I like most about him.) But he writes pastoral and love songs, too, and they can be very good. His first album, Vintage Violence, represents itself as sinister but isn't. That false-face mask, the clever title - it's a hoax. Only one song present is really violent; coincidentally, it's the track he's performed most consistently from this album.

But it's not Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a beautiful little song that says a lot with a little. It's a very straightforward plot: John loves girl, girl goes to Amsterdam, girl comes back a bit different (to quote another song: "Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes / I thought it was there for good, so I never tried.") The heart of the song is the chorus. It's a convincing and underplayed song about preferring the good of one's beloved over having her. "But I love her still," he sings, "and miss her company still more." Call me a sap, but that's the bit that breaks my heart.

His vocal is careful and emotionally resonant. The simple organ and guitar arrangement suits the song by not overplaying anything. The clever doubling of the vocal on "But I love her still" provides oomph without resorting to cliché.

Here's a live performance from a great show in Amsterdam in 2004. The whole thing is available at fabchannel.com and very worth a listen.

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Barracuda

I was going to try to cover all of the studio albums before I started looking at any albums in more depth, but I've wanted to write about this, the most unfortunately overlooked song on Fear. The first of the "liebestod and water" scenes, Barracuda seems to be an account of dead bodies floating and bloating and being eaten in the aftermath of a flood. Though it ends with you (yes, you!) in a dark forest, with the moon, smiling at you, out of reach.

"Dark woman in the water drowning / sinking in a funny way" implies an agent: a barracuda would be the obvious guess. The witty lyrics don't really make linear sense, but there's a general sense of death and desolation and a lot of great (and I daresay funny) imagery - "dark woman like a crow a-crowing for the carrion meat", "ten morons with their whistles blowing", "mimicking our final days." Cale doesn't seem to mind the surroundings - the proto-chorus "the ocean will have us all" is sung matter-of-factly, with just a touch of pride and satisfaction. It's one of his greatest recorded moments.

Which reminds me. It's a formally non-standard song, something Cale was doing quite a bit in the Island Years, and not so much later. It's got two choruses, inserted at funny intervals. And the real chorus is a doozy, especially when you think you've heard the chorus! With a woo-woo girl, Cale speaks in the first person and invites the barracuda to lay down its life for him and to love him. I'm not sure what that's all about (fishing??), but the real effective bit is the last line, the sinister and gleefully delivered, "You always need to bring out the worst in me."

The rhythm track is irreverently funky, with the bass, rhythm guitar, and drums interacting like Shakespearean gravediggers. I think there's supposed to be a bit of an island feel to it. I like the nifty bubbling organ on the protochorus.

The descending viola riff that accompanies Cale's picturesque death scenes here is nothing short of spine-tingling, but it's nothing compared to the atonal (viola) shrieking that follows each chorus. There's no way for me to describe them, you just have to hear them. They're why this one caught my notice the first time I played the album - and why I can't stop listening to it.

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Essential Cale

Also see: Essential Songs

Two are inarguable:

Paris 1919 is the man's best album. It fuses his violent and beauty-seeking sides into a musically inventive, lyrically surprising, and wholly captivating album. It's probably best not to think too hard about the historical allusions, as they seem as impressionistic as the rest of the lyrics. There's no overt representation of the "screaming maniac" side of Cale here, but the maniac is submerged into the lyrics, and gets to sing horrible things very sweetly.

Fragments of a Rainy Season is my favorite live album by anybody and the ideal greatest hits collection to boot. Though Cale is unaccompanied here, his piano and guitar is all the instrumentation these songs need. I've never heard such a walking-on-a-tightrope performance before - not a note or syllable or accent is out of place, but the playing and singing is so intense it feels the whole thing could go off the rail at any moment. The only negative is that it's so good, everything else in his catalog sort of pales by comparison.

You should own one of the following:

Guts takes his Island records and cuts away 70%, leaving a bloody skeleton of the essential maniacal songs. This was the only way his Island discography saw American release back in the 70s, but, though these albums were uneven, I find it loses too much.

Better to buy the Island Years compilation (recently reissued as Gold, with a crap cover photo), which includes the entirety of the Welshman's Doom Trilogy plus all the b-sides, alternate tracks, and an outtake or several - 36 tracks in all. At going rates, it's well under $0.50 US per track.

What of the rest of his catalog? If you don't want to start hunting down imports and long-out-of-print records, your best bet is one or both of these compilations (one of which is an import; the other's out of print - haha):

Close Watch: An Introduction to John Cale is a very broad overview that does a satisfying job of covering his career, the CBGB years not included. Unfortunately, it's heavy on the Island Years, includes the dud "Set Me Free" from "Walking on Locusts", and doesn't give quite enough bang for the buck. No non-album tracks here either. At least it's in print, and you should be able to find it at an affordable price.

Seducing Down the Door is an excellent comprehensive compilation, full of rarities and surprises. It was published by Rhino in 1994, meaning of course that it's out of print. It also fails to meaningfully represent the CBGB years, including only the inessential blues remake/cover "Walking the Dog." It also devotes a lot of space to Paris and the Island years, but 13 tracks out of 38 isn't too much. The coverage of his early pop-classical work is welcome. A little bit of looking should allow you to grab this for $20 or less - a great deal.

I think Sabotage/Live is essential, since nothing else covers this very unique and unglued period. Cale comes uncomfortably close to getting cheesy rather than harrowing with the screaming here, but doesn't quite go over the line. The band is often great here - this is Cale's hardest-rocking album (until Circus Live, at least), but it still shows his amazing talent for texture and arrangement. The 2000 rerelease also includes the Animal Justice EP and the wonderfully dissolute "Rosengarden Funeral of Sores," the b-side to "Mercenaries (Ready for War)." It, alas, is out of print, but only recently. Good luck. EDIT: Back in print, hallelujah!

The best and most essential of Cale's recent records, 2003's 5 Tracks EP, is hard to find. 2003's Hobosapiens took a while to grow on me, but is well-loved now - its main flaw is overlength. blackAcetate (2005) is constructed strangely, but excellent in spots and worth picking up. These two last LPs should be easy to find, but they probably shouldn't be your first Cale albums.

And if you're into noise and drone - I mean, you're REALLY INTO them:

There's the New York in the 1960s box set, full of all kinds of atavistic wonders. The purest and most essential of the three discs (which are all available separately) is Sun Blindness Music, whose title track features Cale exploring a single chord on an electric organ for 43 minutes (the length of an entire vinyl LP). Which sounds very dull, but the way that chord twinkles and pulsates is anything but. I don't listen to it often, but I feel reborn every time I do (especially in the car). The other two discs are more diverse but less fulfilling.

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Cordoba

I tend to prefer accessible Cale. While I first heard this song on the excellent and accessible Fragments of a Rainy Season, it wasn't until I heard the studio original that "Cordoba" really grabbed me. The live version may technically be superior, but I can't say I prefer it. The studio take of "Cordoba" unfolds with a quiet, eerie menace; while I grokked that something bad was going down in the Fragments version, in the sense that something bad is almost always going down in a John Cale song, the Wrong Way Up track grabbed my attention, made me sit up and say, "What the heck is happening here?"

Bombs in suitcases are happening, from the sound of things. This one ranks with Talking Heads' "Listening Wind" as a tune you probably shouldn't be blasting on the car radio whilst going through a border crossing. And especially on the coda, it shows how subtle Cale can be more powerful than angry, screaming Cale; compare the recitation of "the lift stops between two floors... I'll walk towards the station... you walk towards the bus" on here with the more ranty vocals on Fragments. The quiet, detached, perhaps faintly sorrowful vocals on the studio track hint at something horrible yet inevitable-- events are in motion, and cannot now be stopped. It's a cinematic sequence, highly visual in the way many great Cale moments are. The tinkling little backing track reminds me somehow of the ending theme of Koyaanisqatsi (the bit with the burning satellite), and the resemblance to a music box gone wrong makes it all the more affecting. So, while the Fragments "Cordoba" may be another solid track off a stellar live album, I'll take the flawed but involving original.

See a slow and ghostly performance from Amsterdam in 2004 at Fabchannel or listen to the audio:

[Audio Flash Player][Low-quality download]

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The Endless Plain of Fortune

Hello. This is the wife mentioned on the About page-- the one who thinks that the blog-owner's definition of "Good John Cale Music" is waaaay too broad. My definition of Good Cale-- nay, great Cale-- is Paris 1919, his finest studio album (no arguments). And my favourite song off the album isn't the title track or the lovely "A Child's Christmas in Wales," great though they are. No, it's "The Endless Plain of Fortune" that I'll hit up again and again.

It's a wonderful and evocative title, a title that promises something epic in a Don Quixote way. We don't quite get Don Quixote, but we do get something of the exotic. The song is infused with the same kind of quasi-historicity that permeates the album; Paris 1919 exists in the space between the Great War and the end of Empire-- while the songs aren't any more historical than Neil Young's "Like An Inca," they possess a unique and haunting atmosphere. Shadowy characters rise out of the lyrics-- Field Marshal, Martha, Segovia, the Radio Man-- and disappear again. And while I don't always hang on to every lyric while listening to Cale, fascinating phrases catch my attention while I'm submerging myself in the music: "it's gold that eats the heart and leaves the bones to dry," "she walked away in time/she walked a crooked line," and more. I notice different facets of the lyric with every listen.

Is it a post-colonial critique of South African gold mining and British policy in the Transvaal? Is it the plot of some old film as fed through the Cale filter? I don't know, and almost don't want to find out; the mystery is part of the charm. Great backing track, too... it does have a bit of a movie-theme feel, and I mean that in the best possible way.

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Somebody Should Have Told Her

"It was easy to identify her body when she found her way back home." Beautifully ugly. As I said here, "Dead Or Alive" and this song seem to share a central idea. Where "Dead or Alive" yoked an allusively-told noir tale to a poppy tune, this song from 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' combines a dark and oppressive guitar-and-organ piece with more specific lyrics.

I get the feeling that maybe the lyrics weren't quite settled when this live recording was made and/or the lyrics that have been transcribed are maybe a bit wrong. (I also get the feeling that ROIR took Cale out for a drink or twenty to get him to approve this sub-bootleg quality recording for release.) Nevertheless, there are nice touches throughout: "I could have worked so hard to tell her / She would never have listened at all." The narrator's anger and frustration with both the victim and himself is a trick the song shares with "Dead or Alive."

Musically, it opens with a loping drumbeat, long organ chords, and Ritchie Fliegler's guitar. Cale's electric piano vamping and vocals come in next for the verses. The song brightens up at the chorus, with drums sounding on the beat and the organ doing some vamping of its own. The chorus, which modulates up into a major key, doesn't sound very depressive, Cale's hoarse vocals notwithstanding.

The last chorus gives way to a Fliegler-led coda (sharing the chorus lyrics and many of its characteristics) that in spots sounds almost triumphant. I suppose it's possible this is yet another murderer. Psychologically speaking, a very interesting song. It's a great song, really. It's just a shame that a glorified bootleg is the only way it's available.

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