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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Here's to Johnny Viola

It's been a year since I posted? Where has the time gone? I struggled way back in January with the ongoing disaster in Haiti, trying to use it to post on Tonton Macoute. Which, come to think of it, might be worth trying again...

But, maybe as a way to ease back into this thing, why don't we discuss a true rarity: a song about, or at least inspired by, Mr. Cale.

Shearwater are, to my mind, at the very top of the art-music world right now, in quality if not in sales, having delivered three consecutive albums of depth, evocation, and a stark beauty. As frontman and songwriter Jonathan Meiburg put it, the trilogy is music on a theme: "no sound ever comes from inside the gates of Eden."

The first in the very loose trilogy, 2006's Palo Santo, is ostensibly a theme album. Every song, Meiburg claims, is connected in some way to the life of Nico. Despite my fair knowledge of Ms. Päffgen's life and a deep and abiding love for the album, I can't tell you how.

But that's neither here nor there. About three years after I first heard the album, I finally realized that a song called "Johnny Viola" on an album inspired by Nico had to be a reference to our own Mr. Cale. It was the first non-single track on the album that caught my ear, at that.

Have a listen:

OK, so I can't tell you how it relates to our Johnny Viola. But it is an awesome song, and I was tickled and somewhat chagrined to finally make the connection.

[N.B. they're using "The Black Angel's Death Song" as intro music for their concerts this tour. You know, to set the mood a bit. I may have been the only person at the show really enjoying it.]

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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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The Moon Her Majesty

Celebrating the just-past full moon in June, here's another little oddity from the late Nineties, when our man was happy to do recitations for just about anybody who asked. Mr. Cale recorded this poem as a spoken-word piece for the Kerouac tribute Kicks Joy Darkness. I can only assume he composed the music as well, as the quasi-ambient keyboards certainly fit his style and sound. There's not really that much to discuss in the content: analysis of Kerouac certainly isn't my game.

I will say that I prefer Cale's planetarium-music reading of the piece to the author's own looney tunes take (props to Funeral Pudding), though Cale's recitation of "little spritely otay" is probably the most sheepish he's ever sounded on record. In parts, he makes Kerouac's writing sound like Dylan Thomas, which is something of an achievement.

I'd really like to make this available for download, but it's on Amazon MP3. Warren Zevon's recording of Running Through Chinese Poem Song, another poem about the moon (a jaundiced look at Apollo), is worth picking up for contrast. (Note: Amazon's track artist listings are completely wrong for this album. Which is somewhat appropriate.)

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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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Sanities redux

I don't normally make apologies for irregular posting, but after calling Ian out I have to make my own mea culpa. I've just been very busy with other projects and have neglected this blog.

Ironically I've been going through a Cale renaissance. I was disappointed but not surprised that the shiny new Watchmen film did not include Sanities (which I already covered). Can't really say anything about it, as I've not seen it, but I was inspired to get some version of Sanities on the internet, and so put together this cover in an hour.

There's no special insight in this version, and it loses some of my favorite things about Cale's original. This is much more of a one-note horror film number. It does have a certain something in moments, though, I think. In any case, I made it, I'm not too ashamed of it, and I thought I would share it. I promise I won't make this a habit.

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