Fear (Is a Man's Best Friend)

I was saying to M.A. around the time of the last post, "I really have been avoiding the essential stuff. I'd like to write up Fear, but I don't really know what I can bring to it. Something would have to get me in the mindset." I joked, "Maybe I should go get mugged."

Shortly thereafter, a kid got gunned down a few houses down from us. A drug thing or a gang thing, most likely. And I thought, with very little human decency, "Maybe now I should write up Fear."

But I didn't, because, after all, I had not changed. An burst of automatic weapons fire and a corpse on the neighbor's lawn does not necessarily change you. Scare you, yes. Especially when you consider that you were seen by the whole block talking to the police, and not everyone might be innocent. But that state of fright and shock doesn't last long before being swallowed up by the complacency of the day-to-day. I think back on that early, early morning with little fear or sympathy - little pity, even - just with disgust and not a little wonder that it really happened. Ah yes, and the detectives never bothered to call.

So I can't really blame my unplanned hiatus from this work on any scar from the experience, only on a sense of disappointment that I was not in a better position to write about this, one of Mr. Cale's finest songs. Especially one so tantalizingly apropos to the situation on the ground. I just hacked away at the song on my guitars, over and over again, for the next week or so.

Look, there's a reason it's on every greatest hits that's ever been put out for our man Cale. If you've listened to it, you know. If not, you haven't been listening to me, have you?

More...

Gun

Of course John Cale worked with Brian Eno from early on. I mean, sure, Brian Eno works with everybody. He does unreasonably brilliant work with almost everybody. What's impressive is how unique his collaborations are: the Enoed Phil Manzanera guitar part in "Gun" does not sound like David Bowie's Enoized instrumentals, which don't sound like the Talking Heads' Enoid nightmares. There's a common aesthetic and set of techniques there, but very different sounds. It's giving him too much credit to call him the central figure of "art music" in the 1970s, but it's not that far from the truth.

Not that I'm going to give Eno credit for this track. His processing is amazing, but it isn't the keystone. If I had to give credit for Gun's frightening power to a single instrument, it would be the drums. Playing ahead of the beat (establishing the track's nauseating anxiety), thumping so atavistically as to embarrass Meg White or Moe Tucker, throwing in violent tumbling fills... fuck flash and precision, this is great drumming*. The guitar is close behind, screaming eerily like human voices in distress, chopped up into stroboscopic pieces and reassembled. And then there's the vocal, at a singularly effective spot in Cale's range - particularly on the choruses, where it brilliantly undermines the potentially stadium-rock riff.

And his phrasing! He gets so much mileage out of the lyric, a film noir script about detectives on a bad beat in an awful world. It doesn't sound that original or compelling if you haven't heard it, maybe; but there's so much fear and hatred in his delivery of these Philip Marlowe-esque lines that the song completely surpasses the concept.

This song is on every single Cale compilation, and for one reason: it is essential. I will brook no dissent here. If you don't own The Island Years/Gold (which includes Fear whole and entire), you should buy it. If you don't want to, pirate the track for all I care. But you'd better goddamn listen to it, or that final guitar solo might rip out your throat.

* I do appreciate technique. But you've got to know when to just pound those suckers.

More...

The Man Who Couldn't Afford to Orgy

In honor of American greeting card holiday Sweetest Day (aka "Bribes for Sex Day"), here's a song about sex. Well, it's not about sex, exactly: it's about availability to orgy, which usually involves a wider selection of sensual pleasures. You might suspect from the title and the album it's on that "The Man Who Couldn't Afford to Orgy" is some Poe-laced account of the death of a cuckolder. It isn't - that was to come later, heh heh heh.

What it is: just a quiet little quasi-novelty number.
Who can afford to orgy:

• The postman
• The con man
• The milk man
• The butcher
• The astronaut
• The curate

Who can't afford to orgy:

• The poor man
• The sad man
• The green man
• The policeman
• The snowman
  
• The woman (?)
  

Who is he? John Cale, who's sorry to mention that he couldn't afford to orgy.
Do you believe him? Judy Nylon's come-on vocals for the "choruses" just about melt the vinyl, polycarbonate, or silicon they're played from. Do you?
Doesn't that sound like...? "In the Summertime"by Mungo Jerry? It sure does to me - "inspired by" rather than "ripped off from," but nevertheless...
Fun fact: This was the only single (b/w Silvia Said) released from Fear, a strong candidate for Cale's best album. Beach Boys vocals or no, this is not single material. Crazy man.

More...

Buffalo Ballet

“Buffalo Ballet”-- it’s a wonderfully perverse image, isn’t it? Dances with Buffalo, a Wild West version of the “Dance of the Hours” sequence from Fantasia. Anyway, there’s not actually anything about buffalo or ballet in the lyrics to the song. Instead, Mr. Cale takes us back to old Abilene, the final destination of the Chisholm Trail. Or is it? Anyway, the tune's spare and piano-based, but Cale introduces strings and a choir on the chorus of “sleeping in the midday sun.” This isn’t a rollicking cowboy song-- the sound is both dry and expansive, evoking the sun-drenched dusty plains rather than smoky saloons and gambling halls. It’s worlds away from, say, Bob Dylan’s old west. Neither dancing girls nor gunfights, just cow skulls bleached by that midday sun and the tumbleweeds rolling by.

Abilene is a city “young and gay,” but again Cale’s emphasis isn’t on the nightlife, it’s on those cattle, sleeping-lying-rotting in the sun. And then the “broken old men” of the East lay railroad tracks across the plain, and the town grows, and soldiers storm through the town and kill the inhabitants. Those who survive the massacre end up drowning in their own wealth anyway. Or they’re just drinking themselves to death. Hmm. This isn’t exactly evocative of Wild Bill Hickock, Luke Short, and John Wesley Hardin. It is also not raising the image of Abilene’s most famous son, Dwight David Eisenhower. This business of the evil men and their railroads and soldiers running down the people sounds like something else altogether.

It sounds like the Johnson County War.

It’s not a total stretch. This ugly little episode in Wyoming history was the inspiration for both Shane and Heaven’s Gate (the Michael Cimino film, not the cult). In brief, the immigrant population had issues with the cattle barons (who were mostly rich Eastern men), the peasants resorted to cattle rustling and the landowners resorted to hitmen and lynching, and the US cavalry got called in-- to protect the landowners, not the peasants.

Cale’s Old West, like his Old Europe, is his own creation, another Invisible Cities job. I’m not saying he definitely watched Shane or Heaven’s Gate (though his contemporary Roger Waters of Pink Floyd certainly was influenced by Shane, so it’s possible), but he’s taken the name of Abilene, a name nearly as rich in connotation as Deadwood, South Dakota, and done something with it that just doesn’t gel with Abilene but does transpose onto Johnson County fairly well. I’ve no proof one way or another, but it does make me wonder.

FWIW, I don’t care for the choir and much prefer the solo version off Fragments of a Rainy Season. Cale’s matured voice suits the song even better than do his vocals circa Fear.

More...

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.

More...

Emily

A song like the Mona Lisa. Not in terms of quality (because it's certainly not one of the better songs on 1974's 'Fear,' one of the essential albums) but in terms of construction. "Emily" is a hard song to get a bead on. Even having heard it hundreds of times, I still don't really know if I like it. I do listen to it, and it does intrigue me.

The actual lyric and melody seems straightforward and, well, a bit naff. (The portrait's main flaw, on the other hand, is ubiquity.) As you look closer, though, the straightforwardness dissipates. Cale's voice is wonderful on this one. At first, you think he's singing an awful parting song to an estranged lover. Then, with the woo-woo girls joining on the "Maybe we'll love again" chorus, you decide that she must be dead. Repeated listenings, however, reveal an element of glee or gloating in Cale's voice (the equivalent of the smile). I don't know about anyone else, but I think of the narrator of Emily as a murderer.

And the backing track! The synthetic (?) wind-and-wave sound behind the simple bass and piano instrumentation is alien and frightening, definitely the best part of this recording. (Finishing the metaphor, this would be the alien scene behind La Gioconda.) And what an ingenious coda: the voices fade out, but the wind and the waves keep on.

More...