Heartbreak Hotel

This is the song that killed a chicken, and that's hardly the most remarkable thing about it. That was in 1977, in Cale's mid-post-Glam-ish-whateverthehell period. He was doing polo shirts before the Talking Heads, I'm saying. Back then, in those innocent days of good friends, fast women, lots of drugs, and no studio recordings whatsoever, Heartbreak Hotel was pretty much camp, as it was from its debut in the Cale arrangement on June 1, 1974 (yeah, that's the name of the album it's on, too - and we all know what happened on May 30). He would change the arrangement a bit over the years, but through the end of the Seventies it was pretty much the same old bloated parody.

Something like this, from as late as 1981 (gawsh, that's Andy Summers! yet another Cale almost-producee):

And as over-the-top as Cale was through most of that period, and even as genuinely threatening as he could sound, Heartbreak Hotel never really seemed more than a bit of good fun - something to lurch through with some high-concept stage mischief.

But somewhere between playing mit der Polizei and coming out of his lost years, in the less innocent days of good friends, fast women, lots of drugs, and possibly too many studio recordings, somewhere around the time he seems to have hit bottom in '83/'84, he started playing it on solo piano. And no more was this man kidding around.

You can hit this version as being equally over the top, less pleasurable, pretentious, laughably melodramatic without the sense of self-satire that earlier versions had. Hell, audience members start laughing - albeit nervously, this not being what they were used to.

But whatever you think of it, it's hitting an entirely different set of emotional targets now. Like Cale's other piano in extremis songs - Fear and Guts and Waiting for the Man - there's a potent mixture of emotions here. I don't know if it would stand as well on its own without exposure to the Presley version, Cale's earlier and later versions, etc. - but you who haven't heard any of it before can tell me, eh? But IMO it's the definitive Cale version of the song - hell, the most affecting arrangement of the Axton/Durden/Presley song around, says I - and it's not really represented on any albums (John Cale Comes Alive is as close as you get).

But in a radio studio late at night in the winter of 1984, in the middle of an almost unbelievably shambolic performance/forty minutes of weirdness, Cale essayed the unbeatable performance. Anger, resignation, hatred, fear- everything surfaces in it like tongues of flame in a fire. The ending even shut up the annoying radio personality (who, to be fair, was probably panicking at the disaster on his hands). Hear it, if you haven't. Listen again if you have.

Cale gradually gentrified the arrangement, removed the screaming and scenery chewing. The new arrangement, different spins of which can be heard on Circus Live and Fragments of a Rainy Season, is fine - moving in its way, more emotionally resonant than the original - I say this lovingly - wankfest. But it's almost background music now, and doesn't grab you by the balls. I don't think it's coincidence that it's paired with Style It Takes both places.

Subtlety has its virtues, and you can't live like Cale was living in 1984 for very long. But thank God we have recordings of Cale at rock bottom.

More...

Chinese Envoy

Like many a former conspiracy theorist (don't ask), I'm a sucker for songs in code. Songs dressed up in political or historical trappings particularly appeal to me; I used to spend hours puzzling over "Games Without Frontiers" and pondered over the pseudo-Biblical vibe to "The Weight" (yeah, I know, there really isn't any code there at all-- I was twelve, OK?). So, I find the estimable Mr. Cale very satisfying in this regard.

Turning up first on the bleak and bereft Music for a New Society, “Chinese Envoy” is a mysterious little vignette, one that revolves not around the titular envoy but a “princess,” the “mistress of something, she thought.” The princess can talk to the French and the Germans, but they aren’t listening, and then the envoy himself shows up, and everything is ominous in a very Cale way (things galloping out of the darkness like furniture). Eventually we leave the Chinese envoy, or rather he leaves us, “in his brokenhearted pagoda.”

Terrible lyric, that. Probably the worst in the entire song.

The “hook” is what David Byrne called “plink plink plink Chinoiserie,” but in a subtle way, and it works. Musically, it bears the signature of classic Cale, with slide guitar and strings woven together in a haunting tapestry. The music grows so dense that Cale’s voice is half-submerged by the bridge. It’s atmospheric and melancholy and really quite beautiful; everything hints at a tragedy that is never made explicit-- this is one of Cale’s sadder songs, which is saying a lot. (An excellent piano version of this, with the chinoiserie less evident, is on Fragments of a Rainy Season.)

As for the lyric, “Chinese Envoy” belongs to that peculiar Cale Storybookland visited on Vintage Violence and Paris 1919. All times and all places are one; Cardinal Richelieu and the Chinese envoy and the “princess” inhabit a world that is neither here nor there. It might be the France of Louis XIV, or the declining Europe on the eve of World War, or maybe it’s some slice of Cale’s modern life, relayed in code a la Dylan. It strikes me, listening to this one, that what Cale seems to be doing, again and again, is crafting his own invisible cities. Some common thread links the shadowed scenes in his Storybookland. With Calvino’s cities, the key to understanding it all is Venice; I don’t know the origin of Cale’s key, and can’t say whether it’s New York, or Wales, or something far more obscure.

But, as literal meaning is not the point when listening to Cale, I can only say-- great song.

More...

Dr. Mudd

Dr. Samuel Mudd fixed up John Wilkes Booth's leg, broken after an appropriately dramatic jump from Abraham Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater. You know, for all the whining these days about entertainers talking politics, at least they don't get as involved as Booth. Nobody really knows whether Mudd was actually a conspirator in Lincoln's assassination (my bet's no) or whether he had doubts about turning Booth in (my bet's yes). In any case, he did almost four years before being pardoned by President Andrew Johnson.

Now, what the assassination has to do with Chinese nuclear ambitions I don't know. Dr. Mudd the song is a fairly straightforward tract on the Red Menace. Cale revisits Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where "the children's hair fell out and all their skin turned blue." Whatcha gonna do? It seems to be a sympathetic warning to Taiwan and/or Japan, that maybe their American allies aren't very interested in helping them if it comes to all that: "The people back in Washington D.C., they've got a curious sidelong glance / it goes all the way from Capitol Hill up to the Pentagon. What they gonna do, what they gonna do when China drops a bomb on you?"

Which sounds dry and potentially dull, but no! This is a poppy new wave song, with great group backing vocals ("doo doo doo doo-ooh") and a sprightly and highly melodic main vocal line (even if Cale's vocal strain works against it). It's a great combination of dark subject matter with accessible music. It's also a terrible earworm, causing one to annoy the piss out of others when one putters around the house singing the chorus. *ahem*

And the band is hot. The guitar tones sound so good on Sabotage/Live it's criminal, and the playing is exceptional. The bass is a little lacking in force (the recording isn't the best), but it has nice lines. The drums work, providing tension and just a little disco feeling. Compositionally, it feels surprisingly like a Talking Heads song, or perhaps a funkier Siouxsie and the Banshees. Maybe it's not that precise, maybe the recording is naive at best, but the music captured on this album is incredible. I'd even call it a fundamental live recording. Thank god for CBGBs.

(This song is included on John Cale Comes Alive, which I have on vinyl and which I haven't listened to in a while. I'll withhold comment on that version until I hear it again. Can anyone recommend a good service for vinyl ripping, or a trustworthy USB sound card/preamp/turntable combo under $250? My turntable is OK for listening, but not really for recording from.)

More...

Waiting for the Man

In the early 80s, at least, Waiting for the Man was Cale's favorite Velvets song to cover. He turned it into an occasion to do atonal piano exploration and some amazing shrieking. It was the scene of some of the most dramatic vocals of his live career: the tense beginning, the gradual distortion of the vocals as the goods make their way in, and finally the cathartic echoing shrieks. It puts a spring in your step!

I'd like the hear the live version from Berlin, 1984. Rants about Augusto Pinochet and the Emperor Claudius are always welcome.

This solo piano iteration from Christchurch, New Zealand in 1983 may not be the best performance, but it gives you an idea of the intensity of his live shows at the time:

Here's an MP3 (full quality in a Flash player here) of a better performance from John Cale Comes Alive (anthologized on the essential Seducing Down the Door compilation, which is out of print like most essential Cale). It's a good, tight band, but I don't like the recording - it sounds like overlimited, bass-free 80s crap. The vocal, though... it's worth hearing. The other version I have, from the Cale Street roio, is not quite as impressive.

More...