Adelaide

Another song that explores people as places as people, "Adelaide" ain't a patch on Andalucia. John Cale's game on Vintage Violence being exploring pop forms - he cites the Bee Gees, an underrated group of pop songwriters before disco madness infected them, as an influence - he goes whole hog on Adelaide as on Cleo, making cutesy uptempo pop songs that annoy the living piss out of me.

The choice of city may be homage to the brothers Gibb, but it's not a convincing lyric. Not an awful one - "don't want to be late/it's probably night in Adelaide" is an amusing little line working against the premise, and I really like the bit that goes "so pass me the phone/I go it alone/I whistle my way to Adelaide." But there's no sense of a real connection, and no detail to give character to the thing - just vagueness and cliche.

The structure isn't bad, I admit, with verse/alt verse/bridge construction and a cool little coda.

It's the melody, the instrumental, and the vocals that offend. Cale has turned on the charm, and it's so contrived and facile that... eh! The slightly off-key doo-wop parody backing vocals ("oooh nooo") are particularly galling. The piano figure is a hyperactive one without soul or interest. (I do like the harmonica, even if the whole thing ends up sounding like the Sesame Street theme song.) The flaws of this don't transfer at all to Macbeth (a pretty obvious rewrite), but then the strong points of that don't manifest themselves here.

It's not subversive or mocking, just imitative and seemingly in bad faith. Nothing else is really worth commenting on, is it? Well, just this: it's funny that I've complained about how samey Vintage Violence sounds, and yet it's the two songs furthest afield that I actively dislike.

Of course, the way these things always work, this song often pops into my head unbidden at inopportune times. Listening to it repeatedly while writing this post has guaranteed months more of it. Dammit.

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Bring It On Up

Cale's predilection for the Wild West was evident even from the beginning. Back in 1970, his debut Vintage Violence was host to the first I'm aware of, Bring It On Up. It's more rock'n'roll than many of the other songs, though still in the genteel and restrained way characteristic of the album. The song is an encomium to that mainstay of popular Western lore: the saloon. Yes, girls and boys, we have a drinking song here. Shame it's not more interesting.

"Just one bottle left, standing on the shelf / I'd better bring it on up," goes the chorus, and indeed he'd better, what with locusts and guns and sheriffs and jails being all the rest that's on offer. It's a fluffy song, lyrically, but I love the line "Standing in the desert with a gun in my hand / and the locust's gonna come devour me." Locusts being one of my favorite symbols in songwriting. Anyway.

This song is indicative of the problems of Vintage Violence. The chorus has a nice enough hook, but the verse melody, while pleasant, isn't very unique. It's not very unique in comparison with the rest of the album, especially - many songs have similar, bouncy vocal tunes. His band sounds a LOT like The Band on this track (not a bad thing, but a little strange to hear). It's a cute, enjoyable little ditty, but rather forgettable.

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Gideon's Bible

One of the best songs on John Cale's debut, Gideon's Bible is also representative of the general sound and approach of Vintage Violence. It sports surrealistic yet pithy lyrics over a thick, vaguely pastoral bed of piano, acoustic and electric guitar, slide guitar, viola, and wordless backing vocals. It doesn't quite achieve the dramatic gravity of Ghost Story, but it comes close. But it's the chorus melody that really stands out here: it's one of Cale's best, with a haunting and lyrical character unmatched on this album. Or through most of his career, for that matter.

The production on this number is quite interesting: to keep the barrage of instruments from turning the song syrupy, Cale puts the piano and acoustic guitar solely in the left stereo channel and the electric and slide guitars solely in the right. The backing vocals start in the left channel and the viola in the right, but gradually move to the center. The helium-girl verse backing vocals, which start out as a barely perceptible left-channel echo in the first verse, take a much more prominent role for the second verse, putting an interesting spin on Cale's vocal. He was using woo-woo girls effectively from the very beginning (if the shadow vocal isn't, in fact, his own pitch-shifted). It's not as schizophrenic a use of two channels as the Velvet Underground's The Murder Mystery, but it is noticeable and fairly unique.

For me, the lyrics again evoke Old China (the time and place, not the song): "Pulling on the golden robes, another foreign language / stretching out the verbs and nouns together in a greeting." There's hints of the trade with the west: "rolling out the cotton shirt upon the carpet pillow." In that chorus, too, unmoored from the verses as it is: "Gideon lied and Gideon died, the force of China felt." And hints of violence and disaster: "Peering through the cutting wrist", "throttling children carelessly, a messy day with Clancy." No idea if the song is about anything specifically, but I think of the Boxer Rebellion.

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Ghost Story

John Cale got into music very young, legendarily composing a piano piece in grammar school that was taped and broadcast by BBC Wales. By the time he was finished with University (or vice versa), he had caught the performance art bug with such works as "Plant Piece", more popularly known as "Scream At a Potted Plant Until It Dies." Then there's nearly scaring Serge Koussevitsky's widow to death with his composition for axe and piano at Tanglewood in 1963.

Cale never really lost the itch for performance art - he hasn't gotten rid of the hockey mask just yet*. The intensity of it has varied over the years, but the minima so far have been 1970's underrated and underselling Vintage Violence and 1996's adult-contemporary papfest Walking on Locusts. On these albums, songcraft takes precedence over inspiration, personality, and anti-listener ordnance.

To my ear, there isn't much personality on display on Vintage Violence. Wonderful lyrical phrases, invitingly ambiguous music, wide-ranging topics... but no motivating theme or set of feelings. It also sounds more homogenous than nearly any of Cale's other albums. And then there are the problems of Cleo and Adelaide. It's a good album, don't get me wrong, but it's a calculated attempt at a "pop album." His heart wasn't really in it. It might be that the three-day writing and recording time hurt it a bit, the magic of improvisation be damned.

One song, however, particularly transcended its album of birth to become a staple of the live repertoire. Ghost Story is the earliest Cale song that uses the voice familiar as his (both as a singer and as a lyricist). It, like many of the songs on Vintage Violence, is an exploration of language more than any sort of story. I keep harping on Cale's use of "phonetically rich" language, but it's a crucial part of my appreciation of his work. His assemblies of phones are invariably imaginative and resistant to cliche.

"Evocative" is often a euphemism for "objectively meaningless," but some of the images presented here are almost worth short stories of their own: "Stood up, wished us good luck / he changed his attitude twice / the clock in the corner shivered in fear / tired and hungry for days." (Originally it was a box that shivered, but the change in live performance since the late 70s is entirely for the better.) Not to mention clever - "twice" sets your ear up to expect a rhyme, which you don't get until the end of the next verse. It could be that the Welsh background set him up as a great assembler of English sounds, as Russian set up Nabokov. (Not that the two are in the same league, but same idea.)

There are all sorts of great turns of phrase buried in here, "wasting away on advice" being particularly juicy. The final lyric is audacious, if perhaps a little undeserved: "It'll haunt you for the rest of your life." A fitting epigraph for a violent and memorable musical career, though.

Musically, it stands out on the album, with swooping electric organs taking the lead over an agitated and restless bassline and subtle rhythm electric guitar switching between clipped chords and delicate arpeggios. Now that I think of it, it sounds a bit like early post-Syd Pink Floyd, off the soundtrack to More or something. The drums come in and drop out in an alarming and uncomfortable way. It devolves after a restrained scream (the first on record!) to a heavily-drummed jam that suddenly (assuming I don't have a misprinted CD) cuts off mid-measure, tonally unresolved. Yum.

Here's a video of a live performance at the Amsterdam Paradiso in 2004:

Click here for flash-player audio, or here for a low-bitrate MP3.

* As you'd see on Ghost Story from the Circus Live DVD!

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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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