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.

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Vexations

John Cale took part in an infamous 18-hour performance of Erik Satie's "Vexations". While there is no recording of that performance (think of all that tape!), a video has emerged that's quite fascinating. Others have called it "astonishing", "jaw-dropping", "priceless." And I can't disagree - try to think of a network or channel that would play this today.

I've mentioned it before, and still don't really know what I think about the thing. It's certainly hypnotic, and enjoyable enough - it has that great late 19th-century crepuscular French mystic mood going, and that's worth something. You can read fascinating notes on the piece by a pianist who performed it in totum with only one partner, or the opaque Wikipedia entry on the piece, too, if you want a variety of nearly baseless speculation.

Try putting it on repeat, and see what you think after 840 playthroughs (to be honest, I'm not sure whether he plays one cycle or three). Volunteer for this experiment by downloading it here. The audience's titters may be distracting at first, but I find that they ultimately blend in well with the music, giving it some texture. God I'm being pretentious. Let me know how you make out, OK?

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(I Keep a) Close Watch

(Fik shun)

Akron, Ohio. Late 1977.

"I got it!"
"Got what?"
"John Cale's last album. The album they wouldn't release here."
"Whaddya mean? Guts just came out."
"Guts wasn't a real album, just random songs from his last two albums."
"Huh. So what's this album?"
"Helen of Troy. The cover's, uh, kinda cheesy. Cale is in a straitjacket on an antique chair, and some woman is making a face from a mirror on the wall. I haven't actually listened to it yet. Do you wanna come over?"
"Sure, gimme twenty minutes."

Half of Akron, Ohio's John Cale fanclub sped across the city to visit the other half.

"So where did you get it?"
"Man, I told you already. Dave went to England for a couple weeks with his folks. I asked him to send me a copy if he could find it. I gave him money, a pile of money, for it. I still owe him, he says."
"Well, put it on!"

You can imagine the many layers of confusion side one of this schizophrenic album inspired in the membership that day. (Can you? Hell, can I?) Hard rock, hard rock with a gay guy doing the sexy monologue instead of Judy Nylon, pseudo-Beach Boys, whatever the hell that was, more hard rock, murderous gay desperados. And then on the flip side... the first cut is a big sentimental love song drenched in echo and huge sappy string orchestration?!

"I don't know about this, man."
"Yeah, it... is... a little strange."

Little did these two young Ohioans know that the song in question was trying desperately to have a great performer cover it. Cale wanted so badly* to have Frank Sinatra sing "(I Keep a) Close Watch" - he hired the orchestra, carefully calibrated the melody, ripped off one of Johnny Cash's best lines, kept the lyrics universal enough that Frank could do that thing he did. But it didn't work. Maybe the fact that it was lodged between a song about gay love and murder in the Wild West and a song about Pablo Picasso never getting called an asshole had something to do with it. Or the fact that the album that featured it was never released in the US. Or maybe it just wasn't up to Frank's standards.

Anyway, what we got was an over-the-top pile of sloppy sentimentality in performance and instrumentals and arrangement on top of a touching but slight song. It's a shame Cale can't do this one over again.

* According to the contributor of liner notes to Seducing Down the Door. Blame him if it's not true.

(I Keep a) Close Watch/Mama's Song

"Hi, this is Terry."
"Hey man, how's it going."
"Pretty good. Sandy's under the weather, but she's doing a little better. How are you and Vicky?"
"Fine, fine. I mean, she left last night, but that's fine."
"Aw, shit. I'm sorry to hear that."
"You shouldn't be. I'm not."
"OK. I am, though. Well, the reason I called... this is gonna sound kind of silly now."
"C'mon now, I'm a man. I can take it. Hell, I'm a free man now."
"Well, OK. Do you ever listen to John Cale anymore?"
"Yeah, once in a while. Paris 1919 and Fear, anyway. Heh, you know, that record really pissed off Vicky. Maybe I'll put it on..."
"Well, his new one came into the store. It's... it's pretty fucked-up."
"Really? Like Helen of Troy? Or do you mean good fucked-up?"
"Heh, ouch. No, this is good, I think. But it's painful stuff."
"Helen of Troy was pretty painful. Remember how excited you were to get it?"
"It's not that bad. Besides... you remember that 'Close Watch' song?"
"The Disney song?"
"Yeah, uh, that one. Well, he recorded it again."
"Shit."
"No, no, this is great. It's really... desolate. No strings. Nothing. Just him and his piano... and some organ... and... weird stuff. And it's the most pleasant thing on the album."
"Huh."
"Well, if you want to hear it some time, I've got it. Just let me know."
"Sure, I will."
"You wanna go out for a drink Friday?"

So, yeah, social engagements and such aside, the record eventually did change hands.

And on its return:
"Yeah, fucked up is right. Shit, I'm never listening to that again. But you're right, I do appreciate Close Watch a lot more now... until the fucking BAGPIPES start! Let me know when he makes a rock album again."

I Keep a Close Watch

Fifteen years after Helen of Troy destroyed the Akron Ohio Chapter of the International John Cale Fan Club, our friends, still in contact as they arc through middle age, happen to reminisce about music. Which leads to...
"You know, he released the best album he ever made a couple weeks ago."
"Aw, no. I heard some of that Andy Warhol album - the wife borrowed it from the library. Not my thing."
"No, not that. This is a solo acoustic live album. It's the best live album I own."
"You own an awful lot of live albums."
"I'm not exaggerating on this one."
"Heh, you seem serious enough. You know, I kind of would like to hear some of those songs again. Can you make me a tape?"
"Sure. Hey, you know...
"What?"
"... he does Close Watch!"
Groan!

An intro like "This is a love song, so hold onto someone you love," deserves a groan. But sandwiched between "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Hallelujah," Close Watch finally found a context that made sense - not to mention its best recorded performance. And you know what? That's the year the Akron John Cale Fan Club reformed... at least for a while.

Here's a video for your trouble, from a 1983 solo gig down under:

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Woman

I admit, John Cale tends more towards "relationship" songs of the tragic, regretful, angry, &c. nature than he does towards the "love song" per se. Most serious songwriters do, don't they? Because art loves conflict, and love and lust cause as much conflict as any other human feelings - no surprises here.

But Cale does put some uniquely weird spins on things. He can write a love song revolving around the hostility of the outside world, a common enough trope; but (giving him as much credit as possible) he seems to plant clues that argue against the hostility of the outside world, that even imply (stretching, here) that the hostile wasteland is the unavoidable - maybe even desirable - result of the forces of love.

(studio version)

Then again, he can write a love song with poison-pen lyrics like Woman, using an atonal verse and an anthemic chorus (building to an over-the-top synth choir coda). It might be my favorite song on blackAcetate - for an album I feel lukewarm about, there sure are a lot of candidates - but it stretches the boundaries of the genre a fair long way. (The Circus Live version is enjoyable enough, but having a riff and more than a trace of melody on the verses ruins the texture of the song. It's better than that live album's mediocre average, but that's saying little.)

"You're ignorant. You're cool. You never learned to say you're sorry."

No real idea nor little interest about who it's actually about, but... well... it says something that somebody made this video. The thought had occurred to me, too.

(live version)

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Frozen Warnings

The Marble Index is, for my money, one of the most difficult records to listen to Cale ever made (well, helped make). It's hostile and atonal, cold in a way the New York 1960s recordings aren't, and relentlessly SLOW - not to mention Nico's voice and melodies are more than usually soporific. It's an album I admire more than I enjoy: Nico's vision is singularly intense and Cale's "arrangements" are some of the most interesting music he's ever written, but I find it almost impossible to identify with the mindset behind it.

The song I most enjoy is the most tuneful thing present, "Frozen Warnings." The vocal melody is a weird blend of Gregorian chant and Indian raga, and shows more movement than most other tracks. The backing music builds up around an organ/viola drone, creating a feeling of suspended animation. I don't know what else I can say - this is hard music to talk about.

Well, here's something. Cale wrote a piano part and performed this in the Nico retrospective film Nico: Icon. Below is a video; here's an mp3 of that performance. Great stuff.

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Sister Ray

Take it away, Maestro!

I'd wager that "Sister Ray" is the most widely-heard track of its violence and aural hostility. What track on a widely available album by a major artist competes with it? Joy Division and New Order and the Sisters of Mercy covered it. (As did, amusingly, author Alan Moore, in a bizarre parody version about an Objectivist (!) comic book superhero.) Jonathan Richman, in "Roadrunner," simultaneously neutered it and made it really appealing. It sits on countless record store shelves worldwide, lying dormant on copies of White Light/White Heat, waiting to perforate eardrums and induce bad trips and anxiety attacks.

The topics, as the Wikipedia entry dryly notes, cover almost every item on the Lou Reed menu: homosexuality, transvestites, prostitutes, heroin use, sudden violence. It's so over the top that it's much more funny than it is threatening. Reed's voice is mesmerizing here - whether he's chanting "whip it on me, Jim," nagging his friends about shooting a man dead ("Aw, doncha know you shouldn't do that? Doncha know it stains the carpet!"), or droning raga-style "Iiiiii'm searching for myyyyy maaaaaaaain liiiiine," you can barely take your ears off him.

And yet if the song were an instrumental, it would be nearly as astonishing. Here's a war on tape: each player tweaking his volume measure by measure, a band whose every part is trying to drown each other out. It's arguably the single point of John Cale's rock career in which real honest-to-god rocking coexists with his earlier systems-music work whole and entire, body-and-blood soul-and-obscenity. His organ part could have been released as a track on the New York in the 1960s records, and nobody would have thought it out of place; but harness it to Moe Tucker's thumping, Sterling Morrison's squawking, and Lou Reed's guitar and vocal assault, and you have one of the most arresting pieces of art ever created.

A band that created music so powerfully destructive and destructively powerful couldn't last for long. It's a shame that Cale's greatest collaborative relationship - the one with Tucker and Morrison and Reed - couldn't have lasted just a little longer, though. But at least we have White Light/White Heat, and "Sister Ray," to show for it.

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Dying on the Vine

It's Día de los Muertos. Why not enjoy a sugar skull with this post?

A note about Robert J. Widlar.

Besides many other distinctions, Bob Widlar was the father of the operational amplifier, an arrangement of transistors and biasing circuits that easily slotted into more complicated circuits, becoming a core building block of the technological revolution of the late 20th century. He did not invent it, but he set the standard for integrated circuit op-amps and designed some of the best and most versatile that have been created. After making Fairchild Semiconductor the leader in the IC market, he started the linear IC division at National Semiconductor.

This is where, over the course of four years, he established a reputation as an excitable boy. He brought a ewe in to mow the lawn. To stop people from raising their voice to him, he created and secretly installed in his office a device called the Hassler, which would echo any noise in the vocal frequency range at a higher frequency, on the edge of the ear's range; as the volume increased, the frequency offset dropped proportionally, making the echo more noticeable, and giving the effect of a ringing in the ears. He smashed nonfunctional components into a fine powder to ensure they had zero chance of causing him trouble in the future.

And then, after that four years was up, he got in his car and drove down to Mexico, to Puerto Vallarta, leaving no forwarding address. He took a single-room adobe apartment, where he could concentrate on his alcohol and write technical papers on electrical circuits without so much as an electric lightbulb around. National Semiconductor sent a mission down to track him and reacquire him. Eventually he signed on as a contractor, but kept his Mexican residence. He died at fifty-three during a demanding jog. He wasn't identified for several days.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled fragment.

I think of Bob Widlar when I hear this song. I don't only think of him - I think of the Katharine Anne Porter novel Ship of Fools, as well, and of Ambrose Bierce, charging down into Mexico despite his age to join Pancho Villa's army, disappearing from the face of the earth.

To be honest, I think of myself. Even though I'm not an alcoholic, nor a gringo in Mexico, nor hanging out among troops and criminals. I don't think it's self-dramatization; there's something about the song that reaches out and pulls you into it. It's an epiphanic moment, a passing instant of understanding crystallized into a song. Despite the very particular scenario, it's a song with a weird universal resonance.

That's a big claim, but consider this: "Dying on the Vine" is a fairly obscure song in Cale's catalog, its definitive version a live take, the studio album entirely forgotten. And yet I have heard from several other people who call it their favorite Cale song. It is my favorite Cale song. It is not his best song, it is not his most characteristic song, but it is the song that most reaches into my chest and clamps down on my heart.

Two albums feature this song: Artificial Intelligence as an inebriated slow-motion dance, a life observed from the bottom of the bottle; Fragments of a Rainy Season as a flood of illumination. The video above comes very close to a perfect hybrid of the two. Of all the versions, the Fragments version (mp3 here) is the most essential; it's the most accessible path into the song. (It's worth noting that the version included on the Close Watch compilation is indeed the Fragments version.) I was very disappointed by the studio version on first listen, but I've come to understand and appreciate it.

It's interesting to think about the choices behind Cale's different approaches to the song: play up the Spanish motif or not? play up the emotion or hide it? emphasize the choruses or the verses? what spin do you put on the narrator? and how much of him is you? I've gone through six solo guitar arrangements of this song myself, and tweaking each of these parameters has a substantial effect on the nature of the song. But the song stands up to everything! There are few songs I've encountered that can stand up to as much resculpting as this one does, and yet it always seems to retain its soul.

I'm not a reliable guide to the lyrics of this song; my interpretation is completely personal and extremely idiosyncratic. Just part of the magic of the song is the sentence fragment in the chorus: "I was living my life like a Hollywood..." A Hollywood what, he doesn't say, but it evokes so many Nathanael West-type possibilities.

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Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler, the epic final track of 1977's bizarre Animal Justice EP, takes the structure of Mary Lou's lyrics and some of the lyrics themselves and turns them into a different sort of song altogether, a sprawling downtempo brooder that swells to an odd majesty. It's no accident that this b-side of an obscure EP has been a mainstay of his repertoire for nearly thirty years.

(The connection to Ibsen seems extremely tenuous - maybe he was just going for a self-destructive femme fatale idea. I've read somewhere that the song is "about" Anita Pallenberg, of whom it has been quipped that she was fluent in four languages and three Rolling Stones. [CORRECTION: Jack informs me that the Seducing Down the Door liner notes refer to Anita Bryant, late 50s singer and 70s anti-gay crusader. Huh. I still don't get it.] As far as self-destructive blond-haired northern European femme fatales go, well, I tend to think of someone else in Cale's life.)

The song is very similar in construction and feel to Riverbank: heavy, weary, and slow. A woozy, gauzy electric piano and almost-infinite slide guitar form a bizarrely comforting bed of fog for Cale's very straight, affectless vocal. Viola noises break up the verses. Drums and rhythm guitar (and church organ?!) break out at the first chorus, as a touch of menace creeps into Cale's voice. It's an odd menace, though, more resigned and regretful than anything.

The lyrics are rather terse, repetitive, and dour: tired of waiting, tired of the human race, down in all her misery. Her family doesn't brighten things: her brother is sitting around reading Mein Kampf (puts a different spin on Mary Lou, eh?); her mother hangs her banker husband in the closet (though the verb used means "suspend on a hook or hanger" rather than "suspend by the neck" - love that little bit of dark humor in the ambiguity!). And all we learn about Hedda is that she's miserable and tired (so tired of listening to the gossip and complaints). It's a character study with no character except the music itself.

And it's the music that's transfigured in the end. The coda lyric, "Sleep, sleep, sleep, Hedda Gabler" is an interesting gambit after what has come before, but the line would be nothing without the remarkably sympathetic cast of the whole coda: a gentle lullaby piano vamp, a towering and beautiful guitar solo, and ensemble vocals that really seem to mean it. It's an absolution and a purification, and it's amazing to hear.

Here's a video from that great show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam:

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Sold Motel

Into the West. The most recent of Cale's trail songs and gunfighter ballads, Sold Motel is also the most contemporary and the most surreal. It describes a land of motels, Tommy Hilfiger couture, "beach-blanket bourgeois sunning themselves." But the chorus clues us in:

"Send out the messenger, pick up the word
Wild Tchoupitoulas, have you heard?
Send out the messenger, pick up the word
General Custer, have you heard?"

Clues us into what, precisely, I'm not sure, but whether he's talking about Indians or the Neville Brothers in the chorus, the song feels of a piece with earlier Cale Westerns. It's a calculatedly Badass lyric, in the tradition of "Guts" and "Fear" and "Gun": "Down that way they see death everyday, in one form or another / They're no different from there to here, they've just learned how to handle the fear." It doesn't have the emotional heft of those songs, but it's a good lyric full of great sounds.

The song starts out with a rather stereotypical-sounding choppy garage-rock riff. ("Stereotypical garage rock" being one of the dominant sounds, but not the only one, of 2005's blackAcetate - one of the reason the album sounds so uneven.) But the sound gets weirder and weirder, with pitchshifted backing Cales all over the place - and then you hit the angelic choir and strings on the middle eight. Then a guitar solo that briefly turns into a trumpet solo (and back). Take that, Jack White. It's a great production job that survives the heavy sonic layering.

An all-time great song? No. The best on the album? Probably not, but a lot of fun. He performed an acoustic version at the Paradiso in Amsterdam back in 2004. Have a look.

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Magritte

I love the drums on Magritte. They feel jerky, like clattering boxcar wheels. (I'm sure there's a technical term for this, since it's a technique I've heard in many places). And sometimes they switch places with a really synthetic drum machine. This track collects all of Cale's performing instruments into one place: the lead instrument is viola, with bass adding violence and piano connecting the verses with the middle eight. There's more, of course - on HoboSapiens Cale tends to layer on instrument after instrument, sound after sound, until the song almost suffocates. It makes the songs in question hard to really appreciate on first (or fifth) listen, but as a result they tend to be growers. After my fifteenth listen I loved the album. I don't know how many people made it that far, though.

Violence, yes. It's a violent song, and I'm not sure why it should be. It's a covert violence, sort of reminiscent of the incredible violence that sits in plain view in much of Magritte's work. He's a gimmick painter in the popular perception, with his floating faceless bowler-hatted men and his endless blue skies. His work almost seems too easy to enjoy, to me - it doesn't take any work to look at his paintings and feel fear and recognition and some semblance of understanding. Everything seems there on the surface - maybe everything is the surface. (It certainly is for his imitators.) But his work is irresistable - I can't not look.

Which is sort of how I feel about this song. The sonic picture is evocative, but feels a little shallow, somehow. The lyric mentions some of the icons of Magritte's oeuvre, umbrellas and bowler hats inside a canvas of blue, saturated with beauty. It seems like a fairly literal and not very meaty evocation. But like Magritte's work, it's laced with half-hidden questions of memory ("how often we forgot Magritte"), perception ("pinned to the edges of vision"), and violence ("someone's coming that hates us"). These questions make me wonder if I don't give the song and the painter enough credit for depth. Maybe someday it will all click.

The live version on Circus Live hews very closely to the recorded version. It's a pleasant listen, but I don't think it offers anything new. I don't skip it, but I don't really skip to it, either.

P.S. I love the suggestion I've read somewhere that it's a depiction of an art theft - I don't know that I agree, but it's given me some enjoyable thoughts. I think it's appropriate, anyway.

Here's a cool little fan video that juxtaposes the painter with the song.

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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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Jumbo In Tha Modernworld

Who'd have thought that John Cale, of all people, would fall prey to the politico-anthropomorpho-metaphoric song bug, hanging 'round with Paul and Rog and who knows who. Jumbo In The Modernworld is a very curious song to do it, with, though, as whatever metaphors are there are incredibly opaque. Jumbo is presumably an elephant, having lunch with a lion, to talk about an alliance with/against a giraffe. Meanwhile, a hippo may have stolen all the water due to the incompetence of a buffalo security guard. And we should blame it all on the monkey. Who knows, maybe it's about Ahmed Chalabi and his tailor.

I mostly disregard the lyrics, as pleasant as they feel in the mouth. It's mostly a vocal showcase. You hear our sexagenarian friend shout, keen, sing with falsetto, rant, chant, chatter in the studio, and do a very realistic recreation of a lion growl. It's his strongest, most impressive vocal in a long time - I just hope he didn't hurt himself!

The track is pretty amazing, as well. It starts out with a drone and an electronic kettle-drum sounding-thing. Piano and choppy guitar come in as lead instruments and a metal xylophone-type instrument in the background. A new guitar lead comes in on the chorus, to the right, along with a group of "ooh-wah" chain-gang grunters on the chorus. The two guitar leads do a call and response bit on the second chorus, to good effect.

Then everything drops out, leaving just unbearable tension: quiet viola(?) drone, the xylophone, some hand-tapping percussion, electronic vocal humming, and a group of tribal chanters that all sound like Cale, saying something that sounds like "Jumboweh." This state of affairs can't last, and Cale comes back with the chorus for some real screaming.

This feels like an in-joke that turned into studio screwing-around that turned into a song. Which isn't an insult - if he's to be believed, Cale mostly composes in the studio. Despite this track's relatively lightweight nature, it's still a joy to hear him rock out, especially (there is no good way to say this) if you crave the sound of screaming. It may not be deep, but it's got something. At the very least, it rises above the genre.

The video bears no relationship to the lyrics that I can tell. It's not too original a conceit - it almost seems Seussian - but it works well enough with the music and has some really striking visual touches. It's on the Circus Live DVD, but the song itself is only available electronically and as a radio promo single.

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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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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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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.

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