I Keep A Close Watch

Keeping with the personal theme for now. This is my current romantic anthem song. You know, because when you think romantic type music you instantly think John Cale. No, because the opposite. Because keeping a close watch is a smart, smart thing to do, and it took me way too long to learn this lesson. Very good suggestion, John Cale, that we shouldn’t let our hearts run amok all the time. Put your rational brain in charge of your decisions for once, stop thinking with your gonads, and stop doing stupid shit with dumb people. Easier said than done. I thought I was keeping a close watch the first time around, and an even closer one the second and third times. And so on and so forth until I die, I presume. This is just the new year’s resolution you sit down and make shortly after your heart’s been made mincemeat of and you’re feeling down and bitter. Well, a broken heart is like a hangover; there’s not real cure for it except waiting for it to go away on its own. And when it does, it’s open season all over again and your resolutions fly out the window and your heart and gonads make mockery of your brain.

Honi Soit

Simply the most rocking song ever to be sung in the French language. By John Cale, a Welshman. We know, once and for all, that the French and rock’n'roll are fundamentally incompatible. ”Honi soit qui mal y pense” is a French phrase meaning: “Shamed be he who thinks evil of it”. Allegedly spoken by King Edward III; when his cousin  Joan of Kent was shamed by the court for losing a garter on the dance floor, Edward thus defended her honor. The phrase has been adopted as motto by The Most Noble Order of the Garter, the highest English dynastic order ever to be named for an undergarment. So it’s a line spoken by an English king, and associated with  English chivalry and an honour of the British monarchy. Why it’s in French, I don’t know. Did everyone in the king’s court speak French during King Edward’s time? And why John Cale wrote a song about it, I also don’t know, but he’s made an anthem of it that the Knights of the Garter should be proud to adopt. Cale himself is an OBE, or Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a higher rank of honour than the MBE’s bestowed upon the Beatles in 1965. Paul McCartney, of course has been knighted since then, but that still means John Cale has a higher place within nobility than Ringo Starr does. All of which means exactly zero to anyone living outside of Great Britain and the Queen’s jurisdiction. It just shows that while Cale might be a nonentity to the American public, in England he gets honours from the Queen.

Hello, There

Pop goes John Cale. As pop as it gets with him. I like a dark sensibility. I don’t like an angry sensibility. I don’t like aggression. I don’t like vulgarity (well up to a point I like it). I don’t like shock value. Nor yet sentimentality or romance. Or insincerity. But I like a sense of foreboding, a graceful darkness. I like music that pushes the ‘depress’ button, if you will. As far as that goes, Cale can really push it. I can’t handle it a lot of the time. I press the skip button a lot. But sometimes it’s comforting. There’s a time and place and mood for this. Usually at night, after two or three glasses of wine and a kick in the guts from life itself. Music to get drunk and cry to – a very important genre.

Helen Of Troy

For those that say John Cale hasn’t got a sense of humor, I say this song is really fucking funny. It’s got the usual John Cale creepiness, but overlaid with a totally absurd gay voiceover. I’ve never been able to make heads or tails of it, but I find it endlessly amusing. I think it shows a certain sense of whimsy on the artist’s part.

Gun

This might be one of the reasons why John Cale developed a reputation for being dark and depressing. Which is hard to argue with. Cale has been one of the most unrelentingly dark characters in rock for decades, and I’m not talking about silly, campy ‘dark’ like Alice Cooper, or mopey, emo ‘dark’ like The Cure or cynical, cash-grubbing ‘dark’ like Marilyn Manson. Those guys aren’t dark, they’re just trying to sell records to angsty teenagers. Whatever darkness John Cale expresses, it comes from within. I don’t know much about him personally, but he’s supposed to be a pretty decent guy in real life. He just likes to think about things other people prefer to ignore. Even his love songs are tinged with obsession and insanity. He also likes to write about violence and war. Cale can share a shelf with his friends Nick Cave and Nico, who also spew darkness with no thought of selling records and as a result sell none. Those three definitely take a pessimistic view of the human condition, but at least they’ve thought about it long and hard. Cale may not be cheerful company, but he’s good company nonetheless because he is intelligent and everything he writes is so thoughtful. That might not sound like the highest praise, but even some of the best musicians seem not to think about anything except themselves and what they’re going to put up their nose next. I can’t really imagine having a good existential debate with Paul McCartney, just for example. You can just tell that John Cale gives the best existential debates. Since actually having one is unlikely, the next best thing is just listening to his music, which always stirs up existential doubts in me.

 

The Gift

If I ever got drunk enough to do karaoke without dying of alcohol poisoning, this would be my song. No singing required, for The Gift isn’t really a song. Or it’s two songs in one. Or a song and a story. It’s designed, if you have the two-channel, two-speaker stereo setup, so that on one speaker an instrumental song is heard, while on the other John Cale reads a short story. That neat effect is kind of lost if you’re listening on a crappy iPod dock or boombox or similar low-rent kit. The Velvet Underground did a lot of experimentation with using speaker channels for striking effect. On The Murder Mystery four speakers are optimal to fully enjoy the unrelated, overlapping vocals. It’s the opposite of the wall of sound, where layers of vocals and instruments are meshed perfectly into a seamless whole. The story, written by Lou Reed for a college assignment, takes name and influence from O. Henry, with swift characterization and abrupt surprise ending. I’m convinced Lou Reed could have found his way into the pantheon of great American novelists, had he not chosen to tell his stories in verse. Not everyone who’s good at poetry excels at prose, but Reed’s songs are on the edge between – any one of his songs could be punched and molded into story form. Which could be a cool project for him in the future, I think. I’d like to see him sit down and write a book. Maybe we could find out what happened when Marsha Bronson opened that box.

Gideon’s Bible

In the festive holiday spirit… Not really. But I’m trying to relax, and this helps. John Cale isn’t always the most relaxing guy in the world, but he set the mood on Vintage Violence. Later he said that record was too ‘pop’ as if that were at terribly bad thing. I have to remind myself of the context here; in the seventies people had different ideas about credibility. Nowadays being mainstream and being indie are totally not incompatible at all. But what do I know what John Cale thinks about his credibility. Maybe he wishes someone would give him a gig judging a televised singing competition. In fact, I wish somebody would. Yeah, it would be called The Factory: Search for the  Next Superstar, the judges would be however’s left alive from Warhol’s gang – Cale, Lou Reed, Holly Woodlawn, whomever else hasn’t died yet – and the competitors would be judged on their fabulosity and ability to stare blankly into the camera. It would be both slicingly relevant and utterly redundant. Wouldn’t that be neat? I’d watch that.

R

Ghost Story

I was just noticing; what does it tell you about me and my blog that I have a tag for John Cale and none for John Lennon? Because you may have never heard of Cale, but he’s so much a part of my life he’s at a Beatles-level height of importance. The Velvet Underground is like mother’s milk to me. If you didn’t grow up learning this stuff, you’re at a severe disadvantage and I pity you. If you need to get started on Cale, Vintage Violence is a good place. It’s his first and also his mellowest album. He goes from there to some weirder places, not all of which even I will follow.  He’s an uncompromising artist, one of those who doesn’t care at all if he appeals to anyone or not. He doesn’t have that problem that Lou Reed has where he suddenly catches himself becoming too popular and esteemed and has to make a grand effort to make himself unappealing again. He also doesn’t have as much money as Lou Reed does. But that’s the deal – don’t give ‘em an inch of rope, John.

Frozen Warnings

“Into numberless reflections
Rises a smile from your eyes into mine”

In the mood for desolation? What wasteland, what frozen borderlines Nico was thinking of when she wrote we can only guess. She was among a rare breed of crazy artists whose lives, though we may see the outlines, remain unknowable. There are artists who create to sell, ones who create for the dedicated, and the ones who do it just for themselves. Nico was the last type. She said what she had to say, cryptically and with no regard of whether anyone heard her or not. There’s a difference between listening to music that’s popular and music that’s obscure. Popular artists expect to be heard and we expect to hear them. From inception through purchase and consequent enjoyment, the process is essentially a public interaction. With someone like Nico, who was never truly famous even at the height of her success the relationship between artist and listener is profoundly different. It’s in some way a miracle that her voice and the words she wrote, somewhere in England or Germany, so many years ago has found its way to your ears and mine. It’s like a private message – an SOS – from her to us, across miles and decades. It’s like light from a long-dead star traveling eons through space, continuing to exist though its source is gone. Nico is that dead star and it’s amazing to think that her voice is still out there and making an impact on people, though she spent the end of her life singing into the void with no audience to speak of and no reward for her efforts. At least John Cale still loves her and carries a torch, though he’s barely better off in fame himself.

 

 

 

Footsteps

If the world was fair, you’d have heard this on the radio. The world being what it is – not fair – the closest you’ll get on the radio is something Brian Eno produced, most likely Coldplay or U2, and John Cale you’ll find not at all unless you can tune it to one of those college stations that play Velvet Underground songs at 3am. As usual, after a day of non-consensual radio consumption, I fret about the decline of civilization and why I go through life feeling like the dude from Idiocracy, and I come home needing to vent and cleanse my ears.