John Cale - Paris 1919 Poll

xxp now THAT song i think is extraordinary, emotion breaking through his archness. "big white cloud" with those blown speakers breaks through that wall as well.

slow dazzle is really consistent, imo, it's that dumb long track with eno at the end that sucks.

for me the thing is that the best ones on any given Cale album tend to be among the best songs you'll hear that year. British Passport is not a spectacular album, but "Dead or Alive" is a monolithic fucking TUNE. Artificial Intelligence doesn't cohere at all, but fuckin' A, "Dying on the Vine"? I'd shave several years off the end of my life to write a song that good.

aero: I prefer this version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeFYJdW3xDg

the Fragments of a Rainy Season version of Close Watch is the definitive one for me

Christ that lyric is seamless. Seamless.

Wrote on "Macbeth" just now:

http://thisiheard.blogspot.com/2013/07/john-cale-macbeth-1973.html

(Sorry, that post was a little unclear. I think I fixed it OK.)

I used to feel the same way but recently started picking up his back catalog an album at a time as i come across them and, damn, i fall more under his spell as I take in each album as an entire work. his debut album, which i always just sort've liked, has really grabbed me. the same thing happened with "Honi Soit" and "Music For A New Society" last year. I'm on the lookout for 1919 next.

The idea that a you've listened to Honi Soit and Music/Society and not 1919 is amazing to me, you are in for an amazing time.

iirc from Cale bio, 1919 was the only album he wrote entirely pre-studio? Anyway it worked and I wish he'd done more starchy shirt records

i don't remember if we've talked about this video on ilx yet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWvIgX_Ojk

just such an athletic, immersed performer

such a coked-out, out of shape performer

that's the other interpretation, sure.

description not criticism

I saw him do "Heartbreak Hotel" I think three times between '84-'86 - it was a staple of the set, the wigged-out climax of the keyboard section. I was really into dope at the time, speed and heroin and coke in their seasons w/me, but my read on Cale was always that he was taking advantage of the good early-days black tar heroin that was around, not the coke. He didn't talk a lot between songs: can you even imagine being all coked up and not talking much? C'mon, now. Plenty of people make great records on coke but I cannot for the life of me imagine a live performance on that stuff that didn't feature numerous long soliloquies between songs.

its the deliberateness of his wigged-out chaos that always gets me -- this dedication to an idea of performance.

Thread just took a dark turn.

Cale's recollection, for what it is worth, is that it was the coke that done him wrong. Copious, copious quantities. Maybe he was stupefied?

Goes without saying, but the guitar solo in "Gun" is probably the best place to simultaneously recognize the genius of Manzanera and Eno, and hear what it really means when a musician collides with a non-musician.

Cale's recollection, for what it is worth, is that it was the coke that done him wrong. Copious, copious quantities. Maybe he was stupefied?

yeah honestly I have probably never done it in the quantities that touring rock dudes in the 80s did. also one of these shows was at Fender's, where, credible legend has it, you'd go to get your pay at the end of the night and the owner would say "umm, there isn't really any money, can I pay you in coke? it's that or nothing really"

slow dazzle is really consistent, imo, it's that dumb long track with eno at the end that sucks.

"jeweller" is hilarious imo

this (like a lot of Cale's albums tbh) strikes me still as about 2 great songs and a bunch of interesting ones

disagree when considering this album (the only songs i wouldn't consider "great" here are "macbeth" (which is fun) and "antarctica starts here" (and even "antarctica" has that heartbreaking fanfare at the end which i could maybe chalk up to "interesting")) and fear but i guess i agree with it for the rest of his catalogue

"antarctica" is also probably my favorite lyric of his

I must confess I think Cale is one of the duddest rocker's around, his riffs are sluggish and his voice is hectoring. And I don't think he does "performance" very well

I hear that happening on Helen of Troy already.

I never had heard "Helen of Troy" but was super excited to listen to it, reading Christgau say that his cover of "Pablo Picasso" was Cale at "his mad best", and was really disappointed! to hear that it was prim, rehearsed, sluggish, annoyed, zero-fun music. My problem with Cale is that when he's bad, he's literally The Worst

Brad OTM re: this and Fear though, two nearly perfect albums

I must confess I think Cale is one of the duddest rocker's around

OTM, he has a 70s intellectual's need to attempt rock but his heart's not in it

a nearly perfect album = Wrong Way Up.

There is a weird thing that I feel when I listen to Cale, esp. "Pablo Picasso" and his cover of "Frozen Warnings" at the end of Nico Icon. On one hand it's like "he produced these records so he must have greater insight into the inner workings of J Richman and N Pfaffgen that I do" but on the other hand it seems like he's missing the point, he doesn't get it. He's got that song "Hey Ray" which is straight up Lou Reed but misses the mark so spectacularly. I dunno, I feel like there is something in his ear that hears things differently than my ears

xp Alfred otmfm

Man, you should hear "Hey Ray" is is so bad :( He plays it at all his shows. I'm feeling kind of bad getting so critical about a musician I adore.

really all I've needed of Cale are Paris 1919, Wrong Way Up and The Island Years.

no vintage violence? i just listened to "gideon's bible" and it helped me not feel so blue about the current state of john cale.
i feel bad that his chosen profession has wound up being so hard on him, like football players who get dementia at 40 or w/e

really all I've needed of Cale are Paris 1919, Wrong Way Up and The Island Years.

And I need them a lot!

people always bored me anyway

i think pretty much everything the guy did in the 70s is great, and most everything he did in the 80s is worth hearing anyway. don't sleep on church of anthrax and academy in peril.

"Helen of Troy" is def. the worst of the early Cale albums

is the Eno-Dylan Thomas project worth a listen?

i've always preferred the couple of songs from that on fragments of a rainy season to anything from the album proper.

& i'll agree that helen of troy is the weakest island years LP, but it's still pretty great. "china sea" is one of cale's most wonderful tunes (typically nasty lyrics though)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZBxy6KpNj0
music is almost like something off of The Beach Boys Love You.

Cale is the best example of a man getting more attractive as he ages

not a fan of the production on Helen of Troy, but we have songs like "Cable Hogue" "I Keep a Close Watch" and "Leaving It Up To You".

I agree on the hit-or-missness, but I think that's in part just because the good songs are really really good, and also I remember them more since I tend to listen to live stuff more than the original albums. Words for the Dying is uniformly amazing though.

90s and 2000s Cale is really consistent too, I think, maybe just with fewer huge highlights.

he really did have this plodding goofy rock sound circa Helen of Troy. But I think that's well gone by the Sabotage/Live stuff. I agree and disagree with the "70s intellectual's need to attempt rock" -- I mean its clear he's playing at and performing rock as much as just "rocking" but i don't think that's the same as just 'attempting rock' -- he's examining it, using it. But the extent that it has good results in part has to do with the climate he's in, the things that he's grabbing, emulating, repurposing.

He made better albums than Lou Reed in the seventies but Lou caught up and surpassed him after 1982.

no way. the last great lou album was 1980's Growing Up in Public

You mean Mistrial isn't classic?

at this point, i'm comfortable saying it's a tie between lou and john in solo career competition (any decade).
though i might be tempted to say that moe put out the best solo albums of the 80s.

I would also argue that Music For a New Society is better than anything else either of them did in the 80s.

i was gonna celebrate music for a new society with this album and fear upthread but that's definitely an album full of "interesting" songs, meant to be broken, plus "i keep a close watch"

i can only listen to music for a new society under very specific conditions