John Cale S/D

def a nighttime record but i also listened to it this morning while it was raining and it is exactly like viewing the melted world through a rainy car windshield

Meant to bump after seeing him live in February. This was a gig that was meant to happen in July 2022 but got postponed twice due to illness; no reason to think he doesn’t have a good many years in him but going in I knew there was a decent chance this would be his last uk tour, at least his last time visiting my town.

I only bring this up to emphasise how delightfully he gave us the complete opposite of a greatest hits set. They opened with “jumbo in tha modernworld”, almost everything else was from the new one. They slew tbh! He looked a bit frail at his keyboard peering through his readers at an ipad but the voice is the same as ever. At one point he said “this is an oldie but a goodie” and went into “Antarctica starts here” but a drastic unrecognisable* reworking

There was no encore tho I heard they were coming back on & doing “close watch” when they felt like it, which I would have loved

*not actually unrecognisable that’s just something ppl say about stuff like this (and “heartbreak hotel”) but when he announced this song the guy next to me actually muttered “you won’t bloody recognise it tho”

I saw him at Bexhill, really loved it. He played an amazingly loud pablo picasso and a load of hits besides, a few of which (endless plain for fortune, for one) had the melody demolished while others Chinese Envoy were intact and beautiful.

Just looked at a set list and the only old ones at mine were “rosegarden funeral of sores”(!) “guts” “cable hogue” and “half past France” which was the Paris 1919 oldie but goodie I meant to say instead of “Antarctica”

Oh there was also “villa albani” from Caribbean sunset!

Recent set lists look great, he’s playing “Ghost Story” and “Style It Takes” at some shows.

“Style It Takes” is awesome.

I’ll put the Empire State Building on your wall

It’s an all timer as is Chinese envoy!

Why did I wait until now to listen to this record? I adore it! It feels like walking through a museum exhibit of late-period Destroyer albums, with the ambient sounds of the different galleries bleeding into each other.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/16/1194311683/avant-garde-music-legend-john-cale-talks-about-his-album-mercy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QPUwTNtmP8

Hah, I was just about to post another video from this same exact YouTube user, because he was standing right next to me! He recorded the whole show, and I asked him if he was going to upload it, and he told me the name of his channel. This was the highlight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5TBw9fslBw

At the end, when he was walking out (no encore due to curfew), he looked right at me as I kept applauding, and he came over to the edge of the stage and applauded back! Then he looked up to the crowd, waved, and then headed off stage. I was floating on the air and stayed up listening to Cale records until 4 a.m.

FWIW, this was Cale's first time back in NYC since his two BAM shows in 2017 (one celebrating the 50th anniversary of VU & Nico with an amazing line-up of guests, the other a career retrospective). I was at both of those shows, which I hope were recorded and get released someday. They had a no-phones policy, which a few people broke but I didn't want to risk getting thrown out - I just snuck a few quick 2-second videos and saved them somewhere.

(Besides applauding, I may have stood out to Cale because I was the only person wearing a mask - COVID's starting to spike again here in NYC, and I actually know two people whose fathers died from COVID this summer even though they were vaccinated. It's amazing how almost no one is bothering to take any safety precautions.)

* floating on air

wow that "Hedda Gabler" is great

xxxpost Yeah, it still happens: for instance, Graham Nash and Veronique Sanson said that David Crosby died of Covid, but doesn't seem to have been widely reported. Here in the Deep South, I do see Black adults of various age groups masking, and some (fewer) young and old whites, not many in between. I carry one, or have it around my neck, in case I'm unexpectedly close to someone, in a line or the rows of library computers, while avoiding crowds. Haven't been to a show in quite a while, but would consider it for Cale.

hey bird, i was the *other* person in the venue with a mask. it sounds like you were close up though. i was way back on the hill. where it still sounded great and we had a nice view of the visuals.

i think this might have been cale's only show in the usa this tour. it looks like he's headed back to the uk.

That's good you're seeing more people wear them, dow. Hopefully it catches on more - did you see that Guardian interview with Steve Albini posted in another thread? It opens with Albini coming in double-masked, which he pulled down only to sip his drink, and he tells the interviewer two of his clients recently cancelled sessions due to getting Covid. I just had a brunch a week or two ago without someone who was sick with Covid a few weeks earlier and said it had been bad. I have elderly relatives I interact with every now and then, so I try to be careful regardless - wearing a mask is like a nothing gesture to me, it actually helps with my allergies so I mind it even less.

And good for you Freud, solidarity! Truth be told, the very back is actually the best spot in terms of sound. I found this out years ago when I went to see a Wilco show - to my surprise I didn't need any earplugs, and not only was the volume perfect, the mix sounded perfect too, with every instrument and especially the vocals sounding crystal clear. It may even be a prime spot for taping if there isn't too much talking around.

Also forgot how intense the audience can be at these shows. Before Tomberlin came on, I overheard a guy ask someone in front of him "would it be okay if you took your hat off?" etc. and the response was "Actually I can't...I have a medical condition" to which the other guy responded "Oh, well I hope you make it through the night!" which obviously didn't go over well.

not to turn this into the masking thread but they say if you get covid then the odds of getting long covid are ~10 percent, which to me is huge. long covid sounds deceidedly unpleasant, is uncureable, could be permanent, and could involve brain damage (for which "brain fog" is a friendly euphemism). the odds may be even higher for me personally -- a flu i had years ago triggered my alopecia, and since then i have been hairless from tip to toe ("alopecia universalis" to get technical). i am not interested in finding out what covid would do to me.

Back to John Cale—- saw him at a BAM gig in Brooklyn , but didn’t make it up there this time for the Park gig. Thanks for videos . Wish he would do more US cities.

Cale's voice still seems to be in great shape

wow @ that bowed electric bass in that clip

hello I am Vintage Violence years old today <3

BIG WHITE CLOUDS are you kidding me

the way Cale writes about this album gives you zero preparation for what it is. he’s like oh its extremely simplistic i was just trying some things like ok sure you humble-ass motherfucker lol

~sneezes a picasso into a kleenex nbd~

yeah vintage violence is top-tier

it's so fucking good

gorgeous

gives me a vibe of Odessa-era Bee Gees in the best way? maybe just his voice or something but man

plus The Band-adjacent country style is so good

yeah. i've always kind of thought of it as his "loaded"

it's very psychey-pop for sure in parts - cleo in particular <3

is there any song as good as Gideon's Bible?! No there is not it is the best song ever

The chorus on Gideon’s Bible from Vintage Violence is 4 stars

Won't you help me sneeze, I've caught a cold.

One of the songs where you can really see Cale's Beach Boys love.

xxpost yeah Gideons Bible is amazing

Won't you help me sneeze, I've caught a cold.

the opening track is so delightful, just a lovely Hello There wave from Cale
it was so unexpected!

For some reason my streaming service is obsessed with Gideon's Bible, when I shuffle stuff at random it always plays and its fine I like it but it does seem weird giving my listening habits that the algorithm has latched on to this particular song "oh dude loves Gideon's Bible let's play it again!"

on a side note
Am reading Whats Welsh For Zen and was not prepared for his neanderthal views of women and/or physical violence. Tough going. Obv the music stuff is interesting but his dispassionate telling of his marriages & his own truly awful behavior like he’s talking about a walk to the shops really does my head in.

yah hes a legendary asshole

annoyed at myself for going in wide-eyed but oh well

pray for me

he just killed a chicken & threw the head into the crowd

._.

it’s a selling point of the book that he talks about stuff in a frank matter of fact way but it was horrifying to read him describing smashing his gf’s teeth with a whiskey glass and then just sort of breezing on to the next anecdote

yeah horrifying

The chicken incident did result in a good, funny (assholish) song

There's a weird disconnect between the blithe way he describes some of his misdeeds, mostly from his alcohol and drug era, and the insightful introspection of other parts of the book.

The chorus on Gideon’s Bible from Vintage Violence is 4 stars

My favourite bit is the fadeout, with the viola coming in, like the end of a credit sequence in some forgotten urban 1970 movie.

Fans of "roots" John Cale should give a listen to his unloved 1996 album Walking on Locusts. It features one of his all-time best songs, "Secret Corrida" (which is more Leonard Cohen than Americana).

Just came across a good interview---didn't realize he wrote so much in the studio, and was so into improvising there---this part is striking as well, on VU gigs with the Mothers:

...the only reason Zappa was on those gigs was that Herb Cohen knew that he'd get all this publicity from Andy and us. The thing is about Frank, that was reinforced years after I saw him, is that he had a very acerbic wit, which was kind of enjoyable, but at the same time, I really can't say there was anything about his music or him that made me love music. There was something about him, I think it was a real deep-seeded anger and fury about being forced to learn music in the first place - there was a revenge factor there - but it made me very uncomfortable watching him. There was so much putting down of himself that wasn't pleasant. I lost the gleam of innocence that you get from somebody really enjoying a melody or a solo or anything like that. And he could rip off [play, not pilfer] all these incredible solos, and you knew the guy had tremendous talent, but there was never anything there that made me love music so I'd want to do it. The reason you're doing this is to show how people how exciting and enjoyable this is. It's a shared experience. People shouldn't be punished for sharing an experience.

Didn’t Zappa famously mock Nico from the side of the stage, pretending to play organ and making pained singing faces?

Oh worse than that, he went up on stage and actually played her organ and sang some moronic lyrics not much different from his usual output.

https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/andy-warhol-hosts-frank-zappa-on-his-cable-tv-show.html