Review: POPtical Illusion by John Cale
The Velvet Underground’s not-so-secret weapon has been making albums for 50+ years. His best work is often stealth. ALSO: A deep-dive playlist. Arooj Aftab. Grateful Dead. The new film Flipside.
John Cale performing in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, August 2023. Photo by Will Hermes
TO BE HONEST (or tbh as the kids txt), John Cale deserves a major biography. I’m not applying for the job, and mean no disrespect to the foundational 2003 Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell (who also authored a fine volume on Jonathan Richman) or Cale’s essential, if over-designed, memoir What’s Welsh For Zen, a touchstone for my biography Lou Reed: The King of New York. In part, he deserves a major biography because he’s a brilliant musician and a fascinating character. But it’s also because Cale’s best work has frequently been stealth — not necessarily the stuff he’d flag himself, or that’s been issued under his own name.
He’s rightfully proud of his work on the first two Velvet Underground records; n.b. his central role in Todd Haynes’ wonderful, Cale-centric documentary The Velvet Underground. Listen to his first post-Velvets reunion with Reed — Nico is there, too — on the Paris concert recordings circulated as Le Bataclan ’72. It is the sound of roads sadly not taken. The gorgeous viola blueprint for “Pale Blue Eyes,” for example — a post-Cale VU song the trio rehearsed but didn’t performed (there was also a fragment of “Candy Says”).
And then listen to Cale’s celeste + piano — my god, the beauty of it — on Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky,” and his viola (ditto) on “Fly,” possibly Drake’s most sublime recordings:
Cale’s name was in the fine print on Drake’s Bryter Layter, as it was for his punk-generating production on The Stooges, The Modern Lovers and Patti Smith’s Horses.
The fact is that Cale’s full brilliance — like Reed’s, when he let his guard down — shines brightest in collaborations. His LPs with Terry Riley (Church of Anthrax), Brian Eno (Wrong Way Up), and Reed (Songs For ‘Drella) are among his most rewarding. Among his solo albums, it’s those with others playing prominent roles. See his masterpiece Paris 1919, where Little Feat’s Lowell George does with his slide guitar parts something of what Cale did for Drake, and producer Chris Thomas, whose ridiculous resumé includes The Beatles’ White Album, Dark Side of the Moon, “Anarchy in The U.K.” and Pulp’s “Common People.” Ditto the 1974 Fear, which enlisted Eno and Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera as both musicians and producers. There’s all those Nico albums he worked on. His cover of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.” His John Entwhistle-as-Godzilla stomp through Patti Smith’s cover of “My Generation.”
Here’s a lovingly curated little playlist to get a taste of all this (okay, it’s 90+ songs; not so little, but it just scratches the surface). Apple Music users click here, otherwise click here:
And if you want to go super-deep, here’s a YouTube playlist sampling Cale’s early-mid ‘60s work, pre-VU and otherwise, at times in cahoots with Tony Conrad (much of this was released on his legendary Table of the Elements label), Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, Marion Zazeela, and other sound + vision visionaires. (Warning: some of this may frighten pets.)
Anyway. Cale has a new album, his second in just over a year — a remarkable pace for an 82 year old, riding a hydrant gush of creativity that by his account began during Covid lockdown. He’s remained engaged with new music and younger musicians. His tributes to Nico (2013) and the Velvet Underground (in 2017) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music featured the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Meshell Ndegeocello and Mercury Rev. As I wrote in Rolling Stone about the 2017 event, “[it] was no museum display, but a living thing, writhing and howling. And its best moments found a balance between replication and reinvention.” 2023’s Mercy LP drew in Natalie “Weyes Blood” Mering, Sylvan Esso, and Animal Collective. It was a dark set, with a provocative uniformity of sound — a record that moved me despite, and sometimes because, of how Cale often subsumed his contributors in smears of electronics. It felt very much like an end times record.
POPtical Illusion is the sound of reprieve. The mood is feistier, if not more upbeat exactly, and the approaches are more varied. Unlike Mercy, Cale is largely working by himself, with occasional guitar from Dustin Boyer and assists from longtime manager/collaborator Nita Scott. Also in the mix are producers Mikaelin “Blue” BlueSpruce (Solange, Dev “Blood Orange” Hynes) and Seven Davis Jr. (Flying Lotus). Modern funk/soul scientists both, they’re intriguing matches for the composer, an avowed hip-hop fanatic. There’s a lot of clipped drum architecture, rogue samples and noise, heavily textured/layered vocals, echo and reverb that seemingly doesn’t correspond to any physical space. “Calling You Out” repeats that phrase in various configurations over a chopped beats and a meaty bassline draped in sparkling synth washes. “Company Commander” has Cale barking bureaucratic babble as if through a walkie-talkie. “Shark-Shark” has a ‘90s industrial pop vibe, with a Brian Eno-ish sing-song melody. “Laughing in Sleep” sets a booming, relentless machine beat against warm Fender Rhodes and string samples.
My favorite track is “Setting Fires.” It has a hammer dulcimer-like melody with a warm bassline, and sputterings that conjure early Moog output. Here Cale’s measured, melodically deadpan Welsh delivery reminded me of nothing so much as Destroyer records. This is fitting, as Dan Bejar has cited his fondness for Cale’s work. As Bejar told Tyler Wilcox in 2004, Cale was someone “I’ve always really liked. Just the way he used classical instruments. He always ends up being a specter on whatever record I do… I just really like his solo records. There’s kind of like a marriage of this old world austerity with this unavoidable pop sensibility. I can’t seem to shake that.”
A lot of us can’t seem to shake that, and POPtical Illusion is a satisfyingly of-the-moment display of that sensibility. Long may John Cale run.
Sidenote #1: In some ways, Cale shares a lot with his fellow LA transplant T-Bone Burnett, whose outstanding new album (more on that next month) also enlists younger artists, Weyes Blood included. Both Cale and Burnett do outstanding work as sidemen, producers, film music composers/curators, conceptualists. And their own work, while sometimes hitting songcraft gold, is often more interesting for its ideas and approaches.
Sidenote #2: I recently saw Ennio, the documentary on film music composer Ennio Morricone. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and it occurred to me that Morricone and Cale have much in common, too. They both began in the upper regions of the conservatory and the experimental music worlds, but found their voices, and their bliss, in the messier world of pop culture.
Sidenote #3: I just learned via the current issue of Uncut that Linda Thompson (see last week’s post) used to share a squat with Cale (and Joe Boyd) in London circa 1971, around Lots Road. “It was fun,” she told my compatriot Tom Pinnock in a poignant and very funny interview. “I was John’s drug dealer, because the chemists all around that area refused to sell him any more J Collis Browne’s Mixture, which had morphine in it, so he’d send me out to get it! John sure could down that stuff. I’m probably still banned from a few chemists in World’s End.”
Sidenote #4: I was speaking to Jonathan and Grasshopper of Mercury Rev last week, who have a deep and gorgeous new record coming out in September (more on that soon, but here’s a taste). Jonathan told me he’d once asked Cale, when they were in Italy doing one of his Nico tributes, if he’d like to visit them sometime in the Woodstock area. Cale demurred. “John Cage once told me there are a lot of snakes up there,” he replied. Cale doesn’t like snakes. Or hippies. Not a Woodstock kinda guy.
# # #
Speaking of hippies, it’s been 50 years since the Grateful Dead released From The Mars Hotel, and Rhino just issued a blowout 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, naturally. There’s just a couple of studio leftovers on this one — a lovely acoustic guitar-and-organ “China Doll” demo, and a semi-acoustic demo of “U.S. Blues” that’s as timely as ever, alongside a tasty show from the University Of Nevada-Reno, 5/12/74. For the devoted, there’s also From The Mars Hotel: The Angel’s Share, a full set of demos + outtakes. It has assorted versions of two of my favorite Dead songs, “Pride of Cucamonga” and “Unbroken Chain.” Both are co-written & sung by Phil Lesh, the band’s bassist, who like Cale was a conservatory student before he went AWOL with a rock band. I wrote about the parallels between the Dead and the Velvets in Lou Reed: The King of New York, and they never cease to intrigue me.
So many great albums came out this month. I’ve already mentioned the Charli XCX set. I’d also steer you to check out Night Reign by Arooj Aftab, a tremendously gifted singer/songwriter based in Brooklyn whose music has roots in South Asian vocal music, jazz, dub and more. I’ve seen her perform twice, in very different settings: at Pitchfork fest in Chicago, and with the great jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and polyglot journeyman Shahzad Ismaily at Caramoor in Katonah NY. Both times the music was gorgeous, earthy, playful, and transporting.
She’s got some U.S. dates next month:
July 22, 2024 Chicago, IL - Millennium Park Summer Series
July 23, 2024 Ridgefield, CT - Ridgefield Playhouse
July 24, 2024 New York, NY - Central Park Summerstage
July 25, 2024 Saugerties, NY - Opus 40
I’d highly recommend the gig at Opus 40, an utterly unique sculpture park of sorts near Woodstock NY. And yes, Mercury Rev did indeed write a song about it.
The indie documentary film Flipside opens semi-wide today. I loved it. It’s nominally about a failing record store in New Jersey, but it’s also about youthful idealism, the compromises we make, the unreasonable dreams we refuse to abandon. Chris Wilcha made it; Ira Glass, Judd Apatow, David Bowie and Uncle Floyd (IYKYK) figure in it. If you’re reading this, I suspect it’ll hit you close to home.
Finally, thanks to all of you who subscribed in the past week — and extra-special thanks to paid subscribers, who were willing to fully support this project on the basis of a single post. I’m honored, humbled, and intend to make this worth your while. Going forward, I’ll continue to post some free content. But most playlisted posts like this, and the archive, will be paywalled. That’s the only way I can make this a sustainable publication with substantial content. Thanks for understanding, and please consider a paid subscription. And to anyone for whom cost is a significant factor, write to me & I’ll get you sorted.
That’s it for now. Enjoy <3
—Will
Somehow I never heard that Bataclan concert - thank you!
Irman Schmidt told me that Cale was one of the people he bumped into in NYC on his was to a classical music composition competition which he blew off to follow along to a Tony Conrad event. Schmidt was blown away by the NY avant scene and the Velvets. He went back to Germany to his hand at something that combined classical and rock. He started Can.
Great post Will. Just killer.