March 25, 2011

Sometimes a band really is a band, as opposed to a bunch of instrumentalists supporting a front man. Although, by now, even the casually interested know that Lou Reed was the driving force behind those belatedly acknowledged arbiters of punk, the Velvet Underground, far fewer people understand the importance of John Cale and his La Monte Young-infused viola, bass, and keyboards in the group’s initial sound.

One could easily argue that Cale was as much a leader of the Velvet Underground as Reed was during their most artistically challenging period. It’s not so easy to hitch the “songwriter” mantle to a single member of the early Velvets, to separate the sound and intent of a piece from the initial writing process. Studio fermentation tends to blur such lines, especially when more than one band member is an exceptional talent (see also “The Beatles” and “The Band.”)

Both “The Velvet Underground and Nico” and “White Light/White Heat” benefit incalculably from Cale’s skill at switching between mournful drones and molten walls of sludge, depending on the instrument, and his mournful, hovering approach to harmony prevails in many of those albums’ best songs.

Cale wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, just standing there playing a bunch of “Lou Reed music.” As he once said, “When I first met Lou, we were interested in the same things. We both needed a vehicle. Lou needed one to carry out his lyrical ideas, and I needed one to carry out my musical ideas.”

Listen, for instance, to the wasted beauty of “Sunday Morning,” from the Velvets' first album, and note how a distinct sense of time and place is established through the moan of Cale’s viola…and remember that he also laid down a remarkably depraved aural landscape on the band’s legendary S&M ditty, “Venus in Furs.” That viola covered a lot of territory, much of which had never been touched by pop music.

“Sunday Morning”

Yes, Reed was behind the Velvets’ bold, evocative lyrics, and he remains to this day an underrated guitarist; his work with the group was often brilliant. However, he’s never re-captured either the first album’s druggy etherealism or “White Light/White Heat”’s murderous garage band vibe as a solo artist.

He’s come close here and there, because he’s tried repeatedly and he’s capable of genuinely great writing. But it’s not a leap to imagine that the long-missing element in Reed’s work, the entrancing aural heaviness that anchors the first two VU records, could have been supplied by Cale.

The moment in the summer of 1968 when Reed called a band meeting and effectively kicked Cale out of the Velvet Underground, on the apparent grounds that Cale’s talent was nearly as formidable as Reed’s, stands as one of the great tragedies of rock & roll. Who knows what these two might have accomplished had they been able to go on negotiating the fact that Reed is a big asshole.

These days, Reed’s very existence seems like a performance art project centered on being crotchety in black clothing - I wouldn’t be surprised if Laurie Anderson plays electric violin behind him while he does his tai chi in the morning - and, by all accounts, he wasn’t much more fun than that when he was younger and his work was a lot more pharmaceutically rendered. Listeners may have suffered from the falling out, but, in the long run, Cale probably caught a break.

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Luckily for Cale, the Velvet Underground sold so few records during their existence he had nothing to live up to in the eyes of a mass audience, or even in the eyes of most music critics, when he embarked on a solo career. Looking back on it now, though, it’s shocking just how close to the mainstream his first few albums actually were.

Although he would eventually push the concept of confrontational theater to absurd lengths - he wasn’t above onstage bloodletting, and let’s not forget he produced the first Stooges album - Cale is often far more approachable than his reputation as a Guinness-swilling Welsh avant-gardist would lead you to believe. It’s abundantly clear that he had enough Hank Williams and Smokey Robinson records in his collection to leaven the Eric Satie.

1973’s “Paris 1919,” is a prime case in point. One of the more ambitious singer-songwriter albums ever recorded, its pervading emotions - in a conceit that only Cale could have dreamed up, much less navigated so sensitively - are cradled in the City of Light at the end of World War I, during the Versailles Conference that split Europe among the victors and handed Germany a well-aimed death blow…a humiliation that would ultimately give birth to the cult of Hitler.

If such an apparently dry historical context sounds like a snooze, you couldn’t be more wrong. There’s a ghostly stateliness to “Paris 1919”’s tunes, a grandeur that grabs the listener from the first chords, and Cale often infuses the lyrics with a dramatic sense of loss.

“Paris 1919,” far from being a museum piece, is a record about deep, complex wounds and tentative steps toward healing— through love, through artistic expression, and through reminisces about much better times. And, rather incredibly, it’s delivered by Cale and a crack band featuring, of all people, Lowell George, the funky mastermind behind the Dixie-fried rockers Little Feat!

It’s a miracle the album works at all, rather than being an art-pop (as opposed to pop art) masterpiece. But a masterpiece it is— no other record I can name feels remotely like this one.

As I said, “Paris 1919” is something on the order of a singer-songwriter album, or maybe it’s lushly orchestrated west coast rock filtered through a European sensibility. James Taylor and Jim Croce, however, didn’t write tunes with titles like “Child’s Christmas in Wales,” “Macbeth,” or “Graham Greene”…or “Hanky Panky Nohow,” which, for me, is the highlight of “Paris 1919,” and the arguable highlight of Cale’s extraordinarily brave career.

On first listen, “Hanky Panky Nohow” appears to be little more than a gorgeously arranged slice of nonsense. But the song’s very lack of reason is its reason for existence, and there’s more of a direct statement being made than might be immediately obvious upon first listen. Here’s a bit of background, then, before we hear it.

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Dada was a cultural movement that slowly took shape in Europe at the beginning of World War I. A chaotic response to worldwide madness, it stood as a tearing down of the political and societal norms that led to the slaughter of some 16-million soldiers and civilians before the eventual signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Dadaists, living, as they did, in the grip of a conflict that seemed like nothing less than mechanized mass murder, abandoned any connection to art as it was previously understood, instead embracing a kind of “anti-art’ that thumbed its nose at traditional aesthetics or thematic rationality. Nonsensical Dada writings, stage performances, paintings, music, and collages first began to proliferate in Zurich in 1916, but caught on throughout the continent over the course of the war.

Described by one reviewer as “the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated in the brain of man,” Dada was quite clearly and quite accurately applying the same description to the act of warfare. As the Dadaist writer, Hugo Ball, said at the time, “For us, art is not an end in itself…but is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.”

So “Hanky Panky Nohow,” rather than being a string of flowing gibberish, is Cale’s vision of Dada as it applied to the emotional tenor of Paris in 1919. Here it is, then, in all its disembodied glory.

“Hanky Panky Nohow”

If the sacheting of gentlemen
Gives you grievance now and then
What's needed are some memories of planing lakes
Those planing lakes will surely calm you down

There's a name for everything
And for elephants that sing to feed
The cows that agriculture won't allow
Hanky panky nohow
Hanky panky nohow
Hanky panky nohow

“Hanky Panky Nohow” is easily the strangest song that can bring me to tears, and it’s difficult to explain exactly why. I think it’s because, aside from the out-of-nowhere references to elephants, cows, and agriculture, it’s imbued, both lyrically and musically, with the spent sadness the Dadaists themselves surely felt as the war grew increasingly brutal and the mounds of bodies continued to grow.

Dada was a response to the onset of the anesthetizing of our souls, an affliction that was new to the 20th century, and continues unchecked to this very day. In fact, it’s worse now than it’s ever been.

Cale wisely avoids the trap of simply falling into a fit of outright Dadaism. Instead, we have references to the “sacheting gentlemen” of power who launch our wars, who “give (us) grievance,” and force us to find escape in recollections of simpler times. We all have idylls of one form or another locked away in our memories, suggestions that the world doesn’t have to be vicious, that disputes don’t have be settled with violence and bloodshed.

Such a world isn’t a pipe-dream as a strict rule of existence. It’s an option that gets neglected, and the Dadaists surely felt that as strongly as many of us do today, when we turn on the TV to see more planes being launched, more bombs being dropped, and more children torn to bits in the streets.

I’m frightened by religion, too, just like Cale’s protagonist. But spirituality is only one type of religion that repeatedly manages to tie the world into knots. There’s also the unwavering belief in a person, a political system, or a set of rules that might apply quite nicely to you, but ends up getting shoved down the throats of people who choose not to comply with your conviction. Religion, the comfort delivered by assuming we’ve grasped “universal” truths, is why we’re willing to kill. And it’s why we’ll likely go on killing forever.

The sadness of the Dadaists - and Cale conveys this magnificently in a song that I consider to be a work of genius - lies in the fact that the only way they could win was by cutting the umbilical cord that connected them to the great bulk of humanity, to throw up their hands and say, “Let’s try again.”

Could there be a lonelier kind of victory? Is it really a victory at all?

Download: “Hanky Panky Nohow” from “Paris 1919” (1973), but if you’re an adventurous listener, you should hear the whole album. It’s not what you would call easy listening, but it doesn’t deal with easy living. We have a lot more in common with Paris 1919 than you might realize.

Paul Tatara