"Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you to make those improvisations successful most of the time."John Cale
Timeline: 1982
Deerhunter supergroup for Agent Orange victims/ Vietnam Vets benefit
On July 30 he is part of the supergroup Deerhunter (with Ian Hunter, Todd Rundgren, Paul Butterfield) at an outdoors benefit show for Agent Orange victims / Vietnam Vets at Pier 84 in New York. He performs two songs solo, Fear Is A Man's Best Friend and Heartbreak Hotel. The New York Times is not impressed:
(..) although the gesture of solidarity for a humane cause gave some of the performances a special urgency, the band itself lacked much musical cohesiveness. Because of Deerhunter's influences - Mr. Hunter is a disciple of Bob Dylan, Mr. Rundgren of the Beatles and Mr. Cale a charter member of the Velvet Underground - all the music was very much rooted in the 60's rock culture.
The musical high point of the set was a slow pop-soul rendition of Eight Days a Week, the Beatles hit, in which Mr. Hunter and Mr. Rundgren shared the lead vocals in a Smokey Robinson-style arrangement. Mr. Cale's only solo turn, singing his primal-scream rendition of Heartbreak Hotel, the Elvis Presley hit, was also effective for the way it recalled Jim Morrison and the Doors. And Mr. Rundgren delivered a confident solo rendition of his antiwar song Lysistrata.
Local rado station WPLJ made buttons to support the cause.
Music For A New Society
The Music For A New Society album is released in September, including a new version of Close Watch, from the Helen Of Troy album.
Chinese Envoy was inspired by a short story of the French writer Guy de Maupassant.
His wife Risé does the spoken word part of Risé, Sam And Rimsky-Korsakov, a co-write with actor and playwright Sam Shepard. The cover of the album was designed by his ex-wife Betsey Johnson.
"On Music For A New Society, I wanted to do a Marble Index - put the songs down, then write independent arrangements around them, it´s an arranger's record, it even goes outside the realm of that, it's like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The whole thing is hooked on the voice, which I was really proud of; the voice is sticking out there, it's not hidden. There were some examples where songs ended up so emaciated the weren't songs anymore. There was a purist notion of what it was supposed to be, but it flowered into something entirely different, with a lot of overdubbings. The only track with a band on the whole album is Changes Made and that shouldn't be there, but the record company insisted on it."
Close Watch singles
Two singles were released to promote the album. Both have Close Watch on the A-side, with the version Helen 0f Troy and Changes Made as the B-sides.
At the album's 20th anniversary he was interviewed in the English music magazine Uncut:
"Maybe what people are seeing there is the pain involved. People like watching suffering. I just have painful memories of it. There's only so much heroism you can milk from a situation like that. I think it's really passionate, really interested in the humanity of people. It is something I am proud of."
The album is reissued as Music For A New Society + M:FANS, with a full reworking of the album plus a couple of outtakes in 2016.
I'm Waiting For The Man
The bootleg album Las Botas Draciosas Marchan Sobre Polonia contains an excellent live version of I'm Waiting For The ManChris Spedding on guitar, recorded at the Jarlateatern, Stockholm, Sweden on November 3, 1975, a show that was broadcasted on Swedish radio on November 5, 1975.
Music For A New Society video
An acquaintance working for NBC Television dreamed up shooting a video for the album. Cale's game for the princely sum of $ 1,500, ending up surrounded by a chorus line of dance girls, trying to sing Changes Made:
"There was one scene in which all of a sudden one of the girls started sucking my thumb while I was trying to concentrate on the lyrics. (...) If it's ever shown, I'll kill the guy."
"Convergence" shows with Bob Neuwirth
He plays four shows with American musician and visual artist Bob Neuwirth at The Kitchen in New York (September 9, 10 & 11 (early and late). Ruskin Germino plays saxophone and bassoon:
"John Cale and Bob Neuwirth present a series of new works. by both artists. With Ruskin Germino. John Cale, piano, vocals, viola and guitar; Bob Neuwirth, guitar and vocals; Ruskin Germino, tenor saxophone."
The reviewer of the Christian Science Monitor quite like it:
"With a rousing show of progressive country-and-western bebop, the Kitchen has opened the new season of its Contemporary Music Series.
The stars were John Cale and Bob Neuwirth, backed by a woodwind player named Ruskin Germino. Cale, a one-time classical musician and Leonard Bernstein scholar at the Tanglewood Music Center, is best known as a former leader (along with Lou Reed) of the towering Velvet Underground rock group. Neuwirth is a lower-profile performer who has ambled through several arts over the years. Both have the kind of try-anything brashness that goes over well at the unpredictable Kitchen Center for Video, Music, and Dance.
In fact, there were several moments during the show when the musicians might have been playing different songs at the same time. At the beginning, for example, Neuwirth crooned earnest lyrics into a microphone while Cale coaxed odd harmonies and off-center rhythms from his electric viola - the two of them inhabiting dissimilar worlds which, nonetheless, intersected and cooperated when least expected.
In the meantime, Germino shuffled around the rear of the stage, tootling riffs that sounded like saxophone translations of Jack Kerouac. In all, it was pleasant enough, and certainly kept you on your toes."
» Fresh Cale
Order the remastered and expanded Paris 1919 album (2LP, CD) via Domino Records
Order the remastered and expanded The Academy in Peril album (LP, CD) via Domino Records
