John Cale

[Hobo]

Who else will join me in loving his Welsh wonder?

Fragments of a Rainy Season is the best live album I have ever heard and his cover of Hallelujah kicks the over hyped Jeff Buckley version's ass.

Though he can be a bit too weird sometimes, when he is great he is great.

[nihilist]

My favourite Velvet Underground song is 'The Gift', where John just tells a monologue in such a kinda monotone, casual fashion that the ending is totally unexpected, yet the entire song is leading up to it.

Spoiler: Click here to view

A lovesick guy wraps himself up in a parcel and asks for himself to be sent to his young female lover (who has no interest in him at all, btw). The parcel gets there, but the girl and her friend struggle to get into it. Huge blunt instrument through parcel= nasty ending, esp. that *thump*.

Ignore this if you're just talking about the solo stuff.

[Hobo]

I actually haven't gone back into the Velvets yet, the nearest I have is Songs For Drella, Lou Reed and John Cale singing songs about Worhol. Which is pretty wonderful, I think because I can't handle a full Lou Reed album.

[Skummy]

I'm not a huge fan...I love the Velvet Underground, they're one of my favourite bands of all time, and I like Lou Reed's solo stuff; while it can be very patchy and much of it is best left well alone, he's got some gems that are worth rooting through the shit for...Songs For Drella, I don't like at all...it's a fine concept, and musically it's not bad, but a lot of the lyrics are really cringeworthy.

John Cale, though...as I said, I love his work with the Velvets, but as a solo artist he seems very...I'm not sure, but to me he seems too pre-ordained, too deliberate. Like, he sets out every album thinking "for this record, I want to sound this way", instead of letting music come naturally, he's very consciously avant-garde. I think with the Velvets, Lou Reed was able to keep him grounded in a more "pop" (for want of a better word) sensibilities, or at least in more of a sense of melody, whereas as a solo artist he often strives for that, while still wanting to hold on to his more "experimental" routes, and fails more often than not. He just seems very emotionless in much of his music, and while bits and pieces can sound nice, mostly it's pretty impenetrable.

[Hobo]

I do see your point Skummy, though I think that is why I prefer Fragments of a Rainy Season to some of Cale's other albums I've heard. It's mostly piano and the songs are somewhat more penetrable because of that (that said he does like to scream and go a bit mad on the instruments but it's not frequent) and just work better in that setting than the studio versions did. For example the song Thoughtless Kind, which is quite a wonderful song on Fragments, the album version is almost grating (and I forget which album it's from).

[Skummy]

Admittedly, I've not actually heard that album, so I might check it out. The only Cale live stuff I can recall having heard, other than the Velvets (incidentally, there was a recent bootleg leaked that features a previously unheard song and apparently the first live version of Sister Ray, which is superb) is "June 1, 1974", which was a live album by Cale, Nico, Brian Eno and Kevin Ayers, and is mostly pretty disappointing and by-the-numbers.