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How to survive.Ī week before Cohen died, in November, Cale released a video for his version of “Hallelujah.” It features Cale-sturdy and muscular, dressed in black, with heedless white hair and a goatee that makes him appear slightly devious-seated at a grand piano overrun with crickets and mealworms.
The fifth verse opens, “Maybe there’s a God above / but all I ever learned from love / was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.” On this line, Cale resists the temptation to sing “you” as the more colloquial “ya,” which Cohen often did, and cheekily-to make it rhyme in a satisfying way with “hallelujah.” He seems to know that the lyric contains too tough a lesson to be made cute: how to be bested by someone you trusted but still land a blow on your way down. It’s this iteration-which Jeff Buckley covered in 1994 and Rufus Wainwright sings on the soundtrack for the animated film “Shrek”-that most people recognize. Cale’s version is sparse and undulating, and he sounds freshly gutted after every verse. Cohen’s take is cool and moody, sung in a staid, stately baritone. In 1991, though, the song was still an obscure track from “Various Positions,” a record that nobody was paying much attention to. In the early nineties, Cale closed most of his sets with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which Cale first recorded in 1991, for a tribute album titled “I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen,” and later included on “Fragments of a Rainy Season.” “Hallelujah,” which was released by Cohen in 1984, has been covered so relentlessly that it now feels like a shortcut for conjuring feelings of despondency. It is not hard to sense that same spirit in Cale. His poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” published in 1951, ends, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But he wrote often of the possibility of putting off death, or, at least, of defying it. Thomas imbibed and philandered without restraint, dying, in 1953, of pneumonia exacerbated by the several days he’d spent drinking whiskey at the White Horse Tavern, in the West Village. “Death strikes their house,” he intones, his voice cavernous and melancholy. “Fragments of a Rainy Season” opens with a song called “A Wedding Anniversary.” Cale sings lyrics by Dylan Thomas-another aching Welshman-over a tense piano melody.
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The result can be challenging and discordant, but this is still a deeply benevolent impulse-to recognize and free pain. But he doesn’t revel in suffering, either he figures out what hurting sounds like and then articulates it. The album art features an exchange from “Macbeth”:Ĭale is not interested in circumventing or prettifying anguish: let it come down. He was usually accompanied only by his own piano playing, and the set list included compositions from different eras in his discography, along with covers of lonesome songs like “Heartbreak Hotel.” For the reissue, Cale added eight new tracks: some alternative versions-including a second, more jarring “Heartbreak Hotel,” with distorted strings and other inconsonant noises-and some songs that didn’t make the original cut. Last month, Cale reissued “Fragments of a Rainy Season,” a live album recorded at various stops on a 1991 world tour. It can feel, at times, as if Cale is tidying his legacy-dusting the house before company comes by. Lou Reed, his collaborator in the Velvet Underground, died in 2013, followed by other friends and peers: Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros.
Some of these efforts are straightforward: an old record is remastered, and given new packaging, an updated set of liner notes, and perhaps a new video.
Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New Yorkerįor the past several years, John Cale, the Welsh musician and co-founder of the Velvet Underground, has been selectively reissuing his back catalogue. Even as Cale looks back, ingenuity and brazenness still trump nearly every other motive in his work.
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