Sunday, September 5, 2010

The John Cale Song Of The Week - Adelaide




This is the last week during which FBC! will be entirely devoted to John Cale, as we'll be resuming our regular "Your Social Life" column mid-week, what with the trabzillion openings scheduled for pretty much every weekend in September.

The John Cale Song Of The Week series will continue until September 30th, when God Cale will give his concert at Royce Hall, and after that, hopefully you will be more familiar with his back catalog and his newer songs and will from now on devotedly buy his music and try to follow his career.
Speaking of Royce Hall, there are still tickets available, but only the expensive ones, which means you will get the best seats!

I just got some echoes from his Paris 1919 concert tonight in Paris at the legendary Salle Pleyel  - it's a concert hall devoted to classical music and the acoustics are great - and it seems people had the time of their life, with comments ranging from "OMG the world can end outside, I don't fucking care as long as John Cale continues playing" to "I don't want this concert to end, ever" and the assorted "John Cale rules" (and a few others based on French puns I cannot really translate, based on Cale's playing keyboards standing up). So, hopefully, it will be as good, or even better, at Royce Hall at the end of the month. Let's give him a warm welcome and with luck he will give us more than one encore.

While in Paris, Cale was interviewed for a very irritating radio show (irritating because of the woman interviewed before him, and because he is obscured by a translator with a grating voice, so you don't hear what he says).
It's all in French, sorry about that, but he does deliver the information that after this tour is over, he wants to go back to the studio and record a new album.
Now the *slightly alarming* part is that this future album will be "a hip-hop record focusing on Japanese anime characters", if the translator didn't transform whatever it is that Cale said.
If it is indeed the case, I sure hope that Cale will be able to, in Jennifer Moon's words "completely renew and transfigure/transcend the genre". Whatever it will be, we're curious here at the FBC! headquarters.

Meanwhile, the difficult choice for today's installment of the John Cale Song of The Week is Adelaide, from his 1970 first solo album Vintage Violence (which also contains Big White Cloud and Amsterdam, two other songs that didn't get the success they deserve).
It's one of his lesser-known songs, one that should also have been a major hit, it's so catchy. I wanted you to experience the lighter side of John Cale, and also give you something that would irresistibly make you smile, hop, jump,  and dance to enjoy this long weekend and forget  that today, you missed Paris 1919 in Paris.

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