John Cale was never very kind to his solo debut, Vintage Violence. When it was released in early 1970, Cale had been out of The Velvet Underground for less than two years, his gnarled viola and angular passions having put him at tough odds with Lou Reed. He wanted, then, to prove he could be the songwriter, the person penning the words and melodies behind which a band could work. Vintage Violence was unequal parts practice for something more and proof of concept. “There’s not too much originality on that album, it’s just someone teaching himself to do something,” he wrote much later. “I was masked on Vintage Violence. … You’re not really seeing the personality.”
That is, of course, a classic bit of Cale self-deprecation, since the sizzled-and-warped country-rock of Vintage Violencedoes ferry several classic Cale tunes, from the arcing “Gideon’s Bible” to the woozy “Ghost Story.” But it’s also true that Cale’s personality as a polyglot seemingly interested in everything emerged more and more on his next two solo albums and his only two for Reprise, while he worked A&R and production roles for Warner Bros. in California: 1972’s bracing and exploratory classical sojourn, The Academy in Peril, and 1973’s masterclass in anxious but accessible songcraft, Paris 1919. By reissuing both records in tandem, Domino—Cale’s home now for a dozen years—affirms the artistic fearlessness Cale then fostered at the edge of 30, when all of music seemed like one inviting playpen.
When Cale arrived in Los Angeles in the early ’70s, he was a pinball in the world, his past having bounced him into a now-precarious position. He was out of The Velvet Underground, out of a marriage with designer Betsey Johnson, and out of a New York scene of which he had been a vital piece. He had just kicked heroin, too. In California, he entered a chaotic new relationship that led to a quick and disastrous marriage, started his new industry gig, and found his West Coast drug of choice, cocaine.
Despite its reputation as Reprise’s first classical album, The Academy in Peril indulges that extreme upper energy, bouncing among ambitious ideas with unguarded zeal. Consider the first three tracks. Cale begins with a slide guitar jam alongside Ronnie Wood (then a Face but not yet a Stone), with whorls of strings, horns, and keys circling above like vultures. “Brahms” is a tempestuous piano solo, the sweetness of its start giving way to waves of dissonance and clusters of chords that suggest a more articulate version of a fist slammed against ivories. And “Legs Larry at Television Centre” predicts the ways that not only Cale would continue to bend form but also the more esoteric spaces classical music would subsequently explore. His multi-tracked viola frames and tries to hold a fluttering melody, shaping its contours to the demands of a grating stage manager. “Lovely, lovely, hold it. That’s very nice, very nice,” Cale commands himself. “Keep the rain coming.”
Warner Brothers spent $120,000 on The Academy in Peril, and Cale even enlisted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to play on several of its tracks. (“I had forgotten what it was like to work with musicians like that, who really need an authoritative figure,” he wrote.) Still, there is an early punk energy to it all, from idea to execution. Cale wrote most of it in the English studio as he recorded it, attempting to build symphonies on the go and painstakingly overdubbing its mountain of parts alone. What’s more, it ignores any suggestions of what it’s supposed to be, moving from a troika of increasingly jarring orchestral pieces to “King Harry,” a static-caked and serpentine-voiced mix of reggae and country-blues. Here is Cale, creating his own secret fusion and ignoring the strictures of expectation.
The frantic pace of making The Academy in Peril, though, taught Cale an important lesson: take the time you need to make the album you want to hear. That is precisely what he did on Paris 1919, arriving at the studio with songs already written. By that point, Cale was ensconced in the Warner Bros. firmament, from meetings with Mo Ostin and chats with Van Dyke Parks to high-level talks about rewiring American movie theaters for a quadrophonic presentation of A Clockwork Orange. One of those executives, Ted Templeman, suggested Cale collaborate with a new band of California aces who had been in Frank Zappa’s orbit: Little Feat. How would this wild and weird country-rock band, led by a maverick named Lowell George, work with a Welshman who had just made a classical record?
In late 1972, Cale rendezvoused with the band and bassist Wilton Felder at Sunwest Studios in Hollywood. For the first time, Cale had also fully relinquished production duties, enlisting Chris Thomas, an English producer whose recent success with Procol Harum Cale admired. Cale soon found he admired Thomas’ work ethic, too: “After I’d left the studio, Chris would be there working on those tracks, listening over and over to the tapes,” Cale wrote. “That’s the secret to progress in production.”
This remastered and expanded reissue of Paris 1919 is a testament to that progress and the patience that engendered it. In previously unreleased tapes, Cale teases his new chemical habits as he tries to find his way through “Half Past France,” then attempts new vocal arrangements for its beginning in an alternate version. (New liner notes by music journalist Grayson Haver Currin explore this process, too.) The band locks seamlessly into its piano groove during a rehearsal tape for “Child’s Christmas in Wales” and goes absolutely wild during an eleventh take on “Macbeth,” confirming George’s status as one of his generation’s absolute guitar giants.
The gentle, swaying version of “Hanky Panky Nohow” that eventually made Paris 1919 was the right one, but a brilliant “Drone Mix” included here, with Cale’s viola seesawing in hypnotic waves, shows just how much he and Thomas were willing to tinker with these tunes, to test the bounds of songcraft. Appended at the end of these extras, “Fever Dream (You’re a Ghost)”—a new Cale composition that perfectly flows out of yet another mix of “Hanky Panky Nohow”—shows that he’s still doing just that into his 80s.
For their own very different reasons, The Academy in Peril and Paris 1919 feel timely, even more than half a century after their release. The Academy in Peril presages not only the increasingly permeable borders of modern classical musicians with an indie rock ethos but also those of culture at large. It is not a sketchbook of audacity but instead a statement of it. And recorded during another period of extreme international uncertainty, Paris 1919’s tuneful view of the very difficult things we do to one another—with politics, religion, leadership, subjugation—remind us that we are always dealing with the long tail of the past in whatever present we happen to live. We’re not so far away, after all.
