TALES OF LOHR: JOHN CALE'S "MERCY"
The latest album by a true music legend; plus, "Factory Roll Call" remembers Warhol's last love
As performer, composer, and producer, John Cale has never been one to shy away from thornier sonic and creative paths. Whether channeling the inscrutable muse of his former Velvet Underground cohort Nico; lending his discerning aesthetic sense to recordings by Squeeze, Patti Smith, and the Stooges; or bringing his classical training and love of poetry and artistic esoterica to his own expansive solo discography, Cale has always been forthright in his willingness to push his listeners in outré, potentially unsettling directions. Which is what makes the swelling, majestic serenity that greets the ear from the very first notes of MERCY (Domino), Cale’s first solo album of new material in eleven years, such a thoroughgoing surprise.
MERCY eschews the rarefied orchestral leanings of many of Cale’s best-known works in favor of a pop-inflected, electronics-rich sonic palette. The vibe both hearkens back to Cale’s 1985 LP Artificial Intelligence and nods in the direction of vaporwave, chillhop, and other 21st century ambient electronica genres. Surging, insistent keyboard washes backed by dense, reverberant percussion is the bedrock on which many of these songs take root. The album-launching title track’s brooding yet breezy atmospherics could have scored Sonny Crockett cruising the mean neon-drenched Miami streets; “NOISE OF YOU”’s blissful multi-tracked backing vocals ride hissing drum machines to create 2023’s first great pop ballad of 1984; and the chirruping mechanized accents undergirding the sensuous “I KNOW YOU’RE HAPPY” (a collaboration with eclectic singer-songwriter Tei Shi) provide stirring notes of color to Cale’s own latter-day ode to joy.
But it would be foolhardy to regard MERCY as a mere featherlight pop offering, a trifle knocked off between meatier projects. The depth of Cale’s songcraft is on display here in almost overwhelming profusion. It’s there in the way he marries minor-keyed echoes of piano with stuttering synth squalls and the dreampop-redolent guest vocals of Weyes Blood on “STORY OF BLOOD,” birthing a futurist ballad from a barrelhouse-flavored prelude. It’s there in the anxious pinpoint keyboard strokes that propel the haunting album closer “OUT YOUR WINDOW,” and in the way the stuttering, edgy drums offset the airy tableau of “NIGHT CRAWLING.” Sharp ears will discern computerized burbles, half-heard snatches of what sounds like spectral radio transmissions, and all other manner of textural adornment thickening the stew of sounds found throughout the recording, bringing Cale back to his earliest roots as a student of John Cage’s school of found-sound minimalism. (MERCY, like much of Cale’s best work, is most rewarding when experienced through a quality set of headphones.)
Then there’s the sheer, grim certainty of a handful of tracks that belie potential efforts to brand the album as minor Cale. The groaning desolation of “MARILYN MONROE’S LEGS (beauty elsewhere),” crafted in collaboration with the appropriately named engineer / producer Actress, conjures in just under seven minutes the stark noir elegy it took Andrew Dominik nearly three hours to shape with his Marilyn-deconstruction film Blonde. Paying tribute to another legendary beauty with strong ties to Cale’s old manager / producer Andy Warhol, “MOONSTRUCK (Nico’s Song)” commences with the most concrete classical sounds of the album, edgily sawing strings giving way to a touchingly apt dreamscape of keening keyboards broken by a multitude of voices sighing up from the depths of purgatory, at the very least. And there’s no denying the discombobulating angularity of the Animal Collective-featuring “EVERLASTING DAYS,” a bracingly spare concoction of crack-and-pop keyboards, martial drum fills, and droning electronics. These tracks are by no means easy listening, but they’re worthwhile in their challenges, and compel the connoisseur of unconventional sounds to keep pressing onward.
The title of “EVERLASTING DAYS” likewise makes evident another aspect of MERCY that bears contemplation. On March 9 of this year, John Cale will be 81 years old, and knowledge of this fact brought to my mind, throughout the album’s nearly 72-minute runtime, the concept of “late style.” Simply expressed, this is the aesthetic effect on a creative work of an artist’s advancing age or infirmity, and with it, a growing sense that, sooner rather than later, whether by choice or circumstance, said artist’s career will be reaching its end. I was originally introduced to this idea by Jordan Ferguson’s 33 1/3 monograph on 2003’s Donuts, a collection of largely instrumental beats by seminally innovative hip-hop producer and mixmaster J Dilla, much of which was created from a Los Angeles hospital bed, where he was battling the dual effects of lupus and a rare blood disorder. Of course, Dilla’s encroaching mortality was of a far different stripe than the journey currently facing Cale. The rap pioneer ultimately passed away just three days after his 32nd birthday, having put serious numbers on the scoreboard of his genre and the musical culture at large, but still, one assumes, with much remaining left forever unsaid. This knowing yet frustrated sense can be felt throughout the sometimes deliberately truncated tracks and eerily elegiac distortions of the samples that make up the building blocks of Donuts.
Cale’s discography of game-transforming music, by comparison, is sprawling, decades. The sense one takes from MERCY is that of a man with no more artistic worlds left to conquer, and the music that results is blessed with a becalmed, ethereal inevitability. A number of the track titles reflect this idea of the security of one’s place in eternity, not just “EVERLASTING DAYS,” but also the mysteriously magisterial “NOT THE END OF THE WORLD” and the smoothly ambient “TIME STANDS STILL,” on which Cale asserts that it is indeed “later than you think,” while sounding none too put out by this reality. (Cale is in uniformly fine voice throughout, his lightly Welsh-inflected baritone graced with a compelling gravitas.)
Of course, these observations are not to suggest that MERCY indeed represents Cale calling it quits. He is in fact, even as I write this, in the midst of a European tour in support of this album (his next date is on February 6 in Liverpool). But only an incurable optimist would assume that Cale is closer to the beginning of his life than to its end, and the sense that we are here encountering Cale’s “late style” is impossible to avoid. What MERCY says about that style is that it is still heady with invention, engaged in all the intricate possibilities of compositional creation and production technology, and capable of generating music as full, bright, and spirit-affirming as anything Cale has ever recorded. John Cale may be drawing within hailing distance of the Undiscovered Country, but he has proven with this album that, for him at least, the world of music circa 2023 still offers plenty of its own riches to unearth.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
JON GOULD (1953-1986)
Jon Gould, the last serious romantic partner of Andy Warhol’s life, was the scion of an old-money Massachusetts family that traced its American connections all the way back to the 1600s. After a brief gig as an advertising executive for Rolling Stone, Gould was hired by Paramount Pictures in 1978, working his way swiftly up to executive status.
In November 1980, at an art exhibition in New York City, Gould met Andy Warhol, who was then mere weeks away from a long-brewing split from Jed Johnson, who had been his partner for almost twelve years. (The meeting had been brokered by photographer and Warhol confidante Christopher Makos, who had met Gould at a public bath house.) More than twenty years Gould’s senior, Warhol was immediately smitten with the young professional. Warhol and Johnson formally ended their relationship in December, Johnson moving out of the Upper East Side townhouse the two had shared since 1974. The very next day, Warhol sent Gould a dozen red roses, ostensibly in an attempt to court the Paramount exec into buying ad space for Paramount films in the pages of Warhol’s Interview Magazine. The roses continued to arrive on an almost daily basis, until an embarrassed Gould ultimately insisted Warhol put an end to it.
Warhol at first attempted to justify his crush on Gould as a smart business move, but he also said he thought it was a good idea to “try to fall in love,” and chose Gould as the object of his assertive affections. Gould’s resistance eventually wore down, and he and Warhol began to see each other socially, taking trips together to Aspen, Colorado and to Warhol’s Hamptons beachfront property. Warhol basked in the attention of the young, prosperous, good-looking Gould, but their relationship was complicated by Gould’s in-the-closet status, and by the executive position that frequently required him to spend long stretches of time back on the West Coast. After a few years, Warhol convinced Gould to shift his base of operations to Paramount’s New York offices, and to move into the 66th Street townhouse. Nevertheless, Gould insisted to his twin brother Jay (coincidentally, a twin named Jay was something he shared in common with Jed Johnson) that his relationship with Warhol was never of a sexual nature.
In early 1984, Gould was hospitalized with pneumonia, receiving in-patient care for almost a month. He was discharged in March of that year, but his health continued its decline, and in 1985, perhaps to spare Warhol the pain of tending to his illness, Gould broke up with the artist and returned to Los Angeles. Warhol took the breakup hard, and his diaries, published posthumously in 1989, are filled with references to the depression and bleak moods brought on by the end of his time with Gould.
Over the course of 1986, Gould’s health continued to go downhill, and while many of his intimates suspected he was suffering from AIDS, he flatly refused to entertain the rumors, maintaining his stance as a “normal” straight man. Eventually, his condition deteriorated to the point where, on September 10, 1986, Warhol mentioned in his diary that he has heard from a friend that Gould was back in the hospital in L.A. Eight days later, on September 18, Jon Gould died at the age of 33. He has lost his sight and was down to a mere seventy pounds, but still, to the very end, denied that he had AIDS.
Warhol never publicly discussed Jon Gould’s death during the remaining five months of his own life. In 2017, following the death of Gould’s mother Harriet, the family’s Massachusetts home was put up for auction. Among the lots included in the house’s inventory were artworks, photos, letters, and handwritten poetry that revealed, in surprising detail, the extent of the affection shared by Andy Warhol and the final man in his life.
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