JOHN CALE "LIVE"
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Here’s three different live shows spanning almost fifteen years by the great Welshman. I have no idea what year the first set with Nico comes from, since I was provided with hardly any info on it when I first got it. My guess is earlier-rather-than-later ’70s, since the material heavily leans on Nico’s post-”Chelsea Girl”/pre-”The End” period, when Cale produced “The Marble Index” and “Desertshore”.
The second is from Stockholm, Sweden, in ‘75, with guest lead guitar by Chris Spedding.) It opens with the really strong track “Autobiography”, which (I think) doesn’t appear on any Cale studio album. It’s one of his strangest, since it really is a song all about just him (I dig the lines “My name is Cale/you can call me John” and “Don’t come from near/don’t come from west/I come from Wales”). I also found it interesting that “Mercenaries”, which appears on the live album “Sabotage” from ‘79, was in his repertoire as early as four years prior. This set also features a truly wretched cover of The Doors’ “Love Me Two Times”, but we’ll forgive him –
The third and final set is from German TV’s “Rockpalast” from ‘84 — and my download of it here is unfortunately incomplete. Again, Cale starts it all off with “Autobiography”, and the funny thing is there’s ten years in-between this set and the previous one above — and yet, the two different performances of the song sound EXACTLY the same. Righteous! The one-two punch of this lead-off next to the song “Oh La La” make this set the best out of all three I’ve included here.
John Cale - En concert à l’Enfer [Live with Nico] (ZIP file)
John Cale - Stockholm, Sweden, 1975(ZIP file)
John Cale - “Rockpalast”, 1984 (ZIP file, incomplete set)