Fragments of a Rainy Season

It was nice of John Cale to make an album for everybody standing there saying “Where do I start with John Cale?” This live album was recorded around Europe in 1992 and reissued in 2016 with extra songs and the proper running order restored. There are several things to know about Cale when you first approach him. He’s a trained musician, completely unstoppable on piano, and pretty great on guitar. (He does not play viola on this album, as far as I can tell.) His legacy is as much about who he’s worked with, and how, as his own material. Three of the biggest examples of how he works with a songwriter are here: “I’m Waiting For The Man,” by his lifelong friend, Lou Reed. (If Lou had lifelong friends, Cale was one.) In Reed’s demo, this song is a gentle country-ish comedy number. Cale added the ostinato from hell and all of a sudden, New York heaved into view. Cale’s left hand is a thing of wonder. “Heartbreak Hotel” becomes a Fassbinder film in Cale’s voicing, and “Hallelujah,” the Leonard Cohen song that has now been banned from several song competitions, is really a Cale/Cohen collaboration, as we know it. Cale clarified the melody with his piano (and his voice) and chose different verses than Leonard did. This doesn’t touch on Cale’s own material, which include his setting a Dylan Thomas poem to music. (As a singer, he lands in a district where Bryan Ferry and John Doe and Future Islands also live: the home of the dramatic and emotionally tweaked male.) A lot of message board buddies think of this as Cale’s best album, which makes some sense, as it’s self-contained and lacks nothing. But Cale’s gift is social and horizontal and there is no one album with him. He has never acted or played or produced as if he, John Cale, were the point. You need the entire sprawl of Cale to get him.