Solo Performance At Belgium 1983

This is the set that he was still playing ten years later for Fragments, but here, Cale is living through a patch that was influenced by the disease of addiction. Everything here is raw, and still articulate, impeccably played but igniting itself over and over. There are great piano ornaments in “I’m Waiting For The Man” that were smoothed out by the Nineties, and his chords on “Heartbreak Hotel” ring with a doom that Metallica can only dream of. Half on guitar, half on piano, this was the kind of set he lived on for decades. “Cable Hogue” was the emotional center of several shows, as it is here. “Oh Cable Hogue, wish you were with me now,” Cale sings, and it sounds like Hogue—a fictional hobo from a Sam Peckinpah movie—is Cale’s best friend, or possibly Cale himself.