Music Arcades: John Cale: Helen of Troy

The cover is ominous — a contender for worst album covers recognition — and doesn't augur well for the production values of what's inside. Surely it's hard to go too far wrong with Messrs Eno, Collins and Spedding on board? Well, yes, but Cale gives it his best shot at pushing the envelope of 'wrong', 1975-style. And 1975 was a good year for 'wrong'.

Stunning to read on Wikipedia, then, that around the same time as this album, Cale had produced a masterpiece in the shape of Horses.

In a recurring pattern, I bought up the John Cale back catalogue to dig out the original versions of those outrageously heady songs on Fragments of a Rainy Season, only to find that the later, solo, live versions knocked the originals into a cocked hat every time. That's certainly true here for Leaving it up to You, (I Keep A) Close Watch and The Ballad of Cable Hogue. The stark difference in quality makes me wonder if JC could, if the mood took him, wring pure essence of musicality out of an apparently nondescript song like Engine, just as he did with the aforementioned three songs on Fragments.

Now I've touched on this before, but let me ask again: what is the story with The Ballad of Cable Hogue? I've watched the Peckinpah film, I've listened to the Calexico song, and I've listened to this song. Although Inverarity discerns a connection between the first and last of these (Cale, he says, "[changes] the story in surprising ways… with original scenes") my inattentive eye and ear found nothing. And the Calexico version is orthogonal to both. Gideon Coe once played the Calexico song on national radio, and then kindly read out my email asking listeners what linked these three works. There was no reply.

Not for the first time Fragments of a Cale Season came to the rescue just a week ago with some sanguine commentary on the fruitlessness of trying to join the dots between Cale's songs and the sources he cites in them. I actually had Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools in my Amazon shopping basket, but I can delete it now.

So, as always, Fragments of a Cale Season has the answer to all your track-by-track Cale hermeneutic needs.