John Cale “Artificial Intelligence”
If you found yourself in New York City at Danceteria at 2am in the early 1980s, almost anything was possible. You might have been having the best night of your life. You might have fallen in love. You might have seen Madonna. Or Jean Michel Basquiat. You might have had a terrible headache. You might have had your hand down somebody else’s pants. You might have been stranded in the City until the morning trains started up again. And quite possibly — very possibly — you might have been high on cocaine.
However, if you were forty-two year old John Cale at the club that night, you might have been struck by inspiration. You might have composed an entire album in your head. You might have even rushed back to your Soho loft and shit those concepts onto paper, along with the coke and booze and whatever else was rotting your inside.
These would have been compositions made for a very cheap synthesizer. They would have been rattlingly bass heavy. They would have been sung in a low, dull monotone reminiscent of Ian Curtis and Peter Murphy. They would all sound like they were programmed by the computer from “War Games” and would have been no discernible rhythm. And if you were hungover Danceteria Cale, you would have asked your professional stoner friend, Larry Sloman from “High Times,” to write the lyrics for you. And while those words would prove to be the record’s primary selling points, they would ultimately get lost beneath the nauseating monotony of everything else.
Months later, after you would have finally released this album — your one and only album for Beggars Banquet — your daughter would have been born. You would have been ready, for the first time in twenty years, to get sober. And, looking back, you would have been mildly appalled by these compositions and that album you had just recently subjected everyone to.
I know none of this for fact. Actually, I know surprisingly little about John Cale. For most of my adult life, I’ve been sufficiently familiar with the first sentence of his future obit: Admired, Welsh avant-garde composer and multi-instrumentalist who co-founded the Velvet Underground. I, of course, know that he plays viola (honestly, who plays viola?) and that Lou Reed might have been a completely forgotten Long Island songwriter without him. But, I also hold the unpopular opinion that the band was probably better (if less revolutionary) with Doug Yule and without John Cale.
I suppose I do know a few more things. Like that he almost always appears handsome in photos and erudite in interviews. I know that he produced two of the greatest albums of the 1970s — “Horses” and “The Stooges.” And I know that I once owned his solo albums, “Vintage Violence” and “Paris 1919,” and that I listened to each a couple of times, not fully “getting” them, prematurely moving on, and feeling confident that I could fake talk about them if they ever came up. I’ve since returned to those records with greater curiosity and generosity. As for the rest of his oeuvre — all I can say is that I am sincerely trying.
Of all of the John Cale solo albums to choose from — and there are many — I am not sure exactly why “Artificial Intelligence” is the one that called to me. I very much liked the painting on the cover. I admired the label (Beggars Banquet) that released it. And, candidly, it came out during a major blind spot for me — that time in his career between the critically acclaimed 70s work and his reunion with Lou Reed (and, then briefly, with The Velvet Underground). Today, as he approached eighty, Cale appears stylish (as ever), sober and decidedly academic. He survives as a symbol of the best in Art Rock from the late 1960s and 1970s.
But, in 1985, he was apparently a fucking mess.
Much of “Artificial Intelligence” feels like the morning after the night before. It’s the sound of John Cale slowly waking up, head screaming, reaching for water, more coke and cursing the daylight. Like he’s trying to program complex compositions into a computer but not remembering what the original song was supposed to sound like.
The best of these bottom-heavy plodders, wherein Cale imitates Joy Division, is “Dying On The Vine.” It bass line is foreboding — threatening — and its lyrics make for a great, cinematic line read:
Who could sleep through all that noisy chatter
The troops, the celebrations in the sun
The authorities say my papers are all in order
And if I wasn't such a coward I would run
I'll see you when all the shooting's over
Meet me on the other side of town
Yes, you can bring all your friends along for protection
It's always nice to have them hanging around
Those are literally the best (only) compliments I can pay to the otherwise moodless synth that dominates “AI.” And, it must be noted, Cale didn’t even write those lyrics. “Vigilante Lover” and “Song of the Valley” are more of the same, but less realized. They remind me of the scores to lesser German art films that I was forced to endure in a college Semiotics seminar. Falling somewhere between sloppy and pretentious.
To be clear, he has always demonstrated good taste: his affection for Joy Division, Bauhaus and PIL is sincere and duly noted. But whereas those artists were experimenting within the structure of song, it does feel like Cale, in ‘85, was randomly programming sounds and words into his Texas Instruments personal computer and then through his synthesizer and availing himself to whatever came out the other side. There are no “songs” to be found in most of these tracks. Given his renown as both a composer and multi-instrumentalist, there’s a startling lack of composition and instrumentation on “A.I.”
On three occasions, he manages to bump into a good idea, though it’s unclear if the successes are products of inspiration or the randomness of programming. “Everytime the Dogs Bark,” sounds like he is psychically jamming with late 70s Lou Reed — loose and weird and urban and vibey in ways the rest of the album is not. On “The Sleeper,” he manages to hold a groove that would make Stereolab or LCD Soundsystem proud. And, on the closer, “Satellite Walk,” Cale proves that he’s still capable of using his bass for good. Any of these tracks would work today in the very late night/early morning hours at a bar in some sketchy but cool outskirt of Brooklyn where the hangovers have not yet kicked in. However, I am a very sober Dad in Vermont at the moment, so, presently, their appeal is completely hypothetical.
Unsurprisingly, the response to “Artificial Intelligence” was tepid. Hearing it now, decades later, I think even the sympathetic reviews were generous — grading Cale on a Velvet curve. To my ears, this is a somewhat interesting but far less listenable album from a major figure in Alternative and avant-garde Rock music. Semi-colon move on.
After “Artificial Intelligence,” Cale cleaned up, dusted himself off and hunkered down to make much better music. But it took a minute. Just before his upswing, and immediately following this record, he made “Words for the Dying” — a concept album about the Falkland Islands expressed through the poetry of Dylan Thomas. 1980s hipster New York must have been one hell of a fucking party.