It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. Down 7th Street, a parade of parochial school girls wended its way towards the projects on Avenue D, the sidewalks coming alive with the plaid skirts swishing not quite in unison as they walked in twos and threes. People sat on the stoops reading papers, and a game of stickball was in progress in the vacant lot.
Suddenly, an argument flared up—in staccato Spanish — Dee Christian, a Robin-Hood-like figure among the 7th Street amphetamine junkies (A-heads, we called them), had once again run into Spanish Eddie. Guns were drawn, and the argument moved out into the street. Interested heads peeped from tenement windows and watched as Dee Christian
Read More
went down, four bullets in his stomach. Eventually, I think, an ambulance came.
"Gideon lied / And Gideon died / The force of Cain felt."
New York is, of course, not such a nice place. And the New York scenemakers are a breed apart from their brethren elsewhere. To make joie de vivre coexist with the cockroaches takes some doing, or, perhaps, some help. Can Andy Warhol get behind cockroaches? See, the question answers itself. New York, New York, says the old show tune. It's a hell of a town.
"So hold on tightly / The show's on nightly / They speak so very slow / It gets so hard to follow ..."
John Cale has been around. First with the Velvet Underground, where he played electric viola and wrote some stuff for them. Then he disappeared for a while, re-emerging as an employee of Elektra Records, where he helped Nico and her album The Marble Index, a work formidable in its unapproachability, and (paradox upon paradox) he then produced the Stooges' first album, which is so staggeringly simple that most people can't take it.
Now he has showed up on Columbia, with an album of amazing complexity. Most of the songs sound like a Byrds album produced by a Phil Spector who has marinated for six years in burgundy, anise, and chili peppers. Does that help? I didn't think it would.
Well, then, suffice it to say that this is an important album, even though it takes a while to take hold. It stands up well next to such masterpieces as Astral Weeks, Jesse Winchester's album, and—yes, I dare say it — Highway 61. It is a deeply moving personal statement by an artist who just doesn't compromise in any direction and I believe that it is destined to become one of the most important albums of the past few years.
Obviously, there is a story here. There is a list of characters on the back, and times and places crop up as they would in a diary. The story goes untold in a literal sense, though, and the inferences don't make a whole. No matter, because it's just as interesting to listen and let the total gestalt form slowly. About all you can tell after the 60th listening is that there is more to be gotten, and it may take years. Like Van Morrison's lyrics, Cale's pop out at you at odd times and sock
