Lucking Out - James Wolcott [66]
Drinking brought out his daredevil demons, as if a concert pianist suddenly Incredible Hulk–ized into Oliver Reed. Once at a club date in Washington, D.C., that I attended that already had its surreal aspects—a double bill with Garland Jeffreys, who wore masks onstage as racial signifiers and Brechtian devices—and joining Patti and crew onstage for the “My Generation” finale, Cale was possessed of the whim to poke out one of the overhead stage lights with the spear end of his bass; he thrust the neck of the bass upward, missed by inches, and the momentum carried him over the lip of the stage onto a table that overturned, creating an interesting cascade. A couple of Patti’s bandmates, along with a roadie or two no doubt, carried Cale backstage like one of the wounded warriors from the rugby field in David Storey’s meaty spectacle The Changing Room. As they carried him backstage, they passed Jeffreys, who may have been wearing one of his voodoo masks, at least that’s how it’s been lacquered into memory all these years. “Lucky he missed the light,” someone said of John backstage—“he might have been electrocuted.”
I flew once to San Francisco, my first visit, to see Patti perform. I must have had money and time to burn, though I don’t recall it. After the encore Cale laid his bass on the stage floor near an amplifier, and a foghorn roar of feedback was the result. A stagehand, presumably doing what he would have done under all similar circumstances, zipped from the wings and moved the instrument away from the amp and set it upright on a stand, as if tidying up. He failed to factor in that to an avant-gardist of the research-and-development wing of rock, droning feedback was a design element, one of the votive sounds in the church of noise. Irked in the extreme by this intrusion, Cale bit the helpful roadie on his jeaned butt. No damage, but he got the point across. And these were incidents I witnessed firsthand. There may have been others. Once, after Patti returned from an out-of-town appearance, I asked Jane Friedman how John had behaved. “He was great,” she said. “G-r-a-t-e.”
I had my own run-in with Cale’s wolfman side one night at CBGB’s when I offered to buy him a beer. What kind? I asked. “Mossuh,” he said, the word hard to pick out from the din coming from whoever was playing. What? I asked. He raised his voice, but somehow what came out of his mouth managed to be even less decipherable. “Moses?” I asked. And his hands were suddenly around my throat and he barked, “MOLSON!” With exquisite dry irony, Merv the bartender said, “John’s requesting a Molson’s,” as he proceeded to uncap a cold bottle, John’s considerable grip receding from my throat now that his request had been properly translated. I didn’t take it personally, and there was no repeat performance. In fact he was unfailingly genial and chatty whenever I ran into him, and his presence on the scene, despite the sporadic aggro-surges, cast a more generous corona than that of his former co-pilot, Lou Reed, whose cool-as-shit sarcasms seemed to come out of a private loop of Bob Dylan’s surlier moments from Don’t Look Back projected on the inside of his sunglasses. Lou was an infrequent drop-in at CBGB’s, likely preferring