Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [96]
You get two songs. In each case I’ll quote from the lyrics, with a minimum of interpretation, and then tell what Cale's music sounds like. Not that they are two such separate entities, however: this was a marriage made in purgatory.
“Frozen Warnings”
Into numberless reflections
Rises a smile from your eyes
Into mine
Frozen warnings close to mine
Close to the frozen borderline
Through a pale morning's arctic sunlight glinting dimly off the snow, a bank of violas emits one endless shrill note which eventually becomes electronically distorted by points of ice panning back and forth through the space between your ears, descending and then impossibly ascending in volume and ineluctable intensity until they’re almost unbearable though infinitely graceful in their beauty; at length they wind off into the skies trailing away like wisps of fading beams.
“Evening of Light”
Midnight winds are
landing at the end of time
The story is telling air to lie
Mandolins are ringing
to his fires singing
Conscience sink into a
slumber till the end of time
… the doorbells hum
unto the undead end of time
In the morning of my winter
When my eyes are still asleep
A dragonfly lay in the cold
dark snows I’d sent to kiss your
heart for me.
(Nico's concept of love: While she lies interred in the endless wastes of the arctic night, she has sent an insect to the object of her affections, to kiss his heart yet. But even the insect must die before it can reach him, the soft rustling of its gentle wings stilled under drifts that eventually preserve its frozen corpse for eternity under a snowbank that becomes an ice mountain, the insect and Nico having become one in endless sleep, for they were the real lovers in the first place after all.)
The children are jumping
in the evening of light
The tears and sins are heavy
in the evening of light
Midnight winds are landing
at the end of time
A trickle of harpsichords out of the sky which drop gently at first and gradually increase in volume and presence in the mix until they seem to almost lacerate, punctuated occasionally by the shiftings and groanings of bowed basses like famished carnivores in some deep bog from which they ascend with the by-now violent intensity of the harp-sichords, now accompanied by some electronic gnashing noise which sounds like someone's nerves are being roasted on a spit. All of this gets more and more intense until the violas return to arch up in a series of twisted pterodactyl shrieks, the harpsichords pounding down like murderous hailstones, the basses sounding militant air-raid, two-note alarums before crashing to their own death, the whole sucked away by a series of hissing, clicking, buzzing electronic processors, simply more dead information being disposed of.
What Goes On, January 1983
1“This article was originally written in 1978, for Diana Clapton's brief-lived but muchmissed New Wave Rock magazine. It was laid out and ready to go, then aced out at the last second by coverage of the Nancy Spungen murder, after which the magazine folded. Although it may seem a bit dated in places, I think the piece holds up, especially inasmuch as A) the album is timeless, and B) it is now available again, as an import item. I would like to thank Diana again for having the editorial soul to make such an assignment in the first place.”—Lester's preface was added when he gave this piece to What Goes On.
Jim Morrison:
Bozo Dionysus
a Decade Later
We seem to be in the midst of a full-scale Doors Revival. It had been picking up steam for a while, but when Jerry Hopkins’ and Daniel Sugerman's biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive,