Bringin’ the Crazy: John Cale in the 1970s

Partying with Cheap Trick, 1978

This video clip is of personality “Partying Susan Blond” interviewing members of the band Cheap Trick, along with David Johansen of the New York Dolls, and various other rock personalities of the 1970s. Of course John Cale shows up, and it’s obvious that he’s brought his close friend Heineken with him. In fact, I’d venture to say he’s brought an army of Heinekens with him and possibly other diversions as well.

Image © Theresa K., Punk Turns 30

Some highlights: somehow John hijacks the microphone from Susan Blond at the 12:50 mark, and asks some quite incomprehensible questions. Everyone looks extremely uncomfortable with John’s Welsh-accented gibberish. The only thing vaguely decipherable is “I think we should get some of these [drunken garbled words].” At 13:20 John decides to show off his party tricks and actually manages to balance a beer bottle on his finger (rather impressive given his condition). He comments, “This bottle is gonna fall off my finger any minute!” and makes the disgusted frown so commonly known to his fans.

Susan and the camera crew try to divert attentions to the other gentlemen being interviewed, but their attempts are unsuccessful as The John Cale Show (sponsored by Heineken!) is far more entertaining. John’s “Hey baby, I’m drunk, WOOOO!” face at 14:11 is perhaps the best thing ever. John also forgets what one of his band members does in his band. This is sort of bad given that he wrote the songs the band performed.

Susan then points how “handsome” John looks, to which he replies, “Maybe I am handsome, maybe he is vegetarian.” John makes some other people uncomfortable with his nonsense and Susan awkwardly cuts the interview short. It’s probably safe to say if John had his own TV talk show in the 1978, it would’ve consisted of a whole hour of these kinds of activities.

Onstage Outfits (the ski mask, the hard hat, etc.)

Along with having “issues” with sobriety and making music which sounds like an imagined soundtrack to the book Go Ask Alice, Cale’s stage outfits also teetered on the line between completely incomprehensible and completely awesome.

Cale’s stage attire included, but was not limited to, surgical scrubs, camouflage, dark aviator shades (always), coveralls, hard hats (the kind people wear in industrial work sites), and last but not least, the infamous ski mask from the cover of his album Guts (which pre-dates Friday the 13th). Subsequently Cale looked less like a rock star onstage, and more like the crazy guy who works at the city morgue or the shipyard (probably his intention).

The onstage outfits definitely exemplify the intensity in Cale’s music from that period in the late 1970s. Notice that he didn’t dress up as a banker, an engineer, or a schoolteacher. Cale wearing a nice Bill Cosby sweater would have killed the full rock effect.

“Chicken Shit”

Aside from dressing up like a vision from an industrial hell onstage, John Cale’s 1970s gigs occasionally degenerated into bewildering madness in which stages were left looking more like battlefields, and dead chickens were decapitated for “dramatic effect.”

In what is known infamously as the “Croydon Chicken Incident,” John Cale introduced a dead chicken onstage during his death-rock version of the Elvis Presley song “Heartbreak Hotel.” In Cale’s own words from his autobiography, What’s Welsh for Zen:

“All those punks with their leather and chains, pushing everybody because they had taken too much speed. So I thought, try a little voodoo! I am singing, ‘We could be so lonely,’ swinging the chicken around by its feet, nobody in the audience knowing it was dead, ‘we could be so—’ Twhok! I decapitated it and threw the body into the slam dancers at the front of the stage, and I threw the head past them. It landed in somebody’s Pimm’s. Everyone looked totally disgusted. The bass player was about to vomit and all the musicians moved away from me. Even the slam dancers stopped in mid-slam. It was the most effective show-stopper I ever came up with.” (2)

Two members of Cale’s band were vegetarians, and they walked off the stage in protest. Cale later wrote a song about the incident called “Chicken Shit.”

Sources:

1. “Squeeze’s Chris Difford,” Mojo Magazine: Blondie and the Story of New Wave, Volume 2, Issue 5.

2. Information about lyrics and the excerpt from What’s Welsh for Zen from: http://www.xs4all.nl/~werksman/cale/

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