You’re a ghost and you hum because, maybe not something else, but if there’s one thing ghosts know how to do, it’s kill time. And from there to humming, you know, there is only one step. “You’re a ghost, la la la la la la la la la,” she sings John Cale while a stampede of violas, pianos and tubas erupts with the impetus of twenty Olympic triathletes.
You’re a ghost, let’s say the one from Lou Reed, and you’re so busy because anniversaries are piling up. Candles, more candles! Just around the corner, the 50th anniversary of ‘Berlin’, a masterpiece of despair and an atrocious portrait of the disintegration of a couple. Soon, too, 10 years of the last breath. Death. ‘The Black Angel’s Death’. October 27, 2013. Sunday morning. A look at the trees, a couple of movements to ‘repel the monkey’, tai chi posture number 21, and good-bye. And since there are no two without three, it is also half a century of ‘Paris 1919’, pinnacle of the career of the Scottish partner-archenemy-friend. The dark and the light. The yin and the yang.
Lou Reed y John Cale, together again (sort of) half a century later.
‘Berlin’ and ‘Paris 1919’; when part of the Velvet Underground met again in old Europe (without knowing it)
Because you’re a ghost, let’s say the one from old (and not so old) Europe, and two former companions, close enemies since their egos collided aboard The Velvet Underground, have come to sing to you. Each in their own way. The European disunity, the Erasmus for the dark and ghostly side of life. We are in 1973 and things, incredible as they may seem. they work really well: ‘Transformer’, Recorded just a year earlier with the help of David Bowie, it has turned Lou Reed into the new prophet of suburban and marginal glam. ‘Vicious’, ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ and all that.
John Cale, for his part, continues to do his thing, recording four hands with Terry Riley and trying to fit the minimalist buzzes of La Monte Young into more or less pop-looking artifacts. Two men, one destiny and the Cold War as an unlikely record company Celestina. “It was strange that that happened. In those days we didn’t speak to each other in any way”, Cale would recall years later in the face of such a geographical coincidence. Yet the continental obsession, that play Europe between winds and strings, it obeyed completely different reasons.
So while Cale from Los Angeles put together a delightfully Versailles-esque album in which “every song was about a Welsh boy lost in the desert and feeling nostalgic for all the things he loved about Europe,” Reed found in the divided berlin the best metaphor to narrate the brutal decomposition of a couple. The New Yorker had never set foot in the German city in his life, but he “loved the idea of a divided city.”
«In Berlin, by the wall…»
The wall, Reed said, represents what happens in the relationship of Caroline and Jim, the two characters on the record. «The soul of the divided city and the absence of a clear identity carried with it a morally ambiguous air, a place where black markets, international intrigues, the drug trade and activities with all kinds of subterfuge could take place. The present was tense, the past was a scary movie and the future something unknown and potentially terrifying,” recalls Anthony De Curtis, the New Yorker’s biographer, in ‘A Life’.
Lou Reed. in the Berlin abysses of 1973
«In Berlin, by the wall». In Berlin, next to the wall. Thus begins one of the saddest and most desolate albums in the history of rock. The savage shipwreck of an expatriate couple entangled in a murky spiral of infidelity, violence, drug addiction and self-destruction. Few things are more shocking, even today, than the inconsolable crying of ‘The Kids’. Few more terrifying verses than the one that closes ‘Sad Song’: «I’m gonna stop wasting my time / Somebody else would have broken both of her arms». “I’m going to stop wasting time / Anyone else would have broken his arms.” A tragedy in ten acts and a remarkable symphonic apparatus with which Reed peered into an abyss from which he would never fully return.
Next to it, ‘Paris 1919’ is a haven of peace, a pop oasis in which John Cale combines abracadabrant Californian rock, postwar ghosts and French-style orchestrations. “In the 1970s, during the height of the Cold War, I started thinking, ‘How did we end up here?’ Everyone was running towards Argentina, because it was a country free of nuclear weapons. And that was all because of the Treaty of Versailles,” Cale recalled in an interview with the ‘Los Angeles Times’.
The title of the album, in fact, refers to the Peace Conference that anticipated the Treaty of Versailles and that the Welshman uses as a lever to slide songs like ‘Andalucia’, ‘Graham Greene’, ‘Child’s Christmas in Wales’ or ‘Half Past France’. Macbeth and the Queen of England. “If they’re alive, then I’m dead,” sings a globe-trotting Cale who, Dunkirk to Paris and Norway to Berlin (yes, Berlin too), sings to a disgraced continent.
The ghost of old Europe, humming and killing time while waiting for that second war that was to come.