Description
John Cale was never very kind to his solo debut, Vintage Violence. When it was released in early
1970, Cale had been out of The Velvet Underground for less than two years. He wanted to prove
he could be the songwriter, the person penning the words and melodies behind which a band
could work. “I was masked on Vintage Violence,” he wrote much later. “You’re not really seeing
the personality.” Indeed, Cale’s personality as a polyglot seemingly interested in everything
emerged more and more on his next two solo albums, his only two for Reprise: 1972’s bracing
and exploratory classical sojourn, The Academy in Peril, and 1973’s masterclass in anxious but
accessible songcraft, Paris 1919. By reissuing both records in tandem, Domino—Cale’s home
now for a dozen years—affirms the artistic fearlessness Cale then fostered at the edge of 30,
when all of music seemed like one inviting playpen.
When Cale arrived in Los Angeles from New York in the early ’70s, he was a pinball in the world,
his past having bounced him into a now-precarious position. In California, he entered a chaotic
new relationship that led to a quick and disastrous marriage, started his new industry gig, and
found his West Coast drug of choice, cocaine. Despite its reputation as Reprise’s first classical
album, The Academy in Peril indulges that extreme upper energy, bouncing among ambitious
ideas with unguarded zeal. Warner Brothers spent $120,000 on The Academy in Peril, and Cale
even enlisted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to play on several of its tracks. Still, there is an
early punk energy to it all, from idea to execution. Cale wrote most of it in the English studio as he
recorded it, attempting to build symphonies on the go and painstakingly overdubbing its
mountain of parts alone. Here is Cale, creating his own secret fusion and ignoring the strictures
of expectation.
