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.
The frantic pace of making The Academy in Peril, though, taught Cale an important lesson: take the time you need to make the album you want to hear. In late 1972, Cale rendezvoused with Little Feat and bassist Wilton Felder in Hollywood. How, though, would this wild and weird country-rock band, led by a maverick named Lowell George, work with a Welshman who had just made a classical record? Cale, too, had the help of Chris Thomas, an English producer he admired. “After I’d left the studio, Chris would be there working on those tracks, listening over and over to the tapes,” Cale wrote. “That’s the secret to progress in production.”
This remastered and expanded reissue of Paris 1919 is a testament to that progress and the patience that engendered it. In previously unreleased tapes, Cale teases his new chemical habits as he tries to find his way through “Half Past France,” then attempts new vocal arrangements for its beginning in an alternate version. (New liner notes by music journalist Grayson Haver Currin explore this process, too.) The gentle, swaying version of “Hanky Panky Nohow” that eventually made Paris 1919 was the right one, but a brilliant “Drone Mix” included here, with Cale’s viola seesawing in hypnotic waves, shows just how much he and Thomas were willing to tinker with these tunes, to test the bounds of songcraft. Appended at the end of these extras, “Fever Dream (You’re a Ghost)”—a new Cale composition that perfectly flows out of yet another mix of “Hanky Panky Nohow”—shows that he’s still doing just that into his 80s.
