While preparing for our upcoming intervention with Townsman Hrrundivbakshi I stumbled on a personal Rock Video Holy Grail: live performances by mid-70s John Cale of a couple of my favorite songs from Fear, the title track and “Buffalo Ballet”. (The titles the foreign production crew gave the songs are pretty funny.) Cale’s hair is long and greasy, friend of Rock Town Hall Chris Spedding is decked out in black leather and is about as thin as a B string, the sound and performances are shakey, in a satisfyingly human way… In past efforts to find cool videos of Cale I’ve found plenty of stuff from his bloated early ’80s period and plenty of stuff from his more subdued Elder Statesman period of the last 15 years. I’ve seen all the crappy footage of the Velvet Underground that’s floating about. Until now I’ve never seen live clips of Cale from around the time of this relatively fertile period.
