Most of us associate a specific album with a specific period of time, whether it be that special summer following graduation from high school, the night we almost got busted for underage drinking and ended up puking in the backseat of Jumbo Harner’s dad’s Plymouth Fury, or the day we fell in love with that certain somebody who tore our heart out and left us forever confused, angst ridden, and bitter.
And so it goes with John Cale’s LP Sabotage/Live, which Cale recorded with a six-piece band at CBGB on a June night in 1979.
I was 21 years old and mentally going to pieces in a house in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania that was collapsing right around me. Not that I noticed, really; when the ceiling in the room next to mine collapsed, dropping a one-ton beam square on a housemate’s bed (he fled the house that same day), it didn’t even occur to me to seek safer quarters.
To be honest, I would have welcomed a one-ton beam crushing me in my sleep. It would have come as something of a relief.
I was two months into a bona fide nervous breakdown and drinking to blot out consciousness. And I had company, for ours was a halfway house for the damned. My fellow inmates included a glassy-eyed fellow as translucent as a deep sea fish who was continually drunk and flitted silently about the house never speaking a single word to anybody. It was said he was from a wealthy family and had been thrown out of West Point and a couple of Ivy League schools for drinking before ending up at what amounted to a so-so state university in the sticks. It frightened me to even look at him. It was like looking into a lurid funhouse mirror of my future.
And then there was Steds, my running buddy, who was sinking into alcoholism at about the same rate as I was. The two of us drank, popped pills, smoked pot, and made lots of crank calls to the PTL Club suicide hotline for laughs, but we both knew the joke was on us. We were both running away from something, and that something wanted to kill us.
But even people on a boat taking on water have to eat, and one Tuesday afternoon Steds and I decided to get roaring drunk and make stew. Neither of us knew how to cook anything more complicated than a hot dog, but how hard could it be?
We retreated to the kitchen, Steds put Sabotage/Live–the spanking new John Cale LP he’d just purchased at the reeking-of-incense head shop near campus–on the stereo, and we started tossing everything we could put our hands on into a very large pot.
Sabotage/Live was hardly good for me in my shattered nervous condition. It’s a very aggressive album, what with Cale’s gut-churning bellowing and Marc Aaron’s slashing and dissonant guitar work, and very paranoid-making what with its geopolitical yakety yak about the duplicity of mercenaries and the oxymoronic nature of military intelligence.
That said, all of that noise and paranoia necessitated heavy medication, and all of that belligerence inspired ambition, and after we’d dumped all of the usual suspects into that pot (canned tomatoes, hamburger, canned potatoes, an entire steak, a couple of diced green peppers, about five different varieties of canned beans, two chopped onions, an entire jarful of hot peppers, a few diced carrots, a shitload of garlic, bags of frozen corn, succotash, and brussel sprouts, etc.) we got… creative.
“What else have we got?” I asked.
“Pork and beans!” cried Steds over the din of “Mercenaries (Ready for War),” which boasts a driving beat, lots of insane guitar caterwaul and Cale crooning things like “My rifle is my friend.”
“Will that work?”
“Of course it will work! Pork and beans go with everything! And let’s throw in some hot dogs! And that old headcheese! And… and… this bottle of vodka! The French always cook with vodka!”
“And some pot!” I added, inspired.
So we did. To the accompaniment of the very “raucous” “Evidence” we emptied a third of a bottle of vodka and some skunk weed into the pot for flavoring, along with a couple of bottles of Gennesee Cream Ale (they use wort instead of sugar!), a half-dozen shots of mescal (“We’re going Tex Mex!” shouted Steds), and the contents of an ancient bottle of codeine cough syrup we found in the upstairs bathroom medicine cabinet (we both regretted not drinking it later).
By this time we were both doing stupid dances to Cale’s spastic cover of Rufus Thomas’
“Walkin’ the Dog” while the stew boiled over. Then Steds had a brilliant idea. “Mushrooms!” he cried.
“We don’t have any mushrooms,” I said.
“Oh yes we do!” he said, disappearing into his room off the kitchen and reappearing with a baggy full of the kinds of mushrooms that open little doors in your mind you never knew were there.
“More STUFF!” cried Steds.
“I’ve got a bottle of librium,” I said. “And a whole shitload of fake quaaludes my pig farmer pal Billy sells to gullible high school kids. And a couple of black beauties I was saving for my philosophy exam because I took one before an essay test on Black Elk Speaks and filled three blue books in about 5 minutes, walked out, and ended up getting an A. And I never even opened the book!”
And so it went. Steps managed to dig up a stray hit of blotter, a dozen Benadryl (Steds: “To prevent hives!”), three very large horse pills that neither of us could identify (“Maybe they’re for horses”: Me), a handful of Pez from a stray Pez dispenser, and one very large and desiccated pickle Steds discovered beneath his pillow (“I guess I was saving it for a midnight snack.”)
As any boozehound who has ever cooked with alcohol knows, you end up pouring more of the stuff into yourself than you do into the food. What you may not know is that the same principle applies to cooking with illicit drugs. By this time Cale was lost in the very theatrical and to be completely honest overlong “Captain Hook” and Steds and I were playing a game not unlike chess with a dozen or so random objects on the kitchen table, and we both shared a telepathic understanding of the rules.
I would move a salt shaker to the edge of the table and Steds would say, “Intriguing. Risky, but intriguing.” He would cautiously push a bread knife a slow inch and I would cry, “Quel gambit!” Finally I moved the Pez dispenser to the left of the kitchen knife and shouted “Checkmate!” After which Steds congratulated me on a brilliant move and we went back to steaming our chemically enlarged faces over of our bubbling stew pot, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the La Brea Tar Pits.
What’s that? You want to hear more about the album? Suffice it to say that I heard it that day for the first time and never listened to it again, until last week that is.
And you know what? It holds up. Cale’s in full rock mode and not pussyfooting around; no winsome Paris 1919 melodies on this one unless you count the Nico-esque “Only Time Will Tell,” which features somebody named Deerfrance playing the role of Nico. No, Sabotage/Live is a bellicose call to arms and real barnburner, and I can only describe it as Cale’s belated response to old bandmate Lou Reed’s heavy metal live souvenir, 1974’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal.
The only real difference is that everybody’s favorite classically trained Welshmen was obviously keeping up on current events when he recorded Sabotage/Live, and with Marc Aaron he opted for nascent No Wave over Lou’s Detroit Rock City. The name that springs to mind is not The Velvet Underground but Warren Zevon; Cale’s baritone vocal stylings and fascination with the unseemly underbelly of Cold War geopolitics both bring to mind the wag who gave us “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “The Envoy.”
As for the stew, it was delicious. Hearty, aromatic, and completely paralyzing. We both had four bowls and spent the next 12 hours on the sofa in the living room unable to feel our faces. We couldn’t even stand up long enough to do hits from Steds’ four-foot bong. The only words spoken during that entire interlude came from Steds. Who held up his spoon and said, “Look. A Pez.”
I really didn’t expect to live to see age 22. But here I am. And the odd thing is I don’t look back on those days with fear and loathing; the honest truth is I never felt so alive in my life. Living with your nerves on the outside of your body will do that.
This one’s for you Steds, wherever you are.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
