Newpaper article for impending John Cale show on 09/24/94 at the Bottom Line, New York, NY

New York Times

"John Cale in a Quiet Phase"
By JON PARELES
Published: September 27, 1994

While thousands of collegiate participants in the CMJ Music Marathon were out hearing young alternative rockers abusing guitars,
one of the style's founding fathers played a decorous two-night stand that put most of his progeny to shame. John Cale, a founding
member of the Velvet Underground, performed on Friday and Saturday nights at the Bottom Line, accompanied by his own piano
or guitar, the Soldier String Quartet and a pedal steel guitarist, B. J. Cole.

Mr. Cale's music has swung between the two extremes of his classical-music training and his love of noisy rock. He's now in a
quieter phase, surveying his songwriting since he left the Velvets in the late 1960's. In 1992, he released a live recording of a solo
concert, "Fragments of a Rainy Season" (Rykodisc), and he has just put out a retrospective, "Seducing Down the Door" (Rhino).

In his early show on Friday, with a song list similar to the "Fragments" album, Mr. Cale set forth an extraordinary range of music,
from the 1950's-flavored three-chord rock of "Darling I Need You" to the art songs of "The Falklands Suite," with lyrics from Dylan
Thomas poems. Mr. Cale isn't afraid to show his musical or literary erudition. His songs invoke historical events and spin globe-
hopping narratives; they also calmly depict shattering violence and make bleak, death-haunted observations: "Ain't it sordid how life
goes on, when life could be tearing you apart," he sang in "Leaving It Up to You." In a new song, "Set Me Free," he envisions "the
anger rising to the last man in town."

Around Mr. Cale's gruff voice, the arrangements were meticulous, with the steel guitar gleaming above hymnlike piano chords and
the string quartet churning out muscular chords or chamber-music counterpoint. Mr. Cale hasn't abandoned his fondness for noise;
in "Fear (Is a Man's Best Friend)," the ironically jaunty chorus toppled into dissonance, with Mr. Cale howling the title. At the Bottom
Line, Mr. Cale's repertory sounded like parlor songs for a haunted parlor, where there is no refuge from heartbreak or the lessons
of history.