Brian Eno's Another Green World Read online

  Eno always sounded proudly self-confident and assured about his many arty theories when he talked to the press, but privately, he was anything but. “Making [Another Green World] was almost unmitigated hell,” Eno admitted in an interview with the NME the following year. “It was terrible … I used to come home and cry. It was absolutely awful.

  “I’d set myself this constraint. I’d written a few songs and things beforehand and I said, ‘I’m just fed up with that way of working. What I really believe in is reacting to the studio situation. That’s what I’ve been telling people about all this time, so what I’m going to do is abandon all those songs and walk into the studio without any starting point and generate it all there.’ But in fact, as you can imagine, this didn’t always work out. I was very unsure about this experiment and studios are terribly expensive.”

  He kept at it, over those long hot months in the summer of 1975. Small green shoots began pushing up through that grey terrain of fragmented beginnings, flowering into a vibrant sonic ecology with a life all its own.

  “Abandon normal instruments.”

  Another Green World lists several made-up instruments on its sleeve—Eno is credited with playing, among other things, “snake, digital, desert, castanet, and club guitar,” Yamaha bass pedals, treated rhythm generators, chord piano, bass guitar, and “electric elements and unnatural sounds’’; Fripp, meanwhile, is credited with “Wimshurst guitar, Wimborne guitar, and restrained lead guitar.” The rest of the instrumentation on the album is pretty much what it says on the tin: John Cale on viola; Percy Jones on fretless bass; Phil Collins on drums and other percussion; Rod Melvin on Rhodes piano and lead piano; Paul Rudolph on additional bass, snares, guitar, and “assistant castanet guitars’’; and Brian Turrington on more bass guitar, and piano. The names of the more whimsical-sounding instruments were intended as colorful descriptions of the way they sounded, rather than indicating anything about the instrument’s actual provenance. A “castanet guitar,” for instance, had nothing to do with actual castanets; it meant a guitar that had been played with mallets and fed through an effects box.

  But the most interesting instruments on Another Green World were the musicians themselves. The list of musicians was a bizarre combination of talents and backgrounds—who would have thought to put Robert Fripp, formerly of King Crimson, and John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, on the same album? And to complement the use of primitive drum machines, or “rhythm generators,” as they were then called, with the drumming talents of Phil Collins (of the prog-rock monolith Genesis)? Adding to the already offbeat mix of performers was Paul Rudolph, a multi-instrumentalist on Another Green World who had also played on Here Come the Warm Jets; Rudolph played in a band called the Pink Fairies, and had recently replaced Lemmy as the bass player in Hawkwind. (Lemmy went on to form Motörhead that year.) Percy Jones, who played fretless bass on Another Green World, had been a member of the poetry band The Liverpool Scene in the late 1960s, and was now playing in a jazz-fusion outfit with Phil Collins called Brand X. Rod Melvin, who played keyboards and piano on Another Green World, came from Ian Dury’s band Kilburn and the High Roads. Bass player Brian Turrington hailed from a dynamite but short-lived rock band called the Winkies, and had played on both of Eno’s previous solo records. It was an odd bunch, to say the least.

  The disorienting mix of people was intentional. “With session men most people treat them as if they’re interchangeable,” said Eno in an interview during the time of Another Green World. “You get the best bass player you can but you tell him what to do. But the musicians I work with play a very creative role—they’re not there as the executives of my ideas. Perhaps every group of musicians should have written above them ‘This Group is a Musical Instrument, treat it as such.’”

  Robert Fripp was a veteran of Eno projects by this time, and a good friend and comrade. He and Eno seemed like a strange match on the surface—avantrock’s odd couple—but that was part of the reason why they worked so well together. Fripp was a bona fide guitar virtuoso, while Eno was a self-described “non-musician.” (Eno could play some guitar at the time, but he used to tape down the frets of his guitar to make it easier to play.) Eno looked like an alien; Fripp had a beard and looked like a college professor—and, in a way, he almost was. “For me, there was more juice in popular culture than via academia and/or the conservatory,” Fripp wrote in an e-mail. “[Though] not an academic in any way, temperamentally I incline to a more reflective stance than many road warriors of my acquaintance.”

  Both Fripp and Eno had fled their respective popular groups in pursuit of greener artistic pastures; Eno left Roxy Music in 1973 and Fripp left King Crimson in 1974. Intellectually, Eno and Fripp were a perfect match, and the two seemed to have an almost psychic rapport on collaborations like 1973’s No Pussyfooting and 1975’s upcoming Evening Star. To offer a cinematic analogy, Eno and Fripp were a bit like the David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti of early-to-mid-1970s experimental rock music. “I met Angelo Badalamenti on Blue Velvet and since then he has composed music for all my films,” wrote Lynch in his book Catching the Big Fish. “He’s like my brother. The way we work is: I like to sit next to him on the piano bench. I talk and Angelo plays. He plays my words. But sometimes he doesn’t understand my words, so he plays differently. And then I say, ‘No, no, no, no, Angelo,’ and I change my words. And somehow through this process he will catch something, and I’ll say, ‘That’s it!’ And then he starts going with his magic, down that correct path.”

  In an interview with Lester Bangs in the late 1970s, Eno talked about how he and Fripp would sometimes clash on an idea, but the idea would end up working somehow in the end. “This happened the other day in this session, when we were working on a piece and I had this idea for the two guitars to play a very quick question and answer, threenotes-threenotes, just like that, and Fripp said, ‘That won’t fit over those chords,’” Eno said to Bangs. “He played it slowly, what that meant, and it made this terrible crashing discord. So I said, ‘You play it, I’ll bet it’ll fit,’ and it did, and it sounded really nice, too. But you see I think if you have a grasp of theory you tend to cut out certain possibilities like that.”

  Fripp’s and Eno’s working methods were almost eerily complementary. “Brian has exceptionally good taste plus a set of working procedures developed from a different background to mine: the fine arts; and one form of his guiding principles are articulated in the Oblique Strategies,” wrote Fripp in an e-mail. “My own background is that of the working player. The musician has guiding principles from within their particular discipline. The sense of form (arithmetical and geometrical) is comparable to notions of form within the (visual) arts. Musical thinking has its own procedural dynamic—we follow where the music leads as it takes on a life of its own.”

  John Cale and Eno, meanwhile, didn’t share the same tightly-knit working relationship. Eno had met Cale the year before, when they were both taking part in the unfortunately-nicknamed ACNE concert, which also included Kevin Ayers of Soft Machine fame, and Nico, the erstwhile chanteuse of the Velvet Underground. (The letters in “ACNE” stood for Ayers, Cale, Nico, and Eno.) Shortly after the somewhat doomed show—which featured, among other things, Nico darkly intoning a rendition of “Deutschland über Alles’’—Cale invited Eno to play on his album Fear. Eno also worked on Cale’s next album, Slow Dazzle, and Cale returned the favor by playing viola on Another Green World.

  Cale was a tall, swarthy Welshman with a limited attention span for Eno’s exploratory sonic tinkering. Cale was six years older than Eno, and had some seriously intimidating chops. In addition to having been a key member of the Velvet Underground, he was also a veteran of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, jammed with John Cage and others in a groundbreaking 18-hour performance of Erik Satie’s infamous Vexations in 1963, and possessed extensive formal training in music composition.

  Cale’s former band the Velvet Underground inspired plenty of musicians of the time,
but not many of them got as close to their favorite band as Eno did. Eno, for his part, had been a total fan for years; his short-lived rock band in art school, the Maxwell Demon, was almost completely inspired by the Velvets. For Eno, the Velvet Underground’s music in the late 1960s was a revelation; Eno adored the appealing roughness and simplicity of the songs, the fuzzy, muddy timbres, the band’s artiness, their dirtiness. The band’s third album, in particular, was almost a holy talisman for Eno; he told one interviewer that he had stopped listening to it completely because he was concerned that the album would lose its special power.

  Eno didn’t have the chops of Cale or Fripp, but he was a musician, and the whole “non-musician’’ claim, repeated over and over through the years, seems a little bit trumped-up in retrospect. Of course, compared to a guitar virtuoso like Fripp, Eno was a “non-musician.” But Eno could play a number of different instruments—not with any particular virtuosity, which is why he often relied on other musicians to generate sounds for him—but he had a talent for synthesizers, and for processing and treating instruments using the limited analog means that were available at the time, in ways that sounded like no one else. “He used to show up with his computer in his case, looking like a bank manager,” said Cale in an interview with What’s On in 1990, remembering the early days of working with Eno. “He’d put the briefcase on the desk and open it out and plug it in. The keyboard’d be really hard to play because it was so small. I’d say ‘Come in on Thursday at 12 o’clock. I’ve got four empty tracks—plug into those and I’ll see you at 6 o’clock.’ He said he wasn’t a musician, just a wholesale amateur, but he was very effective on a musical level and that’s all that mattered to me.”

  Eno’s insistence on calling himself a “non-musician’’ was partly a reaction to the prog-rock of the time, and the 1970s emphasis on virtuosity. It was also a logical extension of his interest in experimental music, and his experiences in Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Eno was an emerging type of musician; he was a true synthesizer player. In the 1980s, Eno would become a virtuoso player of an instrument—the Yamaha DX-7.

  In a way, Eno’s lack of formal training was a gift. It meant he approached the synthesizer for what it was: a generator of complex sounds, not as a keyboard. He came at synths from tape machines, and from using tape recorders as generators of strange sounds. This was in stark opposition to the famed progressive keyboard noodlers of the time, like Rick Wakeman of Yes, who treated the synthesizer primarily as a very fancy keyboard.

  Eno’s lack of formal musical training made him more predisposed to view the studio, too, as a sort of synthesizer, a way to build new sounds. “The documentary aspect is part and parcel of most recording studios,” said Harold Budd. “You perform something and it’s captured, and it’s recorded and pressed and put out in the world. The part with Eno was just the opposite. You use the studio in order to get the sounds that are going to be captured, you know what I mean? It just put a reversal on it.”

  Eno may have been a studio maven and a synthesist, but he wasn’t much of a gearhead. “Some producers go in, and they say, ‘Have you got the Lexicon 224 echo?’” Eno said in a 1981 interview with Jim Aikin in Keyboard Wizards. “‘Have you got this, have you got that? Oh, you haven’t got that? I can’t work here.’ Suddenly their world crumbles because you don’t happen to have the new Eventide D949 phaser, or whatever it is, and they can’t envisage working without this. But when I go into the studio, I look around and see what is there and I think ‘Okay, well, this is now my instrument. This is what I’m going to work with.’ Another example would be when you’re faced with a guitar that only has five strings. You don’t say, ‘Oh God, I can’t play anything on this.’ You say, ‘I’ll play something that only uses five strings, and I’ll make a strength of that. That will become part of the skeleton of the composition.’ That’s really what I mean, that any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.

  “So, that’s one aspect of the untrained musician thing. The other aspect is this: I believe strongly that recording studios have created a different t y pe of musician and a different way of making music … [when] I make a record, very often I work rather like a painter. I put something on, and that looks nearly right, so I modify it a little bit. Then I put something else on top of that, and that requires that the first thing be changed a little bit, and so on. I’m always adding and subtracting. Now this is obviously a very different way of working from any traditional compositional manner; it’s much more like a painting. So it’s clearly a method that is also available to the non-musician. You don’t have to have traditional technical competence to work that way.”

  Basing Street, where Another Green World was recorded, was a deconsecrated church that had been converted into an impressive suite of recording studios. It was established by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, and mainly recorded Island recording artists. A number of heavyweight acts recorded there—Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Rolling Stones, and so on—along with Roxy Music, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, and many more.

  “It was an old church, of quite sort of big dimensions, that housed two studios and a little copying facility and an apartment,” remembered Sage. “The main studio where we did most of the work was the main congregation part of the church, which had very high ceilings. The main foyer was a very big space. The main control room was like a gallery overlooking that area … we used to go down to the crypt, the lower bowels of the church; that was more a regularsized studio. It was a cozier sort of environment, with facilities to eat; you went down the stairs to Chris Blackwell’s private flat that he would let the artists use when they were in town.”

  It seemed fitting that a converted church was where Eno first got to test out his budding theories of the studio as a musical instrument. In a sense, this new way of working in the studio transferred certain godlike powers to the role of producer. “You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound —you handle it,” wrote Eno in his essay “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” published in Down Beat in 1983.

  Churches, like studios, can also be thought of as musical instruments. Old stone cathedrals generate enormous amounts of reverb, lending the feeling of everlasting sound. In R. Murray Schafer's classic book The Soundscape, Schafer wrote: “Anyone who has heard monks chanting plainsong in one of these old buildings will never forget the effect: the voices seem to issue from no point but suffuse the building like perfume.” In the book Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–1960, Peter Doyle explored how the medieval cathedral was a resonating musical instrument that could literally add itself to the voices of its congregation. “This notion would later find an important direct rhyme in twentieth century practice,” wrote Doyle, “when Brian Eno (and others) would come to see the recording studio as a kind of musical instrument … But to return to the medieval church, not only was it a resonating musical instrument; sometimes it also possessed apparently ‘magical’ properties that were a direct result of its reverberant character: ‘a mass by Fairfax—the medieval organist of St. Albans—was composed with a fourth part supplied by the church. Even if this is no more than legend, it shows that the building was recognized as an instrument.’”

  “Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them.”

  Another Green World is the first Eno record which credits “Brian Eno,” not the otherworldly, vaporous “Eno’’ he had been referred to on previous records. It’s also the first Eno album that gives an explicit credit to the Oblique Strategies cards on the back cover sleeve.

  Eno and his artist friend Peter Schmidt released the Oblique Strategies cards in 1975, when they realized that they had both been independently developing sets of ideas to help themselves come up with creative solutions to trying situations. “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number
of working situations when the panic of the situation— particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” explained Eno in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in 1980.

  The most clear antecedent to the Oblique Strategies cards was John Cage’s adoption of the ancient Chinese divination system, the I Ching, to make musical decisions. Some other related concepts to the Oblique Strategies were the Fluxus movement’s fanciful and inventive “Fluxkits” and Fluxus boxes—one particularly inspired example of these boxes, by George Brecht, was called the “water yam” box. The boxes often contained cards with witty sayings or specific instructions.

  Another possible predecessor to the Oblique Strategies cards was the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s “Distant Early Warning” cards, issued in 1969. Some of McLuhan’s cards, which were printed on a regular deck of poker cards, had quotes from other thinkers (one card read “Propaganda is any culture in action”—Jacques Ellul); others had classic McLuhan quotes (the ten of diamonds read “The medium is the message”); a king card read “In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinated idiot’’; the nine of spades sported the ominous warning “With data banks we are taped, typed and scrubbed.”

  Cage’s I Ching methodology was graceful and complex, and McLuhan’s Distant Early Warning cards bordered on plain goofy—almost like fortunecookie fortunes from some bizarro media-studies universe. The Oblique Strategies cards, meanwhile, had a specific, utilitarian purpose. The quirky cards were designed to help artists and musicians get out of creative ruts and loosen up in the studio. Each Oblique Strategy had a different aphorism: “Accept advice,” read one. “Imagine the music as a series of disconnected events,” read another. “Humanize something free of error.”