Brian Eno's Another Green World Read online

  Many of the songs on Another Green World used synthetic percussion—a “rhythm generator” that Eno had treated in various ways to make the machine’s limited palette sound less wonky and more interesting. Several pioneering bands in the early 1970s were using these lumbering analog ancestors to modern drum machines. Sly and the Family Stone recorded There’s a Riot Goin’ On with heavy use of these early drum machines. The German group Can’s landmark 1971 album Tago Mago also made creative use of rhythm generators, as did Cluster’s 1974 album Zuckerzeit.

  Offbeat German bands like Can, Cluster, and Harmonia were major Eno touchstones. Eno would go on to befriend and collaborate with members of all of those bands. But if there was ever an unsung hero in the popular accounts of Eno’s musical development, it was Conny Plank, who died in 1987. Plank was a trailblazing producer and sound engineer in West Germany who worked with several ground-breaking German bands of the 1970s—Kraftwerk, Cluster, and Neu!, for starters. Plank favored a rough, live sound for synths, guitars, and drums, instead of the smoothed-over Velveeta cheese that was popular in the mid-1970s. Plank also built up layers of sonic treatments and stark, disorienting effects that still sound radical to this day.

  “In Dark Trees,” the next track on Another Green World, is an ominous cloud of dark ambience, underscored by a foreboding, chugging rhythm, again provided by Eno’s treated symphony of machines. Like many of the other ambient tracks that Eno worked on by himself, “In Dark Trees” was initially inspired by coming across a particular sound. The melody, rhythm, and concept came later. “For me it’s always contingent on getting a sound, the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be,” explained Eno to Lester Bangs in 1979. “So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards. That’s why I enjoy working with complicated equipment, because I can just set up a chain of things, like a lot of my things are started with just a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out often sounds very complex and rich, and as soon as I hear a sound it always suggests a mood to me.”

  The next instrumental, the elegiac, meditative “The Big Ship,” is a blend of contrasting textures— organic and synthetic, icy and warm. The backing beats are again provided by Eno’s treated rhythm generator. The song was entirely constructed from synthesizers, but it’s hard to tell; the song has a lush, woody, hymnal feel, like a hundred harmoniums playing at once. A cold, glassy synth melody is layered on top, contrasting with the song’s rich, honey-like timbres. The trebly synth blips flitting about don’t have a regular pulse; the timing of the loop is distorted slightly, speeding up and down. The electronics don’t feel like they’re moving in rigid lockstep; there’s still a human sense of error to it.

  That wistful, stately instrumental opens the floodgates for the unabashed sentimentalism of “I’ll Come Running,” one of the most storied songs on the album. Paul Kennedy, an avid record collector in New York, recalled that many prog fans he knew in the 1970s who bought Another Green World to hear complicated guitar work and cutting-edge synthesized instrumentals would flip the record over to Side Two right before “I’ll Come Running,” deeming the song too sappy and poppy for their tastes. There was nothing “progressive” about “I’ll Come Running”—it practically sounded like a mid-1960s Beatles song, penned by Paul McCartney. Because those prog-rockers flipped the record over before the song started (presumably while holding their noses), their version of Another Green World jumped straight from “The Big Ship” to “Sombre Reptiles,” which meant that they also inadvertently skipped the title track, “Another Green World”—the last instrumental piece on Side One.

  “I’ll Come Running” was the one song on Another Green World that was clearly based on earlier material. The song’s DNA can be traced to an earlier Eno tune called “Totalled.” Eno played “Totalled’’ on a BBC Peel session in 1974, backed by The Winkies. In “I’ll Come Running”‘s previous incarnation, it was a rock song—not unlike the three-chord punk ditties that would become ubiquitous a few years later—crammed with crunchy distortion and the goofy chorus “I’ll come running to tie your shoe/Whoa-oh-oh-oh/I’ll come running to tie your shoe.” The inner life of that screwball rock song—and how it blossomed into a luminous, unexpected piano ballad on Another Green World—was, in a way, the story of Eno’s own musical transformation from 1974 to 1975.

  The next three tracks on the album after “I’ll Come Running”—“Another Green World,” “Sombre Reptiles,” and “Little Fishes”—are all delicate, miniature instrumentals, tiny jewel boxes stuffed with odd little sounds. “Another Green World” features “desert guitar’’; “Sombre Reptiles’’ is underscored by “synthetic and Peruvian percussion”; “Little Fishes” uses Eno’s prepared piano. “The little tone poems, they’re exquisite really, and in a way I don’t think they’ve been surpassed in that area,” said the critic David Toop. “A lot of other people have tried to do things in a similar way, but I think that was a moment of using the studio, and he managed to make instruments sound unlike themselves.”

  The lyrics of the next song, “Golden Hours,” could be interpreted as a meditation on mortality and life passing by, with lines like “The passage of time/ Is flicking up dimly upon the screen/I can’t see the lines/I used to think I could read between.” But the most intriguing aspect of “Golden Hours’’ is how every part of the song seems to clash with every other part of the song, and yet it somehow all hangs together.

  Eno wrote the original melody for “Golden Hours” one day in the studio on a Farfisa organ, and kept piling on more effects and parts. (Eno is credited with “choppy organs, spasmodic percussion, club guitars, and uncertain piano.”) The song literally conflicts with itself—the last two verses of “Golden Hours’’ are layered with another two verses, which have completely different, and totally nonsensical, lyrics. The timing of Eno’s overdubs was slightly off, on purpose, because Eno was trying to sound like a oneman Portsmouth Sinfonia. “I wanted a lot of voices that were a little bit off with one another, so I overdubbed the voices myself but I didn’t use headphones,” Eno explained to Jim Aikin in Keyboard Wizards. “The engineer would just give me a cue when to start singing. He was listening to the track in the control room, and when he cued me I would start singing, so that my pitch is deliberately slightly off and my timing is slightly off, to reproduce that effect.”

  In addition to the disorienting layers of conflicting lyrics, the burbling organ, the ungainly rhythm, John Cale’s elegant viola and Fripp’s complicated guitar runs, there was also the heavy extent to which Eno stacked his own voice on top of itself, building up airy harmonies with his own voice—a trademark Eno technique. Eno’s voice is paper-thin, like a piece of phyllo dough; it stacks well on itself, giving way to a layered, golden richness.

  The next two instrumentals—“Becalmed’’ and “Zawinul/Lava’’—are beautifully spare piano-driven pieces, and foreshadow the elegant, minimal piano work on Music for Airports. “Zawinul/Lava,” in particular, sounds a lot like “1/1’’ from Music for Airports—they’re even in the same key—and the two pieces actually sound quite good played simultaneously. The title, of course, was likely inspired by Joe Zawinul, the late jazz keyboardist with the Weather Report (the “lava” in the title is anyone’s guess.) “Zawinul/Lava” also features the somewhat creepy sounds of children squealing in the background; the melancholy keyboard melody is overlaid with a treated recording of a playground. (If there was a beat to go with the melodies and children’s voices, it would sound a lot like a Boards of Canada tune.)

  “Everything Merges with the Night,” the next song on the album, is possibly the sappiest song ever written that grapples with either a romance with a woman named Rosalie (“Rosalie/I’ve been waiting all evening/Possibly years, I don’t know’’) or, more tantalizingly, Chilean socialism and cybernetics experiments. The clue to the latter theory, here, is the verse “Santiago/Under the volcano/Floats like a cushion on the sea/But I can never sleep here/Everythin
g ponders in the night.” It is conflicting imagery like this that keeps Internet fans awake at night; Eno lyrics for songs like “Everything Merges with the Night” have been picked over and debated on various websites to a mind-bending degree.

  “Spirits Drifting,” the final piece on Another Green World, is an ethereal instrumental with an extremely long fade-out. The long fade-out, another signature Eno touch, gently transitions the listener back to reality after having been immersed, for the past hour or so, in another sonic world. Artful uses of fade-ins and fade-outs can make you feel as if you’re stepping into a scene that’s still happening when you leave it; Eno would use this technique to great effect on albums like David Bowie’s Low and U2’s The Joshua Tree. The fade-out also makes a conceptual statement, as Eno wrote in his essay “Ambient Music,” that “the music is a section from a hypothetical continuum and that it is not especially directional: it does not exhibit strong ‘progress’ from one point (position, theme, statement, argument) to a resolution.”

  ‘‘Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor.” / ‘‘Don’t be frightened of clichés’’

  The year 1975 was an eerily prescient year for popular music. Rock narratives tend to skip neatly from the psychedelic 1960s to the 1977 punk rock explosion and the post-punk that followed it. Outside of Led Zeppelin and a few other juggernauts, the mid-1970s often get short shrift by biographers, while punk gets lionized for cutting through the bloated prog-rock dreck that preceded it.

  In a recent biography of Brian Eno, On Some Faraway Beach, David Sheppard paints a dim picture of popular music in the UK at the time: “In 1975, chart pop seemed to grow blander by the month, with only pockets of resistance … the UK singles chart continued to be the preserve of Philadelphia soul crooners The Stylistics and Caledonian heart-throb popsters The Bay City Rollers. Meanwhile, Rod Stewart’s career-defining Atlantic Crossing LP and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett-saluting Wish You Were Here would soon book in for protracted album chart residencies. Prog mastodons such as Yes and Genesis still roamed the earth …”

  Plenty of people hated the mainstream music of 1975 while they were living through it. In retrospect, though, 1975 was a year packed with subtle accidents and shifts in thinking that would soon yield seismic results. It was in the year 1975 that Donna Summer first approached Giorgio Moroder about producing a record; in the summer of 1975, the first Summer/Moroder collaboration, Love to Love You Baby, was released, foreshadowing the mind-melting ‘‘I Feel Love’’ of a few years later. Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity, three King Tubby albums, and Parliament’s Chocolate City were all released that year, too. And though it would be some years before hip-hop hit the charts, rapping was gaining steam in the Bronx underground, with youngsters Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa picking up ideas from Kool Herc, who had started messing with turntables in the early 1970s.

  Rock wasn’t looking too shabby, either. Bob Dylan’s classic Blood on the Tracks was released in 1975. Patti Smith came out with her career-defining Horses. Neil Young and Crazy Horse issued both Tonight’s the Night and Zuma. Fleetwood Mac’s second self-titled record made the band into multi-platinum superstars, hitting Number 1 on the Billboard charts and giving way to several top 20 singles. Black Sabbath came out with their sixth album, Sabotage, and while it wasn’t as well-received as Paranoid, it was still a solid record, cracking the Top 20 in both the US and the UK.

  Led Zeppelin released their burgeoning double-LP Physical Graffiti; though it wasn’t their greatest record, they basically owned the world, so it didn’t matter. In the chilly early January of 1975, Zeppelin was inciting riots stateside; over 1,000 rabid fans stormed the Boston Garden, breaking down doors and chairs while waiting for tickets that never materialized. Shortly thereafter, the band sold out three concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden in a mere four hours. British rock mainstays The Who released The Who By Numbers, and the album’s darkly introspective content (sample lyric: ‘‘Hey goodbye all you punks, stay young and stay high / Hand me my checkbook while I crawl off to die’’) didn’t scare off fans; the album hit the top 10 in the US and the UK.

  Progressive rock looked like it was doing a pretty good job of self-destructing on its own; the prog firmament was taking some hard hits. Robert Fripp had left King Crimson the year before in favor of acting as a ‘‘small, mobile, independent, intelligent unit,” free to pursue experiments with Eno and others. In 1975 Peter Gabriel made the announcement that he was quitting Genesis. Keyboardist Rick Wakeman had quit Yes that year, too, to pursue a lucrative solo career.

  There were plenty of pop singles in 1975 that were bona fide smash hits; these were the tunes that would continue to haunt us forever. ABBA released their self-titled album, which included the charttopping “Mamma Mia’’ and “S.O.S.,” soon to achieve immortality as a DJ mainstay on the wedding reception and bar mitzvah circuit. The Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin’’ charted that year, too. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody’’ held an iron grip on the Number 1 spot in the winter of 1975. Pink Floyd hit it big with “Wish You Were Here.” Eno’s former bandmates Roxy Music had just come out with Siren; slick hits like ‘‘Love is the Drug’’ foreshadowed a smoother, more polished future. Minnie Riperton’s ‘‘Lovin’ You’’ (which would go on to live another bizarro life as a sample in the 1990s electronica classic The Orb’s Adventures through the Ultraworld) made its appearance.

  Even David Bowie’s 1975 ‘‘plastic soul’’ outing Young Americans wasn’t as dire as it was made out to be by critics at the time. There were still enjoyable moments on that album; even the clumsy title track stands up to repeat listens, and toward the end of 1975, Bowie’s work on the upcoming Station to Station would pave the way for a transition to a new sound. On the German avant-garde side, Can came through with Landed—not a mindblowing record but certainly far from the band’s worst. Harmonia’s Deluxe and Neu!’s Neu! 75 were paving the way for new German sounds. And, of course, there was Kraftwerk. “Autobahn,” the epic 22-minute-long ode to the joys of freeway driving, was recorded in 1974 and charted in both the US and the UK in 1975. The song had been hacked down to a more radio-friendly three minutes, making it seem more like a goofy gag than the marvelously expansive, visionary piece of proto-techno it was. But it would help open up American and British ears to a radically new sound.

  It was in 1975 that Eno launched his own record label, called Obscure, in addition to putting out three of his own albums in 1975—Another Green World, Discreet Music, and Evening Star, with Fripp. Eno convinced Island Records to fund Obscure (they did, on a shoestring budget), and Eno wore hats as Obscure’s A&R man, producer, chief evangelist, and curator. He had started Obscure to bring some of his favorite experimental musicians—many of whom were extremely obscure at the time—to a wider audience.

  “It was refreshing that someone who had got a bit of success was prepared to use it to propagate their ideas or give support to people who were finding it difficult to access,” said David Toop, who starred on the fourth release on Obscure in 1975, New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, with his friend, the sound sculptor Max Eastley. “Brian had access at that point, and he used it in a very generous way, I think. If you look at Obscure from an A&R perspective, everyone who has been involved in the label has become pretty established in a way.” Gavin Bryars, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Harold Budd were but a few names on Obscure who would go on to be major figures in their fields.

  One could also make a convincing argument that 1975 was the year punk broke; The Ramones released their first single, ‘‘Blitzkrieg Bop,” in November of that year, the same month that the nascent Sex Pistols played their first gig, at St. Martin’s College of Art. For every action, though, there was an equal and opposite reaction—Iron Maiden formed one month later, merging prog’s pomp and theatrics with a new wave of heavy metal.

  “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”

  While Led Zeppelin was busy inciting riots in the US, Brian Eno was feeble and be
dridden. On one cold January night in 1975, a taxi hit him as he was walking home from a late-night recording session at Basing Street Studios in London. He was recording a song called “Miss Shapiro’’ with his former Roxy Music bandmate, Phil Manzanera. “At that instant my mind was operating incredibly fast,” he recalled in an interview with Arthur Lubow in People in 1983. “On one channel, I thought, ‘So that may be the last thing I do.’ Then I thought, ‘If I’m going to survive this, I’ve got to get up as soon as it hits me,’ because I could see another car following the taxi that would surely swerve around and run over my head. The third thing I thought was, ‘Who is going to get in touch with my girlfriend?’ And the fourth thing was, ‘Isn’t the brain an incredible thing? It’s like a 24-track tape with all these things going on at once.’ It sounds ridiculous, but in that moment I developed a theory about how my brain worked. Then I got hit.”

  David Toop was slated to record with Eno the morning after the accident, and heard the bad news. “I turned up at the studio in the morning and the session was canceled because he was in the hospital,” he recalled. “I went to go visit him and the place smelled like sour milk.” Some milk had spilled on the floor, and Eno was too weak to clean it up. Seeing Eno in such a sad state—lying down, immobile, with head injuries and a bad back—deeply worried his friends. But the forced solitude and contemplation led to a now-famous epiphany about ambient music, shrouded in 30-odd years of myth. In the Discreet Music liner notes, Eno wrote: