Brian Eno's Another Green World (5 page)

At a time when anyone can run a serviceable home recording studio on a laptop, it’s hard to imagine how risky it was back then, in those pre-digital days, to make an album this way. Studio time in London was scarce and expensive. According to what Eno said about
Another Green World
after the fact, the lack of advance planning was all part of a deliberate strategy, designed to give himself more of an artistic challenge. “I found that if you went into a studio with demos, you spent all your time trying to re-create the demos—which was not only extremely timeconsuming, but always prevented you from seeing what was actually happening,” he argued to Ian MacDonald in the
NME
in 1977. “You might be missing all kinds of things because you had a fixed goal in mind. So I decided to risk going into the studio with no written material. And it’s a real risk because studios are so expensive these days. If it just doesn’t happen to be your day, you can spend £500 for nothing.”

Many years later, Eno elaborated on this principle, in a conversation with his friend and collaborator Daniel Lanois.

Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down, and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, that the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives that that’s how things work.

    If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings. And I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

Another Green World
certainly seemed like an unpromising beginning at first. Even with the
impressive roster Eno assembled, and his own burgeoning talents in the studio, the sessions would either reveal themselves to be encouraging seeds, ready to burst into a resplendent sonic paradise—or a complete, unremitting disaster.

At the start, it looked to be the latter. During the first few weeks of the
Another Green World
sessions, there were several agonizing days when it looked as if everything was going to pot. For the first four days of work on
Another Green World
in July of 1975, nothing—absolutely nothing—came out at all. The pressure to succeed was too intense. Eno was on the verge of canceling the studio time and recording a lot of demos at home and going back to the old ways of doing things.

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.

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.