Brian Eno's Another Green World (7 page)

Though there were definitely frustrating moments, most of the musicians who worked on
Another Green World
have fond memories of the recording sessions. “[Eno] was more critical of him self,” said Jones. “He used to apologize for himself. He’d say ‘I’m not really a keyboard player,’ and we’d say ‘Oh that’s alright, we don’t care.’ He would sometimes say the bass was too busy, and I never took that as a critique, really. I figured it was his record, his stuff—he’s perfectly entitled to tell everybody what he wants. The cool thing about him was, if he didn’t like what you were doing, he would be very specific about what he did want you to do. He was very good like that, in that he would listen to what you were doing and say
‘Take that line you were doing, those two bars, and loop it, keep repeating it, for a while.’ You always felt in touch with him, that he could always tell you what you wanted.”

Eno’s canny ability to cherry-pick the best two bars out of a long, meandering sequence, or the most promising idea out of a huge slew of them, would come to be one of his most valuable skills as a producer. His friend Christine Alicino, who dated Eno in the early 1980s and collaborated with him on the early video art piece
Thursday Afternoon
, said that one of Eno’s most appealing qualities was his ability to always find the good in something, and zero in, with almost laserlike intensity, on that thing. “It always amazes me,” she said. “Sometimes you have to go out to see a band because it’s a friend or a friend of a friend, but as soon as you go he totally enjoys it; there’s always something he gets out of a situation. He might not like all the music, but there’s one phrase that he likes, and he sees one thing and that makes the whole thing worth it. Once when we were on Market Street, there was this guy playing on tin cans or something, and Brian was so into it and videotaping it. There are so many people who would just walk by that man.”

Eno kept using the Oblique Strategies for years; he still uses them to this day. In an interview with
Interview
’s Ingrid Sischy in 1995, David Bowie
described how Eno used a twist on the Oblique Strategies cards—something resembling charades— while producing Bowie’s 1995 album
Outside
. “What Brian did specifically on
Outside
and he’d done it in various ways on our 1970s sessions was put everybody in another space before they started playing,” Bowie said. “He walked into the session and said, ‘I’ve got something very interesting for us to look at today.’ And out of his little bag he pulled these six flash-cards and gave one to each of us. He didn’t tell me he was going to do this. He said, ‘I want you to read these cards and adopt the characters on them for as long as you can when we start playing.’ He said to our drummer [Sterling Campbell], ‘You are the disgruntled ex-member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that you were not allowed to play.’ And then the pianist [Mike Garson] was told, ‘You are the morale booster of a small rag-tag terrorist operation. You must keep spirits up at all costs.’ My card said, ‘You are a soothsayer and town-crier in a society where all media networks have tumbled down,’ so I knew it was my job to pass on all the events of the day. Because of this set-up, when we started playing, everybody came into the music from a very different space from where they would normally. So you had six really vibrant personalities with interpretive abilities playing from idiosyncratic points of view, and the confluence of all
that produced an extreme atmosphere that was quite outside what one might have expected from a bunch of rockers.”

The assorted experimental techniques and tricks Eno used in the studio had another purpose, besides hopefully producing some interesting artistic result; he wanted to have a good time. “It’s almost like when you go to a dinner party and it’s a bit boring and it’s a bit stilted, the conversation, and then somebody will walk in who’s just really fun, and it will transform the whole atmosphere of the room,” Abrahams said. “It’s exactly the same thing, because recording studios can be worrying places. There’s a lot of money being spent, there’s people’s egos to worry about, there’s all kinds of worries. He’s got a completely different agenda—the agenda is to do something that’s culturally worthwhile, one, and two, to have fun while doing it. And when you encounter someone who’s liberated of all the crap you usually worry about when you go into the studio, it’s infectious—it’s like a license to stop worrying about all those things yourself.”

The beats on
Another Green World
and the famous Soviet children’s story
Peter and the Wolf
had an odd cosmic connection.

Eno recruited bass player Percy Jones and drummer Phil Collins through a chance meeting during a 1975 rock remake of
Peter and the Wolf
. (Eno had been invited to play the wolf.) “They took the Prokofiev score and rearranged it a bit, and did a rock version of it,” remembered Jones. “Brian Eno was invited in. He came in and recorded a synth part and one section, and I wasn’t there at the time. But he was playing over the rhythm section I was in, which was me and Phil [Collins], and apparently he liked what he heard. A few days later I got a call from him asking
if I could do some recording with him. At the time I didn’t really know very much about him; I mean I knew him from Roxy Music, which I’d figured to be sort of a pop group, you know, so I didn’t really know what to expect.”

Eno’s pick of Jones and Collins for
Another Green World
was inspired, but didn’t completely jive with Eno’s sensibilities at the time. Jones and Collins were given to funkier, jazzier excursions in their group Brand X. Eno, for his part, was more in the art-rock and experimental-music camps. “Well, I used to have this little little badge which said, ‘Join the Fight Against Funk,’” Eno admitted in a
Synapse
interview in 1979. “Because in 1974 or 1975, I absolutely despised funky music. I just thought it was everything I didn’t want in music. And suddenly, I found myself taking quite the contrary position, and I had to chuck my little badge away, because it wasn’t true anymore.” (A curious statement for a man who would soon command monster funk riffs in songs like “Regiment’’!)

When Jones arrived at Basing Street, he was confused, to put it mildly. Jones had experience doing session work, and expected to be told what to play. In the studio, he found Eno sitting at a piano, tapping madly on a single piano key. Eno told him to improvise a line on his bass using the rhythm of his tapping. “It wasn’t what I expected at all; it was sort of
out-there, deep stuff,” remembered Jones. “Usually, you go to a studio they give you a chord chart or something to work with; it’s structured. But his initial guidance would be incredibly vague. There was a tune called ‘Sky Saw,’ and the instruction he gave us was he hit a middle ‘A’ on the piano and he just went ‘dun dun dun dun dun dun’ but it had a rhythm, and that was the starting point for the tune. I just started playing ‘dun dun doodle doodle da da,’ put some sort of modulation on it, so we put down that sequence, and that was it, and we moved onto something else.”

“Sky Saw”’s humble beginning was the little seed that blew up into the album’s unforgettable opening track. (The song’s title could be interpreted as a play on “see-saw,” or “sea saw”; Eno explained to interviewers a few years later, rather cryptically, that
Another Green World
was meant to be a “sky record,” while
Before and After Science
was an “ocean record.”)

“He’s got this great production technique—I think it naturally comes to him, I don’t think it’s a deliberate thing—but he kind of plants these little seeds of ideas, like when you were saying he was just playing that little rhythm on the piano,” commented Abrahams. “It might not obviously have been a fully fledged composition, but there was obviously something in it that he liked. And I think instead of doing what a conventional composer would do, which would be to work
with these very small elements and then extrapolate them deliberately, he kind of plants these little seeds in people’s minds and lets the musicians kind of go free with them, and then it ends up sounding like Brian Eno nonetheless, because it’s his seeds.”

The final version of “Sky Saw’’ incorporates Jones’ fretless bass and Phil Collins’ drumming, a searing viola solo by John Cale, additional bass guitar by Paul Rudolph, and various effects by Eno. “It wasn’t ’til the record came out that I heard what he’d done to it,” marveled Jones. “He’d taken that rhythm track and put all this stuff on top of it, and made it into a really strong piece of music. It was really interesting how he initiated the tune; he could have gone a million different ways with an introduction like that. I always came out of those sessions thinking, ‘I did something cool today.’ It was fun, it was innovative—he broke some ground in a way.” “Sky Saw’’ would go on to live another life as the track “M386’’ on
Music for Films
, and an early Ultravox tune, and in many other guises.

Jones and Collins also put down the rhythm track for “Over Fire Island,” the second track on
Another Green World
. Much to Eno’s chagrin, a similar bassline appeared on the Brand X album, released in 1976. “We did a tune on the first Brand X album called ‘Unorthodox Behaviour’; it’s pretty much the
same bassline,” said Jones. “Phil and I pretty much just took that, and recorded it for Eno, and I think at that point the Brand X record had been recorded and hadn’t come out. Brian actually got a bit miffed when the Brand X record came out and he heard the same bassline. I can’t remember exactly what he said; he looked a bit miffed: ‘How come you’ve got the same thing on the Brand X record?’ Phil and I just looked kind of vague and I think the subject got dropped; it wasn’t mentioned again. Despite it being the same sort of rhythm section thing, the two tunes were very different. What Eno did with it is radically different from what Brand X did with it, but that’s where that bassline came from.”

The spare drum and bass workout of “Over Fire Island’’ ends in buzzing, alien electronic noise—what sounds like a UFO landing—laying the groundwork for the blinding effulgence of the unearthly next track. “St. Elmo’s Fire” is the album’s grand statement, its crowning achievement. It features some of Eno’s most imagistic, rapturous lyrics:

Brown Eyes and I were tired

We had walked and we had scrambled

Through the moors and through the briars

Through the endless blue meanders

In the blue August moon

In the cool August moon

The most enthralling part of the song, though, was the sonic backdrop for these lyrics. The subtle clicking noise at the beginning of the song is a treated “rhythm generator,” a precursor to the modern drum machine, and the textures are spare—a minimal piano motif that darts between octaves, a smattering of organ and “desert guitars,” and Eno’s lean voice—all combining to make an understated setting for Robert Fripp’s transcendent “Wimshurst guitar” solo.

A Wimshurst machine is an electrostatic generator that was invented in the 1880s, an ancestor of the better-known VandeGraaffgenerator. The Wimshurst discharged large high-voltage sparks that jumped wildly between its metal plates. Eno issued a challenge to Fripp to play a guitar solo that sounded like the darting sparks of an electrostatic generator; this gelled well with Fripp’s sensibilities, and the end result was incandescent. “Brian has better taste, a more interesting mind and developed sense of play than almost all the musicians I have known,” remarked Fripp. “A good professional musician knows what they’re doing, so they do what they know. This is death to the creative life. So, working with Brian is usually a lot more fun and musically creative than working with good professional players (mastery in musicianship is necessary to go beyond the strictures of professionalism).”

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.