Album Club Selection #20: Brian Eno - Another Green World

I don't think anyone wants an echo chamber of kymbyha about any album around here. I haven't had the chance to listen to any of the last few records... I hope to be able to at some stage.

But to Magic Rat's point above... absolutely, if you have a negative reaction to an album, post it. Even if it's only a 'it did nothing for me because of x, y, z'... post. In fact, I'd say to keep the idea behind this club alive, if you've had a chance to listen to the album, please post about it (positive or negative). At least that let's the person nominating it know you've given it at least one listen.

Firstly, I perhaps need to think about my syntax more..........

But I'd agree about the negative responses.

Simply typing "This album is garbage" doesn't add anything, but I don't know if I've felt that way about any of them.

I genuinely found this record interesting in parts, and it's obviously very well put together (for want of a better phrase) .

The punchline is, it's not really for me, which is fine.

I don't think any of us will get overly precious if our choices aren't universally popular.........will we?

Now, to work on not being a shite member of the album club.........

I have avoided opining on some of the albums here because I disliked some and just hated others. But seeing a couple of the less-than-enthusiastic reactions here makes me realize that reading a negative reaction is much better than receiving none at all. I'm going to participate more in the future.

I occasionally trade CDs back and forth with the guy a couple houses down. A few years back he bought the remastered Tales of TO, and asked me if I was interested. Gut reaction said no, because I disliked it when it first arrived. But then I thought what the hell, it's been decades, maybe age will bring a new perspective. Nope. That is some tedious shit.

Right, once more I've lapsed into the "shite album club member" zone, so I'm trying to get caught up.

This is an interesting album.

Eno's a seminal artist, hugely talented.

This album, it had its moments for me and I may well dip back into it in the future.

But in the here and now I need to file this under - not really my bag.

What he said.

I can't believe Scott mentioned Swamp Thing. I never bothered reading that comic because, well, it was a comic and it was called Swamp Thing. I assumed Comics For Stupid People was already taken. But then a friend got me to read a collection of the first 6 (I think?) issues and damn, I was hooked. I won't go on, except to say that seeing that an issue was titled Another Green World was a 'my head is exploding' moment.

Oh, Bill. Bill, Bill, Bill. You rapscallion. You damn thief (of hearts). Although you presumably didn't know it, I've been long debating which of three different albums to go with first. One of my choices was actually another Brian Eno LP, Music for Films. And then you snaked me! (After many months of me not doing anything, so who's really to blame? Clearly you. And equally clearly, my choices have been universally beloved.)

I don’t know what possessed me to pick up an expensive import copy of Brian Eno’s Music for Films when I ran across it in a small independent record store in Washington D.C. when I was about seventeen. I’d never heard a single second Eno’s work, although I knew him from his collaborations with David Bowie and, to a much lesser extent, Talking Heads.

But buy it I did. And when I got home a few days later, I cranked up the stereo, having not the slightest idea what to expect. I listened. And a bit less than an hour later when I was able to move again, I shut my mouth, picked up my eyeballs from where they’d fallen on the floor and popped them back in. And my life has never been the same since. I’d bought my first ambient record.

Ambient, to me, often sounds like what I’d imagine a long space voyage would sound like if the spaceship were built in the late seventies and the designers were inspired by the sterile beauty of Stanley Kubrick’s films. It’s usually fairly or very slow, although sometimes the beat is so ambiguous as to be almost missing altogether. On most of Eno’s ambient recordings there are rarely any percussion instruments used in the normal way. Things shift in and out of focus, appear and disappear, come and go, as though you’re traveling through a musical fog. Here, listen to this—it's the very first Eno I ever heard:

Right? See what I'm sayin'? Didn't that just totally fill your very soul with a heady and untenable combination of quiet peace and desperate longing? It sounds, to me, like lying back, all alone, staring up at the sky on a beautiful spring day in a verdant, pastoral (is there any other kind?) field which happens to be located on a spaceship bound for a distant galaxy on a decades-long voyage.

This is not music for everybody, I realize. During my college years I played Music for Films several times a week, I’d guess, when I wasn’t playing The Replacements or R.E.M. or Springsteen. It was a sort of aural palate cleanser. The only other Eno I bought back then was Another Green World which is, for my money, his masterpiece. Another Green World is a bridge between Eno’s ambient work and his more traditional pop-related material. In fact, most of the album is actually ambient, something which is easy to overlook, so striking are the numbers with lyrics. And it's got Phil Collins! A reminder that before he became such a huge global superstar popster (and subsequently a punchline for having the temerity to write and record a lot of songs a lot of people loved), he was not only a drummer, he was in fact one of the most acclaimed drummers on the planet.

(SIDENOTE: Another Green World is also the name of a wonderful issue of the amazing comic book series Saga of the Swamp Thing, Alan Moore's very earliest American comic book work. It is a very serious contender for greatest comic book series ever, and I cannot recommend it highly enough, if you like comics or horror or both.)

But much as I was a PC fanboy at the time, it was the lyrical numbers which really drew me in initially. I was used to Eno's ambient stuff, and was therefore unprepared for just how damn catchy his pop stuff could be. But, I mean, this is damn catchy!

(Also, perhaps a precursor to "Drive All Night," to tie it all back in to our boy?)

But. Chief amongst not just the lyrical numbers but all songs on the album is the odd piece of utter pop perfection which is "St. Elmo’s Fire."

I’ve never been entirely sure why this song smacked me over the head as it did the very first time I heard it, but writing the piece just now, I played it a half-dozen times in a row and the thing still does a number on me. It’s superficially a straight-forward pop song, three minutes long, three verses, three choruses, guitar solo, the whole regular schmeer. Yet it’s sort of a really catchy pop song done by an alien who’s really, really familiar with our culture and gets it completely…almost.

It starts off with some knocking, perhaps wood blocks, perhaps not and the sound of something, perhaps a tape, starting up. Then a few notes are repeated over and over on the piano, a driving motion that’ll serve as the pulse of the song. Some clattering percussion, almost devoid of rhythm, enters. Insistent chords bang out on another keyboard instrument, first insistently syncopated but subtly shifting so it’s instead squarely on the first downbeat. And then Eno starts singing.

He’s got a somewhat talky sort of voice but if it’s not necessarily much better than other talkers like Lou Reed (when Reed cares to try) or J Mascis, it’s a bit more accessible and less grating. It may not knock Lennon or McCartney off their perches as amongst the greatest rock voices ever, but it fits the material.

The first verse lets us know what we’re in for:

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

And without a pause we go into the chorus:

In the blue August moon In the cool August moon

What does any of this mean? What could endless blue meanders be? After listening hundreds of times, I have no idea. Nor could I possibly care less. The words work. The sound of them, the images they convey, the tone they set, are all that matters. They sound good and somehow manage to mean nothing in a rather poetic way without being pretentious at all. They’re almost little more than another instrument, like the piano or the percussion or the guitar solo, yet weighted with some emotional resonance I don’t fully understand. Another verse and another trip through the chorus gives us more of the same:

Over the nights and through the fires We went surging down the wires Through the towns and on the highways Through the storms in all their thundering In the blue August moon In the cool August moon

Then the final verse:

Then we rested in a desert Where the bones were white as teeth, sir And we saw St. Elmo’s Fire Splitting ions in the ether

Again, the scene set is beautiful and haunting and if we get no more than stray images and a hint of story supplied mainly by ourselves, it’s no less powerful for that. And then comes what may be the most amazing part of the song: the guitar solo.

As Eno is not one to bow to tradition just for tradition’s sake, there aren’t a lot of solos in his work. Yet here he’s got a guitar solo right smack dab in the standard place. Except that it’s not. For one thing, rather than soloing over the verse chords or the chorus chords once, the guitarist, King Crimson leader and frequent Eno collaborator Robert Fripp, solos over the chorus chords, seems about to wrap things up, and then decides to go over another chorus. What’s more, when the lyrics kick back in for two more choruses, he keeps soloing, albeit more softly. Which means that very nearly one-third of the entire song is the guitar solo—and well over one-half if you include the sections where Eno is also singing over the solo—a ratio wildly out of balance for a pop song. Meanwhile, harmonically, the entire song is remarkably simple, with the verses consisting of nothing more than the I chord, and the chorus just vi-IV-V repeated over and over.

But more than anything it’s the sound and style of the solo itself that’s so stunning. It’s not clear whether Fripp wasn’t sure what to play or whether he was just asking Eno what he was looking for, but Eno later said:

"...on ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ I had this idea and said to Fripp, ‘Do you know what a Wimshurst machine is?’ It’s a device for generating very high voltages which then leap between the two poles, and it has a certain erratic contour, and I said, ‘You have to imagine a guitar line that has that, very fast and unpredictable.’ And he played that part which to me was very Wimshurst indeed."

So if you can just picture those two poles in the background in all the Frankenstein films, with the electricity sparking back and forth between them, you can imagine this solo.

It’s a really gorgeous and melodic version of that. And it’s the combination of the anarchic, blistering guitar solo, the odd instrumentation elsewhere in the song, the impressionistic lyrics and the sheer melodic appeal of the tune itself that makes this one of the great, albeit rather obscure, pop songs in history.

In the blue August moon In the cool August moon In the blue August moo In the cool August moon

It was only recently, though, that I realized that Eno's lyrics are essentially a highly intellectualized version of "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom" or "da-doo-ron-ron-ron" or "sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-tee-da" or "de-do-do-do-de-da-da-da" or "Sha la la sha la la la la, sha la la la la la la" or, for that matter, "hello, hello, hello, how low." There are some things that regular words are not capable of quite capturing, and sometimes words mean so much more than they seem.

I confess to this album holding my attention much more than some of the album club choices have. Previously I had only known the collab with David Byrne.

I like the tracks with vocals, but I really love the instrumentals. I like that they are not overly long and overstay their welcome.

I will definitely listen to this more.

Here's where I wish I was better at articulating music, because this album is pretty weird. It easily would fit into my top-10 albums ever.

(Tangent. Another Green World was released in 1975, my favorite year ever for albums. I was 19, so I'm sure that factors in but get this: Born To Run, Horses, Tonight's the Night and Zuma, Blood On the Tracks and The Basement Tapes, Wish You Were Here, Hissing of Summer Lawns. This is off the top of my head.)

So prior to this Eno released 2 LPs that rocked in a way I'd never heard before, with words that could be described as surrealistic and dada, but more important clever and funny. A year or two after Another Green World he headed in the direction he is, I guess, best known for--ambient music. Well, AGW is kind of a bridge between the two. He abandons straight out rock (if that's how you could describe the early stuff) and with the help of King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, John Cale from the Velvet Underground, Phil Collins on drums, and Collins' Brand-X bandmate bassist Percy Jones, creates a series of tracks that range from pop to ambient. With the exception of the opening track, Eno's vocals are what some might call mellow. Calm. Some tracks are Eno alone on synthesizers of one sort or another, while others feature a full band, including a few people I haven't listed. Some vocals, lots of instrumentals.

Listen to Fripp's solo on the great St. Elmo's Fire. Yow! I put the CD on in the car for my wife to hear, and to my delight (and hers) she reacted to the entrance of the vocals with "what the fuck IS this?!?! Despite that, I would describe AGW as music to relax to. I named our cat Eno (RIP). I bought the t-shirt. I love this thing. Give it a chance.