Peter Gabriel has made no secret of the fact that he didn't care for Bob Ezrin's production of "Here Comes the Flood" on PG's first solo LP. I always thought Gabriel was way, way off-base with that assessment. Does it get ever so bombastic and over the top towards the end? Sure. But Dick Wagner's guitar is magnificent and Allan Schwartzberg's drums sound like the apocalypse itself, and I mean that in the best possible way. Hell, I wish the apocalypse would be half that badass...and yet somehow tasteful at the same time. (I mean, is there anything worse than a gauche apocalypse?)
Now, it's a magnificent song, irrespective of its arrangment. So the Robert Fripp-produced recording they did later? Wonderful. The solo version he did on Kate Bush's 1979 Christmas special? Wonderful.
This version?
I have never had any issue with my rock and roll going big—I'm not sure I could love Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles, The Who or Springsteen as much as I do if I did, never mind my various prog guilty pleasures—and if it sometimes misses the mark, well, hey, that's the risk you run by swinging for the fences, right?
But it's hard to listen to that intimate reading by the older Gabriel and deny that it's got a power every bit the equal of the debut version, albeit in a far more restrained but no less effective for that manner. (The fact that his voice sounds better than ever there doesn't hurt, of course.)
So. As previously mentioned, Mark Kozelek has a new album, his second collaboration with Desertshore. And there's more than one song named after a boxer—a Kozelek trademark—but unlike "Tavoris Cloud," this one, with lyrics perhaps nearly as autobiographical, isn't heartbreaking. Rather, it's maybe the best smack-talking song ever about the pantheon of great guitarists. (Admittedly, there isn't a whole lot of competition.) I mean, how can you beat:
I can play like Fripp or Johnny Marr And I can play circles 'round Jay Farrar I like Jeff Beck and Page just fine But I hate Derek Trucks and Nels Cline I hate Nels Cline
followed by a parody of Cline's trademark wiggity-wiggity-woo. (Of which I'm very much a fan, incidentally.)
(I love the idea of Jay Farrar looking up and saying, in a McNutty voice, "what'd I do?!")
But is Kozelek done? Not even close. He hasn't gone after the big daddy yet.
I can play like Malcolm and Neil Young And I can play circles 'round most anyone I like Kirk Hammett and Steve Vai But I hate Eric Clapton and Nels Cline I hate Nels Cline
Listen, I love Mark Kozelek, and although he mainly plays nylon-string acoustic these days, he is indeed one hell of an electric guitarist. But Eric Clapton, now...now you're playing with fire. And if you're gonna come at the king, you best not...ah, the hell with it. Slowhand's a big boy and Kozelek's laconic rumble gives the impression of either utter assurance that his absurd assertions are indisputable or he's taking the piss and doesn't really care much that you know it's not true and at the end of the day the point is that this is awesome.
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. Chief among them is the odd piece of 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, for that matter, "hello, hello, hello, how low." There are somethings which regular words are not capable of quite capturing, and sometimes words mean so much more than they seem.
