I can’t remember which of the following took place first, but they were related.
One of them was procuring the U2 album The Unforgettable Fire. I’d been a U2 fan for some time, proudly spinning the keening, martial triumph of War, and often falling asleep to the dream-like echoes and Twlight Zone tones of Boy and October. I popped in Unforgettable Fire, and was met by something all wrong, a restrained, wintry soundscape of an album, full of cryptic lyrics and guitar that sounded like keyboards.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t exactly like it. But I only had a handful of albums to choose from, so Unforgettable Fire kept getting listened to. Eventually, I got used to its unexpected contours. I started wanting to listen to the album every day. Now I’d rank it in any top 10 of rock CDs.
The other thing that happened sometime in the same era was that a friend gave me a cassette of two Brian Eno ambient albums, Apollo Atmospheres and Soundtracks and On Land. Those unusual compilations of sound—like music for yoga class aboard a UFO—ended up residing permanently in a bedside clock radio. Each morning’s “alarm” was instead a weird, warm upwelling, a slow floating to the surface. Somehow this worked very well for my teenage brain.
Brian Eno’s soundcraft had worked its way into my consciousness twice over. He was the producer of The Unforgettable Fire (with Daniel Lanois), and had taken a brash young Irish band and made of them something awe-inspiring. A documentary on the making of the album showed him working mysterious magic, turning knobs, fiddling with guitars in unusual ways, even changing the speed of recordings to evoke an entirely different feel. I’d never heard anything like it. He seemed like a sound sorcerer. I soon learned of his previous efforts as producer, which included many impressive credits, Devo and Talking Heads among them.
Eno, who was born in England with the impressive handle Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, began his career in the band Roxy Music, creating a role for himself that went well beyond synth player. He was a spaced-out, flamboyant presence, donning full-on glam rock regalia that made him look like a cross between Iggy Pop and Dr. Frankenfurter. Before long, his role expanded to something along the lines of mission control for the band—he was installed in front of a strange control panel, manipulating joysticks and knobs and switches, with which he took the band’s raw sounds and transformed them even before they made it to the house speakers.
His odd, semi-musical role was unlike much that had come before (Les Paul’s recording manipulations and the Beatles’ tape-looping are among earlier echoes, as are the works of minimalist composers like John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass), and his importance to contemporary music and recording methods is hard to overstate. The early years of Eno’s strange voyage are explored in Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth, a DVD scheduled for release next month.
The film is a standard mix of talking heads and vintage footage, and at times seems to verge on the sycophantic, though mostly in subtle ways like the timing of melodramatic swells in the (very good) soundtrack and, indeed, the title. The film posits Eno as something of an alien presence, and it’s hard to argue otherwise, especially if you’ve seen his Oblique Strategies cards (a deck of unusual suggestions for creative inspiration, worth a story on their own) or footage of his unusual in-studio manipulations. Much is revealed in the film, through third-person interviews (and a few Eno interviews), about Eno’s methods and proclivities, and it’s a fascinating ride.
The vintage footage alone would make the film worthwhile—Roxy Music is not a band often included on lists of the best acts in music (at least on this side of the Atlantic), but the sheer weirdness of singer Bryan Ferry’s songwriting combined with Eno’s “treatments” created something that didn’t sound much like anyone else at the time. To see the band flailing away on a strange jam while Eno warps and crafts the overall sound is a revelation if you’ve never seen it. It brings to mind modern DJs backing up rappers, but what Eno does is manipulation of sound as it happens, something that’s still seldom practiced on entire bands.
The roots of Eno’s current reputation as the ultimate studio guru are in full flower in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and it’s a long (perhaps too long) and spellbinding trip, with plenty of depth for fans and explanation for newcomers.
Eno was, in his behind-the-scenes way, as important as the Beatles to rock music. Getting an inside glimpse of his early career is highly entertaining, and it’s also essential to understanding what the term “producer” means at its finest. One hopes a sequel examining Eno’s activities after 1977 is to follow.
