In February of 1981, Brian Eno and David Byrne released My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, which paired the funky African polyrhythmic music both were so intrigued by with snippets from radio broadcasts and Middle Eastern singing. The album was both a prequel and a sequel to the 1980 Talking Heads album Remain In Light. Though completed before Remain In Light, Bush Of Ghost was delayed because of a legal problem with one of the voices used.
Along with "Moonlight In Glory", "Regiment" is one of the songs that made Eno happiest.
"I think my synth solo on Regiment is possibly the best I've ever played," he told Melody Maker. "People think it's a Fripp guitar rip-off, but it really is me on synthesizer.
"In fact I remember Fripp once saying something like I was the best guitar player he'd heard, and I didn't even play guitar."
Both Eno and Byrne wanted to make an album that made people dance and connect on a spiritual level.
"We are both fairly disenchanted with ordinary song structures - the voice you record is invested with your own personality," Eno said. "What we wanted was to create something more mysterious, and by taking voices out of context, but featuring them dominantly as the main vocal performance, you can go on to create meaning by surrounding the voice with a musical mood."
In some cases they use sounds from a New Orleans preacher, an exorcism, readers of the Koran and, in the above example, a Lebanese singer named Dunya Yusin. The album is named after a novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola
Years ahead of his time, Rolling Stone's Jon Pareles wrote "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is an undeniably awesome feat of tape editing and rhythmic ingenuity. But, like most found art, it raises stubborn questions about context, manipulation and cultural imperialism."
In June of 1979 Robert Fripp released Exposure, his debut solo album. Though he was hardly solo, with musical contributions from Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Peter Hamill, Terre Roche and, perhaps most surprisingly, Daryl Hall.
Fripp dissolved King Crimson following the release of 1974's Red and eventually moved to New York City in 1977 where he checked in on the punk rock scene. He plays guitar on Blondie's "Fade Away and Radiate" and produced albums by The Roches Peter Gabriel and an as yet unreleased record by Daryl Hall. 1977 is also the year he played those twin guitar solos on David Bowie's "Heroes".
Fripp was obsessed with the year 1981. At one point he was convinced the world would that year so in 1979 he established a campaign he called "The Drive to 1981", three years of very hard and very public hustling.
Exposure is exhibit A.
"'Exposure' deals with tweaking the vocabulary of, for want of a better word, 'rock' music," he told Melody Maker's Allan Jones. " It investigates the vocabulary and, hopefully, expands the possibilities of expression and introduces a more sophisticated emotional dynamic than one would normally find within 'rock.'"
Exposure was originally supposed to be part of a trilogy along with Peter Gabriel's second album and Hall's Sacred Songs. First RCA rejected the Hall album. Then they asked that Hall's vocals be removed from all but two tracks on Exposure. (You Burn Me Up" and "North Star")
Fripp flew Peter Hammill of Van der Graff Generator to New York .
"He came into the studio dressed in a rather svelte and smooth fashion, took off his nice cloths and got into a smelly dressing-gown, poured himself a liberal dose from the bottle of cognac he'd brought with him, and went in there and started delivering the goods. Great man. Very nice man. He said that when he began singing he wanted to be the vocal equivalent of Hendrix. Conceptually, he was right on the beam. And he delivers, I think."
Though it may not have been the album he originally envisioned, Fripp was very pleased with Exposure.
"As a whole it's so good. So good. I think probably, in terms of the genre, it's conceivably the best record in the past five years, perhaps longer. I don't think of it as a 'progressive' rock album. I think in a sense it rises above ALL categories. In a sense it's a compendium, none of the components are in themselves innovatory, but nothing is dated."
Many of the lyrics are written by Fripp's girlfriend, an American therapist named Joanna Walton. As he explained to Canadian college radio DJ Dick Tooley
She's in fact a native New Yorker, and one level Exposure has to do with the kind of way a man and woman relate to each other in a contemporary situation, trying to be free of all the archetypes and so on. And how difficult that might be. So You Burn Me Up, I'm A Cigarette is my love song to Joanna. I May Not Have Had Enough Of Me, But I've Had Enough Of You, Chicago and North Star are her love songs to me.
Exposure received a rare 5 star review in one of the Rolling Stone Record Guides and a B+ from Robert Christgau who wrote
Fripp has always been a bit of a jerk, but over the years he's figured out what to do with the talent that goes along with his affliction. This concept album earns its conceit, orchestrating bits and pieces of art-rock wisdom--from punk to Frippertronics, from King Crimson to singer-songwriter--into a fluent whole. Maybe soon he'll get smart enough to forget about J.G. Bennett. "It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering" isn't exactly big news, and old Crimson fans will swallow side two without the caveat
In 1985 when I was a program director at my college radio station I chose this six year old album for one of our Classic Album hours and was actually stopped on the street and thanked for the choice.
“Brian (Eno) and I did play a number of ‘art pranks’ on the band. They
really didn’t go down too well though".
-David Bowie
On May 18, 1979 David Bowie released Lodger. It is often considered the last of the fabled Berlin Trilogy recorded with Brian Eno even though the album was recorded in New York and Montreux where Bowie had homes. Still, Eno's impact on the album can be heard to an even greater degree than on Low and Heroes, especially in the way his Oblique Strategies cards encouraged accidents in the studio. Not all of the musicians enjoyed the experiments. Carlos Alomar called some of Eno's ideas "bullshit...I totally, totally resisted it"
Adrian Belew played guitar on most of the tracks:
“When I arrived they had about twenty tracks already done: bass, drums, rhythm guitar, but no vocals. They said, ‘Adrian, we’re not going to let you hear these songs. We want you to go into the studio and play accidentally – whatever occurs to you’ ... I would just suddenly hear ‘One, two, three, four’ in the headphones and a track would start ... I didn’t even know what keys the songs were in or anything. The one particular song where I remember I lucked out on was ‘Red Sails’, ‘cos I started the guitar feeding back and it was right in key. Anyway, they would let me do this maybe two or three times and by then I might know something about the song, so it was over.”
Some of the songs on Side One reflect Bowie's travels. "African Night Flight" is about a group of German fighter pilots Bowie met in Kenya. "Yassassin" combines Turkish melodies with a reggae beat. "Red Sails" sounds like Neu recording a song set in the South China Seas. Side Two contains the hits ( "Boys Keep Swinging" and "D.J." as well as the final single from Lodger, "Look Back In Anger") . David Mallet returns to direct the music video.
RCA exec Mel Ilberman came out with the early spin on Lodger:
“It would be fair to call it Bowie’s Sergeant Pepper, a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life’s pressures and technology.”
But, of course, record execs don't write the reviews. Writing for Rolling Stone Greil Marcus hoped for something bigger on the even of the 80's:
Lodger might have been an event, if only as a record we would someday look back on as work that mapped the territory between past and future. Instead, it’s just another LP, and one of his weakest at that: scattered, a footnote to “Heroes“, an act of marking time.
Robert Christgau was more taken with the album, giving Lodger a grade of A-:
I used to think Bowie was middlebrow, but now I'd prefer to call him post-middlebrow--a habitue of prematurely abandoned modernist space. Musically, these fragments of anomie don't seem felt, and lyrically they don't seem thought through. But that's part of their charm--the way they confound categories of sensibility and sophistication is so frustrating it's satisfying, at least if you have your doubts about the categories. Less satisfying, actually, than the impact of the record as a whole.
In May of 1979 Sire Records released the soundtrack to Rock N Roll High School, months before the August release date. The album kicks off with four Ramones performances including the title track, "I Want You Around", and a five song Ramones medley. There is also the curious teaming with Sire labelmates The Paley Brothers on a cover of Ritchie Valens's "Come On, Let's Go", recorded when Joey Ramone was too sick for the session. The Paley Brothers needed the career boost but it did nothing to help the power poppers make the charts. They broke up later in the year.
The film itself is entertaining thanks to PJ Soles and the Ramones, who are so clearly out of their element. Dee Dee needed 40 takes to finally master the line "Oh boy, pizza!"
The soundtrack features more than The Ramones. It serves as a great introduction to some superb artists like Nick Lowe, Eddie + The Hot Rods, and Devo.
And the soundtrack likely introduced legions of future music snobs to Brian Eno, although 1977's "Energy Fools the Magician" probably didn't get much attention in this context.
The album also features two hits : Alice Cooper's "School's Out" and "Smokin' In The Boy's Room" by Brownsville Station". And from 1974, there's Todd Rundgren's ballad, "A Dream Goes On Forever", a song that may have been overlooked from that quirky double album Todd.
In December of 1978 Antilles Records released No New York, a compilation of 16 songs by four artists, produced by Brian Eno who was in New York at the time to produce the sophomore Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food. The New York no wave scene consisted of bands that were experimenting with dissonance, noise, and elements of free jazz and funk. The bands Eno agreed to producer were The Contortions ( whose "Flip Your Face" has been cited by Steve Albini has his favorite song); Teenage Jesus and the Jerks ( featuring Lydia Lunch); Mars and D.N.A. ( featuring singer/guitarist Arto Lindsay). All four bands were friends and shared the same rehearsal loft. Each band had one day to record. Eno was mostly hands off . Lydia Lunch remembers seeing him reading a newspaper while they were recording. Eno did add some echo and compression to the guitars on Mars' "Helen Forsdale". The album has been recorded for Island Records but, upon hearing the noisy, dissonant sounds of No New York, they passed.
Critics did their best to celebrate the album. Robert Christgau gave No New York a B+ writing
Especially with Adele Bertei on organ, the Contortions can be a great band, extending Ornette Coleman's Dancing in Your Head into real rock and roll territory, and it's exciting to be able to hear them minus James Chance's stupid stage shtick. (Maybe they'll become a studio group, like Steely Dan.) But the rest of this four-band compilation has the taint of marginal avant-gardism: interesting in occasional doses, but not as significant as it pretends to be. Arto Lindsay's hysterical blooze singing holds DNA together--wish they were on side one with the Contortions. I like the relentless music of Mars's "Helen Fordsdale" (the words are incomprehensible even with a lyric sheet, which if the lyric sheet is any indication is just as well) and the paranoid poetry of "Puerto Rican Ghost." And although in the wake of Chance's theme song, "I Can't Stand Myself," I've begun to tolerate Lydia Lunch droning "The leaves are always dead" etc., she credits herself with too much maturity by publishing as Infantunes. Abortunes would be more like it.‘
Rolling Stone's Tom Carson adds While Eno initiated the current project, he doesn’t seem to have put much energy into it: his production is unusually restrained. On the whole, he appears more taken with the basic idea rather than the actual substance of the music, and such priorities seem perfectly appropriate.
In October of 1978 Brian Eno released Music For Films, a collection of musical scraps and sketches from previous recording projects that had an original 1976 run of 500 copies that were distributed to film production companies. Among the more interesting tracks on the 1978 album are "Two Rapid Formations", an outtake from Another Green World featuring Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks and the viola of John Cale and "M386", a slowed down reimagining of Another Green World's "Skysaw".
Although it comes across as fragmented, Music For Films did make Eno money, with many of the tracks finding their way on to movie and tv documentary soundtracks over the years.
"One of them has been used about twenty-five times in different programmes,’ he told Mojo’s Andy Gill. ‘It’s about thirty seconds long and it took me thirty seconds to make.’
Within weeks,another Eno production would hit record stores. One that couldn't be more different: a collection of underground no-wave rock band called No New York.
Raised on comic books and science fiction flicks, I was one of those teenagers who, upon hearing Devo's cover version of "Satisfaction", had to buy the debut album by the Akron quintet. I've already written about the band's interactions with producer Brian Eno.
It occurs to me today that the album is perfectly sequenced. Select "shuffle" and the entire thing sounds nerve racking jumble, anxious to a fault.
But playing it loud in my dorm room in 1978 and 79 gave me "the ability to torment".
Released when synthesizers were instruments reserved for disco and albums were reserved for thoughtful and emotional sharing by Californians, Q: Are We Not Men? confounded the critics below.
From Tom Carson, writing for Rolling Stone : What's most impressive about Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is its authority: Devo presents their dissociated, chillingly cerebral music as a definitive restatement of rock and roll's aims and boundaries in the Seventies. The band's cover version of "Satisfaction," for instance, with its melody line almost completely erased and the lyrics delivered in a yelping, droogy chant to mechanical rhythms, at first comes across as an intentional travesty, a typical New Wave rejection of the old-fart generation. But what Devo is really doing is reshaping the old message into their own terminology -- claiming one of the greatest anthems of the Sixties, with all its wealth of emotional associations, for their own time. It's a startling gesture, yet a surprisingly convincing one.
The same could be said for the whole album. The primitive guitar work and pulsing beat suggest a gamut of early Sixties borrowings, but the group is also reminiscent (the vocals especially) of some of the artier New Wave bands such as Wire or the B-52s. Yet all of these influences are flattened into an arid, deliberately fragmented science-fiction landscape. There's not an ounce of feeling anywhere, and the only commitment is to the distancing aesthetic of the put-on.
I suspect, though, that in adopting this style, Devo would argue that they're simply being good journalists -- that the futuristic deadpan comedy of their stance reflects the current pop-culture reality. "Too Much Paranoias," for example, starts out as a mocking, jarring little ode to dread that's genuinely frightening, then turns into an overt joke in which the chief villain is apparently a McDonald's hamburger ("Hold the pickles hold the lettuce," in a spasmodic shriek), but the joke is equally scary. And the group's attitude remains poker-faced throughout. In the lobotomized anthems that end side one, "Mongoloid" (a sort of bastard cousin to the Ramones' "Pinhead," with a great, stuttering guitar line) and "Jocko Homo," it's impossible to tell whether these guys are satirizing robotlike regimentation or glorifying it. The answer seems to be that there isn't any difference. Brian Eno's production is the perfect complement to Devo's music. Eno thickens the band's stop-and-go rhythms with crisp, sharp layers of percussive sound, full of jagged edges and eerie effects that whip in and out of phase at dizzying speeds. On every cut, Devo seems to know exactly what they want and how to achieve it almost effortlessly. Such apparently random strategies as "What Goes On"-style organ in "Mongoloid" or the near-Byrds-like guitar intro to "Gut Feeling" coalesce into a barbed, dislocated texture that draws you in even while it sets your nerves on edge.
Though the group's abstract-expressionistic patterns of sound are closely related to Eno's own brand of experimentation (not to mention the recent work of David Bowie, who one once slated to produce this LP) and to a host of other art rockers, Devo lacks most of Eno's warmth and much of Bowie's flair for mechanized melodrama. For all its idiosyncrasies, the music here is utterly impersonal. This Ohio band either treats humanity as just another junky, mass-cult artifact to be summarily disposed of, or else ignores it completely. Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is a brittle, small masterpiece of Seventies pop irony, but its shriveling, ice-cold absurdism might not define the Seventies as much as jump the gun on the Eighties.
From Robert Christgau's B+ graded review:
If this isn't Kiss for college kids, then it's Meat Loaf for college kids who are too sophisticated to like Meat Loaf. Aside from music per se, the Kiss connection is in their cartoonishness--Devo's robot moves create distance, a margin of safety, the way Kiss's makeup does. But the Meat Loaf connection is deeper, because this is real midnight-movie stuff--the antihumanist sci-fi silliness, the reveling in decay, the thrill of being in a cult that could attract millions and still seem like a cult, since 200 million others will never even get curious. (It's no surprise to be told that a lot of their ideas come from Eraserhead, but who wants to go see Eraserhead to make sure?) What makes this group worthy of attention at all--and now we're back with Kiss, though at a more complex level--is the catchy, comical, herky-jerky rock and roll they've devised out of the same old basic materials. In small doses it's as good as novelty music ever gets, and there isn't a really bad cut on this album. But it leads nowhere.
On July 21, 1978 Talking Heads released More Songs About Buildings and Food, kicking off a four year association with producer Brian Eno. With Eno's ability to use the studio as an instrument, Talking Heads moved from the spare sounds of ...77 to fuller far more interesting arrangements. Eno and band members also shared a growing interest in African music .
Some fun facts:
Eno corralled the entire secretarial pool at Compass Point Studios in Nassau to join Tina Weymouth (as Tina and Typing Pool) to sing on "The Good Thing".
Among the Enoisms: the dub-influenced repeat echo on Chris Frantz's drum on 'Warning Sign". There are sonic treatments on every song really.
Among the proposed album titles: Oh! What a Big Country, Tina and the Typing Pool and, from Jerry Harrison, Fear of Music. It was Tina's asking her husband whether anyone would really buy more songs about buildings and food that they found the title.
Like a dealer playing three card monte, I am constantly alternating what tops my list of favorite Talking Heads albums. More Songs is certainly one of the band's peaks. It broke the band in the US, peaking at 29 on the Billboard charts.
Now for some contemporaneous reviews : here's Ken Emerson writing for Rolling Stone :
On More Songs about Buildings and Food, David Byrne sings the word feelingssssss with a puppy's yelp that turns into a snaky hiss. Even the ostensibly jubilant "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" hurtles to an abrupt coitus interruptus: "But first, show me what you can do!" If, in one song, Byrne chides the girls for ignoring the boys ("Girls, they're getting into abstract analysis"), in most of the others, Byrne himself seems frantically to be staving off amorous involvement: "I've got to get to work now" (the traditional male equivalent of "Not tonight, honey -- I've got a headache"). Indeed, the word work recurs throughout the record as the singer both pushes and parodies the Protestant ethic: (Not since the Four Freshmen has there been a group as Protestant and downright preppie as Talking Heads.) Love wreaks havoc on the rational, workaday world, and David Byrne's comic cold shoulder recalls the more strenuous resistance of Joni Mitchell, so many of whose songs have expressed a similar fear that love will deflect her artistic career.
Love and work, of course, is what Freud said all of us need, but on More Songs about Buildings and Food, Byrne appears able to imagine the proper equilibrium only in "Found a Job," wherein a bickering couple's relationship improves while collaborating on television scripts. He sings about this improvement with considerable sarcasm, though, and elsewhere on the LP, love and logic are at loggerheads. The tension between the two, like the similar tension Bryan Ferry creates between sentimentality and sophistication, is excruciating, and when it snaps in the album's final song, "The Big Country" (a title taken from a line in Ferry's "Prairie Rose"), Byrne is bounced into the void. Flying over the United States, he looks down with regret and revulsion at life below: "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." Yet, at the same time, he's "tired of traveling" and wants "to be somewhere." Like a hijacked airplane that no nation will permit to land,the singer seems doomed to fly until his fuel is exhausted and he plummets to a fiery death.
Sound gloomy? Well it would be if Byrne didn't see hilarity in tight-assed hysteria and laugh at his Puritan pratfalls. Or if coproducer Brian Eno, once Bryan Ferry's colleague in Roxy Music, hadn't crammed so much humor and energy into each song. The cerebral, brittle sound of Talking Heads: 77 has been fleshed out with supple synthesizer fills, and Chris Frantz' drums and the synthesized percussion leap boldly out of the mix. Almost every cut has a percussive gimmick -- handclaps, clattering rim shots, a heavily echoed backbeat -- that rivets the attention, punctuating the melody or hammering home the words.
These arrangements bustle without sounding cluttered. Whenever the agitated jangle of guitars starts to nag, it slips into something mellifluous. Thus "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls" shuttles back and forth between the staccato attack of a mid-Sixties garage band and the playful lilt of a nursery rhyme. "Stay Hungry" manages to meld James Brown, the early Beatles ("Things We Said Today") and a "progressive"-rock synthesizer. The eclecticism of More Songs about Buildings and Food -- its witty distillations of disco and reggae rhythms, its reconciliation of "art" and punk rock -- is masterful. The music represents a triumph over diversity, while the words spell out defeat by disparities between mind and body, head and heart.
This, presumably, is why Talking Heads make music -- and superb music at that. Because talk is cheap.
Robert Christgau of the Village Voice gave the album an A, writing :
Here the Heads become a quintet in an ideal producer-artist collaboration -- Eno contributes/interferes just enough. Not only does his synthesized lyricism provide flow and continuity, it also makes the passive, unpretentious technological mysticism he shares with the band real in the aural world. In fact, there is so much beautiful music (and so much funky music) on this album that I'll take no more complaints about David Byrne's voice. Every one of these eleven songs is a positive pleasure, and on every one the tension between Byrne's compulsive flights and the sinuous rock bottom of the music is the focus. I have more doubts than ever about Byrne's post-hippie work-ethic positivism -- on one new song, he uses the phrase "wasting precious time" and means it -- but if it goes with music this eccentric and compelling I'm damn sure going to hear him out.
Jim Harrington adds this observation in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die :
The singer's eccentric, smartly self-conscious lyrics remain at the forefront of "With Our Love" and "The Good Thing," but they have to elbow for space against the increasingly complex rhythm work of bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz. If ...77 was primarily for your head, More Songs About Buildings And Food was equally intended for the feet as it boogied through classical minimalism, spacey disco, and African funk
Sure David Bowie called it "unremittingly dull", but Brian Eno's follow up to Discreet Music, Ambient 1: Music For Airports, released in 1978, has sold more than 200,000 copies . In the liner notes, Eno stated the manifesto; "It must be as ignorable as it is interesting" and "induce calm and a space to think".
I've been using it to drown out fellow office workers and train passengers for many years.
A nervous flyer, Eno believed the muzak streamed through airport terminals only made fliers feel more anxious.
The first of the four tracks consists of Robert Wyatt on piano who was instructed to play spontaneously:
Brian just sort of got me to improvise at the piano for a while and chose what to use of it later. I was surprised and delighted with his use of what I did – how he created a sustained mood. I didn’t know what he would do with what I’d played . . . I think the results were brilliant, pure Brian – great stuff!
Said Eno:
I had four musicians in the studio, and we were doing some improvising exercises that I'd suggested. I couldn't hear the musicians very well at the time, and I'm sure they couldn't hear each other, but listening back, later, I found this very short section of tape where two pianos, unbeknownst to each other, played melodic lines that interlocked in an interesting way. To make a piece of music out of it, I cut that part out, made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half speed, so the instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very slow.
"2/1" has vocal performances by Eno, Christa Fast, Christine Gomez and Inge Zeininger :
There are sung notes, sung by three women and myself. One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank's studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again. So this is the piece moving along in time. Your experience of the piece of course is a moment in time, there. So as the piece progresses, what you hear are the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. The basic elements in that particular piece never change. They stay the same. But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety.
In Michael Bloom's Rolling Stone review he called the album ‘aesthetic white noise... In theory, none of these pieces end: the loop can continue, with eternal variation, as long as the airport is standing. But whether or not they ever play this stuff over the loudspeakers at LaGuardia, Brian Eno has succeeded once again in provoking his fans.’
(The album would be played at LaGuardia for an installation at the Marine Terminal in 1980)
Robert Christgau gave the album a B+ review, writing:
Although I'm no frequenter of airports, I've found that these four swatches of modestly "ambient" minimalism have real charms as general-purpose calmatives. But I must also report that they've fared unevenly against specific backgrounds: sex (neutral to arid), baseball (pleasant, otiose), dinner at my parents' (conversation piece), abstract writing (useful but less analgesic than Discreet Music or my David Behrman record). Also, I'm still waiting for "1/1" to resolve the "Three Blind Mice" theme.
Eno also spent 1978 working on new albums by Talking Heads, David Bowie and by the No Wave artists of New York City. The Devo debut he produced would be out by the end of the Summer. In other words, we certainly haven't heard the last from Mr Eno this year.
In February of 1978 what sounded like a dream pairing of new wave art rockers Devo with producer Brian Eno was turning into a nightmare for the latter. Eno would later describe Devo as "anal", neutering almost every attempt to do anything other than replicate the demos. Eno described the situation to Andy Gill of Mojo :
‘They were a terrifying group of people to work with because they were so unable to experiment . . . I’d be sitting there at the desk, and there are EQs, echo sends, all those kinds of things, and my hand would sort of sneak up to put a bit of a treatment on something, and I could feel Jerry Casale bristling behind me. It was awful! He would stand behind me all the time, then lean over and say, “Why are you doing that?” ’
You have to listen closely for Eno-isms on Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo!. The pinging sounds at the beginning of "Shrivel Up" and some of the effects on "Space Junk" made it past Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, who later admitted :
"In retrospect we were overly resistant to Eno’s ideas . . . I’d kind of like to hear what the album would have sounded like if we’d been more open to Eno’s suggestions. But in those days we thought we knew everything.’
For more on the sessions at Conny Plank studios in snowbound Germany, there's the following article, written by Jon Savage for Sounds Magazine.
ARE WE NOT READY?
Devo: the phenomenon and where they're coming from.
The first thing you notice on arrival at Cologne Airport is the modernity and organisation. No baggage queues. No prefab ramshackle buildings. Instead you get sweeping architecture and lavish decoration: glass walls, marble, straight lines, expensive consumer items in glass display cages. If you're bored, you can find a chair with a small TV set on one arm: just insert pfennigs to watch.
Cologne itself was largely flattened by Allied bombing in WWII. The reconstruction of the town around it results in grey, bland uniformity. Not depressing, just hardly there. Not dissimilar to Britain, except Germany seems further on down the Affluence Road: "A fake chandelier in every living room!"
Conny's Studio is a converted Victorian farm on the outskirts of Wolperath, a small village thirty kilometres east-south-east of Cologne. It's high up and snow-bound: as a greeting, the weather turns and remains its coldest for many winters. The studio itself is a converted stable, its unpretentious façade hiding what would be one of the best computerised desks in the world.
Conny - Konrad Plank - has worked since the late '60s producing bands such as kraftwerk in their earlier days, Neu!, Cluster (with and without Eno), La Düsseldorf and Harmonia (Michael Rother and Cluster). His knowledge about this end of German music is virtually encyclopaedic. It was here that Eno mixed down four tracks of Before And After Science last summer: both are now working on Devo's first album.
Devo themselves are, to say the least, in an interesting position. No record contract, no production contract (as everyone is at pains to emphasise), no manager - Jerry Casale handles all that - and apparently little finance, yet they're in the middle of recording an album in an excellently equipped German Studio with Brian Eno producing and David Bowie expected to appear.
Thus far, in the UK at any rate, Devo amounts to two 45s, occasional adulatory press, and a hefty cult. As for now, they're a media phenomenon, a gimmick almost, rather than a band. Sometimes too much press can be counterproductive, but these guys are totally ready for it, all the same. Jerry Casale (bass) and Mark Motherbaugh (synthesizer) have been working together for about five years, while the group as it is now - with Jim Mothersbaugh (guitar), Bob Casale (guitar) and Alan Myers (drums) - have been together for about eighteen months. Hardly overnight sensations.
But there's a lot of pressure all at once. The pressures of moving out from Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, playing other American cities, emerging into the global spotlight as Bowie takes them under his wing. And apart from the simple acclimatisation from the USA - this being their first time in Europe - they're here working what amounts to twelve hours a day in freezing conditions. It's hardly the most relaxed situation.
So who are these people? Devo aren't exactly going to let it all out. This fits in with their chosen image: a corporate unit, with the individual members and their history unimportant - for instance, no pictures were to be taken of them without their Devo suits. It made sense: the strength of Devo as a phenomenon so far has been their consistent, brilliant presentation of the group as a total package: music, visuals, image, ideology, language, films - each referring to itself and each other.
That said, it's possible to reveal that Devo are in fact human beings. Most communication is with Jerry or Mark, the others being friendly but low profile. Jerry is the principal organisational force - he's taken on the chores of a manager - while Mark could be the spark at the bottom, being responsible, if nothing else, for the pinhead routines and the synthesizer that's at the root of their sound. "It's one of Mark's specialities, projecting insanity."
Both Jerry and Mark are creators of the band's visuals: familiar elements wrenched out of context, or once-used images re-presented in a different form. They've both been in contact, in various degrees, with the Image Bank, a Canadian art organisation which could be superficially described as working in similar areas. The band are very American, clever, and a paradoxical mixture of sophistication and naivety.
In all this, the music is easily forgotten, but shouldn't be. Conny's Studio is the first time the band have been let loose on twenty-four tracks. The two singles were recorded on a four-track, Mongoloid on a Revox in their garage in December 1976. There was no heating: the weather was so cold that Mark played with his gloves on. It could be why it sounds slow.
The 45s are being re-recorded for the album, and even in their unmixed state the versions are very different, Mongoloid for instance featuring a drum snap/slap nowhere to be found on the original. The album will probably contain twelve tracks, including stage favourites Uncontrollable Urge, Too Much Paranoias, and maybe Gut Feeling. Studio time is booked until early March, when the group plan to come to Britain to play a date at the Roundhouse on March 11.
The studio process in itself is simply unglamorous and very hard work. The group had gone through the first flush of getting most of the basic tracks down, and were in the middle period of getting the tiny elements right, adding overdubs, before the final remixing could begin. This involves constant listening and re-listening, constant decisions as to the prominence the various elements are to take in the mix, quite apart from the choice of the elements themselves.
Eno's role as producer is that of intermediary between man and tape, an interpreter almost: with twenty-four tracks also, organisation is all important. It's a difficult task, to balance the almost scientific quality of running through a tape for the hundredth time with the feeling that must remain. So far the results were impressive...
The interview took place in between breakfast and lunch in the studio. It was the hardest I've ever done. I felt like the fly in the ointment rather than the fly on the wall. Barring Jerry, the group didn't want to talk in an interview situation, and the atmosphere of unwillingness and suspicion was strong. It was insisted that all the group were present, but unless stated, all Devo replies are by Jerry Casale.
Can we start with why you came out to Germany to record?
"We were told to. We didn't know what we wanted. It was just as easy to be told where to come. It was through the Bowie connection, but we could go further than him, right now, if you know what I mean."
Can we talk about the production on the singles?
"It was a combination of our degree of organisation and the amount of money we had with what was available. So it represented really a random point in time. Mongoloid was recorded in December 1976, and Satisfaction in August/September 1977.
I was puzzled by the cover art of [The Rolling Stones'] Satisfaction - no doubt the idea...
"Yes. It was a parody of slickness. Those glasses were 3D glasses. Just Hollywood. A parody of sexuality - plastic tits..."
So what's the situation now with your record contract?
"Mmm. We don't want to go too far into it, but don't be surprised if you see a big WB on the album jacket."
There's that whole argument that when you enter the business you get sucked in by it...
"I don't even think that's a question: you get sucked in. But if the choice is between being sucked in and not being sucked in, I'd rather be sucked... I really think that's up to us. That's what becomes the creative process at that point - the creative process then is so inexorably connected with business that it's impossible to separate them."
Can you explain the idea of Devolution?
"Devolution's a big idea about the way things are. Everyone has a big idea about the way things are whether they admit it or not: a lot of people's ideas masquerade themselves as non-ideas, which we find the most dishonest. Devo just has the biggest, best and most interesting ideas about reality that allow people to discover things, which is exactly what other ideas don't allow. Other ideas begin by ignoring what's there so their idea doesn't account for the whole picture. It's like when people thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe, but the movement of certain planets didn't really match because their idea of what was happening was, at basis, wrong. And when the premise is wrong, everything else that follows is sick."
Do you feel that our culture is accelerating almost to the point of implosion?
"It's in the centre of the most highly industrialised part of the United States. It's hilly, grey, like culturally stripped. There's one thing different about Akron, though, and that's that it's safe. It made it really easy to just watch everything happening that was going on everywhere else but not really to be in it, but be aware of it. It wasn't so isolated that we didn't know what was happening."
With Devolution, what you're saying is we've reached any limit of expansion?
"Right. The consumer attitude can only go so far. When you've eaten everything on the plate, what's next? Goo, Yeah - Evo/Devo, consume/shrivel up. The idea that people have of themselves and their purpose on the planet has got to change."
Devo to me is an example of a strong undercurrent, a wish to express 1978 disorientation, to break down the way we think...
"The breaking down musically has occurred - punk and Devo are here to mutate. Devo's just the clean-up squad of the '80s, the Smart Patrol."
When did you start playing outside of Akron and Cleveland?
"When they wouldn't let us play anymore. April 1977. We went to CBGB's in New York."
What was that like?
"Perfect. We got on stage at two o'clock in the morning"
Mark: "Got into a fight with The Dead Boys".
"The crowd loved it. It had nothing to do with music - it was the aliens against the spuds. The Dead boys attacked us onstage during Jocko Homo..."
You must have really gotten to them?
"Sure. They took it personally. 'If the spud fits, wear it.' And the crowd loved it... we continued to play all through the fight and ended up looking good. Mark offered himself up first, being in the front line."
(Tape 2, with Jerry Casale the next day.)
What was involvement with Iggy?
"It was probably a superficial involvement. Iggy's always in a plane slightly obtuse to any kind of tangible relationship. He drifts in and out of focus."
Could you tell me more about the origin of Devo?
"Devolution was a combination of a Wonder Woman comic book and the movie Island Of Lost Souls, the original, with Bela Lugosi, Charles Laughton. That was various things I'd been thinking about - devolution, of going ahead to go back, things falling apart, entropy. It grabbed every piece of information and gave it some kind of cohesive presence - it was a package. Just as our music and our identity exist as a technique rather than a style."
There seems to be a new way of approaching rock'n'roll: a few bands are emerging with their own ideology, package.
"Yeah. It's the next logical step. It will ensure the existence of vital rock'n'roll. If rock'n'roll is going to maintain its position, its purpose, then the emphasis has to switch, otherwise it'll become a vestigial organ, meaningless."
You're in an interesting position now.
"Yes. We're like stored energy about to become kinetic."
Devo appear sure they have the answer. They are impressive, and make good, clear-headed sense, although some of what they say isn't so omniscient as it seems, and veers on occasions towards sweeping generalisations. It could be the arrogance of pressure, paranoia, or everyone bidding for you on a world scale, or it could be merely to provoke, to polarise. It doesn't matter now.
My french isn't strong enough to pick up the fact that this goovey song from Brel's final album is an offensive, anti-Flemish tirade. Guess I just like it for the atmosphere.
Brian Eno : R.A.F.
This B side to "Kings Lead Hat" anticipates the Eno/Byrne sound montage recordings of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by using sound elements from a Baader Meinhof ransom message made by public telephone at the time of the Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking. You can find this on Eno's Vocal box set.
William Onyeabor : Ride On Baby
This one popped up on shuffle while I was driving today and I couldn't figure out what album this was from until I snuck a peek at my phone at a stop sign. It comes from the first album by Nigerian one man band synth master William Onyeabor, one of David Byrne's favorite musicians.
Eddie Hazel : I Want You ( She's So Heavy)
1977's greatest Beatles cover comes from Parliament-Funkadelic lead guitarist Eddie Hazel's Game, Dames and Guitar Thangs album. Nine minutes of bliss.
