In March of 1980 RCA Records finally released Sacred Songs, the album Daryl Hall (of Hall and Oates fame) recorded with King Crimson's Robert Fripp three years earlier. The album is considered part of a loose trilogy of Fripp productions, along with Fripp's 1979 album Exposure ( on which Hall sang) and Peter Gabriel's second album, Scratch. Why did it sit in the RCA vaults for so long? You can blame the record company which didn't believe the album --full of Frippertronics and other art rock explorations--was commercial enough.
Though after one listen to "Babs and Bads" I'm convinced a cut down version would have received plenty of airplay.
Frustrated by record label politics, both Hall and Fripp made their displeasure known in interviews.
"Daryl is a remarkable singer," Fripp told Best magazine's Jean-Gilles Blum in 1979. "It is too bad RCA is limiting the scope of his career. As for Hall and Oates, they are a very profitable group. They limit their format and possibilities on purpose as part of a commercial compromise they accept."
That's one of those statements that begins with a complement and ends with a knife stab. By '79 Fripp was also angry with Hall.
"When you get into a relationship or a collaboration with a musician, it's almost like a romantic relationship – and that's the best way I could put it. You get into somebody's heart. And Robert, I think, had visions that he was going to steal me away from John (Oates)," Hall told Pitchfork in 2007. "And I think that he thought that we were going to work together. That was never my intention, and because of all the difficulties we had, that was his response to all that. I understand where he's coming from. That was his way of spraying out his frustration."
Hall would say the Sacred Songs experience is why he fell out of love with the music business. But Hall and Oates were just getting ready to own the first half of the 1980's. With Voices, released that Summer, they would score four hits including the US#1 "Kiss On My List" and the US#5 "You Make My Dreams". That album would spend 100 weeks in the Billboard 200, briefly lifting Sacred Songs up to #58.
In March of 1980 Robert Fripp's sabbatical from King Crimson bore new fruit with the album God Save the Queen/Under Heavy Manners. The follow-up to Exposure consists of atmospheric Frippertronic instrumentals on Side A. Side B has what Fripp called "Discotronics", more tape loops but this time with a beat. With "Under Heavy Manners", we even get lyrics sung by David Byrne (billed as Absalm el Habib), as future touring head Busta Jones plays bass:
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.
On April 6 1979, The Roches released the self-titled debut album. Produced by Robert Fripp, this is a sparse album that puts the sisters harmonies, their wit and songwriting chops in the spotlight. Fripp recruited some of his King Crimson bandmates to help, but his only memorable involvement comes in the form of a guitar solo on the album's most beautiful track, "Hammond Song".
As the sisters explain in the opening track, "We", Maggie and Terre has been performing together for ten years ( even adding backing vocals on Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon). They recorded Seductive Reasoning in 1975, before sister Suzzy joined them. I've always believed there's magic in the harmonies of singing sisters and this album offers some great examples ( especially "Quitting Time").
The Roches were best appreciated on stage. I caught them in New Orleans in the 80's with my sister who became a lifelong fan. If you've never seen them, you might find their songs too quirky. I gave the album to my friend's wife for her birthday and she only listened to it once as far as I can tell. But back in the day, the critics were taken with the sisters. The album finished #11 in the Village Voice Pazz + Jop poll, whose founder, Robert Christgau, gave The Roches a grade of A. He wrote:
Robert Fripp's austere production of this witty, pretty music not only abjures alien instrumentation but also plays up the quirks of the Roches' less-than-commanding voices and acoustic guitars. Thus it underscores their vulnerability and occasional desperation and counteracts their flirtations with the coy and the fey. The result is not a perfect record, but rather one whose imperfections are lovingly mitigated. Replete with memorable melodies, heartbreaking harmonies, wise words, and lotsa laffs.
The Roches would team up again with Robert Fripp on their third album, 1982's Keep On Doing, another one I would recommend. They cut a lovely version of "Come Softly To Me" on 1985's Another World. Maggie Roche, the band's best songwriter and humorist; the one who sang pretty and low, passed away in 2017. She was 65.
On June 1, 1978 Peter Gabriel released his second solo album, known by many fans as "Scratch" for its Hipgnosis cover. Produced by Robert Fripp, who plays guitar with future King Crimson bandmate Tony Levin on bass and the E Street's Roy Bittan on keyboards, the album has a monochromatic feel. Front loaded with the best songs (including "D.I.Y.", which may be a recognition of punk rock's influences) the album loses its energy on the second side. The best was yet to come.
Dave Marsh wrote the Rolling Stone magazine review:
Peter Gabriel's first solo album promised some sort of reconciliation between art rock and the rock mainstream: it had the sense of a breakthrough in negotiations between warring factions. Its two most direct hard-rock songs, "Modern Love" and "Solsbury Hill," were among 1977's most underrated.
Gabriel's second solo LP (which has the same title, or lack of one, as his debut) makes similar gestures to the mainstream, yet focuses more often on the progressivism he helped pioneer as a founding member of Genesis. There are still some good rock numbers — "On the Air" and "D.I.Y." most notably, as well as the kinky reggae song, "A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World" — but Gabriel, aided by producer Robert Fripp's banks of crashing guitar chords and various electronics, has discarded most of the gloss of the first record for a personal vision that is darker, more frightening and not quite as accessible.
As a lyricist, Gabriel is forever given to indirection and opacity: an underlying theme parallels the war between the sexes and man's war with the environment — or at least I think it does, since nothing is straightforward enough for certainty. As a composer, Gabriel displays similar meandering tendencies, and Fripp emphasizes these aspects. Given different arrangements, the melodies of almost any of these songs might easily be transferred into a pop context. Clearly, I don't find this Peter Gabriel as enticing as last year's, but I certainly can't dismiss it. If the prettiest moments are more difficult to listen to, the most difficult passages are easier to grasp. On the road to détente between progressive rock and whatever it is most of us care for, the new album seems an acceptable way station — encouraging enough to make tuning in for the next installment worthwhile, yet obtuse enough to make plain the difficulty of traveling this road.
Robert Christgau gav e the album a B- grade, writing:
One of those records that is diminished by the printed lyrics that are its reason for being. Musically, Gabriel combines with producer Robert Fripp for alert art-rock that gets down around atonality rather than jumping into the astral-noodle soup, with Roy Bittan's romantic flourishes as welcome as "D.I.Y.," a hard-rock landmark in a hard-rock year. B`ut even though it makes you sit up when it comes on the radio, it's basically program music, designed to support words as elitist (and programmatic) as the social commentary Gabriel used to essay in his Genesis days. Remember the immortal words of Chuck Berry: beware of middlebrows bearing electric guitars.
On September 23, 1977 David Bowie released the greatest single of the year, "Heroes" b/w "V-2 Schneider". Though it's often thought of as an ass kicking song about two lovers taking on the world, upon closer inspection it's a sad tune about lovers hanging in there "just for one day".
The backing track Bowie sang on MARC sounded nothing like the final version.
Though not a big hit upon its release, "Heroes" is the high point of Bowie's Berlin trilogy. The song may have even got its name from the Neu song "Hero". You can hear the Velvet Underground influence as well. Songwriting credit goes to Bowie and Brian Eno. Producer Tony Visconti played a big role and even sings backing vocals. Carlos Alomar plays guitar. George Murray is on bass and Dennis Davis is on drums. But the most famous contribution is from Robert Fripp who layed down three guitar solos the first three times he heard the song. In the clip below Visconti says the solos were pretty but meaningless until he layered all three of them together. These master class stories always fascinate me.
All that was missing were the lyrics. Bowie asked Visconti and others to leave him alone so he could come up with something. Among the inspirations Bowie quoted is the Otto Mueller painting Lovers Between Garden Walls.
Another bit of inspiration came by accident when Bowie looked out the window and caught the married Visconti in an embrace with backing vocalist Antonia Maas. She would later help Bowie translate Heroes into "Helden", the German version.
Upon its release "Heroes" was not met with widespread praise. The NME's Charlie Gillett famously stated
"Well he had a pretty good run for our money, for a guy who was no singer. But I think his time has been and gone, and this just sounds weary. Then again, maybe the ponderous heavy riff will be absorbed on the radio, and the monotonous feel may just be hypnotic enough to drag people into buying it. I hope not".
This week, one of all time favorite singer songwriters, Lloyd Cole, shared a list he made for a Brazilian blog on his Facebook page. "This does paint a pretty good picture of how you get to be me, I think... maybe...," said Cole. A smart lyricist and acute observer of life and love, Cole has always been at his best when he keeps the music simple and catchy. "Life's a Gas" is a cover of a T.Rex tune from Electric Warrior.
1. Electric Warrior - T.Rex -Made me want to be a pop star.
2.Diamond Dogs - David Bowie
Made me realize, at an early age (just 13), how ambitious a project writing a pop song could be.
3.Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen
Showed me how language, with the right delivery, could have an emotional, as well as intellectual impact.
4.No Pussyfooting - Fripp and Eno
Introduced me to the beauty of the drone.
5.Low - David Bowie
Changed everything. Pop music can be anything.
6.Another Music in a Different Kitchen - Buzzcocks
Somehow made 16 year old kids in N. England feel that they, too, could make music if they thought hard enough and applied themselves.
7.Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan
I was too young when this was released but I had an older girlfriend in London 1979, and nothing has been the same, since then. Language is a virus from outer space, and pianos, guitars don't have to be perfectly in tune so long as they have that Wild Mercury thing.
8.Hot Buttered Soul - Isaac Hayes
The genius doesn’t have to be the songwriter.
9.Never Mind The Bollocks - Sex Pistols
There can be a beauty in brutality.
10.Dirty Mind - Prince
OMG, minimalism isn’t just for avant garde Germans.
