FEATURE 8 TAKING MANHATTAN (BY STRATEGY) From 1978 to 1984, Brian Eno lived and worked in NYC. The music he helped create has influenced generations. WORDS SIMON REYNOLDS it could be argued that Brian Eno is the most consistently creative figure in rock history, someone whose innovation rate over the decades eclipses even that of his shape-shifting collaborators David Bowie and David Byrne. From his disruptive presence in Roxy Music to his alternately quirky and contemplative solo albums, from inventing ambient music to his recent explorations in “generative music,” it’s a career that has, well, careered, zigzagging from extreme to extreme between pop and antipop, between febrile rhythm and near-immobile tranquility. » Brian Eno on a NYC rooftop, 1982. Photo by Ebet Roberts/ Redferns
FEATURE FEATURE then consider his panoply of partnerships with other artists—Devo, Talking Heads, U2, and John Cale, to name just a few—as producer or collaborator/catalyst. Eno is also a musical philosopher, someone whose interviews, critical writings, and sundry musings about sound, art, and culture deserve to be compiled into a book. (His published diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices, was hugely entertaining but didn’t capture the full scope and provocative richness of his thoughts.) If there’s a golden period for Eno, though, it would have to be between 1978 and 1984, a period when he lived in New York. Those years represented a surge of music-making, collaboration, and conceptualizing, with Eno burning through ideas at staggering speed. All through the late ’70s and early ’80s, New York’s art scene and music culture were the climate that stoked his ferment. “I’ve got this feeling that I really know New York very well and will be at home there,” he told Disc magazine in October 1972, on the eve of his first visit to the city. “I feel there are two 10 places I’m emotionally based in... One is the English countryside, where I was born and bred, and the other is the heart of New York City.” There are perfectly logical reasons why Eno would feel a profound attraction to New York. After all, the two biggest influences on his approach to music, the Velvet Underground and Steve Reich, came from here. Eno also intuited that London, pop culture’s energy center during the ’60s, had ceded that power-spot status to New York by the ’70s. Within a few years of the Disc interview, he was spending extended periods of time in Manhattan. Then he moved wholesale and made New York his base for over half a decade. The ensuing period is without doubt the most fertile and impressive stretch of his life’s work, which included not just music but video art as well. Eno fed off New York’s border-crossing artistic energy, while catalyzing and contributing to it. There were also more playful “lifestyle” reasons why Eno settled in Manhattan. “I moved to New York City because there are so many beautiful girls here,” he told Lester Bangs in 1979. “More than anywhere else in the world.” His first visit in late ’72 was with Roxy Music on their debut US tour. The next couple of trips he came as a solo artist; the second of these, in 1975, was to promote his second solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Eno was accompanied by Richard Williams, a former Melody Maker writer (and the first journalist to rave about Roxy) who had become an A&R man at Island Records. Williams had heard the buzz about Television, so the two Britons headed down to CBGB to see them perform. Although Eno at this point had zero pedigree as a producer, he and Williams ended up working with Television on demo recordings that could easily have turned into a debut album for Island. But the results failed to capture the fierce majesty of Television’s live shows. “I didn’t care for the sound he got on tape or the performance much either,” Tom Verlaine once recalled. “The rest of the band felt the same way. So we didn’t ABOVE: Eno in Steve Maas’ apartment on W. 8th Street, 1978. Photo by Marcia Resnick finish the ‘album’ they wanted those demos to be.” It was an inauspicious start to Eno’s New York period. Ultimately, it would be not Television but a different CBGB band (also with a TV-oriented name) who cemented Eno’s connection to the city. Talking Heads first met up with Eno in London in May 1977. During this hangout session they discovered many common interests, both musically and intellectually. Eno played them an album by Fela Kuti and declared that afrobeat was the future of music. He suggested that this was a direction he and Talking Heads could jointly pursue. Later that month, Eno was back in New York, where he accompanied his friends and intermittent collaborators David Bowie and Robert Fripp to a Max’s Kansas City gig by Devo, the hot hype of the season. So captivated was Bowie by their robotic theatrics and angular sound, he took to the stage to announce Devo’s second set of the night. Hailing the Akron, Ohio, band as rock’s future, Bowie vowed to produce their debut album in To- kyo later that summer. (Ultimately it was Eno, not Bowie, who would produce Are We Not Men? in Cologne the following year.) As for Talking Heads, the first album Eno made with the group, More Songs About Buildings and Food, was recorded in Nassau, Bahamas. But the mastering was done in New York and Eno flew in on April 23, 1978 to oversee the process. He planned to stay a few weeks, taking care of some other pending projects away from UK distractions before heading home in time for his 30th birthday. But New York provided plenty of distractions of its own, and it would be seven months before he returned to Britain. Recalling his first substantial sojourn in New York, Eno admitted to enjoying the attention he received as a cult figure operating on the cutting edge of rock. “Everywhere I go, people are running up with cassettes,” he told Melody Maker in 1980. “The first five weeks I was in New York this time I had 180 cassettes given to me.” But he spoke also of the stimulating conversations he was enjoying thanks to the crosstown traffic between different fields of art—music, painting, theater, modern dance. A common syndrome experienced by first-time UK visitors to New York is that they’re electrified by the city’s kinetic (and cinematic) energy, then immediately crash into a depressive slump upon arrival back in humdrum England. Eno refused to unplug. By the middle of May 1978, he was ensconced in an apartment in Greenwich Village subletted from Steve Maas who owned and lived in the apartment upstairs and was in the process of launching the soon-to-be-legendary Mudd Club. “The first time I heard of the Mudd Club somebody said, ‘Eno’s got a new bar below Canal Street, let’s go,’” recalls Glenn O’Brien, once the music columnist for Interview magazine and host of the New York cable music show TV Party. “Actually Eno had nothing to do with it, except I think he consulted with Maas on the sound system.” Through Maas, Eno met Anya Phillips, who was involved in the initial conception of the Mudd Club. She hipped him to “no wave”: a cluster of harsh, dissonant, uncompromisingly experimental groups (among them the Contortions, whom Phillips managed, and with whose frontman James Chance she would later become romantically involved). No wave had emerged with the express intent of making the firstwave CBGB punk bands seem passé and mired in rock ’n’ roll tradition. “I happened to be in New York during one of the most exciting months of the decade... in terms of music,” Eno recalled. “It seemed like there were 500 new bands who all started that month.” In the first week of May, Eno attended a five-day festival of no wave bands at Artists Space, a gallery in Tribeca. Impressed by the music’s extremism, he proposed the idea of a compilation to Island Records focused on the four key groups in the scene: Mars, DNA, the Contortions, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Intuitively he grasped that no wave was destined to be a brief spasm of unsustainable intensity that needed to be documented before it passed. Eno had plenty in common with the no wavers. Most came from art-school backgrounds similar to his own. Like him, they approached music-making with a conceptual mindset and a dilettante’s disregard for craft. “The New York bands proceed from a ‘what would happen if’ orientation,” Eno informed New York Times critic John Rockwell in July 1978, contrasting their approach with that of expressionistic, emotion-driven new wave songsmiths like Elvis Costello. In another 1978 interview with Creem, he praised no wave using terms and concepts that he clearly would like to have seen applied to himself. These “research bands” take “deliberately extreme stances that are very interesting because they define the edges of a piece of territory,” he said. “They say, ‘This is as far as you can go in this direction.’” No wave pioneers (and even earlier, the Velvet Underground) generated “a vocabulary” of ideas that later artists could use in more palatable ways and that could ultimately become the basis of mainstream pop in the future. “Having that territory staked out is very important,” Eno said. “You achieve a synthesis by determining your stance in relation to these signposts.” But although there was a mutual admiration pact between Eno and the no wavers (who revered their patron for his work in Roxy Music and his solo output), there were big differences too. No wave was based around an aesthetic of assault and confrontation. Lyrically, it stretched from deadpan nihilism “I HAPPENED TO BE IN NEW YORK DURING ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING MONTHS OF THE DECADE... IN TERMS OF MUSIC.” - <strong>BRIAN</strong> <strong>ENO</strong> (James Chance) and tortured expressionism (Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus) to explorations of psychotic states (Mars). There was a huge gulf between no wave and Eno’s alternately quirky and placid music, especially the proto-ambient directions he pursued on Another Green World and Discreet Music. Lunch speaks warmly of Eno today but at the time she made a number of public jibes, describing Eno’s music as “something that flows and weaves... It’s kind of nauseating,” she said. “It’s like drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but it’s very smooth going down.” Yet Eno-fication is strikingly absent from the compilation No New York. There’s nothing of the blurry, aqueous sound applied to certain songs on Are We Not Men or More Songs About Buildings and Food, which clearly bore Eno’s production fingerprints. “[No New York] was done totally live in the studio, just like a document,” says Chance. Mars, the most forbiddingly abstract of the no wave outfits, benefited from a smidgeon of Eno’s studio sorcery: for “Helen Forsdale,” Eno recalled that he put an echo “on the guitar part’s click and used that to trigger the compression on the whole track, so it sounds like helicopter blades.” DNA’s Arto Lindsay was actually infuriated by Eno’s hands-off approach: “He was reading some studio instrument magazine while we were recording and I wanted to throttle him!” Lindsay hastens to add that “Eno is a fabulous man. He was generous. I was dead broke, and he was such a gentleman he would call me up and say ‘I’ll buy you lunch.’” As a relative veteran of the music industry, Eno also dispensed advice: Lindsay recalls Chance showing Eno a contract that he’d been offered by Michael Zilkha of ZE Records. “Brian said, ‘Nobody would sign that but a desperate man.’ James immediately signed it!” At the end of 1978, No New York slipped out into the world via Island’s jazz subsidiary Antilles to meager fanfare. No wave had already splintered, with most of the groups heading toward more accessible music. But the record would gradually accrue cult status, as much for the challenge of getting hold of a copy as for the challenging music on it. The legend of no wave has swollen over the decades, in part because of intermediaries like Sonic Youth (as Eno predicted, sort of) applying its innovations to pop and rock music; the movement has also come to represent a musical moment of uncompromising purity. No wave—which lasted barely two years and whose bands didn’t make many records or find many listeners in their own time—has been the subject of no less than three lavishly illustrated books in recent years. In the winter of 1978–79, Eno went peripatetic, spending time in San Francisco, London, Montreux, and Bangkok. When he returned to New York in the spring to work on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, he had the germ of a new approach in his head: the merger of hypnotic dance rhythms and found voices. Through immersion in Fela and P-Funk, he had turned on to the idea of densely layered, ethnofunkadelic polyrhythms. On his Thailand vacation, he had taken with him a recording of British dialects and become fascinated by the “redundant” information in these heavily accented utterances. Regional cadences meant that the speech contained its own musicality, something that he thought could be combined excitingly with dance grooves. This merger of found voices and trance rhythms would become the governing concept for much of the music he made in the next few years, both solo and in his increasingly collaborative partnership with Talking Heads. The first manifestation of his new obsession was “I Zimbra,” the opening track on Fear of Music. It bore Eno’s clear imprint, from the afrobeat-style percussion to the use of sound poetry (originally written by the Dadaist Hugo Ball but here incanted by David Byrne). “I Zimbra” was pretty much the reprise of what Eno had done on “Kurt’s Rejoinder” from his 1977 solo album Before and After Science, albeit using a different Dadaist (Kurt Schwitters). But it was Fear’s closing track, “Drugs,” that proved to be most prophetic. Talking Heads tried recording the song, originally titled “Electricity,” in the conventional way but couldn’t get it to work. So Eno and Byrne took the accumulated takes and effectively remixed the song into existence. “We kind of deconstructed it, tore it down to its basic elements, then built it up again with new stuff,” recalls Byrne. “We took instruments (cont'd on pg. 14) 11
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