Music Made Me #5: Trail Mix

In the spring of 2012, I planned a two-week road trip through the Four Corners area—partly to research a book I was writing about westerns, but mainly to visit some places that I just had to see for myself.  Just before I left, my friend Ben sent me a gift package: a collection of CDs that would serve as soundtrack for the journey.  As a result, I discovered some of my favorite music of the 2000s while simultaneously discovering some of the most awe-inspiring sites in the American West.  In my mind, the two are now inseparable.  When I hear specific songs, I picture the landscapes that were rolling by when I heard those tunes for the first time, and I am overcome with a kind of pure emotion—something that goes beyond simple description, and hovers in the present moment with the all-pervasive majesty of the desert sky.  I can’t share the full experience… but I can share the sights and sounds, in the hope that some of the magic conveys.

 

Two albums carried me from Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas.  The first was Coastal Grooves by Blood Orange.  The album title says it all.  Blood Orange’s electronic grooves are perfect for a sunny day drive with the windows rolled down.  Ditto the Gentle Stream album by Swedish pop band The Amazing, which has a folksier, more laid-back quality but with the same kind of flow.

They say that long-distance driving changes the frequency of a person’s brain waves, putting the mind into a relaxed but creative alpha state, which explains how these tunes got burned into my subconscious so quickly.  I wasn’t just driving, I was daydreaming.

 

Just south of St. George, Utah, there is a stretch of highway 15 that winds through a brightly-colored slot canyon.  It gives you the sense that you are entering a completely new country.  It was here that I first heard listened to The War on Drugs, an indie rock band from Philadelphia.  I exited the highway in St. George and made my way to Snow Canyon State Park while listening—really listening—to the band's album Slave Ambient.  In my mind, it sounded like a Bob Dylan pop album crossbred with shoegaze acoustics (guitar washes, heavy feedback, etc.).  For me, it was the perfect combination for the place and time. 

The red rocks of Snow Canyon are mostly sandstone, crafted by wind and years.  When the late afternoon sun hits them, they seem to radiate light from within.  The music resonated with the same flared intensity.  I’m reminded of something filmmaker John Huston said about his film The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean: “It has a big spirit.  The wind blows through it.  Adown the corridors of time.”  A grandiose pronouncement, for sure, but one that any romantic can understand. 

I passed through Zion National Park and spent a couple of days in the Kanab area.  I remember listening to the first few tracks of the Battles album Gloss Drop on the winding roads above and over Zion.  The funky industrial tune “Futura” was playing as I drove though a long mountain tunnel that had windows carved out of the rock.  I rolled the car windows down and let the beats echo off of ancient stone.   

On the way to Kanab, I found a strange underground bar that boasted an impressive collection of dinosaur fossils and footprints, as well as an entire room filled with exotic iridescent rocks.  (I later learned from a local paleontologist that dinosaur tracks are still being found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument… which gave me the feeling that I was really wandering into uncharted territory.)  I tried The Beach Boys: The Smile Sessions, figuring that the psychedelic sounds would match the setting, but the listening experience was jarring (too many stops and starts), so I switched to Megafaun’s self-titled album when I got back on the road. 

I was still listening to the folksy blues of Megafaun as I drove up a desolate road to the reputed site of the old Gunsmoke set.  It was a long, straight, flat road toward white-rock mountains and I was the only one out there… so I drove fast, hypnotized by the wall of sound at the end of “Get Right,” then lulled into a state of serenity by the sweetly silent “Hope You Know.”  The transition between these two songs is so perfect that I never want to listen to them separately.

A few days later, I was in Page, Arizona.  I had planned a boat tour to Rainbow Bridge off of Lake Powell, but I arrived early and had some time to kill.  I don’t remember how I learned about Antelope Canyon… but, dear God, I'm glad I did.  These slot canyons exist on Navajo land, and the only way to see them is to take a guided tour.  My tour guide started pointingout  rock formations that looked like faces and animals, illuminated by visionary colors.  After that, I saw everything differently—not just in the canyons, but everywhere I went for the duration of my trip.  In Antelope Canyon, I even saw a premonition of things to come: a rock formation that looked exactly like the landscape of Monument Valley at dawn.

 

This was also the day that I discovered the band Neon Indian. I picked their album Era Extran(y)a out of my bundle of CDs because the name was fitting—and their exotic electronica was a perfect match for the day's scenery.  The next morning, I got up before dawn to drive out to Lake Powell.  As I was crossing over a massive gorge on the edge of town, “Heart: Decay” emerged from my speakers.  As the sun began to crest the horizon, transforming the shadows around me into red and orange fire, “Fallout” began.  The grandeur of places and timing like this can make anyone believe in destiny.

By this point in the trip, I felt like I had been completely emptied out.  I no longer had any expectations, because my wildest expectations had already been completely overwhelmed.  I was just floating through the experience, letting every little thing wash over me.  As I got closer and closer to Monument Valley, I felt like I was being guided.  I’m not a particularly religious person, but it’s hard to shake off such impressions when they come to you. 

Once again, I found myself on a seemingly endless road.  I felt like the only person in the world, listening to relics of a bygone civilization—in this case, Phantogram and Uh Huh Her.  When I hit Kayenta, I switched to M83.

What can I say about Monument Valley?  Best to say nothing and let M83 do the talking.  The tracks that really made an impression on me at the time were “Run into Flowers,” “Noise” and “Beauties Can Die” (from the album Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts) along with “Intro,” “Wait,” “Raconte-Moi Une Historie,” “Echoes of Mine,” and especially “Soon, My Friend” (from the album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming).

I was still listening to M83—though I had now moved onto the album Saturdays=Youth—when I left Monument Valley and headed north into the Rockies, toward Telluride.  “We Own the Sky” was playing as I saw the first snowclouds.  The sun was gone by the time “Highway of Endless Dreams” started.  Snow flurries were falling as “Dark Moves of Love” flooded my mind.  Halfway through “Midnight Souls Still Remain,” I had to pull over to the side of the road and write something down.

For months, I had been working on a comic book series called To Hell You Ride, and that was one of my many reasons for making this trip into the desert.  The story was set in the mountain town of Telluride, and I had never been to Telluride.  Now here I was, a few minutes away from my destination, and I suddenly came up with the exact words to express the central theme of the story.  (For those who have read To Hell You Ride, they are the words that Two-Dogs says to Mary at the beginning of issue 5.)

I’ll say it again: I’m not a particularly religious person… but I have an open mind, and sometimes it gets filled with things that I know did not originate there.  The subtle flux of that final M83 song had something to do with it.

Frankly, after everything that had happened on my road trip, Telluride was a bit underwhelming.  In the story I was writing, the town represents “the end of the road”—and that’s kind of how it felt.  As it happened, I had arrived in Telluride a few days after the end of ski season, so the place was empty and desolate.  Most of the stores and restaurants were closed.  That was perfect for the story I was writing, but also kind of unsettling. 

That night, I woke up in my hotel room to complete darkness.  For some reason, the power had gone out and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.  It was like waking up blind.  I was staying in a big hotel room and I had to feel my way along a long wall toward my travel bag, so that I could retrieve my cell phone for light.  For those few minutes, I was out of the world.  I couldn’t see or hear anything.  (This is doubly disconcerting for someone who lives in the heart of Los Angeles, and thus never experiences total silence or darkness.)  After I checked my phone and confirmed that (a) I was still in my hotel room and (b) the world was still turning, I managed to go back to sleep.  I have no idea what caused the power to fail, but it was back on in the morning.

I left Telluride before sunrise, and resumed my musical journey.  I passed through the idyllic farming communities on the high plateau of Iron Springs, listening to Grizzly Bear (which didn’t fit the mood), St. Vincent (still not quite right…) and Wilco.  The Making Mirrors album by the Australian singer-songwriter Gotye got things back on track.  The opening song, “Easy Way Out,” does more in 2 minutes than most pop songs can do in five or six.  “Eyes Wide Open” is a perfect driving tune.  “Giving Me a Chance” is a perfect b-side reflection.  This was also the first time I’d heard the song “Somebody That I Used to Know.”  Like everyone else, I would eventually become tired of hearing that song played ad nauseum on every radio station and in every karaoke bar… but, for the moment, I loved it.  It made me feel like I could drive all day.

Which, in fact, I did.  I left Telluride around 6am, made a long detour through Moab, then hit the highway back toward Los Angeles.  I planned to stop and spend the night in Cedar City, Utah.  Then I planned to stop in Vegas.  Then I decided, the hell with it, why not drive all the way through to Los Angeles so I could see my wife and sleep in my own bed?  So I played out the “b-side” of my trip in one ridiculously long day, covering approximately 900 miles and exhausting the rest of my CD collection. 

I fell in love with the Real Estate album Days and the self-titled Widowspeak album (which reminded me a lot of Mazzy Star), then went back to The War on Drugs.   I tried listening to Vangelis’s Soil Festivities in the home stretch, but it was making my eyelids heavy so I switched to Megafaun.  Somewhere around Baker, I stopped and got a really big cup of coffee, then started driving again with all the windows down and the stereo at full volume to keep me awake.  When “Scorned” came on, I was utterly entranced by the sound of that loud and lonely harmonica echoing off of the starry night sky. 

Some time ago, I read an article claiming that 80% of Americans have never seen or recognized the Milky Way.  I can’t believe that.  I don’t want to believe that.  I stared up at the stars, feeling completely awestruck, until the light pollution of L.A. drowned most of them out -- bringing me back down to earth.

Now, when I want to remember that experience, I play a mix tape of songs from my 2012 road trip.  I suppose I could also get back on the road and re-trace my steps, but I know I will never be able to repeat the perfect timing, or the perfect combination of new sense experiences.  Next time, I’ll need new destinations and new songs.  For the time being, here’s my Trail Mix… 

Music Made Me #4: Firsts

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to a mix tape club—a group of people who routinely exchange mix CDs, just for the hell of it. Intrigued, I spoke to the guy who organized the group and he told me that it all started in 2003—after the music industry was undermined by Napster but before the age of Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes—because he was having a hard time discovering new music on his own. So he pulled together some friends who agreed to make one mix each over the course of the next year, and share it with the group.  Eleven years later, the mix tape club is still going strong… and I wanted in.

First, however, I had to submit to a kind of initiation ritual.   I had to answer two questions with complete honesty: (1) What was the first album you ever purchased? (2) What was your first concert?

I hesitated, wondering if I was going to be judged for my musical past.  Something about these two questions reminded me of the way small towns in the Mid-West claim to be "the birthplace of" someone famous.  People shouldn't be held responsible for where they were born, should they?  It's not like we get to pick the spot.  And, really, should an adult be judged by the very first song(s) that made an impression on them?  There's a certain amount of luck or fate at work there.  And yet, in much the way that a hometown can shape a person, such early musical influences start a kind of dialogue between us and the universe.  The real question is: What was it that made you start listening?

My buddy Rob G. recently posted a blog about his answers to these two all-important questions—he even broke the first question down by media format, naming his first album on vinyl, cassette tape and CD—so, in the interest of solidarity, here are my answers:

MY FIRST RECORD

Records were on the way out when I started buying music, so I didn’t buy an album on vinyl until I was in high school, when I saw a copy of The Doors compilation album Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine in a used record shop.  I was enough of a Doors fan to know that the album had never been released on cassette or CD, and that it had two songs that couldn’t be found anywhere else, so I promptly bought it.  Then I had to get a turntable.

Having said all that…. My first music purchase ever was a couple of 45s.  At age 6, I was a huge Ghostbusters fan, so I had to have the Ray Parker theme song.  I also had to have “Heart of Rock n Roll” by Huey Lewis and the News… which I had heard in my 1^st grade gym class, of all places.  I hated gym class, but I could have jumped rope for hours to that song.

MY FIRST CASSETTE

I didn’t start buying a lot of albums on cassette until 7^th grade, when I got my first Walkman.  That year, Metallica’s And Justice for All... and the eponymous Black Album were in constant rotation.  But before that… 

The very first cassette I ever bought was Michael Jackson's Thriller.  My dad had rented the Making of Thriller video for me, and then I had to have the album.  Of course I loved the title track, but I also really liked "Wanna Be Startin' Something?" (still an ideal way to kick off just about any mix tape, in my opinion) and "Human Nature."  I quickly followed up with Bad and Off the Wall. 

I’m not sure it would be possible for me to overstate my enthusiasm for Michael Jackson at that point in my life.  His music was a kind of refuge for me.  While my mom was battling a life-threating illness, and when my family moved to a new town... I could always lock myself in my room, turn on the music and try to dance like Michael.  I couldn’t do it, of course (who could?), but I promise it wasn’t for a lack of trying.  I found it impossible to listen to any of those albums without moving.  And as soon as I started moving, I pretty much forgot about everything else.  Now, really, what more can you ask for?

MY FIRST CD

I was a somewhat reluctant convert to CD culture.  I stubbornly held out until 1994, when the BMG Music Club’s promise of 11 free albums won me over.  What were those eleven albums, you ask?  Well, I know Nirvana: In Utero was one of them.  And Counting Crows: August and Everything After.  The Cranberries: Everyone Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?  Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral.  (My taste in music was all over the place.)  The rest is a blur…. But it doesn’t matter because, while I was waiting for BMG to send me my free stuff, I had to go to the nearest music store and buy something to listen to in the meantime.  So, technically, my first CD was Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell. 

 

Ironically, the most recent album I purchased was The Endless River—a followup to The Division Bell.   OK, maybe “followup” is a bit generous.  The Endless River is basically a collection of discarded intros and outros from The Division Bell… something that only a die-hard fan of David Gilmour-era Pink Floyd could love.   Because I actually like Gilmour-era Pink Floyd (I don't agree that the band was a "spent force" after Roger Waters left) and because I’m a sucker for nostalgia, I don't mind so much.  If nothing else, it reminds me of 1994... when I used to go running every day with the B-side of the album ("Take It Back," "Coming Back to Life," "Keep Talking," "Lost for Words," "High Hopes") blaring in my headphones.

I remember one day I went running in the early morning.  The way the sunlight reflected off of a dew-covered field--at precisely the moment when I had gone far enough to achieve that famed "runner's high"--forever changed the way I listened to this album.

MY FIRST CONCERT

First, a word of explanation: I grew up in the Piedmont region of Virginia.  It was a three-hour drive to the nearest major amphitheater.  Still, all things considered, there are worse places to start than with a Sting concert.   At the time, I only owned one Sting album—Ten Summoner’s Tales—and that one only because the song “Shape of My Heart” had been featured in the movie The Professional, and because it sort of reminded me of a girl I liked.  But anybody who grew up in the 80s, and had a radio, was bound to know a lot of Sting songs.  The highlight of the show was an encore of Police tunes. 

After that, my best friend and I made it a mission to see as many big-name rock bands in concert as we could.  We continued to be limited by geography… but over the next few years we did manage to see The Rolling Stones, The Who, Aerosmith, The Allman Brothers Band, U2, INXS, Page and Plant, etc.

SO

My answers gained me admittance into the mix tape club for 2015.  In the meantime…. Anybody want to exchange mix tapes?

Music Made Me #3: Birth of a Mix Tape

 
1935: The German electronics company AEG (Aus Erfahrung Gut) invents the first reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder. They call it the Magnetophon.

1958: RCA Victor introduces the first quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape cartridges.  But almost nobody buys them because they're bulky and expensive.

1963: The Dutch electronic company Philips introduces the first "compact cassette" for audio recording. 

1966: The first music albums are released on cassette in the U.S. by the Mercury Record Company, including Eartha Kitt's If You Go Away, Nina Simone's Wild is the Wind, and John Mathis's The Shadow of Your Smile. 

Early 1970s: In-car cassette decks are a boon for the new format.  This is the beginning of the time-honored tradition of "road testing" new albums, and it revolutionizes the way people listen to music. 

Late 1970s: Re-recordable cassettes arrive, followed by the ubiquitous Sony Walkman (in the year of my birth -- coincidence?).  DJ Grandmaster Flash pioneers the making of "party tapes" (a.k.a. "mixtapes"). 

1987: Alan Sugar develops the first twin-cassette deck for the mass market, infuriating record labels and ushering in the dawn of the mix tape phenomenon.

1988: This was the year my family moved to a new town and I discovered MTV.  It was also the year I realized that love is a mix tape.  I used to sit up late at night listening to a local radio station's "all request hour": an endless stream of popular songs requested by teenage listeners and dedicated to their current flame or recent breakup.  The songs were predictable (Aerosmith's "Angel," Van Halen's "When It's Love," Def Leppard's "Love Bites,"  INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart"), but the on-air dedications were heartfelt... and that sometimes changed the way I heard a song.   

1991: The peak year of cassette culture.  My family moved again and, on my first day at a new school, I became infatuated with a girl in my seventh grade homeroom.  In my old town, I could have professed my love on the all-request hour... but that didn't seem to be a thing in my new town.   So I became friends with her friends, to learn more about her.  (It would have been too obvious to befriend her directly, right?)  Then, by some glorious stroke of luck or fate, I was paired up with her for a science project.  I spent every single minute of our time together trying to make her laugh.  Her friends told me they'd never seen her laugh that much, and encouraged me to ask her out.  But, of course, that would have been too risky...

I waited for the middle school dance.  I knew that music would help me make my case.  Once the dance was underway, it was just a matter of waiting for the right song.  The right song, as it turned out, was Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters."  I summoned my nerve to leave the safety of the wallflowers corner.  I asked her to dance.  We slow danced.  All was right with the world.  Then the song ended, and I returned to my corner.  Sometime later, one of her friends approacheded told me that I should go ask for another dance.  "If you ask her," the friend said, "she'll say yes."  I decided to wait.

The last song of every dance was always "Stairway to Heaven."  That was the song every lovestruck guy in my middle school waited for, whether you liked Led Zeppelin or not, because it was the longest song that would get played all night (at least, until GNR's "November Rain" was released as a single).  It represented eight full minutes of potential bliss with the girl of your dreams.  So I waited.  And waited.  Finally, I heard the world's most familiar opening chord progression.  And I started across the dance floor.

I was stopped short by a girl from my art class who asked me to dance.  The next eight minutes were excruciating.  I tried to slow dance, but I was just too busy kicking myself.

That failure strengthened my resolve, at least briefly.  I bought a dozen roses, and I brought them to school early one morning, before anyone else had arrived.  I didn't have the nerve to present them directly, so my plan was to put them on her chair in homeroom, and hope that she would figure out who they were from.  (It's official.  I am an idiot.)  But I couldn't do it that first day, because I almost had an anxiety attack just getting the flowers to my locker.  One step at a time, folks.  And I couldn't do it the second day, because, well... you know, people might see me.  A week passed, and the roses started to wither inside my locker.  Then I couldn't give them to her at all, because who the hell declares their love with a dozen dead roses?  So I had to come to school early again one morning, and throw the roses away before anyone saw them.

The only person who ever even knew they existed -- and this is the really embarrassing part -- was my mother.  Of course, my mother thought it was all very sweet.  But I knew better.  Who the hell declares their love with roses anyway?  Might as well write her a sonnet.  That's so archaic.  I needed something subtler.  Something cooler.  Something that could convey the exact emotions I wanted to convey in a way that I couldn't possibly express in words.

1992: My friend Anne introduced me to the art of mix tape.  I don't remember what prompted that glorious gift.  One day, she just handed me a Memorex cassette of her favorite songs.  The song titles were written on the label in purple ink, but most of the names didn't mean anything to me at first.  After a few listens, I was pretty much infatuated with Anne.

Mind you, I didn't fall for Anne because of her taste in music or her ability to make a perfect mix tape.  Actually, that first mix tape was kind of schizophrenic.  It got off to a rocky start with a couple of country songs.  Anne was convinced that I didn't like country music because I hadn't heard the right country songs.  The truth is that I grew up in the mountains of Virginia and I'd already heard far more country songs than I ever wanted to.  

But there were some surprising gems on the tape, like Otis Redding's "Dreams to Remember" (which I had somehow never heard before), Jimmy Soul's infectiously silly "If You Want to Be Happy" (which was an ironic song for a really pretty girl to put on a mix tape) and The Rolling Stones' "Almost Hear You Sigh" (which is not a great song... until a really pretty girl puts it on a mix tape for you).  The best part was the way the tape ended, with back-to-back arena rock ballads: Journey's "Open Arms" and REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling."  There was something so stupidly romantic about those two songs that I couldn't help wishing that the tape represented some kind of implied intimacy. The B-side ended abruptly, halfway through the last song, which was annoying (and more accurately symbolic of the level of implied intimacy encoded in that tape)... but it left me wanting more.  And, lucky for me, Anne kept making tapes that got better and better.  Her third mix tape introduced me to Oasis ("Wonderwall") and Sarah McLachlan ("Hold On" - the alternate version on the 1993 No Alternative compilation).

I reciprocated, of course.  My first attempt at a mix tape wasn't anything worth writing about -- check out the Billboard End of Year Charts for 1991 and 1992 and you'll have some idea of how bad it was -- but, hey, I was just getting started.

Music Made Me #2: 80s Movie Music Mix

My fellow musical journeyman Rob G. has just posted the track list for his 80s Movie Music Mix tape.   It's the soundtrack for his recent birthday party, comprised entirely of songs from 80s movie soundtracks.  He writes, "Hearing all these songs together made me smile and laugh, but also inspired me! And so, I wanted to share this feeling. I mean, that's the point of mixes to begin with, right?"

It inspired me too.  And given the nature of our rapport lately, I have to fllow up Rob's mix with one of my own.   So, without further ado, here is Volume II.

1. "Who Made Who" - AC/DC (MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE, 1986)
2. "Relax" - Frankie Goes to Hollywood (POLICE ACADEMY, 1984)
3. "I Will Follow" - U2 (THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN, 1982)
4. "A Million Miles Away" - The Plimsouls (VALLEY GIRL, 1983)
5. "How Do I Let You Know" - Phoebe Cates (PRIVATE SCHOOL, 1983)
6. "Moving in Stereo" - The Cars (FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, 1982)
7. "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" - Talking Heads (RISKY BUSINESS, 1983)
8. "In the Air Tonight" - Phil Collins (RISKY BUSINESS, 1983)
9. "Cruel Summer" - Bananarama (THE KARATE KID, 1984)
10. "Daddy's Girl" - Peter Cetera (THREE MEN AND A BABY, 1987)
11. "Let My Love Open the Door" - Pete Townshend (LOOK WHO'S TALKING, 1989)
12. "Within Your Reach" - The Replacements (SAY ANYTHING, 1987)
13. "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" - Tears for Fears (REAL GENIUS, 1985)
14. "Silent Running" - Mike + the Mechanics (CHOKE CANYON, 1986)
15. "Cry Little Sister" - G Tom Mac (THE LOST BOYS, 1987)
16. "Strong As I Am" - The Prime Movers (MANHUNTER, 1986)
17. "No Easy Way Out" - Robert Tepper (ROCKY IV, 1988)
18. "Don't Dream It's Over" - Crowded House (THE STAND, 1994 / ADVENTURELAND, 2009)

A few stray thoughts and justifications...

Is there any better way to kick off an 80s mix than with AC/DC?

Have you ever seen the abortion sequence in THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (cut to U2's first hit single)?  It's batshit crazy, and the perfect way to start a section of tracks from early 80s sex comedies.

I love FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH.

I love Phoebe Cates.  (If you haven't seen PRIVATE SCHOOL, get on it.)

Two songs from RISKY BUSINESS?  Well, Rob used two songs from BACK TO SCHOOL, so I think I can get away with it... Besides.  Love on a real train. 
 
"Cruel Summer" is a painfully obvious choice for an 80s mix (not to mention a followup to a mix tape by the world's biggest KARATE KID fan), but I couldn't help it. 

Now that I have a daughter, I have newfound appreciation for THREE MEN AND A BABY... which has a surprisingly great soundtrack.  And if iTunes had "The Minute I Saw You" by John Parr, I would have used that instead of "Daddy's Girl."  Then again, I think it's kind of interesting that both of these mixes have songs by Peter Cetera.  (Rob, I don't suppose you have the THREE MEN AND A BABY soundtrack on vinyl?)

I watched LOOK WHO'S TALKING again recently and it does not hold up to my 12-year-old memory of it.  But I still like the Pete Townshend song, and it seems like an appropriate way to follow up THREE MEN AND A BABY.  I guess this is the baby-friendly section of my mix tape.

Rob used Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" from my favorite movie of the 80s, so I had to go for the second best song on that soundtrack. 

Nobody except Lance Henriksen fans remembers CHOKE CANYON, but I dare you not to get "Silent Running" stuck in your head.

Speaking of Lance Henriksen... I feel sort of guilty featuring a song from THE LOST BOYS without acknowledging Tangerine Dream's excellent score for that other (better) 1987 vampire movie NEAR DARK.  I could have made this entire mix using only songs from Tangerine Dream movie scores.  But, following Rob's lead, I have tried to avoid instrumentals.

I know I sort of cheated on the last song.  It wasn't technically featured in an 80s movie.  But it was featured in a 90s movie based on a novel that was really popular in the 80s, and a 2000s movie set in the 80s.  Yeah whatever.  It's the last song on the mix.  Seems like the right place to shake things up, and -- just as Rob had this crazy urge to end on two songs with the word "dance" in the title -- I had this crazy urge to conclude with the finale-friendly titles "No Easy Way Out" and "Don't Dream It's Over."

This is probably not the last of the 80s mix tapes.  But for now I'll turn it back over to Rob.

Music Made Me #1: Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam

About a month ago, my friend Rob and I started scheming an experiment.  It started with a casual facebook post: “Does anybody still make mix tapes?”  This prompted some passionate responses from friends who grew up practicing the art of the mix tape.  We quickly followed up with another question: “Nirvana or Pearl Jam?”  For those of us who came of age in the late 80s / early 90s, this was an important question - although probably not as unavoidable as the Beatles vs. Stones debate of our parents’ generation.

I recently read a book called Beatles vs. Stones, in which the author tries to get to the core of the main music debate in the 1960s.  According to him, the debate not just about music: “To say that you were a Beatles fan was to imply that (just like the Fab Four) you were well adjusted, amiable, and polite.  You were not a prig, necessarily, but nor were you the type to challenge social conventions.  For the most part, you conformed.  You agreed.  You complied.  When you looked upon the world that you were bound to inherit, you were pleased.”  On the other hand: “To align with the Rolling Stones was to convey the opposite message.  It meant you wanted to smash stuff, break it and set it on fire.” 

The debate changed as the bands changed, but the author maintains: “To this day, when people want to get to know each other, they often ask: ‘Beatles or Stones?” A preference for one group over the other is thought to reveal something substantial about one’s personality, judgment or temperament.  The clichés about the two groups are sometimes overdrawn, but they still retain a measure of plausibility.  With some qualifications, the Beatles may be described as Apollonian, the Stones as Dionysian; the Beatles pop, the Stones rock; the Beatles erudite, the Stones visceral; the Beatles utopian, the Stones realistic.”

I’d like to propose an alternative perspective.  Obviously I can’t speak from experience about how this debate was waged in the 60s, but it seems to me that the Beatles vs. Stones argument might be a debate between people who grew up in ever-so-slightly different times.  The golden era for The Beatles was 1966 – 1969, beginning with the release of Rubber Soul and ending with the recording of Abbey Road.  Of course, Beatlemania started well before 1966.  The golden era for The Rolling Stones was 1968 to 1972, from Beggar’s Banquet to Exile on Main Street - but the band remained musically relevant through at least 1978 (when the Some Girls album was released) and continues to tour today.  In my mind, this suggests that listeners who came of age in the early to mid-60s might be more inclined toward the Beatles, while listeners who came of age in the late 60s and 70s might be more inclined toward the Stones.

Neuroscientist (and musician) Daniel Levitin theorizes that most people’s musical preferences tend to form around the age of 14, because “it is around fourteen that the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adultlike levels of completion.”  In other words, a few years can make a big difference.  This might help explain why Rob prefers Nirvana, a band that achieved mainstream success in 1991 (around the time he turned fourteen), while I prefer Pearl Jam, a band that broke out in 1992 but had its biggest commercial success in 1993 (the year I turned fourteen). 

It’s not the exact year itself that’s important, but the zeitgeist.  Chicago Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis makes a distinction between Generation X and Generation Y listeners, theorizing that the former has a contempt for nostalgia while the latter doesn’t.  Generation X listeners (more Nirvana fans?) seem to derive their musical taste from the punk movement of the late 70s / early 80s, while Generation Y listeners (more Pearl Jam fans?) derive their musical taste more from the classic rock era of the late 60s / early 70s. 

Nirvana, like the Stones, has a reputation for being more confrontational, more raw, and—by some standards—more musically “pure.”  But, like the Beatles, their legacy rests on comparatively limited output.    Pearl Jam's larger body of work demonstrates a greater musical range… but, like the Stones, their longevity (i.e. their musical growth - or lack of growth, depending on who you ask) has turned some listeners against them.

Of course, nobody who really cares about music thinks of their own musical taste in such broad terms.  We like what we like not because of abstract external forces but because of personal instincts and experiences.  It's an emotional topic, and that’s how our most music-obsessed friends—the ones who spent a lot of time cultivating the art of the mix tape—responded to the Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam debate.  There were few casual answers...

“Nirvana broke new ground. Pearl Jam revisited arena rock from the 70s. I like em, but come on...”

“There's just no comparison. Lyrics alone, Eddie wins by a landslide. And if PJ is just '70s arena rock, Nirvana is just a mix of Punk and Pop. They hardly broke new ground.”

“As long as that [Nirvana] list contains Negative Creep, Lounge Act, and Frances Farmer, it's a no-contest. And I love Pearl Jam.”

“I always say the same thing when people argue about nirvana... Nirvana is the band that everyone will tell you is the best band of all time... yet that no one ACTUALLY listens to.”

“Nirvana=more important to history. Peal Jam=better band. Both=GREAT.”

Inspired to make our cases for the opposing teams (or maybe just because we're gluttons for punishment), Rob and I made our own mix tapes and posted the track lists online. 

 

I don’t think either of us won any converts.  The facebook responses still played out like a contemporary political debate, with both sides deeply entrenched.  So what did we determine?

#1. I am probably not the best person to defend Pearl Jam in a debate with Rob, who is without doubt a hardcore Nirvana fan.  I was taken to task by a fellow PJ fan for not including enough of the early material (I mostly avoided Ten, because even today it seems omnipresent) and by another fellow PJ fan for not including enough of the later stuff (which I don't know as well).  I was also taken to task by Rob for using the shortened version of "Yellow Ledbetter."  Mea culpa.  In my own defense, I'll say that Pearl Jam has a much bigger catalogue than Nirvana, which lends itself to a lot of possibilities… but I’m going to stand by my mix, simply because it’s the mix that I want to listen to right now.   Compiling my playlist gave me newfound appreciation for "In My Tree," "Of the Girl" and "You Are," and prompted me to listen to some of the newer albums for the first time.  It’s not the mix I would have made a few years ago, and probably not the mix I would make a few years from now.  But that’s part of the fun.

#2. Rob’s Nirvana mix has made me deeply curious about how Nirvana might have evolved musically if Kurt Cobain hadn’t killed himself.  Rob included two of their later songs, “Marigold” (a showcase for Dave Grohl) and “You Know You’re Right” (the last song Kurt Cobain wrote), neither of which I had heard before and both of which I love.  This sparked new enthusiasm… and isn’t that the real purpose of a mix tape?

#3. If we were going to be “fair” about this Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam mix tape debate, we would have both played by the exact same rules:  Same time period (‘91 – ‘94), no singles.  That could have been fun, because often it’s the challenge of making a mix tape that’s so appealing.  In most cases, you’re trying to find the precise middle-ground between your own sensibilities and someone else’s.  In this particular case, with a pair of mix tapes geared toward contrast, we could have probably created a song-for-song matchup that would be pretty interesting.  But I’ll leave that to someone else.  For me, this mix tape experiment has already served its purpose by renewing my enthusiasm for two great bands… and, of course, for mix tapes in general!

More to come.

Fire and Rain

A few weeks ago, my father sent me a copy of a book called Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970. I didn’t have to ask why. We have always connected on music... not necessarily on our taste in music, but on our enthusiasm for music and its formative influence. My dad doesn’t talk much about his past, so I was intrigued when he pitched this book to me by saying that 1970 was a “watershed” year for him - the year he got his driver’s license, the year his parents divorced and he moved to a new town, a year when music played a significant role in his life.

He once told that he briefly played guitar in a garage band as a teenager. (Years later, when I was about twelve years old, he taught me how to play the opening of “Secret Agent Man.” That’s as far as my own musical training goes.) On another occasion, he told me that his mother forgot his birthday and, in her haste to pick out a last-minute present at the local department store, bought him a copy of a Steppenwolf album that she normally wouldn’t have approved of. (It’s almost impossible for me to imagine my grandmother allowing anyone to listen to Steppenwolf around her. When I was a kid, she wouldn’t even let me bring Garbage Pail Kids stickers into her house.) He was clearly impressed with that particular birthday gift, even if it did arrive late. One of the only other details I’ve heard about my father’s teenage years is that he once pinned a giant American flag on the wall of his bedroom - which suggests to me that a song like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” might have spoken to him about the ways the country was changing in 1970.

1970 was also an important year for David Browne, the author of Fire and Rain. In the introduction, Browne explains how he got the idea to write the book: “My wife suggested I write about the music I loved in my childhood, meaning not just Simon & Garfunkel but Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Beatles, James Taylor, and so on. As she rightly pointed out, I was still giving cursory listens to those musicians’ new releases, attending their reunion concerts, even interviewing them for one outlet or another. When we wondered aloud whether they had anything in common, one thing came to my mind: 1970. Here was the year in which two of those groups fell apart, one achieve critical cultural mass and also collapsed, and another broke through to a new level of mass acceptance. Further researching those twelve months, I was reminded what a turbulent year 1970 truly was. I’d remembered Kent State and Charles Manson’s trial, but I’d nearly forgotten about the Southern Strategy or the brownstone that exploded in New York’s Greenwich Village, right down the street from an NYU dorm where I would later live. It was a year - a strangely overlooked on, in some regards - of upheaval and collapse, tension and release, endings and beginnings.”

Browne does an admirable job of organizing and providing cultural context for four albums: the Beatles’ Let It Be, CSNY’s Deja Vu, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends and James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. I was intrigued by many of the details he unearthed about the artists -- Simon & Garfunkel’s first incarnation as a bubblegum pop duo called Tom & Jerry, McCartney’s legal separation from the Beatles, Taylor’s rehab, and the creation of David Crosby’s first solo album (a haunting psychedelic journey with Jerry Garcia) -- but I was also left with a desire for a different book... one that focused on different albums.

Let It Be is the least relevant album of the Beatles’ mature years. Browne uses it to illustrate that the musicians, and American culture in general, were in transition. If the Beatles represented the past, the author proposes, CSNY (who were then being hailed as “the American Beatles”) represented one possible continuation. Of course, that continuation was not to be. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young quickly split up and pursued solo careers. As Browne explains, the very notion of rock super-groups was becoming outdated, the “come together” mindset of the late 60s giving way to the “me decade.” Simon & Garfunkel also parted ways in 1970, as younger listeners turned to harder rock. As a solo artist, Simon retained the older (early 30s) audience. So did James Taylor, who always had a softer, “adult contemporary” sound.

If Browne shared some of his own personal experiences of this music, and justified his album choices in an emotional way (beyond the book’s introduction), I think the narrative might resonate more strongly. Because he adopts a more staid journalistic approach, I couldn’t help feeling that the focus on these four particular musicians was somewhat arbitrary, and the book itself a bit too blandly nostalgic. Why not also write about the harder rock that was already replacing the music of these four bands? I was left wanting to hear about how The Doors made the transition from the sixties with their laid-back, blues-heavy 1970 album Morrison Hotel. Or the way Led Zeppelin followed their balls-to-the-wall Brown Bomber album (an early taste of heavy metal) with the somber mysticism of Led Zeppelin III. The story of guitarist Nick Drake, somewhat similar to Taylor’s tale of drug abuse and mental breakdown, might have made for more compelling reading. And Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew surely would have inspired a more challenging look at the progressive mutations of rock and roll.

Of course, my reaction is based mostly on my own musical preferences. I suppose all I’m really saying is that when someone writes about music, they should be 100% emotionally engaged, not just intellectually engaged. The hell with journalistic objectivity... I want to hear more of the enthusiasm that’s in Browne’s introduction. I believe that music, more than any other art form, conveys pure emotion. Writing about music should mean tapping into that pure emotion, and trying to convey it via another medium. A good writer should be able to get the reader just as engaged. Could I find the right words to share my initial emotional reactions to Morrison Hotel, Led Zeppelin III, Bryter Layter and Bitches Brew? I don’t know... If so, it would be a hell of a book.

Of course, David Browne has a distinct advantage over me here. He experienced those four albums at the time of their release, and within the cultural context that inspired and influenced them. I could not write about them in that context with the same kind of honesty that he can. I’d have to pick another year, one that corresponds with my own personal formative experiences of music... Where to begin?

In his book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel J. Levitin writes: “Researchers point to the teen years as the turning point for musical preferences. It is around the age of ten or eleven that most children take on music as a real interest, even those children who didn’t express such an interest in music earlier. As adults, the music we tend to be nostalgic for, the music that feels like it is ‘our’ music, corresponds to the music we heard during these years. One of the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease (a disease characterized by changes in nerve cells and neurotransmitter levels, as well as destruction of synapses) in older adults is memory loss. As the disease progresses, memory loss becomes more profound. Yet many of these old-timers can still remember how to sing the songs they heard when they were fourteen. Why fourteen? Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged; in general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdale and neurotransmitters act in concert to ‘tag’ the memories as something important. Part of the reason also has to do with neural maturation and pruning: it is around fourteen that the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adultlike levels of completion.

“There doesn’t seem to be a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music, but most people have formed their tastes by the age of eighteen or twenty. Why this is so is not clear, but several studies have found it to be the case. Part of the reason may be that in general, people tend to become less open to new experiences as they age. During our teenage years, we begin to discover that there exists a world of different ideas, different cultures, different people. We experiment with the idea that we don’t have to limit our life’s course, our personalities, or our decisions to what we were taught by our parents, or to the way we were brought up. We also seek out different kinds of music….”

When I was twelve, I made a mix tape using my father’s music: CSNY, James Taylor, The Eagles, The Band, Three Dog Night, The Doobie Brothers, Elton John, etc. By the time I was fourteen, I was paying more attention to “new” music. (New to me, at least.) Part of me would love to write a book about 1994, featuring an album for each new season of emotion. 1994 was the year I got hooked on Pink Floyd (via their album The Division Bell) and Led Zeppelin (prompted by the release of Page & Plant’s live album No Quarter), and newer bands as diverse as The Cranberries (No Need to Argue) and Nine Inch Nails (The Downward Spiral). It was also the year that hometown boy Dave Matthews released Under the Table and Dreaming. I was never a huge DMB fan, but if you lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, at that time... there was no avoiding that album, and no dodging the enthusiasm it created on the local music scene.

Another writer might be more inclined to recall 1994 through the music of Oasis, Green Day, Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, Portishead, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, L7, Luscious Jackson or even (god help us) Hootie and the Blowfish. Whatever the year and whatever the musical selections... if a writer can explain their choices with emotional honesty, I’ll always listen.

MOVIES MADE ME #9: THE DOORS

For a generation that came of age in the late 1960s / early 1970s, there was no ignoring the influence of Jim Morrison. For a kid growing up in rural Virginia in the late 1980s / early 1990s, it was a little easier… at least until Oliver Stone made THE DOORS. There are a two main reasons that the film made such an impression on me:

1) Val Kilmer becomes Jim Morrison. Today I can’t watch footage of the real Jim Morrison without thinking of Val Kilmer’s performance, and I can’t watch Val Kilmer in any other film without thinking of Jim Morrison. That’s true of only one other performance that I can think of: Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. (Every time I watch a Johnny Depp movie, I notice at least one small moment when he lapses into his Hunter Thompson persona… and it often thrills me more than anything else in the movie.)

2) Every single scene in THE DOORS is driven by music and/or poetry. It would have been easy enough to make a film that simply hit the high notes, but this film delves deep into the band’s catalogue. I was familiar with the staples ("Break on Through," "Light My Fire," etc.) which played routinely on Charlottesville’s classic rock station (3WV, anyone?), but this was my introduction to “Love Street,” “Indian Summer,” “Dead Cats, Dead Rats,” poems from An American Prayer and the epic “Celebration of the Lizard.” I already appreciated the music of The Doors, but the impressionistic poetry really hooked me. I became captivated, like so many before me, by Jim Morrison’s attempts to “reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages.”

The big debate is whether or not Oliver Stone should have made a film about the man behind the myth instead of perpetuating the exaggerated popular perception. The film begins with the Morrison's claim that he was possessed by a dead Indian as a young child. Stone builds the movie around this moment of willful self-invention, repeatedly featuring the rock god's ghostly Indian companion in important scenes – most notably, a sequence where The Doors drop acid in the Mojave Desert and Jim descends like Orpheus into an Indian cave to be quickened. Stone does all this to forward the film’s overarching idea of Jim Morrison as “shaman” – a leader who suffers and dies to “purify the tribe.”

Jim’s band mate Ray Manzarek has been pretty outspoken about his dislike for what follows. He’s essentially said that Stone misrepresents his friend as a drunken buffoon rather than a radical intellectual; as someone who uses drugs to escape pain rather than to "break on through." Manzarek is even more blunt in his autobiography, where he writes about Stone’s attempt to recreate one of Jim Morrison’s student films:

“…Oliver tried to re-create Jim’s film based on what I told him and what I’m now telling you. Of course, he went completely over the top. A grotesque exaggeration. And how he turned Jim into a disciple of Adolf Hitler, well… perhaps someone ought to look into Mr. Stone’s psyche; into what I perceive to be his latent anti-Semitism, and not-so-latent fascist tendencies. I like to think that little student movie is as revealing of Oliver’s real problems as anything he’s ever done. It’s all there in capsule form. A wonderful reduction of psychotic leanings.

And what a misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche. Typical Leopold and Loeb-type of misinterpretation. If you don’t understand the concept of the Ubermensch, Oliver, don’t quote Nietzsche. Don’t do what the Nazis did. Don’t interpret the warriors freedom from the lowered state of consciousness of the first three chakras. That only begets a Hell’s Angels type of man. It uses the will to power as a justification to be the bringer of death instead of a bringer of joy and creativity. The lowered consciousness shouldn’t approach Nietzsche. He’s too dangerous. Nietzsche would have you leave all your preconceptions, all your childish beliefs, all your fears, and step into the light of freedom and divine responsibility. He would have you become a creator, if you dared. A creator who was responsible for the continuation of this existence. A lover of life. A dancer. A proud, bold, laughing man who delights in all the nuances and dangers of this all-too-brief life of ours. Not a naysayer or an extinguisher of life, but one who embraces it all and says, “Again!” And if you don’t understand that, don’t get too close to the fire. It’s highly volatile. This heat is definitely more than you should approach, Mr. Oliver Stone.”

Manzarek’s rant is as over the top as Stone’s fake student film (it’s hard to take someone seriously when they’re criticizing someone else’s chakras), but he has a point: Nietzsche’s philosophy is life-affirming, not nihilistic. And I like to think that Jim Morrison’s “road of excess” was equally life-affirming. That's what drew me into the myth.

In my mind, Stone’s film breaks down into three acts. The first act is about Jim Morrison, a precocious young man who wanted to break through his own insecurities and do something meaningful. (There is no hint, in the film, of the chunky intellectual military brat presented in Danny Sugarman’s book No One Here Gets Out Alive.) In Act 2, the rock god explodes. Overwhelmed by his own public mystique, Jim loses himself in the fashioning of a modern-day myth. Though he initiates his “prolonged derangement of the senses, to attain the unknown,” he’s ultimately at the mercy of forces greater than himself, a mortal participant – not a god – in the great Dionysian revelry. Accordingly, the third act is tragedy: the “fake hero” implodes. Like Zarathustra, he has his limitations.

How else could it end? This is the way the Sixties ended. When I first saw the film as a teenager in the early 1990s, however, THE DOORS didn’t seem to me like a cautionary tale. It seemed like a celebration of life in extremis and I got caught up in the dance, anticipating a different ending: “I am of today and before… but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and time to come.“ The would-be hero dies, but the music and the poetry obviously live on. All these years later, people are still making pilgrimages to Morrison's mysterious grave in Paris, searching for something larger than everyday life.

I haven't made that trip, but I did make a trip last fall to Mitchell Caverns in the Mojave Desert, the shooting location where Jim Morrison’s first acid trip culminates. While I was there, one of the guides said that Oliver Stone and company defaced this natural preserve by painting their own petroglyphs on the walls. (Note the white paint on the walls in the second to last photo.)

Brian Eno's Dream Landscapes

In the summer of 2000, I attended a mixed media art show at the Hayward Art Gallery in London, England. Sonic Boom featured exhibits by thirty different artists, but the one I remember most was Brian Eno’s “Recovery Room” – a small, enclosed space where a visitor could sit and watch pastel projections morphing in sync with the faint sounds of an ambient loop. There was nothing especially provocative about the exhibit – which, I suppose, was the point – but I was nevertheless awed… simply by the name of the artist.


In his biography On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, (Chicago Review Press, 2008) author David Sheppard acknowledges that Eno's Sonic Boom exhibit “seemed not to differ greatly from those increasingly found in contemporary clothing boutiques or swish restaurants." He interprets this as proof that contemporary culture had finally caught up with the provocateur, who began his career as a member of the experimental glam-rock band Roxy Music. There’s no question Eno's once-maligned musical experiments have endured the test of time. As the author notes, the “ambient” music that he pioneered is now a distinct genre of music. This helps to explain Eno’s iconic status, but his biggest claim to fame is his work as a producer on high-profile pop rock albums by David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2.

Few music producers have the kind of cachet that Brian Eno has; he stands alongside music industry legends like Phil Spector, George Martin and Quincy Jones as a Svengali-esque figure who brings out the best in those he works with. Sheppard does his due diligence in sussing out Eno’s specific role on these projects, acknowledging that his contributions differ widely from project to project. “For Eno,” he says, “‘production work’ can mean anything from organization and personnel-management to hands-on playing or simply discerning overlooked seeds of ideas from which new and exotic musical blooms may be nurtured.”

In the case of David Bowie’s “Berlin trilogy,” it was the nurturing that made all the difference. When he began working with Bowie on Low (1977), Eno says, “He [Bowie] was pretty much living at the edge of his nervous system, very tense. But as often happens, that translated into a sense of complete abandon in the work. One of the things that happens when you’re going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it’s in that sense that ‘tortured’ souls sometimes produce great work.” Sheppard observes the album is practically divided between Bowie and Eno. The more instrumental B-side (a quiet “recovery” from the heavier A-side) belongs mostly to Eno. Bowie's subsequent album Heroes (1977) fits the same mold, while Lodger (1979) shows evidence of a more pervasive mind meld. At this point, the fully-recovered Bowie moved on, as did Eno.





Sheppard suggests that this pattern repeated itself in Eno's work on a trilogy of albums with the Talking Heads (More Songs about Buildings and Food in 1977, Fear of Music in 1979, and Remain in Light in 1980) and later with U2 (beginning with The Unforgettable Fire in 1984, continuing with The Joshua Tree in 1987 and culminating with Original Soundtracks in 1995). In each instance, Eno gets involved as a provocateur – urging the musicians to loosen up and experiment with new sounds. Gradually, he forges a deep bond with the musicians, and slowly becomes an equally creative member of the band. Soon after, he begins to dominate the artistic process… which inevitably leads to "creative differences." The proof of the successful collaboration remains in the music, which prompts listeners as well as the musicians themselves to speak of a vital “trace element” in the alchemy of sound that clearly comes from Eno.

My favorite U2 songs have always been those with an Eno-esque / ambient quality. (I am one of those rare fans who truly enjoys Original Soundtracks, the album on which Eno was incorporated into U2 as a fifth member of the band.) I share David Sheppard’s opinion that, until The Unforgettable Fire, the Irish quartet’s music was often “shrill, sloganeering, evangelically tinged rock bombast.” Eno gave them a textured, transcendent quality that is now instantly recognizable as “the U2 sound.” Even when he's not present, Eno remains a vital trace element in the band's alchemy. He is the redemptive spirit in the familiar landscape... something that Sheppard's biography illustrates by focusing mainly on the producer's solo work.

When the young avant-garde artist's ambitions outgrew Roxy Music in the mid-70s, he embarked on a solo career – creating his first three albums out of musical fragments. With the third album, Another Green World (1975), he found his “voice.” Ever since then, the key to Eno's sound has been vision. Throughout the book, Sheppard hints that Eno has a condition known as synesthesia, where a person experiences one stimulus via two senses. The most common form of synesthesia is to experience sound as both a musical note and a color. (...which explains Eno’s “Recovery Room” exhibit.) Although the author doesn't give explicit examples, I can't help applying this insightful idea to specific songs. Compare, if you will, the following tracks from Eno's first album Here Come the Warm Jets (a collage in warm colors?) and Another Green World (where he seems to be "cooling off")...





Of the latter track, Eno says, “I can remember very clearly the image that I had which was this image of a dark, inky blue forest with moss hanging off and you could hear horses off in the distance all the time, these horses kind of neighing, whinnying.” The place and the sound are inextricably combined in his imagination; his music was slowly evolving into distinct layers of sound, foreground and background, action and landscape, sound and “soundscape.”

This became even more pronounced in 1975, when Eno was struck by a car while crossing the street. Sheppard documents the artist's reflections on that turn of events: “For about a week I’d been feeling that I was about to have an accident. It was the same feeling as I had before I got appendicitis when I was sixteen – or before my lung collapsed… I always seem to sense when I’ve pushed too hard, you know? When I’ve been carried off on the momentum of media approval or professional opportunism and have ceased to think about where I am or what I’m doing.”

After the accident, one of Eno’s caretakers left him at rest in a fortuitous environment, where he fell asleep listening to a low-volume recording of 18th century harp music, mixed with the sounds of a light rain storm outside. That experience gave birth to “ambient” music – beginning with the album Discreet Music (1975) and continuing with the hugely influential Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978). Eno believed (or, rather, knew from personal experience) that ambient music could have genuinely restorative properties –- relieving stress, aiding meditation, defragging the brain. (Nowhere, he figured, is that more necessary than in crowded airports.) With each new album, he asked listeners to close their eyes and enter the “recovery room”:





Subsequent ambient works were more grounded in specific landscapes. Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors (1980) was a collaboration with pianist Harold Budd, whose earliest musical inspiration was "the sound of the desert wind humming in the telegraph wires near his childhood home" in the Mojave Desert. Ambient 4: On Land (1982) draws on Eno’s own childhood in rural Suffolk, England. He remembers how one song on the album (“The Lost Day’) reconnected him with a long-forgotten memory: “In the distance there’s this little bell sound. It’s not really a bell; it’s actually the sound from a Fender Rhodes piano played very, very quietly… Every time I heard it, it had a pull on me that I couldn’t explain… I went home at Christmas to visit my parents. I went for a walk on Christmas day, a windy day. They live on a river. And as I was walking I heard this sound – it was actually the sound of the metal guy wires banging against the masts of the yachts. They have metal masts on yachts, and the sound was so identical. I suddenly realized where I got this sound from.” (This author refers to this as “psycho-geography.”) Apollo: Atmospheres and Landscapes (1983), arguably the best of Eno’s ambient works, floats through the ether of outer space.

All of these albums have the effect of slowing the listener down and making us aware of our sensations in the present moment. That, as Sheppard's biography illustrates, is the secret of Eno’s success. He paints with music, creating restorative emotional landscapes and helping us to get lost in worlds we know by heart.





And you know it’s time to go
Through the sleet and driving snow
Across the fields of morning
Light in the distance

And you hunger for the time
Time to heal, desired time
And the earth moves beneath
Your own dream landscape