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Article Excerpt
The Heavenly Music Corporation --
(1980-82, Mom dead.)
"No Pussyfooting" is an album by the guitar player Robert Fripp and the keyboard player Brian Eno. The album consists of two songs, or compositions; there are no voices on the record, no lyrics. Unlike other recordings by Fripp and Eno, alone or as members of groups, "No Pussyfooting" doesn't involve studio overdubs. Although the music provides a fullness, an illusion of depth, the two cuts appear to be long improvisations between the players, conducted in real time, within simple boundaries. Side one is made up of achingly long tones, swells of sound that rise and fade. In vocal terms, the instruments groan or wail. They keen. On side two, the tones are frantic with ripples, oscillations. In vocal terms, the instruments ululate. Or orgasm.
Side one is called "The Heavenly Music Corporation." Side two, "Swastika Girls."
I bought "No Pussyfooting" in 1979 or 1980, at the record store on the eighth floor of Abraham & Straus, a palatial department store on Fulton Street, a few blocks from where I lived. My friend Jeremy and I had been going there regularly to browse the long sections of Frank Zappa and Kinks records, and to dare ourselves to spend money on some of the mysterious products we couldn't have investigated otherwise. I was curious about Brian Eno because he was the producer of the newest Talking Heads record. I imagine I selected the two Eno records I bought--"Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy" and "No Pussyfooting"--on the strength of the jacket art, which was alluringly dark and strange, and which had a resemblance to gallery art, as did the jackets of Talking Heads albums.
I also liked the name Eno. It sounded vaguely alien, bliplike, like the names of some of the writers I'd begun to idolize: Lem, Kafka, Poe, Borges.
When I got those records home, "Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy" turned out to be a sequence of songs in conventional rock format, three to six minutes long, mostly with guitars and drums underlying their creepy, synthesized sound effects and ominous, gnomic lyrics. Perfect, in other words. "No Pussyfooting" was this other thing: a pair of fuzzy electronic suites, which absolutely refused to beguile. I should have filed it in my collection and forgotten it, gravely disappointed, as I'd imagine most of its teen-age buyers were. Instead, I decided I loved "The Heavenly Music Corporation," and hated "Swastika Girls."
I had a room to myself, on the top floor of our house. My bed was on a loft, built above a hivelike construction of desktops and storage spaces. Directly below where I placed my pillow was a wooden compartment that neatly held my amplifier and turntable. I had a set of headphones--absurdly heavy, ear-clamping muffs, connected to the stereo by a mushy, coiled rubber-coated cord, twice as thick as a telephone's.
Late at night, when I was done reading, and had turned off my light, I'd wear the headphones and listen to the twenty-one minutes of "The Heavenly Music Corporation," or as much as I could before it lulled me to sleep. I memorized each swell of guitar and synth, anticipating the moment (which, I've since confirmed, occurs exactly at the ten-minute-and-thirty-second mark) when the synthesizer's repeated plunge toward a certain note suddenly seems to persuade the guitar to follow, so that the second half of the piece becomes a long finishing, an ebbing away.
Some nights, whatever teen-age anxiety or fear thrilled my body kept me awake through the whole piece. So I'd lean over the edge of my bed, still wearing the headphones, and place the needle at the start of the track again. I'd mastered the art of nudging the monstrous phones off my head as I launched into deeper stages of sleep, and I'd wake to find them crammed between the mattress and the wall.
Fripp's long guitar solo was a human voice I grew to know better, most likely, than its maker. His thinking, audible as he tested the surf of Eno's synthesizer, was like a morality only I understood. I covered it in sleep, then bore it out into the day with me, a surrogate brain wave with which to respond to the world.
The Man Who Fell To Earth --
(1976, Mom out of hospital.)
My mother and her boyfriend took me to a midday showing of the Nicolas Roeg film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" at the Quad Cinema on West Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. "The Man Who Fell to Earth" stars David Bowie as a gentle and moody alien visitor to our planet, one who, upon encountering man's inhumanity to alien, becomes increasingly bitter and self-abnegating, until he ends up a decadent and drunken pop star. This was the bowdlerized American release, missing the blatant sex scenes that have since been restored, though David Bowie's attempt to present his "true self" to his human lover, played by Candy Clark--shedding his disguise, he reveals goatlike slit pupils, and a smooth, doll-like bump in place of his genitals--was shocking to me.
As we three stepped back out into the daylight of Manhattan, I was deeply immersed in the spell of the film. I'd been reading Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" and a handful of other classic science-fiction stories, and alien equals alienated was a rebus I grasped. Any one of these people I see walking around me, I remember thinking, in astonishment, as we made our way back to the subway, could be like him. By "like him" I meant, or thought I meant: a secret visitor from another planet. But my wonder at the film was really wonder at the force of my identification with the figure of the misunderstood alien. I didn't for a minute imagine that I wasn't an earthling, so what I really meant was: Any one of these people I see walking around me could be like me. Could feel like me, just as I felt like Bowie. That is to say, subjective, sad, and special.
Wish You Were Here --
(1979 or 1980, Mom dead.)
The party was in the apartment of a man named Louis (some of these names have been changed), who wore his hair in Rastafarian-style dreadlocks,...
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