By 1973, I had graduated high school and was struggling to find my footing in life. My taste in music had grown from Jimi Hendrix to incorporate the whole of the San Francisco psychedelic-rock genre, Frank Zappa (many young men of my age went through a Frank Zappa stage at some point), the nascent jazz-fusion movement, and the emerging British prog-rock scene. One of the key albums for the later was 1969's In the Court of the Crimson King, and I could just as easily have included the track 21st Century Schizoid Man in this retrospective as easily as I could The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows in the first post of this series.
It's arguable, though, if ITCOTCK was a quantum leap in my musical perspective or just a continuation of my expanding musical horizons although, surely, nothing else sounded quite like King Crimson at the time. I was disappointed by their follow-up album, In the Wake of Poseidon - I thought it was too derivative and similar to their debut, a fairly bold judgement for a 16-year-old - and was frankly bored by their next two LPs, Lizard (1970) and Islands (1971). I had just about written the band off when a friend played their 1973 album, Larks Tongues in Aspic, for me and blew my mind. King Crimson was back, and guitarist Robert Fripp entered my pantheon of rock heroes. Of course, their music wasn't played on the radio back them - their songs were generally too long, too instrumental, and too weird even for progressive FM stations but was spread in the States by word of mouth among knowing music fans.
By '74, I was living in a rented house in a bad section of industrial waterfront on the South Shore of Long Island with an ever-changing roster of dirt-bag housemates. I was a dirt bag myself and my income alternated between minimum wage jobs (security guard, janitor, apartment-complex maintenance) and collecting unemployment. I preferred the latter. One of my initial housemates had a pet iguana he had named Eno, "you know, like Fripp & Eno." I pretended I understood the reference; of course I knew Fripp, but who the hell was this "Eno"? Obviously, Roxy Music hadn't yet landed on my turntable.
Of course, being young men in the '70s, we had multiple stereo systems in the house - the best, high-end system in the living room for communal use and private systems of various quality in our individual bedrooms. One day, Richard (Eno the iguana's owner) played the album No Pussyfooting by Fripp & Eno on the living-room system and Oh. My. God.
It would be an understatement to say I had never heard anything like this before. Two extended, side-long tracks (The Heavenly Music Corporation and Swastika Girls), no vocals, no identifiable melodies, not even any real structure or composition. I was already familiar with side-long instrumental tracks, particularly Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (1973), but even that had some logical progression and compositional structure while Pussyfooting was just long, droning electronics overlaid with Fripp's idiosyncratic guitar. At times it sounded soothing, at other times ominous, and always futuristic. The cover photo of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno sitting in a roomful of glass furniture with mirrored walls looked otherworldly, and even the titles were subversively suggestive. We all understood Swastika Girls to be a porno reference, which left no doubt the album title was meant as a double entendre ("heh, heh, you said 'pussy'," as Beavis would later chuckle).
The music may be ahead of its time even today. The embedded track above is only a portion of the 18:43-long Swastika Girls, and it's hard to find a streaming copy of the album that doesn't artificially carve the the two side-long compositions into shorter, presumably more palatable (for some tastes) sections. One really needs to listen to the whole album all the way though to really appreciate what's happening here.
My housemates, who had already absorbed the lessons to be learned from No Pussyfooting and were further down the avant-garde rabbit hole than I, were more than willing to tutor me further. They played The World of Harry Partch for me, and then Terry Riley's In C. This was my introduction to minimalism and 20th Century composers, and I probably wouldn't have been receptive if I hadn't already digested No Pussyfooting.
Shortly after No Pussyfooting, Eno's solo debut album, Here Come the Warm Jets, was released. I stole a cassette copy of the recording from the desk of an executive whose office I had to clean (I told you I was a dirt bag). On one level, Warm Jets was a far more conventional rock record than No Pussyfooting - its tracks were in song format, with lyrics, choruses, refrains, and instrumental bridges - but heavily soaked through with avant-garde production techniques and with Fripp's riveting guitar work. If not for the existence of No Pussyfooting, tracks like Baby's on Fire or Needles in the Camel's Eye might be listed here as the second Song That Changed my Life.
But No Pussyfooting was my introduction to Professor Eno and I sat at his feet for much of the next two decades absorbing additional lessons. I eagerly awaited each subsequent Eno release, combing the imports bin of the local record store for anything new, and then jumping on each release as it arrived on these shores. Not only did his music lead me indirectly to minimalism and contemporary composition, but it also directly led me to No Wave, ambient music, Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, Laaraji, Gavin Byers, Cluster, and much, much more, some of which I may have come to enjoy today anyway, but most of which I probably would never have encountered, much less appreciated. So much of what I listen to and enjoy today can be traced back through multiple degrees of separation to Brian Eno, and Eno himself to No Pussyfooting.
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