Read Online Brian Eno's Another Green World by Geeta Dayal - Free Book Online Page B

that many prog fans he knew in the 1970s who bought
Another Green World
to hear complicated guitar work and cutting-edge synthesized instrumentals would flip the record over to Side Two right before “I’ll Come Running,” deeming the song too sappy and poppy for their tastes. There was nothing “progressive” about “I’ll Come Running”—it practically sounded like a mid-1960s Beatles song, penned by Paul McCartney. Because those prog-rockers flipped the record over before the song started (presumably while holding their noses), their version of
Another Green World
jumped straight from “The Big Ship” to “Sombre Reptiles,” which meant that they also inadvertently skipped the title track, “Another Green World”—the last instrumental piece on Side One.
    “I’ll Come Running” was the one song on
Another
Green World
that was clearly based on earlier material.The song’s DNA can be traced to an earlier Eno tune called “Totalled.” Eno played “Totalled’’ on a BBC Peel session in 1974, backed by The Winkies. In “I’ll Come Running”‘s previous incarnation, it was a rock song—not unlike the three-chord punk ditties that would become ubiquitous a few years later—crammed with crunchy distortion and the goofy chorus “I’ll come running to tie your shoe/Whoa-oh-oh-oh/I’ll come running to tie your shoe.” The inner life of that screwball rock song—and how it blossomed into a luminous, unexpected piano ballad on
Another Green World—
was, in a way, the story of Eno’s own musical transformation from 1974 to 1975.
    The next three tracks on the album after “I’ll Come Running”—“Another Green World,” “Sombre Reptiles,” and “Little Fishes”—are all delicate, miniature instrumentals, tiny jewel boxes stuffed with odd little sounds. “Another Green World” features “desert guitar’’; “Sombre Reptiles’’ is underscored by “synthetic and Peruvian percussion”; “Little Fishes” uses Eno’s prepared piano. “The little tone poems, they’re exquisite really, and in a way I don’t think they’ve been surpassed in that area,” said the critic David Toop. “A lot of other people have tried to do things in a similar way, but I think that was a moment of using the studio, and he managed to make instruments sound unlike themselves.”
    The lyrics of the next song, “Golden Hours,” could be interpreted as a meditation on mortality and life passing by, with lines like “The passage of time/ Is flicking up dimly upon the screen/I can’t see the lines/I used to think I could read between.” But the most intriguing aspect of “Golden Hours’’ is how every part of the song seems to clash with every other part of the song, and yet it somehow all hangs together.
    Eno wrote the original melody for “Golden Hours” one day in the studio on a Farfisa organ, and kept piling on more effects and parts. (Eno is credited with “choppy organs, spasmodic percussion, club guitars, and uncertain piano.”) The song literally conflicts with itself—the last two verses of “Golden Hours’’ are layered with another two verses, which have completely different, and totally nonsensical, lyrics. The timing of Eno’s overdubs was slightly off, on purpose, because Eno was trying to sound like a oneman Portsmouth Sinfonia. “I wanted a lot of voices that were a little bit off with one another, so I overdubbed the voices myself but I didn’t use headphones,” Eno explained to Jim Aikin in
Keyboard Wizards
. “The engineer would just give me a cue when to start singing. He was listening to the track in the control room, and when he cued me I would start singing, so that my pitch is deliberately slightly off and my timing is slightly off, to reproduce that effect.”
    In addition to the disorienting layers of conflicting lyrics, the burbling organ, the ungainly rhythm, John Cale’s elegant viola and Fripp’s complicated guitar runs, there was also the heavy extent