Music journalism holds a special place in my heart. As a not-quite teen in was my entryway into Writing with a capital W, just as the music the writers were talking about was my gateway into art and ideas and aesthetics. Even long pieces in music magazines about albums I had never heard (or even hated upon listening to them) had a positive impact on my burgeoning imagination.
So with all of this in mind I’m pleased to be able to today showcase what is essentially a record review (although in reality it is much more) and I hope it will get the readers gears turning in the way that all of that great writing about music did when I was a kid.
I can’t speak to the Fripp and Eno record in question as I have never listened to it, but I can certainly speak to the quality of this piece on it. One sentence review- it’s great.
Enjoy.
TJB.
Travel back in time with me to a chilly yet clear day in February 1964—the seventh, to be exact, and watch as the jet planes come down from the sky at Kennedy airport in Brooklyn. Your attention can’t but be caught by the few thousand fans waiting to get a glimpse of four young English rock musicians as they get off the plane and are whisked away to their hotel. Two days later, these same musicians will appear on a nationally-broadcast television program, wearing matching suits and with matching hair, on a pink stage setup flooded with fluorescent light. Throughout the performance the in-studio crowd will be screaming. This TV appearance was a musical performance, yes, but it was simultaneously more than and less than that; it was the official product launch party for the Beatles in America—and undoubtedly there was no one in the crowd who came primarily to hear the music.
Maybe there was something specifically American about that television show. Would it have happened like that in Europe? Perhaps. It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that, only a little over eleven years after that fateful television spot, the landscape of musical performance would change so much as to produce the recording which is the subject of this review. Nothing about Fripp and Eno’s 1975 Paris gig bears any relation to the Beatles’ appearance in 1964. For one, the performance venue was very different. Instead of on a stage lit for television this concert occurred in near total darkness, the only light coming from a projected image of a galloping horse looped infinitely. And if you had been there and could manage to get a clear view of the performers you would have seen that they presented themselves very differently from our boys from Liverpool. The Beatles were a polished and groomed product; the two musicians on stage in Paris were not. Robert Fripp, bearded and bespectacled, sat on a stool for most of the show; he looks utterly boring, about as far away from a “product” as you can imagine. His collaborator, Brian Eno, is wearing a goofy thrift-store jacket and a beret; he’s apparently in a more serious mood than his days as knob twiddler for Roxy Music, and he has abstained from wearing feathers or blue eyeliner. Eno’s stage presence with Roxy Music, and Fripp’s with King Crimson, are on either end of a spectrum with the Beatles in the middle. But the Beatles were the visual component of an all-encompassing entertainment package; Fripp and Eno in Paris were all about the music, to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
And the crowd in attendance at the Olympia is totally on board with this. Note that there is almost no sound coming from the audience. Aside from some random cheering and clapping in the intro (Maybe Fripp and Eno came onto and then off the stage several times before the show started?) the audience takes it in complete silence. The people who came to see Fripp and Eno perform were willing to sit politely and quietly and listen to what was happening onstage. However, they would not have had any idea what was going to happen. The liner notes are worth quoting here:
Fripp just recently disbanded King Crimson at a point which many would describe as their artistic pinnacle. Eno also recently parted ways with Roxy Music at a similar juncture and then aborted his first and only extensive solo tour after only a handful of shows, due to a collapsed lung. Fripp and Eno live in concert? What would they do?
Indeed, the musicians themselves had no idea what they would do. Fripp’s guitar lines are improvised, as is, I assume, Eno’s choice of which tape loops to play in the background. The two musicians were venturing into the unknown when they played this concert, but that doesn’t seem to worry them. Live improvisation! To my knowledge the only antecedent for this kind of attitude towards live performance would have to be in the world of free jazz—Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane being chief among the practitioners of this highly esoteric art. Perhaps the European classical tradition offers a foreshadowing of Fripp and Eno’s approach in the traditional cadenza for the solo instrument in a concerto. But even that has its strictures: the orchestra ends on an unresolved seventh chord or something like that, and then—here we go, the soloist lets loose a barrage of who-knows-what, perhaps revisiting the themes from the concerto or perhaps not, before settling down into a trill that is extended until the rest of the orchestra remembers that its their turn to play now. Fripp and Eno, in contrast, are following the lead of the jazz / blues / jam band tradition of “winging it” over prearranged material; Eno’s loop forms a background to Fripp’s soloing, and he never strays far from that loop. This is something unprecedented in music, and the crowd at the Olympia is drinking it in.
I personally don’t like rock shows. Rock is an art of recording, not live performance. But my friends who go to rock clubs don’t really expect everything to be made up on the spot. Is this because there simply aren’t any bands doing that? Adherence to expectations certainly seems to be the prevailing style in rock these days. Of course, there always will be, and still is, a small audience for the avant-garde. But both Fripp and Eno were squarely within the cohort of early-seventies rock stars; each had been on top-ten albums in the previous few years. These musicians, and their approaches to music, were popular back then.
Just think for a moment what it had taken to get to this moment in Paris that May night. The Beatles—probably the world’s greatest rock band in terms of influence on musicians as well as listeners—blew the lid off the kettle with their Sgt. Pepper album in 1967; they showed how it was possible to make art with the vocabulary of verse-chorus, guitar-drums pop. But things had been simmering for a while. The Beach Boys recorded their opus, Pet Sounds, and released it in 1966 to overwhelming acclaim; the Beatles themselves had been working toward Sgt. Pepper with their previous two albums. But from 1967, the directions taken by rock and pop were dizzyingly eclectic. In only a few short years, recorded popular music would go from catchy dance songs about girls and cars to half-hour sci-fi epics and multi-part sidelong suites about the Hindu scriptures.1 I can’t overemphasize how strange it must have been to be listening to the new records as they came out during that time; each new album must have seemed like a revelation, an opening of the possibilities of recorded music.
But what kind of music is the stuff captured on Live in Paris 28.05.75?
Well . . . it’s not really rock music. It’s not part of the classical tradition, or even the free jazz tradition. It certainly isn’t “ambient music”—this isn’t the sort of thing that blends with the knives and forks at dinner, as Erik Satie famously categorized his “Furniture Music” of 1917. Parts of it are smooth and quiet; parts are foreboding and abrasive. And no one at the Paris Olympia is having conversations or reading a book or doing anything else than paying close attention to the sounds coming from the stage.
So . . . should you listen to this album? I don’t know. If you’re a completist you probably already have; for everyone else . . . well . . . the definitive document of this pair’s collaboration will always remain No Pussyfooting; and there are many Fripp solo records which showcase his guitar looping to a much greater degree2. Ultimately, this album is a historical curiosity, nothing more. One time, two prominent rock musicians performed an hour of completely improvised music to a raptly attentive house.
But I mean, I can’t imagine any of our current crop of rockers doing that.
Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery reached #2 on the UK album chart; Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans reached #1.
Let The Power Fall; the version of “God Save the King” found on the League of Gentlemen CD; “Breathless” from Exposure; “Threnody for Souls in Torment” from The Bridge Between (can you tell I am one of those aforementioned completists? I fell in love with Fripp’s looping music when I was 15 and have continued to love it ever since).
Very well done, William! I would have liked to have been in the audience at the Olympia to hear them play. Thanks for reminding me of Fripp and King Crimson. The Hall of the Crimson King is always worth another listen.