Happy Birthday, Brian Eno

Brian Eno turns 60 today, but he’s looked 60 for the past 20 years if you ask me. Here’s an idea of the incredibly geeky friends I’ve had over the years: I remember pulling my hair back to expose a mock receding hairline and bring a finger to my lip, creating the universally recognized “Shhh” signal. I did this to mock Brian Eno, who I witnessed doing the same thing during a video showing the recording process of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, telling someone outside of the shot to be quiet as they were recording some bongos or other pointless percussion instrument. Why the hell would U2 need bongos on a track?
As you may notice, I hated what Brian Eno did to my beloved U2 during that album. I considered Boy and War to be fantastic albums, October less so, but I relegated my anger towards The Unforgettable Fire, and album I deemed The Unforgettable Fart, directly at Eno, who I held responsible for their stunning lack of “rock.”
A friend in college had the entire Eno solo album collection and swore by it. It sounded like a bunch of shit that you’d play to help go to sleep if you asked me. Another friend advised me to give it another chance. And he appealed directly to my technical nature by making me hip to an Eno technique of hooking up your speakers. I can’t remember the details at the moment, but I believe it had something to do with reversing the positive and negative wires and then introducing a third speaker.
It sounded insane, but the dude swore that it could produce some trippy results with certain albums.
“Play Raw Power through that set up and it sounds awesome!”
I did as instructed and it did produce some pretty cool results. It was almost like a primitive form of surround sound, placing instruments in odd spaces and vocals in unusual places in the mix. The two louspeaker terminals of the third speaker is connected by only using the two positive (red) speaker connectors on the amplifier. The idea is to place this speaker somewhere behind you, like surround sound but only with this one speaker, preferably at the apex of the imaginary triangle. Your two original speakers form the other side of the triangle. What happens is that the third speaker seems to reproduce everything that is not located in the central stereo image, thereby producing some fairly wild results at times and with the right kind of album.
The friend went on to explain that several of Eno’s solo albums were mixed to the point where this strategy also produced unusual results. I took his word at it, but I started at an album that wasn’t a part of that experimentation. In fact, it wasn’t at all a part of Eno’s ambient 70’s material. I started with Brian’s first album after leaving Roxy Music, Here Come The Warm Jets, an album billed as an extension of both glam and art rock, which meant it was an album that took years for me to appreciate.
For the second time, I walked away from Brian Eno’s material as unimpressed.
It wasn’t until another friend played Eno’s collaboration with David Byrne before I finally was matched with a worthy album. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is a wonderful complement to the Talking Heads' Fear Of Music album and an extension of the quirky white boy world beat jams the pair created immediately after the Heads’ session.
My initial dismissal of The Unforgettable Fire also ended too, as a girlfriend I had during the mid-80’s insisted on playing that album and an album by Aztec Camera every time we had sex at her place. She also had Whitesnake’s Slide It In, derided it as a mistake purchase as recommended by a girlfriend, but she would never let me play that one while we fucked.
Perhaps if Eno had his hands on that one, things would have been differently.