Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard

by Roni Sarig

  (w/ Dub Syndicate) Time Boom X de Devil Dead (On-U Sound, 1987; 1994); a strong collaboration with Adrian Sherwood’s dub group.

  Give Me Power (Trojan, 1988; 1994); a compilation of Perry productions.

  Some of the Best (Heartbeat, 1988); a compilation of Perry’s early reggae works, including an early Bob Marley track.

  Scratch Attack! (RAS, 1988); combines two early albums.

  Chicken Scratch (Heartbeat, 1989); a collection of early Perry ska songs from 1964-66, backed by the Skatalites.

  Open the Gate (Trojan, 1989); a two-CD compilation of Black Ark material.

  (w/ Mad Professor) Mystic Warrior (Ariwa, 1990); collaboration with UK dub star, also released in a Mystic Warrior Dub version.

  From the Secret Laboratory (Mango, 1990); another collaboration with Adrian Sherwood.

  Lee Scratch Perry Meets Bullwackie in Satan’s Dub (ROIR, 1990).

  Public Jestering (Attack, 1990); a compilation from 1972-76.

  Lord God Muzick (Heartbeat, 1991); a new album recorded in Jamaica.

  Out of Many – The Upsetter (Trojan, 1991); a compilation of early ‘70s material,

  (the Upsetters) Version like Rain (Trojan, 1992); a compilation from 1972-76.

  The Upsetter and the Beat (Heartbeat, 1992); a late ‘80s reunion with producer Coxsone Dodd.

  Soundz from the Hot Line (Heartbeat, 1992); a compilation from the Black Ark days.

  (w/ King Tubby) Dub Confrontation Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (Lagoon, 1994; 1995); a mixing battle between the two dub greats.

  (w/ Mad Professor) Super Ape inna Jungle (RAS, 1995); a wacky dub-techno creation.

  (w/ Mad Professor) Black Ark Experryments (Ariwa, 1995).

  (w/ Mad Professor) Experryments at the Grass Roots of Dub (Ariwa, 1995).

  (the Upsetters) Upsetters a Go Go (Heartbeat, 1995); features lost tracks from Perry’s original band, remixed.

  Who Put the Voodoo Pon Reggae (Ariwa, 1996).

  Technomajikal (ROIR, 1997); a collaboration with Yello’s Dieter Meier.

  Upsetter in Dub (Heartbeat, 1997); a collection of Black Ark dubs.

  Arkology (Island, 1997); a three-CD box set documenting the work at Perry’s Black Ark studio between 1975 and 1979

  BRIAN ENO

  Bono, U2:

  Some bands went to art school; we went to Brian Eno.

  As an independent musical adventurer, Brian Eno has been alternately the most artfully sophisticated mind in pop and the catchiest composer in experimental music. A musical creator with truly equal-opportunity ears, his huge body of work serves as a meeting ground for minimalism and glam rock, techno and pop, European intellectualism and non-Western folk styles, obscure composers and stadium rock. Eno has stood at ground zero in the development of art rock, ambient, new wave, no wave, New Age, trance-dance, and mannered pop. As a producer, he has played a critical role in the careers of some of rock’s most significant acts. As an inspiration, he has been cited by artists in all forms of contemporary music.

  Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:

  When I was in, like, sixth grade, I went ape over Roxy Music’s second record. The credits said Brian Eno did “treatments,” and I thought, “Wow, what does that mean?” Then I got [Genesis’] The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and the credits called the way the piano was treated “Enosification,” and I was like, “So what did Eno do there?” It was such a big deal to me, all those things. It started the spark. Through learning more about what Eno was doing with tapes, I started playing with that stuff... Soon after I heard Music for Airports, I gave away all my records and decided to start from scratch. I only listened to Music for Airports for two or three years... And I really liked working with unfamiliar sounds and musique concrète, but I also really liked pop music. Eno was very important to solving the problem of living in both worlds at the same time.

  Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Suffolk where his father was a postman. At a young age Eno began tuning in American radio broadcasts from the nearby U.S. Air Force Base, where he first heard sounds that seemed to come from another world: early rock ‘n’ roll, doo-wop, easy listening pop. Eno also became fascinated with tape recorders as a kid, and when he finally got one he constantly investigated its possibilities. The tape recorder, essentially, became Eno’s first instrument.

  As Eno entered art school in the mid-‘60s, he began hearing the work of modern composers such as John Cage and LaMonte Young. Soon he fell under the influence of British composer Cornelius Cardew, with his collective of anarchic musical experimenters the Scratch Orchestra, and joined a similar group, the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Simultaneously, Eno pursued rock music with Maxwell’s Demon, a band for which he sang and operated electronics.

  In 1971 Eno settled on a single musical pursuit when he formed Roxy Music, an eccentric art rock band that took its cues from the Velvet Underground and early German krautrock bands. Eno was nominally the keyboardist, but his true function was something closer to sound engineer, handling “treatments.” Eno’s musical direction and freakish glam look – with makeup, glitter suits, and feather boas – dominated Roxy Music’s first two albums and tension developed between Eno and singer Bryan Ferry. In 1973, Eno decided to move on.

  Scott Kannberg, Pavement:

  We had all these electronic keyboards on our first single, and I think that came from him. I was in a record store and I heard this amazing electronic solo on a Roxy Music bootleg, Eno was just going off on this warped accompaniment. A week later I was like, “Oh, we gotta have something like that on our song.”

  Eno’s first stop was (No Pussyfooting), an experimental guitar album with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, on which the two developed a system of delayed tape looping (called “Frippertronics”) that enabled Fripp to layer guitar parts and essentially accompany himself. Eno also embarked on a solo career with 1973’s Here Come the Warm Jets and the following year’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), two excellent records – both playfully melodic and sonically adventurous – that at different points seemed to prefigure both punk rock and synth pop.

  Eric Bachmann, Archers of Loaf:

  If you listen to the guitar stuff on those first two pop records, we owe a lot to that. The production things that he was just starting to work out, that’s totally how I see us. By no means do we have the kind of brain that he has, but I admire his attitude. He would just try anything, where a lot of people wouldn’t have the energy.

  Eno subsequently recorded two more ambitious pop-oriented records, Another Green World (which featured the Velvet Underground’s John Cale as well as future pop star Phil Collins) and Before and after Science (featuring the German duo Cluster, with whom Eno would collaborate often). These albums, though, were clearly informed by a new direction Eno had begun to take in music, following a 1975 car accident. While recuperating in bed, Eno found himself listening to a record with the volume turned very low. Unable to get out of bed to make the music louder, he simply let it play at a barely audible level. As he later wrote, “This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.”

  Beginning with his record, Discreet Music, Eno began to investigate music “that could be listened to and yet could be ignored” – quite similar to the goals of early 20th-century composer Erik Satie’s “furniture music” – which Eno termed “ambient music.” The first part of Discreet Music involved a system of tape delay loops that processed two synthesizer melodies in various permutations, while the second part reconfigured the popular classical piece Pachelbel’s Canon by altering the tempo of certain instruments. Both works clearly fell more in the realm of experimental composition than pop, and furthered Eno’s earlier interests in self-generating and tape music.

  Jim O’Rourke, solo / Gastr del Sol:

  I loved Eno. His record Discreet Music was absolutely huge, massive, gargan
tuan, one of the biggest eye-openers for me. He explained what he was doing in the liner notes, and that was the key because it was the first time one these records explained exactly what they were doing. That really got me into minimalism.

  Continuing along the ambient path of Discreet Music – which proved so calming it was used in hospitals for childbirth – Eno released a series of records to be used as aural decorations for the environment, including Ambient 5 / Music for Airports (which was broadcast at LaGuardia Airport) and later, the evocative Ambient 4 / On Land. Though these records are peaceful to the point of boring, Eno’s ambient works definitely reward repeated listenings. While they can be blamed for giving birth to shelves of awful New Age music, they also inspired musicians over a decade later to explore the connections between tranquility and dance with “ambient house.”

  Alex Patterson, the Orb:

  I only met him once, like in 1984, at EG [Eno’s label, where Patterson worked]. We shook hands and said hello, that was it, really. But the influence is there because I got the EG back catalogue [Eno’s ambient work]. And that was the connection I put together, really. Dance music and ambient together in what became ambient house.

  While Eno’s ambient works gained him few pop fans of his own, during the same years he was closely involved with a number of high-profile rock records. He produced the debut albums by Devo and Ultravox, and also compiled No New York, the essential document of the radical late ‘70s no wave scene (featuring DNA and Lydia Lunch). In addition, between 1977 and ‘79, Eno collaborated with David Bowie on a trilogy of albums – Low, Heroes, and Lodger – which many consider to be Bowie’s artistic peak.

  Eno helped shape the Talking Heads’ sound by producing three of their early records. Following 1980’s Remain in Light, on which Eno co-wrote many of the songs with Talking Heads leader David Byrne, he and Byrne collaborated on a hugely influential record, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, that merged nonwestern (or “world”) music with western dance beats – something he’d begun earlier with his Possible Musics release. Both records anticipated the next decade’s ethno-techno/trance music of Banco de Gaia and Loop Guru.

  David Byrne:

  We [Talking Heads] met him early on and he felt like a kindred spirit. Here’s somebody who looks at music from a “what if” point of view. It’s from a composer’s point of view, but not from a musician with chops point of view. It was a way of breaking out of tried and true formulas. We also learned a few gimmicks, like the many uses of the Roland space echo.

  Beginning in the early ‘80s, Eno collaborated with Canadian producer Daniel Lanois. Early joint efforts included work on a record by Eno’s brother, Roger, and with composer Harold Budd on The Pearl. Their best known co-credits, however, began in 1984 when they remade U2’s sound on hugely popular albums, The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. For 1991’s Achtung Baby, Eno and Lanois earned themselves a Grammy for reshaping U2 once again. Though Lanois left to pursue other high-profile production work (including Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel), Eno stayed on for the band’s Zooropa album, and participated in yet another makeover on 1997’s Pop. In 1995, Eno, along with the members of U2 (with guests including Luciano Pavarotti), recorded under the name Passengers. Their Original Soundtracks compiles music they’d written for imagined movies, something Eno had done decades earlier with his Music for Films.

  The ‘90s have seen a bit more of everything Eno has offered in the past: more production work (for James, John Cale), more collaborations (with Cale, as well as Public Image Limited’s Jah Wobble), more ambient music (Neroli), and even a return to pop-oriented composition (The Nerve Net). Recently, composer Philip Glass, an important early influence, has arranged symphonic treatments of the three albums Eno made with David Bowie in the ‘70s. Beyond music, Eno has pursued visual art (through video works and installations), created CD-ROMs, appeared as a visiting professor, donated time to the War Child charity, published an extensive diary (A Fear with Swollen Appendices), and even at one point conspired with Peter Gabriel and performance artist Laurie Anderson on developing a sort of multicultural avant-garde theme park in Europe. While he remains one step removed from the limelight, Eno continues to tirelessly push the limits of his own creativity – and by extension the creativity of everyone he’s touched over the years.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  Here Come the Warm Jets (Island, 1973; EG, 1982); continuing in the direction of Eno’s work with Roxy Music, this first solo album is a triumph of eccentric pop.

  (w/ Robert Fripp) (No Pussyfooting) (Antilles, 1973; EG, 1981); an experimental guitar album featuring “Frippertronics.”

  Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (Island, 1974; EG, 1982).

  (w/ Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico) June 1, 1974 (Island, 1974); a live album featuring former members of the Velvet Underground and Soft Machine.

  Another Green World (Island, 1975; EG, 1982); Eno’s classic, a middle ground between his pop-oriented early albums and the ambient directions he would head.

  Discreet Music (Antilles, 1975; EG 1982); an album of highly listenable program and self-generative music.

  (w/ Robert Fripp) Evening Star (Antilles, 1975; EG, 1982).

  Before and after Science (Island, 1977; EG, 1982); Eno’s last vocal album for many years.

  (w/ Cluster) Cluster and Eno (Sky [Germany], 1977); Eno’s first collaboration with the German duo.

  Music for Films (Antilles, 1978; EG, 1982); a collection of instrumental works created for use in films.

  Ambient 1 / Music for Airports (EG, 1978; 1982); the first full-fledged ambient work.

  (w/ Moebius and Roedelius) After the Heat (Sky [Germany], 1978); another collaboration with the duo otherwise known as Cluster.

  (w/ Harold Budd) Ambient 2 / The Plateaux of Mirror (EG, 1980).

  (w/ John Hassell) Fourth World Volume 1: Possible Musics (EG, 1980); an attempted meshing of western and non-Western music, with composer/trumpeter Hassell.

  (w/ David Byrne) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Sire, 1981); an acclaimed synthesis of non-Western music with techno beats.

  Ambient 4 / On Land (EG, 1982).

  (w/ Roger Eno, Daniel Lanois) Apollo Atmospheres and Soundtracks (EG, 1983); ambient music for a film about space travel to the moon.

  Working Backwards 1983-1973 (EG, 1984); an 11-disc box set containing all Eno albums in his first 10 years, plus one disc of rarities.

  (w/ Harold Budd) The Pearl (EG, 1984).

  Thursday Afternoon (EG, 1985); the soundtrack for Eno’s video piece of the same name.

  (w/ Cluster) Old Land (Relativity, 1985); a compilation of Eno’s work with Cluster.

  (w/ John Hassell) Power Spot (ECM [Germany], 1986).

  More Blank than Frank (EG, 1986); a collection of essential tracks from Eno’s early albums.

  Desert Island Selection (EG, 1989); a single-CD collection of Eno’s own favorites from his early vocal albums.

  (w/ John Cale) Wrong Way up (Opal / Warner Bros., 1990); a strong return to vocal music after over a decade away.

  The Shufov Assembly (Opal / Warner Bros., 1992); an ambient album.

  Nerve Net (Opal / Warner Bros., 1992); like many of his successors, Eno takes ambient into the world of dance music here.

  Neroli (All Saints / Gyroscope, 1993); another ambient release.

  Brian Eno II / Vocal (EG / Virgin, 1994); a box set collection of Eno’s more pop-oriented vocal works.

  Brian Eno I / Instrumental (EG / Virgin, 1994); a box set collection of Eno’s ambient and experimental works.

  (w/ Robert Fripp) The Essential Fripp & Eno (EG / Virgin / Caroline, 1994); a collection from the two Fripp/Eno collaborations, including unreleased music.

  (Passengers) Original Soundtracks 1 (Island, 1995); best known as a U2 side project, this features the band and many guests, with Eno taking a larger role than his normal production duties.

  (w/ Jah Wobble) Spinner (All Saints / Gyroscope, 1995); collaboration with the former Public Image Limited bassist.r />
  The Drop (Thirsty Ear, 1997).

  (Harmonia 76) Tracks & Traces (Rykodisc, 1997); a recently uncovered batch of recordings featuring Neu!’s Michael Rother and Cluster with Eno.

  ADRIAN SHERWOOD

  Johnny Temple, Girls against Boys:

  Producing the most whacked-out and unpredictable recordings in reggae, Sherwood has always driven the point home that musical boundaries are fluid. Sherwood’s dissecting of songs is so over-the-top it baffles the mind and stomach to figure out how the ideas were ever generated. The haphazard sounds emanating from his records are a gold mine of inspiration for anyone seeking to deconstruct their music.

  A white kid who grew up in England during the punk rock explosion of the ‘70s, Adrian Sherwood hardly fit the profile of someone destined to be a master producer of dub reggae. But in becoming just that, he brought the worlds of dub and rock closer together. With his On-U Sound label serving as the meeting ground, Sherwood applied dub’s studio techniques to post-punk styles and used post-punk’s wide-ranging sound palette to modernize and expand the possibilities of dub.

  While he doesn’t play a traditional instrument, Sherwood has done as much as anyone to define the studio itself as an instrument for creating and shaping sound. As such, Sherwood is an important reference point – particularly in the U.K. – for makers of electronic music in all genres, from techno to trip-hop to drum ‘n’ bass. In addition to countless projects at On-U, Sherwood has remixed some of the biggest acts of the ‘80s and ‘90s, including Depeche Mode, the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Garbage, to name only a few.