29
recorder with guitar solos, and then begin the real creative process of blending, mixing, and
deleting), Phil Spector (who "understood better than anybody that a recording could do things
that could never actually happen"), the Beach Boys, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Byrds
(whose experimental and psychedelic approach Eno appreciated), the Beatles (whose 1966
album Revolver, recorded on four-track with George Martin at the controls, Eno described as
"my favourite Beatles album"), and Simon and Garfunkel ("The song `Bridge Over Troubled
Water' [1970] is perfection in its way. I'm told it took 370 hours of studio time to record
that's longer than most albums, but it is such an incredible tour de force. It's the World Trade
Center of production in a way, you might not think that the building is necessarily beautiful,
but you cannot help but be impressed by it.").
16
Although I have argued that Eno's early solo albums belong in the genre of progressive rock,
he has been constantly at pains to dissociate himself from some of the most popular manifes-
tations of that genre. In 1978 he took the following broad view of recent rock history and his
place in it:
At the end of the 1960s, there were two mainstreams, one that came
from the Beatles, with big sales, and one from the Velvet Underground
and the early Who and Bo Diddley much rougher, more urban and
less Gothic. I always felt I was part of that second thing. Technology is
a separate issue. It just happened that the fantasy bands got involved in
technology because they could afford it, rather than because it was a
particular predilection of theirs or particularly belonged with that kind
of music.
17
By the "Gothic fantasy bands" Eno doubtless means groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake &
Palmer, who managed to turn an unlikely blend of elements an instrumental virtuosity pre-
viously unheard of in rock, a grandeur of conception rivalling that of Mahler and Strauss, a
widely expanded harmonic and rhythmic technique (with roots in both nineteenth-century art
music and jazz), and an infatuation with the possibilities of synthesizers and twenty-four-track
recording technology into one of the most commercially successful musical blends of the
era. Eno has attacked this kind of music on a number of occasions, calling it "grotesque" in
one instance,
18
making a snide remark about "the well-known and gladly departed orchestral
rock tradition" in another,
19
decrying "really dumb bands who've tried to make a kind of aca-
demic form out of rock music" in yet another.
20
What has apparently bothered Eno most about
progressive rock of this type is not its seeming to want to claim a vicarious and inappropriate
16
Brown, "On Record: Brian Eno," 94. Paul Simon has said that "Bridge Over Troubled Wa-
ter" "took somewhere around ten days to two weeks to record, and then it had to be mixed."
Jon Landau, "Paul Simon: `Like a Pitcher of Water,'" in Ben Fong-Torres, ed., The Rolling
Stone Interviews, Vol. 2 (New York: Warner, 1973), 398.
17
John Rockwell, "The Odyssey of Two British Rockers," New York Times, 23 July 1978,
II:16. In the same article, Robert Fripp is quoted expressing much the same distaste as Eno
with regard to early- and mid-1970s British progressive rock: "I don't wish to listen to the
philosophical meanderings of some English halfwit who is circumnavigating some inessential
point of experience in his life."
18
Tannenbaum, "Cage and Eno," 68.
19
Eno, "Pro Session Part I," 57.
20
Moore, "Eno = MC Squared," 67.