David Byrne + Brian Eno

On occasion, I’d pick up Tower Records free in-house organ, Pulse, and flip through it in the bathroom. One of the best things about it was that they printed lists of Desert Island Discs from readers – those mythical ten records you’d take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island with nothing but a stereo, plentiful and varied food, and naked island babes who worshipped you as a god. Whoops, wrong fantasy. It was always entertaining seeing what people would put down. Most of them kept to the rules but you did have the occasional scofflaw who decided that the entire recorded output of Pink Floyd should really only count as one record or he’d keep it to ten (and, yes, it was almost always a he) and then throw in his entire tape collection (“only ten discs though”). I also liked seeing not only how narrow some people’s tastes were, but how proud of those narrow tastes they were. People who put nine Rolling Stone records on their list and then stretched out at number ten with something from Keith Richard’s solo project. Or people who put something on their list that’s been out for a month. Sure, you like it now…

For years, I used to try to figure out what 10 records I would take to a desert island. I rarely finished a list, but I loved working on it and seeing how things had shifted since I had last done it. There were a couple of records that always made the list – the first Cars album, Thomas Dolby’s original release of The Golden Age of the Wireless, and Peter Gabriel’s Security were pretty much guaranteed to show up on the list somewhere, usually near the top. The other album that always made the list, and still would today, was David Byrne and Brian Eno’s landmark 1981 collaboration, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I must confess, this is a bit of a cheat, designed to get Brian Eno in this collection twice (there are two other cheats used to get favored musicians in this collection more than once), but, while the front of the album attributes the album to Brian Eno first and David Byrne second, the backside reverses the order, so it’s only a partial cheat (the other two cheats both involve including the same group of musicians recording under different names, bonus points for ferreting them out).

I first heard this in a dance studio, at 8:15 on a cold, snowy morning. When I was a junior at Interlochen, one of our guest dance teachers was this guy named Jeff from something called the Ozone Dance Theater. I only mention this because he seemed on a pretty wide orbit himself and Ozone seemed wholly appropriate. He blew into the dance department that spring like a breath of fresh pot smoke. He was eccentric, to put it charitably, and his reputation as “that weird stoned guy” quickly spread across campus. He talked extremely quietly – and said things that didn’t make sense even when you did hear them – loved to spin in circles, and was seen walking backwards through the woods on more than one occasion. But he had great taste in music. And strange ideas in choreography.

His contribution to the spring dance concert was a wild, ambitious piece. At one point it was nearly and hour long and incorporated ten different pieces of music, but was eventually whittled down to four pieces lasting just over fifteen minutes. Each chunk of the piece was built from some chance element – either something formal like the i ching or something more casual, like dancer improvisations.

The ultimate piece was performed with all the dancers (probably around 30) wearing all black except for white tennis shoes. Almost all of dancers were on stage all of the time, performing complex patterns of repeated movements, or jumping up and down for several minutes at time, or walking as slowly as possible across the stage. While all this was going on, a series of slides was projected around the stage and on the walls of the auditorium. It was all very avant garde and was called yeshe. The local paper, the Traverse City Record Eagle (or the Tragic Shitty Wretched Beagle, as it was not-so-affectionately known) came to write an article about the performance, and I was sitting in the auditorium behind Jeff when he was being interviewed. The reporter asked him the name of his piece, and Jeff said, “It’s called ‘yeshe’, with a small y.” Sure enough, the next day’s paper proudly announced his piece as “Yeshe With a Small Y.” Ah, the Wretched Beagle.

The final version of Yeshe With a Small Y included music by Kraftwerk (Radioactivity), Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark (Pretending to See the Future), and opened with the first two tracks from Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (America is Waiting and Mea Culpa). It’s safe to say that I had never heard music like that, but at that time, neither had anybody else. And it was about to set off an explosion.

Like much of the music that will accompany me to that sandy isle, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts didn’t immediately captivate me. This is significant. Much of the music that appeals to me right away wears its welcome out pretty quickly. Sure, I couldn’t get enough of J. Geils’ Love Stinks for a couple of weeks there, wearing through the vinyl, but once those two weeks were up, I never pulled that single out again. Songs like that, that appeal to me instantly, that I “get” right away, don’t hold much long term interest for me because they don’t teach me anything new. The very thing that makes them immediately captivating – their familiarity – is what bores me after a short while. There are, of course, exceptions, such as Fountains of Wayne, who regurgitate and recombine the past fifty years worth of pop music into their maddeningly catchy tunes and still remain vitally interesting to me. But generally speaking, it’s the music that makes my brain grow new dendrites that ultimately sticks with me the longest. It is the challenge of the unfamiliar, of incorporating new musical vocabulary, that makes listening to new music so exciting for me. A lot of people don’t feel this way. My wife, for one, would rather hear something she knows than something she doesn’t know, but I just make sure I play enough new stuff around her that the unfamiliar becomes familiar and then she has a lot more stuff she knows to choose from. Many people find a kind of music they like and never stray from it, listening to the same records they listened to in college for the rest of their lives (the aptly named Big Chill effect), but that’s not me. I love a bit of musical nostalgia and will wallow for weeks at a time in the warm waters of old favorites, but I’m always willing to jump into the icy sea of unfamiliarity and I hope I always shall be.