Brian Eno

After Music for Airports, Brian Eno released three more albums in the Ambient series: two as collaborations – one with experimental composer and trumpet player Harold Budd, and the other with trance-inducing (or, if you’re me, irritation-inspiring) zither player Laraaji – and one final solo Ambient collection called On Land, which Eno regards as his best album effort.

While this run of records was being produced, Eno continued to collaborate with other musicians, producing Devo’s first album (Are We Not Men?), producing a couple of albums with Germany’s Cluster, and extending his tape loop experiments with guitarist Robert Fripp. He also entered a fruitful collaboration with David Bowie, which resulted in what is sometimes called the Berlin Trilogy: Heroes, Low, and Lodger. By Lodger their partnership started falling apart, but Heroes and Low have some remarkable pieces on them, including some wonderfully evocative instrumentals that, 20 years later, inspired Philip Glass to write symphonic variations.

But Eno’s most fruitful collaboration, as far as I’m concerned, was with New York City’s influential and intellectual new wave band, Talking Heads, and, especially, with their (perceived if not actual) leader, David Byrne. That collaboration, especially the one-two punch of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Talking Heads’ paradigm-shifting Remain in Light, the two albums most responsible (I believe) for the flowering of so-called “world” music raised his visibility to the highest level of his career, but it was his next long-term collaboration that made him an international star. He and producing partner Daniel Lanois shepherded a passionate Irish quartet through three albums in the '80s and made U2 the biggest band on the planet for several years – before Nirvana brought everything back down to earth again.

As if producing some of the most influential and highest-regarded music of the past 25 years weren’t enough, Brian Eno is also an accomplished visual artist, working on provocative video pieces and installations, as well as collaborating with artist Russell Mills on a wonderful book of art and essays, More Dark Than Shark (like the Oblique Strategies, long out of print). He is the ultimate cool egghead intellectual, fingers in lots of pots, feeling the pulse of the culture from many different quarters.

But, like most people, I suppose, his life seems cooler on the outside than it does on the inside. He published a year’s worth of diary (A Year with Swollen Appendicies), which was interesting and informative, although its hard to really work up much sympathy reading his complaints about having to go record a new David Bowie album or hang out with Julian Schnabel or fly to Japan to oversee an exhibit installation. His life is a glamorous whirlwind, but an exhausting one. And, despite his intellectual reputation, it turns out old Brian is a rather earthy guy, his head filled with as many images of bouncing boobies as your average frat guy sucking down beers at Hooters. And, also like many of us, his responsibilities often get in the way of his interests, and he finds himself bogged down in the minutiae of his day-to-day life (no matter how mind-bendingly cool that minutiae may be), grumbling about being unable to do what he really wants. And what is it that Eno wants? Well, according to his diaries, what this mad musical mandarin really wants to do, what he’d really spend his hours working on if all those pesky albums and concerts and gallery shows and books and perfume lines and software projects didn’t get in the way, is sitting at his computer with a copy of Photoshop, loading in pictures of woman, and carefully manipulating the photos to make their asses bigger. Eno may be "the one", the elusive intellectual innovator three steps ahead of everyone else, but, underneath it all, it turns out that his compatriots Queen have him clearly pegged. Fat bottomed girls you make the rocking world go ‘round, indeed.