Peter Gabriel

Venturing gingerly into the musical forest, I soon came to a place where the road split in two. One path was well-traveled, wide and clearly marked. The other was narrow, difficult to see, and somewhat foreboding. One path had been followed by the multitudes and promised easy companionship and social acceptance. The other was overgrown, meandered aimlessly all over the countryside, and offered no guarantee that you’d ever run across a fellow traveler. I stood in the record store, weighing my options. In one hand, the first Boston album. In the other, the first Peter Gabriel album. I bought them both. And that has made all the difference.

I bought the first Peter Gabriel album not because of who he was or where he had come from, but because he had supplied the titles for the tracks on Cords, the third Synergy album. It may seem an odd reason to buy a record, but the world of popular music was virtually unknown to me and any road in was as good as another. Larry Fast’s astonishing palette of synthetic textures and the epic, sophisticated music that he released under his nom de stylus Synergy was the center of my musical universe. It was the very reason I had become interested in music to begin with, and anything that he touched was a holy relic worth exploring.

(For all his qualities, however, Fast struggled with track titles – an admittedly arcane and specialized skill for instrumentals. He fought through his second album with titles like S-Scape and Cybersports and then got Peter to jazz up Cords with Disruption in World Communication, On Presuming to be Modern, and Phobos and Deimos Go to Mars, among others. Larry Fast gave up entirely on the next album, calling everything Delta 1, Delta 2, and so on (although, perversely, he puts them out of order on the record)).

Of course, being so fascinated with every facet of Fast’s career led to a lot of unusual purchases that have shamed me in later years (Nektar? Intergalactic Touring Band? Foreigner?), but I had read that Peter Gabriel was good buddies with Larry (in other words, Fast friends) and the fact that he was wise enough to pick the greatest synthesist of all time to support his songs was a good enough recommendation for me. So I ended up buying it along with the Boston album, which I had already heard and knew I liked. That was a fateful day as those happened to be the very first rock records I ever purchased, and are the foundation on which so much rests.

The Boston album was very slick and seductive and easy to like. And everybody had it. The Peter Gabriel album, however, was something else entirely. The songs were unusual both in form and content. He shied away from easy conventions and instrumentation and even managed to slip in a song in 7/4 (Solsbury Hill) that was so natural sounding that it was years before I noticed the unusual time signature. To be honest, I didn’t really like the album that much, but because I had spent my monthly allowance on it (and because it was one of only a dozen or so albums that I owned), I kept playing it. Gradually, its tentacles slipped through my ears and into my brain and I came to really like it. Or parts of it, anyway – I was never fully able to embrace the entire album. But the new synapses that it created in my head permanently altered my way of listening to music and may be as responsible for my current collection and taste in music as anything else. It led me down the primrose path and I learned to savor the thorns along the way and treasure the unusual vistas and secret spaces that following the road less heard led me to. If I had to forgo some social currency with my peers, so be it. It was a price well worth paying for the joy that the search for interesting and unusual music has brought me over the years.

On the other hand, maybe I would’ve gotten laid sooner if I had slipped into the mainstream along with everybody else I knew.

The Peter Gabriel album was interesting, but didn’t compel me to buy his second album, called, like the first, Peter Gabriel. But I heard good things about his third album (Peter Gabriel), and picked that up one day. The idea, I later learned, was that he wanted each of his records to be like issues of a magazine, so they were all titled the same and the title was always in the same type face for each of the first three albums. He later dropped the conceit (or, rather, his label did, and then he gave it up), so those first three albums are more commonly known by the features of the covers. There’s the one where he’s black and white and sitting in a rainy blue car, the one where he’s scratching off the surface of his own photograph from within, and the one which features a black and white Polaroid of Gabriel manipulated during developing to make it look like his face is melting: Car, Scratch, and Melt.

Melt is a great album – very close to perfect (only Not One of Us falls short of the mark for me), and the first of his solo albums that really feels like he’s found his footing all the way through. Gabriel is one of those rare musicians that is able to bridge the conventional and the experimental without sounding forced in either camp. He has great pop sensibilities and was more than happy to be called a pop musician back in the early 1980s when that was anything but cool. But he’s also fiercely independent and uncompromisingly dedicated to pursuing his own path through the musical jungle.

One of the reasons Melt marks a departure from the first two releases is that it was the first album to really emphasize rhythm, the key that would unlock Gabriel’s future. For the recording sessions, he took away former Genesis mate and drummer Phil Collins’ cymbals, which was scandalous for the time – and, frankly, still is. Without the shimmery sheen of cymbals, the album automatically takes on a darker, more menacing tone, which perfectly compliments the shadowy songs of fear and alienation. That threatening tone is apparent just from reading the titles of the songs: Intruder, No Self Control, I Don’t Remember, Not One of Us.

There’s a claustrophobic feel to the sounds as they bump and scrape their way through the songs. The album is full of creaking metal and strangled guitars and sounds as if it was recorded underwater in the middle of the night. Airless and disoriented.

Melt had a minor hit – Games Without Frontiers (in which his buddy, weirdo musician Kate Bush, sings the title in French (jeux sans frontiere), which my friend Allen always heard as “she’s so fuckin-a”) – but the real breakthrough was the last track, the monumental Biko, about martyred black activist Stephen Biko, who died suspiciously while being detained by the police in South Africa. The track marks a departure from earlier Gabriel – even from earlier on that same album – by being built up directly from an extended rhythm pattern and by being more socially conscious in content. Almost all of the rest of the album is internal – Peter putting on different disguises (a thief, an assassin) to explore the dark terrain of his own psyche. Biko, by contrast, looks outward, and, though tragic in telling, is hopeful in tone and points the way towards the birth of what some have come to call St. Peter, the guardian angel of social activism through a deeper appreciation of the different musical idioms of the world.

That promise is delivered in full on his fourth self-titled album, which his label called Security, a name that has stuck and marks the end of his run of musical magazines. His new rhythmic thesis is laid out in full on the opening track, The Rhythm of the Heat. A compelling African drum pattern slowly dissolves in from the shimmering silence. The layers of rhythm are gradually built up and elaborated upon as Gabriel sings about being drawn in to the rhythm of an exotic culture. A musical version of Carl Jung’s metaphysical reaction to visiting a group of African drummers, The Rhythm of the Heat captures in both form and content the experience of losing your polished Western civilized veneer in the face of some more compelling, primal rhythmic calling. It also perfectly illustrates Gabriel’s new mandate, to explore the rhythms of the world.

Gabriel holds that last word in a soaring arc for a full fifteen seconds as the rhythms of his soul explode in a complex polyrhythmic jam. And the album is off and running.

This was the first album that I ran across that really used the Fairlight CMI (computer musical instrument), the absolute state of the art of synthesis at the time. Prohibitively expensive (like, six figures), the Fairlight was the first real sampler – the first instrument that could use digital recordings of sounds as a source instead of the pure, simple tones most other synthesizers employed. And you could use the Fairlight to perform all kinds of audio alchemy to the sounds. You could take the features of a piano sound and lay them over a violin, you could cross a voice with a chainsaw, you could hear what a tuba sounded like in the flute register. To be fair, the very first time I heard the Fairlight was on the Buggles’ second album, Adventures in Modern Recording, but they mostly used it to recreate and slightly tweak already existing sounds. Gabriel was the first person I heard to really start to exploit the power of this new instrument by combining sounds in freakish Frankenstein ways to create brand new sonic textures never heard before. He’d scrape a pipe and then use that sound and mix it with a dozen other unusual timbres to create an eerily familiar and wholly exotic palette of noise to work from. Songs for this album were built up by exploring these different textures and by playing with and jamming over rhythms, instead of the more traditionally Western method of building up melody and harmony first and then figuring out what clothes to dress it up in.

Security was released in 1982. That spring, I had a history teacher who started his class with a long discussion of the concept of specious present. He said that in order to study history, we tended to break it apart into little units of relatively self-contained time, which is what we were doing in his class by studying the Civil War. The way we learned American history (the only kind I was allowed to study) tended to make it seem like a series of discrete disconnected events. The landing at Plymouth Rock and the early settlement was followed after a period of inactivity by the American Revolution. Another historical dry spell and then the Civil War. More nothing and then the Great Depression and so on. But, he explained, history wasn’t like that. Everything connected with everything else and you really could never point out where something started and something else ended – or, if you could, there was a great deal of overlap involved. But that was too hard to hold onto, so we broke time apart (“tear the day to shreds”, as Gabriel says in The Rhythm of the Heat) so we could hold the parcels in our head more easily. But, he warned, it was a false construct and nothing ever broke apart cleanly.

Three months later, I proved him wrong.