Ken Ficara

I’m listening to After the Heat this morning, the 1978 collaboration between Brian Eno and the German duo Cluster that I bought on CD yesterday. In some ways it is a transition between Eno’s more rock-oriented work of the early 1970s and his increasing focus on instrumental and ambient music later in his career. It is a beautiful and unique album, combining Eno’s quirkiness and humor with his abstract leanings, the instrumental talents of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and the environment of producer Conny Plank’s famous studio. It’s all analog — digital synthesizers did not exist then, and many of the sounds are not produced by synthesizers at all, but by pianos and guitars and basses, treated and modified by Eno and Plank, sometimes “live,” meaning that they didn’t sit for hours adjusting effects units after the musicians had gone, but modified the music as the musicians were playing, using effects units as instruments.

This is an extension of the last post. I bought this LP at J&R Music, the same place I bought the CD reissue yesterday. I was a senior in high school, and discovered that yes, there was a store you could go to and find not only Brian Eno albums, but imported Brian Eno albums, with guys you’d never heard of, and liner notes in German you couldn’t read, and that were utterly magical. There was no way to look up who these folks were, or to track down other recordings, other than by following the names in the liner notes and searching through bins of LPs for albums you’d never seen before.

What this album recalls for me, especially playing it in the morning, is the RJE room at Brooklyn College. RJE stands for “Remote Job Entry.” It’s the room where first-year computer science students, who were required to submit their programs on punch cards (you didn’t get to use terminals until your second year) handed in their decks of cards and waited, sometimes more than an hour, to find out if their programs had run correctly.

I spent a lot of time in that room in the winter of 1983-84, me and my Sony TCS350 cassette Walkman. It surprises me that I can’t remember what album was on the flip side of the cassette After the Heat was on; it was probably the first Cluster&Eno album but I’m not sure I got them at the same time. (I bought LPs, but transferred them to cassette for listening in the car and on the Walkman; cassettes were interesting in that the pairing of albums was largely a function of what you had bought that day. The set of albums I bought yesterday would probably have resulted in a permanent mental pairing of the new U2 and Springsteen albums.)

That winter was the tail end of my fascination with electronic and experimental music; Talking Heads were in remission, Bowie was doing pop music, Eno was deep into ambience, synthesizers were suddenly all over pop radio, and I was in the process of rediscovering the harmonica, and within a few years would be completely immersed in blues, reggae and political hip-hop.

After the Heat is a real moment in time for me. I listened to it obsessively for a few years, and then it went largely unplayed for decades. But when I hear the gentle piano melody of “Lüftschloß,” or the strange phased percussion of “Broken Head,” or the brief snatch of lyrics in “The Belldog,” I am transported back to college, punchcards, and the smell of the computer room.

We were at the machinery
In the dark sheds
That the seasons ignore.
I held the levers
That guided the signals to the radio
But the words I received,
Random code, broken fragments from before.
–“The Belldog”

I went to J&R Music today to buy some actual albums (new ones by old acts: U2, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen, as well as an old Brian Eno collaboration that’s hard to find in its original form at a reasonable price.

This is an increasingly rare experience, even for me. I buy a lot of music online nowadays. I like the instant gratification, and I like being able to find what I’m looking for without having to go to half a dozen stores.

Of course, you can’t go to half a dozen stores anymore to look for albums. Tower is gone, both Virgin Megastores are closing, the HMV store disappeared years ago, lots of smaller outlets are gone, and for the most part to buy CDs nowadays you have to go to places like Circuit City or Barnes and Noble or Borders which have terrible selections and outrageous prices. But J&R was there first, and they’re still there, and they still have an impressive selection and people who know about music, not that they’re particularly nice. They also have great prices — I used to tell people in the Borders at the World Trade Center that they could save a dollar per block per album by walking over to J&R. The U2 album was $6.99; I think the last time I paid that for a new album I was buying the new Cars album at Record Baron on Staten Island.

Or I could have been buying albums by any of the people I bought albums by today. Honestly, these albums all sound like what they are: mediocre releases by aging (or aged) artists. I doubt I would have even bought them if not for my completist instincts. They’re not bad but not very exciting. I am glad to see U2 and Eno and Daniel (now billed as Danny????) Lanois and Steve Lillywhite all working together again, but this is nowhere near as interesting as The Unforgettable Fire or War were. The Springsteen is perfectly serviceable but pales in comparison even to non-canonical Springsteen classics like Tunnel Of Love or The River. The Van Morrison album is quite frankly sad, a live re-creation of one of his greatest albums, Astral Weeks. It’s an attempt to recapture spontaneous magic that happened 40 years ago between a unknown and somewhat paranoid young songwriter and brilliant older jazz musicians who were required to record in a separate room. It’s not reproducible by a cantankerous old superstar with a band of hired guns attuned to his every querulous move.

I have owned the beautiful After the Heat, recorded in 1978 by Brian Eno with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, for many years, but I wanted a digital copy of it and gentle electronic landscapes are not well-suited to digitization from LPs, no matter how well taken care of they were.

So despite the nostalgic feeling of going to the store and buying new albums, taking them home and unwrapping them, I’m less excited by the music I bought today than the edgier and more interesting music, by younger people, that I buy at shows or download. I don’t feel that the death of the record labels or traditional music retail outlets store is bad for music. In some ways it’s an improvement; before the advent of emusic or Amazon or iTunes or CD Baby it was harder to find music, especially unpopular music, and when you did find it, it was expensive. And that extra money didn’t go to the musicians.

Cephas & Wiggins
Originally uploaded by kenf225

Piedmont blues guitarist John Cephas died yesterday. He was a gentle man, a wonderful musician, and a born educator. I saw him play many times and took a guitar class with him at the Augusta Heritage Festival in 2003.

Piedmont blues is a distinct genre very different from the Delta blues of Robert Johnson, Son House and other Mississippi musicians, and their many descendants and imitators. Piedmont blues is more melodic, usually fingerpicked, and often sounds like ragtime. If you’ve heard Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train” (also performed by Taj Mahal), or the music of people like Blind Blake, the Rev. Gary Davis, John Jackson, Blind Boy Fuller, or Brownie McGhee or modern day players like Ernie Hawkins, that’s Piedmont blues.

Cephas and his musical partner, Phil Wiggins, probably the best living blues harmonica player, started playing together sometime in the late 1970s. I first heard them at a cigarette company-sponsored free show at the IBM building in midtown in 1990, the same weekend I met Willie Dixon. I own all of their albums, have seen them in concert better than a dozen times, most recently at an outdoor show in Madison Square Park, from which the above photo comes. (And I would not have known about that show if not for redstapler pointing out the sign after lunch one day with rosefox and others, so thanks to both of them, because Cephas and Wiggins didn’t come to NYC often enough.)

Their shows were not only spectacular musically. Cephas took every opportunity to talk about the culture and the history of the blues; he would often explain the difference between Piedmont and Delta blues as he tuned his guitar down to play a haunting tune by Skip James, in my opinion the greatest Delta blues musician. Cephas and Wiggins carried the lonely torch of honest acoustic blues for decades, and with Cephas being close to 30 years older than Wiggins, they crossed generations with each other as well as with their audiences.

Their easy camaraderie, snappy clothes and perfectly set straw hats, and virtuoso musicianship made every show a joy. I dragged many people to see them, most of whom had no idea who they were and knew little about the music. I don’t recall anyone being anything less than wildly enthusiastic.

All of their albums are in print and well worth buying. And there are a few musicians still playing this music well and honestly, particular Corey Harris and Guy Davis. You can hear a lot of the Piedmont in Keb Mo’s playing sometimes, in Taj Mahal’s. You hear them when anyone fingerpicks blues. But you’ll never hear them quite like John played them, and I will miss that, and his laugh, and the way he would shake his head when people tried to get too analytic or strict about playing music.

I guess I’m like so many other folks
I can’t stop now
I guess I am a hopeless case
I can’t put this guitar down
I was determined I was gonna play those blues

–“I Was Determined,” John Cephas, 2004