Eno in 1974, Part 2: Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy
- 20 hours ago
- 15 min read
It's rock-and-roll with something wrong with it.
This is Eno in '74. Taking Tiger Mountain by strategy
Brian Eno: vocals, “snake” guitar, keys, “treatments”
Phil Manzanera: guitar
Brian Turrington: bass, piano
Freddie Smith: drums
Robert Wyatt: percussion, backing vocals
Andy Mackay: saxophone
Portsmouth Sinfonia: strings
guests: Phil Collins, drums on “Mother Whale Eyeless;” Polly Eltes, vocals on “Mother Whale Eyeless”
produced by Brian Eno
art by Peter Schmidt
This is part two of a two-part piece on Brian Eno in 1974. Click here to read part one.
Being the most relentlessly productive “non-musician” of the 1970s came at a cost. We left off with Brian Eno quite literally having worked himself sick; laid out by a pneumothorax while on tour with the Winkies. (Still a crazy name for a band.) The unfortunate timing of Eno’s collapsed lung spelled the end of any promotion by him for his debut solo LP, Here Come The Warm Jets.
Before we march ahead to what Eno got up to post-recovery, we have to go back to 1969, when he joined the Portsmouth Sinfonia.
Any old-school Tumblr denizens remember this?
Yeah! That’s the Portsmouth Sinfonia!!
There’s this misconception that the Sinfonia was an orchestra for non-musicians. It being a professional orchestra that all swapped instruments for a funny finale is another popular myth. The Portsmouth Sinfonia formed around the Portsmouth College of Art. As Abi Bliss for the Wire explained, it falls somewhere in the fluxus family tree for its inherent absurdity, the randomness of the final product, ties to early performance art, and the element of audience participation. Some members could play their instruments, some couldn’t. Some could read music, some couldn’t. But as Melody Maker described, “There seem(ed) to be more can’ts than cans.” Their goal was to take art-world elitism by the beltloops and pants it, and by god did it work. The same year they guested on Eno’s “Put A Straw Under Baby,” they performed at the fucking Royal Albert Hall.
Eno’s time in the Sinfonia (he played clarinet) got him comfortable with the idea of not knowing; to the degree that he’d put himself on instruments he didn’t know how to play in the studio. This was crucial to his creative process.
Okay, back to the spring of 1974. Never one to put his feet up (or let himself recover from illness and injury) for long, Eno’s out of the frying pan and into the fire. He’s drafted by his label, Island Records, to perform at the Rainbow Theatre with Kevin Ayers of the Soft Machine, ex-Velvets John Cale and Nico, and special guest Mike Oldfield. Kevin put all this together, it was more of a Kevin record than anything. John was producing Nico’s The End at the time, which Eno contributed synths to. Their performances of “Driving Me Backwards” (phenomenal) and “Baby’s On Fire” (not so much!) made the cut for the live album, June 1, 1974.
Eno heard something in their “Baby’s On Fire” that I just don’t. He was right in thinking it was “incredibly out of tune, so out of tune you wouldn’t believe it.” But to him, that was “fantastic...there’s a riff between the guitar and one of the bassists, and they’re so out of tune it sounds like cellos. Amazing!...You wouldn’t have thought of making it, in fact, it’s such a bizarre sound.” This is an example of another central point of Eno’s philosophy: “mistakes” aren’t really mistakes. They’re viable paths to follow for the sake of the creative process. They force players to chase ideas they never would otherwise.
Besides John’s marriage ending (the bugger in the short sleeves fucked his wife,) June 1, 1974 resulted in Eno and Phil Manzanera lending a hand to Fear. And it got Eno thinking: instead of having, like, five bassists on one album, what if I cut the next with a set group of fewer musicians? He drafted up a group with himself, Phil on guitar, Brian Turrington on bass, Freddie Smith on drums, and Robert Wyatt on percussion and backing vocals. Eno was working on Wyatt’s Rock Bottom at the time.
For a brief recap: Eno was working with Nico while producing Cale, Wyatt, and himself. At the same time, he had his eye on what’s going on out in New York. CBGB’s was home to some promising new talent: the Patti Smith Group, the Ramones, and the group Eno was interested in, Television. He very nearly produced their record, but in a decision that just might have haunted Tom Verlaine for the rest of his life, he turned both Eno and a contract with Island down! And since the Taking Tiger Mountain crew were in Island Studios at the same time as Genesis, Eno lent a hand to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Phil Collins played on “Mother Whale Eyeless” as a thank-you.
Everyone’s in the right place at the right time, and like Warm Jets, a certain degree is left to chance. Oh, the Oblique Strategies of it all.
Eno revealed in an unpublished 20,000 word book chapter by Lester Bangs that the idea for a game thatdeliberately puts artists outside their comfort zones might’ve come from a project him and his classmates were assigned in art school. Meanwhile, artist Peter Schmidt made the beta version of Oblique Strategies in 1970 for use in his studio.
Cards bear such instructions as, “Amplify the most embarrassing detail” and “Subtract the most important part.” The most famous card reads, “Honor thy mistake as intention.”
Even people comfortable with the idea of not knowing get stuck sometimes. Human nature is to figure out what you’re going to do, then do it! You don’t decide to cut the apple in the middle of cutting the apple. You do it when you pull the knife out of the drawer carefully and by its handle, right? Even Brian Eno got stuck in the studio. He would get so focused on one thing that he’d forget all the great ideas he had off the clock. He’d just be going through the motions, and that’s no way to be when your outcome is your process. Since Oblique Strategies didn’t hit the market until 1975, Eno was his own playtester while recording Taking Tiger Mountain. Whenever he got stuck, he’d pull a card from the deck and act on it. As he described in interview with Allan Jones, it’d force him to try something, even if he knew it had no chance of working. “I used the cards as a way of jolting myself back into thinking about what I was doing.”
Speaking about packs of cards, the album title was inspired by Eno coming across a pack of postcards depicting Maoist opera of the same name. Of course, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) had nothing to do with “Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy,” let alone China or communism! And the lyrics only briefly mention countries in Asia. “I’m not Maoist or any of that; if anything I’m anti-Maoist,” he clarified in More Dark Than Shark.“Strategy interests me because it deals with the interaction of systems, which is what my interest in music is really…” He liked what the title meant to him. “I was interested in combining that very naive and crude form of basic expression with an extremely complex concept like Tiger Mountain.”
Though his lyrics were still nonsense, they weren’t placeholders anymore. Now they were written out of panic! Eno claimed he wrote the whole of Taking Tiger Mountain in fifteen minutes so he wouldn’t have time to feel self-conscious or weird about what he would sing. “...the thing about writing fast is that you don't guard yourself.”
Why all of these diversions? Why did he make it so hard for himself?! Because, to Eno, it’s not about mapping the shortest distance from point A to point B and following the path. In his mind, if you know where you’re going and exactly how to get there, you might as well not go in the first place.
Others call Taking Tiger Mountain an extension of Warm Jets. I don’t think so. (It’s never that simple with Eno!) Tiger Mountain is both more minimal in its production and more exploratory with its arrangements and content. This album also lets Phil Manzanera do more. He’s using all sorts of different guitar tones and textures. There’s three or four unique ones in Burning Airlines Give You So Much More alone!
“When I got back home, I found a message on the door:
Sweet Regina’s gone to China, cross-legged on the floor.”
With a passing mention of “burning airlines” (a reference to the worst commercial aircraft disaster to date,) the narrator of “Burning Airlines” instead wonders what his sweet Regina is up to. Is she having her morning tea? On some spy mission, wearing microphones in her wig and donning a false beard? Has she flown off to Japan to get married? Eno peers in at the first-class traveling set. One could say it’s...music for airports.
I love this riff. I love it. It’s stupidly simple, it’s just another scale, but it’s the punchiest element of the arrangement. “Burning Airlines” establishes the sonic landscape we’ll traverse for the rest of the LP; keyboards, piano accents, and this is huge: a drum machine. Sly Stone made heavy use of drum machine on There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Fresh. Any seventies record that uses it just slingshots the whole thing into the future. This combo of guitars, drum machine, and keys gets stuck in my head like a motherfucker. Warm Jets has that lingering seventies glam identity. As soon as you put on Tiger Mountain, you know this is a Brian Eno record independent of anything else.
On Back In Judy’s Jungle, Eno whistles the theme as the soldiers in Bridge On The River Kwai. I only know this because it was one of my dad’s favorite movies and one of the DVDs he would constantly watch. It was River Kwai, the entirety of Gunsmoke, and The Dirty Dozen, all burned into my brain! “Judy’s Jungle” is a peculiar song. It carries on with Tiger Mountain’s sonic palette of chiming keys and playful guitar. It’s a waltz with a belly full of rye. The lyric masks, even satirizes, war. While the upper class gets to jet off to Japan and imagine themselves as spies, the dumb, blind, and mute are shipped off to the jungle. The narrator was picked because he was mean, number thirteen had bad luck, and another had a “cauliflower ear for the birds.” Clearly whoever’s in charge has the idea that if you put all these misfits together, they’ll make one useful soldier. They’re just bodies. The backing vocal on “While somehow appearing so kind!” has no reason to be that funny. Eno must’ve pulled the card that said “sing it squiggly.”
The Fat Lady of Limbourg tips a hat to John Cage with some prepared piano. Limbourg had a mental institution, the titular Fat Lady is supposed to be one of its residents. (I’ve heard this song was about a supposed sexual encounter Eno had, but none of my sources support this interpretation.) Is she some kind of “expert” as the songwriter phrased it, her skill so sought-after she had to stay hidden like a spy? Is her sense of taste really so good that she can pick out otherwise indistinguishable samples? Or are the guards and nurses gossiping amongst each other about this “quack” who’s laid a big black egg – this likely-fabricated story of her past? The listener doesn’t know if any of the events in the song are actually happening or if they’re one of the Fat Lady’s delusions. “That’s what we’re paid for,” to listen to her rambling.
I didn’t “get” Taking Tiger Mountain when I first listened to it. It was strange. But the one track I knew I got down with was Mother Whale Eyeless. It has a topsy-turvy funk appeal, but not the way Talking Heads are topsy-turvy funk. Eno did it his own way, with a perfect balance of asymmetrical elements. His synths blip like a radar. The urgent two-note bassline and Eno’s far-away voice create intrigue – it sounds like he’s singing through a pane of glass. We enter “Mother Whale” at a lull in the activity: “I can think of nowhere I would rather be/Reading morning papers, drinking morning tea.” Listen to how Eno and Co. kick the story into gear. Drums and percussive piano bash in on the word “clutches the tray.” If you don’t get caught up in another minimal, addictive riff slung by Eno and Phil (it’s difficult not to,) pay attention to the lyrics. The scenes switch like channel-surfing.
We start in a kitchen sink drama, reading the morning paper and drinking tea. Then, shock! Awe! Betrayal! “Living so close to danger even your friends are strangers/Don’t count on their company.” And what’s the husband hiding with his wife’s beauty products? “This is for the fingers, This is for the nails/Hidden in the kitchen right behind the scales...” No one on Tiger Mountain is as they seem.
We flick to another war movie: “Back on the trail/The seven soldiers read the papers and mail.” Between the River Kwai reference and this allusion to The Magnificent Seven, I have reason to believe Eno was on a serious war movie binge at the time. He makes a passing comment on the difference between wars we see in movies, where heroes “swing about through creepers, parachutes caught on steeples” versus the real thing. “Heroes are born, but heroes die/Just a few days, a little practice and some holiday pay.” We have stupid monkey brains and want to see stuff blow up. We’re indifferent to the strategic, empirical side of war, and we cover our ears at the human horrors.
“Mother of God, if you care, we’re on a train to nowhere
Please, put a cross upon our eyes
Take me, I’m nearly ready, you can take me
To the raincoat in the sky.”
These lines read like they were plucked from John Cale’s Paris 1919. They’re also my favorites of the whole of Taking Tiger Mountain. Once you decipher the Eno-ism with the raincoat – Polly Eltes sings a bridge likening God and heaven to Jonah in the belly of the whale – this is harrowing stuff. When Eno hones in and writes focused images, man does his stuff hit.
The arrangement flips channels too! What an ugly key change from the bridge to the “In another country with another name” verse. Another spy movie! Going back-and-forth from the pulsar verse to spiraling guitar accents over the swaying bridge and refrain. It’s punchy, lively, and totally kooky. “Mother Whale Eyeless” might just be my favorite mid-seventies Eno tune because it’s three songs rolled into one. (Then again, “I’ll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoe)” is stiff competition…)
Who even knows what The Great Pretender is about. The lyrics are the last thing I’m paying attention to. The production takes center stage. Slithering twin guitars, chugging synths, and drum machine drag the listener into the undertow. Eno even sings in a darker manner, I don’t think we’ve heard his lower register at all up until this point
And the unrelenting cricket choir. I have to admit it’s grating to my ear, a major turn-off. A track like “Mass Production,” one of my favorite things Iggy Pop ever did, would never have existed without “The Great Pretender.”
The same subscriber who gifted me my copy of Taking Tiger Mountain got me into the band Magazine. (You almost certainly know who they are if you’ve read this much of this post.) I can point to you exactly where Magazine’s sound on their Real Life LP came from. It came from Third Uncle. I hear a lot of Wire in this as well. This is like if you put Pink Flag in the blender and put the songs back together from memory. “Did this riff go with this song or this song? Fuck!”
I cannot believe “Third Uncle” is almost five minutes long. “The Great Pretender” makes every second of its five-minute run time felt. Not “Third Uncle.” It blows past you, with a whip-fast riff, atonal, scratchy rhythm guitar from Phil, and noodly excitable bass. The instrumentation deliberately swamps Eno’s lead vocal, treating it as another instrument.
Oh god, Put A Straw Under Baby. I don’t care if it’s “bad.” I love it. No guilty pleasures here! I don’t want this orchestra arrangement to sound “good.” I want it to sound like a fourth grade band concert. It sounds correct this way. I hope to god this makes sense: it feels like the pink bunny suit scene in A Christmas Story. On the one hand, you’re in the pink suit with floppy ears. It’s hot. It’s scratchy. This is the single most embarrassing moment of your life, and you know it is as it’s happening. At the same time, the Sinfonia’s stab at this is so earnest you can’t help but be charmed. I love joy, fun, and whimsy! I love knowing you’re bad at something and just doing it anyway. Gold star for trying, Sinfonia!
The True Wheel is a boss-ass new wave song because it is not a perfect circle; “the certain ratio.” The golden ratio. “The True Wheel” rolls right along, but there’s some jagged element when you listen. On paper, it’s is a standard rock-and-roll song: three chords, in 4/4 time. But each chord only gets one bar. A three-chord cycle on top of 4/4 time means it only makes matches up again at the twelfth bar, not the fourth like your brain wants it to. Apparently Eno heard the hook, “We are the 801/We are the central shaft” in a dream while high on mescaline. Richard Mills pointed out 8-0-1 could spell “E-N-O” as “eight-nought-one,” but let’s be real. This is a stretch. In any way, it oozes with personality; especially the punchy piano and one-note guitar solo that gradually winds up in pitch. The drums in the coda are fabulous. So is Eno’s playful delivery: “Uh-oh! Nothing there this time!” and Bowie-like “uh-uh-uh-OH”s.
China My China feels like a Syd Barrett song. Eno’s delivery even reminds me of Syd’s on “Waving My Arms In The Air.” The typewriter chorus is delightfuly kitschy, I don’t even know how you’d come up with that.
After 48 minutes, Taking Tiger Mountain finally gets to exhale on its title track. Breezy-feather light guitars and a light wind sound effect really do make you feel like you’re high atop a snowy mountain. We reach for the summit, just out of reach. “We climbed and climbed, oh how we climbed” It’s almost...ambient. Well-played, Eno. A perfect lead-in to his next project.
Forward-thinking as Eno’s you can place Here Come The Warm Jets in and around the music of 1974. You can’t do that with Taking Tiger Mountain. This is rock-and-roll with something wrong with it. Every song on this LP is a conventional rock-and-roll song in some combination of melody, harmony, rhythm, and arrangement. But it’s never all four. Something’s always off-center, just like Peter Schmidt’s album art. At first glance, these are kitschy Warholian screen prints. Take a closer look and you’ll see the pupils of all the eyes are sloppily blacked out; we have some cross-eyed Enos. That’s it, that’s Brian Eno in 1974! Cross-eyed rock-and-roll! Each set of conventions has been socked in the face!
Warm Jets has that quality, but Tiger Mountain cranks it up. I might prefer this album for that reason? But Warm Jets has the more replay value of the two, it’s more palatable to my ear. Both albums prove how shockingly irrelevant lyrics are to the pop music craft. As long as you have something for the listener to hang onto, you’re good. While Warm Jets perfects the offbeat pop craft, it wouldn’t dare make half the choices Tiger Mountaindoes, and they’re only a few months apart!
Both albums together make a complete picture of Eno in 1974; the tender post-Roxy, pre-Another Green Worldyears. They reveal Eno discovering his own non-musician-musician superpowers. He surrounded himself with people just as willing to put themselves in uncomfortable environments as he was, and they collectively used thefriction to make great work. Here Come The Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) both prove that Eno does have some special quality about him. He’s not just an art-school dropout faffing about with pretentious artistic processes, using the studio as an instrument to produce the sounds he hears in his head orwhatever. Was Eno really a “non-musician” as he so fervently claimed in the seventies? Of course he was a musician. But he did make a path for true non-musicians to go down, try their hand in a studio, and make great records for themselves.
Personal favorites: “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” “Mother Whale Eyeless,” “Third Uncle,” “The True Wheel,” “Taking Tiger Mountain”
– AD ☆
End of Part Two
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